Читать книгу Son of a Hundred Kings - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 28

Lockie McGregor strode past William in the hall, saying in a brisk voice, “Catherine’s here, isn’t she?” He was a stout man, with a round head, a thick neck, and a solid body as soundly coopered as a keg of nails. There had never been a moment in Lockie McGregor’s life when he had not overflowed with energy and confidence. There had been few moments when he had not demanded the same qualities in those around him.

He said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to indicate a man standing behind him: “This is Alvin George. Smart young man. I’ve taken a fancy to him. He travels for a Toronto hat firm.”

William said: “Oh yes. Come in, Lockie. And you, Mr. George.” There was no light in the front hall, and so it was impossible to get any impression of the smart young man who traveled for a Toronto hat firm. “Catherine was here. She came in to see the boy. But she’s gone.”

“Gone? Where? Good grief, Billy, that girl is always coming or going. I never know where to find her.” The energy his daughter had inherited from him seemed reprehensible when it interfered in any way with his plans. He strode into the sitting room, saying, “Good evening, Tilly.” Then he stopped, his eyes on Uncle Alfred. “Oh, you’re here, are you? Spreading good cheer as usual, I suppose. Any more Catholic plots to take over the city and set up the Inquisition again? Any more secret drilling on Strawberry Hill?”

Having come from next door, neither man wore an overcoat. Alvin George followed the merchant into the sitting room. William saw now that the smart young man had a stolid and rather pasty look to him and that he was dressed in the height of fashion, with a fawn waistcoat and a watch fob dangling below it in the form of a galleon with spread sails.

“Tilly,” said William, hesitating, for introductions worried him, “this is Mr. George from T’ronto. My wife, Mr. George. And this is her uncle, Mr. Alfred Hull.”

The stranger said, “How-da-do,” in an indifferent voice and, seating himself in a corner, spread his feet wide apart, placing his hat on one knee. His eyes had yellowish pupils and looked like a pair of poached eggs. The merchant drew William off to one side and began to whisper in his ear: “He sells me a big bill of goods twice a year. Sharp as a trap and knows his business. I brought him up to meet Catherine. Why can’t that girl of mine be around when I want her?” He let his voice drop another notch. “What you think of him, Billy?”

“I guess he’s smart enough.”

“He’ll make something of himself, that young man. Did he stay at home because it’s New Year’s and there were parties to go to? No, sir, he came on from Toronto so he could get an early start on his work in the morning. Called me up from the Cameo House, and I took him with me to the mayor’s party this afternoon. I tell you, a young man who passes up all this New Year foolishness is going to make something of himself. He might be”—he hesitated, then continued in the lowest of whispers—“just the husband for Catherine! At any rate, I thought I would trot him out tonight and put him through his paces.” He gave his head a confidential nod. “I’ve big ideas for that girl of mine. Her mother thought I named her for an aunt in the family. I’ll tell you a secret, Billy. I didn’t. I named her after the Queen. You know, Catherine the Great. She was my daughter, and the name of a queen was none too good for her.” He fell into a brief moment of reflection. “Sometimes I wonder about her. She’s bright and she’s good and she’s a pretty little chick. But occasionally I think she’s a little giddy. What do you think, Billy?”

“I’ve never seen anything in Cathy that I couldn’t approve and admire.”

The merchant was pleased. “I guess you’re right. She’s like her mother in some ways. But,” hastily, “not in too many. You never knew Mrs. McGregor. A fine woman. She had to be or I wouldn’t have picked her out. But she had her faults. She was stubborn, Billy, stubborn as a mule. She was against the sign, dead set against it. I had the figure made and gilded and all ready to go up in front of the store, but she said no, she would leave me if it was used. That expensive sign lay in the attic for seven years, getting dusty, and all because of her stubbornness. Then she did leave me. She died. The funeral was at two in the afternoon. At four the sign was up. And I want to tell you it caused a lot of talk at first.” He nodded his head with deep satisfaction. “And ever since, for that matter.”

Realizing that this private conversation had been carried on long enough, the merchant raised his voice to address the hat salesman. “This is the boy I was telling you about, George. What do you think of the little codger?”

The salesman studied Ludar before replying. “He’d be a hard one to fit,” he said finally. “Quite a long head he has. He’ll have to be fitted out with English caps. You’d never be able to suit him with one of these billycocks, or even one of these straw boaters.”

