With Edge Tools

by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor

CHAPTER II.

CROSS FIRE.

Duncan was dressing. It was already five minutes past the hour named for dinner on his invitation, but if Duncan were not late at dinner, it would deprive the guests of one stock topic of conversation, and he had never yet been so inconsiderate. No one waited for him, and when he finally appeared with some trumped up excuse, it was greeted with a round of laughter, and served to enliven the naturally trifling entrée conversation; so no one,—least of all the hostess,—blamed him. One who has been in an engine house when an alarm of fire is turned in can form some idea of Duncan's dressing accomplishments. There were, to be sure, no clanging gongs, stamping horses, and scurrying, half-dressed men, but there was the same instantaneous assumption of perfect order out of bewildering chaos. His servant was his faithful assistant, and when Duncan's steps were heard upon the stairs, he would seize a shirt in one hand and a pair of trousers in the other, which he held waiting for the arrival of his master. Duncan would make a wild rush through the door, and his top coat, coat and waistcoat would fly across the room at random, while Parker pulled off one pair of trousers and assisted him on with another. A dive into a face bath would give Parker time to change the odds and ends in Duncan's pockets; while on would go the shirt, and the tie would be adjusted and his hair smoothed while the servant replaced the muddy boots with evening shoes. Coat and waistcoat would go on together, hat, umbrella and overcoat be seized, and off Duncan would start in the official time of three minutes and seventeen seconds.

On the present occasion he desisted from his dressing long enough to read a small, blue note which he found upon his dressing table. It was worded as follows: "The coast is clear at nine, and will be so till after midnight. I will see you if you come." There was no signature or address. It had been left by a maid in the usual way, so Parker said, but even unsigned and non-committal as it was, it did not please Duncan. "I wish I could forget that woman," he muttered to himself. "But I suppose I will be there and play the fool, just as I always do. I have a mind to break away from her, though." Then, turning to Parker, he continued audibly, "I am going to Chicago to-morrow morning. Have my portmanteau and shirt box packed. You know about what I want, but put in plenty of shirts as I may be gone some weeks."

"Very good, sir," replied the taciturn Parker. "Hi suppose you will want your hulster for the journey, sir."

"Yes," replied Duncan; then putting on his coat and hat, and seizing a pair of gloves and a stick, he rushed down the stairs without stopping for that apartment elevator which was never running, jumped into the cab he had left waiting, and was off uptown to his dinner. He was only half an hour late but his rudeness was punished, for he was placed between a débutante and a dowager, and condemned for two mortal hours to endure alternately insipid zephyrs and chilling blasts of small talk. Stiff-backed chairs were there and stiff-backed people were in them. Shaded candles threw a flickering light upon a mass of plate and flowers, bonbons, almonds, fruit and glasses. Around the table was a circle of bare necks and diamonds, white shirts and ties; and behind the chairs solemn footmen silently moved from place to place passing the endless courses. Some of the guests were bright and others solemn; some brilliant and others stupid; but they were the component parts of a fashionable dinner. There was a banker, a broker, a yachtsman, a diplomat, a merchant, and a sprinkling of dawdling men of leisure, and their wives, daughters, and cousins. The forks rattled and the tongues clattered, while each strove to hide his inner nature behind an effective pose. The clever succeeded and the stupid failed. Coffee was brought; the women arose, a man or two sprawled beneath the table to find some fan or glove, and then the women filed slowly out to gossip and dissect their neighbors, and the men remained to drink and smoke and drink again, while a ribald wag related some choice but scandalous tale, and ardent sportsmen took sides in vain disputes about the "Poseidon's" time allowance and "Salvador's" Suburban chances.

