Peter had sent for Henry Clay Bean earlier, and the solemn little boy arrived just as the Federation President was leaving, and she halted for a kindly word with him. (She earnestly hoped that her son’s interest in the child went further than his vow to make him laugh if he had to take a correspondence course in circus clowning to accomplish it.)
“Hello, Jest and Youthful Jollity!” she caught Peter’s greeting as she went out. “Nods and becks and wreathèd smiles. The loud guffaw that speaks the vacant mind, eh, old top?”—and Beany’s puzzled, respectful, “Ye-as, suh!”
In exactly three-quarters of an hour she was back, looking very grave.
“Well, Mrs. Mercury?” Peter hooded the anxious eagerness in his eyes. “At first glance, you appear to be alone.”
“I am alone, my son, and I bring you bad news.” A slight, quickly controlled tremor passed over the slim figure in the blue brocaded dressing gown, but she proceeded with the bracing directness for which she was famous. “Peter, she was very gentle and very kind; she inquired for you with a great deal of interest and was sincerely glad to know of your improvement, but—she is going to marry the superintendent of the mill on the seventeenth of next month—the day she is twenty years old.”
Peter Parker drew a long breath. “I doubt it greatly,” he said. “And now, Eugenia, I have one more chore for you. Will you go to the largest and most complacent bank you can find, demand to see the president (modestly mentioning that you’re a president yourself—all us prexies together!) and ask him to send me the expertest expert accountant and auditor he has in stock?”
“But, Peter, you are hardly well enough, I think—and besides, can’t Mr. Carey tell you anything you wish to know?”
“Mr. Carey can’t tell me anything I don’t know,” her son stated serenely, “with the possible exception of the time in which Cotton Belle won the quarter in ’99. Will you be fleet, Eugenia?”
His mother still hesitated. “I suppose you know, Peter, that your mill is in a very bad way, financially. Poor Mr. Carey seems greatly distressed over it. I understand from him that, owing to the dishonesty of a tried and trusted employee, the Altonia is and has been on the brink of failure.”
“You understand from old Carey that he understands from Luke Manders that such is the mournful fact, Eugenia.”