VIII
February 27. I sat for hours in my room, that night, trying to find some solution of the mystery and groping for a future course of action. I thought of a visit to my mother, on the chance that she would give me the key to the puzzle, but could not bring myself to it. Rejecting that idea, I decided to seek out Mr. Blodgett, who, being your friend, might know the reason for what you had done.
Finding on inquiry, the next morning, that Mr. Blodgett was a member of one of the chief banking firms of New York, I went to his office. The ante-room was well filled with people anxious to see the great banker, and the door-boy refused me access to him without giving my name and business. Knowing that "Donald Maitland" would mean nothing to Mr. Blodgett, and might even fail to secure me an audience, I wrote on a slip of paper, "A seeker of knowledge from the Altai Mountains." Nor was I wrong, for the boy, on his return, gave me immediate entrance, and another moment brought me face to face with my once-disliked countryman.
His hand was extended to greet me, but as he looked at my face his arm dropped in surprise. "Your name, please?" he demanded, with a business-like clip to his voice, at the same time picking up and glancing quickly at three or four cards and slips of paper that were on the corner of his desk.
"I am the attorney for ancient peoples," I announced, smiling, "come to thank the New World for its kindness to a broken-legged man."
Instantly Mr. Blodgett smiled too, and again extended his hand. "Glad to see you," he said. "Sit down." Then looking at me keenly, he added, "You've done a lot of bleaching or scrubbing since we met."
"In the interval my face has been hidden from the sun-god of my fathers."
"Ah!" Then his Americanism cropped out by a question: "Are you European or Asiatic? – for you are too dark to be the one, and too white to be the other."
"My parents were American, and I was born in New York."
"The deuce you were! Then why were you masquerading in Arab dress and with a brown face in Tangier, and why did you say you came from some mountains in Asia?"
"I was for the time an Arab, and I was last from the Altai Mountains," I explained, and smilingly added, "Is my explanation satisfactory?"
"Well, I suppose you spoke by the book," he replied. "Wherever you were born, I'm glad to see – Hold on!" he cried, interrupting his own speech. "Why did you call yourself Dr. Rudolph Hartzmann, of Leipzig, if you were an American?"
"I did not," I denied, startled by his question, for my identity with the pseudonym was known only to my professors and publishers.
"You weren't living in Tangier under the name of Hartzmann?" he inquired.
"No."
"Then how came it that when my servant was sent to leave some fruit and flowers for you and inquire your name, he was told that you were Dr. Rudolph Hartzmann, of Leipzig?"
"Are you serious?" I questioned, as much puzzled as he for the moment.
"Never more so. I remember our astonishment to think that any European should have so dark a skin and live in the native quarter."
"Mr. Blodgett," I explained, "I did not know till this moment that a pen name I have used to sign my writings had been given you, but it was a joke of my father's to register me under it, and my only theory is that he had given some one in the hotel that name, and, by mischance, your servant was misinformed."
He was too good a business man to look as skeptical as he probably felt, and merely asked, "What is your real name, then?"
"Donald Maitland, son of William Maitland."
His eyes gave a startled wink and he screwed his lips into position for a whistle, but checking the inclination, he merely turned his revolving-chair so that he looked out of a window. He sat thus for a moment, and then, facing me, he questioned, with a sudden curtness of voice and manner, "What is your business with me?"
"I have taken the liberty of calling on the supposition that you are a friend of Miss Walton."
"I am."
"Miss Walton was once my father's ward, yet last night she refused to see me. Can you tell me why?"
"The reason is rather obvious," he asserted crisply.
"Will you tell me what it is?"
He looked at me from under his gray eyebrows. "Is that all you want of me?" he demanded.
"Yes."
"Well, then, Miss Walton refused to see you because she despises you."
I felt my cheeks burn, but I gripped the arm of my chair and waited till I could speak coolly; then I asked, "For what?"
"You are ignorant of the fact that your father embezzled a part of Miss Walton's fortune, and that you and he have since lived upon it?" he exclaimed, with no veiling of his contempt.
I sat calmly, for the idea was too new, and I had too many connecting links to recall, to have the full horror of the disgrace come home to me at once. He did not give me time for thought, but interrogated, "Well?"
Having to speak, I asked, "You are sure of what you say?"
"Sure!" he ejaculated. "Why, it's been known to every one for years, and I was one of the trustees appointed by the court to look out for Miss Walton's interest in what property your father couldn't take with him!"
