Under the Skylights Part 30

What had he and the directors meant by such a game of fast-and-loose? Why had they treated an artist of Mr. Dill's standing with such inconsiderateness and injustice? Why had they tried to handle so important a question by themselves? Why had they not consulted the stock-holders? Why had they not consulted _her_--a stock-holder since the foundation of the bank and an amateur of approved standing? And many more interrogatories no less hard to answer.

Hill listened to her cowed, intimidated; it was one more trouble in a time of trouble. He presently found his voice--or a part of it--and explained in low, trembling tones that concerns of much greater importance had come to the front; that this entire matter of decoration must be set aside for the present, perhaps for all time; that some other----

Eudoxia threw an indignant frown upon him and drove off to see his wife.

Almira Hill was at home--in these latter days she was seldom anywhere else. Socially speaking, she had evaporated years ago; but there was no reason why she should not precipitate herself and appear once more in concrete form. Eudoxia had an intuitive sense that Almira would welcome the chance.

"Receive with us," Eudoxia urged her. What easier way for Almira to see some of her old friends? She considered. She consented.

Then Eudoxia opened against the bank. "Give me your help for my--nephew,"

she said to end with.

"Mr. Hill has spoken of this to me," replied the old lady slowly; "but he is so worried, so anxious, about something these days, that I hardly----"

"_We_ are worried; we are anxious, too, my dear Mrs. Hill. Figure the situation. Imagine the strain upon two young people----"

Almira had not lost all her sentiment, nor all her interest in the concerns of youth. She promised to give what help she could.

Eudoxia sped on to see Euphrosyne McNulty. She found the household in a state of suppressed tumult. The servant who opened the door was all at sea; obscure sounds of sobbing came from somewhere above; and when Euphrosyne finally washed in she was like the ocean half-subsided after a storm. She had just learned that Preciosa had refused Robin Morrell.

"Such a caller at such a time!" she had articulated over Eudoxia's card.

It took away half the sweetness of the triumph. She rushed to her toilet-table, hoping, meanwhile, that Norah had not boggled with the tray and that her father-in-law had not left his pipe on top of the piano.

Eudoxia was brief. She made no vain pa.s.ses of regret that Euphrosyne had not taken her place earlier on her invitation-list. She invited her, now, with all emphasis, to attend her "art reception," and hoped that she would allow her dear daughter to help pour tea. A sunburst exploded before Euphrosyne's unready eyes. She recovered herself and accepted for both.

Eudoxia drove to the office of the Pin-and-Needle Combine. Like every other moneyed person in town, she had a finger in that pie. Why shouldn't she drop in on the cooks?

Robin Morrell was not there; she was received by Richard. Richard had heard from Gibbons what was in the wind, but knew nothing as yet, of course, about his brother's rejection.

Eudoxia understood that Richard was hand and glove with Hill. She asked his influence as a matter of justice to Daffingdon Dill. Richard had been impatient and resentful to begin with; now he became dogged and surly.

She had come at the wrong time and about the wrong business. Virgilia had dismissed him with no gentle hand--people had smiled over his discomfiture for a week. The memory of this still rankled. Why in the world should he exert himself for Daffingdon Dill?

Let him exert himself for his brother then. But he became more dogged and surly still. Why should his brother succeed when he himself had failed?

Why should his brother need help anyway? Why must this woman come poking into a man's most private affairs? Eudoxia surmised, through the medium of his sullen mood, a house divided against itself. She left Morrell in anger and drove to her husband's office.

Every man had rebuffed her. Only the women had been complaisant--and even these she had had to pay. As she sat by her husband's desk, waiting for his attention, her wrath rose against the Grindstone and Hill, against the Morrells and their Combine.

"I'll take my Grindstone stock," she declared, "and hawk it up and down the street at eighty--half what it's worth. Let us see where Andrew Hill will be _then_!"

