Buch lesen: «The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode»

THE FIRST ADVENTURE
I
IN WHICH HE BUYS A CHRISTMAS TREE

There was never in the world a better fellow than Jimmy Bulstrode. If he had been poorer his generosities would have ruined him over and over again. He was always being taken in, was the recipient of hundreds of begging letters, which he hired another soft-hearted person to read. He offended charitable organizations by never passing a beggar's outstretched hand without dropping a coin in it. He was altogether a distressingly impracticable rich person, surrounded by people who admired him for what he really was and by those who tried to squeeze him for what he was worth!

It was a general wonder to people who knew him slightly why Bulstrode had never married. The gentleman himself knew the answer perfectly, but it amused him to discuss the question in spite of the pain, as well as for the pleasure that it caused him to consider —the reason why.

Mary Falconer, the woman he loved, was the wife of a man of whom Bulstrode could only think in pitiful contempt. But, thanks to an element of chivalry in the character of the hero of this story the years, as time went on, spread back of both the woman and the man in an honorable series, of whose history neither one had any reason to be ashamed.

Nevertheless, it struck them both as rather humorous, after all, that of the three concerned her husband should be the only renegade and, notwithstanding, profit by the combined good faith of his wife and the man who loved her.

Oh, there was nothing easy in the task that Jimmy set for himself! And it did not facilitate matters that Mary Falconer scarcely ever helped him in the least! She was a beautiful woman, a tender woman, and there were times when her friend felt that she cleverly and cruelly taunted him with Puritanism and with his simple, old-fashioned ideas and crystal clearness of vision, the culte he had regarding marriage and the sacred way in which he held bonds and vows. It was no help at all to think she rebelled and jested at his reserve; that she did her best to break it – and there were times when it was a brilliant siege. But down in her heart she respected him, and as she saw around her the domestic wrecks with which the matrimonial seas are encumbered, and knew that her own craft promised to go safely through the storm, Mary Falconer more than once had been grateful to the man.

As far as Bulstrode himself was concerned, each year – there had been ten of them – he found the situation becoming more difficult and dangerous. Not only did the future appear to him impossible as things were, but he began to hate his arid past. He was sometimes led to ask, what, after all, was he getting out of his colossal sacrifice? The only reward he wanted was the woman herself, and, unless her husband died, she would never be his. Bulstrode had not found that he could solve the problem, and now and then he let it go from sheer weariness of heart.

In the face of the window of the drawing-room where Bulstrode sat on this afternoon of an especial winter's day the storm cast wreaths of snow that clung and froze, or dropped like feathers down against the sill. The gentleman had his predilections even in New York, and in the open fireplace the logs crumbled and disintegrated to ashen caves wherein the palpitating jewels of the heat were held. Except for this old-fashioned warmth, there was none other in the room, whose white wainscoting and pillars, low ceilings and quaint chimney-piece, characterized one of those agreeably proportioned houses still to be found in lower New York around Washington Square.

Bulstrode had received about half an hour ago a letter whose qualities and suggestions were something disturbing to him:

"There is such a thing, believe me" (Mary Falconer wrote in the pages which Bulstrode opened to read for the twentieth time), "as the gloom of Christmas, Jimmy. People won't frankly own to it. They're afraid of seeming sour and crabbed. But don't you, who are so exquisitely apt to feelings – to other people's feelings, – at once confess it? It attacks the spinster in the bustling winter streets as she is elbowed by some person, exuberantly a mother, and so arrogantly laden with delicious-looking parcels that she is almost a personal Christmas tree herself. I'm confident this 'gloom of Christmas' grips the wretched little beings at toy-shop windows as they stand 'choosin'' their never-to-be-realized toys. I'm sure it haunts the vagrant and the homeless in a city fairly redolent of holly and dinners, and where the array of other people's homes is terrifying. And, my dear friend, it is so horribly subtle that no doubt it attacks others whose only grudge is that their hearths are not built for Christmas trees or the hanging of stockings. But these unfortunates are not saying anything aloud, therefore we must not pry!

"There's a jolly house-party on at the Van Schoolings'. We're to go down to-morrow to Tuxedo and pass Christmas night, and you are, of course, asked and wanted. Knowing your dread of these family feasts – possibly from just such a ghost of the gloom – I was sure you would refuse. But it's a wonderful place for a talk or two, and I shall hope you will go – will come, not even follow, but go down with me."

