Frances Waldeaux Part 21

"Most certainly, no!" he said vehemently. "Of all mean frauds the perfunctory priest is the meanest. If I could be like one of the old holy gospellers--then indeed!"

He was silent a moment, and then began to stride up and down the long hall, his head thrown back, his chest inflated.

"I have a message for the world, mother."

"I am sure of it," she interrupted eagerly.

"But I must deliver it in my own way. I have lost two years. I am going to put in big strokes of work now. In the next two years I intend to take my proper place in my own country. I will find standing room for George Waldeaux," with a complacent smile. "And in the meantime, of course, I must make money enough to support you and the boy handsomely. So you see, mother," he ended, laughing, "I have no time to lose."

"No, George!" It was the proudest moment of her life. How heroic and generous he was!

She filled his pocket-book the next day, when he went to New York to take the world by the throat. It was really not George Waldeaux's fault that she filled it.

Nor was it his fault that during the next two years the world was in no hurry to run to his feet, either to learn of him, or to bring him its bags of gold. The little man did his best; he put his "message," as he called it, into poems, into essays, into a novel. Publishers thanked him effusively for the pleasure of reading them, and--sent them back.

The only word of his which reached the public was a review of the work of a successful author. It was so personal, so malignant, that George, when he read it, writhed with shame and humiliation. He tore the paper into fragments.

"Am I so envious and small as that! Before G.o.d, no words of mine shall ever go into print again!" he said, and he kept his word.

He came down every month or two to his mother.

"Why not try teaching, George?" she said anxiously. "These great scholars and scientific men have places and reputations which even you need not despise."

He laughed bitterly. "I tried for a place as tutor in a third-cla.s.s school, and could not pa.s.s the examinations. I know nothing accurately. Nothing."

It occurred to him to go into politics and help reform the world by routing a certain Irish boss. He made a speech at a ward meeting, and broke down in the middle of it before the storm of gibes and hootings.

"What was the matter?" he asked a friend, whose face was red with laughter.

"My dear fellow, you shouldn't lecture them! You're not the parson.

They resent your air of enormous superiority. For Heaven's sake, don't speak again--in this campaign."

It is a wretched story. There is no need of going into the details.

There was no room for him. He tried in desperation to get some foothold in business. The times were hard that winter, which of course was against him. Besides, his critical, haughty air naturally did not prepossess employers in his favor when he came to ask for a job.

At the end of the second year the man broke down.

"The work of the world," he told Frances, "belongs to specialists.

Even a bootblack knows his trade. I know nothing. I can do nothing.

I am a ma.s.s of flabby pretences."

Every month she filled his pocket-book. She found at last that he did not touch the money. He sold his clothes and his jewelry to keep himself alive while he tramped the streets of New York looking for work. He starved himself to make this money last. His flesh was lead-colored from want of proper food, and he staggered from weakness.

"'He that will not work neither let him eat,'" he said grimly.

It was about this time that Miss Vance came home. Mrs. Waldeaux in a moment of weakness gave her a hint of his defeat.

"Is the world blind," she cried, "to deny work to a man of George's capacity? What does it mean?"

Clara heard of George's sufferings with equanimity. "The truth is,"

she said, when she told the story to Miss Dunbar, "Frances brought that boy up to believe that he was a Grand Llama among men. There is no work for Grand Llamas in this country, and when he understands that he is made of very ordinary clay indeed, he will probably be of some use in the world."

Lucy was watering her roses. "It is a matter of indifference to me,"

she said, "what the people of New York think of Mr. Waldeaux."

Clara looked at her quickly. "I do not quite catch your meaning?" she said.

But Lucy filled her can, and forgot to answer.

CHAPTER XVII

Clara had brought Miss Dunbar back and established her in her own house near Weir, under the care of a deaf widowed aunt. Dunbar Place was a stately colonial house, set in a large demesne, and all Kent County waited breathless to know what revelations the heiress would make to it, in the way of equi-pages, marqueterie furniture, or Paris gowns.

Mrs. Waldeaux found Lucy one day, a month after her arrival, seated at her sewing on the broad, rose-covered piazza, looking as if she never had left it.

"Have you come to stay now, my dear," she said, "or will Prince Wolfburgh----"

"Oh, that is an old story," interrupted Clara. "Lucy handed the little prince over to Jean Ha.s.sard, who married him after he had a long fight with her father about her dot. He won the dot, but Count Odo is now the head of the house. Jean, I hear, is in Munich fighting her way up among the Herrschaft."

"Jean has good fighting qualities," Lucy said. "She will win."

"I had a letter from her to-day," said Miss Vance. "Here it is. She says, 'I mean to rebuild the Schloss, and I have put a stop to the soap-boiling business. I will have no fumes of scorching fat in our ancestral halls. Four of the princesses live with us here in the flat.

Gussy Carson from Pond City is staying with me now. We have an American tea every Wednesday. Gus receives with me.'"

"Poor princesses!" said Lucy.

Miss Vance folded the letter with a complacent nod. "I am glad that Jean is settled so satisfactorily," she said. "As for Lucy----"

No one answered. Lucy threaded her needle.

"I start next week to Chicago, did you know, Frances? The Bixbys--two orphan heiresses--wish me to take them to Australia, coming back by India. And I suppose," she said, rising impatiently, "if I were to stay away forty years I should find Lucy when I came back, with white hair maybe, but sitting calmly sewing, not caring whether there was a man in the world or not!"

Lucy laughed, but did not even blush.

Mrs. Waldeaux presently said good-by, and Clara went home with her to spend the night. Lucy was left alone upon the piazza. It was there that George Waldeaux saw her again.

This had been the hardest day of his life. He rose that morning telling himself with an oath that he would earn the money to buy his own food or never eat again. His mother had sent him a cheque by post.

He tore it up and went out of his cheap lodging-house without breakfast. There was a queer change in him--a sudden lofty independence--a sudden loathing of himself. He knew now that it was not in him to do good work in the world, but at least he would pay his own way. He had been a ma.s.s of vanity and now he was so mean in his own eyes that he shrank from the pa.s.sers-by. Perhaps the long strain had damaged the gray matter of the brain, or some nervous centre--I do not know what change a physician would have found in him, but the man was changed.

A clerk was needed in a provision shop on Green Street. George placed himself in the line of dirty, squalid applicants. The day was hot, the air of the shop was foul with the smells of rotting meat and vegetables. He felt himself stagger against a stall. He seemed to be asleep, but he heard the butchers laughing. They called him a drunken tramp, and then he was hurled out on the muddy pavement.

"Too much whiskey for this time o' day!" a policeman said, hauling him to his feet.

"Move along, young man!"

Whiskey? That was what he wanted. He turned into a shop and bought a dram with his last pennies. It made him comfortable for a few hours, then he began to cry and swear. George Waldeaux had never been drunk in his life. The ascetic, stainless priest in him stood off and looked at this dog of the gutter with his obscene talk, and then came defeat of soul and body.