There was nothing to remark about her until she lifted her eyes, and then the curious, intense depth of them (like a dog who could speak, I thought), held me almost breathless with sympathy. She looked, somehow, as if she had gone through more than would be right for her to tell.
"Poor creature," I said as she disappeared through a baize door. "Tell me about her. What is her trouble?"
"She has none that I know of," he replied quietly. "She"s the housekeeper."
"Good Heavens, Will! I think I should go mad myself, if I lived here!
How does one tell them apart?"
"I don"t think one does, always," he remarked placidly. "I sometimes think that accounts for a good deal! There"s a man, now--see that fussy little fellow getting out of his motor coat? That"s Jarvyse."
"_The_ Jarvyse? The great specialist?"
"That"s it," he grunted with a disrespectful grin. "From my point of view, you know, aunty, he might about as well stay in, now he"s here.
I wouldn"t go too near him, if I were you--he"ll say you"re a paranoiac, if you mention your prejudice against free silver or thick soup at dinner or steam heat. Everything"s been paranoia with him since 1902. It"s just as much an _idee fixe_ as anybody"s here. If you object to anything he says, he diagnoses you immediately. You couldn"t build asylums fast enough to hold all Jarvyse"s paranoiacs!
That"s why I"m here, by the way; the case I want you to see is really father"s. But he loses his temper so, when he meets Jarvyse, that he sends me up, instead. The old boy doesn"t bother me--"Morning, doctor."
We stepped into a noiseless lift and he ran it to the fourth floor. At the end of the corridor an open door showed a pleasant little interior; a window full of red geraniums, goldfish in a globe, an immense grey cat by a little Franklin stove with bra.s.s b.a.l.l.s atop, and in the centre a round old-fashioned mahogany table piled high with various household linen. We walked directly into this little home-like picture--a great relief after the lavish publicity of the immense halls--and as I greeted the housekeeper, who stood by the heaped table (with an actual note of apology in my voice for having mistaken her!) I noticed a little elderly man, a vague pepper-and-salt effect, sitting by a business-like desk in the corner, his hat and stick on the chair beside him, a book and pencil on his knee.
"Good morning, Mr. Vail, I rather hoped you might be here; let me present you to my aunt, Mrs.----"
"Good heavens!" I almost said it aloud, for the vague pepper-and-salt took on familiar lines suddenly, and the matter-of-fact little features scattered so indistinguishably, as it were, though the boyishly round face became obviously one with the much-photographed trader-prince; it was Absolom Vail, the multimillionaire! When had he...
"Mrs. Leeth used to be Mr. Vail"s housekeeper for many years," my young doctor"s voice sounded reprovingly (had my jaw dropped?) "and he often looks in on her like this."
"Oh!" I recalled the hat and stick and breathed again. Not that I had any interest in the old gentleman, but he seemed a sort of public character, he and his "old stocking savings-bank," his "millions for deposit, but not a cent for speculation," his "every penny earned in honest trade," and all the rest of it.
"Never forgot an old friend yet," he chirruped, and the housekeeper smiled gravely. It was very decent and kindly and quite what one would have expected; I remembered that every employee always received a personally selected gift at Christmas and that he had stood G.o.dfather for seventeen (or was it twenty-seven?) children of labourers, born on the great eight thousand acre estate on the Hudson.
My boy listened a moment to a call from the house-telephone, turned on his heel and swung hurriedly down the corridor. I appeared to have been abandoned.
The housekeeper"s lips moved silently as she fingered the napkins on the further corner of the table; it was unnecessary, evidently, to include her in the social situation, though she would be perfectly capable of the inclusion if it should be thought best.
"I had the pleasure of meeting your daughter in London last spring, Mr.
Vail," I said.
"Minnie?" he inquired, his shrewd little eyes on me.
"I think so--the Countess of Barkington."
"Yes, that"s Minnie. Well, Minnie"s a good girl, I guess. I haven"t seen her much lately. Not for some years, but once or twice. Ever see Irene?"
"I don"t think so. She married----"
"She took an Italian. She"s a countess, too--contessa they call it over there. The Contessa di Abbriglia. Hannibal, her husband"s name is--always seemed like a Newfoundland dog"s name, to me. He hasn"t any such amount of land as Barkington, but the family"s older, I believe.
Hannibal"s old enough, anyhow. How old was the count, Mrs. Leeth, when Irene married him?"
"Miss Irene was twenty-one, Mr. Vail, and Count Hannibal was forty."
