“How about Archie? Can he play a good game?”
“Very fair for a boy of fourteen; he was fond of whist until his troubles came,” said Mrs. Winter, with a faint clouding of her keen gaze. “Since then he hasn’t taken much interest in anything. Janet has brightened him up more than any one; and when he heard you were coming that did rouse him. You are one of his heroes. He’s that sort of a boy,” she added, with a tinge of impatience in her soft Southern voice. As if to divert her thoughts, she began deftly moving the cards before her. Her hands showed the blue veins more prominently than they show in young hands. This was their only surrender to time; they were shapely and white, and the slim fingers were as straight as when the beaux of Fairfax County would have ridden all day for a chance to kiss them.
The colonel watched the great ruby wink and glow. The ruby was a part of his memories of his aunt; she had always worn it. He remembered it, when she used to come and visit him at the hotel at West Point, dazzling impartially officers, professors, cadets and hotel waiters. Was that almost forty years ago? Well, thirty-four, anyhow! She had been very good, very generous to all the young Winters, then. Indeed, although she never quite forgave him for not marrying the wife of her selecting, she had always been kind and generous to Rupert; yet, somehow, while he had admired and found a humorous joy in his Aunt Rebecca, he wondered if he had ever loved her. She was both beautiful and brilliant when she was young, a Southern belle, a Northern society leader; her life was full of conquests; her footsteps, which had wandered over the world, had left a phosphorescent wake of admiration. She had always been a personage. She was a power in Washington after the war; they had found her uniquely delightful in royal courts long before Americans were the fashion; she had been of importance in New York, and they had loved her epigrams in Boston; now, in her old age, she held a veritable little court of her own in the provincial Western city which had been her husband’s home. He went to Congress from Fairport; he had made a fortune there, and when he died, many years ago, in Egypt, back to his Western home, with dogged determination and lavish expenditures of both money and wit, his widow had brought him to rest. The most intense and solemn experience of a woman she had missed, for no children had come to them, but her husband had been her lover so long as he lived, and she had loved him. She had known great men; she had lived through wonderful events; and often her hand had been on those secret levers which move vast forces. She had been in tragedies, if an inviolable coolness of head, perhaps of heart, had shielded her from being of them. The husband of her youth, the nearest of her blood, the friends of her middle life—all had gone into the dark; yet here she sat, with her smooth skin and her still lustrous eyes and her fragrant hands, keenly smiling over her solitaire. The colonel wondered if he could ever reconcile himself with such philosophy to his own narrowed and emptied life; she was older than he, yet she could still find a zest in existence. All the great passions gone; all the big interests; and still her clever mind was working, happy, possibly, in its mere exercise, disdaining the stake, she who had had every success. What a vitality! He looked at her, puzzling. Her complexity bewildered him, he not being of a complex nature himself. As he looked, suddenly he found himself questioning why her face, in its revival of youthful smoothness and tint, recalled some other face, recently studied by him—a face that had worn an absolutely different expression; having the same delicate aquiline nose, the same oval contour, the same wide brows—who? who? queried the colonel. Then he nodded. Of course; it was the man with the moles, the brother. He looked enough like Mrs. Winter to be her kinsman. At once he put his guess to the test. “Aunt Becky,” said he, “have you any kin I don’t know about?”
“I reckon not. I’m an awfully kinless old party,” said she serenely. “I was a Winter, born as well as married, and so you and Mel and Archie are double kin to me. I was an only child, so I haven’t anything closer than third or fourth cousins, down in Virginia and Boston.”
“Have you, by chance, any cousin, near or far, named Mercer?”
Resting her finger-tips on the cards, Aunt Rebecca seemed to let her mind search amid Virginian and Massachusetts genealogical tables. “Why, certainly,” she answered after a pause, “there was General Philemon Mercer—Confederate army, you know—and his son, Sam Nelson; Phil was my own cousin and Sam Nelson my second, and Sam Nelson’s sons would be my third, wouldn’t they? Phil and Sam are both dead, and Winnie Lee, the daughter, is dead, and poor Phil—the grandson, you know—poor boy, he shot himself while at Harvard; but his brother Cary is alive.”
“Do you know him?”
“Never saw him but once or twice. He has very good manners.”
“Is he rich?”
“He was, but after he had spent his youth working with incredible industry and a great deal of ability to build up a steel business and had put it into a little combination—not a big trust, just a genuine corporation—some of the financial princes wanted it for a club—to knock down bigger game, I reckon—and proceeded to cheapen the stock in order to control it. Cary held on desperately, bought more than he could hold, mortgaged everything else; but they were too big for him to fight. It was in 1903, you know, when they had an alleged financial panic, and scared the banks. Cary went to the wall, and Phil with him, and poor Phil killed himself. Afterward Cary’s wife died; he surely did have a mean time. And, to tell you the truth, Bertie, I think there has been a little kink in Cary’s mind ever since.”