Ludar had been feeling reassured with all the coming and going of people and the friendliness of the pretty lady from next door, but now his spirits took another downward plunge. Was it a bad sign to have a long head? Did it indicate that he was dangerous and likely to cut throats or burn down houses with matches? He watched the salesman with apprehensive eyes, fearing more revelations of his own unworthiness.

The merchant went on talking in loud and confident tones. “It was quite a shindig the mayor gave this afternoon. He greeted each one of us with the usual ‘It sure beats hell how heaven keeps going!’ Finance Chairman Huffer threw nickels out of the window at some boys sliding on the sidewalk, so you can judge how well lit up he was. Yes, it was quite a party. What did you think of His Honor, George?”

“He’s a Turp,” answered the hat salesman promptly. “In the trade we divide people up into three classes: Sharps, Flats, and Turps. This boy here is a Sharp. You’re a Flat, Mr. McGregor. The mayor’s a Turp. Short for Turnip, you know.” He shook his head as though he had revealed a municipal scandal. “With the size head he’s got, we couldn’t fit him with a single hat from our whole line. I’ll bet fifteen cents right here and now that he has all his hats made to order.”

What further efforts the energetic merchant might have made to draw his companion out were rendered impossible by a sudden outburst of sound down the street. There was a loud tooting on a horn, the jingling of sleigh bells, and a continuous volume of cheering and singing.

“Now what foolishness can this be?” asked Lockie McGregor, getting up and starting for the front door.

“Wickedness and vanity!” exclaimed Uncle Alfred. Nevertheless, he deposited his Bible on the seat of his chair and walked out with the rest.

Every front door on Wilson Street, it seemed, had opened to watch the passing of two large carryalls packed with young people, all of whom were wrapped up in blanket coats of red and white and were wearing toboggan caps. One of the men had elevated himself to the front seat of the first of the two lumbering vehicles and was attempting to play “Little Brown Jug” on a horn, but without much success. The rest were waving to the people in the doors and shouting, “Happy New Year! Happy New Year!” Never before in its history had staid old Wilson Street been treated to so much unrestrained noise and merrymaking.

“A generation of vipers!” said Uncle Alfred bitterly.

As the second carryall passed, a man dropped off the end and walked over to the group in the open door of Number 138. It was clear that he had not belonged to the merrymakers, because he was wearing a bowler (which no one ever called anything but a “christy stiff”) and thin gloves.

“You’re William Christian, aren’t you?” he asked, nodding to the carpenter. “I’m Allen Willing of the Star. I stole a ride up. What a time they’re going to have! They’re on their way to the Carlton farm and they’ve got three gallons of oysters and fifteen pounds of soda biscuits. Every pretty girl in town must be in that party—and all of them looking their very best. I tell you, it takes a cold night like this to bring out the roses in the cheeks and the sparkle in the eyes. If I hadn’t had some business with you, Mr. Christian, I think I’d have found a seat for myself between two of the liveliest of them.”

“Young man,” said Tilly, looking at him sternly, “aren’t you married?”

“Oh yes, I’m married,” the newcomer answered airily. “Good gad, how married I am! Thirty years from now they’ll take a picture of my wife and me sitting together on a horsehair sofa, with one of these new-fangled phonographs playing ‘Home, Sweet Home.’ And they’ll call it The New Darby and Joan.”

“I must say,” declared Tilly, “that you don’t talk like a married man.”

“Now that’s what I call a compliment. Apparently the fetters haven’t cut too deeply into my wrists yet. I know what you’re thinking, Mrs. Christian, that newspapermen are a wild lot. Oh, we are!” He turned to William. “Have you the boy here with you, Mr. Christian?”

“Yes. We’re going to keep him until he can be sent back to his relatives in the old country.”

“Good. I’d like to ask him a few questions. That is, if Mrs. Christian will allow a moral leper like me in her house.”

“Come in,” said William. “The boy’s in the sitting room, and that’s the only place we have to receive company. You’ll have to put up with the rest of us, I’m afraid.”

“I work my best with people looking on. Brass bands and cheering multitudes excite me to prodigies of achievement. I’m glad Sloppy Bates passed out just as he was starting to come here, because I was fairly itching to do the story myself. I’m going to put some writing into my account of the arrival of this boy and the death of the father. I’m going to pull out all the stops and let the chords of my fancy thunder and roar. It will get the whole front page if necessary.”

