"It hasn"t troubled me, Tuck," answered Crane cheerfully. "But I am curious to know whether or not you did kick him."
"The question seems to be, do you allow your servants to be insolent or not?"
Crane turned to the cook.
"Mr. Tucker seems unwilling to commit himself on the subject of the kick," he observed. "Have you any reason for supposing your cat was kicked?"
"Yes," said Jane-Ellen. "The noise, the scuffle, the bad language, and the way Willoughby ran into the kitchen with his tail as big as a fox"s.
He is not a cat to make a fuss about nothing, I can tell you."
"I beg your pardon," said Crane, who was now evidently enjoying himself, "but what did you say the cat"s name is?"
"Willoughby."
Burton threw himself back in his chair.
"Willoughby!" he exclaimed, "how perfectly delightful. Now, you must own, Tuck, prejudiced as you are, that that"s the best cat name you ever heard in your life."
But Tucker would not or could not respond to this overture, and so Crane looked back at Jane-Ellen, who looked at him and said:
"Oh, do you like that name? I"m so glad, sir." And at this they smiled at each other.
"Don"t you think you had better go back to the kitchen, Jane-Ellen?"
said the butler sternly.
In the meantime, Tucker had lighted a cigar and had slightly recovered his equanimity.
"As a matter of fact," he now said, in a deep, growling voice, "I did not kick the creature at all--though, if I had, I should have considered myself fully justified. I merely a.s.sisted its progress down the kitchen stairs with a sort of push with my foot."
"It was a kick to Willoughby," said the cook, in spite of a quick effort on Smithfield"s part to keep her quiet.
"O Tuck!" cried Crane, "it takes a lawyer, doesn"t it, to distinguish between a kick and an a.s.sisting push with the foot. Well, Jane-Ellen,"
he went on, turning to her, "I think it"s not too much to ask that Willoughby be kept in the kitchen hereafter."
"I"m sure he has no wish to go where he"s not wanted," she replied proudly, and at this instant Willoughby entered exactly as before. All four watched him in a sort of hypnotic inactivity. As before, he walked with a slow, firm step to the chair in which Tucker sat, and, as before, jumped upon his knee. But this time Tucker did not move. He only looked at Willoughby and sneered.
Jane-Ellen, with the gesture of a mother rescuing an innocent babe from ma.s.sacre, sprang forward and s.n.a.t.c.hed the cat up in her arms. Then she turned on her heel and left the room. As she did so, the face of Willoughby over her shoulder distinctly grinned at the discomfited Tucker.
Not unnaturally, Tucker took what he could from the situation.
"If I were you, Burt," he said, "I should get rid of that young woman.
She is not a suitable cook for a bachelor"s establishment. She"s too pretty and she knows it."
"Well, she wouldn"t have sense enough to cook so well, if she didn"t know it."
"It seems to me she trades on her looks when she comes up here and makes a scene like this."
"Beg pardon, sir," said Smithfield, with a slightly heightened color, "Jane-Ellen is a very good, respectable girl."
"Certainly, she is," said Crane, rising. "Nothing could be more obvious.
Just run down, Smithfield, and ask her to send up a menu for to-night"s dinner." Then, as the man left the room, he added to his friend:
"Sorry, Tuck, if I seem lacking in respect for you and your wishes, but I really couldn"t dismiss such a good cook because you think her a little bit too good-looking. She is a lovely little creature, isn"t she?"
[Ill.u.s.tration: Jane-Ellen sprang forward and s.n.a.t.c.hed the cat from Tucker"s knee]
"She doesn"t know her place."
Crane walked to the window and stood looking out for a minute, and then he said thoughtfully:
"If ever I have a cat I shall name it Willoughby."
"Have a cat!" cried Tucker. "I thought you detested the animals as much as I do."
"I felt rather attracted toward this one," said Crane.
