A SISTERLY SCHEME
Away up in the very heart of Maine there is a mighty lake among the mountains. It is reached after a journey of many hours from the place where you “go in.” That is the phrase of the country, and when you have once “gone in,” you know why it is not correct to say that you have gone through the woods, or, simply, to your destination. You find that you have plunged into a new world – a world that has nothing in common with the world that you live in; a world of wild, solemn, desolate grandeur, a world of space and silence; a world that oppresses your soul – and charms you irresistibly. And after you have once “come out” of that world, there will be times, to the day of your death, when you will be homesick for it, and will long with a childlike longing to go back to it.
Up in this wild region you will find a fashionable Summer-hotel, with electric bells and seven-course dinners, and “guests” who dress three times a day. It is perched on a little flat point, shut off from the rest of the mainland by a huge rocky cliff. It is an impertinence in that majestic wilderness, and Leather-Stocking would doubtless have had a hankering to burn such an affront to Nature; but it is a good hotel, and people go to it and breathe the generous air of the great woods.
On the beach near this hotel, where the canoes were drawn up in line, there stood one Summer morning a curly-haired, fair young man – not so very young, either – whose cheeks were uncomfortably red as he looked first at his own canoe, high and dry, loaded with rods and landing-net and luncheon-basket, and then at another canoe, fast disappearing down the lake, wherein sat a young man and a young woman.
“Dropped again, Mr. Morpeth?”
The young man looked up and saw a saucy face laughing at him. A girl was sitting on the string-piece of the dock. It was the face of a girl between childhood and womanhood. By the face and the figure, it was a woman grown. By the dress, you would have judged it a girl.
And you would have been confirmed in the latter opinion by the fact that the young person was doing something unpardonable for a young lady, but not inexcusable in the case of a youthful tomboy. She had taken off her canvas shoe, and was shaking some small stones out of it. There was a tiny hole in her black stocking, and a glimpse of her pink toe was visible. The girl was sunburnt, but the toe was prettily pink.
“Your sister,” replied the young man with dignity, “was to have gone fishing with me; but she remembered at the last moment that she had a prior engagement with Mr. Brown.”
“She hadn’t,” said the girl. “I heard them make it up last evening, after you went upstairs.”
The young man clean forgot himself.
“She’s the most heartless coquette in the world!” he cried, and clinched his hands.
“She is all that,” said the young person on the string-piece of the dock, “and more too. And yet, I suppose, you want her all the same?”
“I’m afraid I do,” said the young man, miserably.
“Well,” said the girl, putting her shoe on again, and beginning to tie it up, “I’ll tell you what it is, Mr. Morpeth. You’ve been hanging around Pauline for a year, and you are the only one of the men she keeps on a string who hasn’t snubbed me. Now, if you want me to, I’ll give you a lift.”
“A – a – what?”
“A lift. You’re wasting your time. Pauline has no use for devotion. It’s a drug in the market with her – has been for five seasons. There’s only one way to get her worked up. Two fellows tried it, and they nearly got there; but they weren’t game enough to stay to the bitter end. I think you’re game, and I’ll tell you. You’ve got to make her jealous.”
“Make her jealous of me?”
“No!” said his friend, with infinite scorn; “make her jealous of the other girl. Oh! but you men are stupid!”
The young man pondered a moment.
“Well, Flossy,” he began, and then he became conscious of a sudden change in the atmosphere, and perceived that the young lady was regarding him with a look that might have chilled his soul.
“Miss Flossy – Miss Belton – ” he hastily corrected himself. Winter promptly changed to Summer in Miss Flossy Belton’s expressive face.
“Your scheme,” he went on, “is a good one. Only – it involves the discovery of another girl.”
“Yes,” assented Miss Flossy, cheerfully.
“Well,” said the young man, “doesn’t it strike you that if I were to develop a sudden admiration for any one of these other young ladies whose charms I have hitherto neglected, it would come tardy off – lack artistic verisimilitude, so to speak?”
