Chauncy hesitated. He wished to say something about his Uncle Bezaleel. He did not know very much about Baggs’ business relations to Boardman Blake. In spite of Baggs’ blustering display of confidence in his nephew, any ostentatious intimations that Chauncy knew everything about his business in general, Chauncy knew very little. One reason was that the uncle’s business, after all the brag, was very limited, and then Bezaleel knew that Chauncy had too much principle to back him in certain dishonest schemes. The young man now hesitated, impelled to say something about his uncle, and yet held back by an unwillingness to damage one with whom he had been associated.
“I guess you had better go to your uncle’s, Plympton. There is going to be a conference there, I believe, my uncle and his lawyer, and your uncle and his lawyer, and oh, I don’t know what else. Miss Green told me; and bless me, what that mail–bag don’t know, isn’t worth the knowing. She will hold more news than an ocean steamer. Now mind, Plympton, I don’t know what is up. Take my word for it. But there is something to pay, and I would go there.”
“I shall, most certainly,” and Walter’s eye flashed like that of a watch dog who starts in the night as he catches the stealthy step of a burglar. “I hope it is nothing serious with my uncle.”
“I don’t know how it is; but two lawyers—that means a rush in the market, Plympton; yes, a rush.”
Chauncy ceased talking. His efforts at conversation had already wearied him. He lay upon his bed silently arguing a point. This “rush in the market” meant a very significant movement by his enterprising uncle, though its exact nature was a mystery to Chauncy. His uncle’s slippery ways had suggested to him one occasion when he himself had been false to Walter, and almost involuntarily he exclaimed, as one may do in sickness that weakens the control of the mind over itself,—”I don’t think I ever tried to deceive you, save once. I hope though you won’t hold it against me.”
Walter caught this confession imperfectly; and what made him guess the occasion to which Chauncy referred? Was it a chance look out of the window toward the rocks of the Crescent, about which the surf had wound its scarf of snow? Walter thought of the day when he saw Bezaleel Baggs on the shore looking off toward the Chair. He was reminded of Bezaleel’s resemblance to the mysterious form he saw one morning in Boardman Blake’s store, that morning when Chauncy Aldrich so persistently tried to call off Walter’s attention from the store. Walter now turned suddenly to the invalid.
“Aldrich, see here. What do you mean by saying you deceived me once? I can only think of one time when I guess you did try to pull the wool over my eyes, and I want you to own up if it was so. Do you remember one morning when I first came this way to stop? I was opening my uncle’s store and you drove down in a wagon, and I came out to the door and saw you there, and I fancied I saw somebody else in the store?”
Chauncy nodded his head in assent. Then he added slowly, “That’s—the time—I mean, too.”
“Look here! Wasn’t that your uncle inside the store?”
Chauncy hesitated. He spoke at last, and with sudden force. “Plympton, I don’t want to deceive you now; but I did then, and am sorry. It was my uncle in the store. Now, I don’t want to go back on anybody, sick as I am. He is my mother’s brother, if he isn’t what he ought to be.” His lip quivered. He was thinking of a mother, long ago at rest in death.