There was more of the letter – there always is more of women's letters. Their minds and pens are so charmingly facile; there is nothing a woman can do better than talk, except to write.

Bulstrode smoked slowly, the pages between his fingers, his thoughts travelling like wanderers towards a home from which a ban had kept them aliens. His eyes drifted to the beginning of the letter. He wasn't familiar with the homeless vagrant class. His charities to that part of the population consisted in donations to established societies, and haphazard giving called forth by a beggar's extended hand.

If anybody may be immune to the melancholy of which his friend Mrs. Falconer spoke, it should surely be this gentleman, smoking his cigar before the fire. The unopened letters – there was a pile of them – would have offered ample reason why. No one of the lot but bore some testimony to the generous heart which, beneath dinner-jacket and behind the screw-faced watch with the picture in the back of it, beat so healthy and so well.

But the bestowal of benefits, whilst it may beautify the giver, does not always transform itself into the one benefit desired and console the bestower! Bulstrode had a charming home. He was alone in it. He had his clubs where bachelors like himself, more or less infected with Christmas gloom, would be glad to greet him. He had his friends, many of them, and their home circles were complete. His, by force of circumstances, began and ended with himself, and as if triumphant to have found so tempting a victim, the gloom came and possessed Bulstrode as he sat and mused.

But the decided sadness that stole across his face bore no relation, to the season, to whose white mystery and holy beauty there was something in his boyish, kindly heart that always responded.

The sadness Mrs. Falconer's letter awakened would not sleep. What his Christmas might be…! He had only to order his motor, to call for her and drive over the ferry; to sit beside her in the train, to drive with her again across the wintry roads. He had but to see her, watch her, talk with her, share with her the day and evening, to have his Christmas as nearly what a feast should be as dreams could ask. The whole festival was there: joy, good-will – peace? No. Not peace for him or for her – not that; everything else, but not that. And he had been travelling for five weary months in order to make himself keep for her that peace a little longer.

Bulstrode sighed here, lifted the letter where there was more of it to his lips – held it out toward the fire as if the red jewels were to set themselves around it, thought differently, and putting it back in its envelope, thrust it in the pocket of his waistcoat.

"Ruggles," he asked the servant who had come in, "you sent the despatch to Tuxedo?"

"Yes, sir."

"There'll be later a note to send. I'll ring. Well, what is it?"

"There's a person at the door, sir, who insists on seeing you."

The servant's tone – one particularly jarring to the ears of a man who had fellowship with more than one class of his kind – made the master look sharply up. Ruggles was a new addition to the household, and Bulstrode did not like him.

"A person," Bulstrode repeated, quietly; "what sort of a person?"

"A man, sir."

"Not a gentleman? No," he nodded gently; "I see you do not think him one. Yet that he is a man is in his favor. There are some gentlemen who aren't men, you know. Let him in."

In doing so Ruggles seemed to let in the night. Bulstrode had, in the warmth of his fragrant room, forgotten that outside was the wintry dark. Ruggles, in letting the man in, had the air of thrusting him in, and shut the door behind the visitor with a click.

The creature himself let in the cold; he seemed made of it. The snow clung to his shoulders; his shoes, tied up with strings, were encrusted with it. His coat, buttoned to his chin, frayed at the cuffs and edges, was thin and weather-stained. He had a pale face, a royal growth of beard – this was all Bulstrode had time to remark. He rose.

"My servant says you want to see me. Come near the fire, won't you?"

The visitor did not stir. Bewildered in the warmth of the room, he stood far back on the edge of the thick rug. To all appearances he was a bit of driftwood from the streets, one of the usual vagrant class who haunt the saloons and park and steer from lockup to night-lodging, until they finally steer themselves entirely off the face of history, and the potter's field gathers them in. Nothing but his entrance into this conventional room before this well-balanced member of decent society was peculiar.

As he still neither moved nor spoke, Bulstrode, approaching him, again invited: "Come near the fire, won't you? and when you are warm tell me what I can do for you."

"It's the storm," murmured the man, and a half-human look came across his face with his words. "I mean to say, it's this hellish storm that's got in my throat and lungs. I can't speak – it's so warm here. It will be better in a second. No, not near the fire; thanks – chilblains." He looked down at his poor feet.