“Rather,” was Miss Flossy’s prompt and frank response; “especially as there isn’t one of them fit to flirt with.”
“Well, then, where am I to discover the girl?”
Miss Flossy untied and retied her shoe. Then she said, calmly:
“What’s the matter with – ” a hardly perceptible hesitation – “me?”
“With you?” Mr. Morpeth was startled out of his manners.
“Yes!”
Mr. Morpeth simply stared.
“Perhaps,” suggested Miss Flossy, “I’m not good-looking enough?”
“You are good-looking enough,” replied Mr. Morpeth, recovering himself, “for anything– ” and he threw a convincing emphasis into the last word as he took what was probably his first real inspection of his adored one’s junior – “but – aren’t you a trifle – young?”
“How old do you suppose I am?”
“I know. Your sister told me. You are sixteen.”
“Sixteen!” repeated Miss Flossy, with an infinite and uncontrollable scorn, “yes, and I’m the kind of sixteen that stays sixteen till your elder sister’s married. I was eighteen years old on the third of last December – unless they began to double on me before I was old enough to know the difference – it would be just like Mama to play it on me in some such way,” she concluded, reflectively.
“Eighteen years old!” said the young man. “The deuce!” Do not think that he was an ill-bred young man. He was merely astonished, and he had much more astonishment ahead of him. He mused for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “what’s your plan of campaign? I am to – to discover you.”
“Yes,” said Miss Flossy, calmly, “and to flirt with me like fun.”
“And may I ask what attitude you are to take when you are – discovered?”
“Certainly,” replied the imperturbable Flossy. “I am going to dangle you.”
“To – to dangle me?”
“As a conquest, don’t you know. Let you hang round and laugh at you.”
“Oh, indeed?”
“There, don’t be wounded in your masculine pride. You might as well face the situation. You don’t think that Pauline’s in love with you, do you?”
“No!” groaned the young man.
“But you’ve got lots of money. Mr. Brown has got lots more. You’re eager. Brown is coy. That’s the reason that Brown is in the boat and you are on the cold, cold shore, talking to Little Sister. Now if Little Sister jumps at you, why, she’s simply taking Big Sister’s leavings; it’s all in the family, any way, and there’s no jealousy, and Pauline can devote her whole mind to Brown. There, don’t look so limp. You men are simply childish. Now, after you’ve asked me to marry you – “
“Oh, I’m to ask you to marry me?”
“Certainly. You needn’t look frightened, now. I won’t accept you. But then you are to go around like a wet cat, and mope, and hang on worse then ever. Then Big Sister will see that she can’t afford to take that sort of thing from Little Sister, and then – there’s your chance.”
“Oh, there’s my chance, is it?” said Mr. Morpeth. He seemed to have fallen into the habit of repetition.
“There’s your only chance,” said Miss Flossy, with decision.
Mr. Morpeth meditated. He looked at the lake, where there was no longer sign or sound of the canoe, and he looked at Miss Flossy, who sat calm, self-confident and careless, on the string-piece of the dock.
“I don’t know how feasible – ” he began.
“It’s feasible,” said Miss Flossy, with decision. “Of course Pauline will write to Mama, and of course Mama will write and scold me. But she’s got to stay in New York, and nurse Papa’s gout; and the Miss Redingtons are all the chaperons we’ve got up here, and they don’t amount to any thing – so I don’t care.”
“But why,” inquired the young man; and his tone suggested a complete abandonment to Miss Flossy’s idea: “why should you take so much trouble for me?”
“Mr. Morpeth,” said Miss Flossy, solemnly, “I’m two years behind the time-table, and I’ve got to make a strike for liberty, or die. And besides,” she added, “if you are nice, it needn’t be such an awful trouble.”
Mr. Morpeth laughed.
“I’ll try to make it as little of a bore as possible,” he said, extending his hand. The girl did not take it.
“Don’t make any mistake,” she cautioned him, searching his face with her eyes; “this isn’t to be any little-girl affair. Little Sister doesn’t want any kind, elegant, supercilious encouragement from Big Sister’s young man. It’s got to be a real flirtation – devotion no end, and ten times as much as ever Pauline could get out of you – and you’ve got to keep your end ’way – ’ – ’way up!”
