“Eh? Oh, he’s a man named Covell—Seymour Covell. When I knew him he was head of a meat and provision firm on Commercial Street in Boston. Used to take contracts to fit out ships and all that. Later on he went out to Chicago and got in on the ground floor with a crowd that were killing hogs and beef cattle on a big scale. He is with ’em yet, judging from this letter, commodore of the fleet or something like that.”
“And he writes to you for money?”
Townsend laughed aloud. “Money!” he repeated. “He must be a millionaire a dozen times over. No, no! he doesn’t want money. He wants me to help him with his son, a young fellow in the twenties. Had a kind of hard time with him, I guess. Here, you read yourself what he says. It will save time. Read it out loud.”
He handed her the letter. It was a long one and she read it through, aloud, as requested. It began by calling the writer to Foster Townsend’s memory, speaking of old acquaintanceship and the like. Seymour Covell, it appeared, was a widower with one child, a son, now twenty-seven years of age. The requested favor had to do with the latter.
“I have had a devil of a time with him,” Covell had written. “He and I don’t seem to pull well together, for some reason or other. Maybe it is partly my fault, I don’t know. While his mother lived she spoiled him, I guess, and I probably did my share. I don’t think he is bad; naturally I wouldn’t. He has had the best of everything I could buy for him, expensive preparatory school—he was fired from one but he graduated from another—college, although he did not finish that. He thought he wanted to be an artist, paint pictures, you know.”
“Like old ’Lisha’s grandson,” broke in Townsend, with a sardonic chuckle. “Regular disease, that seems to be. Go ahead, Esther.”
His niece continued her reading. “‘So,’ she read, ‘I sent him to Paris, where they teach that sort of thing. He learned a lot over there, but not altogether about pictures. Then he studied in New York. He paints some, when he feels like it, but he hasn’t sold anything yet. For the past six months he has been here at home in Chicago, and that isn’t doing him any good. He isn’t too well, but he isn’t sick either. I am about at my wit’s end and I have thought of you, Townsend. When I knew you you were a real man and, from what I have taken pains to find out about you lately, I judge you have reached the position I expected you to reach. I wonder if you can’t find something for Seymour to do. Yes, he is named after me; his mother started in to handicap him at the very beginning, you see. I wonder if you couldn’t get him some sort of a job—never mind what or what it pays—in your part of the country. Something that would keep him out of doors a part of the time and build him up, and, more than all, get him away from the hothouse crowd he is traveling with. If you could it would be worth more money than I have got—to him and to me. I don’t care much what it is, not at first. Get him out of the city and away from city tricks and manners. If you cared to let him come and visit you a week or two in the beginning, so that you might look him over and size him up, that, I should think, would be a good idea. Under a man like you, a driver, and as good a judge of men and the best handler of men I ever knew, we might make something of him yet. God knows I want him to be worth while. What do you think? Give me your advice, at least.’”
There was more, but not much. The letter was written upon paper bearing the name of one of the largest packing-houses in the country and was signed, “Your old-time friend, Seymour T. Covell.”
Esther, having finished her reading, looked at her uncle. He was, apparently, thinking deeply, pulling at his beard, his brows drawn together.
“How strange that he should write like this—to you,” she said. “About his personal affairs, and his own son. Did you use to know this Mr. Covell very well, Uncle Foster?”