Paul Ralston

by Mary Jane Holmes

He knew the popular feeling was with him, but it did not help him much. He was very proud and felt keenly the insult put upon him and the injustice of it. It was a disgrace to be mixed up in such a row, and all he wanted was to be alone until his temper had cooled.

“Let me out of this before I break his head,” he said, as he pushed his way to the street.

The bell in the church near the hotel was ringing its first summons for service, but Paul did not hear it, or remember that he was to sing a solo that morning and that Elithe was to sing another at the offertory, and if he had he could not enter the House of God in his present state of mind. Leaving the hotel, he walked along the beach until he reached the seat under the willow tree where Jack had sat the night before until the stars came out and the fog was creeping inland. Here Paul sat down, trying to comprehend the situation and forget the indignity offered him. But he could not. The more he thought of it the angrier he grew, with a feeling that he must do something.

“I’d like to kill him!” he said aloud, just as a shadow fell upon the sand, and looking up he saw a half-grown boy regarding him wonderingly. “Who are you and why are you staring so at me? Be off with yourself!” he said savagely.

The boy, who did not know Paul, went off, but remembered the incident, which was to form a link in the dark chain of evidence tightening around Paul Ralston. He heard the last note of St. Luke’s bell and the answering ring of other bells floating out to sea, and knew that service was commencing in all the churches. Then he remembered his solo and Elithe. Had she heard of the fray? Had all the people heard of it, and what would they say? He knew what Miss Hansford would say, and laughed as he thought of the epithets she would heap upon Jack. The laugh did him good, and he could think of the sore spot in his side where Jack had struck him. “His fist was like a sledge hammer and would have felled an ox,” he said to himself, beginning to wonder what had happened to rouse Jack to such a pitch. He was in no hurry to go home, for, although he could not think himself in any way to blame, he shrank from meeting his people with a kind of shame that he had been in a broil.

At last, when he heard the one o’clock bell, he started for home, which he reached just as the family were sitting down to lunch. He did not care to join them, and bade the maid bring him something to his room. “I’ll take a bath and get cooled off before I see Clarice,” he thought, after his lunch was over. Going to the bath room he divested himself of his light gray coat, noticing as he did so a brown stain on the sleeve, which in his fall had come in contact with a pool of tobacco juice. Paul was very fastidious with regard to his clothes; a misfit or soil of any kind ruined them for him, and Tom Drake, who was in one sense his valet and who was just his height and figure, seldom had need to buy a new garment, as all Paul’s castoffs were given to him. Paul found him on the rear piazza and said to him, “Here, Tom, is another coat I’m through with. There’s a stain on the sleeve. Maybe you can get if off.”

Tom was so accustomed to these gifts that he took them as a matter of course, and was very proud of his general resemblance to Paul, whom he admired greatly, trying to walk like him and talk like him as far as possible. He had not yet heard of the trouble with Jack, and did not know why the coat was given to him, unless it were for the stain. Thanking Paul for it, he put it on at once, with the remark that it fitted him to a T. “We do look in our backs as near alike as two peas,” he said to himself when he saw Paul leave the house, habited in another coat nearly the same style and color as the one he was wearing.

Paul was going to see Clarice, whom he found in hysterics, while her mother was in a state of collapse, with several lady friends in attendance. They had heard of Jack’s arrival and the scene at the hotel. Of this the most extravagant stories had been told them. That Jack was intoxicated went without saying. Another story was that he and Paul had fought like wild beasts, rolling together on the hotel piazza. A third, that without the slightest provocation Jack had flown at Paul, knocked him down, broken his arm and further disabled him. This seemed probable, as Paul did not come at the time he was expected, and a messenger was about to be sent to the Ralston House to inquire for him when he appeared.

At sight of him Clarice redoubled her sobs, while Paul tried to quiet her, assuring her he was not harmed and making light of the matter. When she grew calm he began to relate the particulars, and as he talked and heard the expressions of sympathy for himself and indignation against Jack, his temper began to rise again, and he said many things not very complimentary to Jack,—threatening things natural in themselves under the circumstances, but which came up afterward as proof against him. Clarice was the most excited, declaring that Jack should not come there and begging Paul to find him and keep him away. This Paul promised to do, although shrinking from another encounter with the enemy.

The summer day was drawing to a close and the sun was setting when he left the Percy cottage and started for home. As he crossed the causeway between Lake Wenona and Lake Eau Claire he saw Jack turning into a cross road on the Heights, and guessed that he had started for his mother’s cottage, though why he should go that way, which was longer, he could not guess. Dreading the result for Mrs. Percy and Clarice if Jack went to them in a state of intoxication, as he probably was, he decided to overtake him and if possible persuade him to turn back. The quickest way to reach the oaks in which he had disappeared was to cross the open space between Miss Hansford’s cottage and the woods. Seated on the steps and piazza were three or four of the lodgers, together with Miss Hansford. They had all heard of the encounter at the hotel and were discussing it when Paul came rapidly up the path from the avenue. His face was flushed and he looked excited and flurried, and seemed unwilling to be stopped.