Rich Man, Poor Man
It was a vivid period to her – that first month or so of her new life. For one thing it made her realize clearly what the power, the persuasion of wealth like the Beestons' meant. Fifth Avenue, the Fifth Avenue that would have turned up its nose at Bab the boarding-house waif, now turned itself inside out for Barbara, old Peter Beeston's grandchild. Modistes, milliners, bootmakers, all that horde of outfitters that batten on the rich, swarmed at the Beeston door. Clothes, hats, gloves, laces, what not were showered upon Bab. She had music lessons, she had dancing lessons; lessons in French, and in Italian, too, she took daily. Miss Elvira saw to all this. Bab, indeed, might have a manner; she might, indeed, be born to it; but even so, Miss Elvira was still determined there should be no mistake about it. Bab at times felt as if her head were whirling.
"It's ridiculous!" she protested. "I'm just living my life in hatshops! What do I need with so many things?" Indeed, as she pointed out, already she had enough for a dozen débutantes. "You try on that hat!" Miss Elvira directed grimly, adding that by the time she'd finished with Bab, Bab would look like someone.
Bab thought so too – either that, or Miss Elvira would destroy them both. However, all that her aunt did could not compare with the aid David lent. What he did was invaluable. It was he who first helped Bab make friends in that big world about them – girls whom he himself knew, men who were his own friends. Miss Elvira had wished to achieve this by a single, magnificent coup.
"Why not give a dance?" she suggested; but David put his foot down firmly. Bab happened to overhear him.
"Don't be an old silly!" he laughed, at the same time playfully pinching Miss Elvira's cheek. "A dance when she doesn't know a soul? Why, she'd feel as if she were alone in New York!"
"Well!" retorted his aunt. "What do you expect when you keep her always to yourself?"
The remark seemed provocative. At any rate after this on every pretense David went out of his way to have her meet his friends. To them, it appeared, Bab was for many reasons an object of more than passing interest. Good taste usually restrained them from probing too intimately into her past, but when curiosity got the better of them Bab laughingly revealed what they longed to hear.
One girl in particular seemed deeply interested. She was Linda Blair, a bizarre, slender creature, tall, with reddish-brown hair and a thoughtful smile.
"A boarding house!" she exclaimed, incredulous when Bab told her the nature of Mrs. Tilney's establishment. "Do you really mean it?"
"Oh, yes," returned Bab, amused; "it was the landlady and one of the boarders who brought me up!"
"Not really?" cried the girl, her air shocked. "A clerk and a boarding-house keeper?"
"They were the two kindest people in the world," returned Bab, and after a gasp the other recovered herself.
"Oh, I'm so sorry!" she exclaimed hurriedly. "I didn't understand!"
Bab knew she hadn't.
Kind, pleasant, friendly like himself, these were the friends that David brought to her. The grim, dark old house after years of silence awoke again. Young voices were heard within it; there were young folk roaming its vast dim rooms and halls. Upstairs one day Beeston, its master, heard unwonted sounds below; and he sat up, frowning curiously. Not for twenty years had he heard such sounds in his house.
"What's that?" he grumbled.
Miss Elvira happened to be with him.
"It's Barbara," she answered – "she and David. They have some friends with them."
There was a pause. "Huh," said Beeston. Then: "The old tomb seems waking up, don't it?" It did, indeed. Now that she had caught her breath, found the time to look about her and to see what life, this new and wonderful existence, held in store for her, Bab's spirits soared buoyantly. And yet even in the midst of it, as the time sped on and the flitting days had changed themselves into weeks, then into that first vivid month, a shadow, a little cloud, began all at once to creep hazily over the spirit of her dream. Varick – where was he? She had not seen him once! She had not even heard from him! Why?
In those swiftly changing hours, the time that had so swiftly sped, Bab's greatest delight had been to think that the friends she had made were his friends too; that this life she was living was his life also. Eagerly she waited to see him. Eagerly too, as eagerly as she had wished for that, she had wished to have him see her. Vanity was no fault of Bab's; but she wanted him to know that the Bab at Mrs. Tilney's had been transformed, transfigured, into a different sort of a Bab. As well as Miss Elvira she divined what the new hats, the new dresses, all these and the rest had done for her. No need to look in the glass to know that! Already she had seen the eyes, frankly admiring, that followed her wherever she went. Even David had shown it! The first night she had walked into the drawing-room, her slender throat and round, girlish, white shoulders revealed in the first dinner dress she had ever had on, David had stared. For a long moment he had gazed; then his lips parted.
