The Second Victorian Mystery Megapack, page 64
There was a pause.
“Did I tell you he said that?” breathed Anita Flagg.
“You know you did,” said Holworthy.
There was another pause.
“I must have been mad!” said the girl.
There was a longer pause and Holworthy shifted uneasily.
“I’m afraid you are angry,” he ventured.
“Angry!” exclaimed Miss Flagg. “I should say I was angry, but not with you. I’m very much pleased with you. At the end of the act I’m going to let you take me out into the lobby.”
With his arms tightly folded, Sam sat staring unhappily at the stage and seeing nothing. He was sorry for himself because Anita Flagg had destroyed his ideal of a sweet and noble woman—and he was sorry for Miss Flagg because a man had been rude to her. That he happened to be that man did not make his sorrow and indignation the less intense; and, indeed, so miserable was he and so miserable were his looks, that his friends on the stage considered sending him a note, offering, if he would take himself out of the front row, to give him back his money at the box office. Sam certainly wished to take himself away; but he did not want to admit that he was miserable, that he had behaved ill, that the presence of Anita Flagg could spoil his evening—could, in the slightest degree affect him. So he sat, completely wretched, feeling that he was in a false position; that if he were it was his own fault; that he had acted like an ass and a brute. It was not a cheerful feeling.
When the curtain fell he still remained seated. He knew before the second act there was an interminable wait; but he did not want to chance running into Holworthy in the lobby and he told himself it would be rude to abandon Sister Anne. But he now was not so conscious of the imaginary Sister Anne as of the actual box party on his near right, who were laughing and chattering volubly. He wondered whether they laughed at him—whether Miss Flagg were again entertaining them at his expense; again making his advances appear ridiculous. He was so sure of it that he flushed indignantly. He was glad he had been rude.
And then, at his elbow, there was the rustle of silk; and a beautiful figure, all in black velvet, towered above him, then crowded past him, and sank into the empty seat at his side. He was too startled to speak—and Miss Anita Flagg seemed to understand that and to wish to give him time; for, without regarding him in the least, and as though to establish the fact that she had come to stay, she began calmly and deliberately to remove the bell-like hat. This accomplished, she bent toward him, her eyes looking straight into his, her smile reproaching him. In the familiar tone of an old and dear friend she said to him gently:
“This is the day you planned for me. Don’t you think you’ve wasted quite enough of it?”
Sam looked back into the eyes, and saw in them no trace of laughter or of mockery, but, instead, gentle reproof and appeal—and something else that, in turn, begged of him to be gentle.
For a moment, too disturbed to speak, he looked at her, miserably, remorsefully.
“It’s not Anita Flagg at all,” he said. “It’s Sister Anne come back to life again!” The girl shook her head.
“No; it’s Anita Flagg. I’m not a bit like the girl you thought you met and I did say all the things Holworthy told you I said; but that was before I understood—before I read what you wrote about Sister Anne—about the kind of me you thought you’d met. When I read that I knew what sort of a man you were. I knew you had been really kind and gentle, and I knew you had dug out something that I did not know was there—that no one else had found. And I remembered how you called me Sister. I mean the way you said it. And I wanted to hear it again. I wanted you to say it.”
She lifted her face to his. She was very near him—so near that her shoulder brushed against his arm. In the box above them her friends, scandalized and amused, were watching her with the greatest interest. Half of the people in the now half-empty house were watching them with the greatest interest. To them, between reading advertisements on the programme and watching Anita Flagg making desperate love to a lucky youth in the front row, there was no question of which to choose.
The young people in the front row did not know they were observed. They were alone—as much alone as though they were seated in a biplane, sweeping above the clouds.
“Say it again,” prompted Anita Flagg “Sister.”
“I will not!” returned the young man firmly. “But I’ll say this,” he whispered: “I’ll say you’re the most wonderful, the most beautiful, and the finest woman who has ever lived!”
Anita Flagg’s eyes left his quickly; and, with her head bent, she stared at the bass drum in the orchestra.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but that sounds just as good.”
When the curtain was about to rise she told him to take her back to her box, so that he could meet her friends and go on with them to supper; but when they reached the rear of the house she halted.
“We can see this act,” she said, “or—my car’s in front of the theatre—we might go to the park and take a turn or two or three. Which would you prefer?”
“Don’t make me laugh!” said Sam.
As they sat all together at supper with those of the box party, but paying no attention to them whatsoever, Anita Flagg sighed contentedly.
“There’s only one thing,” she said to Sam, “that is making me unhappy; and because it is such sad news I haven’t told you. It is this: I am leaving America. I am going to spend the winter in London. I sail next Wednesday.”
“My business is to gather news,” said Sam, “but in all my life I never gathered such good news as that.”
“Good news!” exclaimed Anita.
“Because,” explained Sam, “I am leaving, America—am spending the winter in England. I am sailing on Wednesday. No; I also am unhappy; but that is not what makes me unhappy.”
“Tell me,” begged Anita.
