On the Stairs Part 15

"Don't hurry to thank G.o.d. Perhaps you will want to thank the Devil."

Raymond's face fell. "You don't mean that _he_--on top of everything else--has come forward to--?"

"My friend! my friend! It isn't that at all. 'He' has nothing to do with it. Quite another party."

And it was. A Mr. Gluckstein, a sort of impresario made suddenly rich by a few seasons with fiddlers and prima donnas, was the man. He was willing, he said,--and I paid the news out as evenly and considerately as I could,--he was willing to take the house and a.s.sume the mortgage--but he asked a bonus of five thousand dollars for doing it.

"The scoundrel!" groaned Raymond, his face twisted by contemptuous rage.

"The impudent scoundrel!"

"Possibly so. But that is his offer--and the only one. And it is his best."

Raymond sat with his eyes on the floor. He was afraid to let me see his face. He hated the house--it was an incubus, a millstone; but--

He visibly despaired. "What shall I do about Albert's college, now?" he muttered presently.

He seemed to have pa.s.sed at a bound beyond the stage of sale and transfer. The odious property was off his hands--and every hope of a spare dollar had gone with it.

"His mother writes--" began Raymond.

"Yes?"

"She tells me--Well, her father died last month, it seems, and she is expecting something out of his estate...."

"Estate? Is there one?"

"Who can say? A man in that business! There might be something; there might be nothing or less. And it might take a year or more to get it."

"And if there is anything?"

"She says she will look after Albert's first year or two. I was about to refuse, but I expect I shall have to listen now."

He was silent. Then he broke out:--

"But there won't be. That old woman with her water-waves and her wrinkles is still hanging on; even if there should be anything, she would be the one to get most of it. I know her--she would s.n.a.t.c.h it all!"

"Listen, Raymond," I said; "you had better let _me_ help you here."

"I don't want you to. There must be some way to manage."

He fell into thought.

"I doubt if she can do anything, herself. Whatever she did would come through him in the end. You say he likes Albert?" He was silent again.

"I don't want to meet either of them--but I would about as soon meet him as her."

I saw that he was nerving himself for another _scene a faire_. Well, it would be less trying than the first one. If his sense of form, his _flair_ for fatalism, still persisted, ease was out of the question and no surrogate could serve.

Perhaps, after all, there had been nothing between those two. Anyway, in the general eye the marriage had made everything right. She was accepted, certainly. And as certainly he had lived down, if he had ever possessed it, the reputation of a hapless husband.

He wrote to her in a non-committal way--a letter which left loopholes, room for accommodation. Her reply suggested that he call at the bank; she would pa.s.s on the word. He told me he would try to do so. I saw the impudent concert-monger was to have his house.

And so, one forenoon, at eleven or so, Raymond, after some self-drivings, reached the bank; by appointment, as he understood.

Through the big doors; up the wide, bal.u.s.traded stairway--it was the first time he had ever been in the place. He was well on the way to the broad, square landing, when some lively clerks or messengers, who had been springing along behind him, all at once slackened their pace and began to skirt the paneled marble walls. A number of prosperous middle-aged and elderly men were coming down together in a compact group. It seemed as if some directors' meeting was in progress--in progress from one office, or one building, to another. In the middle of the group was John W. McComas.

He was absorbed, abstracted. Raymond, like some of the other up-farers, had gained the landing, and like them now stood a little to one side.

McComas looked out at him with no particular expression and indeed with no markedness of attention.

"How do you do?" he said indifferently.

"I'm pretty well," said Raymond dispiritedly.

"And that was all!" he reported next day in a high state of indignation.

"Don't suppose I shall try it again!"

But a careless Gertrude had failed to inform her husband of the appointment. She had been busy, or he had been away from home....

"Go once more," I counseled, I pleaded.

A note came to him from McComas--a decent, a civil. Come and talk things over--that was its purport. He went.

McComas, as you can guess, was very bland, very expansive, very magnanimous (to his own sense). "I _like_ Albert!" he declared heartily.

But he did little to cloak the fact that it was his own money which was to carry the boy through college.

Raymond was in the depths for a month. After Gluckstein had got his deed for the house and Albert had packed his trunk for the East, he felt that now indeed he had lost wife, home and son.

PART VIII

I

Before leaving his house for good and all, Raymond spent a dismal fortnight in going over old papers--out-of-date doc.u.ments which once had interested his father and grandfather, books, diaries and memoranda which had occupied his own youthful days: the slowly deposited, enc.u.mbering sediment of three generations, long in one place. There were several faded agreements with the signature of the ineffable individual who had married into the family, had received a quit-claim to those suburban acres, and had then, at a point of stress, refused to give them back. There were sheaves of old receipted bills--among them one for the set of parlor furniture in the best (or the worst) style of the Second Empire. There were drafts of Raymond's early compositions--his first attempts at the essay and the short story; there was an ancient, heavily annotated Virgil (only six books), and there was a sheepskin algebra in which he had taken, by himself, a post-school course as a means of intellectual tonic, with extra problems dexterously worked out and inserted on bits of blue paper....

"I filled the furnace seven times," he said to me, laconically.

I myself felt the strain of it all. It is less wearing to move every two or three years, as most of us do, than to move but once--near the end of a long life, of a succession of lives.

I never asked what Mr. Gluckstein thought of the orchestrion.

Raymond went to live at a sort of private hotel. Here he read and wrote.

He carried with him a set of little red guide-books, long, long since out of date, and he restudied Europe in the light of early memories. He also subscribed to a branch of a public library in the vicinity--a vicinity that seemed on the far edge of things. However, the tendency of the town has always been centrifugal. Many of our worthies, if they have held on to life long enough, have had to make the same disconcerting trek.

From this retreat Raymond occasionally issued to concerts and picture-exhibitions. I do not know that he was greatly concerned for them; but they carried on a familiar tradition and gave employment still to a failing momentum.

From this same retreat there would issue, about the Christmas season, a few watercolors on Italian subjects. If they were faint and feeble, I shall not say so. We ourselves have one of them--an indecisive view of the ruins in the Roman Forum. It is not quite the Forum I recall; but then, as we know, the Roman Forum, for the past half-century, has altered almost from year to year.

Letters reached him occasionally from Albert the freshman. They might well have come from Albert the soph.o.m.ore. Raymond showed me one of them on an evening when I had called to see him in his new quarters.