This Jack and the Other

by Edgar Fawcett

THIS JACK AND THE OTHER

By Edgar Fawcett

"COME in."

Griffith, as he spoke these words, reclined in a huge easy-chair, with a posture of great indolence, smoking a cigarette. His pretty studio, full of choice drapings, odd ornaments and unfinished sketches, looked, through one of its smaller windows, on the Academy of Design. Griffith loved that window. He used to say that if he could only get the right distance back from it, Fourth Avenue literally became for him the Grand Canal, while rattlings of carts and jinglings of street-cars mellowed into musical calls of gondoliers. He made some such observation now to his friend, Evan Mowbray, who had availed himself of the "Come in" to enter and stand staring at a very inchoate picture on an easel bathed in searching sunshine.

"Is this the tenth or eleventh time, Jack, that you've slandered the Palazzo San Marco? You know very well that it looks no more like the Academy of Design than Grace Church looks like Westminster Abbey. … Any news?"

"Yes," yawned Griffith; "I've painted for two hours."

"On that thing?" and Evan" slanted his cane-handle toward the still moist canvas.

" 'Thing' isn't polite, Evan."

"Oh, well, Jack," said his friend, turning away, "I dare say it's very splendid and original. But upon my word, it looks to me, for all the world, like a strip of mildewed wall-papering. Pray, what is the subject?"

Griffith threw away his cigarette and rose. "Oh, it's a study in color," he said, carelessly. "You never did know the merest alphabet of art, Evan."

"But you'd call it——"

"I'd call it—'m—well, I'd call it a Norseland sea-shore, lighted by a stormy sunset."

"Oh, really! But I——"

"Never mind." Griffith went to a table and took up an opened letter which lay there. "You asked me, my dear Evan, if there was any news. I've had this from my cousin Jack, down in Rio. He's utterly cleaned out again, and wants more help."

Evan, standing erect and handsome, with his close-cropped blond locks and his limpid blue eyes, scanned the letter, which was by no means long.

"I wouldn't give him another cent. He's always begging you to help him. And how many times have you sent him money, down there in Rio Janeiro?"

"Lots," muttered Griffith.

"Of course. And here are you, Jack——"

His friend paused, and Griffith, as it were, continued for him, with a rather weary smile on his dark, fresh, frank face:

"Here am I, Evan, you mean, with ten unsold pictures and nearly twice as many unpaid debts."

"It's your own fault, Jack. You will paint these extraordinary——"

"Masterpieces. Thanks. I take that as a compliment … Well, we were talking about poor Jack. He's my first cousin, you know, after all. We're both Jack Griffith, both named after that misanthropic old uncle of ours, who went out West years ago and has made a huge fortune there, it's rumored, among the gold mines or the silver ones—I never exactly learned which. He quarrelled with each of our dead fathers, and Jack and I, a few years ago, used to compare notes—family annals, as it were—and try to decide which of our fathers it was whom Uncle John hated the most. Jack was the eldest son of the eldest son, you know, and that always made him put on airs concerning our opulent uncle. He used to say that his father had once had the cool courage to tell Uncle John he'd cheated both his brothers in the distribution of the family inheritance."

"Perhaps he did," said Evan Mowbray, musingly.

Griffith bridled. "My dear Evan, please recollect that I reserve to myself the privilege of insulting my own relations." Then, with drowsy irony: "I shouldn't be surprised, though, if you were right. Only, the greater wrong, I'm nearly sure, was done to Jack's father. There was some business partnership between Uncle Ralph and Uncle John. Jack often referred to that; he knows twice as much about it as I do. … Upon my word, I wished he'd gone out there to Nevada, or wherever it is, and asked Uncle John for a hundred thousand or so as amends for his fraternal scampishness, instead of dancing down to Rio on a wild-goose chase after buried diamonds that were probably ten miles from the place in which his hare-brained companions believed them."

"And now, Jack," said Evan, with a sombre look of reprimand, "you know that you shouldn't give this scapegoat kinsman another dime. Promise me you will not?" And Evan, who dearly loved and admired his friend, laid a hand on Griffith's shoulder.

"Lord save us," was the gentle and mournful answer, "I haven't got many more dimes to send. I suppose that as long as I have any, though, I will send." Here the young artist glanced toward the easel that upbore his latest landscape. He was very well aware that Evan considered it a daub; but that knowledge did not alter his own conviction that it was a masterpiece of "symphonic" and "symbolic" impressionism.

