Infidelity!
He was stunned.
But just as he was on the point of resigning his position in the store, after six months of glorious triumph, the business began to pick up so tremendously that he wondered what had got into people.
His uncle chucked him in the ribs and called him a gay dog! Men came in and ordered sundaes who had never tasted one before, and they all looked at him in a strangely respectful way. Women smirked and giggled and called him a naughty fellow, and said they really ought not to let him wait on them.
All of a sudden it dawned on him that he was“somebody.” He was a rake!
The New York paper devoted two full columns to his perfidious behaviour in the Tenderloin. For the first time in his life he stood in the limelight. Nellie charged him with other trifling things, such as failure to provide, desertion, cruelty; but none of these was sufficiently blighting to take the edge off the delicious clause which lifted him into the seventh heaven of a new found self-esteem! His first impulse had been to cry out against the diabolical falsehood, to deny the allegation, to fight the case to the bitter end. But on second thought he concluded to maintain a dignified silence, especially as he came to realise that he now possessed a definite entity not only in Blakeville, but in the world at large. He was a recognised human being! People who had never heard of him before were now saying, “What a jolly scamp he is! What a scalawag!” Oh, it was good to come into his own, even though he reached it by a crooked and heretofore undesirable thoroughfare. Path was not the word—it was a thoroughfare, lined by countless staring, admiring fellow creatures, all of whom pointed him out and called him by his own name.
Mothers cautioned their daughters, commanding them to have nothing to do with him, and then went with them to Davis’ to see that the commands were obeyed. Fathers held him up to their sons as a dreadful warning, and then made it a point to drop in and tell him what they thought of him with a sly wink that pleased and never offended him.
He mildly protested against the sensational charge when questioned about it, saying that Nellie was mistaken, that her jealousy led her to believe a lot of things that were not true, and that he felt dreadfully cut up about the whole business, as it was likely to create a wrong impression in New York. Of course, he went on, no one in Blakeville believed the foolish thing! But in New York—well, they were likely to believe anything of a fellow there!
He moved in the very centre of a great white light. Reporters came in every day and asked him if there was anything new, hoping, of course, for fresh developments in the great divorce case. Lawyers dropped in to hint that they would like to take care of his interests. But there never was anything new, and his New York lawyers were perfectly capable of handling his affairs, particularly as he had decided to enter no general denial to the charges. He would let her get her divorce if she wanted it so badly as all that!
“I’d fight it,” said the editor of the Patriot, counselling him one afternoon.
“You wouldn’t if you had a child to consider,”said Harvey, resignedly, quite overlooking the fact that there were nine growing children in the editor’s household.
“She’s too young to know anything about it,” argued the other, earnestly.
Harvey shook his head. “You don’t know what it is to be a father, Mr. Brinkley. It’s a terrible responsibility.”
Mr. Brinkley snorted. “I should say it is!”
“You’d think of your children if your wife sued you for divorce and charged you with—”
“I’d want my children to know I was innocent,”broke in the editor, warmly.
“They wouldn’t believe it if the lawyers got to cross-examining you,” said Harvey, meaning well, but making a secret enemy of Mr. Brinkley, who thought he knew more of a regrettable visit to Chicago than he pretended.
Late in the fall several important epoch-making things happened to Harvey. Nellie was granted a divorce and the custody of the child. His uncle fell ill and died of pneumonia, and he found himself the sole heir to a thriving business and nearly three thousand dollars in bank. Mrs. Davis blandly proposed matrimony to him, now that he was free and she nearing the halfway stage of mourning.
He was somewhat dazed by these swift turns of the wheel of fate.
His first thought on coming into the fortune was of Phoebe, and the opportunities it laid open to him where she was concerned. His uncle had been dilatory in the matter of dying, but his nephew did not have it in his kindly heart to hold it up against the old gentleman. Still, if he had passed on a fortnight earlier, the decree might have been anticipated by a few days and Phoebe at least saved for him. Seeing that the poor old gentleman had to die anyway, it seemed rather inconsiderate of fate to put it off so long as it did. As it was, he would have to make the best of it and institute some sort of proceedings to get possession of the child for half of the year at the shortest.
