White Ashes.

by Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. n.o.ble.

CHAPTER I

On the top floor of one of the lesser office buildings in the insurance district of lower New York, a man stood silent before a map desk on which was laid an opened map of the burned city. No other man was in the office, for this was on a Sunday; but it would not have mattered to the man at the map had the big room presented its usual busy appearance. All that went on about him would have pa.s.sed his notice; he only gazed stolidly from the map to the newspaper with flaring headlines, and from newspaper back to map, trying to gauge the measure of his calamity.

The morning papers had been able to print nothing save the bare facts that the fire had started near a large hotel, had spread with appalling rapidity to the adjacent buildings, and getting beyond the control of the fire department was sweeping southward under a wind of thirty miles an hour. The afternoon extras, however, gave fuller--and graver--details. The central business section of the city was entirely in ruins, and the conflagration had as yet shown no sign of a stay.

Sunday though it was, in many of the greater insurance offices on William Street the executives had gathered and were endeavoring to calculate the effect of this catastrophe on their a.s.sets.

But in the office on the top floor, where the man stood alone, there was no longer any doubt. Whether the fire was checked or whether it swept onward mattered now to him not at all; he was looking into the eyes of ruin utter and absolute. . . . But this, perhaps, is premature, since before this day was to arrive much water was to flow under many bridges, and it is with the flowing of some of that water that this story has to deal.

About five o'clock, Charles Wilkinson called, as he often did, through inclinations in which the gastronomic and the amatory were about evenly divided. Long since, after a series of t.i.tanic but perfectly hopeless struggles, he had abandoned all direct attempts to borrow money from his opulent step-uncle; subsequent efforts to achieve indirectly the same result by a myriad of methods admirably subtle and of marked ingenuity had resulted only in equal failure. To be sure, there had never been any really valid reason why his endeavors should have been successful unless as compensation for years of patient labor. He conceived his esteemed relation as a sort of safe-deposit box, to a share of whose contents he was ent.i.tled if he could contrive to open it. Farther back in the quest, he had approached Mr. Hurd with the dash and confidence of a successful burglar, but of late the pursuit had lapsed to a mere occasional half-hearted fumble at the combination.

However, he often came to tea. Tea was something--tangibly of no great importance, but from Wilkinson's viewpoint a sop to his self-respect in the reflection that he was getting it from old man Hurd. Besides, it kept the proximity established. Charles was as simple an optimist as a frankly predatory young man could be; some day the vault door might quite unexpectedly swing open, and it would be highly desirable to be close at hand and to have an intimate knowledge of the exits. Mr. Hurd was his only rich relation, and the step-nephew clung to him with tentacles of despair.

Tea at John M. Hurd's was something,--comparatively a more vital factor to Wilkinson, who lived in a cheap boarding house, than to its other partakers,--and Isabel Hurd was something more.

He felt a sincere admiration for Isabel, and his admiration had the substantial foundation of real respect. It happened that his step-cousin was what is kindly called a nice girl, but Wilkinson's regard pa.s.sed hurriedly across any pleasing personal qualities she might have possessed. To him she was the daughter of a magnate who lived in a large house on Beacon Street and whose traction company gave its stockholders (whatever else might be said of its pa.s.sengers) very little cause for complaint. To a young man whose creditors would have harried him nearly mad but for the fact that for several years past he had been able to secure scarcely any credit from any one, Isabel a.s.sumed the calm and quiet attractiveness of a well-managed national bank. And had she seriously considered marrying him, she could have confidently relied on his loyalty so long as Mr. Hurd could sign his name to a check. This reflection might not have been a flattering one to her, but it should have been a comforting one. Had it been beauty that first attracted him, he might have wavered after the freshness faded, but the chance that the Ma.s.sachusetts Light, Heat, and Traction Company would be obliged to discontinue its liberal dividends was so remote as to be negligible. And Wilkinson, at all events, was consistent.

Barnes, the stout butler, a.s.sisted him to remove his overcoat and took his hat, and he stepped unannounced into the drawing room.

