To Rose Van Cortlandt the blow was a bitter one. Everything she had loved—wealth, position—had been swept away from her, her position in society depending wholly upon his wealth. The note he left upon his night table was of a private nature, intended solely for his wife and not for these pages. In a month the few intimate friends she saw had grown tired of telling her how charming she looked in black. In the settling of the estate, despite the money owed to his creditors, Sam had left her far from penniless. The house in Park Avenue was sold, and all it contained—the pictures alone bringing her a comfortable fortune that many another woman in her situation would have been satisfied with. Rose Van Cortlandt considered it a mere pittance. She found a bond of sympathy among other widows who had been reduced to twenty-five thousand a year.
Lamont became a frequent visitor to her smart little studio apartment in Washington Square—to which Sue was never invited, and where we shall leave Rose Van Cortlandt to the care of a few so-called Bohemians to consume her whiskey and cigarettes.
Enoch was doing an unheard-of thing—for Enoch—straightening up the living-room of his hermitage on the top floor, slowly transforming this much-beloved refuge of his from its pell-mell accumulation to a semblance of neatness and order. The idea had struck him suddenly, following a decision which he had come to the evening before, as he sat hunched up in his big leather chair before the fire thinking over past events, the Van Cortlandt suicide being one of them.
He had left his card at the house of mourning with a formal word of sympathy, more than that he felt he could not do. He had argued with himself for more than an hour, trying to decide whether or not to write the widow a letter of condolence, and had begun two at his desk, both of which he destroyed as being false in sentiment and not honestly in keeping with his opinion of the deceased, whose business methods he had so openly denounced to the Fords. True, he had accepted her invitation, and gone to the musicale, but in this case it was Sue who was solely responsible for his presence. What he had expected had happened—he had found Lamont, despite his warning to him, pleading to take her home. He had arrived in the nick of time to offer her his arm and his club cab, both of which she had gladly accepted.
The old room during all the years it had warmed and sheltered Enoch, had become, little by little, so choked with books, bibelots, and souvenirs, some of them utterly useless to him, that he had only now awakened to the fact that there was little floor space left for his feet to wander over, and he was continually upsetting this and that, whenever he moved. Nooks on the table and mantelpiece, where he was wont to lay his pipe, spectacles, and tobacco, were now hard to find, and were continually being smothered under letters, books, and pamphlets—Matilda and Moses having strict orders to keep everything tidy, and to touch nothing.
“’Spec’ I fine him snowed under some mornin’, an’ have to dig him out,” remarked Matilda. “Gittin’ so bad, Mister Rabbit wouldn’t have no show gittin’ through—reg’lar claptrapshun place—bad’s my ole pot-closet, whar I used to stow ’way mah broom. ‘Bresh up! Bresh up!’ he sez to me, ‘Matilda.’ Jes’ ez ef I cud straighten out dat dar conglomeraction, ’thout techin’ it—mah lordy! but I do certainly despize dust, man.”
“’Tain’t no common dust,” Moses would reply. “’Spec’ yo better keep yo black han’s offum dat yere dust—ain’t yo never heerd tell of immo’tal dust? Ef you ain’t, yo ain’t never read yo Bible. Dem things, like dust an’ ashes dar, is sacred.”
Enoch had begun his house-cleaning with a will. He was in no humor to be interrupted. He went at his work grimly, his teeth set; the hopelessness of the task appalled him.