All—all—the fruits of his manhood’s work had been lavished at her feet, and here, when he was wounded to the quick by the jilt Fortune, his wife, where was she? Sailing eastward in the best rooms of a crack ocean liner, in company with her lovely Lilian, without whose society she had declared it would be impossible to recover the tone of her shattered nerves!
It was really the only thing for her to do, so had said Mrs. Foljambe to her doctor, reminding him of the tremendous help she had previously derived from certain baths in Germany. The doctor, wise in his generation and well aware of what was expected of him, had suavely acquiesced. Mr. Foljambe was informed by his wife that her sole chance of recovery lay in the jaunt in question—and as to expense, it was a real economy, he knew. The money she was to have at her disposal was a sum of a few thousand dollars which had been given to her years before by her husband—which he had invested for her in her own name—and which had chanced to have been never as yet spent by her. So the state-room on the ship had been taken within a day or two after she had announced to him her intention of going abroad.
Lilian, clinging to her father’s neck with tears and caresses, assured him that she did not want to go; that it would be dull as ditchwater for her, and that she should always be thinking of him left behind. But Lilian was overpowered, and in due time yielded to her mother’s decree that her first duty was to her.
Not so Olive. Without protestation, without gush over her father, she had calmly said she had no idea of going abroad that summer. With the help of her friend Luttridge she had picked out a little flat on the west side of the Park, where there were tree-tops for the trouble of going to the window and a delightful sense of being out-of-doors. The sale of her pearl necklace had paid for the furniture. She retained as cook the kitchen-maid who had been trained under M. Lenormand, and then, when all was done, announced to her father that they—he, she, and the brother recently come home from college—were going there to live, the other brother having resigned his place in New York and gone to the West to grow up with the country.
The evening of the day that found Martin Foljambe creeping dejectedly out of his former mansion, with a heart in his bosom heavy as the iron that had seared it, brought him uptown to see for the first time Miss Olive’s new arrangements for his comfort.
To Martin, past the age for picnics, the whole thing appeared but a mournful makeshift. But Olive and Luttridge, who came in to dine upon a grilled fowl and a can of mock-turtle soup, and Tom, the recent graduate, who was charged by Olive “to help to cheer papa,” laughed and chaffed and made merry with the glorious unconcern of youth. After dinner, when the two young men went out into the Park to smoke their pipes, Olive sat with her father upon a sofa pinched between two doorways of their narrow sitting-room.
“And now tell me, papa,” she said with alarming briskness, “just what I may expect as an allowance to keep house upon.”
He explained that for the present he would have nothing he could call his own except the sum the assignee was paying him weekly for his services in assisting to wind up the assigned estate to the best possible advantage, and that, even from that, certain amounts would have to be deducted for use for things other than mere housekeeping.
“Oh, well,” said she, “we shall be able to live. And do you know, I already love this. It is like a honeymoon without the bother of a husband. You will have an excellent draught of air through your bedroom. I forgot to tell you that I got a note to-day from Mrs. Louis Rushmore offering me the work on her husband’s notes of that expedition they made last year to Mexico. Mrs. Rushmore started in herself to put them in shape for publication, but seems to have got into a hole. You know, it is to be a sort of ‘In Memoriam’ for Mr. Rushmore, published on the most lavish scale, with illustrations and all that. She recalled that when we all met in Mexico Mr. Rushmore took rather a fancy to me principally because I was the only person of the party who could read his handwriting. You remember, he got me to copy out in his note-book certain of his own memoranda that he couldn’t decipher to save himself?”
“And how, pray,” said Mr. Foljambe, writhing upon the hard little sofa Olive and Luttridge had thought so artistic in design, “did Mrs. Rushmore come to suppose you were in need of employment?”