Pence turned on her slowly. "I doubt whether you could get eighteen for it to-day. The street is talking--talking low, but it's talking."

"Why, is anything wrong with the Grindstone?"

"Well, rather. Hill, I judge, has come as close to the edge as a man can without falling over. I'm glad your holdings are no heavier."

"Ah!" said Eudoxia; "that's why he has choked off Dill! Well," she resumed with unimpaired energy, "I'll take my Pin-and-Needle and sell it for next to nothing. I'll give it away. I'll stick it under the cracks of doors. I'll present it with every pound, or rather every cup of tea. Let us see, then, how Richard Morrell----"

"Do that," said her husband, "and half the banks in town will fail.

You're not ready for such a crash as that, are you?"

"Why, what's the matter with Pin-and-Needle?" asked Eudoxia.

"It's at death's door. It's gasping. Unless something is injected, unless somebody galvanizes it----"

"Ah!" cried Eudoxia; "so that's why Orlando Gibbons gave the McNulty dinner! Oh, things must hold off a few days longer! Make them, Palmer!

That girl must marry him, so that I can save my Grindstone stock and my Pin-and-Needle investments, and so that Daff can get those pictures to paint, and so that Virgilia can get him!" Oh, heavens! She had once aspired to guide the chariot of finance, yet all she had to offer against this threatening squadron of calamities was an "art reception" with tea!

XXV

"Go? Of course we'll go!" said Little O'Grady spiritedly. "Anybody may go who's able to pay a dollar and who's got a friend to name him. I hope you and I can cough up as much as that, Ignace; and then if we have to live the rest of the week on sawdust, why, we will. Go? I guess yes. If I'm ever to make the Queen's acquaintance and get her profile, this is no chance to throw away."

Prochnow was in a deplorable state and needed all the support Little O'Grady could give him. He had not seen Preciosa for several days. He had called at the house once or twice--that vast florid pile, which had always looked lackadaisical rather than cruel; but it had refused to admit him. Euphrosyne had repulsed him with the utmost contumely; even old Jeremiah (who may not have meant to be harsh, but who seemed to be acting under superior orders) told him he must not appear there again.

Nothing came to console him except three or four tear-stained little scrawls from Preciosa herself. In these she vowed in simple and slightly varying phrases to be faithful; n.o.body should come between them, n.o.body should make her untrue, n.o.body should prevent her from keeping her promise, n.o.body should take her away from him, and the like.

"What does it mean, Terence?" asked Prochnow, vastly perturbed by these blind reiterations.

Little O'Grady pondered. "Her folks are against us, that's all," he replied. "They're trying to marry her to somebody else," he told himself.

"Who can it be?" Then, aloud and cheerfully: "If you can't see her at one house, why, just see her at another. Come along with you."

They found the town moving on Eudoxia Pence _en ma.s.se_, with several policemen in front to keep order. On the front steps they grazed elbows with the Joyces and the Gowans; and with these and other members of the general public they swept on, joining the vast throng of those who were so eager to press the great lady's Smyrna rugs with their own feet and fumble her silk hangings with their own fingers and rap her j.a.panese jars with their own knuckles and smell her new paintings with their own noses and see Mrs. Palmer Pence herself with their own eyes. "Gee! ain't it swell!" whispered Little O'Grady, who could make swans out of geese or geese out of swans with equal facility.

Prochnow ignored the swells, the jars, the pictures and all the rest; he sought only Preciosa. Little O'Grady was not in a new field for nothing, and he looked at everybody. First of all, there was the great Eudoxia herself, and her profile was as lovely as ever. When, when, when should he reach the point of modelling it? She stood there with a vain pretence of receiving,--she was too conventional to dispense with the recognised forms even on the occasion of a mere popular outpouring. Little O'Grady went up to her boldly and shook hands; he was outside the general understanding that made her, in so promiscuous a function, something to be looked at rather than touched--save by a few intimates. Only let him bring her within range of his aura, he thought, and her subjugation would inevitably follow. Then he stepped back and watched her. There was still a determined cordiality in her smile, but a furtive anxiety marked the glance she sent now and then into the second or third room beyond, where a pressing crowd and a subdued glare of candle-light seemed to indicate a focus of interest hardly second to the picture gallery itself. Little O'Grady caught this anxious look. "Is she afraid for her bric-a-brac or her spoons?" he wondered. "No, it's something more than that."