"Bab!" he'd cried. "Why, you're lovely!"
At the compliment, breathed low in admiration, the color had crept faintly into her delicate face, tinting it to a hue lovely in its contrast with the soft pale ivory of her neck and shoulders. If Varick only could have seen her then! But Varick apparently had vanished.
After that encounter – her first day's surprising experience with the Lloyds – it was clear to Bab that she was not the only one toward whom their feeling was antagonistic. That Varick was included seemed clear. That he was suspected of something seemed as evident. Nor was that all. His attitude had itself been curious.
The more she thought of it the more queer seemed his manner when he had learned of her relationship to the Beestons. What had happened? What had he done? Why was he no longer welcome in that house? In learning who she was Bab's first thought had been: "Now I'll see him there! Now he'll come to see me!" But Varick had not come. However, though he hadn't, Bab had said nothing to anyone. Not for worlds would she have shown the ache that day by day, hour by hour, ate gradually into her heart. It was not like him to have done that. Why had he? Then, finally she learned!
IX
It was from her grandfather that this revelation came. The holidays had passed. January with its cold and snow was gone; February followed, in turn giving way to a mild, spring-like March; and daily gaining strength, Beeston was up and out of doors. Overwork was the man's chief trouble; his vitality literally had burned him out. What he needed was rest, much rest. Every afternoon, tucked up in the corner of a big motor landau with the top let down, he drove in the park and on Riverside Drive, Bab and David with him. Bab before long learned to look forward with pleasure to these excursions.
By now she had lost the feeling of uneasiness that Beeston once had roused in her; and in its place had risen a deep affection for the dark, lonely, grim old man. Of his son he no longer asked now, silenced when once he realized she could tell him nothing; nor did he ever probe her about her own experiences. The past, it seemed, he had accepted as a closed book. It was as if he had resolved to rouse no sleeping dogs, but meant to take out of what was left him of life whatever happiness it held. Bab, for all his prickly ways, could not have had a kindlier, more devoted relative. Certainly he let her want for nothing. All that money meant was hers. Beeston every day made sure of that.
"Happy?" he'd rumble at her.
"Happy!" she'd return.
To see her few indeed would have thought any shadow hovered in her heart – not David, not Beeston, at any rate. Perched up between them in the motor, she laughed and chatted, her face radiant, the slim figure in its furs, its jaunty little toque, a charming, animated picture. Indeed, with David's gentleness, with her grandfather's gruff, amused indulgence, there were times when she could almost forget that shadow; when, in fact, she was forgetfully happy, almost as happy as she averred.
It was on a day, a ride just such as this, then, that Bab first got that hint about Varick. That day David had not gone with them. The Lloyds having closed their town house, transferring themselves to their country place out on Long Island, David was spending the day there. Alone with Bab, Beeston all at once grew communicative.
A smile, lurking and sardonic, had crept into his face. Curiously, though, as Bab was to learn, it was at himself that Beeston smiled. The man, it appeared, had been trying to do a kindly turn; and this, the cause of his cynical amusement, seemed to have been no less than an effort to reward Mrs. Tilney and Mr. Mapleson for what they'd done for Bab. To his amazement, however, the two had declined, Mrs. Tilney refusing stiffly, not to say indignantly, the offer made by Beeston's lawyers, Mr. Mapleson, for his part, growing suddenly agitated.
Bab pricked up her ears. Mr. Mapleson's queerness long had been an old story with her. Of late, though, in her visits to Mrs. Tilney's, she had noted he had grown still more queer. Why was it? What had happened that made them all so queer? Why the last time she had gone there she had happened suddenly on Mr. Mapleson, and the little man was in tears! And then, too, that was but a part of it.
"Yes, ran up the stairs!" Beeston was saying, still speaking of Mr. Mapleson. "The lawyers tell me the man looked downright terrified!"
Bab spoke then. "Dad" – it was thus she called him – "dad," she demanded, "what's wrong? Why Is it that Mr. Varick never comes to our house? He used to, you know!"
Varick! At the name she saw a quick gleam spring in Beeston's eyes, and then, his brows thickening, he scowled. But Bab now had forgotten caution in her determination to know. Assuredly there must be some good reason why Varick had avoided her.
"Huh!" said Beeston abruptly. "What difference is it to you what that fellow does?"
"Only that I like him, dad! That's enough, isn't it?" Bab answered deliberately; and Beeston, from under his shaggy brows, gave her another sharp stare.
