Quin Part 17

Madam Bartlett's accident had far-reaching results. For fifty years her firm hand had brooked no slightest interference with the family steering-wheel, and now that it was removed the household machinery came to a standstill. She who had "ridden the whirlwind and directed the storm" now found herself ignominiously laid low. Instead of rising with the dawn, primed for battle in club committee, business conclave, or family council, she lay on her back in a darkened room, a prisoner to pain. The only vent she had for her pent-up energy was in hourly tirades against her daughters for their inefficiency, the nurses for their incompetency, the doctors for their lack of skill, and the servants for their disobedience.

The one person who, in any particular, found favor with her these days was her son's new secretary. Every Sat.u.r.day, when Quinby Graham stopped on his way to the bank with various papers for her to sign, he was plied with questions and intrusted with various commissions. A top sergeant was evidently just what Madam had been looking for all her life--one trained to receive orders and execute them. All went well until one day when Quin refused to smuggle in some forbidden article of diet; then the steam-roller of her wrath promptly pa.s.sed over him also.

He waited respectfully until her breath and vocabulary were alike exhausted, then said good-humoredly:

"I used to board with a woman up in Maine that had hysterics like that.

They always made her feel a lot better. Don't you want me to s.h.i.+ft that pulley a bit? You don't look comfortable."

Madam promptly ordered him out of the room. But next day she made an excuse to send for him, and actually laughed when he stepped briskly up to the bed, saluted smartly, and impudently asked her how her grouch was.

There was something in his very lack of reverence, in his impertinent a.s.sumption of equality, in his refusal to pay her the condescending homage due feebleness and old age, that seemed to flatter her.

"He's a mule," she told Randolph--"a mule with horse sense."

Quin's change from khaki to civilian clothes affected him in more ways than one. Const.i.tutionally he was opposed to saying "sir" to his fellow men; to standing at attention until he was recognized; to acknowledging, by word or gesture, that he was any one's inferior on this wide and democratic planet. He much preferred organizing to being organized, leading to being led. Early in his military training he had evinced an inclination to take things into his own hands and act without authority.

It was somewhat ironic that the very trait that had deprived him of a couple of bars on his shoulder should have put the medal on his breast.

But freedom from the restrictions of army life brought its penalties. He found that blunders condoned in a soldier were seriously criticized in a civilian; that the things he had been at such pains to learn in the past two years were of no apparent value to him now. It was a constant surprise to him that a plaid suit and three-dollar necktie should meet with less favor in the feminine eye than a dreary drab uniform.

About the first of March he was getting somewhat discouraged at his slow progress, when an incident happened that planted his feet firmly on the first rung of his social ladder.

Ever since their mother's accident, Miss Isobel and Miss Enid had stood appalled before their new responsibilities. They were like two trembling dead leaves that still cling to a shattered but st.u.r.dy old oak. What made matters worse was the absence of the faithful black Tom, who for years had served them by day and guarded them by night. They lived in constant fear of burglars, which grew into a veritable terror when some one broke into the pantry and rifled the shelves.

Quin heard about it when he arrived on Sat.u.r.day morning, and as usual offered advice:

"What you need is a man in the house. Then you wouldn't be scared all the time."

"Well," said Madam, "what about you?"

Quin's face fell. He had no desire to exchange the noisy, wholesome family life of the Martels for the silent, somber grandeur of the Bartletts. His affections had taken root in the shabby little brown house that always seemed to be humming gaily to itself. When the piano was not being played, the violin or guitar was. There were bursts of laughter, s.n.a.t.c.hes of song, and young people going and coming through doors that never stayed closed.

"You don't seem keen about the proposition," Madam commented dryly, smoothing the bed-clothes with her wrinkled fingers.

"Well, I can't say I am," Quin admitted. "You see, I'm living with some friends out on Sixth Street. They are sort of kin-folks of yours, I believe--the Martels."

A carefully aimed hand grenade could have produced no more violent or immediate result. Madam d.a.m.ned the Martels, individually and collectively, and furiously disclaimed any relations.h.i.+p.

"They are a trifling, worthless lot!" she stormed. "I wish I'd never heard of them. They fastened their talons on my son Bob, and ruined his life, and now they are doing all they can to ruin my granddaughter.

Haven't you ever heard them speak of me?"

"Oh, yes," said Quin with laughing significance.

"What do they say?" Madam demanded instantly.

"You want it straight?"

"Yes."

"Well, Mr. Martel told me only last night that he thought you were an object of pity."

Madam's jaw relaxed in amazement.

"What on earth did he mean?" she asked.

"He said you'd got 'most everything in life that he'd missed, but he'd hate to change places with you."