The voice which the storm had beaten and thrashed to painful hoarseness was entirely out of keeping with the man's appearance, and in intonation, accent, and language was a shock to the hearer.

"Don't stand back like that – come into the room." Bulstrode wheeled a chair briskly about. "There; sit down and drink this; it's a mild blend."

"I'm very wet," said the man. "I'll drip on the rug."

"Hang the rug!"

The tramp drained the glass given him at one swallow merely; it appeared to clear his throat and release his speech. He gathered his rags together.

"I beg pardon for forcing myself on you like this, but I fancy I needn't tell you I'm desperate – desperate!" He held out his hand; it shook like a pale ghost's. "I look it, I'm sure. I haven't eaten a meal or slept in a bed for a fortnight. I've begged work and charity. All day I've been shovelling snow, but I'm too weak to work now."

He was being led to a chair. He sank in it. "Before they sent me to the Island I decided to try a ruse. I went into a saloon and opened a directory, and I said, 'The first name I put my finger upon I'll take as good luck, and I'll go and see the person, man or woman. I opened to James Thatcher Bulstrode, 9 Washington Square." He half smiled; the pale, trembling hand was waving like a pitiful flag, a signal of distress to catch the sight of some bark that might lend aid. "So I came here. When there seemed actually to be some chance of my getting in, why, my courage failed me. I don't expect you to believe my story or to believe anything, except that I am desperate – desperate. It's below zero to-night out there – infernally cold." He took the pin out of the collar turned up around his neck and let his coat fall back. Under it Bulstrode saw he wore a thin flannel shirt. The tramp repeated to himself, as it were, "It's a bad storm."

He looked up in a dazed fashion at his host as if for acceptance of his remark. In the easy chair, half swathed in rags, pitiful in thinness, dripping from shoes and clothes water that the storm had drenched into him, he was a sorry object in the atmosphere of the well-ordered conventional room. The heat and whiskey, the famine and exposure, cast a film across his eyes and brain. He indistinctly saw his host pass into the next room and shut the door behind him.

"By Jove!" he murmured under his breath in wonder find dumb thanks for the shelter. "By Jove!" The stimulant filtered agreeably through him; more charitable than any element with which he had been lately familiar, the fire's heat began to thaw the ice in his bones. He laid his dripping hat on his knees, his thin hands folded themselves over it, his eyes closed. For hours he had shuffled about the streets to keep from freezing. At the charity organization they gave work he was too weak to do; he had not eaten a substantial meal in so long that he had forgotten the taste of food and had ceased to crave it. In the soft light of lamp and fire he fell into a doze. Bulstrode, if he had stolen softly in to look at his visitor, would have seen a man not over thirty years of age, although want and dissipation added ten to his appearance. He would have been quick to take note of the fine, delicately cut face under the disfiguring beard, and of the slender, emaciated body deformed by its rags.

Possibly he did so noiselessly come in and stand by the unconscious creature, but the sleeping vagabond, dreaming fitful, half-painful things, was ignorant of the visitor. Finally across his mind's sharp despair came a sense of warmth and comfort, and in its spell he awoke.

A servant, not the one who had thrust him into the drawing-room, but another with a friendly face, stood at his side, and in broken English asked the guest of Bulstrode to follow him; and gathering his scattered senses together and picking up his rags and what was left of himself, the creature obeyed a summons which he supposed was to hale him again into the winter streets.

It was some three hours later that Bulstrode in his dining-room entertained his singular guest.

"I have asked you to dine with me," he explained, with a certain graciousness, as if he claimed, not gave, a favor, "as I'm all alone to-night. It's Christmas eve, you know – or perhaps you've been more or less glad to forget it?"

The young man who took the chair indicated him was unrecognizable as the stranger who had staggered into 9 Washington Square three or four hours before. Turned out in spotless linen and a good suit that fitted him fairly well, shaven face save for a mustache above his lip, bathed, brushed, refreshed by nourishment and sleep and repose, he looked like one who has been in the waters, possibly a long, long time; like one who has drifted, been bruised, shattered, and beaten, but who has nevertheless drifted to shore; and in spite of his borrowed clothes, his scarred, haggard face, he looked like a gentleman, and Bulstrode from the moment he spoke had recognized him as one.

