The Business of Life

She nodded, pale and expressionless, slowly brushing up the violets fastened to her muff.

Farris appeared, announced the time, and held Desboro's coat. They had just margin enough to make their train.

CHAPTER IX

The following morning, Aunt Hannah returned to her tiny apartment on Park Avenue, financially benefitted by her Westchester sojourn, having extracted a bolt of Chinese loot-silk for a gown from her nephew's dismayed wife, and the usual check from her nephew.

Lindley, a slow, pallid, and thrifty soul, had always viewed Aunt Hannah's event with unfeigned alarm, because, somehow or other, at the close of every visit he found himself presenting her with a check. And it almost killed him.

Years ago he had done it for the first time. He had never intended to; certainly never meant to continue. Every time she appeared he vowed to himself that he wouldn't. But before her visit ended, the pressure of custom became too much for him; a deadly sense of obligation toward this dreadful woman – of personal responsibility for her indigence – possessed him, became gradually an obsession, until he exorcised it by the present of a check.

She never spoke of it – never seemed to hint at it – always seemed surprised and doubtful of accepting; but some devilish spell certainly permeated the atmosphere in her immediate vicinity, drawing perfectly good money out of his innermost and tightly buttoned breast-pockets and leaving it certified and carelessly crumpled in her velvet reticule.

It happened with a sickening regularity which now he had come to view with the modified internal fury of resignation. It had simply become a terrible custom, and, with all his respectable inertia and thrifty caution, adherence to custom ruled Lindley Hammerton. For years he had pinched roses; for years he had drawn checks for Aunt Hannah. Nothing but corporeal dissolution could terminate these customs.

As for Aunt Hannah, she banked her check and had her bolt of silk made into a gown, and trotted briskly about her business with perennial self-confidence in her own ability to get on.

Once or twice during the following fortnight she remembered Jacqueline, and mentally tabulated her case as a possible source of future income; but social duties were many and acridly agreeable, and pecuniary pickings plenty. Up to her small, thin ears in intrigue, harmless and not quite so harmless, she made hay busily while the social sun shone; and it was near the end of February before a stagnation in pleasure and business brought Jacqueline's existence into her mind again.

She called up Silverwood, and eventually got Desboro on the wire.

"Do you know," she said, "that your golden-headed and rather attenuated inamorata has never had the civility to call on me!"

"She has been too busy."

"Too busy gadding about Silverwood with you!"

"She hasn't been here since you saw her."

"What!"

"It's quite true. An important collection is to be sold under the hammer on the premises; she had the contract to engineer that matter before she undertook to catalogue my stuff."

"Oh! Haven't you seen her since?"

"Yes."

"Not at Silverwood?"

"No, only at her office."

He could hear her sniff and mutter something, then:

"I thought you were going to give some parties at Silverwood, and ask me to bring your pretty friend," she said.

"I am. She has the jades and crystals to catalogue. What I want, as soon as she gets rid of Clydesdale, is for her to resume work here – come up and remain as my guest until the cataloguing is finished. So you see I'll have to have you, too."

"That's a cordial and disinterested invitation, James!"

"Will you come? I'll ask half a dozen people. You can kill a few at cards, too."

"When?"

"The first Thursday in March. It's a business proposition, but it's between you and me, and she is not to suspect it."

"Very well," said Aunt Hannah cheerfully. "I'll arrange my engagements accordingly. And do try to have a gay party, James; and don't ask the Clydesdales. You know how Westchester gets on my nerves. And I always hated her."

"You are very unjust to her and to him – "

"You can't tell me anything about Cary Clydesdale, or about his wife, either," she interrupted tartly, and rang off in a temper. And Desboro went back to his interrupted business with Vail.

Since Jacqueline had been compelled to suspend temporarily her inventory at Silverwood in favor of prior engagements, Desboro had been to the city only twice, and both times to see her.

He had seen her in her office, remained on both occasions for an hour only, and had then taken the evening train back to Silverwood. But every evening he had written her of the day just ended – told her about the plans for farming, now maturing, of the quiet life at Silverwood, how gradually he was reëstablishing neighbourly relations with the countryside, how much of a country squire he was becoming.