“Some day,” said Sam.
The day he chose to tell her was the first day they were at sea—as they leaned upon the rail, watching Fire Island disappear.
“This is my unhappiness,” said Sam—and he pointed to a name on the passenger list. It was: ‘The Earl of Deptford, and valet.’ “And because he is on board!”
Anita Flagg gazed with interest at a pursuing sea-gull.
“He is not on board,” she said. “He changed to another boat.”
Sam felt that by a word from her a great weight might be lifted from his soul. He looked at her appealingly—hungrily.
“Why did he change?” he begged.
Anita Flagg shook her head in wonder. She smiled at him with amused despair.
“Is that all that is worrying you?” she said.
CHAPTER 2
THE GRAND CROSS OF THE CRESCENT
Of some college students it has been said that, in order to pass their examinations, they will deceive and cheat their kind professors. This may or may not be true. One only can shudder and pass hurriedly on. But whatever others may have done, when young Peter Hallowell in his senior year came up for those final examinations which, should he pass them even by a nose, would gain him his degree, he did not cheat. He may have been too honest, too confident, too lazy, but Peter did not cheat. It was the professors who cheated.
At Stillwater College, on each subject on which you are examined you can score a possible hundred. That means perfection, and in, the brief history of Stillwater, which is a very, new college, only one man has attained it. After graduating he “accepted a position” in an asylum for the insane, from which he was, promoted later to the poor-house, where he died. Many Stillwater undergraduates studied his career and, lest they also should attain perfection, were afraid to study anything else. Among these Peter was by far the most afraid.
The marking system at Stillwater is as follows: If in all the subjects in which you have been examined your marks added together give you an average of ninety, you are passed “with honors”; if of seventy-five, you pass “with distinction”; if Of fifty, You just “pass.” It is not unlike the grocer’s nice adjustment of fresh eggs, good eggs, and eggs. The whole college knew that if Peter got in among the eggs he would be lucky, but the professors and instructors of Stillwater were determined that, no matter what young Hallowell might do to prevent it, they would see that he passed his examinations. And they constituted the jury of awards. Their interest in Peter was not because they loved him so much, but because each loved his own vine-covered cottage, his salary, and his dignified title the more. And each knew that that one of the faculty who dared to flunk the son of old man Hallowell, who had endowed Stillwater, who supported Stillwater, and who might be expected to go on supporting Stillwater indefinitely, might also at the same time hand in his official resignation.
Chancellor Black, the head of Stillwater, was an up-to-date college president. If he did not actually run after money he went where money was, and it was not his habit to be downright rude to those who possessed it. And if any three-thousand-dollar-a-year professor, through a too strict respect for Stillwater’s standards of learning, should lose to that institution a half-million-dollar observatory, swimming-pool, or gymnasium, he was the sort of college president, who would see to it that the college lost also the services of that too conscientious instructor.
He did not put this in writing or in words, but just before the June examinations, when on, the campus he met one of the faculty, he would inquire with kindly interest as to the standing of young Hallowell.
“That is too bad!” he would exclaim, but, more in sorrow than in anger. “Still, I hope the boy can pull through. He is his dear father’s pride, and his father’s heart is set upon his son’s obtaining his degree. Let us hope he will pull through.” For four years every professor had been pulling Peter through, and the conscience of each had become calloused. They had only once more to shove him through and they would be free of him forever. And so, although they did not conspire together, each knew that of the firing squad that was to aim its rifles at, Peter, his rifle would hold the blank cartridge.
The only one of them who did not know this was Doctor Henry Gilman. Doctor Gilman was the professor of ancient and modern history at Stillwater, and greatly respected and loved. He also was the author of those well-known text-books, The Founders of Islam, and Rise and Fall. This latter work, in five volumes, had been not unfavorably compared to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The original newspaper comment, dated some thirty years back, the doctor had preserved, and would produce it, now somewhat frayed and worn, and read it to visitors. He knew it by heart, but to him it always possessed a contemporary and news interest.
“Here is a review of the history,” he would say—he always referred to it as “the” history—“that I came across in my transcript.”
In the eyes of Doctor Gilman thirty years was so brief a period that it was as though the clipping had been printed the previous after-noon.
The members of his class who were examined on the Rise and Fall, and who invariably came to grief over it, referred to it briefly as the “Fall,” sometimes feelingly as “the.… Fall.” The history began when Constantinople was Byzantium, skipped lightly over six centuries to Constantine, and in the last two Volumes finished up the Mohammeds with the downfall of the fourth one and the coming of Suleiman. Since Suleiman, Doctor Gilman did not recognize Turkey as being on the map. When his history said the Turkish Empire had fallen, then the Turkish Empire fell. Once Chancellor Black suggested that he add a sixth volume that would cover the last three centuries.
“In a history of Turkey issued as a text-book,” said the chancellor, “I think the Russian-Turkish War should be included.”
Doctor Gilman, from behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, gazed at him in mild reproach. “The war in the Crimea!” he exclaimed. “Why, I was alive at the time. I know about it. That is not history.”