He went so far as to slyly consult an impecunious lawyer about the matter, with the result that a long letter was sent to Nellie setting out the facts and proposing an amicable arrangement in lieu of more sinister proceedings. Harvey added a postscript to the lawyer’s diplomatic rigmarole, conveying a plain hint to Nellie that, inasmuch as he was now quite well-to-do, she might fare worse than to come back to him and begin all over again.
The letter was hardly on its way to Reno, with instructions to forward, when he began to experience a deep and growing sense of shame; it was a pusillanimous trick he was playing on his poor old woman-hating uncle. Contemplating a resumption of the conjugal state almost before the old gentleman was cold in his grave! It was contemptible. In no little dread he wondered if his uncle would come back to haunt him. There was, at any rate, no getting away from the gruesome conviction, ludicrous as it may seem, that he would be responsible for the brisk turning over of Uncle Peter, if nothing more.
On top of this spell of uneasiness came the surprising proposition of Mrs. Davis. Between the suspense of not hearing from Nellie and the dread of offending the dead he was already in a sharp state of nerves. But when Mrs. Davis gently confided to him that she needed a live man to conduct her affairs without being actuated by a desire to earn a weekly salary he was completely stupefied.
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, Mrs. Davis,”he said, beginning to perspire very freely.
They were seated in the parlour of her house in Brown Street. She had sent for him.
“Of course, Harvey, it is most unseemly of me to suggest it at the present time, seeing as I have only been in mourning for three months, but I thought perhaps you’d feel more settled like if you knew just what to expect of me.”
“Just what to expect?”
“Yes; so’s you could rest easy in your mind. It would have to be quite a ways off yet, naturally, so’s people wouldn’t say mean things about us. They might, you know, considering the way you carried on with women in New York. Not for the world would I have ’em say or even think that anything had been going on between you and me prior to the time of Mr. Davis’ death, but—but you know how people will talk if they get a chance. For that reason I think we’d better wait until the full period of mourning is over. That’s only about a year longer, and it would stop—”
“Are—are you asking me to—to marry you, Mrs. Davis?” gasped Harvey, clutching the arms of the chair.
“Well, Harvey,” said she, kindly, “I am making it easy for you to do it yourself.”
“Holy—” began he, but strangled back the word “Mike,” remembering that Mrs. Davis, a devout church member, abhorred anything that bordered on the profane.
“Holy what?” asked she, rather coyly for a lady who was not likely to see sixty again unless reincarnated.
“Matrimony,” he completed, as if inspired.
“I know I am a few years older than you, Harvey, but you are so very much older than I in point of experience that I must seem a mere girl to you. We could—”
“Mrs. Davis, I—I can’t do it,” he blurted out, mopping his bro
w. “I suppose it means I’ll lose my job in the store, but, honestly, I can’t do it. I’m much obliged. It’s awfully nice of you to—”
“Don’t be too hasty,” said she, composedly.“As I said in the beginning, I want some one to conduct the store in Mr. Davis’ place. But I want that person to be part owner of it. No hired man, you understand? Now, how would a new sign over the door look, with your name right after Davis? Davis &—er—er—Oh, dear me!”
“I’ll—I’ll buy half of the store,” floundered he. “I want to buy a half interest.”
“I won’t sell,” said she, flatly. “I’m determined that the store shall never go out of the family while I am alive. There’s only one way for you to get around that, and that’s by becoming a part of the family.”
“Why—why, Mrs. Davis, I’m only thirty years old. You surely don’t mean to say you’d—you’d marry a kid like me? Let’s see. My mother, if she was alive, wouldn’t be as old as—”
“Never mind!” interrupted she, with considerable asperity. “We won’t discuss your mother, if you please. Now, Harvey, don’t be cruel. I am very fond of you. I will overlook all those scandalous things you did in New York. I can and will close my eyes to the wicked life you led there. I won’t even ask their names—and that’s more than most women would promise! I won’t—”
“I can’t do it,” he repeated two or three times in rapid succession.
