CHAPTER VI.
A year after Laidley's death, Judge Rhodes, being in New York, breakfasted with Mr. Neckart. He noticed that the editor had grown lean and sallow. "And God knows he had no good looks to spare," smoothing down his own white beard over his comfortable paunch. Something, too, of that easy frankness which had made Neckart so popular was gone; no topic interested him; his eye was secretive and irritable; he spoke and moved under the constant pressure of self-control. The judge, as he watered his claret, eyed the dark face opposite to him critically. "Now, I never," he thought, "saw a sign of ill-temper or cruelty in that man. Yet I have a queer fancy that if the reins were once taken off he could not master himself again. It must be devilishly uncomfortable, holding one's self in in that way," the last morsel of quail sliding down his throat unctuously. "I can let myself out without danger."
"Why, you eat nothing! The campaign's been too much for you, Mr. Neckart," he said aloud. "You've run down terribly in the last year. Always the way. You young men make too many spurts in the first heat, and break down before the middle of the race. Well, that's our American policy. But the American physique won't stand it."
"Do you only mean that I have broken down physically, or do you see any change in my work? The leading articles are mine, you know. Don't be afraid to be frank."
"Well, now that you ask me—Your articles are more forcible lately, more popular: they bring down the galleries, eh? But it's a sledge-hammer force, it's vehemence, d'ye see? There's a lack of that moderation, that repressed power, in which was your real strength. You asked me to be frank?"
"Yes. And I knew just what you would say. Well, what must be, is!" with a gesture which dismissed the subject.
"Nonsense! It's your nervous system that needs toning, that's all. If our side goes in, get a foreign mission—some warm, lazy place on the Mediterranean, say. Rest a few years, and when you come home take an easier pace for the rest of your life. Lord bless you, boy! I've been through it all. When I was a young fellow—mere bundle of nerves, high-strung, sir—high-strung! Ambition, love! Constitution wouldn't stand it!—Bit of the steak, John, rare.—Joe Rhodes, I said, either come down to the jog-trot level or die. So here I am! Good for forty years yet, please God! When you are my age you may be just what I am, if you choose."
Neckart's eye twinkled: "Try the birds, judge."
He made an effort after that to resume his old careless manner, and the judge had tact enough to drop the subject. But he was not deceived. "There's more here than meets the eye," he said shrewdly to himself. "Neckart has had a blow that has made him stagger. He has worked like a horse in a treadmill. But he has the constitution to stand it. Functions in healthy condition—tremendous vital power. Either hereditary disease is at work, or some morbid passion, or he would not have given way."
He urged him to eat with tender solicitude, even gave him his famous recipe for a salad. No matter what our sympathy, our help for each other can seldom come any closer than skin or stomach, after all.
"By the way," he said presently, "I hear that Swendon has bought a place up the Hudson. Can you tell me anything about him?"
"I meet him everywhere," said Neckart. "The old man is failing fast. But he takes life just as he always did—like a boy let loose for the holidays."
"She never comes into town: she is not a woman of society."
"I remember the little Swede was no favorite of yours," noticing a certain reserve in Neckart's tone. "But I had an object in asking for her. Of course you would not be likely to know much about them: they are out of your line."
"I have met the captain and his daughter several times during the year," said Neckart. "They were camping on the Maine coast last summer, and I stumbled into their tent one day. Miss Swendon fancied her father would grow strong on a diet of fish of his own catching. When the cold weather set in she took him to St. Augustine. I ran against him by the old fort the very morning I arrived, and in the spring we met at Omaha, and made the overland trip to California together. There is no kind of air and no kind of amusement which she has not tried, since she had the means, to give the old man his health back again. To no purpose, however."
"Very odd!" the judge nodded mysteriously. "Very odd indeed about that property! Laidley told me the very night before he died that he had made a will leaving it in charity. Now, Jane inherited by virtue of a will made two years before. No other forthcoming. I suppose remorse seized him in articulo mortis. There was a curious thing occurred in that last interview of mine with Laidley.—How can I see Swendon?" interrupting himself. "Where is their house?"
Mr. Neckart hesitated a moment: "I am going there this evening to dine and spend the night, and I will take you with me. It will be a surprise which the captain will like."
"The very thing! Precisely! The truth is, Neckart—light a cigar—the truth is," lowering his voice and leaning over the table, "Laidley exacted a half promise from me that night which troubles me. The fellow died forthwith, you see, and so clenched it on me. He had a plan for Miss Swendon's future, and asked me to forward it. I thought he was going to cheat the girl, and paid little attention to it. But he did the clean thing after all, and then died promptly. I must say Laidley acted in a much more decent and gentlemanlike way than I expected. So, now I feel as if I owed it to the fellow to keep my word."
Mr. Neckart nodded. He asked no questions, but scanned the judge's flabby face narrowly. Rhodes lifted one leg on to the other knee and nursed it. It was his confidential attitude.
"It's a delicate matter, you see. Van Ness is concerned."
"Van Ness, the antiquarian?"
"Oh, he's more than that! You don't suppose a man of his breadth of intellect confines himself to old bricks and dry bones? Why, God bless you! Pliny Van Ness is the final authority in Philadelphia on new singers or pictures or cracked teapots or great religious or philanthropic reforms. If he were taken from it, the underpinnings of that town would be knocked away, and it would fall flat."
"Last fall, I think, I heard he had a plan for enforcing compulsory education in Pennsylvania?"