"If you are a trustee of Miss Walton," I said, growing cool in my agony of shame, "can you spare me five minutes and answer some questions?"
That I did not deny knowledge of the wrong seemed to raise me in his opinion, for he nodded his head and looked less stern.
"How much did my father – How much did Miss Walton lose?" I inquired.
"One hundred and thirty thousand was all the property he could negotiate, and we succeeded, by bidding in his house over the mortgage and by taking the library at a valuation, in recovering twenty-six thousand."
"Was that amount net?"
"Yes."
"Then in 1879 the amount due Miss Walton was one hundred and four thousand dollars?"
"Yes."
"Thank you, Mr. Blodgett," I added, rising. "I am only sorry, after your former kindness, to have given you this further trouble. I am grateful for both." In my shame I did not dare to offer him my hand, but he held out his.
"Mr. Maitland," he rejoined, "I'm a pretty good judge of men, and I don't believe you have done wrong knowingly."
"I never dreamed it," I almost sobbed, shaking his hand.
"It's pretty rough," he said. "I hope you won't show the white feather by doing anything desperate?"
I shook my head, and walked to the door. As I reached it a new thought occurred to me, and, turning, I asked, "What has the legal rate of interest been since 1879?"
For reply he touched an electric button on his desk, and I heard the lock click in the door by which I stood. He pulled a chair near his own, and commanded, "Come here and sit down," in such a peremptory tone that I obeyed. "Why did you ask that question?" he catechised.
"That I may find out how much I owe Miss Walton."
"What for?"
"To attempt restitution."
"I hope you know what you're talking about?"
"I'm still rather confused, but so much I can see clearly enough."
"How much property have you?"
"My father left me something over thirty-one thousand dollars."
"Thirty-one from one hundred and four leaves seventy-three."
"And interest," I corrected.
"I thought that was what you were driving at," he surmised calmly. He pulled out a volume from its repository in his desk, and turned backwards and forwards in the book for a few moments, taking off figures on a sheet of paper. "Eight years at five per cent makes the whole over one hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars less thirty-one."
"Thank you."
"Where can you get the balance?"
"I must earn it."
He looked at me with a slightly quizzical expression and asked, "How?"
"That I have yet to think out."
"Any business?"
"I have the offer of a professorship at Leipzig, but that's out of the question now."
"Why?"
"It would give me only two thousand a year at first, and the interest on the debt will be over six thousand annually."
"What do you know?" he questioned.
"Most of the languages and dialects of Europe and Asia, and a good deal of history and ethnology. I am fairly read in arts, sciences, and religions, and I know something of writing," I answered, smiling at the absurdity of mentioning such knowledge in the face of such a condition.
"Humph! And you'd have sold all that for two thousand a year?"
"I think so."
"Well, that only proves that a man had better cultivate his gumption, and not his brains!"
"If he wishes to make money," I could not help retorting gently.
"You're just like Maizie!" he sniffed, and his going back to your familiar name in my presence was the best compliment he could have paid me. "You two ought to have died young and gone to heaven, where there's nothing to do but cultivate the soul."
"I wish we had!"
"Why don't you go to your mother?"
"For what?"
"For the money."
"Has she money?"
"Yes. She had a little money when she married your father, which she kept tight hold of; her mother's death, two years ago, gave her more, and she has just married a rich man."
"I don't know yet what I shall do," I replied, rising.
"Well," he advised kindly, "before you blow your brains out or do anything else that's a waste of good material, come and see me again."
"Thank you," I responded. "And, Mr. Blodgett, as a favor, I ask that all I have told you, and even my presence in New York, shall be confidential between us."
"Nonsense!" he growled. "I shall tell Maizie all about it."
"Miss Walton least of any," I begged.
"Why don't you insist, too, that Mrs. Blodgett, who intends that I shall inform her nightly of everything I know, sha'n't be told?" he queried.
"It grieves me to be a marplot of connubial confidences," I rejoined, responding to his smile, "but this must be between us."
"Have your own way," he acceded, and then laughed. "I'll have a good time over it, for I'll let Mrs. Blodgett see there is a secret, and she'll go crazy trying to worm it out of me."
He shook my hand again, and I felt ashamed to think that his voice and manner had once made me hold him in contempt.