"We somehow never get on, nowadays. We need only talk with one another five minutes to find ourselves fighting like cat and dog."

Griffith said this in his easy, dreamy way, several hours later, amid the music and babble of a ball at Sherry's. He looked very handsome, though a trifle worried and fatigued. Evening-dress always became his olive, oval, face; the white tie at his throat seemed to deepen the soft brilliancy of his peculiar, dusky eyes.

"I never saw but one man who had eyes at all like yours," the lady to whom he now spoke had once told him. "That was Edwin Booth, whose eyes were a kind of golden black. Yours are smaller, and haven't the same trick of occasional metallic splendor. But you ought, nevertheless, to be proud of the resemblance."

She used to say things like this to him in the early days of their intimacy. But latterly, as Griffith put it, she was forever scolding him, and "getting up rows." Personally, she was very winsome and elegant, a blonde, with the most delightful wild-rose coloring. She carried her slender figure so that all its willowy curves made the nicest harmonious interplay. Her name was Mrs. Rochester; she had married at an early age, and now, though scarcely thirty, was a widow, rich, courted, with a position that hundreds of her own sex envied her.

"You're shockingly rude," she murmured to Griffith. "It's lucky no one heard what you've just said, or I should have been compelled to quarrel with you."

"But you're always quarrelling with me," moaned Griffith.

"I mean—seriously."

"I've never known it to be any other way, I'm sure. You wouldn't speak to me for six weeks, you know."

"I supposed that was settled, Jack. Besides, I did speak to you—more or less."

"A good deal less than more. I lived on snubs, like a dog on bones. And they were pretty bare bones, too. … Will you dance? And I'll tell you, while we're dancing, just how you wrung my soul."

"I'm so angry that I wouldn't," murmured Mrs. Rochester, "if you didn't dance remarkably well."

"Oh, you've told me that before, and I always suspect that you mean it to give me a kind of dig in the ribs——"

"Jack!" They were moving about the floor, now. People looked at them and said, "What a nice pair they make!—both so handsome!" Then whispers were exchanged. "Why doesn't she marry him?" and "Has he asked her?" and "Good gracious, he's horribly poor, nowadays, you know," and "They say she keeps on refusing him once every week, regularly, by the day and the time of the clock."

But these were only the airy fatuities of gossip. Griffith had always told himself that Sara Rochester would laugh in his face if he ever dared to propose marriage. He was all very well to dance with, and to fight with, and to call on at the last minute for one of her nice little dinners, when somebody else couldn't come and had left that vacuum which society, no less than nature, abhors. … But ask her to marry him! Why, she'd tell him he was crazy; that was all it would be. And instead of getting on together as they did, now and then being partners at the Delmonico and Sherry germans, now and then meeting in Tuxedo at a club-house ball, now and then staying at the same country-house and behaving "chummy" to one another during the Meadowbrook hunts—now and then, in short, reaping solid enjoyment from each other's company—instead of all this, Griffith had solemnly mused, it would just be the end of everything with the dear little woman, and some other fellow would step in, and he'd get a dazzling, inscrutable smile the next time he spoke to her at an Assembly or a Patriarchs' or any other confounded place, and she'd glide off from him on the other fellow's arm, and there would be an end of his treasured intimacy with the sweetest and loveliest woman in the town,—not to mention all other towns on the habitable globe.

" 'Dig in the ribs,' Jack, I will not stand," said Mrs. Rochester, while they glided along together. "You know I will not. …"

"Of course I do," sighed Griffith, as he danced, with his slow, capable step. "I'd like to see any man dare to do it I'd … well, I'd kill him here in this ballroom."

He heard her irrepressible laugh bubble up in the region of his right shoulder. "How dare you? I wasn't thinking of that. I meant your phrase. … Why will you talk in such vulgar style? you, who tell me that you're a poet-painter or a painter-poet—which is it?"

"Both—when I'm with you."

"I began to-night by lecturing you."

"Yes; I know. Scalping me."