The young man smiled.
“I’ll keep my end up,” he said; “but are you certain that you can keep yours up?”
“Well, I think so,” replied Miss Flossy. “Pauline will raise an awful row; but if she goes too far, I’ll tell my age, and hers, too.”
Mr. Morpeth looked in Miss Flossy’s calm face. Then he extended his hand once more.
“It’s a bargain, so far as I’m concerned,” he said.
This time a soft and small hand met his with a firm, friendly, honest pressure.
“And I’ll refuse you,” said Miss Flossy.
***
Within two weeks, Mr. Morpeth found himself entangled in a flirtation such as he had never dreamed of. Miss Flossy’s scheme had succeeded only too brilliantly. The whole hotel was talking about the outrageous behavior of “that little Belton girl” and Mr. Morpeth, who certainly ought to know better.
Mr. Morpeth had carried out his instructions. Before the week was out, he found himself giving the most life-like imitation of an infatuated lover that ever delighted the old gossips of a Summer-resort. And yet he had only done what Flossy told him to do.
He got his first lesson just about the time that Flossy, in the privacy of their apartments, informed her elder sister that if she, Flossy, found Mr. Morpeth’s society agreeable, it was nobody’s concern but her own, and that she was prepared to make some interesting additions to the census statistics if any one thought differently.
The lesson opened his eyes.
“Do you know,” she said, “that it wouldn’t be a bit of a bad idea to telegraph to New York for some real nice candy and humbly present it for my acceptance? I might take it – if the bonbonnière was pretty enough.”
He telegraphed to New York and received, in the course of four or five days, certain marvels of sweets in a miracle of an upholstered box. The next day he found her on the verandah, flinging the bonbons on the lawn for the children to scramble for.
“Awfully nice of you to send me these things,” she said languidly, but loud enough for the men around her to hear – she had men around her already: she had been discovered – “but I never eat sweets, you know. Here, you little mite in the blue sash, don’t you want this pretty box to put your doll’s clothes in?”
And Maillard’s finest bonbonnière went to a yellow-haired brat of three.
But this was the slightest and lightest of her caprices. She made him send for his dog-cart and his horses, all the way from New York, only that he might drive her over the ridiculous little mile-and-a-half of road that bounded the tiny peninsula. And she christened him “Muffets,” a nickname presumably suggested by “Morpeth”; and she called him “Muffets” in the hearing of all the hotel people.
And did such conduct pass unchallenged? No. Pauline scolded, raged, raved. She wrote to Mama. Mama wrote back and reproved Flossy. But Mama could not leave Papa. His gout was worse. The Miss Redingtons must act. The Miss Redingtons merely wept, and nothing more. Pauline scolded; the flirtation went on; and the people at the big hotel enjoyed it immensely.
And there was more to come. Four weeks had passed. Mr. Morpeth was hardly on speaking terms with the elder Miss Belton; and with the younger Miss Belton he was on terms which the hotel gossips characterized as “simply scandalous.” Brown glared at him when they met, and he glared at Brown. Brown was having a hard time. Miss Belton the elder was not pleasant of temper in those trying days.
“And now,” said Miss Flossy to Mr. Morpeth, “it’s time you proposed to me, Muffets.”
They were sitting on the hotel verandah, in the evening darkness. No one was near them, except an old lady in a Shaker chair.
“There’s Mrs. Melby. She’s pretending to be asleep, but she isn’t. She’s just waiting for us. Now walk me up and down and ask me to marry you so that she can hear it. It’ll be all over the hotel inside of half an hour. Pauline will just rage.”
With this pleasant prospect before him, Mr. Morpeth marched Miss Flossy Belton up and down the long verandah. He had passed Mrs. Melby three times before he was able to say, in a choking, husky, uncertain voice:
“Flossy – I – I – I love you!”