"Well, yes. I don't know why that didn't pass. It died out. Van Ness was trying, too, to establish a grand scheme for the benefit of the mining population. But somehow I haven't heard of that lately. Oh he's a great man, sir! When I hear him talk half an hour it quite lifts me up to purer air. I always say when I come away, 'Joe Rhodes, you're a selfish scoundrel! A selfish scoundrel!'"
The judge smoked in silence a few minutes. "Yes," he resumed thoughtfully, "it was about Van Ness. Poor Laidley had that reverence for him which men of his calibre are apt to have for a character of perfect excellence, and in his anxiety for Jane he planned that a marriage should be brought about between them. I was to inaugurate the matter—bring them together. Easily, naturally, you understand? The sort of thing that is done every day. I've seen excellent matches made in Virginia by a little quiet management of friends."
"Yes. It is done every day." Mr. Neckart yesterday would have talked of the marriages of half the women he knew as "good matches" or "well managed" without knowing that he was vulgar in so doing. But now the whole idea struck him as loathsome and disgusting. Were women to be paraded before their buyers as in a slave-market? He looked at the poor judge babbling innocently as he might at some venal go-between in the markets of Cairo.
"Thinking the matter over," pursued the judge anxiously, "it has occurred to me that Laidley would not have been so confident of Van Ness's ultimate concurrence in the scheme unless Pliny had shown some prepossession in favor of the little girl."
"You think, then, the sultan is ready to throw the handkerchief?" dryly.
"Oh, that's a coarse way of putting it, Neckart. But, considered as a match, now, really, you know, Van Ness is—The idea that he was favorable to it was suggested to me again yesterday when he proposed that we should look up the captain and call upon him. He is not a man who usually makes advances."
"Is Mr. Van Ness in New York with you?"
"Yes, certainly. I thought you knew that."
"And you propose to take him out to-night?"
"Why, that seemed a good plan. Unless you have some objection?"
"What objection can I have? What does it matter to me?" He stooped to pat his dog, that sat upright watching his face.
"Surely, that is that savage wolf-hound of Miss Swendon's?"
"Yes. He divides his time between us." After a few minutes he said, "You seem to anticipate no difficulty in the way of your conquering hero? Yet Miss Swendon by no means belongs to the warm-blooded, susceptible order of women. This Van Ness, as I remember him, is a starved, insignificant-looking fellow."
"Oh, on the contrary! He has a very noble presence. Pliny is tall, with much dignity of carriage."
"Pompous, eh? 'I am Sir Oracle'?"
"Nothing of the kind. Rather deprecating manner, with a calm face, beaming blue eyes, and abundant fair hair and beard. The very finest of Saxon types, in fact."
"Ah? But these reformers are apt to be underbred, irritable, with nasty peculiarities of habits and manner which they never have thought it worth while to cure. I suppose your friend is like his brethren?"
"Now, Neckart, just wait until you see Van Ness. You'll be charmed, or I've no judgment. Most men are, and all women," laughing significantly.
They rose at the moment. As they left the room Neckart caught sight in a mirror of his own dwarfed bulk and the massive head set in its black mane. He stopped and looked for an instant at himself fixedly, a thing which he had not done perhaps for years, and then walked on in silence beside the judge. When they parted in the street he wrote a line on a card and gave it to him.
"In case I am not able to go out on the same train with you, this is the route to the farm," he said.
He could scarcely be courteous. He was in a rage of indignation. Not, of course, that it mattered to him whether Jane married this or any other man whom she loved. She was only an acquaintance—more perhaps—his little friend. She must marry: he had thought of that often; and she would love—with a strength and fidelity beyond that of any woman he had ever known. He had often thought of that too. When the time came—years hence, perhaps—he would consult with her father as to the man. They must be satisfied that he would make her happy—they two. It must be a careful, cautious, slow matter. He might surely claim so much of a guardianship over her! He had studied her character very carefully, and appreciated it as a rare and delicate one; and he was very fond of the captain—very fond of the captain. But as for the plan of marriage—Mr. Neckart understood his own disgust at the judge, and accounted for it naturally. He had but little of the ordinary chivalric belief in woman's modesty and purity. Much knowledge of female lobbyists and literary tramps and champagne-tippling belles had shaken his faith, probably.
"But this girl is the most innocent, sincerest thing God ever made," he said. "She is clean in thought and body and word."
In those long days on the Maine coast, or by the sea-wall at St. Augustine, or crossing the interminable mountain-ranges or alkali deserts, he had had time to read this candid soul page by page: her clear skin and liquid eyes were not more transparent than her thoughts. All through that day's work a young noble figure moved like a shadow—a woman with the brave blue eyes, the ruddy lips, the grand unconsciousness of the great women of her race. The blood of Aslauga and Ingeborg was in her veins. So strong was this feeling upon him, that always, when he was making ready to meet her, he bathed and arrayed himself as if he was going to take part in the rites of a church or some sacred place. "'So white, so fair, so sweet was she!'" he sang softly to himself. And guzzling Rhodes, with his oily laugh and fat hands, meant to show her off, exhibit her fine points to this Admirable Crichton of morality, and persuade him to marry her! Was there any danger that she would love or marry him? She was undoubtedly dull in perception of character: had she not always made a demigod of the silly old captain? The finest vessels were always first to break themselves to pieces against some earthen pitcher.
He made haste to take an early afternoon train. He would see his friends again before Rhodes arrived.