The Sentimental Adventures of Jimmy Bulstrode.

by Marie Van Vorst.

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 pa.s.sing 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 enc.u.mbered, 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 pa.s.s 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 cla.s.s. 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 cla.s.s 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, b.u.t.toned 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 cla.s.s 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 h.e.l.lish 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 hoa.r.s.eness 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.s into the next room and shut the door behind him.