The Debtor Part 19

"I told you I didn't think so," he retorted, eying him with some wonder and a little timidity. "But I declare I didn't know what to do. There was that other check not accounted for yet; and I can't afford to lose any more, and that's a fact. Then you think I ought to have cashed it?"

Anderson's face twitched a little. Then he said, as if it were wrung out of him, "On general principles, I should not call it good business to repeat a transaction of that kind until the first was made right."

The druggist looked relieved. "Well, I am glad to hear you say so. I hated to--"

"But Captain Carroll may be as good pay in the end as I am,"

interrupted Anderson. "He seems to me to have good principles about things of that kind."

"Well, I'll cash the next check," said Drew, with a laugh. "I must go back, for I left my little boy alone in the store."

The druggist had scarcely gone before the old clerk came to the office door. "That young lady who was here a little while ago wants to speak to you, Mr. Anderson," he said, with an odd look.

"I will come out directly," replied Anderson, and pa.s.sed out into the store, where Charlotte Carroll stood waiting with a heightened color on her cheeks and a look of mingled appeal and annoyance in her eyes.

"I beg your pardon," she said, "but can you cash a check for me for twenty-five dollars? It will be a great favor."

"Certainly," replied Anderson, without the slightest hesitation. He was conscious that both clerks, the man and the boy, were watching him with furtive curiosity, and he was aware that Carroll's unreliability in the matter of his drafts had become widely known. He pa.s.sed around the counter to the money-drawer.

"Money seems to be very scarce in Banbridge this morning," remarked Charlotte, in a sweet, slightly petulant voice. She was both angry and ashamed that she had been forced to apply to Anderson to cash the check. "I have been everywhere, and n.o.body had as much as twenty-five dollars," she added.

Anderson heard a very faint chuckle, immediately covered by a cough, from Sam Riggs. He began counting out the notes, being conscious that the man and the boy were regarding each other with meaning, that the boy's elbow dug the man's ribs. He handed the money to Charlotte with a courteous bow, and she gave him in return the check, which was payable to her mother, and which had been indorsed by her.

"Thank you very much indeed," she said, but still in a piqued rather than very grateful voice. She really had no suspicion that any particular grat.i.tude was called for towards any one who cashed one of her father's checks.

"You are quite welcome," Anderson replied.

"It is a great inconvenience not having a bank in Banbridge," she remarked, accusingly, as she went out of the door with a slight nod of her pretty head. Then suddenly she turned and looked back. "I am very much obliged," she said, in an entirely different voice. Her natural gentleness and courtesy had all at once rea.s.serted themselves. "I trust I have not inconvenienced you," she added, very sweetly. "I would have waited until papa came home to-night and got him to cash the check. He was a little short this morning, and had to use some money before he could go to the bank, but my sister and I are very anxious to take the eleven-thirty train to New York, and we had only a dollar and six cents between us." She laughed as she said the last, and Anderson echoed her.

"That is not a very large amount, certainly, to equip two ladies to visit the shopping district," he said.

"I am very glad to accommodate you, and it is not the slightest inconvenience, I a.s.sure you."

"Well, I am very much obliged, very much," she repeated, with a pretty smile and nod, and she was gone with a little fluttering hop like a bird down the steps.

"He's got stuck," the boy motioned with his lips to the old clerk as Anderson re-entered the office, and the man nodded in a.s.sent. Neither of them ventured to express the opinion to Anderson. Both stood in a certain awe of him. The former lawyer still held familiarity somewhat at bay.

However, there followed a whispered consultation between the two clerks, and both chuckled, and finally Sam Riggs advanced with bravado to the office door.

"Mr. Anderson," he said, with mischief in his tone, and Anderson turned and looked at him inquiringly. "Oh, it is nothing, not worth speaking of, I suppose," said Sammy Riggs, "but that kid, the Carroll boy, swiped an apple off that basket beside the door when he went out with his sister. I saw him."

