"I understand," said Edith.
"I will get Mr. Dieman to throw them all overboard soon as I can get my hooks to going," he replied, rising. "Where is Mr. Winthrope?"
"In New York," replied Edith, rising also, and standing awkwardly by waiting for him to move.
"I don"t understand where he comes in?" said Eli, as he placed his cane between his arms behind his back, and spraddling out his legs, with his hat c.o.c.ked back.
"That is another matter," said Edith, attempting to pa.s.s it over.
"I am very busy," he said, half-whistling a tune, then drawing his legs together and whirling round on one foot, he directed his eyes upon Star, and remarked: "You are so much poortier than your sister May; and this young lady (turning to Edith) is poortier than all the rest," after which he smiled broadly, showing his good teeth.
It was rather a delicate moment for the young ladies. It was hard to reprove him, when they had solicited his aid in their great undertaking.
Star was vexed. Edith was disappointed in him, for she expected that he would show a little more solicitude for her affairs than he showed in his actions and answers to her questions. She drew down her dark brows when he spoke as he did, feeling indignant, and looking at him sharply, said:
"Mr. Jerey, that is very impolite in you."
"Oh, my! beg your pardon!" he said, with an innocent smile. "I am so used to talking to my own sisters when I go home that I really forgot where I was. If you will pardon me, I will go? and not do it any more--but that"s my opinion."
As he concluded his apology he simmered down as to smile, looked serious after seeing the ladies were provoked, struck the toe of his patents with his cane, set his hat squarely upon his head, crossed his legs, put his hands in his pockets, with the cane under his right arm, smiled again, resumed a correct form of standing, expecting the while to hear the ladies go on with their scolding. But as they did not say any more, he turned round, and walked out as straightly as a West Pointer on parade, opened the door himself, and let himself out. After closing the door behind him, he stepped to the piazza, and stopped on the edge of it, gawking around like a country lout.
He was nothing of the kind, being absolutely indifferent as to what people thought of him, or as to how he acted, so long as he was not immorally sensitized. He was playing his part in the drama of a great city"s life, and playing it excellently; so what did it matter, if the sticklers for formality were shocked.
Going down the long walk through the Jarney grounds, with frosted incandescents throwing fantastic shadows about him, he whistled something that sounded like a hot time in the old town--sometime soon.
CHAPTER XXV.
MONROE IS CAUGHT IN A NET OF HIS OWN WEAVING.
Ever efficient and ever advancing, though the time since he left his mountain home was short, John Winthrope had pressed onward and upward till he was not only the a.s.sistant treasurer in the New York office, but stood high in the favor of the heads of the great firm; and, if he continued on his outlined course, promised to enjoy still further favors and special privileges. His rapid rising, his pecuniary uplift, his progress in favor, his increasing enjoyment of privilege, his continuing prosperity, did in nowise diminish his sense of duty, nor beguile him from that course which he had laid out to follow when he first became obsessed with the idea of making his mark in the world of finance, as seen through the eyes of steel and iron.
During all the months, dreary though they were, that he went through in the city of Pittsburgh, he continued to live, according to his own adopted code, at the cheap lodging house in Diamond alley. The emoluments of his position, handsome though they might be considered for one so young as he, and for one so new in the ranks of the employed, were not any more compensatory than the allotments, as per schedule of bills to be met, demanded. For, after paying for his simple lodging, his small personal requirements, and sequestering a sum for the inevitable rainy day, he sent the balance to his parents to a.s.sist them in the liquidation of a debt of purchase on their home in the hills beyond the roar and turmoil of business; to which home he hoped to go sometime, an ever present dream, to spend his leisure days, or to rest when the burdens of life should become too great for his shoulders to carry.
Being steadfast of purpose, and retired in a social way, he had it over other men in his unquenchable ambition to make good--in that, instead of idling away his time in questionable company, as so many such young men do, or loafing about clubs being a good fellow at a high cost, he enlarged his knowledge of the details of business by utilizing his spare moments in courses of suitable studies, in which he exercised his energies and ability to their utmost.
After being transferred to his new post, he did not change his plans, even though his compensation was enhanced to a surprising and very agreeable amount; nor did he deviate one iota from his habits of living.