III
HIS household cares disposed of, Crane went off to the stables. It was a soft hazy autumn morning, and though he walked along whistling his heart was heavy. These changes in background always depressed him. His mother had been dead about two years, and at times like this he particularly missed her. She had always contrived to make domestic difficulties not only unimportant, but amusing. She had been pretty and young, both in years and spirit, and had had the determining influence on her son since his childhood.
His parents had married early and imprudently. The elder Crane, stung by some ill-considered words of his wife"s family, had resolved from the first to make a successful career for himself. Shrewd, hard and determined, he had not missed his mark. Burton"s earliest recollections of him were fleeting glimpses of a white, tired, silent man seldom, it seemed to him, at home, and, by his gracious absences, giving him, Burton, a sort of prior claim on all the time and all the attention of his mother.
As he grew older and his father"s fortune actually materialized, he began to see that it had never given pleasure to his mother, that it had first taken her husband"s time and strength away, and had then changed the very stuff out of which the man was made. He had grown to love not only the game, but the rewards of the game. And Burton knew now that very early his mother had begun deliberately to teach him the supreme importance of human relationships, that she had somehow inculcated in him a contempt not, perhaps, for money, but for those who valued money.
Under her tuition he had absorbed a point of view not very usual among either rich or poor, namely that money like good health was excellent to have, chiefly because when you had it you did not have to think about it.
Both her lessons were valuable to a young man left at twenty-five with a large fortune. But the second--the high delight in companionship--she had taught him through her own delightful personality, and her death left him desperately lonely. His loneliness made him, as one of his friends had said, extremely open to the dangers of matrimony, while on the other hand he had been rendered highly fastidious by his years of happy intimacy with his mother. Her wit and good temper he might have found in another woman--even possibly her concentrated interest in himself--but her fortunate sense of proportion, her knowledge in every-day life, as to what was trivial and what was essential, he found strangely lacking in all his other friends.
He thought now how amusing she would have been about the manicured maid servants, and how, if he and she had been breakfasting together, they would have amused themselves by inventing fantastic explanations, instead of quarreling and sulking at each other as he and Tucker had done.
Tucker had been his father"s lawyer. It had been one of the many contradictions in Mrs. Crane"s character that, though she had always insisted that as a matter of loyalty to her husband Tucker should be retained as family adviser, she had never been able to conceal from Burton, even when he was still a boy, that she considered the lawyer an intensely comic character.
She used to contrive to throw a world of significance into her p.r.o.nunciation of his name, "Solon." Crane could still hear her saying it, as if she were indeed addressing the original lawgiver; and it was largely because this recollection was too vivid that he himself had taken to calling his counselor by his last name.
He sighed as he thought of all this; but he was a young man, the day was fine and his horses an absorbing interest, and so he spent a very happy morning, pa.s.sing his hand along doubtful fetlocks and withers, and consulting with his head man on all the infinity of detail which const.i.tutes the chief joy of so many sports.
At lunch, he appeared to be interested in nothing but the selection of the best mount for Miss Falkener--a state of mind which Tucker considered a great deal more suitable than his former frivolous interest in cats. And soon after lunch was over he went off for a ride, so as to get it in before he had to go and meet his new guests.
A back piazza ran past the dining-room windows. It was shady and contained a long wicker-chair. The November afternoon was warm, and here Tucker decided to rest, possibly to sleep, in order to recuperate from a disturbing night and morning.
He contrived to make himself very comfortable with a sofa pillow and extra overcoat. He slept indeed so long that when he woke the light was beginning to fade. He lay quiet a few moments, thinking that Mrs.
Falkener would soon arrive and revolving the best and most encouraging terms in which he could describe the situation to her, when he became aware of voices. His piazza was immediately above the kitchen door, and it was clear that some one had just entered the kitchen from outdoors.
And he heard a voice, unmistakably Jane-Ellen"s, say:
"Stranger, see how glad Willoughby is to see you again. Just think, he hasn"t laid eyes on you for all of three days."