“Of course,” added Oliver, “what the family would really like me to do is to get the Robbie Wallings to take them up. I suppose I could get round half a million of them if I could manage that.”
To all of which Montague replied, “I see.”
A great light had dawned upon him. So that was the way it was managed! That was why one paid thirty thousand a year for one’s apartments, and thirty thousand more for a girl’s clothes! No wonder it was better to spend Christmas week at the Eldridge Devons than to labour at one’s law books!
“One more question,” Montague went on. “Why are you introducing me to them?”
“Well,” his brother answered, “it won’t hurt you; you’ll find it amusing. You see, they’d heard I had a brother; and they asked me to bring you. I couldn’t keep you hidden for ever, could I?”
All this was while they were driving up town. The Evanses’ place was on Riverside Drive; and when Montague got out of the cab and saw it looming up in the semi-darkness, he emitted an exclamation of wonder. It was as big as a jail!
“Oh, yes, they’ve got room enough,” said Oliver, with a laugh. “I put this deal through for them—it’s the old Lamson palace, you know.”
They had the room; and likewise they had all the trappings of snobbery—Montague took that fact in at a glance. There were knee-breeches and scarlet facings and gold braid—marble balconies and fireplaces and fountains—French masters and real Flemish tapestry. The staircase of their palace was a winding one, and there was a white velvet carpet which had been specially woven for it, and had to be changed frequently; at the top of it was a white cashmere rug which had a pedigree of six centuries—and so on.
And then came the family: this tall, raw-boned, gigantic man, with weather-tanned face and straggling grey moustache—this was Jack Evans; and Mrs. Evans, short and pudgy, but with a kindly face, and not too many diamonds; and the Misses Evans,—stately and slender and perfectly arrayed. “Why, they’re all right!” was the thought that came to Montague.
They were all right until they opened their mouths. When they spoke, you discovered that Evans was a miner, and that his wife had been cook on a ranch; also that Anne and Mary had harsh voices, and that they never by any chance said or did anything natural.
They were escorted into the stately dining-room—Henri II., with a historic mantel taken from the palace of Fontainebleau, and four great allegorical paintings of Morning, Evening, Noon, and Midnight upon the walls. There were no other guests—the table, set for six, seemed like a toy in the vast apartment. And in a sudden flash—with a start of almost terror—Montague realized what it must mean not to be in Society. To have all this splendour, and nobody to share it! To have Henri II. dining-rooms and Louis XVI. parlours and Louis XIV. libraries—and see them all empty! To have no one to drive with or talk with, no one to visit or play cards with—to go to the theatre and the opera and have no one to speak to! Worse than that, to be stared at and smiled at! To live in this huge palace, and know that all the horde of servants, underneath their cringing deference, were sneering at you! To face that—to live in the presence of it day after day! And then, outside of your home, the ever widening circles of ridicule and contempt—Society, with all its hangers-on and parasites, its imitators and admirers!
And some one had defied all that—some one had taken up the sword and gone forth to beat down that opposition! Montague looked at this little family of four, and wondered which of them was the driving force in this most desperate emprise!
He arrived at it by a process of elimination. It could not be Evans himself. One saw that the old man was quite hopeless socially; nothing could change his big hairy hands or his lean scrawny neck, or his irresistible impulse to slide down in his chair and cross his long legs in front of him. The face and the talk of Jack Evans brought irresistibly to mind the mountain trail and the prospector’s pack-mule, the smoke of camp-fires and the odour of bacon and beans. Seventeen long years the man had tramped in deserts and mountain wildernesses, and Nature had graven her impress deep into his body and soul.
He was very shy at this dinner; but Montague came to know him well in the course of time. And after he had come to realize that Montague was not one of the grafters, he opened up his heart. Evans had held on to his mine when he had found it, and he had downed the rivals who had tried to take it away from him, and he had bought the railroads who had tried to crush him—and now he had come to Wall Street to fight the men who had tried to ruin his railroads. But through it all, he had kept the heart of a woman, and the sight of real distress was unbearable to him. He was the sort of man to keep a roll of ten-thousand-dollar bills in his pistol pocket, and to give one away if he thought he could do it without offence. And, on the other hand, men told how once when he had seen a porter insult a woman passenger on his line, he jumped up and pulled the bell-cord, and had the man put out on the roadside at midnight, thirty miles from the nearest town!
No, it was the women folks, he said to Montague, with his grim laugh. It didn’t trouble him at all to be called a “noovoo rich”; and when he felt like dancing a shakedown, he could take a run out to God’s country. But the women folks had got the bee in their bonnet. The old man added sadly that one of the disadvantages of striking it rich was that it left the women folks with nothing to do.
Nor was it Mrs. Evans, either. “Sarey,” as she was called by the head of the house, sat next to Montague at dinner; and he discovered that with the very least encouragement, the good lady was willing to become homelike and comfortable. Montague gave the occasion, because he was a stranger, and volunteered the opinion that New York was a shamelessly extravagant place, and hard to get along in; and Mrs. Evans took up the subject and revealed herself as a good-natured and kindly personage, who had wistful yearnings for mush and molasses, and flap-jacks, and bread fried in bacon-grease, and similar sensible things, while her chef was compelling her to eat paté de foie gras in aspic, and milk-fed guinea-chicks, and biscuits glacées Tortoni. Of course she did not say that at dinner,—she made a game effort to play her part,—with the result of at least one diverting experience for Montague.
Mrs. Evans was telling him what a dreadful place she considered the city for young men; and how she feared to bring her boy here. “The men here have no morals at all,” said she, and added earnestly, “I’ve come to the conclusion that Eastern men are naturally amphibious!”
Then, as Montague knitted his brows and looked perplexed, she added, “Don’t you think so?” And he replied, with as little delay as possible, that he had never really thought of it before.
It was not until a couple of hours later that the light dawned upon him, in the course of a conversation with Miss Anne. “We met Lady Stonebridge at luncheon to-day,” said that young person. “Do you know her?”