The food was a feast to the stranger, in spite of nourishment already given him by Prosper. He restrained the ferocious hunger that woke at sight and smell of the good things, forced himself not to cry out with eagerness, not to tear and grasp the eatables off the plate, not to devour like a beast. Every time he raised his eyes he met those of the butler Ruggles, and as quickly the stranger looked away. The face of the servant standing by the sideboard, back of him the white and gleaming array of the Bulstrode family silver like piles of snow, was for some reason or other not a pleasant face; the stranger did not think it so.

Once again seated in the room he had entered in his outcast state, a cup of coffee at his hand, a cigar between his lips, the agreeable atmosphere of the old room and its charming objects, the kindly look on the face of his host, all swam before him. Looking frankly at Bulstrode, he said, not without grace of manner:

"I give it up. I can't – it's not to be made out or understood…"

"Do you," interrupted the other, "feel equal to talking a little: to telling me how it happens that you are wandering, as you seem to be? For from the moment you first spoke – "

The young man nodded. "I'm a gentleman. It's worse somehow – I don't know why, but it is."

Bulstrode thought out for him: "It's like remembering agreeable places to which you feel you will never return. Only," he quickly offered, "in your case you must, you know, go back."

"No," said the young man, quietly.

There was so much entire renunciation in what he said that the other could not press it.

"Better still, you can then go on?"

The vagrant looked at his companion as if to say: "Since I've known you – seen you – I have thought that I might." But he said nothing more, and Bulstrode, reading a diffidence which did not displease him, finished:

"You shall go on, and I'll help you."

The stranger bowed his head, and the wine sent the color up until his cheeks took the flush of health. Remaining a little bent over, his eyes on his feet clad in Bulstrode's shoes, he said:

"I'm an Englishman. My family is everything that's decent and all that, you know, and proud. We've first-rate traditions. I'm a younger son, and I've always been a thorn in the family's side. I've been a sort of vagabond from the first, but never as bad as they thought or believed."

He paused. His recital was painful to him. Bulstrode waited, then knocking off the ash from his cigar, urged:

"Tell me about it, tell me frankly; it will, you see, be a relief. We can do better that way – if I know."

The stranger looked up at him quickly, then leaning forward in his chair, talked as it were to the carpet, and rapidly:

"It's just a year ago. I'd been going it rather hard and got into trouble more or less – lost at cards and the races, and been running up a lot of bills. My father was awfully down on me. I'd gone home for the holidays and had a talk with my father and asked him to pay up for me just this once more. He refused, and we got very angry, both of us, and separated in a rage. The house was full of people – a Christmas ball and a tree. My father had, so it happened, quite a lot of money in the house. I knew where it was – I had seen him count it and put it away. That night for some reason the whole thing sickened me, in the mess I was in, and I left and went up to London without even saying good-by. In the course of the week my brother came and found me drunk in my rooms. It seems that the money had been taken from my father's safe, and they accused me."

"But," interrupted Bulstrode, eagerly, "it was a simple thing to exculpate yourself."

Ignoring his remark, the other continued: "I have never seen my father since that night."

No amount of former deception can persuade a man that he is a lame judge of character. The young Englishman's emaciated face, where eyes spoiled by dissipation looked out at his companion, was to this impulsive reader of humanity a good face. Bulstrode, however, saw what he wanted to see in most people. Given a chance to study them, or rather further to know them intimately, he might indeed have ended by finding in some cases a few of the imagined qualities. Here misery was evident, degradation as well, timidity, and hesitation, – but honesty? Bulstrode fancied that its characters were not effaced, and he helped the recital:

"Since you so left your people?"

"The steady go down!" acknowledged the other. "I worked my passage to the States on a liner – I stoked…"

"Any chap," encouraged the gentleman, "who can do that can pull himself, I should say, out of a worse hole."

"There's scarcely a bad habit I haven't had down in the hole with me," confessed the other, "and they've held me there."

They both remained for a few seconds without speaking, and the host's eyes wandered to where, over his mantel-shelf, in a great gold frame was the portrait of a lady done by Baker. A quaint young lady in her early teens, with bare arms and frilled frock. She had Bulstrode's eyes. By her side was the black muzzle of a great hound, on whose head the little hand rested. Under the picture, from a silver bowl of roses, came a fragrance that filled the room, and, close by stood a photograph of another lady, very modern, very mocking, and very lovely.

