Читать книгу After the Manner of Men - Lynde Francis - Страница 8

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ON the broad veranda of the administration building at Highmount, which looked down sidewise upon the twinkling light or two of Coalville and faced on even terms an opposing shoulder of the mountain where the newly erected drill derrick stood, Carfax was holding Miss Farron and four privileged members of the senior class at bay, while Tregarvon contentedly monopolized Miss Richardia Birrell.

The two thus comfortably isolated had quickly exhausted the commonplaces. Tregarvon was made to know thus early that one of Miss Richardia’s charms was her ability to plunge at once into the heart of things; and the talk had turned upon Carfax, distance and the hubbub of the others sanctioning personalities.

“Oh, you don’t know him yet,” Tregarvon protested, in refutation of a remark of Miss Birrell’s based upon Carfax’s apparent satisfaction with his present besetment. “He is anything but a butterfly, in the meaning you imply; and I say this in spite of his pretty face and airy gabble, and the lisp and his bad habit of slipping instinctively, as you might say, into the easiest chair in sight. I’ve summered him and wintered him, and I know.”

“I like loyalty,” said Miss Richardia, with the air of one to whom abstractions are as daily bread. “Are you going to winter him in Coalville?”

“No such good luck as that for me, I’m afraid. After the shooting begins, I don’t imagine he has a week untaken. You may not believe it, but Poictiers is in demand—where he is known and appreciated.”

“I am sure we shall appreciate him,” was the half-mocking rejoinder. “Young men who come to Highmount driving their own tonneau cars are not so plentiful.”

Tregarvon’s laugh was not more than decently boastful.

“This particular tonneau car happens to be mine,” he explained. “Besides, Carfax might discount your praise. His latest purchase is an imported Dumont-Sillery, I believe. It probably cost three times as much as mine; and on the other side of the water, at that.”

“How easily and familiarly you talk of imported luxuries and ‘the other side’,” she commented, still in the mocking vein. And then, with an exactly proportioned touch of wistfulness: “I wish I might have a glimpse into your world; the world you have turned your back upon—temporarily.”

Tregarvon slid into this little pitfall without realizing that it had been digged especially for him, thus proving that social hunger may be as blind as any of the other appetites. So far from suspecting pitfalls, he was thinking that there were many less enjoyable diversions than sitting in a moderately secluded corner of a dimly lighted veranda in the company of a young woman who was kind enough to evince an interest in a chance visitor’s proper sphere.

“It is not such a very high-planed world, the one I’ve left behind, Miss Richardia; not nearly as human as this of Coalville and Mount Pisgah,” he returned. “I believe I have seen more real human nature in the past three weeks than I had ever seen before.”

“You mean that the other world is artificial?”

“It is; without intending to be, especially. We are not elemental any more; not even in our passions. We do things in a certain well-defined way because that is the way other people do them. We are afraid, or at least disinclined, to strike out on new lines.”

“You have struck out on a new line, haven’t you?” she asked.

“I have been pushed out, in this Ocoee matter. There is enough of the elemental surviving in me to make me break with traditions and become a hustler when it is a question of bread and meat for my mother and sister. But apart from that, I suppose I am quite as hidebound as other men of my world.”

“And Mr. Carfax?” she queried. “Is he a slave to conventions, too?”

“Poictiers is a law unto himself in a good many ways; but on the whole, he’s tarred with the same stick. You will remark his regalia: I couldn’t have pulled him up here to-night with a three-inch hawser if he hadn’t happened to have evening clothes in his kit. And he has brought his man; a typical Cockney valet, knee-smalls, Oxford ties, and all.”

Miss Richardia’s quiet laugh fitted the incongruity. But when she spoke again it was of the business affair.

“You are at work on the Ocoee?” she inquired.

“Yes, indeed! I am going to make a spoon or spoil a perfectly good horn. You must all come over and see my test-drilling outfit when we get it going.”

“Is it your machine that we can see over beyond the glen? I wonder if you could make me understand what you are going to do?” she said, with interest real or so skilfully feigned that Tregarvon could not distinguish the difference.

He expressed himself as being very willing to try; did try at some considerable length. And Miss Birrell, notwithstanding an air of abstraction that seemed to come and go, appeared to grasp the mechanical details.

“You have no doubt that you will succeed? It will be fine to prove to everybody that all that was needed was for some one to come from the other world—your world—to show them how to do it.”

Tregarvon winced, seeing now the pitfall into which he had suffered himself to be led.

“Is that the impression I’ve been giving you?” he asked. “Do I advertise myself as such a blooming bounder as that would signify?”

“Forgive me,” she said, with a little laugh which might have meant anything from veiled ridicule to a keen appreciation of a palpable hit. “I suspect it is the way of your world to be austerely sufficient unto itself. You may contradict me if I am wrong.”

“Nonsense!” he exclaimed generously. “You are as much of my world as I am.”

“Oh, no!” she objected: “we are only poor outlanders. I was called that once, in Boston; not spitefully, of course, but rather as an excuse for my shortcomings, I fancy.”

“Whoever said it was a snob,” he exploded. “Boston is horribly provincial, at times, you know.”

“And Philadelphia never is?”

“I shouldn’t dare to make the claim too broad. But I am sure we recognize the fact that there is an America west of the Alleghenies—and south of Mason and Dixon’s line.”

“That is charitable, at least,” she conceded. “Still, you think it is left for you to demonstrate success where others have failed—in the Ocoee undertaking.”

“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” he answered, with due modesty. “Indeed, I know little or nothing about the early history of the mine. My father became interested in it some years before he died, and I think he always regarded it as a dead loss. But he bought the stock, or rather, I should say, had it forced upon him, when it was pretty cheap, and——”

“Yes,” she interrupted, a little forbiddingly, he thought; and then she began to speak of other things as if groping for a more congenial common ground. It was found when Tregarvon confessed to an amiable weakness for good music.

