“I don’t know her,” said Craighill, and changed the subject.
CHAPTER VII
WAYNE COUNSELS HIS SISTER
MR. RICHARD WINGFIELD, unjustly called the Cynic, was suspected of literary ambitions; but the suspicion was based upon nothing weightier than a brochure on golf which he had printed at his own expense for private circulation, and a study of the Greater City, abounding in sly ironies, which had appeared with illustrations in a popular periodical.
Wingfield, if we may enter briefly into particulars, was tall and thin, with a close-cropped beard and dark hair combed to the smoothness of onion-skin. He was near-sighted, and his twinkling eye-glasses were protected by a slight gold chain. His aspect was severe, his manner disconcertingly serious. He carried, in all weathers, an umbrella whose handle bore on a silver plate the anticipatory legend, “Stolen from Richard Wingfield.” He was on many committees; he gave luncheons for actors, lecturers and other distinguished visitors; he attended the opera in New York and was reported now and then to be engaged to a prima donna. He patronized a private gymnasium and was a capital fencer. He cultivated the society of physicians, discussing the latest discoveries of Vienna and Paris in sophisticated terminology; he sat in the amphitheatre at surgical clinics, inscrutable and grave. His interest in medicine gave rise to the belief about the Club that he suffered from an incurable malady; but his medical cronies declared that he was as sound as wheat and would live forever. He affected an air of not caring greatly; he uttered paradoxes and enjoyed mystifying people; he quizzed likely subjects and had never been known to laugh aloud. It was he who first announced that five generations constitute an old family in Pittsburg. Practical men called Wingfield a loafer; others insinuated that his private life would not bear scrutiny. (A man who drinks nothing but koumiss in a club famed for its rye essences is sure to be the victim of calumny.) There was a particular little table in the corner of the Allequippa Club’s smoking-room—a room where all branches of human endeavour were represented at five o’clock every afternoon, from the twisting of stogies up through the professions to the canning of entrées—there, at his own little table, sat Mr. Wingfield, watching, as he said, the best men of the Greater City at the light-hearted occupation of hardening their arteries.
There was no telling what might happen; it was never safe to leave town, and having spent two years abroad in his young manhood, Wingfield abstained from further foreign travel. One must pick up gossip when it is fresh. Nothing, he said, is so discouraging as to miss the prologue; and so he spent most of his time at home. “But for the invention of sleeping-cars, and the fact of our being only one night from New York we should be the most moral city in the world,” he averred. Wingfield was a University of Pennsylvania man, and spoke in bitter contumeliousness of Yale and Harvard, which are, as all Pennsylvania men are able to demonstrate, grossly inferior institutions. Princeton, to all such, is only a blot on the Mosquito Strip and the seat of ignorance. His mother was a Philadelphian, and Dick’s two aunts were still residents of that city, where, through much careful instruction on their part, he knew Chestnut Street’s meridional importance and the sacred names one must whisper and those one must not utter at all. His income was derived from coke ovens situated in three districts, and these it pleased his humour to call Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego.
Wingfield walked to Mrs. Blair’s gate with Wayne talking of pictures and music. He was a diligent collector of anecdotes of the brief sort that end with abrupt and unforeseen climaxes, and he recounted a number for Wayne’s amusement. He carefully avoided any reference to Colonel Craighill’s marriage, though he knew Wayne better than anyone else and might have spoken his mind without offense. Wayne had appeared unusually dull and depressed, a mood that frequently followed a debauch, and Wingfield, familiar with his latest escapade, wished to lift his friend’s spirits if he could. At the Blairs’ gate he declined Wayne’s invitation to enter; but before they parted he made a point of suggesting that they have luncheon together the next day. He was wiser and kinder than most people gave him credit for being, and here, it had occurred to him, he might do a little good.
Wayne entered his sister’s house with a latch-key which it had been her own idea that he should carry. Mrs. Blair came out of the reception room while he was hanging up his hat and coat and asked him to go into the parlour for a few minutes.
“I have a caller—a matter of business—I’ll be with you in a minute, Wayne. Find something to read, won’t you?”
He bade her take her time and sought a table covered with magazines in three languages which gave to her library a rather club-like air. Mrs. Blair believed in self-culture and practised it à la carte, not overlooking the hors d’œuvres and desserts. He lighted a cigarette and turned over the periodicals until he found one that interested him. The murmur of voices reached him from the room across the hall; and he argued that the caller was no one he knew, or he should have been asked to come in and speak to her, such being Mrs. Blair’s way. In a few minutes she carried the conversation to what appeared from her tone to be a satisfactory conclusion. It had grown dark and a servant brightened the hall and adjoining rooms with the mild electric glow that was Mrs. Blair’s ideal of house lighting. Wayne, lifting his eyes at the soft flooding of his page, saw that his sister’s caller was the girl he had met in the art gallery. Her long coat made her appear taller as she stood against the background of the reception room portières. She was laughing happily at some remark of Mrs. Blair’s. She murmured something that did not reach him, but Mrs. Blair caught her hands exclaiming:
“Don’t trouble about it; it will soon begin to come easier. You are going to do something really worth while; remember, I have faith in you and you’re bound to arrive. No one ever disappoints me!”