Beside Eudoxia stood Almira Hill,--"a mother in Israel, if ever there was one," O'Grady commented. "And what's the matter with _her_? Shy? Awkward?

No, she's too old and experienced for that. There, she's looking in the same direction. Something's up. What is it?"

It was this: Almira's husband had told her that morning how it all depended upon Preciosa McNulty.

Roscoe Orlando Gibbons came through the crowd, with a great effect of smiling joviality. But he too glanced over the press of heads toward the glare of candle-light with a strained intensity not to be concealed.

Roscoe Orlando suddenly turned aside toward an old fellow who sat on a pink brocade sofa. "See, there's her grandfather," whispered Prochnow.

Old Jeremiah had instinctively taken refuge on the one piece of furniture that reminded him of home. Here he sat, awkwardly twisting his hands and blinking every now and then at the great light that shone afar off. "I could never in the world have got him to anything resembling a dinner,"

declared Eudoxia. "He acts like a stray cat," said Little O'Grady. "But he needn't,--there seem to be plenty of the same sort here, after all."

Yes, at a second glance old Jeremiah appeared to be less the victim of society than of circ.u.mstances; and when Roscoe Orlando Gibbons bowed over him and whispered and they both looked toward the illumination while Eudoxia Pence looked at them, Little O'Grady was surer than ever that something was in the air.

He felt Prochnow suddenly slipping behind him. "Her mother!" the young fellow explained. Yes, it was Euphrosyne in full fig and in very active circulation. She rustled, she swooped, she darted, she was as if on springs. "Well, she feels her oats," commented Little O'Grady. He looked at her again. No, what moved her was not vainglory, not a restless sense of triumph. She was keyed up to the most racking pitch of anxious expectation. She looked whither Eudoxia and Roscoe Orlando and all the others had looked, but with an intensified expression, and Little O'Grady almost felt as if challenged to solve some obscure yet widely ramified enigma.

He turned round as if in search of help. In a doorway near-by he saw another familiar face. "Why, there's Daff!" he cried. "It's Dill, our hated rival," he explained to Prochnow. "And that girl with him is Miss Jeffreys, the one he's going to marry."

Prochnow looked at the tall handsome figure in the long frock-coat with the bunch of violets, and felt abashed by his own short jacket and indifferent shoes. He noted too the a.s.sumption of ease and suavity with which the other was entertaining a little knot of ladies. It was this person, then, an out-and-out man of the world, against whom he, uncouth and unpractised boy, had presumed to pit himself!

Little O'Grady was not able immediately to detach Dill's attention from his a.s.sociates. Meanwhile he studied both Dill and Virgilia. The general effect was brilliant enough, yet----Yes, surely they were too loquacious, too demonstrative; they were talking against time, they were working under cover, they were kicking up a dust. And, yes--both Daff and Virgilia, in the midst of this gay chatter, shot certain furtive, sidelong glances whither so many had been sent before.

The group in the doorway showed signs of breaking up. "Daff," said Little O'Grady, "for the Lord's sake, what's on?"

"Ah, O'Grady," said Dill, in a cool, formal manner; "are you here?" Since that calamitous episode at the bank, he had cared less than ever for O'Grady: they had been quite right in throwing him out. He had found it hard to tolerate his forwardness at the beginning of the negotiations, and to carry the burden of his Bohemian eccentricity through them; and harder still to pardon the slap-dash sally that had thrown the common fat into the fire. Now up popped the fellow, knowing him as intimately and familiarly as ever.