Flossy’s voice was not choking nor uncertain. It rang out clear and silvery in a peal of laughter.
“Why, of course you do, Muffets, and I wish you didn’t. That’s what makes you so stupid half the time.”
“But – ” said Mr. Morpeth, vaguely; “but I – “
“But you’re a silly boy,” returned Miss Flossy; and she added in a swift aside: “You haven’t asked me to marry you!”
“W-W-W-Will you be my wife?” stammered Mr. Morpeth.
“No!” said Miss Flossy, emphatically, “I will not. You are too utterly ridiculous. The idea of it! No, Muffets, you are charming in your present capacity; but you aren’t to be considered seriously.”
They strolled on into the gloom at the end of the great verandah.
“That’s the first time,” he said, with a feeling of having only the ghost of a breath left in his lungs, “that I ever asked a woman to marry me.”
“I should think so,” said Miss Flossy, “from the way you did it. And you were beautifully rejected, weren’t you. Now – look at Mrs. Melby, will you? She’s scudding off to spread the news.”
And before Mr. Morpeth went to bed, he was aware of the fact that every man and woman in the hotel knew that he had “proposed” to Flossy Belton, and had been “beautifully rejected.”
***
Two sulky men, one sulky woman, and one girl radiant with triumphant happiness started out in two canoes, reached certain fishing-grounds known only to the elect, and began to cast for trout. They had indifferent luck. Miss Belton and Mr. Brown caught a dozen trout; Miss Flossy Belton and Mr. Morpeth caught eighteen or nineteen, and the day was wearing to a close. Miss Flossy made the last cast of the day, just as her escort had taken the paddle. A big trout rose – just touched the fly – and disappeared.
“It’s this wretched rod!” cried Miss Flossy; and she rapped it on the gunwale of the canoe so sharply that the beautiful split-bamboo broke sharp off in the middle of the second-joint. Then she tumbled it overboard, reel and all.
“I was tired of that rod, any way, Muffets,” she said; “row me home, now; I’ve got to dress for dinner.”
Miss Flossy’s elder sister, in the other boat, saw and heard this exhibition of tyranny; and she was so much moved that she stamped her small foot, and endangered the bottom of the canoe. She resolved that Mama should come back, whether Papa had the gout or not.
Mr. Morpeth, wearing a grave expression, was paddling Miss Flossy toward the hotel. He had said nothing whatever, and it was a noticeable silence that Miss Flossy finally broke.
“You’ve done pretty much everything that I wanted you to do, Muffets,” she said; “but you haven’t saved my life yet, and I’m going to give you a chance.”
It is not difficult to overturn a canoe. One twist of Flossie’s supple body did it, and before he knew just what had happened, Morpeth was swimming toward the shore, holding up Flossy Belton with one arm, and fighting for life in the icy water of a Maine lake.
The people were running down, bearing blankets and brandy, as he touched bottom in his last desperate struggle to keep the two of them above water. One yard further, and there would have been no strength left in him.
He struggled up on shore with her, and when he got breath enough, he burst out:
“Why did you do it? It was wicked! It was cruel!”
“There!” she said, as she reclined composedly in his arms, “that will do, Muffets. I don’t want to be scolded.”
A delegation came along, bringing blankets and brandy, and took her from him.
***
At five o’clock of that afternoon, Mr. Morpeth presented himself at the door of the parlor attached to the apartments of the Belton sisters. Miss Belton, senior, was just coming out of the room. She received his inquiry after her sister’s health with a white face and a quivering lip.
“I should think, Mr. Morpeth,” she began, “that you had gone far enough in playing with the feelings of a m-m-mere child, and that – oh! I have no words to express my contempt for you!”
And in a most unladylike rage Miss Pauline Belton swept down the hotel corridor.
She had left the door open behind her. Morpeth heard a voice, weak, but cheery, addressing him from the far end of the parlor.
“You’ve got her!” it said. “She’s crazy mad. She’ll make up to you to-night – see if she don’t.”