She lay perfectly still, staring at him with her small restless eyes, and when she spoke again it was to revert to the subject of burglars.

Quin was relieved. He had been skating on thin ice in discussing the Martels, for any moment might have brought up a question concerning Eleanor.

"I used to have a corporal that was an ex-burglar," he said, plunging into the new subject with alacrity. "First-rate fellow, too. Last I heard of him, he had a position as chauffeur with a rich old lady who lived alone up in Detroit. She had two burglar-alarm systems, but the joke of it was she made him sleep in the house for extra protection!"

"I suppose you are trying to frighten me off from engaging you?" Madam asked.

"Not exactly," Quin smiled. "Of course I'll come if you can't get anybody else. But there's no question of engaging me. If I come, I pay board."

Madam laughed aloud for the first time since her accident.

"Do you take me for a landlady?" she asked.

"Only when you take me for a night-watchman," said Quin.

They eyed each other steadily for a moment, then she held out her hand.

"We'll compromise," she said. "No salary and no board. We'll try it out for a week."

The next day Quin's suit-case, containing all his worldly possessions, was transferred from the small stuffy room over the Martels' kitchen to the large luxurious one over the Bartletts' dining-room. It was quite the grandest room he had ever occupied, with its ma.s.sive walnut furniture and its heavily draped windows; but, had it been stripped bare but for a single picture, it would still have been a _chambre de luxe_ to him. The moment he entered he discovered a photograph of Eleanor on the mantel, and ten minutes later, when Hannah tapped at the door to say that dinner was served, he was still standing with arms folded on the shelf in absorbed adoration.

That first meal with the Misses Bartlett was an ordeal he never forgot.

Their formal aloofness and evident dismay at his presence were enough in themselves to embarra.s.s him; but combined with the necessity of choosing the right knife and fork, of breaking his bread properly, and of removing his spoon from his coffee-cup, they were quite overpowering. During his two years in the army he had drifted into the easy habits and easier vernacular of the enlisted man. Whatever knowledge he had of the amenities of life had almost been forgotten. But, though his social virtues were few, he pa.s.sionately identified himself with them rather than with his faults, which were many. To prove his politeness, for instance, he insisted upon his hostesses having second helps to every dish, offered to answer the telephone whenever it rang, and even obligingly started to answer the door-bell during the salad course.

That dinner was but the initiation into a week of difficult adjustments.

When he was not in the arctic region surrounding Miss Isobel and Miss Enid, he was in the torrid zone of Madam's presence. New and embarra.s.sing situations confronted him on every hand, and when he was not breaking conventions he was breaking china. But Quin was not sensitive, and, in spite of the fact that he was being silently or vocally condemned most of the time, he cheerfully persevered in his determination to win the respect of the family.

The saving of his ignorance was that he never tried to conceal it. He looked at it with surprise and discussed it with disconcerting frankness.

He was no more abashed in learning new and better ways of conducting himself than he would have been in learning a new language. He laughed good-humoredly at his mistakes and seldom committed the same one a second time. His limitations were to him like the frontier to a pioneer--a thing to be reached and crossed.

If only he could have contented himself with performing the one duty required of him and then gracefully effacing himself, his success would have been a.s.sured. But that was not Quin's nature. Having identified himself with the family, he promptly a.s.sumed full responsibility for its welfare. By the end of the second week he was the self-const.i.tuted head of the establishment. No mission was too high or too low for him to volunteer to perform. One moment he was tactfully severing diplomatic relations with a consulting physician in the front hall, the next he was firing the furnace in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Whenever he was in the house he was meeting emergencies and adjusting difficulties, upsetting established customs and often achieving unexpected results with new ones.

Miss Isobel and Miss Enid stood aghast at his temerity, and waited hourly for the lightning of Madam's wrath to annihilate him. But, though the bolts rained about him, they failed to destroy him.

On one occasion Miss Isobel was so outraged by his familiar att.i.tude toward her mother that she plucked up courage to remonstrate with him; but Madam, instead of appreciating the interference on her behalf, promptly turned upon her defender.

"Now, Isobel," she said caustically, "_you_ may be old enough to want men to respect you, but I am young enough to want them to like me. You leave young Graham alone."

Quin meanwhile, in spite of his arduous duties at the office and at home, was living in a world of dreams. The privilege of hearing Eleanor's name frequently mentioned, of getting bits of news of her from time to time, the exciting possibility of being under the same roof with her when she returned, supplied the days with thrilling zest. Since her teasing note in answer to his double-barreled communication, he had written but once and received no answer; but he knew that she was expected home for the Easter vacation, and he lived on that prospect.

One evening, when he was summoned to Madam's room to shorten her new crutches, he realized that the all-important subject was under discussion.