He did one thing, however, which is pardonable and commendable, and that was to dress as became his office with a much more satisfactory and becoming taste. Blessed with good looks, a frank, open countenance, a finished polish, and a natural grace, any personal adornment was befitting to him. In his case, the clothes did not make the man, but the man made the clothes, as is often true in some men and women. By gradual degrees, his cheap shop clothes, as they gave way to the ravages of wear and time, were displaced by stylish modern cuts, tailored and otherwise; but this only happened as wages increased and exigencies demanded.
So he may now be seen at his desk in a neatly fitting business suit of dark serge, with creases in the trousers, and his coat collar always clean of dandruff and falling hair. His shirt fronts were the nattiest, his collars the whitest, his ties the neatest, his shoes the highest polished of anyone in the office. With his dark-brown hair, clear blue eyes, fair skin, smooth face and dark eyebrows, he could well be envied by those less gifted.
Still, with all these characteristics, he was the least reconciled to his lot. In March he was called upon to take his leave for New York. In March he was compelled to take leave of the sick young woman, whom he had visited every day without a break for months by force of the most unusual circ.u.mstances that ever came to a young man, or to any man, perhaps. He had become so accustomed to these daily visits to Edith"s bedside, and had become so fraught with the most formidable fire of life, that when the final day came round, he seemed to have buried the object before his going, and lived in a perpetual dream thereafter, still perplexed and confounded by a mystery.
Edith was not yet well when he last looked upon her face; but signs of improvement were ever growing brighter. This is what gave him such pain of heart--the thought that he had to leave when the time had come for him to see her in her reason. But still, he thought, perhaps it was for the best. For was she not laboring under an hallucination, a delusion, a wild estrangement of the senses? And, of course, when she came to herself, he would, by virtue of the natural laws of caste, have to go his own way after all, and find solace for his pa.s.sion in some other person less worthy. It was better, thought he, that he was away--so far away that he should never see her again; and time, the sure healer of all ills, of all regrets, of all sorrows, of all misery, would bind his wounds from the harrowing effects of proud flesh. He could never hope, was his everlasting complaint, to vie with other men in the conquest of her heart. So why fret away his time on such an improbable question?
Seeing all these things in this light, and believing in them seriously and honorably, he exerted his best endeavors to cast the burden from his soul. But the burden was too heavily laden to be so easily thrust aside.
He had not heard from her since the last evening he left her home--except on one occasion, when a letter from her father to another member of the firm in the branch office, indirectly referred to her improving condition. This was all--a very slim thread it was upon which to build any hope that she, in her enlightening mind, ever again called for him, which seemed proof sufficient to convince him of his preconceived opinion.
But--why? but--why? he always asked himself, did she make such an impression on him, unless he had struck, in her heart, a responsive chord. No matter how he reasoned, he invariably got back to the premises of his theme, namely, that he could not hope for any recognition on her part so long as their stations in life were miles and miles apart.
He had spent many days on this unsolvable proposition, in all its various phases, and was still weighing it in his mind, even while busily engaged at his desk, when, one day, Miram Monroe was announced, and led into his office with all those outrageous formalities that flunkies about such offices show to their superior beings, who have the brains and money to conduct gigantic industrial corporations. Mr. Winthrope was surprised more than he felt able to express himself; but he good-humoredly extended his hand and saluted him with a cheerful, "How are you? and how are all the people back in old Pittsburgh," meaning, of course, the people only in the main office.
Mr. Monroe was as stoical as ever, but he greeted John with considerable more cordiality than had been his wont. "They are all prospering," he answered, as he glanced around the room.
John watched him closely, in a critical way, having in mind the telegram he had received the day previous from Mr. Jarney that said, "Beware of Monroe." John did not fully understand the meaning of this telegram; but he read its significance in the face of the man standing now before him, which, as he then looked at it, presented a mixture of tragedy, comedy, treachery and sculduggery. He saw these traits now in Monroe, not that his face had presented them to him on any other occasion, but the telegram had revealed to him too forcibly what he could not before comprehend. Why did Mr. Jarney send it, if the coming of Monroe was not for some insidious purpose? he asked himself.
"You do not often come to New York, Mr. Monroe--at least, not to this office," said John, breaking the ice for a plunge into Mr. Monroe"s perverseness toward a hateful silence.
"Not often," he answered, extracting some papers from an inside coat pocket. He began deliberately to run over these papers, as if looking for a particular one. Finding one that seemed to meet his searching approval, he drew up a chair to a desk in the middle of the room and sat down, still very deliberately, with his eyes bent upon the paper that he held in his hand.