“Think it over, Harvey dear,” said she, impressively.
“I’ll buy a half interest if you’ll let me, but I’ll be doggoned if I’ll marry a stepmother for Phoebe, not for the whole shebang!”
“Stepmother!” she repeated, shrilly. “I don’t intend to be a stepmother!”
“Maybe I meant grandmother,” he stammered in confusion. “I’m so rattled.”
“Nellie has got Phoebe. She’s not yours any longer. How can I be her stepmother? Answer that.”
“You can’t,” said he, much too promptly.
“Well, promise me one thing, Harvey dear,”she pleaded; “promise me you’ll take a month or two to think it over. We couldn’t be married for a year, in any event, so what’s the sense of being in such a hurry to settle the matter definitely?”
Harvey reflected. He found himself in a very peculiar predicament. He had gone to her house with the avowed intention of offering her three thousand dollars and the studio in exchange for a half interest in the drug store. Now his long cherished dream seemed to be turning into a nightmare.
“I will think it over,” he said, at last, in secret desperation. “But can’t you give me a year’s option?”
“On me?”
“On the store.”
“Well, am I not the store?”
“No ma’am,” said he, hastily. “I can’t look at you in that light. I can’t think of you as a drug store.”
“I am sure I would make you a good and loving wife, Harvey. If Davis were alive he could tell you how devoted I was to him in all the—”
“But that’s just the trouble, he isn’t alive!”cried poor Harvey, at his wits’ end. “Give me eight months.”
“In the meantime you will up and marry some one else. Half the girls in town are crazy—no, I won’t say that,” she made haste to interrupt herself, suddenly realising the tactlessness of the remark. “Come up to dinner next Sunday and we will talk it over again. It is the best drug store in Blakeville, Harvey; remember that.”
“I will remember it,” he said, blankly, and took his departure.
As he passed Simpson’s book store he dashed in and bought a New York dramatic paper. Hurriedly looking through the route list of companies, he found that the “Up in the Air”company was playing that week in Philadelphia. Without consulting his attorney he telegraphed to Nellie:—“Am in trouble. Uncle Peter is dead. Left me everything. Will you come back? Harvey.”
The next day he had a wire from Nellie, charges collect:—“If he left you everything, why don’t you pay for telegrams when you send them? Nellie.”
He replied:—“I was not sure you were with the company, that’s why. Shall I come to Philadelphia? Harvey.”
Her answer:—“Not unless you are looking for more trouble. Nellie.”
His next:—“There’s a woman here who wants me to marry her. Won’t you help me? Harvey.”
Her last:—“There’s a man here who is going to marry me. Why don’t you marry her? Naughty! Naughty! Nellie.”
He gave up in despair at this. On Sunday he allowed Mrs. Davis to bullyrag him into a tentative engagement. Then he began to droop. He had done a bit of investigating on his own account before going up to dine with her. She had been married to Davis forty-two years and then he died. If their only daughter had lived she would be forty-one years of age, and, if married, would doubtless be the mother of a daughter who might also in turn be the mother of a child. Figuring back, he made out that under these circumstances Mrs. Davis might very easily have been a great-grandmother. With this appalling thought in mind, he was quite firm in his determination to reject the old lady’s proposal. Mrs. Davis taking Nellie’s place! Pretty, gay, vivacious Nellie! It was too absurd for words.
But he went home an engaged man, just the same.
They were to be married in September of the following year, many months off.
That afternoon he saw a few gray hairs just above his ears and pulled them out. After that he looked for them every day. It was amazing how rapidly they increased despite his efforts to exterminate them. He began to grow careless in the matter of dress. His much talked of checked suits and lavender waistcoats took on spots and creases; his gaudy neckties became soiled and frayed; his fancy Newmarket overcoat, the like of which was only to be seen in Blakeville when some travelling theatrical troupe came to town, looked seedy, unbrushed, and sadly wrinkled. He forgot to shave for days at a time.