John M. Hurd's drawing room reflected the substance of its master in so far that it appeared to represent lavish resources. In the rather dim light, the deep rose tapestry curtains, the really beautiful rugs on the highly polished floor, the heavy, stately furniture, and the big central crystal chandelier all made for dignity. Even the broad-framed pictures on the wall, although there were two or three old masters among them, looked above suspicion. Miss Hurd was seated near the window, talking to two young men who seemed on terms of informality in the house.

"Shall we have tea?" she asked, when her step-cousin had seated himself.

"By all means--but I hope you don't mean it literally," replied Wilkinson, promptly. "Tea, by all means, if necessary to preserve the conventionalities, but especially anything and everything else you like." He turned to Bennington Cole. "I feel rather proud of my success in this establishment, Benny. A year ago Isabel would have handed you out nothing except a couple of anemic sugar wafers with the cup; now you can get English m.u.f.fins and all kinds of sandwiches and eclairs--which is at least a little better."

"Congratulate you," said Cole, with a laugh.

"Oh, I haven't finished," Wilkinson went on. "The next step in my missionary movement will be a popular demand for chicken salad. That's a big forward step---you eat it with a fork--and from there it will be an easy gradation up the _carte du jour_ until finally I triumph in the introduction of real food, so that when you ask for tea in this house you will get a full portion of porterhouse steak and French fried potatoes. But don't think me hypercritical, Isabel," he added. "Even now I can usually manage to part from you without reeling, faint with hunger, down your front steps and collapsing at their feet--I should say foot."

"I'm extremely relieved to hear you say so," replied the girl.

The third young man, who alone of the three wore a frock coat, and who retained on his hand his left glove while his right was laid smoothly across his knee, now entered the conversation.

"You talk as though you were really hungry, Charlie," he said.

"Well, I am, rather," the other rejoined. "And I can tell you, Stan, that if you lived in my boarding house, you never could have completed that charming still-life effect of the platter of fish that I recently saw in your studio. You would have eaten your model before you could have finished the picture."

"Why don't you change your boarding house, Charlie, if it's so bad?"

Miss Hurd inquired.

"I did," her cousin replied. "Of boarding houses within my sadly circ.u.mscribed means there is a very wide but strictly numerical choice.

They are all exactly alike, you understand. I changed once, twice, twenty, forty times. I grew positively dizzy caroming from one inferior boarding house to another. You would have thought I was trying a peripatetic preventative for dyspepsia. Finally the mental strain of remembering where to go home at night became so irksome that I decided to leave bad enough alone and stay where I was--one eleven Mount Vernon Place--at the sign of the three aces. It's no worse, you see, than anywhere else--it's merely a matter of living down to my painfully limited income. But," he added thoughtfully, "I sincerely wish some philanthropist would put me to the trouble of moving again."

The two men laughed at Wilkinson's frank exposition, but his cousin frowned a little.

"I wish father would do something for you," she said. "There are so many things he could do if he chose."

"He was good enough to offer me a job as conductor on one of his street cars, the last time I mentioned the subject," the other responded cheerfully. "But I told him that the company's system of espionage was reputed to be so nearly perfect that I doubted whether I could make the position pay--that is, pay as it ought. And you know, Isabel," he added, "that with all due respect to my esteemed relation, he's exceedingly awkward to get anything out of. Can either of you gentlemen," he turned to the others, "suggest anything along these lines? I would be willing to pay a liberal commission."

"Well," said the painter, "if he wanted to buy a Caneletto cheap, I know where you could pick one up for him. It would rather damage my reputation to recommend him to buy it, but you could do it all right, Charlie. Guaranteed authentic by European experts--they're easily fixed. And if he didn't like the Caneletto, you could get him a very fair Franz Hals--by the same artist."

Miss Hurd, whose feelings had not been in the least lacerated by the reference to her parent's notable eccentricity of retentiveness, but who had been amused at the suggestion, interposed.

"I'm afraid it couldn't be done," she said. "Louis von Glauber pa.s.ses on every picture that father buys."

"That settles _that_, then," Pelgram rejoined.

"Well, Benny, anything to suggest?" Wilkinson inquired.