Mr. Morpeth looked up and down the long corridor. It was empty. He pushed the door open, and entered. Flossy was lying on the sofa, pale, but bright-eyed.
“You can get her,” she whispered, as he knelt down beside her.
“Flossy,” he said, “don’t you know that that is all ended? Don’t you know that I love you and you only? Don’t you know that I haven’t thought about any one else since – since – oh, Flossy, don’t you – is it possible that you don’t understand?”
Flossy stretched out two weak arms, and put them around Mr. Morpeth’s neck.
“Why have I had you in training all Summer?” said she. “Did you think it was for Pauline?”
Through a thickly falling snow, on the outskirts of one of New York’s suburban towns, (a hamlet of some two hundred thousand population,) walked a man who had but one desire in the world ungratified. His name was Richard Brant, and he was a large, deep-chested, handsome man – a man’s man; hardly a woman’s man at all: and yet the sort of man that is likely to make a pretty serious matter of it if he loves a woman, or if a woman loves him.
Mr. Richard Brant came from the West, the Western-born child of Eastern-born parents. He made his fortune before he was thirty-five, and for five years he had been trying to find out what he wanted to do with that fortune. He was a man of few tastes, of no vices, and of a straight-forward, go-ahead spirit that set him apart from the people who make affectation the spice of life. He wanted only one thing in the world, and that one thing money would not buy for him. So he was often puzzled as to how he might best spend his money; and he often spent it foolishly. As he walked through the suburban streets of the suburban city, this sharp Winter’s night, he was reflecting on the folly of spending money on a fur coat. He was wearing the coat – a magnificent affair of bearskin and sable.
“South of Canada,” he said to himself, “this sort of thing is vulgar and unnecessary. I don’t need it, any more than a cow needs a side-pocket. It’s too beastly hot for comfort at this moment. I’d carry it over my arm, only that I should feel how absurdly heavy it really is.”
Then he looked ahead through the thick snow, and, although he was a man of strong nerves, he started and stepped back like a woman who sees a cow.
“Great Cæsar’s Ghost!” said he.
He was justified in calling thus upon the most respectable spook of antiquity. The sight he saw was strange enough in itself: seen in the squalid, commonplace sub-suburban street, it was bewildering. There, ahead of him, walked Mephistopheles – Mephistopheles dressed in a red flannel suit, trimmed with yellow, all peaks and points; and on the head of Mephistopheles was an old, much worn, brown Derby hat.
Brant caught Mephisto by the shoulder and turned him around. He was a slight, undersized man of fifty, whose moustache and goatee, dyed an impossible black, served only to accentuate the meagre commonness of his small features.
“Who are you?” demanded Brant.
“Sh-h-h!” said the shivering figure, “lemme go! I’m Zozo!”
Brant stared at him in amazement. What was it? A walking advertisement – for an automatic toy or a new tooth-powder?
“It’s all right,” said the slim man, his teeth chattering, “lemme get along. I’m most freezing. I’m Zozo – the astrologer. Why – don’t you know? – on Rapelyea Street?”
Brant dimly remembered that there was a Rapelyea Street, through which he sometimes passed on his way to the railroad station, and he had some faint memory of a gaudily painted shanty decked out with the signs of the zodiac in gilt papier maché.
“My orfice got a-fire this evening,” explained Zozo, “from the bakery next door. And I had to light out over the back fence. Them people in that neighborhood is kinder superstitious. They ain’t no idea of astrology. They don’t know it’s a Science. They think it’s some kind of magic. And if they’s to see me drove out by a common, ordinary fire, they’d think I was no sort of an astrologer. So I lit out quiet.”
His teeth chattered so that he made ten syllables out of “quiet.”
“They don’t understand the Science of it,” he continued, “and the fire got at my street clo’es before I knew it, and so I had to light out mighty quick. Now, jes’ lemme get home, will you? This here flannel ain’t no fur coat.”
Brant’s coat came off his shoulders in an instant.
“Put this on,” he said. “Confound you! – ” as the man resisted, – “put it on!”
The astrologer slipped into the coat with a gasp of relief.