" – And the whole thing with malice aforethought," he wrote. " – Every blessed move only a strategy in order that, to do you honour, I may stand soberly and well before the community when you are among my guests.

"In tow of Aunt Hannah; engaged for part of the day in your business among the jades, crystals, and porcelains of a celebrated collection; one of a house party; and the guest of a young man who has returned very seriously to till the soil of his forefathers; all that anybody can possibly think of it will be that your host is quite as captivated by your grace, wisdom, and beauty as everybody else will be.

"And what do you think of that, Jacqueline?"

"I think," she wrote, "that no other man has ever been as nice to me. I do not really care about the other people, but I quite understand that you and I could not see each other as freely as we have been doing, without detriment to me. I like you – superfluous admission! And I should miss seeing you – humble confession! And so I suppose it is best that everybody should know who and what I am – a business woman well-bred enough to sit at table with your friends, with sufficient self-confidence to enter and leave a room properly, to maintain my grasp on the conversational ball, and to toss it lightly to my vis-à-vis when the time comes.

"All this is worth doing and enduring for the sake of being your guest. Without conscientious scruples, apprehensions, perplexities, and fears I could never again come to Silverwood and be there alone with you as I have been. Always I have been secretly unhappy and afraid after a day with you at Silverwood. Sooner or later it would have had to end. It can not go on – as it has been going. I know it. The plea of business is soon worn threadbare if carelessly used.

"And so – caring for your friendship as I do – and it having become such a factor in my life – I find it easy to do what you ask me; and I have arranged to go with Mrs. Hammerton to Silverwood on the first Thursday in March, to practice my profession, enjoy the guests at your house party, and cultivate our friendship with a clear conscience and a tranquil and happy mind.

"It was just that little element of protection I needed to make me more happy than I have ever been. Somehow, I couldn't care for you as frankly and freely as I wanted to. And some things have happened – you know what I mean. I didn't reproach you, or pretend surprise or anger. I felt neither – only a confused sense of unhappiness. But – I cared for you enough to submit.

"Now I go to you with a sense of security that is delightful. You don't understand how a girl situated as I am feels when she knows that she is in a position where any woman has the right to regard her with suspicion. Skating, motoring, with you, I could not bear to pass people you knew and to whom you bowed – women – even farmers' wives.

"But now it will be different; I feel so warmly confident at heart, so secure, that I shall perhaps dare to say and do and be much that you never suspected was in me. The warm sun of approval makes a very different person of me. A girl, who, in her heart, does not approve of what she is doing, and who is always expecting to encounter other women who would not approve, is never at her best – isn't even herself – and isn't really happy, even with a man she likes exceedingly. You will, I think, see a somewhat different girl on Thursday."

"If your words are sometimes a little misty," he wrote, "your soul shines through everything you say, with a directness entirely heavenly. Life, for us, begins on Thursday, under cover no longer, but in the open. And the field will be as fair for you as for me. That is as it should be; that is as far as I care to look. But somehow, after all is done and said that ever will be said and done between you and me, I am conscious that when we two emerge from the dream called 'living,' you will lead and direct us both – even if you never do so here on earth.

"I am not given to this sort of stuff.

"Jacqueline, dear, I'd like to amuse my guests with something unusual. Could you help me out?"

She answered: "I'll do anything in the world I can to make your house party pleasant for you and your guests. So I've asked Mr. Sissly to give a recital. It is quite the oddest thing; you don't listen to a symphony which he plays on the organ; you see it. He will send the organ, electrical attachments, lights, portable stage and screen, to Silverwood; and his men will install everything in the armoury.

"Then, if it would amuse your guests, I could tell them a little about your jades and crystals, and do it in a rather unusual way. I think you'd rather like it. Shall I?"

He wrote some days later: "What a darling you are! Anything you do will be charming. Sissly's men have arrived and are raising a racket in the armoury with hammer and saw.

"The stage will look quite wonderful between the wide double rank of equestrian figures in armour.

"Aunt Hannah writes that you called on her and that you and she are coming up on the train together, which is delightfully sensible, and exactly as it should be. Heaven alone knows how long you are going to be able to endure her. It's rather odd, you know, but I like her and always have, though she's made things disagreeable for me more than once in my life.