I went back to the hotel, and thought over the past, seeing how blind I had been. Now for the first time everything became clear. I understood the trip to Europe and our remaining there, why my mother had left us, why Mr. Walton had been permitted to take you from us without protest, why we had not mingled with Americans, and my father's motives in making me write under a pen name, in registering me at hotels by it, and in giving that name to your servant. Now it was obvious why he never signed his articles, and why he appealed to me to let him aid me to make a reputation: it was his endeavor to atone to me for the wrong he had done.
Good-night, my love.
IX
February 28. Many times in the last three years I have begun a letter to you, for the thought that you, like the rest of the world, may rank my father with other embezzlers stings me almost to desperation. Each time it has been to tear the attempted justification – or I should say, extenuation – into fragments, long before it was completed. In all my trials I have come to realize that nothing I can say can stand him in stead; for whatever I urge is open to suspicion, not merely because it is my interest to condone his act, but still more because it inevitably becomes an indirect justification of myself, and therefore, in a sense, a plea for pardon.
At moments, too, when with you, I have had to exercise the greatest self-control not to tell you what I feel. If I were only some one else than Donald Maitland, so that I might say to you: —
"You should know that your guardian was incapable of the lowness the world imputes to him! I am not trying to belittle the sin, but to distinguish the motive. His wrong was no mean attempt to enrich himself at the expense of one he loved, for his nature was wholly unmercenary, and his transgression originated, not through greed, but through lack of it. Like all men of true intellect, he was heedless in money matters, and I am conscious that there was in him, as there is in me, the certain weakness which is almost inevitable with mind cultivation, – an engulfing, as it were, of the big principles of right and wrong in the complexities and the refinements of cultivated thought. His birthright was scholarship, but in place of the life he was fitted for he was forced into Wall Street, and toiled there without sympathy or aptitude for his work. Do you not remember how, aside from our companionship, his books were his one great pleasure? The wealth of mind he gave to us tells the story of how he must have neglected his office in favor of his library. Yet though this preference might have made him a poor man, I cannot think his studies would ever have led him into dishonesty. I have never had the heart to trace the history of his act, but Mr. Blodgett tells me that shortly after his marriage he first began to speculate, and knowing as I do my mother's extravagance and my father's love for her, I can understand the motive. The inevitable result came presently, and, as a temporary expedient, a small part of your property was used. Then a desperate attempt was made to recover this by the risking of a larger portion, and after that there was nothing left but confession or flight. I wish he had spoken, but the weakness that produced the first wrong accounts for the second, and I believe his chief thought was of me, and how I might be saved from the consequences of his guilt. Unless you have put him wholly out of your heart, you must appreciate that it was no sordid scheme to cheat you, but a surrender to the love strong enough to overcome his honesty. You must know that he loved you too well to wrong you willingly, and I think with pain of what I am sure he must have suffered in his shame at having robbed you. Do you not remember the sadness in his face in those later years, and his tenderness to both of us? Can you not see that his kindness, his patience, and his care of us were his endeavored atonement?"
Oh, Maizie, I ask nothing for myself, but if you could be brought to think of him, to love him, as you once did, my greatest grief would be ended.
Bitter as my misery was after Mr. Blodgett's revelation, there was still some sweetness to make it bearable. For years I had thought of you as heartless and forgetful, and even in my love had hated and despised you at moments, as only love can hate and despise. The world thinks that animosity is always strongest against enemies, though daily it sees the intensest feuds between those nations and individuals who are most closely related, and never learns that the deepest hatred comes from love. Now I knew that you had cause for slighting my letters and gift, and the knowledge of my injustice and the thought that you were more lovable than ever were the silver lining to my cloud of shame.
My first meeting with you was a pure chance, yet it shaped my life. For three weeks after my call on Mr. Blodgett I pondered and vacillated over what I should do, without reaching any decision. At the end of that time I went to his office again.
"Mr. Blodgett has asked two or three times if you hadn't called," the boy informed me; adding, as he opened the door to the private office, "He told me, if you ever came again, sir, to show you right in."
I passed through the doorway, and then faltered, for you were sitting beside the banker, overlooking a paper that he was commenting upon. Could I have escaped unnoticed, I should have done so; but you both glanced up as I entered.
The moment you saw me you rose, with an exclamation of recognition and surprise, which meant to me that you knew your old friend in spite of the changes. Do you wonder that, not foreseeing what was to come, I stood there as if turned to stone? My manner evidently made you question your own eyes, for you asked, "Is not this Dr. Hartzmann?"