His only excuse to himself was, What’s the use?
During the holidays, in the midst of a cheerful season of buying presents for Phoebe—and a bracelet for Nellie—he saw in the Patriot, under big headlines, the thing that served as the last straw for his already sagging back. The announcement was being made in all the metropolitan newspapers that “Nellie Duluth, the most popular and the most beautiful of all the comic opera stars,” was to quit the stage forever on the first of the year to become the wife of “the great financier, L. Z. Fairfax, long a devoted admirer.”
The happy couple were to spend the honeymoon on the groom’s yacht, sailing in February for an extended cruise of the Mediterranean and other “sunny waters of the globe,” primarily for pleasure but actually in the hope of restoring Miss Duluth to her normal state of health. A breakdown, brought on no doubt by the publicity attending her divorce a few months earlier, made it absolutely imperative, said the newspapers, for her to give up the arduous work of her chosen profession.
Harvey did not send the bracelet to her.
The long winter passed. Spring came and in its turn gave way to summer. September drew on apace. He went about with an ever increasing tendency to look at the wall calendar with a fixed stare when he should have been paying attention to the congratulations that came to him from the opposite side of the counter or showcase. His baby-blue eyes wore the mournful, distressed look of an offending dog; his once trim little moustache drooped over the corners of his mouth; his shoulders sagged and his feet shuffled as he walked.
“Harvey,” said Mrs. Davis, not more than a fortnight before the wedding day, “You look terribly peaked. You must perk up for the wedding.”
“I’m going into a decline,” he said, affecting a slight cough.
“You are going to decline!” she shrilled, in her high, querulous voice.
“I said ‘into,’ Minerva,” he explained, dully.
“I do believe I’m getting a bit deaf,” she said, pronouncing it “deef.”
“It will be mighty tough on you if I should suddenly go into quick consumption,” said he, somewhat hopefully.
“You mu
stn’t think of such a thing, dearie,”she protested.
“No,” said he, letting his shoulders sag again. “I suppose it’s no use.”
Just a week to the day before the 6th of September—the one numeral on the calendar he could see with his eyes closed—he shuffled over to the tailor’s to try on the new Prince Albert coat and striped trousers that Mrs. Davis was giving him for a wedding present. He puffed weakly at the cigarette that hung from his lips and stared at the window without the slightest interest in what was going on outside.
A new train of thought was taking shape in his brain, as yet rather indefinite and undeveloped, but quite engaging as a matter for contemplation.
“Do you know how far it is to Reno?”he asked of the tailor, who paused in the process of ripping off the collar of the new coat.
“Couple of thousand miles, I guess. Why?”
“Oh, nothing,” said Harvey, blinking his eyes curiously. “I just asked.”
“You’re not thinking of going out there, are you?”
“My health isn’t what it ought to be,” said Harvey, staring westward over the roof of the church down the street. “If I don’t get better I may have to go West.”
“Gee, is it as bad as all that?”
Harvey’s lips parted to give utterance to a vigorous response, but he caught himself up in time.
“Maybe it won’t amount to anything,” he said, noncommittally. “I’ve got a little cough, that’s all.” He coughed obligingly, in the way of illustration.
“Don’t wait too long,” advised the kindly tailor. “If you get after it in time it can be checked, they say, although I don’t believe it. In the family?”
“Not yet,” said his customer, absently. “A week from today.” A reflection which puzzled the tailor vastly.
Whatever may have been in Harvey’s mind at the moment was swept away forever by the sudden appearance in the shop door of Bobby Nixon, the “boy” at Davis’.
“Say, Harvey,” bawled the lad, “come on, quick! Mrs. Davis is over at the store and she’s red-headed because you’ve been away for more’n an hour. She’s got a telegram from some’eres and—”
The George Barr McCutcheon Megapack: 25 Classic Novels and Stories Page 228