"You're wasting your time scandalously. You've got an idea that you can paint in a new, astonishing fashion. You caught it from some of those artists you saw last year in Paris. You did some really good work before that. If you'd gone on, being industrious and sincere in your own line of accomplishment, and not drifted into all sorts of lazy habits both before then and since then, you might——"

"Heavens! Do spare me!" entreated Griffith. He had his revenge an instant later. He paused in the dance with his most genial bow, and placed his partner just at the side of a certain ravaged widower, Mr. Vanderdecken, whose attentions he knew that Sara Rochester almost loathed. …

"I saw you commit your act of dastardly desertion," said Evan Mowbray to him, as they left the ball together, a little while before the beginning of the german. "Instead of aggravating that woman as you're constantly doing, Jack, why on earth don't you ask her to marry you?"

They were walking side by side along the still, starlit avenue.

"As if she would, Evan! Besides, I don't aggravate her. She's forever nagging at me."

" 'Nagging' is beautiful, Jack, to say of one's lady-love."

"She isn't my lady-love, as you romantically put it. She'd no more accept me than the man in the moon—if there were one. … Besides," Griffith added, gravely, "I hope I've too much self-respect to ask her. Everybody'd say—you know what everybody'd say, Evan."

"Damn what everybody'd say," retorted Mowbray, stoutly. "You've been awfully fond of her for three years, and she … why, the 'nagging' you speak of, old boy, only means how fond she is of you!"

"It's too late for Delmonico's, isn't it?" said Griffith, as they neared that far-famed inn. "Come across Madison Square to my diggings, Ev, and I'll give you——"

"Not a drop more, I've had two glasses of champagne and a slice of canvas-back, and I'll be sworn——"

"Oh, well, don't swear or be sworn," said Griffith, drowsily. "How nice that Farragut statue of St. Gaudens's looks under the electrics, doesn't it? There's an artist, Ev. … So you will come? I'll take your arm through the park. So dangerous, don't you know? Tramps and sandbaggers, and all that sort of thing. It's only a bottle of very old Scotch, which my dear friend, Algy Gladwin, sent me over from London last month. There were six. If I'm not mistaken," he added, dryly, "you drank the other five——"

"I, Jack! How outrageous of you!"

"——With my assistance, after balls, dinners and other pow-wows like the present."

"You may well say 'with my assistance,' " grumbled Mowbray. "As I perceive," he added, in amicable sarcasm, "that you're grossly intoxicated, I'll see you across the Park to the stoop of your residence."

He did more. As Griffith turned up the lights in his studio a letter caught his eye, lying on a little dark table where his mail was usually placed.

"Another dunning screed, I suppose." The envelope gave a spiteful crackle as he tore it open.

"Your fire hasn't quite gone out yet, Jack," said Mowbray. "I see some embers there, and I know where you keep your wood. …"

"Evan!"

"Eh? Behind that folderol Japanese curtain, isn't it? I'll just——"

"Evan!"

Griffith had caught his friend's wrist. With the other disengaged hand he lifted a letter high, so that the two fresh-lit gas-burners could strike it. Then, flutteringly, he gave the letter to Mowbray. He himself flung his form into an arm-chair.

"Read, Ev, read."

"Read what?" came the half dazed reply.

"That—that! Uncle John's dead, out in Nevada, and he's left me two millions. Some lawyers there write to some lawyers here. There can't be any mistake. Read!"

"I wonder how people will act," said Griffith to himself, quite late on the following afternoon. He had taken for granted that everything would get into the papers, sooner or later, but he hadn't been prepared for the perfectly flamboyant account of his new inheritance with which three or four journals had greeted him while busied over his coffee and egg. "Confound their calling me a second-rate painter!" he muttered. This was a stab whose wound even last night's benign tidings could not properly salve. It meant a very sharp thorn under a very big rose.

Later came talks with the lawyers downtown. Griffith signed a few papers, and tried to look abstracted and semi-indifferent. All the while he felt either as if his feet were a pair of wings or else as if his arms were. When he got uptown again he remembered that he had a certain sum in a bank there, which only yesterday had seemed to him like a snowdrift under the spell of a vigorous thaw. Now he went to the bank and drew a fairly large check with wholly altered feelings. In a week or so, the lawyers had suavely told him, he would have so much "ready money" that the affair of its prompt yet judicious investment might prove a trifle embarrassing.