"Of course it is!" cried Mr. Blodgett, with a quickness and heartiness which proved that your question was almost as great a relief to him as it was to me.
"I did not think, Miss Walton," I replied, steadying my voice as best I could, "that you saw my face clearly enough that evening, to recollect it?"
"The moonlight was so strong," you explained, "that I should have known you anywhere."
"Then your eyes are better than mine," asserted Mr. Blodgett. "I accused the doctor of using blondine, to atone for my not recognizing him, though I must confess he will have to use a good deal more if he wants to be thought anything but Italian."
"Then you have met before?" you questioned.
"Yes," replied Mr. Blodgett. "I was going to tell you when we got through with that mortgage. I knew you would be interested to hear that the doctor was in New York. Seems like Tangier, doesn't it?"
"In reminiscence," I assented, merely to gain time.
"None of your rickety ruins," chuckled Mr. Blodgett.
"But more ruin," you said.
"And more danger," I added, pointing out of the window at the passers-by in Wall Street. "Nowhere in my travels, even among races that have to go armed, have I ever seen so many anxious and careworn faces."
"Most of them look worried," suggested Mr. Blodgett, "only because they are afraid they'll take more than three minutes to eat their lunch."
For a moment you spoke with Mr. Blodgett on business, and then offered me your hand in farewell, saying, "I am very glad, Dr. Hartzmann, for this chance reunion. Mr. Blodgett and I have often spoken of the mysterious Oriental who fell in – and out – of our knowledge so strangely."
"I have wished to meet you, Miss Walton," I responded warmly, "to thank you for your kindness and help to me when" —
"That was nothing, Dr. Hartzmann," you interrupted, in evident deprecation of my thanks. "Indeed, I have always felt that we were in a measure responsible for your accident, and that we made but a poor return by the little we did. Good-morning."
Mr. Blodgett took you to your carriage, and when he returned he gave a whistle. "Well!" he exclaimed. "I haven't gone through such a ten-second scare since I proposed to my superior moiety."
"I ought" – I began.
But he went on: "There's nothing frightens me so much as a wrought-up woman. Dynamite or volcanoes aren't a circumstance to her, because they have limits; but woman!"
I laughed and said, "The Hindoos have a paradox to the effect that women fear mice, mice fear men, and men fear women."
"She got so much better and longer look at you in Tangier than I did that I don't wonder she recognized Dr. Hartzmann when I didn't. But why did she stop there in her recollections?"
"It appeared incomprehensible to me for a moment, yet, as a fact, her knowing me as Donald Maitland would have been the greater marvel of the two. When she knew me, I was an undersized, pallid, stooping lad of seventeen. In the ten years since, my hair and skin have both darkened greatly, I have grown a mustache, and my voice has undergone the change that comes with manhood, as well as that which comes by speaking foreign tongues. Your very question as to whether I was of Eastern birth tells the whole story, for such a doubt would seem absurd to one who remembered the boy of ten years ago. Then, too, Miss Walton, having recognized me as Dr. Hartzmann, was, as it were, disarmed of all suspicion by having no question-mark in her mind as to my exact identity."
Mr. Blodgett nodded his head in assent. "And you don't know it all," he informed me. "I'm going to be frank, doctor, and acknowledge that I've expressed a pretty low opinion of you to her more than once. If Maizie were asked what man in this world she'd be least likely to meet in my office on a friendly footing, she would probably think of you. Your presence here was equivalent to saying that you weren't Donald Maitland, let alone the fact that I greeted you as Dr. Hartzmann, and that she could never dream of my having a reason to deceive her in your identity."
"Such a chain of circumstances almost makes one believe in kismet," I sighed. Then I laughed, and added, "How easy it is to show that one need not be scared – after the danger is all over!"
"That isn't the only scare I owe to you," muttered Mr. Blodgett. "I didn't take your address because I told you to come again. Why didn't you?"
"I am here."
"Yes. But for three weeks I've been worrying over what you were doing with yourself, and not knowing that you hadn't cut your throat."
"I am sorry to have troubled you. I stayed away to save troubling you."
"You're as considerate as the Fiji islander was of the missionary, when he asked him if he had rather be cooked à la maître d'hôtel or en papillote. What have you been doing?"