Bulstrode, delicately drawing inferences from the influences in his life, and, if not consciously grateful, reflecting them charmingly, broke the silence:

"You must have formed some plan or other in your mind when you came to my door? What, in the event of your being received, did you intend to ask me to do?"

The stranger lifted his head and his response was irrelevant: "It seems a hundred years since I stood there in that storm and your man pulled me in. I haven't seen a place like this for long, not the inside of decent houses. When I left the ship I managed to get down with a chap as far as Florida, where he had an orange-plantation, but the venture fell through. I fancy the rest is as well forgotten. When I came in here to-night I intended to ask you for a Christmas gift of money, and I should have gone out and drunk myself to hell."

"You spoke" – Bulstrode fetched him back – "of your father and your brother; was there no one else?"

The younger man looked up without reply.

"There has been, then, no more kindly influence in your life – no sister – no woman?"

Bulstrode brought out the words; in his judgment they meant so very much. He saw a change cross the other's face.

"I fancy there are not many men who haven't had a woman in their lives for good or bad," he said, with a short laugh.

"Well," urged the gentleman, gently, "and for what was this woman?"

As if he repelled the insistence, the young fellow stammered:

"I say, this putting a fellow on the rack – "

But Bulstrode leaned forward in his chair and rested his hand on his companion's knee and pleaded:

"Speak out frankly – frankly – I believe I shall understand; it will free your heart to speak. This influence which to a man should be the best – the best – what was it to you?" Bulstrode sat back and waited, and the other man seemed quite lost in melancholy meditations for some few seconds. Then Bulstrode put it: "For a young man, no matter how wild, to leave his home under the misapprehension you claim: – for him to make no effort to reinstate himself: with no attempt at justice: for him to become a wanderer – there must be an extraordinary reason, almost an improbable one – "

"I don't ask you to hear," said the vagrant, quickly.

"I wish to do so. It would have been a simple matter to exculpate yourself – you had not the funds in your possession, had never had them. You took no means to clear yourself?"

"None."

Bulstrode looked hard at the face his care had revealed to him: the deep eyes, the neck, chin, the sensitive mouth – there was a certain distinction about him in his borrowed clothes.

"Where is the woman now?"

"She married my brother – she is Lady Waring – my name," tardily introduced the stranger, "is Cecil Waring."

Bulstrode bowed. "Tell me something of her, in a word – in a word."

"Well, she is always clever," said the young man, slowly, "always very beautiful, and then very poor."

"Yes," nodded Bulstrode.

"She is like the rest of us – one of a fast wild set – a – "

"A gambler?" Bulstrode helped the description.

"She played," acknowledged the young man, "as the rest do – bridge."

"Were you engaged to her, Waring?"

"Yes," he slowly acknowledged, as if each word hurt him.

"And did she believe you guilty?"

"I think," said the other, with an inscrutable expression, "she could not have done so."

"But she let you go under suspicion?"

"Yes."

"Without a word of good faith, of comfort?"

"Yes."

"Did she know of your embarrassments?"

"Too well."

"You tell me she was poor and – possibly she had embarrassments of her own?"

"Possibly."

Bulstrode came over to him.

"Was she at the Christmas ball that night?"

The young man rose as well, his eyes on his questioner's; the color had all left his face – he appeared fascinated – then he shook himself and unexpectedly laughed.

"No," he said; "oh no."

The older man bowed his head and replied, quite inaptly:

"I understand!"

He took a turn across the room.

The few steps brought him in front of the mantel and the photograph of the modern lady in her furs and close hat. He stood and met the fire of her mocking eyes.

"And you believe him, Jimmy!" he could hear her say in her delicious voice.

"Yes," he mentally told her, "I believe him."

"You think that to save a woman's name and honor he has become an outcast on the face of the earth … Jimmy!"

He still gently replied to her:

"Men who love, you know, have but one code – the woman and honor."

Still mocking, but gentle as would have been the touch of the roses in the bowl near the photograph, her voice told him,

"Then he's worth saving, Jimmy."