Chapter XII

Anderson was in the state of mind of a man who dreams and is quite aware all the time that he is dreaming. He deliberately indulged himself in this habit of mind. "When I am ready, I shall put all this away," he continually a.s.sured his inner consciousness. Then into the delicious charm of his air-castle he leaped again, mind and body. In those days he grew perceptibly younger. The fire of youth lit his eyes. He fed on the stimulants of sweet dreams, and for the time they nourished as well as exhilarated. Everybody whom he met told him how well he looked and that he was growing younger every day. He was shrewd enough to understand fully the fact that they considered him far from youth, or they would not have thus expressed themselves, but the triumph which he felt when he saw himself in his looking-gla.s.s, and in his own realization of himself, caused him to laugh at the innuendo. He felt that he _was_ young, as young as man could wish to be. He, as before said, had never been vain, but mortal man could not have helped exultation at the sight of that victorious visage of himself looking back at him. He did not admit it to himself, but he took more pains with his dress, although he had always been rather punctilious in that direction. All unknown to himself, and, had he known it, the knowledge would have aroused in him rebellion and shame, he was carrying out the instinct of the love-smitten male of all species. In lieu of the gorgeous feathers he put on a new coat and tie, he trimmed his mustache carefully. He smoothed and lighted his face with the beauty of joy and hope and of pleasant dreams. But there was, since he was a man at the head of creation, something more subtle and n.o.ble in his preening. In those days he became curiously careful--although, being naturally clean-hearted, he had little need for care--of his very thoughts. Naturally fastidious in his soul habits, he became even more so. The very books he read were, although he was unconscious of it, such as contributed to his spiritual adornment, to fit himself for his constant dwelling in his country of dreams. Certain people he avoided, certain he courted. One woman, who was innately coa.r.s.e, although her life had hedged her in safely from impropriety, was calling upon his mother one afternoon about this time. She was the wife of the old Presbyterian clergyman, Dr. Gregg.

She was a small, solidly built woman, in late middle life, tightly hooked up in black silk as to her body, and as to her soul by the prescribed boundaries of her position in life. Anderson, returning rather earlier than usual, found her with his mother, and retreated with actual rudeness, the woman became all at once so repellent to him.

"My son gets very tired," Mrs. Anderson said, softly, as she pa.s.sed the pound-cake again to her caller. "Quite often, when he comes in, he goes by himself and has a quiet smoke before he says much even to me."

Mrs. Gregg was eating the pound-cake with such extreme relish that Mrs. Anderson, who was herself fastidious, looked away, and as she did so heard distinctly a smack of the other woman's lips.

"He grows handsomer and younger every time I see him," remarked Mrs.

Gregg when she had swallowed her mouthful of cake and before she took another.

Mrs. Anderson repeated the caller's compliment to her son later on when the two were at the supper-table. "Yes, she paid you a great compliment," said she; "but, dear, why did you run out in that way?

It was almost rude, and she the minister's wife, too."

"I don't see how Dr. Gregg keeps up his necessary quota of saving grace, living with her," said Anderson.

"Why, my dear, I think she is a good woman."

"She is a bottled-up vessel of wrath," said Anderson.

"My son, I never heard you speak so before, and about a lady, too."

Anderson fairly blushed before his mother's mild eyes of surprise.

"Mother, you are right," he said, penitently. "I ought to be ashamed of myself, and I am. I know I was rude, but I did not feel like seeing her to-day. Of course she is a good woman."

Mrs. Anderson looked a little reflective. Now that her son had taken a proper att.i.tude with regard to her sister-woman, she began to feel a little critical license herself. "I will admit that she has little mannerisms which are not exactly agreeable and must grate on Dr.

Gregg," said she. As she spoke she seemed to hear again the smacking of the lips over the pound-cake. Then she looked scrutinizingly at her son. "But," she said, "I do believe she was right, Randolph, about your looks."

"Nonsense," said Randolph, laughing.

It was a warm night. After supper they both went out on the front porch. Mrs. Anderson sat gazing at her son from between the folds of a little, white lace kerchief which she wore over her head, to guard against possible dampness.

"Randolph," said she, after a while.

"What is it, mother, dear?"

"Do you feel well?"

"Of course I feel well. Why?"

"You look too well to be natural," said she, slowly.

"Mother, what an absurdity!"

"It is so," said she. "I had not noticed it until Mrs. Gregg spoke, but I see it now. I don't know where my eyes have been. You look too well."

Randolph laughed. "Now, mother, don't you think that sounds foolish?"

Mrs. Anderson continued to regard him with an expression of maternal love and severity, which pierced externals more keenly than an X-ray.

"No," said she, "I do not think it is foolish. You look too well to be natural. You look this minute as young in your face as you did when I had you in petticoats."

Randolph laughed loudly at that, but his mother was quite earnest.

She was not satisfied, and continued arguing the matter until she became afraid of the increasing dampness and went into the house, and the son drew a breath of relief. The mother little dreamed, with all her astuteness, of what was really transpiring. She did not know that when she had seated herself beside her son on the porch she had displaced with her gentle, elderly materiality the sweetest phantom of a beloved young girl. She did not know that when she entered the house the delicate, evanescent thing returned swifter than thought itself, and filled with the sweet presence that vacuum in her son's heart which she herself had never filled, and nestled there through a delicious hour of the summer night. She did not dream, as she sat by the window, staring out drowsily into the soft shadows and heard no murmur from her son on the porch, that in reality the silence of his soul was broken by words and tones which she had never heard from his lips, although she had brought him into the world.