Concluding that Monroe was not willing to be communicative about his errand, John sat down at his own desk. Scrutinizing Monroe from a side view, he saw it was the same face that was so indefinable to him in his apprenticeship in the head office; the same lengthened visage that then struck him so forcibly as that of a mountebank, clothed in undeserving power; the same white, wrinkleless skin that reminded him perpetually of a true portraiture of a ghost. John sat spell-bound, drawn irrisistably to this peculiarly eccentric man.
Monroe sat pouring over his papers, as if it had been his custom to come there every day and do the same thing, unbelievably composed in his manner. To John, there was a mephistophelean aspect about Monroe, as he sat at the desk, apparently in the throes of some abstruse problem that he could not readily make out. But, however, after awhile Monroe seemed to have reached a solution of what he was delving into, and directly turned and faced John, with his usual inane stare.
"Mr. Winthrope," said he, with no change in the monotonous enunciation of his words, so precise did he give utterance to them, "there seems to be an error in your accounts, which indicates a shortage in this office."
"An error! A shortage!" gasped John, as if he had been stabbed from behind with a dagger.
"Yes;" answered Monroe very slowly, very mouse-like, very aggravatingly, "a shortage--or an error." He straightened up in his chair, after saying this, to see the effect of his a.s.sertion in John"s countenance.
Recovering his composure in a moment or so, John drew down his eyebrows to a scornful straightness, and glared at his accuser. John was not very often convertable to such an exhibition of temper; but when his name and his honor were brought under reproach, his resentment became visibly uncontrollable.
"Do you mean, Mr. Monroe," said John, looking straight into his gray-green eyes, "that I am short in my accounts with this office?"
"That is my intimation," replied the insinuating Monroe, opening his mouth squarely at the emphasizing of "my". "I have been sent here to have a reckoning with you."
The very bluntness of his statement was so monstrous to John, that he could not, for a short time, comprehend what it meant for him. The very essence of the a.s.sertion was too much for his grasp, so horrified was he for the few moments that he sat facing the serene detractor of his character. The very thought of such a crime was so contrary to his nature, that he was almost blind from the sensations of the blow coursing through him.
"Are you in earnest? or are you here to jest with me, Mr. Monroe?" asked John, rousing himself to face the inevitable.
"I am in dead earnest," answered Monroe.
"Then you," responded John, weighing his words, "lie--or some one else--is lying--for--you."
"Don"t get agitated and go off half-c.o.c.ked," said Monroe, in the same icy tone as before. "I"ll show to you, in due time, where you have been peculating."
At first, John was on the point of taking physical issue with the challenger of his good name; but remembering the significant telegram from Mr. Jarney, and remembering also that he was at a disadvantage with Monroe over the question of fact, he subdued his pa.s.sionate feelings, and thought he would parley for time to await the coming of Mr. Jarney before long.
"Some one has been doctoring the books," said John, smoothly, "if there is an apparent defalcation. I know what I have been doing, Mr. Monroe.
My cash has balanced each day. My accounts in this office are straight, Mr. Monroe. I am straight, Mr. Monroe. You are crooked. And I will have no more from you till my superiors have been consulted."
"Well, Mr. Winthrope," responded Monroe to John"s a.s.severation, "I am the auditor of the firm for this office, and I am to be consulted first.
According to our books you are short. I was, therefore, sent here to have an accounting with you, and if I find that our books are correct and your accounts wrong, I am to have a warrant issued for your arrest.
Believe me, Mr. Winthrope, when I say that I find an error which indicates peculating on your part. I do not want to see your name blackened by an exposure that would naturally follow should I take it in my head to proceed against you. I have a free hand to act any way I choose, be that what it may. Now, I can fix this matter up for you so that no word of it will get out, and so that you can leave with money in your pockets, and mine, and no one will be the wiser. I can compromise the matter by you being reasonable. Will you be reasonable and enter into my scheme?"
John was surely astounded at this long speech of Monroe"s. He studied a short moment. He did not want to compromise himself with Monroe in any scheme that, if he were guilty, would cover up the crime with which he was charged. If he was found to be responsible for any shortage, he was fully willing to take the consequences which arrest and exposure might entail, rather than attempt to clear himself of the blame, if blamable.
But not being guilty, as he had good reason to believe, he held that justice, unless mercilessly blind, would deal fairly with him. Moreover, he would be making a mistake if he did not draw Monroe out, and secure from him his plan of a secret compromise.