"I suppose I'll have lots of fun watching how people behave," he mused, as he strolled along the Avenue, past the marble majesties of the Manhattan Club and the brand-new altitudes of the Waldorf. "Here comes Doddridge the multi-millionaire. He generally gives me a nod about two inches deep. I wonder what he'll do now."

Mr. Doddridge bowed so appreciably and beamed so sunnily that Griffith half expected him to stop and reach forth a hand. "Oh, money, money," he murmured below his mustache. "What's that thing I learned in college? Aurea sacra famem. … No, I'm afraid that isn't right. I never could quote a line of Latin right. … Here's the Effinghams'. I'll drop in; it's their big tea; the awning's up, and all these carriages are threatening to smash each other; yes, this must be the day of their pow-wow, and I'm sure I'm asked. So here goes."

He knew a great many people in the thronged drawing-rooms. Everybody's bow was somehow different from of old—more interested, more animated. He spoke to several ladies with whom he was but slightly acquainted, and found that they treated him with a sort of repressed astonishment not exempt from a certain feverish and novel cordiality. Finally, he came face to face with Mrs. Rochester.

"In mercy's name," she faltered, "what are you doing here?"

"I don't know that I'm doing anything here in mercy's name," he answered. "A fellow usually doesn't, does he, at these afternoon crushes? Unless you mean," he added, meekly, "that so many women come to them and so few men——"

"I mean nothing of the sort, Jack. I've heard, you understand."

"M—yes. I thought you had. Isn't it jolly?"

She gave him a quick, severe glance, lowering her eyes the next instant.

"It may be jolly enough, but you might have the good taste to think so in private."

"In private?"

"Certainly. If you haven't any respect for the memory of an uncle who's behaved so generously to you, you might at least cultivate the appearance of some. Your being here like this is too awful. For a year, certainly, you shouldn't be seen out, and here you are, without a scrap of mourning, on the very day after you've heard of your uncle's death."

Griffith gave a forlorn start. "By Jove! I forgot all about it!" Then he pursued, plaintively, "But, you see, I've never even set eyes on him."

"Do hush!" grimly commanded Mrs. Rochester. "People are listening to every word you say. This is so exactly like you. Upon my word——"

"There, now," he broke in, with great sadness, "you're going to scold again! But I suppose you're right this time."

"This time!" she bristled.

"I'll—I'll cut—excuse me, I'll go straight away. I'll go and buy black studs and a 'weeper' for my hat, and all that sort of thing. I'm so glad you told me. Nobody else did."

"Nobody else cared—I mean, knew you well enough to care," frowned Mrs. Rochester. "Now, for the sake of decency, slip at once from the house."

"Of course I will—of course," stammered poor Griffith. "But I can drop in on you this evening, can't I, at say nine or——?"

"I'm dining out, and going afterward to the Poughkeepsies' ball," came her cold response.

"The Poughkeepsies' ball—yes; I was going there myself. But now I—yes, of course; good-by. …" And Griffith, with a suppressed sigh at the glacial glance she shot toward him, steered himself miserably out of the rooms.

He quickly left the house likewise. "Of course," he meditated, "I've made the biggest kind of blunder. She's right; I begin to think she's nearly always right—except about my pictures. They're not the daubs she's more than hinted they are. Now that I can paint with glorious leisure, I'll achieve such a masterpiece that she'll have to knock under and admit she was wrong. What fun to stand by and watch her face while she gives in, lowers her colors, and all that!"

Somewhat later this same evening, he appeared at his club in decorous mourning garb. It chanced that only a few of his intimate friends were present, though the big rooms were somewhat crowded. The men whom he knew well shook hands with him and said cordially congratulatory things. That was all in the proper course of affairs, but soon he had evidence of striking change. Men who had forgotten for weeks to bow to him came up and genially gripped his hand. One man, whom he had cut because he believed him to be a cad (possessing somewhat powerful proof of it), approached with a face wrinkled into the most obsequious of smiles. A notorious snob, of great wealth and intensely exclusive ideas, bowed to him with radiant affability. The pompous and enormously wealthy Mr. Quackenboss crossed the room and shook him smilingly by the hand. Van Courtlandt Van Wagenen, who rarely spoke to anyone out of his own little côterie of airy plutocrats, actually laid a hand on his shoulder and called him "my dear boy," and spoke of their two mothers having been second cousins. … And so it went on, to the infinite amusement of Griffith.

