“Did you hold any of Cary’s stock?” He was piecing his puzzle together.
“Yes, but my stock was all paid for, and I held on to it; now it is over par and paying dividends. Oh, the property was all right, had it been kept in honest hands and run for itself. The trouble with Cary was that in order to keep control of the property he bought a lot of shares on margins, and when they began to run downhill, he was obliged to borrow money on his actual holdings to protect his fictitious ones. The stock went so low that he was wiped out. He wouldn’t take my advice earlier in the game; and I knew that it would only be losing money to lend it to him, later—still, sometimes I have been rather sorry I didn’t. Would I better try the spade, Bertie, or the diamond?”
The colonel advised the spade. He wondered whether he should repeat to his aunt the few sentences which he had overheard from Mercer and his companion; but a belief that old age worries easily, added to his natural man’s disinclination to attack the feminine nerves, tipped the scales against frankness. So, instead, he began to talk about Archie; what was he like? was he fond of athletics? or was he a bookish lad? Aunt Rebecca reported that he had liked riding and golf; but he was not very rugged, and since his father’s death he had seemed listless to a degree. “But he is better now,” she added with a trace of eagerness quite foreign to her usual manner. “Janet Smith has roused him up; and what do you suppose she has done? But really, you are the cause.”
“I?” queried the colonel.
“Just you. Archie, Janet argued, is the kind of nature that must have some one to be devoted to.”
“And has he taken a fancy to her? Or to you?”
Aunt Rebecca’s eyes dulled a little and her delicate lips were twisted by a smile which had more wistfulness than humor in it. “I’m not a lovable person; anyhow, he does not love easily. We are on terms of the highest respect, even admiration, but we haven’t got so far as friendship, far less comradeship. Janet is different. But I don’t mean Janet; she has grown absurdly fond of him; and I think he’s fond of her; but what she did was to make him fond of you. You, General Rupert Winter; why, that boy could pass an examination on your exploits and not miss a question. Janet and he have a scrap-book with every printed word about you, I do believe. And she has been amazingly shrewd. We didn’t know how to get the youngster back to his sports while he was out of school; and, in fact, an old woman like me is rather bewildered by such a young creature, anyhow; but Janet rode with him; you are a remarkable rider; I helped there, because I remembered some anecdotes about you at West Point—”
“But, my dear Aunt—”
“Don’t interrupt, Bertie, it’s a distinctly American habit. And we read in the papers that you had learned that Japanese trick fighting—jiu-jitsu—and were a wonder—”
“I’m not, I assure you; that beast of a newspaper man—”