And be it said for the Tippecanoe Club, that no one of the ten men present ever spoke of this incident outside its doors. It was no one’s affair what happened between Rodney Merriam and the army officer; it sufficed that an old man had made the amende honorable in a way that impressed ten young men deeply.
And the next day, in the same spirit of scrupulous honor, Rodney Merriam sought his nieces at The Beeches and made his peace with them.
CHAPTER XXIII
BRIGHTER VISTAS
It was now full summer, and when it is hot in Mariona it is very hot indeed. The old locusts in the court back of the law offices of Knight, Kittredge and Carr were green again and venturesome robins paused there now and then to challenge Opinion and Precedent. There was not much for unattached young men to do when their day’s work was done. The roof garden of the Hamilton Club offered itself to those who cared for that sort of thing, or were zealous in the eternal politics of the place, from which, save for the roof garden, there was no escape. Or, a man with an evening on his hands might sit on the lawn about the Tippecanoe Club, or, better still, with a crony or two, on the balcony that opened from the second story, where trees shut you in with the stars, and the music, not of spheres, but of the mechanical piano in the flat next door. It was possible to obtain there a mint julep compounded under the direction of an alumnus of the University of Virginia,—a julep that was happily calculated to lift the smothered, withered spirit beyond the stars to undiscovered ports of Heaven. You were at perfect liberty to whisper at the Tippecanoe, as you might not at the Hamilton, the name of Jefferson; or you might quote Robert Browning or Richard Cobden without subjecting yourself to fine or imprisonment.
There was the Country Club, another refuge, where college boys sang in dark corners of the veranda, after a hard day of golf or tennis; or danced the two-step with sun-browned summer girls. But the Country Club did not appeal to Morris just now. Zelda did not frequent the club, and the pretty, gray-eyed golf-champion with whom in other summers he had played many a round, bowed a little superciliously now when she passed him in her electric runabout. She did not salute him with a jangle of the gong as had been her pleasant habit in the genial days of their comradeship. Nor did the bands in the glittering beer-gardens tempt him; for there is something not wholly edifying in the passing spectacle of every one and every one’s cook.
Morris Leighton, lingering long after office hours in the dingy old library, found the robin’s mournful vesper note solacing. None of the possible midsummer night diversions appealed to him; he would not even go up to the Tippecanoe Club for dinner lest some one should break in upon what he felt to be his mood. He was reveling in that state of mind in which the young rather enjoy being melancholy. Zelda Dameron snubbed him persistently—consistently; and Morris was just now persuading himself that there was nothing left for him but to lose himself in his work. This is always an interesting stage, at which a young man’s fancy, interrupted in its flights elsewhere, lightly turns to thoughts of labor; and Morris was picturing to himself a long and successful, though austere, life, in which one face and one voice should haunt him. He was engaged in this sort of agreeable speculation when Mr. Carr, who had been attending a conference of railroad officials at one of the hotels, came in unexpectedly, and found his chief clerk engaged in the profitable pastime of reading decisions of the highest courts in the land without the slightest notion of what they were about.
“That you, Morris? I thought every one had gone. I want that English decision you had yesterday in the Transcontinental case.”
“It’s here on the table,” said Morris.
He lighted the gas in the brackets on the wall—they were old and had lost their pristine shine—and when the jets were lighted they spurted out queer shapes of flame, in the absurd manner of decrepit gas-fixtures.
“Thanks, Morris, I’ll take the book home with me. I’m not sure but that we should lay particular stress on that case.”