When they went inside again, it could be seen that the editor of the local newspaper was a rather stocky young man with lively brown eyes, an inquisitive nose, and unruly hair. He walked into the sitting room and promptly took possession of the chair the hat salesman had been occupying. When no one made any move to supply him with another Mr. George draped himself against the side of the secretary and studied the contour of the Willing head, which did not fit into any of the three categories of Sharps, Flats, or Turps.

“Well, Ludar,” began the newspaperman. “You’ve had quite a trip for a boy of your age.”

“Yes, sir.”

The fullness of the evening and the constant procession of new and strange faces were having the inevitable effect. Ludar could hardly keep his eyes open.

“Past your bedtime, eh?” said the editor. “Well, just fend off the sandman for a few minutes while the Delane of Canada asks you a few pertinent questions. First, do you like brandy balls? Here’s a bag of them for you. I got them at Milton Truck’s before starting up.” He winked at the circle of adult faces. “The Machiavellian touch.”

Ludar was sure the large green candy balls in the bag would not be good for him, but he could not resist them. He popped one into his mouth and found it a new and exciting experience.

“Now,” said Willing, “where did you live in England?”

“With Aunt Callie.”

The editor gave his thigh a resounding smack. “Shades of Betsey Trotwood! Of course there would be a female protector in this story. Now we are on our way! This lady with the Jane Austen name, was she kind to you? Did you love her very much?”

“No, sir. She was cruel to me.”

“Better still! An unfeeling guardian. Her last name wasn’t Murdstone, by any chance?”

While the voluble newspaperman plied the boy with questions and Ludar sucked the brandy ball and rubbed his eyes while striving to find satisfactory answers, Lockie McGregor moved his chair over beside that of William.

“Sharps! Flats! Turps!” he said in a fiercely indignant whisper. “Can he think of nothing but hats, this suet-head? I take back everything I said about him. He won’t do for my Catherine. But mark my words, Billy, I’ll get a real man for this little girl of mine.”

Remembering the happy light he had seen in the girl’s eyes while she talked to Clyde, William said, “Why don’t you let her choose one for herself?”

The Remarkable Man snorted. “Never! Do you know the kind of son-in-law I’d get if I let her have her own way? That smart-aleck son of a flyblown grocer in the East Ward! No, Billy, this is too important for her to do the deciding. I’ll get her the kind of husband she ought to have.”

In the meantime Allen Willing had uncovered by his brisk cross-examination the existence prior to his life with Aunt Callie which lingered so uncertainly in Ludar’s lagging memory, and was off on the new scent, baying loudly. He began to discover all there was to know with his skillful queries: the large dark rooms in the mysterious house, the extensive gardens, the avenue of tall trees, the hedges cut into the shapes of animals, the cast-iron deer which had startled Ludar every time he saw it because it was so lifelike. The people remained more vague. Some of them had worn white caps and aprons. The boy produced painfully a few names: Bessie, Frank, Mrs. Mearns, Old Baffle. Strangely enough, Ludar did not mention the pretty lady. Perhaps he considered that his memory of her was his own and could not be shared. Finally he mentioned the clock.

“But,” said Willing, puzzled at the importance which Ludar seemed to attach to it, “there must have been many clocks in such a large house.”

“It wasn’t in the house, sir.”

“Not in the house?” Willing’s eyes began to show signs of mounting excitement. “Where was it then?”

“It was way, way up, sir. With leaves around it.”

“A clock tower!” The editor turned about and nodded to the listeners. “Now we have a real clue. There can’t be many private homes, even in England, with clock towers.”

The probing continued, leading to the discovery that the boy retained also some recollection of stables. They were big, and he had seen horses looking at him from behind bars. There had been a pile of manure “as big as a house,” and always there had been men working at it with pitchforks. He had found his way once to a distant part of the buildings and had fallen into a pigpen. He had been as black as a pig himself when some of the men had hauled him out. And then he contributed, out of a blue sky, a most important piece of information. “Old Mr. Cyril laughed at me.”

Old Mr. Cyril! The editor promptly bombarded the boy with questions, receiving answers which, while both vague and scanty, added much to the picture. Old Mr. Cyril was not around a great deal. He, Ludar, had not seen him often. He always carried a book under his arm. He was quiet mostly, but sometimes he became angry and shouted at Frank and Old Baffle and the rest. He had whiskers.

“Were these whiskers of Old Mr. Cyril’s like—well, like those of Mr. Hull here?”

The boy laughed. “Oh no, sir!”

“What else can you remember about him?”

Ludar thought for a long time. “He had spectacles, sir. But he’d lost part of them.”

