The Prince and Betty Part 20

"I'm so glad she's safe!" said Betty. "There were two boys teasing her in the street. I've been giving her some milk."

Mr. Jarvis nodded, with his eyes on the floor.

There was a pause. Then he looked up, and, fixing his gaze some three feet above her head, spoke.

"Say!" he said, and paused again. Betty waited expectantly.

He relaxed into silence again, apparently thinking.

"Say!" he said. "Ma'am, obliged. Fond of de kit. I am."

"She's a dear," said Betty, tickling the cat under the ear.

"Ma'am," went on Mr. Jarvis, pursuing his theme, "obliged. Sha'n't fergit it. Any time you're in bad, glad to be of service. Bat Jarvis.

Groome Street. Anybody'll show youse where I live."

He paused, and shuffled his feet; then, tucking the cat more firmly under his arm, left the room. Betty heard him shuffling downstairs.

He had hardly gone, when the door opened again, and Smith came in.

"So you have had company while I was away?" he said. "Who was the grandee with the cat? An old childhood's friend? Was he trying to sell the animal to us?"

"That was Mr. Bat Jarvis," said Betty.

Smith looked interested.

"Bat! What was he doing here?"

Betty related the story of the cat. Smith nodded thoughtfully.

"Well," he said, "I don't know that Comrade Jarvis is precisely the sort of friend I would go out of my way to select. Still, you never know what might happen. He might come in useful. And now, let us concentrate ourselves tensely on this very entertaining little journal of ours, and see if we cannot stagger humanity with it."

CHAPTER XIV

A CHANGE OF POLICY

The feeling of tranquillity which had come to Betty on her first acquaintance with _Peaceful Moments_ seemed to deepen as the days went by, and with each day she found the sharp pain at her heart less vehement. It was still there, but it was dulled. The novelty of her life and surroundings kept it in check. New York is an egotist. It will suffer no divided attention. "Look at me!" says the voice of the city imperiously, and its children obey. It s.n.a.t.c.hes their thoughts from their inner griefs, and concentrates them on the pageant that rolls unceasingly from one end of the island to the other. One may despair in New York, but it is difficult to brood on the past; for New York is the City of the Present, the City of Things that are Going On.

To Betty everything was new and strange. Her previous acquaintance with the metropolis had not been extensive. Mr. Scobell's home--or, rather, the house which he owned in America--was on the outskirts of Philadelphia, and it was there that she had lived when she was not paying visits. Occasionally, during horse-show week, or at some other time of festivity, she had spent a few days with friends who lived in Madison or upper Fifth Avenue, but beyond that, New York was a closed book to her.

It would have been a miracle in the circ.u.mstances, if John and Mervo and the whole of the events since the arrival of the great cable had not to some extent become a little dream-like. When she was alone at night, and had leisure to think, the dream became a reality once more; but in her hours of work, or what pa.s.sed for work in the office of _Peaceful Moments_, and in the hours she spent walking about the streets and observing the ways of this new world of hers, it faded.

Everything was so bright and busy! Every moment had its fresh interest.

And, above all, there was the sense of adventure. She was twenty-four; she had health and an imagination; and almost unconsciously she was stimulated by the thrill of being for the first time in her life genuinely at large. The child's love of hiding dies hard in us. To Betty, to walk abroad in New York in the midst of hurrying crowds, just Betty Brown--one of four million and no longer the beautiful Miss Silver of the society column, was to taste the romance of disguise, or invisibility.

During office hours she came near to complete contentment. To an expert stenographer the amount of work to be done would have seemed ridiculously small, but Betty, who liked plenty of time for a task, generally managed to make it last comfortably through the day.

This was partly owing to the fact that her editor, when not actually at work himself, was accustomed to engage her in conversation, and to keep her so engaged until the entrance of Pugsy Maloney heralded the arrival of some caller.

Betty liked Smith. His odd ways, his conversation, and his extreme solicitude for his clothes amused her. She found his outlook on life refres.h.i.+ng. Smith was an optimist. Whatever cataclysm might occur, he never doubted for a moment that he would be comfortably on the summit of the debris when all was over. He amazed Betty with his stories of his reportorial adventures. He told them for the most part as humorous stories at his own expense, but the fact remained that in a considerable proportion of them he had only escaped a sudden and violent death by adroitness or pure good luck. His conversation opened up a new world to Betty. She began to see that in America, and especially in New York, anything may happen to anybody. She looked on Smith with new eyes.

"But surely all this," she said one morning, after he had come to the end of the story of a highly delicate piece of interviewing work in connection with some c.u.mberland Mountains feudists, "surely all this--"

She looked round the room.

"Domesticity?" suggested Smith.

"Yes," said Betty. "Surely it all seems rather tame to you?"

Smith sighed.

"Comrade Brown," he said, "you have touched the spot with an unerring finger."

Since Mr. Renshaw's departure, the flatness of life had come home to Smith with renewed emphasis. Before, there had always been the quiet entertainment of watching the editor at work, but now he was feeling restless. Like John at Mervo, he was practically nothing but an ornament. _Peaceful Moments_, like Mervo, had been set rolling and had continued to roll on almost automatically. The staff of regular contributors sent in their various pages. There was nothing for the man in charge to do. Mr. Renshaw had been one of those men who have a genius for being as busy over nothing as if it were some colossal work, but Smith had not that gift. He liked something that he could grip and that gripped him. He was becoming desperately bored. He felt like a marooned sailor on a barren rock of domesticity.

A visitor who called at the office at this time did nothing to remove this sensation of being outside everything that made life worth living.

Betty, returning to the office one afternoon, found Smith in the doorway, just parting from a thickset young man. There was a rather gloomy expression on the thickset young man's face.

Smith, too, she noted, when they were back in the inner office, seemed to have something on his mind. He was strangely silent.

"Comrade Brown," he said at last, "I wish this little journal of ours had a sporting page."

Betty laughed.

"Less ribaldry," protested Smith pained. "This is a sad affair. You saw the man I was talking to? That was Kid Brady. I used to know him when I was out West. He wants to fight anyone in the country at a hundred and thirty-three pounds. We all have our hobbies. That is Comrade Brady's."

"Is he a boxer?"

"He would like to be. Out West, n.o.body could touch him. He's in the champions.h.i.+p cla.s.s. But he has been pottering about New York for a month without being able to get a fight. If we had a sporting page on _Peaceful Moments_ we could do him some good, but I don't see how we can write him up," said Smith, picking up a copy of the paper, and regarding it gloomily, "in 'Moments in the Nursery' or 'Moments with Budding Girlhood.'"

He put up his eyegla.s.s, and stared at the offending journal with the air of a vegetarian who has found a caterpillar in his salad.

Incredulity, dismay, and disgust fought for precedence in his expression.

"B. Henderson Asher," he said severely, "ought to be in some sort of a home. Cain killed Abel for telling him that story."

He turned to another page, and scrutinized it with deepening gloom.

"Is Luella Granville Waterman by any chance a friend of yours, Comrade Brown? No? I am glad. For it seems to me that for sheer, concentrated piffle, she is in a cla.s.s by herself."

He read on for a few moments in silence, then looked up and fixed Betty with his monocle. There was righteous wrath in his eyes.

"And people," he said, "are paying money for this! _Money!_ Even now they are sitting down and writing checks for a year's subscription.

It isn't right! It's a skin game. I am a.s.sisting in a carefully planned skin game!"

"But perhaps they like it," suggested Betty.