He left the club that night in a rather melancholy mood, however. "What a world! what a world!" he cogitated, while stepping into a cab at the club-door. "I'm learning a lesson in human nature that might turn an angel into a satyr! … Well, anyhow, there's one human being I believe in, and to-morrow I'll go and tell her that I'm able to ask her if she'll marry me, and that I'd never have asked her unless I could have done it with the certainty that nobody would call me a fortune-hunter. … I wonder what she'll say. … No, I don't wonder a bit. I'm sure she'll stop scolding me, once and for all, and—consent to be Mrs. Jack Griffith." … Then, with a qualm of doubt, he pursued: "Well, if I'm not precisely sure, I'm at least devilish hopeful!"

But on the morrow he was confronted by bitter disappointment. Mrs. Rochester received him with icy repose.

"Oh, good Lord!" he lamented; "haven't you got over that yet?"

"Got over what yet, if you please?"

"Why, what I did yesterday. Look at this get-up." And Griffith opened both arms, glancing down at his person. "I'm a perfect crow of blackness. The raven's wing isn't a circumstance to me."

"Oh, I had forgotten your dreadful gaucherie," said Mrs. Rochester, with the tips of her lips. "I was thinking——" and she paused, with a sharp sigh.

"Well?" he queried.

"Oh," she suddenly cried, "the idea of your having all that money! It will ruin you, Jack! You're not fit for it!"

"Thanks; thanks awfully."

"Now, don't look as if I'd insulted you."

"I'll try my best to look otherwise," he returned, with grim meekness.

"You know that I'm right," she protested, her agitation pricking through her coldness. "What on earth will you ever do with all that money except be horribly extravagant with it? Frankly, I must tell you that I believe it will lead you into all sorts of follies."

"What kinds of follies?" asked Griffith, studying the gloss on one of his boots, and at the same time playing automatically with his watch-chain.

"Oh, I don't mean—dissipations. You're above those, I hope."

"But, follies. You mean follies?"

"Yes."

Griffith raised his eyes. "Would you call it a folly," he said, "if I asked you to be my wife? That was the first one I thought of when the news of my altered luck had fully dawned upon me."

Her face flushed and then paled. She bit her lip, and slowly yet excitedly answered him.

"I'm an unpurchasable folly, if you please. You can't buy me."

"Oh, Sara!" He rose, feeling so hurt that his heart weighed, for an instant, like a lump of lead in his breast. Without knowing it, he plunged both hands deep into his trousers' pockets. It was just like him to reveal a romantic emotion in this solidly prosaic style.

"I didn't want to ask you before," he went on, "because I felt that people would call me a fortune-hunting kind of fellow. I—I've been horribly fond of you for over two years, and I supposed you might have seen it. You're rich, you know, and I didn't want——"

She broke in with a light, curt laugh.

"So, now that you can make people think I take you for your money, you're perfectly willing to ask me. But how about my feelings as regards what people will say? I haven't two millions, or anything like that sum. It isn't pleasant for me to realize that if I married you everybody would accredit me with sordid motives."

Rarely made angry by any event, habituated to many "scoldings" (as he was wont to call them) from this woman, whom, in his odd, placid way, he inestimably treasured, Griffith now felt his choler rise and kindle.

"Oh, then, good-morning," he said, more sternly by far than she had ever heard him speak. "Good-morning and—good-by."

"Good-by," she echoed; and with the perverse cruelty that some women can show, when the dictates of caprice grow stronger than those of equity and fair-mindedness, she let her voice cuttingly say, just as he crossed the threshold of her room:

"Purse-proud already. A fine beginning."

He not only heard the words, but they dealt him a rankling wound. Going home to his chambers, he kept hearing them in his brain, and entering his studio he seemed to find them waiting him there, like a presence disembodied yet vocal.

But he had not much time to heed their taunting iteration, for his eye chanced to light on a letter, which he raised from the table where it lay. The name of his new lawyers—Atterbury, Chalmers and Wentworth—gleamed from a corner of the envelope.

"Devil take it," he murmured aloud, "I hope they don't want me down there again to-day. I'm in no state to go, after——"

By this time he had torn open the envelope, and unfolded two formidable pages of type- writing. He sank lazily into his favorite arm-chair and began to read. On a sudden he gave a low, pained cry.

