“Warm for March—ain’t it?” remarked Ford, pouring out for himself a stiff drink.
“It sure is a grand day,” returned the bartender. “Ain’t seen you around lately, mister—er—busy, I suppose, as usual—well, that’s the way to be.”
“Busy,” declared Ford. “Ain’t had time to eat.”
Then he paid for his drink, recounted the fifty dollars in new bills he had drawn, called a cab and went off to Koster & Bial’s, where he managed to secure, late as it was for the matinée, his favorite seat at a front-row table.
It was only when Miss Jane reached her room and learned the story from her sister’s lips that she realized their great good fortune. For some moments Miss Ann held her in her arms, petting her like a child.
“I felt it was for the best, dear,” she kept repeating. They both wept a little; all the worry was over now, her sister assured her. Miss Jane seemed dazed. She could not fully realize it. She sat on the edge of her bed, smiling through the tears, smoothing Miss Ann’s hand. Then they set about making plans for the summer. They decided on Lake Mohonk. Finally, exhausted as she was, Miss Jane went to bed, Miss Ann waiting until she fell asleep before straightening out their meagre accounts of the week before, some of whose items had frightened her, especially the druggist’s bill which had come in the morning’s mail with that hopeless letter from her brother. They were nothing now—new hope, new courage had entered her heart.
CHAPTER XI
Now it happened that Sue had come in fresh and rosy from a walk, glowing with health this fine April afternoon, and had brought Pierre Lamont home with her. There is no secret about where she found him, nothing could have been more public or more innocent than their chance meeting on Fifth Avenue before the Reservoir, that solid and dignified monument with its wavy covering of ivy, which Joe considered the most impressive mass of stone in the city, with Bryant Park as its back yard, and enough Croton water soundly held within its four solemn Egyptian walls to have satisfied the most rabid of teetotalers, and before which Lamont’s patent-leather shoes and English buff-colored spats shone resplendently almost every afternoon between four and five. Indeed, he was so familiar a figure on Fifth Avenue, that his absence was noticed by many whose daily habit it was to see and be seen along the city’s most fashionable highway. More than one man noted in passing the cut and pattern of Lamont’s clothes before ordering his own. And though, unlike Beau Brummel, he did not actually set the fashion, they could rest assured that everything he wore was of the latest. The newest derby was his the day after it appeared in the window of the best hatter. He was a connoisseur as well in gloves and walking-sticks. He was said to pay a formidable price for his clothes, and they were conspicuous in return for their smartness and good taste. At least he dressed like a thoroughbred and a gentleman, and his ease and good looks carried him along triumphantly through many an escapade.
Like Bompard, that idle Norman of Maupassant’s, Lamont “was born with an unbelievable aptitude to do nothing, and an immoderate desire never to disturb that vocation.” This, however, did not prevent him from amusing himself, or of taking a flier on rising stocks, or the races now and then, with his wife’s money. It is safe to say, he worked harder in amusing himself than any other New Yorker of his time, and since there is no more strenuous existence than the daily pursuit of pleasure, no wonder that the silver touch to his temples was whiter for his years than most men’s, though even at thirty-five he had the clean-cut, bronzed complexion of a boy and the hands of a nobleman. Had Jean Valjean encountered him, he would have given him some sound advice; he would have said to him, as he did to Montparnasse: “Some day you will see others afar off working in the fields, and they will seem to you to be resting.” A counsel that clever footpad and criminal jeered at while the old ex-convict held him by the collar—quite as Lamont would have jeered—for every gentleman’s ways are his own, are they not?—and of no one else’s business.
Lamont knew Fifth Avenue as well as any man could know it, and as there is always one popular side to every thoroughfare, he chose that flanking the Reservoir, his promenade carrying him as far up as the Fifth Avenue Church, and as far down as the Hotel Brunswick, which he invariably crossed over to for a cocktail and a look over the coach horses, and where often several people from London of his acquaintance were stopping.