Peter: A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

It was at this time that the new church to be built at Corklesville needed an architect—a fact which Jack communicated to Garry. Then it happened that with the aid of MacFarlane and Holker Morris the commission was finally awarded to that “rising young genius who had so justly distinguished himself in the atelier of America's greatest architect—Holker Morris—” all of which Garry wrote himself and had inserted in the county paper, he having called upon the editor for that very purpose. This service—and it came at a most critical time in the young man's affairs—the Scribe is glad to say, Garry, with his old-time generous spirit suddenly revived, graciously acknowledged thanking Jack heartily and with meaning in his voice, as well as MacFarlane—not forgetting Ruth, to whom he sent a mass of roses as big as a bandbox.

The gaining of this church building—the largest and most important given the young architect since he had left Morris's protection and guidance—decided Garry to give up at once his expensive quarters in New York and move to Corklesville. So far as any help from the house of Breen was concerned, all hope had ended with the expensive and much-advertised wedding (a shrewd financial move, really, for a firm selling shady securities). Corinne had cooed, wept, and then succumbed into an illness, but Breen had only replied: “No, let 'em paddle their own canoe.”

This is why the sign “To Let,” on one of the new houses built by the Elm Crest Land and Improvement Company—old Tom Corkle who owned the market garden farms that gave the village of Corklesville its name, would have laughed himself sore had he been alive—was ripped off and various teams loaded with all sorts of furniture, some very expensive and showy and some quite the contrary—especially that belonging to the servants' rooms—were backed up to the newly finished porch with its second coat of paint still wet, and their contents duly distributed upstairs and downstairs and in my lady Corinne's chamber.

“Got to put on the brakes, old man,” Garry had said one day to Jack. The boy had heard of the expected change in the architect's finances before the villa was rented, and so Garry's confidential communication was not news to him.

“Been up to look at one of those new houses. Regular bird cage, but we can get along. Besides, this town is going to grow and I'm going to help it along. They are all dead out here—embalmed, some of them—but dead.” Here he opened the pamphlet of the company—“See this house—an hour from New York; high ground; view of the harbor—(all a lie, Jack, but it goes all the same); sewers, running water, gas (lot of the last,—most of it in the prospectus) It's called Elm Crest—beautiful, isn't it,—and not a stump within half a mile.”

Jack always remembered the interview. That Garry should help along anything that he took an interest in was quite in the line of his ambition and ability. Minott was as “smart as a steel trap,” Holker Morris had always said of him, “and a wonderful fellow among the men. He can get anything out of them; he would really make a good politician. His handling of the Corn Exchange showed that.”

And so it was not surprising,—not to Jack,—that when a new village councilman was to be elected, Garry should have secured votes enough to be included among their number. Nor was it at all wonderful that after taking his seat he should have been placed in charge of the village funds so far as the expenditures for contract work went. The prestige of Morris's office settled all doubts as to his fitness in construction; and the splendor of the wedding—there could still be seen posted in the houses of the workmen the newspaper cuts showing the bride and groom leaving the church—silenced all opposition to “our fellow townsman's” financial responsibility, even when that opposition was led by so prominent a ward heeler as Mr. Patrick McGowan, who had planned to get the position himself—and who became Garry's arch enemy thereafter.

In these financial and political advancements Corinne helped but little. None of the village people interested her, nor did she put herself out in the least to be polite to them. Ruth had called and had brought her hands full of roses—and so had her father. Garry had continued to thank them both for their good word to the church wardens—and he himself now and then spent an evening at MacFarlane's house without Corinne, who generally pleaded illness; but the little flame of friendship which had flashed after their arrival in Corklesville had died down again.

This had gone on until the acquaintance had practically ended, except when they met on the trains or in crossing the ferry. Then again, Ruth and her father lived at one end of the village known as Corklesville, and Garry and Corinne lived at the other end, known as Elm Crest, the connecting link being the railroad, a fact which Jack told Garry with a suggestive laugh, made them always turn their backs on each other when they parted to go to their respective homes, to which Garry would reply that it was an outrage and that he was coming up that very night—all of which he failed to do when the proposed visit was talked over with Corinne.

None of this affected Jack. He would greet Corinne as affectionately and cordially as he had ever done. He had taken her measure years before, but that made no difference to him, he never forgetting that she was his uncle's nominal daughter; that they had been sheltered by the same roof and that she therefore in a way belonged to his people. Moreover, he realized, that like himself, she had been compelled to give up many of the luxuries and surroundings to which she had been accustomed and which she loved,—worthless now to Jack in his freedom, but still precious to her. This in itself was enough to bespeak his sympathy. Not that she valued it;—she rather sniffed at it.