“I’ll play for you if you wish,” she said almost abruptly; and it was an hour later when Carfax entered the music-room to break the spell which Miss Richardia had woven about her single listener.

“You must do this again, but not too often,” was Tregarvon’s half-jesting warning to his entertainer at the moment of leave-taking; a moment snatched while Carfax was giving the privileged seniors a spin around the campus drive in the yellow car.

“Why not often?—or as often as you care to come?” the musician asked indifferently.

“Because I am much too impressionable. You could very easily make me forget some things that it is up to me to remember.”

“For example?” she prompted.

“It’s a long story, and Poictiers won’t give me time to tell it now. But some other evening, if I may come?”

“Why shouldn’t you come when you feel like it? I hope you won’t go away underestimating your welcome—you and Mr. Carfax. You owe it to us to come frequently, so that the novelty will wear off—for the student body. I’ll venture to assert that Miss Longstreet has been having the time of her life keeping order in the dormitories this evening. Good night; and give my love to Uncle William.”

“To Uncle William? Then you know him?”

She laughed and showed him that Carfax was waiting for him. “Uncle William will know who sent the message if you say ‘Miss Dick’,” she explained; and he was obliged to accept this as an answer to his eager question.

The road down the mountain was a speeding track only in spots, and between stretches the big car crept at a snail’s pace on the brakes, and so permitted conversation.

Carfax began it in genial raillery, congratulating Tregarvon upon the accessibility of Highmount and the very evident heartiness of his welcome.

“You can’t desiccate entirely down here, Vance, with such a well-spring of youth and beauty as that within shouting distance,” he remarked.

But Tregarvon was thinking pointedly of Miss Richardia when he rejoined: “She is a puzzle to me, Poictiers; nothing less.”

“The charming music teacher, you mean? Peaches-and-cream, I’d call her, if she’d let me.”

“You’re blind; blind as a mole!” retorted Tregarvon. “Why, man! she is anything but that—or those.”

“Doubtless,” Carfax laughed. “They are all ‘anything but that’ when you get down under the pose. But ‘peaches-and-cream’ is Miss Birrell’s pose, just the same; not the conventional kind they serve you at the Waldorf or Ritz-Carlton, of course, but the sort you get when the cream comes thick and rich from your own dairy, and the peaches are picked, sun-warm, in your own orchard. You may tell her that, if you like, and palm it off as original with you. Strikes me it’s rather neat.”

“Oh, you go hang!” said Tregarvon. “I don’t have to work in your compliments, second-hand. I can turn ’em myself, at a pinch.”

At this point a half-mile of good road beckoned for speed, and the talk was interrupted. When it was resumed at the next curving hazard in the pike, Carfax had somewhat to say about the Ocoee.

“What do you know about the ancient history of your mine, Vance?” he asked, when the topic was fairly launched.

“Nothing much, in detail. Why?”

“I was asking for information. President Caswell was speaking of it while you were in the music-room with Miss Birrell. He came out and sat with us for half an hour or so. There is a mystery of some sort connected with the Ocoee.”

“Sure!” said Tregarvon. “The mystery is six feet thick, and it consists of a layer of good solid sandstone. I’m about to penetrate it with a test-drill.”

“No; I didn’t mean that,” Carfax objected. “It is another kind of mystery. I’ll tell you what Doctor Caswell said, and you may draw your own conclusions. We had been talking about superstitions and their hold upon humanity. I was scoffing, as usual, but the president seemed inclined to a belief that Providence or fate, or whatever you wish to call it, does interfere sometimes; and that these interferences form a basis for some of the convictions we call superstitions.”

“All of which would seem to be a good many miles from a pair of coal seams made profitless by a stone ‘horse’ between them,” suggested Tregarvon mildly.

“I’m coming to that; the distance isn’t so great as it may seem. The doctor rode his notion as if it were a hobby. He spoke of the well-grounded belief in the saying that ‘murder will out,’ and insisted that the facts proved the truth of this saying; facts which were often mysterious. Then he referred to that other pet notion of the bulk of mankind: that misfortune pursues the possessor of ill-gotten gains. To my astonishment, he pointed to your Ocoee property as an example.”

“The dickens he did!” exclaimed Tregarvon, with interest suddenly awakened. “How did he make the Ocoee fit in?”

“That is the peculiar part of it. When I betrayed my complete ignorance of matters Ocoeean by beginning to ask questions, he shut up like a clam. All I could get out of him was an assertion that misfortunes had accompanied every succeeding attempt to open the mine, and that they would doubtless continue to follow until justice was done.”

“But justice to whom?” queried Tregarvon. “You didn’t let it rest at that, I hope.”

“I tried not to, but he gave me a dignified cold shoulder and referred me to you; said you doubtless knew all the circumstances, and would, he hoped, take proper steps toward removing the curse.”

The descent of Pisgah was accomplished, and Tregarvon steered the yellow car into an empty warehouse which was to be its garage.

Later, when he was showing his guest to the sleeping-room made ready for him by Uncle William, he said: “I don’t wish to pull you into this thing with me blindfolded, Poictiers. If there is a skeleton in the Ocoee closet, I’ll have it out and give it decent Christian burial before I ask you to back me.”

But at this, Carfax appeared at his multi-millionaire best.

“You’ll do nothing of the sort, old man. You will find me some old clothes to-morrow morning and we’ll go up and set your test-drill at work. Further along, when more money is needed, I’ll go somewhere to a bank and turn the fortunate spigot. We’ve got to make a go of your mine now, if only to show Doctor Caswell that the superstitions can’t prove up on this particular homestead.”