"You knew them both?" I asked her, caught by a sudden curiosity to see those deep, secret brown eyes once more. The famous Absolom was just what I had supposed he would be, neither more nor less; the most interesting thing I could see in him was this simple, friendly kindness to an old retainer.
"I dressed both the young ladies for their weddings," she replied quietly.
"It must be very pleasant to you--these talks of old times," I hazarded.
"It is," she answered.
I thought of a number of remarks suitable to one or both of my old companions, but they all, somehow, seemed ba.n.a.l and excessive as I marshalled them to my lips. A quaint, almost hypnotic quiet rose like the tide around us: all seemed said and agreed to. A tiny fire flickered on the Franklin hearth; the iridescent fan-tailed fish bent and flattened and glided in the translucent globe; an old clock ticked restfully somewhere. The two elderly friends there--for they were friends; one felt it. And why not? They were from the same cla.s.s, undoubtedly, the hardware king and the housekeeper, the solid bourgeoisie that is essentially alike in all countries and centuries--these two friends exhaled an atmosphere of contented trust in each other and what life had left for them that spread like a visible cloud, a sort of sunset autumn haze, quite through the little, homely room, and took me under it, with them. No wonder he liked to come there: it did not require much imaginative faculty to infer that neither Barkington nor di Abbriglia had been able to offer such an asylum to their father-in-law....
Asylum! How unconsciously I had fitted the original sense of the kindly old word to its technical uses! Asylum: that was what it was, a refuge, a shelter, a little back-water in the great whirlpool of overstrained, nervous modern life. And Absolom Vail had found one here, it seemed. For he was unmistakably at home here; this was not the first nor the second visit, that was plain. Such atmospheres do not grow from casual encounters.
We exchanged comfortable, old commonplaces from time to time, while Mrs. Leeth sorted, and the hardware lord actually jotted down her notes as to necessary darning and replacing, in a worn red account book--it was almost too quaint for belief! He chuckled at it a little, but not much; it was, after all, such a practical, sane sort of interlude in all the horrid, morbid confusion that the place, with all its conservatories and old mahogany and s.p.a.cious vistas, necessarily included. They were more than common normal, this simple, middle-cla.s.s pair, on their friendly little housekeeping island, with this treacherous sea of pain and revolt forever lapping at the edges.
I don"t remember how he got to telling me of his early life, but I believe it is a habit of all that sort, and Absolom was no exception to his cla.s.s and stratum. I was particularly impressed by one little incident, the foundation, really, of his fortune--if any event can be selected in those lives which seem destined to exhibit the farthest possibilities of acc.u.mulation.
"I had just exactly one hundred dollars," he said (he had the characteristic superst.i.tious reverence for set sums, even decimal multiples of the national symbol) "that I"d saved up as carpenter"s a.s.sistant in Greenwich, Connecticut. I took it out of the savings-bank and I came to New York with a clean shirt and a tooth brush and my old mother"s Bible, packed in a little basket with some boiled ham and bread. I looked out a verse just as I stepped onto the train--what do you think it was?"
"I have no idea, Mr. Vail."
"No. You wouldn"t have. Well, it was this: _Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store. D"you see--basket_! And I always intended to keep a store."
He fixed me triumphantly with his twinkling Santa Claus eyes.
"It"s in Deuteronomy," he said.
"The coincidence must have seemed very comforting to you," I suggested gravely.
"It did. It did," he answered, "and from that moment on, I never had a doubt. Barkington didn"t care much for that story, though--he says that the old fellows that translated the Bible away back in some king"s time--King----"
"King James," said the housekeeper quietly.
"Yes, King James. Well, he says that they didn"t mean that kind of a store. Maybe not. But it did the job for me, that verse, just the same."
The whole incident seemed very characteristic, very national, somehow, and I reflected gently upon it as we sat in silence, broken only by Mrs. Leeth"s practical, dry voice as she announced:
"Greek Key, Irish weave, spring, 1908, six dozen, fair order.
"Thistle pattern, fall, 1906, four dozen, eight darned, ten badly worn."
It seemed that I had been there a long time....
At length I heard Will"s quick, nervous step, and as it neared the door I rose, really reluctantly, and met him.
"I am quite in the doctor"s hands," I said, "and I see that he thinks it time for me to leave. Good-bye, Mr. Vail"--he put his hand out for his gloves and cane--"if you are going, too, perhaps, can I take you back in town with me? I motored out."
"I"m afraid you can"t," he replied, with his twinkling smile, "because I"m one of the ones that don"t get out!"
I stared at him blankly.
""That don"t get out"!" I repeated stupidly. "_That don"t get out_?