Worth saving … he agreed, and turned to his guest. In doing so he saw that Ruggles had come into the drawing-room to remove the coffee-tray.

"Beg pardon, sir, but you mentioned there would be a letter to send shortly?"

"By Jove! so I did!" exclaimed Bulstrode. "I beg your pardon; will you excuse me while I write a line at the desk?" The line was an order to the florist.

For some reason the eyes of the Englishman had not quitted the butler's face, and Ruggles, with cold insolence, had stared at him in turn. Waring, albeit in another man's clothes, fed and seated before a friendly hearth, and once again within the pale of his own class, had regained something of his natural air and feeling of superiority. He resented the servant's insolence, and his face was angrily flushed as Bulstrode gave his orders, and the man left the room.

"I must go away," he said, rather brusquely. "I can never thank you for what you have done. I feel as if I had been in a dream."

"Sit down." His companion ignored his words. "Sit down."

"It's late."

"For what, my friend?"

"I must find some place to sleep."

"You have found it," gently smiled Bulstrode. "Your room is prepared for you here." Then he interrupted: "No thanks – no thanks. If what you tell me is all I think it is, I'm proud to share my roof with you, Waring."

"Don't think well of me – don't!" blurted out the other. "You don't know what a ruined vagabond I am. When you send me out to-morrow I shall begin again; but let me tell you that although I've herded with tramps and thieves, been in the hospital and lock-up, and worked in the hell of a furnace in a ship's hold, nothing hurt me any more, not after I left England – not after those days when I waited in Liverpool for a word – for a sign – not after that, all you see the marks of now – nothing hurts now but the memory. I'm immune."

"You will feel differently – you will humanize."

"Never!" exclaimed the tramp.

"To-night," said Bulstrode, simply.

Waring looked at him curiously.

"What a wonderful man!" he half murmured. "I was led to you by fate: you have forced me to lay my soul bare to you – and now…"

"Let's look things in the face together," suggested the gentleman, practically. "I have a ranch out West. A good piece of property. It's in the hands of a clever Englishman and promises well. How would you like to go out there and start anew? He'll give you a welcome, and he's a first-rate business man. Will you go?"

Waring had with his old habit thrust his hands in his pockets. He stood well on his feet. Bulstrode remarked it. He looked meditatively down between the soles of his shoes.

"You mean to say you give me a chance – to – to – "

"Begin anew, Waring."

"I drink a great deal," said the young man.

"You will swear off."

"I've gambled away all the money I ever had."

"You will be taking care of mine, and it will be a point of honor."

"I'm under a cloud —

"Not in my eyes," said Bulstrode, stoutly.

" – which I can never clear."

Bulstrode made a dismissing gesture.

"I should want the chap out there to know the truth."

"The truth," caught his hearer, and the other as quickly interrupted:

"To know under what circumstances I left my people."

"No, that is unnecessary," said Bulstrode, firmly. "Nobody has any right to your past. I don't know his. That's the beauty of the plains – the freshness of them. It's a new start – a clean page."

Still the guest hesitated.

"I don't believe it's worth while. You see, I've batted about now so much alone, with nobody near me but the lowest sort; I've given in so long, with no care to do better, that I haven't any confidence in myself. I don't want you to see me fail, sir, – I don't want to go back on you."

Bulstrode had heard very understandingly part of the man's word, part of his excuse for his weakness.

"That's it," he said, musingly. "Butting about alone. It's that – loneliness – that's responsible for so many things."

Looking up brightly as his friend whose derelict dangerous vessel, so near to port and repair, was heading for the wide seas again, Bulstrode wondered: "If such a thing could be that some friend, not too uncongenial, could be found to go with you and stand as it were by you – some friend who knew – who comprehended – "

Waring laughed. "I haven't such a one."

"Yes," said the older gentleman, "you have, and he will stand by you. I'll go West with you myself to-morrow – on Christmas day. I need a change. I want to get away for a little time."

Waring drew back a step, for Bulstrode had risen. Cold Anglo-Saxon as he was, the unprecedented miracle this gentleman presented made him seem almost lunatic. He stared blankly.

"It's simpler than it looks." Bulstrode attempted conventionally to shear it of a little of its eccentricity. "There's every reason why I should look after my property out there. I've never seen it at all."