“Cracky!” he cried, “but I was freezin’!”
“Do you live far from here?” Brant inquired.
“Just a bit up the road. I’m ’most home, now,” replied Zozo, still chattering as to his teeth.
As they walked along the half-built street, Zozo told his tale. He had been in the astrology business for thirty years, and it had barely yielded him a living. Yet he had been able, by rigorous economy, to save up enough money to build himself a house – “elegant house, sir,” he said; “‘tain’t what you may call large; but it’s an elegant house. I got the design out of a book that cost a dollar, sir, a dollar. There ain’t no use in trying to do things cheap when you’re going to build a house.”
But his joy in his house was counterbalanced by his grief for the loss of his “orfice.” He had taken the ground-rent of the city lot, and had erected the “orfice” at his own cost. Three hundred and twenty-seven dollars he had spent on that modest structure. No, he had not insured it. And now the bakery had caught fire, and his “orfice” was burned to the ground, and his best suit of street-clothes with it – his only suit, as he owned after a second’s hesitation.
In ten minutes’ walk they arrived at Zozo’s house. It was quite the sort of house that might have come out of a dollar book, with a great deal of scroll-work about it, and with a tiny tower, adorned with fantastically carved shingles. As they stood on the porch – nothing would content Zozo but that his new friend should come in and warm himself – Mr. Brant looked at the name on the door-plate.
“Zozo’s only my name in the Science,” the astrologer explained. “My real name – my born name – is Simmons. But I took Zozo for my business name. ‘Zs’ seem to kinder go with the astrology business, somehow – I don’t know why. There’s Zadkiel, and Zoroaster, and – oh, I don’t know – they’re ‘Zs’ or ‘Xs’, most of ’em; and it goes with the populace. I don’t no more like humoring their superstition than you would; but a man’s got to live; and the world ain’t up to the Science yet. Oh, that’s you, Mommer, is it?” he concluded, as the door was opened by a bright, buxom, rather pretty woman. “Mother ain’t to bed yet, is she? Say, Mommer, the orfice is burnt down!”
“Oh, Popper!” cried the poor woman; “you don’t reelly say!”
“True’s I live,” said the astrologer, “and my street-clo’es, too.”
“Oh, Popper!” his wife cried, “what’ll we do?”
“I don’t know, Mommer, I don’t know. We’ll have to think. Jes’ let this here gentleman in, though. I’d most ’a’ froze if he hadn’t lent me the loan of his overcoat. My sakes!” he broke out, as he looked at the garment in the light of the hall-lamp, “but that cost money. Mommer, this here’s Mr. – I ain’t caught your name, sir.”
“Brant,” said the owner of the name.
“Band. And a reel elegant gentleman he is, Mommer. I’d ‘a’ froze stiff in my science clo’es if’t hadn’t been for this coat. My sakes!” he exclaimed, reverently, “never see the like! That’d keep a corpse warm. Shut the door, Mommer, an’ take the gentleman into the dining-room. He must be right cold himself. Is Mother there?”
“Yes,” said Zozo’s wife, “and so’s Mamie. You was so late we all got a kinder worried, and Mamie come right down in her nighty, just before you come in. ‘Where’s Popper?’ sez she; ‘ain’t he came in yet to kiss me good night? ’Tain’t mornin’, is it?’ sez she. And the orfice burned down! Oh, my, Popper! I thought our troubles was at an end. Come right in, Mr. – Mr. – I ain’t rightly got your name; but thank you kindly for looking after Popper, and if you had an idee how easy he takes cold on his chist, you’d know how thankful I am. Come right into the dinin’-room. Mother, this is Mr. Band, and he lent Simmons the loan of his coat to come home with. Wa’n’t it awful?”
“What’s that?” croaked a very old woman in the corner of the dining-room. It was a small dining-room, with a small extension-table covered with a cheap red damask cloth.
“Simmons’s orfice is burned up, and his best suit with it,” explained Mrs. Simmons. “Ain’t it awful!”
