CHAPTER XI.—MRS. MINSTER’S NEW LEGAL ADVISER.
Some two weeks later Mr. Horace Boyce, on returning home one evening, found on his table a note which had been delivered during the day by a servant. It was from Mrs. Minster—“Desideria Minster” she signed herself—asking him to call upon her the following afternoon. The young man read the missive over and over again by the lamplight, and if it had been a love-letter from the daughter instead of the polite business appointment by the mother, his eyes couldn’t have flashed more eagerly as he took in the meaning of its words.
The meaning of its words! He thought long upon that, ruminating in his easy-chair before the fire until far past midnight, until the dainty little Japanese saucer at his side was heaped up with cigar ashes, and the air was heavy with smoke.
Evidently this summons was directly connected with the remarks made by Tenney a fortnight before. He had said the Minster business should come to him, and here it was. The fact that Mrs. Minster wrote to him at his residence, rather than at his office, was proof that she too wished to have him alone, and not the firm of Tracy & Boyce, as her adviser. That there should be this prejudice against Reuben, momentarily disturbed the young man; but, upon examination, he found it easy to account for it. Reuben was very nice—his partner even paused for a moment to reflect how decent a fellow Reuben really was—but then, he scarcely belonged to the class of society in which people like the Boyces and Minsters moved. Naturally the millionnaire widow, belonging as she did to an ancient family in the Hudson River valley, and bearing the queer name of a grandmother who had been a colonial beauty, would prefer to have as her family lawyer somebody who also had ancestors.
The invitation had its notable social side, too. There was no good in blinking the fact that his father the General—who had effected a somewhat noisy entrance to the house a half-hour ago, and the sound of whose burdened breathing now intermittently came to his ears in the silence of the night—had allowed the family status to lapse. The Boyces were not what they had been. In the course of such few calls as he had made since his return, it had been impossible for him not to detect the existence of a certain surprise that he should have called at all. Everybody, too, had taken pains to avoid reference to his father, even when the course of talk made such allusion natural. This had for the moment angered the young man, and later had not a little discouraged him. As a boy he had felt it a great thing to be the son of a general, and to find it now to be a distinct detriment was disheartening indeed. But this black-bordered, perfumed note from Mrs. Minster put all, as by the sweep of a hand, into the background. Once he visited that proud household as a friend, once he looked Thessaly in the face as the confidential adviser of the Minster family, the Boyces were rehabilitated.
To dwell upon the thought was very pleasant, for it led the way by sweetly vagrant paths to dreams of the dark-eyed, beautiful Kate. During the past month these visions had lost color and form under the disconcerting influences just spoken of, but now they became, as if by magic, all rosy-hued and definite again. He had planned to himself on that first November day a career which should be crowned by marriage with the lovely daughter of the millions, and had made a mental march around the walls encompassing her to spy out their least defended point. Now, all at once, marvellous as it seemed, he found himself transported within the battlements. He was to be her mother’s lawyer—nay, her lawyer as well, and to his sanguine fancy this meant everything.
Everything? The word seemed feeble. It meant one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen as his wife—a lady well-born, delicately nurtured, clever, and good; it meant vast wealth, untold wealth, with which to be not only the principal personage of these provincial parts, but a great figure in New York or Washington or Europe. He might be senator in Congress, minister to Paris, or even aspire to the towering, solitary eminence of the Presidency itself with the backing of these millions. It meant a yacht, the very dream of sea-going luxury and speed, in which to bask under Hawaiian skies, to loiter lazily along the topaz shores of far Cathay, to flit to and fro between spice lands and cold northern seas, the whole watery globe subject to her keel. Why, there could be a castle on the Moselle, a country house in Devonshire, a flat in Paris, a villa at Mentone, a summer island home on the St. Lawrence, a mansion in New York—all together, if he liked, or as many as pleased his whim. It might be worth the while to lease a shooting in Scotland, only the mischief was that badly bred Americans, the odious nouveaux riches, had rather discredited the national name in the Highlands.
So the young man’s fancies floated on the wreaths of scented smoke till at last he yawned in spite of himself, sated with the contemplation of the gifts the gods had brought him. He read Mrs. Minster’s note once again before he went to bed, and sleep overtook his brain while it was still pleasantly musing on the choicest methods of expending the income of her millions.
Curiously enough, during all these hours of happy castle-building, the question of why Schuyler Tenney had interested himself in the young man’s fortunes never once crossed that young man’s mind. To be frank, the pictures he painted were all of “gentlemen” and “ladies,” and his father’s partner, though his help might be of great assistance at the outset, could scarcely expect to mingle in such company, even in Horace’s tobacco reveries.