________________________________________________
_ The separating hedge ran almost beneath Bibbs's window--for this wing
of the New House extended here almost to the edge of the lot--and,
directly opposite the window, the Vertreeses' lawn had been graded so
as to make a little knoll upon which stood a small rustic "summer-
house." It was almost on a level with Bibbs's window and not thirty
feet away; and it was easy for him to imagine the present dynasty of
Vertreeses in grievous outcry when they had found this retreat ruined
by the juxtaposition of the parvenu intruder. Probably the "summer-
house" was pleasant and pretty in summer. It had the lookof a place
wherein little girls had played for a generation or so with dolls
and "housekeeping," or where a lovely old lady might come to read
something dull on warm afternoons; but now in the thin light it was
desolate, the color of dust, and hung with haggard vines which had
lost their leaves.
Bibbs looked at it with grave sympathy, probably feeling some kinship
with anything so dismantled; then he turned to a cheval-glass beside
the window and paid himself the dubious tribute of a thorough
inspection. He looked the mirror up and down, slowly, repeatedly,
but came in the end to a long and earnest scrutiny of the face.
Throughout this cryptic seance his manner was profoundly impersonal;
he had the air of an entomologist intent upon classifying a specimen,
but finally he appeared to become pessimistic. He shook his head
solemnly; then gazed again and shook his head again, and continued
to shake it slowly, in complete disapproval.
"You certainly are one horrible sight!" he said, aloud.
And at that he was instantly aware of an observer. Turning quickly,
he was vouchsafed the picture of a charming lady, framed in a rustic
aperture of the "summer-house" and staring full into his window--
straight into his eyes, too, for the infinitesimal fraction of
a second before the flashingly censorious withdrawal of her own.
Composedly, she pulled several dead twigs from a vine, the manner
of her action conveying a message or proclamation to the effect that
she was in the summer-house for the sole purpose of such-like pruning
and tending, and that no gentleman could suppose her presence there
to be due to any other purpose whatsoever, or that, being there on
that account, she had allowed her attention to wander for one instant
in the direction of things of which she was in reality unconscious.
Having pulled enough twigs to emphasize her unconsciousness--and
at the same time her disapproval--of everything in the nature of
a Sheridan or belonging to a Sheridan, she descended the knoll with
maintained composure, and sauntered toward a side-door of the country
mansion of the Vertreeses. An elderly lady, bonneted and cloaked,
opened the door and came to meet her.
"Are you ready, Mary? I've been looking for you. What were you
doing?"
"Nothing. Just looking into one of Sheridans' windows," said Mary
Vertrees. "I got caught at it."
"Mary!" cried her mother. "Just as we were going to call! Good
heavens!"
"We'll go, just the same," the daughter returned. "I suppose those
women would be glad to have us if we'd burned their house to the
ground."
"But WHO saw you?" insisted Mrs. Vertrees.
"One of the sons, I suppose he was. I believe he's insane, or
something. At least I hear they keep him in a sanitarium somewhere,
and never talk about him. He was staring at himself in a mirror and
talking to himself. Then he looked out and caught me."
"What did he--"
"Nothing, of course."
"How did he look?"
"Like a ghost in a blue suit," said Miss Vertrees, moving toward
the street and waving a white-gloved hand in farewell to her father,
who was observing them from the window of his library. "Rather tragic
and altogether impossible. Do come on, mother, and let's get it
over!"
And Mrs. Vertrees, with many misgivings, set forth with her daughter
for their gracious assault upon the New House next door.
Mr. Vertrees, having watched their departure with the air of a man
who had something at hazard upon the expedition, turned from the
window and began to pace the library thoughtfully, pending their
return. He was about sixty; a small man, withered and dry and fine,
a trim little sketch of an elderly dandy. His lambrequin mustache
--relic of a forgotten Anglomania--had been profoundly black, but
now, like his smooth hair, it was approaching an equally sheer
whiteness; and though his clothes were old, they had shapeliness
and a flavor of mode. And for greater spruceness there were some
jaunty touches; gray spats, a narrow black ribbon across the gray
waistcoat to the eye-glasses in a pocket, a fleck of color from a
button in the lapel of the black coat, labeling him the descendant
of patriot warriors.
The room was not like him, being cheerful and hideous, whereas Mr.
Vertrees was anxious and decorative. Under a mantel of imitation
black marble a merry little coal-fire beamed forth upon high
and narrow "Eastlake" bookcases with long glass doors, and upon
comfortable, incongruous furniture, and upon meaningless "woodwork"
everywhere, and upon half a dozen Landseer engravings which Mr. and
Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years
of possession, as "very fine things." They had been the first people
in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had
rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they
were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the
walls of other people's houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted
follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying
the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say,
inevitably, "Those people know good pictures and they know good
books."
The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a
millionaire, had ruined him because he had failed to understand it.
When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town
always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the
somebody in this case. At about the time he bought the Landseers,
he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house
not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country
place--a farm of four hundred acres--where he went for the summers
to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce,
all the year round. If he had known how to sit still and let things
happen he would have prospered miraculously; but, strangely enough,
the dainty little man was one of the first to fall down and worship
Bigness, the which proceeded straightway to enact the role of
Juggernaut for his better education. He was a true prophet of the
prodigious growth, but he had a fatal gift for selling good and buying
bad. He should have stayed at home and looked at his Landseers and
read his Bulwer, but he took his cow to market, and the trained
milkers milked her dry and then ate her. He sold the office-building
and the house in town to buy a great tract of lots in a new suburb;
then he sold the farm, except the house and the ground about it, to
pay the taxes on the suburban lots and to "keep them up." The lots
refused to stay up; but he had to do something to keep himself and his
family up, so in despair he sold the lots (which went up beautifully
the next year) for "traction stock" that was paying dividends; and
thereafter he ceased to buy and sell. Thus he disappeared altogether
from the commercial surface at about the time James Sheridan came out
securely on top; and Sheridan, until Mrs. Vertrees called upon him
with her "anti-smoke" committee, had never heard the name.
Mr. Vertrees, pinched, retired to his Landseers, and Mrs. Vertrees
"managed somehow" on the dividends, though "managing" became more and
more difficult as the years went by and money bought less and less.
But there came a day when three servitors of Bigness in Philadelphia
took greedy counsel with four fellow-worshipers from New York, and
not long after that there were no more dividends for Mr. Vertrees.
In fact, there was nothing for Mr. Vertrees, because the "traction
stock" henceforth was no stock at all, and he had mortgaged his house
long ago to help "manage somehow" according to his conception of his
"position in life"--one of his own old-fashioned phrases. Six months
before the completion of the New House next door, Mr. Vertrees had
sold his horses and the worn Victoria and "station-wagon," to pay the
arrears of his two servants and re-establish credit at the grocer's
and butcher's--and a pair of elderly carriage-horses with such
accoutrements are not very ample barter, in these days, for six
months' food and fuel and service. Mr. Vertrees had discovered, too,
that there was no salary for him in all the buzzing city--he could do
nothing.
It may be said that he was at the end of his string. Such times do
come in all their bitterness, finally, to the man with no trade or
craft, if his feeble clutch on that slippery ghost, Property, shall
fail. _
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