Copeland, startled, irresolute, followed him to the door of a smaller room used for consultations. Eaton opened it and stepped back.
“I shall be dining at the club later, if you care to see me,” he said, and vanished.
CHAPTER XXVI
JERRY’S DARK DAYS
Jerry, who had never been ill in his life, was now experiencing disquieting sensations which he was convinced pointed to an early and probably a painful death. He went about his work listlessly, and from being the cheerfulest person in Copeland-Farley, he became so melancholy that his fellow employees wondered greatly and speculated in private as to the cause of the change. Jerry encouraged the thought of death and blithely visualized the funeral at which Eaton’s pastor (chastely surpliced and reinforced by a boy choir) would officiate. He chose the rector of Christ Church because that gentleman had not been unmindful of his occasional attendance upon services (Jerry had courageously repeated his first timid visit), and had even made a memorandum of Jerry’s name and address, with a view to calling upon him. This attention clearly pointed to the rector as the minister predestined from the beginning of things to officiate at his funeral, a function about which he meditated much in a spirit of loftiest detachment.
A few people would be sorry when he died, but only a few. The boys at the store would contribute a wreath; they had done that for a drayman who had succumbed to pneumonia a short time before; and the people at his boarding-house would probably grace the last rites with their presence. Copeland would probably attend; he might even add dignity to the occasion by acting as pallbearer. One of the girl stenographers, whose lachrymose facilities had occasionally aroused his ire, would doubtless weep; she had cried when the drayman died, though her acquaintance with that person had been the most casual. Nan might attend the funeral, but he hoped to time his passing so that the funeral could be held on a market morning, thus giving her a good excuse for absenting herself. It would be a sad, pitiful funeral, with only a handful of mourners, as his only living relative was a cousin in Oklahoma whose exact address he had forgotten. The brief list of mourners included the billiard-marker at the Whitcomb. Jerry had once lent him five dollars, which was still carried as an open account and probably a permanent one; he meant to leave a memorandum of general forgiveness, including a release of the billiard-marker from any obligation to pay the five dollars. And he would bequeath him his best cuff-buttons to show that he had died with no hard feelings against him. The thought of the meager attendance and of the general gloom of the affair gave him the keenest satisfaction. No one would care particularly.
Jerry’s malady was one of the oldest that afflicts the human race. Jerry was in love; he was in love with Nan, though he would have stormed indignantly at any hint of this bewildering circumstance, this blighting, crushing fact. His first realization that this was the cause of his trouble fell upon him as he sat one evening in the hotel at Madison listlessly talking to a dry-goods drummer. Jerry was taking a run over Copeland-Farley territory to “jolly” the trade, carrying no samples and soliciting no orders, but presenting himself as the personal representative of the house, bent upon strengthening social ties only, and only casually glancing over the shelves to see how much Copeland-Farley’s competitors were selling. The dry-goods man, noting Jerry’s unwonted gloom, frankly attributed it to a love affair; and to find that his condition was perceptible even to the eye of a dry-goods drummer, for whose powers of discernment he had only the mildest respect, added considerably to Jerry’s melancholy.
Nan was not for him; he knew this; there had never been any doubt in his mind that Eaton and Nan would marry ultimately. Any speculations as to his own part in Nan’s life, beyond the boy-and-girl comradeship he had been enjoying, were vain and foolish; they were even disloyal to Eaton; they were an insult to Nan. Nan had intimated several times that Eaton was in love with Mrs. Copeland, but now that the black clouds had risen on his own horizon, Jerry knew the absurdity of this. Eaton had appeared unusually absent-minded of late, and this marked his friend as a man in the toils of love. Jerry knew the symptoms! Except for a passing attachment for a stenographer in a hardware house, who had jilted him for a red-haired bookkeeper, Jerry had never been in love. He had grieved over the hardware girl’s perfidy for two, perhaps three, days. But this was the real thing and a very different matter; he meant to win the martyr’s wreath by going to his death so heroically that no one would ever know how he had suffered.
Returning to town Saturday evening he checked his grip at a hotel and went to the theater, not for pleasure, but to lose himself among strangers and enjoy his misery. As he moodily surveyed the assembling audience a cold hand gripped his heart. Eaton, followed by Mrs. Copeland, Nan, and a lady he did not know, filed down to the second row where Eaton always sat.
Since Farley’s death Nan had attended no entertainments of any kind; she had refused to accompany Jerry to a concert only a fortnight earlier. Her presence at the theater with Eaton confirmed his worst suspicions. Their engagement would doubtless be announced in a day or two; he must steel himself against this and prepare to offer his congratulations. The comedy presented was one of the hits of the season, but its best lines and most amusing situations failed to evoke a smile from Jerry, who clutched his programme and stared at the back of Nan’s head. Nan was enjoying herself; from his seat on the back row he was satisfied of that, and he assured himself that he was glad of her happiness. At the end of the second act, he left and went to his room to spend a wretched night.
Jerry found on his desk Monday morning a note from Eaton, written several days earlier, asking him to join his theater party and go to the club later for supper. His sister had come down from Cleveland to make him a visit, Eaton explained, and he wanted Jerry to meet her. For an instant the world was the pleasant, cheerful place it had been in the old days before love darkened his life. Eaton was still his friend; but only for a moment was the veil lifted. The clouds settled upon him again, as he grasped the motive behind Eaton’s friendly note—as though at any time in their intercourse there had been the ghost of a motive back of anything John Cecil Eaton had ever done for him except a perfectly transparent, generous wish to be kind to him! But the coming of the sister (who had never, so far as Jerry knew, visited Eaton before) could only mean that Eaton wished to introduce Nan to her as a prospective member of the family. And, proud of his logic, Jerry reasoned that he was to have been given an opportunity to offer his own congratulations.