Accordingly, it followed that to a man who since the seventeenth century knew of no event, of interest, Cyrus Hallowell, of the meat-packers’ trust, was not an imposing figure. And such a man the son of Cyrus Hallowell was but an ignorant young savage, to whom “the” history certainly had been a closed book. And so when Peter returned his examination paper in a condition almost as spotless as that in which he had received it, Doctor Gilman carefully and conscientiously, with malice toward none and, with no thought of the morrow, marked “five.”
Each of the other professors and instructors had marked Peter fifty. In their fear of Chancellor Black they dared not give the boy less, but they refused to be slaves to the extent of crediting him with a single point higher than was necessary to pass him. But Doctor Gilman’s five completely knocked out the required average of fifty, and young Peter was “found” and could not graduate. It was an awful business! The only son of the only Hallowell refused a degree in his father’s own private college—the son of the man who had built the Hallowell Memorial, the new Laboratory, the Anna Hallowell Chapel, the Hallowell Dormitory, and the Hallowell Athletic Field. When on the bulletin board of the dim hall of the Memorial to his departed grandfather Peter read of his own disgrace and downfall, the light the stained-glass window cast upon his nose was of no sicklier a green than was the nose itself. Not that Peter wanted an A.M. or an A.B., not that he desired laurels he had not won, but because the young man was afraid of his father. And he had cause to be. Father arrived at Stillwater the next morning. The interviews that followed made Stillwater history.
“My son is not an ass!” is what Hallowell senior is said to have said to Doctor Black. “And if in four years you and your faculty cannot give him the rudiments of an education, I will send him to a college that can. And I’ll send my money where I send Peter.”
In reply Chancellor Black could have said that it was the fault of the son and not of the college; he could have said that where three men had failed to graduate one hundred and eighty had not. But did he say that? Oh, no, he did not say that! He was not that sort of, a college president. Instead, he remained calm and sympathetic, and like a conspirator in a comic opera glanced apprehensively round his, study. He lowered his voice.
“There has been contemptible work here,” he whispered—“spite and a mean spirit of reprisal. I have been making a secret investigation, and I find that this blow at your son and you, and at the good name of our college was struck by one man, a man with a grievance—Doctor Gilman. Doctor Gilman has repeatedly desired me to raise his salary.” This did not happen to be true, but in such a crisis Doctor Black could not afford to be too particular.
“I have seen no reason for raising his salary—and there you have the explanation. In revenge he has made this attack. But he overshot his mark. In causing us temporary embarrassment he has brought about his own downfall. I have already asked for his resignation.”
Every day in the week Hallowell was a fair, sane man, but on this particular day he was wounded, his spirit was hurt, his self-esteem humiliated. He was in a state of mind to believe anything rather than that his son was an idiot.
“I don’t want the man discharged,” he protested, “just because Peter is lazy. But if Doctor Gilman was moved by personal considerations, if he sacrificed my Peter in order to get even.…”
“That,” exclaimed Black in a horrified whisper, “is exactly what he did! Your generosity to the college is well known. You are recognized all over America as its patron. And he believed that when I refused him an increase in salary it was really you who refused it—and he struck at you through your son. Everybody thinks so. The college is on fire with indignation. And look at the mark he gave Peter! Five! That in itself shows the malice. Five is not a mark, it is an insult! No one, certainly not your brilliant son—look how brilliantly he managed the glee-club and foot-ball tour—is stupid enough to deserve five. No, Doctor Gilman went too far. And he has been justly punished!”
What Hallowell senior was willing to believe of what the chancellor told him, and his opinion of the matter as expressed to Peter, differed materially.
“They tell me,” he concluded, “that in the fall they will give you another examination, and if you pass then, you will get your degree. No one will know you’ve got it. They’ll slip it to you out of the side-door like a cold potato to a tramp. The only thing people will know is that when your classmates stood up and got their parchments—the thing they’d been working for four years, the only reason for their going to college at all—you were not among those present. That’s your fault; but if you don’t get your degree next fall that will be my fault. I’ve supported you through college and you’ve failed to deliver the goods. Now you deliver them next fall, or you can support yourself.”
“That will be all right,” said Peter humbly; “I’ll pass next fall.”
“I’m going to make sure of that,” said Hallowell senior. “Tomorrow you will take those history books that you did not open, especially Gilman’s Rise and Fall, which it seems you have not even purchased, and you will travel for the entire summer with a private tutor.…”
Peter, who had personally conducted the foot-ball and base-ball teams over half of the Middle States and daily bullied and browbeat them, protested with indignation. “won’t travel with a private tutor!”
“If I say so,” returned Hallowell senior grimly, “you’ll travel with a governess and a trained nurse, and wear a strait jacket. And you’ll continue to wear it until you can recite the history of Turkey backward. And in order that you may know it backward—and forward you will spend this summer in Turkey—in Constantinople—until I send you permission to come home.”