"Oh, so you like him, eh?" he returned, his eyes lowering. "That's how the land lies, is it? And why do you like him, let me ask?"
"Why shouldn't I?" Bab retorted quietly. Then without calculating the consequences of what she said, she added: "So would you have liked him if he had been as kind, as pleasant as he always was to me!"
The statement seemed to hit Beeston as significant Again his eyes lit darkly and he gazed at her, his face sneering.
"Huh, I see!" he drawled. "Made love to you, I suppose, down in that boarding house! Eh? So that's it, is it?" At his brusqueness, the blunt, brutal frankness of his scorn, Bab felt all the blood in her body rush hotly into her face. Before she could answer him, however, Beeston spoke again.
"Yes," he rumbled, "it'd be like a Varick to want to do me dirt!" His voice came thickly, contempt and hatred bubbling together in his tone. "You don't know, I suppose, why that fellow's living in that house? Eh? Well, I'll tell you why. His father set out to trim me and I turned the tables on him. That's why. Lord!" growled Beeston. "And now, I take it, the son wants to get back at me! Trying to get you and your money, isn't he?"
But this, it happened, was too much.
"That's not true!" said Bab. "You shan't say that!"
She would have said more but Beeston, with a scornful laugh, cut her short.
"You don't think, do you, he'd marry you without your money? If you do," he sneered, "then why didn't he do it when he had the chance? He was there in that house with you, wasn't he?"
Each word, as he drawled it slowly at her, seemed barbed with a venom calculated to destroy. Her face white, Bab heard him in wonder. Curiously she had no answer. When she tried she could not find the words. Beeston, leaning forward, tapped the chauffeur on the shoulder.
"Drive home!" he ordered.
Was it true? Was it, indeed, that Varick never would marry her except that she had money? She knew it was! How could she disguise it? She herself had said as much in the days when she had been only Bab, Mrs. Tilney's unknown ward. The words, the phrases of that very thought kept recurring to her now. A Varick single and living in a boarding house was far different from a Varick married, living in a four-room Harlem flat!
That was it, then. If he married her it would be only for her money? Bab couldn't believe it! He was not that sort. She didn't care who said it, Varick was not a vulgar fortune hunter. Yes, but if he wasn't, then why hadn't he married her when she was only Bab – Bab of the boarding house? Why? Why? Why?
Her face like stone, Bab sat out the remainder of that drive plunged in those gnawing reflections. Beeston, too, seemed stricken into silence. His brows drawn together, his murky eyes peering from beneath their heavy lids, he was slouched down in his seat, staring straight ahead of him. What visions stalked before him, wraiths of his dead, stormy past, Bab had no guess; but that hatred stirred thickly in his heart one had but to see his face to know. Bab, though, gave little heed to that. Deep in her own heart, too, poison bubbled.
It was true! He never, never would marry her but that she had money! And if marry her he did, never would she know whether it was for herself or for her money. She was still thinking of it, mulling it all over and over in her mind, when the motor rolled up to the Beeston door. Beeston, leaning heavily on the footman's arm, alighted. Bab, still plunged in reflection, sat where she was.
"You coming in?" her grandfather demanded.
Bab shook her head. She had something to do, she said; and saying no more Beeston turned away. She watched him hobble up the stairs and, still on the footman's arm, disappear indoors. Then when he was gone, when the door was shut and the servant had returned to the car, Bab, as the man touched his hat to her, sat up, suddenly alert. She knew what she must do.
"Drive to Mrs. Tilney's," she said.
X
The window was open, letting in a flood of the spring day's mellow sunshine, and the leaves of Mr. Mapleson's geraniums in their boxes on the sill quivered delicately in the breeze. There was a lily, too, standing in a dish beside them; and as the air stirred its stalk and slender, rapier-like leaves, they gracefully curved themselves, nodding and curtsying like a maiden. Outside the clocks had just finished striking six.
Mr. Mapleson sat on the bed; and with his chin in his hands, his shoulders sunken, he gazed vacantly at the wall. Never had his lined face looked so gray, so furrowed; never had it seemed so worn. Age in the last few weeks, it seemed, had told heavily on the little man.
At Mrs. Tilney's the boarders had not only seen this, but had noted more than one other change in him. His shy, friendly voice no longer joined in the talk at the dinner table; his timid, frosty little giggle no more was heard to echo their merriment. Banquo at the feast indeed could not have been more dejected. Submerged, downcast, detached, he had altered utterly in the brief two months since Christmas.