"I don't know," said Cole, slowly. The germ of an idea had flashed on him. "I don't know," he repeated. The impecunious one regarded him attentively.

"My dear Benny, an unconvincing prevarication is of less practical value than--" he began, but he was interrupted by the appearance of a young lady who came through the doorway.

The three men rose quickly, and even the languid face of Stanwood Pelgram took on a look of a little sharper interest than he had so far shown. From the tea table Miss Hurd cordially greeted the newcomer.

"Tea, Helen?" she asked. "You're quite late. What have you been doing?"

"Thank you, Isabel," the other replied. "Quite strong, and with sugar and lemon--both." She sat down and commenced to pull off her long gloves. "I've been helping Cousin Henrietta Lyons select wall papers for her new apartment. I still live, but I've had a very trying time."

"Was it so difficult?" Bennington Cole asked politely. He did not know her very well.

"Well," responded Miss Maitland, "I can think of nothing more difficult than selecting wall papers--excepting, perhaps, Cousin Henrietta Lyons.

As I picked out her papers, I think I'm ent.i.tled to abuse her," she explained with some feeling. "Wall papers in themselves are bad enough." She paused.

"Well, they ought to be," Wilkinson cheerfully put in, adroitly diverting the attack from Miss Lyons. "I understand that most of them are designed by individuals who have failed to succeed as sign painters on account of color-blindness, or by draughtsmen who have lost their positions because of the paramount influence of epilepsy on their work."

"I should estimate that they have about twenty-eight thousand samples at Heminway and Shipman's," the girl continued. "Cousin Henrietta possesses a fine old spirit of thoroughness which made it necessary for us to see them all. We sat on a red plush sofa while a truly affable young man kept flopping the sheets of samples over the back of an easel. That is, he was truly affable for an hour or two; after that he grew a little reticent. At first some of the samples interested me.

There was one design of a row of c.o.c.katoos, each one standing on a wreath of lilacs, that was fascinating, and I liked one that looked like a flock of nectarines hiding in the interstices of a steam radiator. The young man made encouraging suggestions at first, but at the last, scarcely,--although I was so nearly stupefied that I doubt whether I would have heard him even if he had said what he really thought." She took up her cup. "But the walk here did me a lot of good--I walked fast."

"Where your cousin made her mistake," Wilkinson observed, "was in going in for wall papers at all. She should have abandoned the idea of papering her walls, and retained our talented friend, Stanwood Pelgram, to paint them, instead. A splendid conception! How I should like to have attended the pirate view of Miss Lyons's flat, when the last coat of distemper had dried on the parlor ceiling and Stanwood had put the affectionate finishing touches on the decorative panel portrait of Lucretia Borgia in the oval above the kitchen stove! The whole thing would have been a magnificent and unusual symbol of the triumph of paint over paper--a new and vivid ill.u.s.tration of the practical value of true art."

"Oh, nonsense, Charlie!" said Pelgram, much annoyed at being made the rather vulnerable subject of Wilkinson's humor.

His tormentor was delighted at perceiving his victim writhe and went gayly on.

"But unhappily our Stanwood is so impractical. Probably he would have declined the commission. Atmospheric envelopes slowly en route to the dead letter office of dream pastels demand his whole attention.

Painting is cra.s.s; he mildly cameos. Tonal nuances--shades of imperceptible difference in the shadowy debatable land between things colored exactly alike--claim his earnest interpretation. When he rarely speaks, it is usually an important contribution to the world's artistic knowledge on some such subject as 'The Influence of Rubens'

Grandmother on his Portraits of his Second Wife' or 'The True Alma Mater of Alma Tadema.'"

The artist, whose round smooth face was pink with rage, almost choked, but was wholly unable to reply. That he should be made the gross b.u.t.t of a man such as Wilkinson was bad enough, but that this should take place in the presence of ladies--and especially of Helen Maitland--was almost unendurable.

Miss Maitland, seeing the flames approaching the magazine with alarming rapidity, hastily started a back-fire, adapting Wilkinson's style to her purpose with a success which--repartee not being her strongest point--astonished even herself.