The Fortunes of Oliver Horn

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

When the last good-byes had been given, and Oliver had waved his rapier from the doorstep as a final farewell to his fellow-members before he saw his father upstairs to bed, and the delighted escort had turned on their heels to retrace their steps up Broadway, Waller slipped his arm into Munson's, and said, in his most thoughtful tone, one entirely free from cynicism or badinage:

"What a lovely pair of old duffers. We talk about Bohemia, Munson, and think we've got it, but we haven't. Our kind is a cheap veneer glued to commonplace pine. Their kind is old mahogany, solid all the way through—fine grain, high polish and no knots. I only wish they lived here."

CHAPTER XXIV

IN THE TWILIGHT

Each day Margaret's heart warmed more and more to Richard. He not only called out in her a tenderness and veneration for his age and attainments which her own father had never permitted her to express, but his personality realized for her an ideal which, until she knew him, she had despaired of ever finding. While his courtesy, his old-time manners, his quaintness of speech and dress captivated her imagination, his perfect and unfailing sympathy and constant kindness completely won her heart. There was, too, now and then, a peculiar tone in his voice which would bring the tears to her eyes without her knowing why, until her mind would recall some blunt, outspoken speech of her dead father's in answer to the very sentiments she was then expressing to Richard, who received them as a matter of course—a remembrance which always caused a tightening about her heart.

Sometimes the inventor would sit for her while she sketched his head in different lights, he watching her work, interested in every stroke, every bit of composition. She loved to have him beside her easel criticising her work. No one, she told Oliver, had ever been so interested before with the little niceties of her technique—in the amount of oil used, in the way the paints were mixed; in the value of a palette knife as a brush or of an old cotton rag as a blender, nor had any one of her sitters ever been so enthusiastic over her results.

There was one half-hour sketch which more than all the others astonished and delighted him—one in which Margaret in her finishing touches had eschewed brushes, palette-knife and rag, and with one dash of her dainty thumb had brought into instant relief the subtle curves about his finely modelled nose. This filled him with wonder and admiration. His own finger had always obeyed him, and he loved to find the same skill in another.

To Richard these hours of intercourse with Margaret were among the happiest of his life. It was Margaret, indeed, who really helped him bear with patience the tedious delays attendant upon the completion of his financial operations. Even when the final sum was agreed upon—and it was a generous one, that filled Oliver's heart with joy and set Nathan's imagination on fire—the best part of two weeks had been consumed before the firm of lawyers who were to pass upon Richard's patents were willing to certify to the purchasers of the stock of the horn Magnetic Motor Company, as to the priority of Richard's invention based on the patent granted on August 13, 1856, and which covered the principle of the levers working in connection with the magnets.

During these tedious delays, in which his heart had vibrated between hope and fear, he had found his way every afternoon to Margaret's studio, Nathan having gone home to Kennedy Square with his head in the clouds when the negotiations became a certainty. In these weeks of waiting the Northern girl had not only stolen his heart, taking the place of a daughter he had never known—a void never filled in any man's soul—but she had satisfied a craving no less intense, the hunger for the companionship of one who really understood his aims and purposes. Nathan had in a measure met this need as far as unselfish love and unswerving loyalty could go; and so had his dear wife, especially in these later years, when her mind had begun to grasp the meaning of the social and financial changes that the war had brought, and what place her husband's inventions might hold in the new regime. But no one of these, not even Nathan, had ever understood him as clearly as had this young girl.

When it grew too dark to paint, he would make her sit on a stool at his feet, while he would talk to her of his life work and of the future as he saw it—often of things which he had kept shut away in his heart even from Nathan. He would tell her of the long years of anxiety; of the sleepless nights; of his utter loneliness, without a friend to guide him, while he was trying to solve the problems that had blocked his path; of the poverty of these late years, all the more pitiful because of his inability at times to buy even the bare materials and instruments needed for his work; and, again, of his many disappointments in his search for the hoped-for link that was needed to make his motor a success.