“It’s a jedgement,” said the old lady, solemnly. She was a depressing old lady. And yet she evidently was much revered in the family. A four-year-old child hung back in a corner, regarding her grandmother with awe. But when her father entered, she slipped up to his knee, and took his kisses silently, but with sparkling eyes.
“Only one we’ve got,” said Zozo, as he sat down and took her on his knee. “Born under Mercury and Jupiter – if that don’t mean that she’ll be on top of the real-estate boom in this neighborhood, I ain’t no astrologer. Yes, Ma,” he went on, addressing the old woman, who gave no slightest sign of interest, “the orfice burned down, and I had to get home quick. Wouldn’t ’a’ done for them Rapelyea Street folks to see me, scuttin’ off in my orfice clo’es.”
He had shed Brant’s huge overcoat, and his wife was passing her hand over his thin flannel suit.
“Law, Simmons!” she said, “you’re all wet!”
“I’ll dry all right in these flannels,” said Zozo. “Don’t you bother to get no other clo’es.”
He had forgotten that he had told Brant that the suit in his office was his only suit. Or perhaps he wished to spare his wife the humiliation of such an admission.
“I’m dryin’ off first-rate,” he said, cheerfully; “Mamie, Popper ain’t wet where you’re settin’, is he? No. Well, now, Mommer, you get out the whiskey and give Mr. – Mr. Band – a glass, with some hot water, and then he won’t get no chill. We’re all pro’bitionists here,” he said, addressing Brant, “but we b’lieve in spirits for medicinal use. Yes, Mother, you’d oughter’ve seen that place burn. Why, the flames was on me before I know’d where I was, and I jist thought to myself, thinks I, if these here people see me a-runnin’ away from a fire, I won’t cast no horoscope in Rapelyea Street after this; and I tell you, the way I got outer the back window and over the back fence was a caution! There’s your whiskey, sir: you’ll excuse me if I don’t take none myself. We ain’t in the habit here.”
Brant did not greatly wonder at their not being in the habit when he tasted the whiskey. It was bad enough to wean a toper on. But he sipped it, and made overtures to the baby. And after a while she showed an inclination to come and look at his wonderful watch, that struck the hour when you told it to. Before long she was sitting on his knee. Her father was telling the female members of the family about the fire, and she felt both sleepy and shut out. She played with Brant’s watch for a while, and then fell asleep on his breast. He held her tenderly, and listened to the astrologer as he told his pitiful tale over and over again, trying to fix the first second when he had smelled smoke.
He was full of the excitement of the affair: too full of the consciousness of his own achievement to realize the extent of the disaster. But his wife suddenly broke down, crying out:
“Oh, Simmons! where’ll you get three hundred dollars to build a new orfice?”
Brant spoke up, but very softly, lest he might wake the baby, who was sleeping with her head on his shoulder.
“I’ll be happy to – to advance the money,” he said.
Zozo looked at him almost sourly.
“I ain’t got no security to give you. This is a Building Society house, and there’s all the mortgage on it that it’s worth. I couldn’t do no better,” he concluded, sullenly.
Brant had been poor enough himself to understand the quick suspicion of the poor. “Your note will do, Mr. Simmons,” he said; “I think you will pay me back. I sha’n’t worry about it.”
But it was some time before the Simmons family could understand that a loan of the magnitude of three hundred dollars could be made so easily. When the glorious possibility did dawn upon them, nothing would do but that Mr. Brant should take another drink of whiskey. It was not for medicinal purposes this time; it was for pure conviviality; and Brant was expected, not being a prohibitionist, to revel vicariously for the whole family. He drank, wondering what he had at home to take the taste out of his mouth.
Then he handed the baby to her mother, and started to go. But Simmons suddenly and unexpectedly turned into Zozo, and insisted on casting his benefactor’s horoscope. His benefactor told him the day of his birth, and guessed at the hour. Zozo figured on a slate, drawing astronomical characters very neatly indeed, and at last began to read off the meaning of his stellar stenography, in a hushed, important voice.