"Very little to any purpose. I have written to my publisher, offering to sell my rights in my text-books; to a friend, asking him to learn for what price he can sell my library; and to my bankers, directing them to send me the bonds and a draft for my balance. I received the securities and a bill of exchange yesterday, and am so ignorant of business methods that I came to you this morning to learn how to turn them into cash."
"I'll do better than that," volunteered Mr. Blodgett, touching a button. "Give them to me, and I'll have it done." Then, after he had turned the matter over to a clerk, he asked, "What does your publisher offer?"
"Thirty-five hundred."
"And what are your royalties?"
"Last year they were over six hundred dollars."
"Humph! That's equivalent to investing money at eighteen per cent. You ought to get more than that."
"A little more or less is nothing compared with paying so much on my debt."
"What will your library bring?"
"Perhaps four thousand, if I can find some one who wants so technical a collection."
"And you can get along without it?"
"I must," I declared, though wincing a little.
"Rather goes against the grain, eh?" he rejoined kindly.
I tried to laugh, and said, "My books have been such good comrades that I haven't quite accustomed myself yet to thinking of them as merchandise. I feel a little as the bankrupt planter must have felt when he saw his slave children offered for sale."
"And what do you plan to do with yourself?"
"I haven't been able to make up my mind."
We were interrupted at this point by some business matter, and I took my leave. The next morning Mr. Blodgett called at my boarding-place on his way down town.
"I haven't come to talk business," he announced. "I told my wife and daughter, last night, about the fellow from the backwoods of Asia, and made them so curious that Mrs. Blodgett has given me permission to furnish him board and lodgings for a week. I'll promise you a better room than this," he added, glancing at the box I had moved into as soon as I realized how much worse than a pauper I was.
I could hardly express my gratitude as I tried to thank him, but he pretended not to perceive my emotion, and said briskly: "That's settled, then. Send your stuff round any time to-day, and be on deck for a seven-o'clock dinner."
You, who know Mrs. Blodgett so much better than I, can understand my bewilderment during the first day or two of my visit. Her husband had jokingly pictured me as of an Eastern race, which made the meeting rather embarrassing; but the moment she comprehended that I did not habitually sit on the floor, did not carry a scimiter or kris, and was not unwashed and ferine, but only a dark skinned, dark haired, and very silent German scholar, she took possession of me as I have seen her do of others. She preceded me to my room, ringing for a servant on the way, made me open my trunk, and directed the maid where to put each article it contained. She told me what time to be ready for dinner, what to wear for it, and at that meal she had me helped twice to such dishes as she chose, while refusing to let me have more than one cup of coffee. To a man who had never had any one to look after him in small things it was a novel and rather pleasant if surprising experience, and when I grew accustomed to it I easily understood Mr. Blodgett's chuckles of enjoyment when she told him he shouldn't have a third cigar, when she decided how close he was to sit to the fire, and finally when she made all of us – Agnes, Mr. Blodgett, and myself – go to bed at her own hour for retiring. Best of all I understood Mr. Blodgett's familiar name for her, "the boss." That visit was a perfect revelation to me of affectionate, thoughtful, and persistently minute domineering. I do not believe that the man lives, though he be the veriest woman-hater, who could help loving her after a fortnight of her tyranny. Certainly I could not.
By Mr. Blodgett's aid I secured a "paper" cable transfer of the money realized from the bonds and draft, in order that it might seem to come from Europe, and sent it to you, writing at his suggestion, "The inclosed draft on Foster G. Blodgett & Co. for the sum of thirty-three thousand dollars is part payment of principal and interest due you from estate of William G. Maitland." I wonder what your thoughts were as you read the unsigned and typewritten note?
It was your greeting of me by my alias that led me to accept the incognito. Perhaps it was cowardly to shirk my shame by such a means, but it was not done from cowardice; the thought did not even occur to me until it opened a way to knowing you. And in that hope my very misery became almost happiness, for its possibilities seemed those of the Oriental poet who wrote: —
"My love once offered me a bitter draught
From which in cowardice I flinched.
But still she tendered to me;
And bowing to her wish, I then no longer shrank,
But took the cup and put it to my lips.
Oh, marvel! gazing still at her,
The potion turned to sweetness as I drank."
If your old friend, Donald Maitland, were dead to you, your new lover, Rudolph Hartzmann, might fill his place. I never stopped to think if such trickery were right, or rather my love was stronger than my conscience.
Good-night, my dearest.