What it was that weighed on the little man's mind was of course not known to the others. But Mr. Mapleson knew. And it was this knowledge that had worn on him so destructively. Even now at the thought his face grew full of pain; and as he raised a hand to draw it across his brow a penetrating sigh escaped him. "Oh, God!" said Mr. Mapleson.
He was still sitting there, the tragic simpleton, that sentimentalist, when of a sudden a quick footfall, a step he well remembered, sounded in the hall. Then a hand rapped swiftly on the door.
The limousine bearing Bab to Mrs. Tilney's had come swiftly; as a matter of fact, for her it had come too swiftly. Uptown, when she had made up her mind, she had felt so sure, so certain. The thing to do, she had been convinced up there, was to see Mr. Mapy; he would set everything right. Yes, but now that she had come, what was it he was to set right? What was it he or anyone else could do? She confessed she didn't know.
Beeston's sneering, contemptuous speeches still rang echoing in her ears. Even had they been true, the affront in those utterances could not have been more stinging. And again, how did she know they weren't true? A vulgar fortune hunter Beeston had termed him; and what reason had she to believe he wasn't? To be sure, he had neither asked her to marry him nor openly made love to her; but then how did she know he wouldn't if once he got the chance? That was it – if once he got the chance!
"Oh, Mr. Mapy!" called Bab. "Oh, Mr. Mapy!"
Closing his door she stood there smiling wistfully.
The little man's face was a picture. Amazement and alarm together struggled in it – alarm most of all. Then of a sudden, as if from the cloud in her eyes he divined something, Mr. Mapleson scrambled to his feet.
"What is it?" he wheezed, and caught thickly at his breath. "Bab, they haven't sent you away?"
Sent her away? What in the world did he mean?
"Don't you understand?" she faltered; "I needed someone to talk to; I had to come to you! Aren't you glad to see me, Mr. Mapy?"
Mr. Mapleson wet his lips. Whatever it was that had troubled him seemed again to have laid its burden on his soul; for when he spoke it was with difficulty, his words clacking brokenly between his teeth.
"Then nothing's happened – nothing up there? They are kind to you? You are happy?" A half-dozen questions came dragging from his lips. After that, of a sudden Mr. Mapleson held out his pipelike arms to her. "Bab, Bab!" he cried. "Tell me you are happy!"
"Oh, happy enough!" she answered dully.
Then she told him what she herself had been told. After that what happened at Mrs. Tilney's was swift.
That evening, as Varick came down the stairs to the L road station on the corner and trudged briskly up the side street toward Mrs. Tilney's, a curious thing occurred. Across the way, as he approached, two men had come out from the shadow of a doorway; and after a sharp glance at him they had followed him, matching their step to his. The night before, the same thing had happened, and the night before that too. What was more, when he had left the bank a moment that morning he had seen one of the pair standing on a corner across Broad Street. What did they want with him? It hardly could have been a coincidence, his seeing them; for on reaching his room he drew the curtain to look and they still were there. Just then a hand rapped at Varick's door; and his face grim, curiously thoughtful, he turned away from the window.
"I beg pardon," said Mr. Mapleson. His manner hurried, he looked about him sharply. "You are alone?" he inquired. "You have a moment you can spare?"
Varick stared at him fixedly. His expression was, in fact, singularly hard and penetrating for one of his usual kindliness; and when he spoke his tone, too, was no less uncompromising.
"What do you want, Mr. Mapleson?" he asked.
The little man, it seemed, was not to be rebuffed.
"You must come with me!" he said. "You must come with me for a moment!" Catching Varick by the arm he half led, half tugged him down the hall. Then having reached his own door he paused, at the same time peering up at Varick like a little gnome.
"Be kind! Oh, be kind!" whispered Mr. Mapleson; and with this, having thrust open the door, he pushed Varick into the room, then closed the door behind him. Afterward, wandering along the hall, Mr. Mapleson sat down on the stairs.
It was a queer sight, the picture that slight, insignificant figure made huddled there in the dimness of the hall. A ray of light from the gas jet overhead fell upon his face, and Mr. Mapleson, one saw, was smiling rapturously. It was as if all were well now. It was as if, as in the fairy tale, all were to live happy ever afterward. But Mr. Mapy, it appeared, had counted without his host. Perhaps ten minutes had passed, certainly not more than fifteen at the most, and he was still sitting there, his face radiant, when behind him the door suddenly was thrown open. Bab spoke then, and as he heard her Mr. Mapleson got up hurriedly. Both in tone and in manner she seemed abrupt.
