“Why, you know it is. Who should know it better than you?” Mr. Tenney responded.
Horace reasoned to himself as he walked away that there really was no cause for apprehension. Tenney was smart, and evidently Wendover was smart too, but if they tried to pull the wool over his eyes they would find that he himself had not been born yesterday. He had done everything they had suggested to him, but he felt that the independent and even captious manner in which he had done it all must have shown the schemers that he was not a man to be trifled with. Thus far he could see no dishonesty in their plans. He had been very nervous about the first steps, but his mind was almost easy now. He was in a position where he could protect the Minsters if any harm threatened them. And very soon now, he said confidently to himself, he would be in an even more enviable position—that of a member of the family council, a prospective son-in-law. It was clear to his perceptions that Kate liked him, and that he had no rivals.
It happened that Reuben did not refer again to the subject of yesterday’s dispute, and while Horace acquiesced in the silence, he was conscious of some disappointment over it. It annoyed him to even look at his partner this morning, and he was sick and tired of the partnership. It required an effort to be passing civil with Reuben, and he said to himself a hundred times during the day that he should be heartily glad when the Thessaly Manufacturing Company got its new machinery in, and began real operations, so that he could take up his position there as the visible agent of the millions, and pitch his partner and the pettifogging law business overboard altogether.
In the course of the afternoon he went to the residence of the Minsters. The day was not Tuesday, but Horace regarded himself as emancipated from formal conditions, and at the door asked for the ladies, and then made his own way into the drawing-room, with entire self-possession.
When Mrs. Minster came down, he had some trivial matter of business ready as a pretext for his visit, but her manner was so gracious that he felt pleasantly conscious of the futility of pretexts. He was on such a footing in the Minster household that he would never need excuses any more.
The lady herself mentioned the plan of his attending the forthcoming meeting of the directors of the pig-iron trust at Pittsburg, and told him that she had instructed her bankers to deposit with his bankers a lump sum for expenses chargeable against the estate, which he could use at discretion. “You mustn’t be asked to use your own money on our business,” she said, smilingly.
It is only natural to warm toward people who have such nice things as this to say, and Horace found himself assuming a very confidential, almost filial, attitude toward Mrs. Minster. Her kindness to him was so marked that he felt really moved by it, and in a gracefully indirect way said so. He managed this by alluding to his own mother, who had died when he was a little boy, and then dwelling, with a tender inflection in his voice, upon the painful loneliness which young men feel who are brought up in motherless homes. “It seems as if I had never known a home at all,” he said, and sighed.
“She was one of the Beekmans from Tyre, wasn’t she? I’ve heard Tabitha speak of her often,” said Mrs. Minster. The words were not important, but the look which accompanied them was distinctly sympathetic.
Perhaps it was this glance that affected Horace. He made a little gulping sound in his throat, clinched his hands together, and looked fixedly down upon the pattern of the carpet.
“We should both have been better men if she had lived’,” he murmured, in a low voice.