The next morning, he woke up late, and with a headache, in his room at the hotel that he had found it pleasant (and economical) to abandon for so long; and came down-stairs to find a portmanteau containing all his clothes that he had left at the Hill-and-Dale. With it, but without a letter, were his receipted bills from both the clubs.
Birmingham was very repentant. Late in the afternoon he took a walk with Wemyss, and entered timidly the Piccadilly Club, where Townley—good-naturedly—had put him down again. He passed two or three ladies driving on Fifth Avenue who bowed to him no less cordially than before; and in the club some men came up and spoke to him. He began to fancy that the thing was being hushed up; it is so pleasant to hush up disagreeable things, and we Americans do like to be on good terms with everyone, lest someone say we are not good fellows. But the earl was mortally ashamed of the evening’s occurrences; and finally he mustered up courage, with many brandy-and-sodas, to sit down and compose to Arthur a letter of repentant, almost grovelling apology.
Having done this, he felt that he had done all America could well demand. Judge then of his indignation, when, on the morrow, the letter was returned to him unopened.
It was the first time his lordship had ever had a letter sent back to him unopened; and he curses Arthur for a cad up to this day. But what he most feared was that someone should bear tales of his behavior to Miss Farnum. For he had thrice asked her to marry him, already.
CHAPTER XXIX.
CAPTAIN DERWENT SEALS HIS FATE.
THE autumn winds began; winds that in the country bring red leaves, and ripening nuts, and smells of cider, and the crisp white frost; and in the city come with clouds of pungent dust of streets, and sticks and straws, and make one’s daily walk and ride a nuisance, not a pleasure. But all the world, or all the world that Arthur saw, was busied with its dresses and with its future entertainments, and with rejoicings over future marriages, and, now and here, perhaps, regrets, and longer days for women, and sterner work for men. For the beauty of our modern view of life is that it bids no man be content who stays in that position where our simple fathers used to say a wise providence had placed him. Not even our primers have this lesson now; but tell us, with A who is the architect of his own fortunes, how we all may rise in life. We are brought to make light of lessons, too—all lessons, from the first and second down—and the small boy has formed the taste of the nation and dictates its likings not only on the fourth of July; let us have our fun, and jest at all the school-marms and the moral tales. For the school-room’s mimic can make faces long years before the first scholar understands. Terrible indeed must have been the elders of a generation ago, that we kick our heels so high at having gotten loose from them.
So the race of life began again; and Charlie Townley on the home stretch, but laboring heavily. Old Mr. Townley came to the office seldomer than ever, this year; but Tamms was there, as regular as the clockwork beat upon a bomb of dynamite. His wiry red mustache was bitten close above his upper lip, and his discreet eyelids more inflamed than ever. And Charlie knew that all their Allegheny Central stock was still held in the office; and the strike seemed no nearer to a settlement than ever. “These labor troubles have played the devil with the market,” he would say to Charlie; “and public confidence is entirely lost.” Tamms depended much on public confidence. And Deacon Remington’s brokers would go into the board and sell their ten thousand shares, day after day, as punctually as doom. “They must have borrowed lots of stocks,” suggested the younger and the smarter Townley. “Can’t we squeeze them?” But wary Tamms would shake his head. A “corner” was a risky boomerang—suchlike manœuvres he was too old a bird to try.
The firm had acquired a new customer that fall; no less a personage than Lionel Derwent. This unaccountable person sold or bought his hundred shares a day, and spent half his time in the office, and pored over the ticker like any other speculator. “So much for your reformers of the world,” said young Townley to Arthur; and Arthur would have thought it strange, but that he was so rapidly learning the lesson of the world; and its first lesson is, as he fancied, that all men are alike; a lesson you will hear nowhere so frequently inculcated as in Washington and Wall Street, though we have humbly expressed our own opinion upon this theme before.
Tamms said that Mr. Derwent was a damned nuisance; but he made himself most agreeable to old Mr. Townley, and would hold the old gentleman in converse by the hour whenever he happened to meet him in the office. Derwent seemed still to take great interest in Arthur too; but Charlie found him even a greater bore than Tamms. For he was also a continual visitor at the Livingstones; and Charlie worried over it. “Where a man’s treasure is, there shall his heart be also.”