"I've knocked three times, Jack," said Evan Mowbray, quite a good while afterward, "and got no answer. So I concluded to try if the door was locked or not. … Why, how pale you are! What's happened?"

"This," said Griffith. Seated inertly in the arm-chair, he handed his friend the lawyers' letter.

Evan ran his eye over the first page. "Whew!" he ejaculated. Then he submitted the second page to a like process.

"Jack! Jack! This is too terrible!"

"It's a good deal of a knock-down," said Griffith, rising and stretching his limbs. "But I suppose I've got to stand it. Those idiots needn't have taken me for the other Jack Griffith down in Rio, if their wits hadn't been wool-gathering. I've a good mind to sue them for—breach of promise? No; that isn't it. What is it I could sue them for Ev? You see, they admit themselves that the name specified in the will of the late John Griffith was, all the while, the name of the son of Ralph Griffith, his eldest brother. I wasn't even mentioned. The whole two millions are left to Rio Janeiro Jack, and not to your humble friend, New York Jack. 'In recompense for a great wrong which I once did my brother, Ralph,' reads the document, 'I will and bequeath to his only son, John,' etc., etc. And they had that full quotation out of the document sent them from Nevada, and yet they committed this infernal blunder! Well," finished Griffith, with a bleak laugh that somehow ended melodiously, "I suppose I've got to stand it."

Evan went up to him and wrung his hand. "I think you're standing it magnificently. I should go crazy. Nearly every other man would whom I know. At least, I mean, for a time."

"What earthly sense would there be in going crazy, Evan,—even for a time? … No," he added, with soft rumination, "I'll try to keep sane, and watch how those fellows act to me there at the club. The papers will get hold of it, of course, just as they got hold of it before. And I'll be quietly hooted at, just as I was flattered and felicitated."

The papers did get hold of it, and published with what seemed to Griffith agonizing detail, long accounts of the whole ridiculous error. But the prophesied "hooting" was very politely concealed, if it indeed ever took place. A certain kind of sarcastic compassion was more than once manifest, however, and this hurt Griffith worse than open "chaffing." After a day or two he found himself seated before his easel, powerless to paint, and murmuring half aloud, after every two or three ineffectual strokes of the brush, words like:—

"By Jove, I didn't know it could be so deucedly unpleasant to have people feel sorry for you!"

All the while he was thinking of her, and wondering whether she had felt sorry, in the really right and generous way. His anger had entirely fled; he never could stay angry very long with anyone; his nature was too replete with loving-kindness for that. And when a short note came to him in her hand- writing, bidding him "drop in that afternoon between four and five," he kissed it, and smiled a little over it, and shed several authentic tears over it, and obeyed its rather unsympathetic summons.

Mrs. Rochester, when they met, gave him her hand. He pressed it in silence, and as she withdrew it she burst out laughing.

"Jack, I'm awfully sorry," she said.

"Really? I—I thought you'd be glad."

"Glad? Why, what on earth do you take me for?"

He hesitated, and then answered, in his innocent, amiable way: "For the most charming woman in the world."

He saw her eyes close, her lips quiver. "And you," she suddenly exclaimed, "are the most aggravating, exasperating—angel! There!"

She swept away from him, and he followed her, and slipped in front of her and saw that she was weeping.

"Oh, Sara," he faltered, "you are sorry for me!"

"Hush!"

She caught his hand. "I insulted you the other day! I ought to have been ashamed of myself!"

This dizzied him.

"Look out, now," he ventured, in solemn remonstrance. "You don't mean that You're—you're giving yourself away. You'll regret it afterward, I'm afraid, and then you'll scold me like fury if I ever remind you that you said it."

She wheeled full round so that she fronted him, with all the sweet bewitching grace of her tearful eyes and tremulous frame.

"Jack, I want to give myself away! That's why I wrote you to come. I want to give myself away to you! Jack, will you be my husband?"

"I wish the other Jack all kind of happiness with those two millions," said Griffith that night to Evan Mowbray at the club. "I don't want them any more. I had them, you know, for about twenty-four hours or so, and I feel that I got a vast amount of good out of them. I only hope that ne'er-do-well cousin of mine will be able to say as much!"