"I must have hit that officer pretty hard," was the reflection of Robert Lucas.

The episode closed shortly before noon next day, when two elderly men of affairs came to fetch his guests away. They entered the room while he was entertaining the baby with a whistled selection from his repertoire of flute music, and he broke off short as they regarded him from the doorway. The Jewess looked up alertly as they entered.

They bowed to Lucas with a manner of servility in which there was an ironic suggestion, while their eyes examined him shrewdly. They were bearded, aquiline persons, soft-spoken and withal formidable. He had a notion that they found him amusing, but suppressed their amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Then it is you we have to thank," said the elder of them, when formal greetings had been exchanged, "for the safety of this girl and her child."

"I don't want any thanks," protested Lucas.

He could not tell them how the thanks he had already received transcended any words they could speak.

"It was a villainous thing," he went on. "I'm glad I could help. Er-- is the silversmith all, right?"

"Money was paid," answered the grey-haired Jew; "he is safe, therefore. But he spent the night in chains, while his wife was here with you."

He spoke with a pregnant gravity. The Jewess started up and addressed him in a tongue Lucas could not understand. He saw that she pointed to him and to the bedroom and to the stairs, and that she spoke with heat. The old Jew heard her intently.

"So!" he said, in his deep voice. "Then we have more to thank you for than we thought. You gave up your rooms, it seems?"

"It is nothing," said Lucas. "You see, a lady--well, I could hardly--"

"Yes, I see," agreed the old Jew. "I have to do with a n.o.ble spirit.

And you do not want any thanks? So? But we Jews, we have more things to give than thanks, and better things."

"I don't want anything," Lucas answered him. "I'm glad everything's all right."

"You are very good," said the old man, "very good and generous. But some day, perhaps, you will have a need--and then you will find that our people do not forget."

The Jewess had nothing to take with her but her child. She bowed her head and murmured something as she pa.s.sed out, and the baby laughed at him.

"Our people do not forget," repeated the old Jew, as he bowed himself forth.

"Well," said Lucas, half aloud, when he was once more alone in his room, "that's finished, anyhow."

It was the knell of his greater self, of the man he had contrived to be for a few hours. He sat in his chair, dimly realizing it, with vague and wordless regrets. Then, upon the table, he saw the flute, and rose to put it in the cupboard. It would never be useful again, but he did not want to throw it away.

The old dramas, which somehow came so close to reality with so little art--or because of so little art--had a way of straddling time like life itself. "Twenty years elapse between Acts II and III," the playbills said unblushingly, and the fact is that what most men sow at twenty they reap at forty; the twenty years do elapse between the acts. The curtain that goes down on Robert Lucas in his room at Tambov rises on Robert H. Lucas in New York, with the pa.s.sage of time marked on him as clearly as on a clock. With grey in his beard and patches on his boots, and quarters in a boarding-house in Long Island City, he is still concerned with leather, but no longer prosperous.

His work involves much calling on dealers and manufacturers, and their manner of receiving him has done nothing to harden his manner of diffidence and incompetence. His linen strives to be inconspicuous; his clothes do not inspire respect; the total effect of him is that of a man who has been at great pains to plant himself in a wrong environment. Tambov now is no more than a memory; it is less than an experience, for it has left the man unchanged. It is a thing he has seen--not a thing he has lived.

The accident that gave his name and the address of his boarding-house a place in the papers has no part in his story; he was an unimportant witness in the trial of a man whom he had seen in the street cutting blood-spots out of his clothing. He had bought a paper which mentioned him to read on the ferry as he returned home, and had been mildly thrilled to find that an artist had sketched him and immortalized him in his columns. And next morning came the letter.

"Guelder and Zorn" was the name engraved across the head of it, in a slender Italian script; it conveyed nothing to him. The body of the communication was typewritten, and stated that if Mr. Robert H. Lucas would present himself at the above address, the firm would be glad to serve him. Nothing more.

"Mean to say you haven't heard of Guelder and Zorn?" demanded the young man whose place at breakfast in the boarding-house was opposite to him, when he asked a question. "Say--d'you know what money is?

Hard, round flat stuff--money? You do know that, eh? Well, Guelder and Zorn is the same thing."

Somebody laughed. Lucas looked round rather helplessly.

"They say," he explained, referring to the letter, "that they'll be glad to serve me."

"Then you might lend me a couple of million," suggested the young man opposite, with entire disbelief. "Them Jews would never miss it."

Lucas had the sense to drop the matter there. He put the letter in his pocket and went on with his breakfast, and listened with incredulous interest to the talk that went on about the wealth, the greatness, the magnificence and power of the financial house which professed itself anxious to be of use to him. He was sorry to have to leave the table before it came to an end.

It is characteristic of him that the letter aroused no wild hopes, nor even an acute curiosity. He came, in the course of the morning, to the offices of Messrs. Guelder and Zorn in much the same frame of mind he brought to his business efforts. They were near, but not in, Wall Street--a fact of some symbolic quality which he, of course, could not appreciate. He stood on the edge of the side-walk for some moments, looking up at the solid, responsible block of building which anch.o.r.ed their fortunes to earth, till some one jostled him into the gutter. Then he recollected himself and prepared to enter the money- mill.

A hall porter like a comic German heard his inquiry, scrutinized him with a withering glare, and jerked a thumb towards a door. He found himself in such an office as may have seen the first Rothschild make his first profits--a room austere as a chapel, rigidly confined to the needs of business. A screen, pierced by pigeon-holes, cut it in half. Experience has proved that no sum of money is too large to pa.s.s through a pigeon-hole.

"Veil?"

A whiskered, spectacled face, framed in the central pigeon-hole, with eyes magnified by the spectacles, regarded him sharply.

"Oh!" He recalled himself to his concerns with a jerk, and fumbled in his pockets. "I had a letter," he explained.

"Vere is de letter?"

He found it, after an exciting search, and pa.s.sed it over. The whiskered face developed a hand to receive it.

"I don't know what it's about," explained Lucas.

"Perhaps your people have made a mistake in the name, or something."

"Our beoble," said the face in the pigeon-hole, with malignant emphasis, "do nod make mistagues!"

There was an interval while the letter was read, and Lucas stood and fidgeted, with a sense that he was intrusive and petty and undesired.

"Yes," said the owner of the spectacles, at length. "You vait. I vill enguire."

He left his pigeon-hole unshuttered, and to Lucas, while he waited, it seemed that several men came to it and glanced at him forbiddingly. None spoke; they just looked as though in righteous indignation at his presence, with seventy-five cents in his pocket, in that high temple of finance. Then the whiskered and spectacled face fitted itself again into the aperture.

"So you are Mr. Robert H. Lugas, are you?" it inquired. "Den vere vas you in de year 1886?"

"Where was I?" repeated Lucas vaguely. "Let me see! 1886--yes! I was in Russia then--in Tambov."

"Yes." The other's regard was keen. "An' now tell me aboud de man dat lived obbosite to you in Tambov?"

"Do you mean the silversmith?" said Lucas. The other nodded. "Oh, him! He was a Jew. They expelled him."

"And his vife?"

"His wife! They expelled her too," he answered. "I never heard of her again."

"Vot vas de last you heard of her?"

"Oh, that!"

Lucas was staring at him vacantly. It did not occur to him that, by not answering promptly, he might give ground for doubt and suspicion.

The question had re-illuminated in his mind--perhaps for the first time since the event which it touched--that night of twenty years before. He flavored again the heady and effervescent vintage of strong action, of crowded happenings and poignant emotions.

"Veil?" demanded the other.