Duncan was moodily indisposed for banter or dispute. His buoyant and careless spirit seldom deserted him, but this dinner only claimed his presence because his senior partner was the host, and none of his intimes being there, he fell readily into a state of passive ill-humor. He dosed over his glass of port, carelessly puffed his cigar and occasionally proffered an opinion with a superior air incited by his social ascendency over most of the men present. Duncan Grahame was a man whose dominant characteristic was assurance, tempered only by an intuitive knowledge of the social amenities. He was often bold but never vulgar. He was rude in the manner of most society men, but his rudeness was a pose prompted by the mannerisms of the age, and designed, as was his coat, after the latest London model. He possessed the rare fortune of being considered handsome both by men and women. His beauty was of the vigorous type, which wins admiration by its manliness rather than its perfection. His eyes were great, grey wells, which gave to women a Narcissus-like reflection of their own impulses. They charmed by their seeming sympathy, but were really the artful tools of conscious power. To most men's minds curly hair is a blemish which barbers' shears and bristly brushes may remove, but to women Duncan Grahame's short; crispy black curls were a seldom failing charm. Although his eyes might deceive even one who knew the countless evidences of breeding and career, his mouth, partly hidden by a short moustache, betrayed the hard, unmistakable markings of indulgence, and a student of life would have mentally described him by the trite, though significant expression, "a man of the world." And such was Duncan Grahame,—no better and no worse than scores whose names adorn the blue books of metropolitan life. There was once a time, not many years before, when he had been an innocent and confiding boy. He had gone to school and then to college,—a dangerous experiment at best, but, with a boy like Duncan, who had been brought up within the strictness of a Connecticut home and turned upon the world without a knowledge of it, pretty sure to result as it had turned out in his case. It was the old story of weakness, ignorance, and a desire to emulate his upper classmen and be a man. The first step was not taken without a struggle, but one by one the cards of which the Puritan moral structure was built were blown away, and, left without support, the edifice collapsed. What other result could be expected? His Christian ethics were but the expurgated teachings of the pulpit, tempered by dogmas and doctrines, and in his home the faintest whisperings of the real world brought blushes to his parents, and stilted, meaningless words of warning. His first intimations of worldly ways were gathered surreptitiously in the streets, and his first knowledge of the nature of sin came with the temptation. The struggle was brief; perhaps it was as strong as could be expected; and soon he was the careless, fearless leader of the mischievous, rollicking set to be found in every college. He became, he thought, a man, and knew the world. He left college and after two years in London and Paris came to New York. His family was excellent, his appearance attractive, his manners good, and his assurance unbounded,—all that was needed, except money, to win social success in the metropolis. Money he did not have, but he resolved to make it, so into Wall Street he went, and was so successful there, that at the end of three years he became the junior partner of a great brokerage house and was entrusted with the furtherance of many delicate schemes. In society he had won his way to a leadership in not the best, but the best advertised, set in New York. The plunge into the cold torrent of Wall Street deception was sufficient to chill even a stronger optimistic ardor than Duncan's, but when he was carried on into the whirling, flashing eddies of smart society, only to be left shivering upon the cruel reefs of selfishness and debauchery, every chivalrous sentiment was gone, and when he gathered courage for the second plunge, it was as a designing, selfish disciple of utility.

To return to the dinner. The men had left their coffee and cigars and the lucky ones had singled out attractive adversaries, with whom to thrust and parry bright, sharp phrases in those exhilarating practice-bouts of love, sure to precede the desperate encounters where mask and buttoned foil are cast aside. Others, to whom fortune was less kind, were striving to cull from unsympathetic neighbors some evidences of interest and intelligence, or had resigned themselves to the melancholy fate of being bored. Duncan wandered restlessly about awhile. He found no one to interest him, and being too selfish deliberately to resign himself to another dowager, he remembered that his intended journey to the West offered a plausible reason for retiring, so, making his excuses to the hostess, he took his departure, feeling, as he folded his muffler about his neck and buttoned his great-coat, that for a successful dinner more depends on the choice of guests than the choice of wines.

The little blue note found upon his dressing table turned his steps still farther uptown. The thaw of the afternoon was over; it was snowing, and cold blasts blew the flakes against his face, biting his cheeks and chilling his humor, so that when he had trudged the three squares he had to go, he felt the ill-temper which a raw wind invariably produces in one whose moods change with the barometer. He approached the particular flight of brown stone steps he sought, and observing that the street both ways was free from passers, and that the curtains of the adjoining houses were drawn, he ascended and rang the bell; a servant soon opened the door and he entered quickly. The door closed, and, instead of darkness and snowflake blasts, there was warmth and light, and a pretty woman standing just inside the drawing-room door, murmuring playfully in a soft tone: "Duncan, you cold, naughty fellow, I was willing to lay a dozen bottles of Houbigant that this wind would have blown away what little was left of your flighty heart."

"Don't chaff me. I'm in no mood for it. I wish you had sat out a stupid dinner and afterward had tramped three blocks in the snow."