“A monocle!” The editor got to his feet and stared with a look of triumph around the circle of intent faces. “We now have some facts to go on. It seems certain that this Old Mr. Cyril was the head of the family, the boy’s own grandfather, in fact. One of the sons in the family group was called Cyril. Young Mr. Cyril, he was probably called by all these servants. We have a picture now on which we can build—an extensive estate, a large house with an ivy-covered clock tower, a whole train of servants. The children don’t seem to have been about. Married and out on their own, no doubt. All we have to do is find in England an estate which answers this description, owned by a gentleman of bookish habits, wearing a monocle and answering to the name of Old Mr. Cyril Something-or-other. The family undoubtedly had wealth and more than likely a title.”

Uncle Alfred asked a question. “Was the boy’s father the oldest son in the family?”

“According to the photograph, yes.”

“Then,” said Mr. Hull, once of Coldwater, with a triumphant flourish of his hand, “the boy is the heir.”

“That’s the way it looks,” answered Willing. “He’s another Lord Fauntleroy or I miss my guess.”

Lockie McGregor, who had shown unusual restraint in remaining silent while all this was going on, now cleared his throat. “I’m not a lawyer and I’m not a newspaperman,” he said, “but I’m not satisfied we’ve got to the bottom of this yet. Now, if you don’t mind, Mr. Willing, I’m going to ask a few questions myself. I think I can make him remember what his real name is.”

The opportunity, however, had slipped by. The boy had fallen into a sound sleep, and William refused to let him be wakened. “The poor little fellow is tired out,” he said. “Do you realize that he hasn’t slept in a real bed for at least a month?”

Tilly had vanished a quarter of an hour before, and so William lifted the sleeping boy and carried him into a bedroom which opened off the sitting room. It had no light, and he left the door open as he turned back the covers and deposited his charge under them. He said to himself that this was a shabby place for one who belonged to a family with a clock tower and stables. It was small, and the lace curtains hanging at the one window had been removed from the sitting room when they started to fall into pieces. There was a bureau which William had made. It was somewhat too fancy in design, and he counted it among his failures.

“I don’t believe there’s a toy in the house,” he thought. “What will the poor little fellow have to amuse himself with?”

There was no use thinking of buying toys out of the money the city would pay each week. Tilly had already declared that every cent of it was to be added to her principal. After a moment’s thought he produced from one of the drawers of the bureau a rather tattered copy of Pilgrim’s Progress. Shaking his head over this doubtfully, he placed it on a chair together with the flattened tin pail and the wooden caboose, and then shoved the chair against the side of the bed to prevent the occupant from falling out. “Little boys waken early,” he said to himself. “These will keep him busy if he does.” He had never dipped into the volume himself. It belonged to Tilly, and she had been too solicitous about the preservation of the weakened binding. He was not much for reading, anyway; a year before Tilly had decided they could not afford the Star and had cut it off, and he had missed it little.

He returned to the sitting room at the same moment that Tilly arrived with a tray containing cups of chocolate and a plate heaped high with buttered gingerbread. Each man in the room sat up straight and smiled expectantly. For several minutes thereafter no sound was heard save the clicking of cups on saucers.

Uncle Alfred had mellowed as the evening progressed. He was now smiling with an expansive generosity which even included William. “ ’Tilda,” he said, holding his cup of chocolate in front of him and blowing on it, “if this boy you’ve taken into your home and circle had his rights, there would be a butler to get together a bite of supper like this. And hand it around, too, in velvet knee britches.”

Willing nodded his head. “No manner of doubt about that,” affirmed the editor. “Mrs. Christian, you may be acting in loco parentis to a future earl or duke.”

“That will make no difference in how I treat him,” declared Tilly. “I intended to do my duty, and that’s what I’ll still do.” She was enjoying herself to the utmost. It made her proud to have company like this and to have them praise her food. It was clear also that she already had visions of dazzling rewards, checks for large amounts, signed with ducal flourishes, which could be added to her precious principal.

William was even more content. He could see how completely his wife and her uncle had changed sides. There would be no further opposition or criticism. When the company had gone he filled the tray with the dishes and carried it out to the sink in the kitchen. “I’ll wash them tonight,” he called to Tilly, who was pulling down the blinds. “Might as well, because I need hot water. I’m going to give the clothes the poor little fellow was wearing a thorough scrubbing. If they’re not ready for him in the morning he’ll have nothing to put on.”

“I’m going right to bed,” answered his wife. “This has been a very trying day.”