"No, no, you've said enough!" said Bab. "I won't hear you!"
Mr. Mapleson's face fell.
"Why, why!" he exclaimed. "What is it?"
Bab went straight toward him, toward the stairs.
"I'm going," she said, and her voice was like steel. "I'm going," said Bab, saying it between her teeth, and over her shoulder she gave Varick at the same time a look. Its air of disdain Mr. Mapleson did not miss. Neither did he miss the break in her voice, a note of hurt, of outrage, and nervously he put out his hand to halt her. "No, don't stop me!" she said, and pushed his hand aside. "It's true! It's true what they told me about him! He's just what they said he was!"
Varick's face was like a mask. He did not speak; he made no effort, so much as by a look, even to answer her.
Again after a glance at him Mr. Mapleson stammered: "What is it? Why, what is it?"
Bab answered with a laugh.
"Ask him!" she said; that was all. The next instant she had gone hurrying down the stairs. Then presently, far below, the street door slammed. At the sound, his eyes still on Varick's, Mr. Mapleson shuddered involuntarily.
"What is it?" once more he whispered. "Tell me what you've done."
Varick's face did not alter.
"I tried to save her," he said; "I did my best I asked her to marry me."
"To save her?" echoed the little man, and a gasp escaped him. "To save her!"
Varick's face grew still harder.
"Mapleson, are you mad or what is it? My soul, man; whatever in the world possessed you?"
Mr. Mapleson's jaw dropped suddenly. Again the last vestige of color fled from his furrowed face. He gaped at Varick like one bemused.
"What do you mean?" he whispered.
Varick said it then.
"I've found you out, Mapleson! You had those letters, didn't you? You gave those lawyers their proofs. It was you, wasn't it, who got together all those papers?"
Yes, it was Mr. Mapleson who had done all this, but still he did not speak. It was as if his tongue, paralyzed, cleaved to the roof of his mouth.
"Well," said Varick, "they were all forgeries! You forged them, John Mapleson. You cooked them all up yourself! Bab is no more Beeston's grandchild than I am!"
Mr. Mapleson did not even deny it.
"Hush!" he whispered, his voice appalled. "What if they should find out! Think what they'd do to her!"
XI
And there you are! Forger and fraud, jailbird too – all these, as Varick charged, Mr. Mapleson had been. Bab, indeed, was no more old Peter Beeston's grandchild than was the little man himself.
That night the dinner hour came and went disregarded; time sped and midnight drew near before the colloquy in Mrs. Tilney's top-floor back had ended. Mr. Mapleson admitted everything, bit by bit laying bare the whole of that tragic farce, the story of his past. And what a tale it was! Grotesque you'd call it, an outlandish, ludicrous affair, and yet of a pathos, banal as it was, one could not mistake. For Mr. Mapleson was not by nature in any way a criminal. Neither had he become a jailbird in seeking to serve his own ends. That was his story. Not once but twice the little man had become a forger, and each time he had forged only to help others. It had never been for himself.
"You mean you got nothing!" questioned Varick.
"I!" cried Mapleson. His tone was not only surprised, it was resentful. "Certainly not!" he said.
"Good Lord!" Varick murmured.
Absurd as it was, though, Varick could not overlook or disregard the fact that what Mr. Mapleson had done had its sinister side. Not above a week had passed when out of a clear sky the first bolt descended. Fraud and forgery, sad to say, seldom lack effect.
At one o'clock on a Saturday afternoon – it was the first half-holiday in April – Varick slammed shut the covers of the ledger he was working on and, his task finished for the day, donned his hat and hurried out into Broad Street. The day was glorious. A mild breeze was stirring, while from overhead, pouring down between the cañon-like walls of the skyscrapers, a burst of sunshine filled all the neighborhood with light. Its radiance contrasted vividly with the lower city's usual dingy dimness, though Varick gave little heed to that. He bustled onward, his face grim. Even when across the street a man stepped out from a doorway and followed him, matching his step to Varick's, he gave it scant attention. To be watched, to be followed, was not any novelty now. It neither worried him nor made him wonder why he was the subject of that espionage. The night before, shoved under his door at Mrs. Tilney's, he had found the card of no less a person than his one-time friend, David Lloyd. "I'd like to see you," was penciled on the back. But until that morning, some time after he had reached the bank, the full significance of the card and its message had not dawned on him.