WHEN Esther entered the dining room next morning she found her uncle already seated at the breakfast table reading a letter. The remainder of the mail brought up from the post office by Varunas lay beside his plate unopened. The letter seemed to be interesting, for although he looked up to bid her good-morning, he returned to the reading immediately. When he reached the foot of the last page he muttered an exclamation; shook his head, and, turning back to the beginning, read the letter through once more.
“What is it, Uncle Foster?” she asked, after a moment. “Anything important?”
He nodded, absently. “Eh?” he queried. “Important?... Why, yes, I guess so—maybe.”
“It isn’t bad news? Nothing has gone wrong with the lawsuit?”
“Eh? No, no. Nothing to do with that. It is.... Humph! I’ll tell you about it while we eat. How are you feeling this morning? All shipshape and ready for the day’s run, eh?”
“Yes. I am feeling very well, thank you.”
Something in her tone caused him to glance up quickly. He gave her an appraising look.
“Humph!” he grunted. “Why, yes, you do seem to be pretty well up to the top notch, that’s a fact. I haven’t seen as much color in your cheeks or snap in your eye for more than a week. What has done it? Been dreaming about singing to all those good-looking Frenchmen, have you?”
She laughed. She was in good spirits, wonderfully so. The color he had mentioned deepened under his gaze.
“Oh, no!” she replied, lightly. “Not exactly that.”
“Must be something. Did you and that Griffin have an especially nice evening?”
This was perilously near the truth. A part of the evening he mentioned had been anything but pleasant, but for hours before falling asleep she had been thinking of Bob’s great news and what it would mean to both of them. Paris alone—or with only Mrs. Carter—had not been too alluring, in spite of its glorious fulfillment of her hope. But Paris with Bob—or at least with Bob not too far away—that was different.
She laughed again, to cover her confusion. She would tell him what Bob intended doing, she had made up her mind to tell him, but before she could speak the maid came in with the breakfast and while she was there telling was, of course, impossible.
And as soon as the maid had gone Foster Townsend began speaking of another subject, that of the letter he had been reading. He picked up the closely written sheets and tapped their edges upon the table.
“Funny how things come around,” he observed, rubbing his beard with his free hand. “Yes, it is so! I read once in a story-book—I don’t read many, haven’t got time to waste on yarns that a man makes up out of his head, but I do read once in a while one—I remember reading how a fellow found a letter his mother, or his best girl or somebody, had written years and years before, and when he read it this time the book said it came to him like a voice out of the past.... Humph! A voice out of the past. That’s a pretty good way to put it, seems to me. And that’s about what this letter here is,” rapping the table with the papers in his hand. “Here’s a man I used to know twenty—no, nearer thirty years ago. He did me a big favor then. He lent me money to go on with a deal that started me up the ladder. I didn’t have a cent scarcely. He was only a few years older, but well-off already, and not a relation or anything, not even a friend, at least I hadn’t counted him that. He let me have the money because he said he believed I had the right stuff in me, and he wouldn’t have charged me a penny interest if I hadn’t made him. I swore then if ever I got the chance to do him a good turn I’d do it no matter what it was. And now—when for all I knew he might be dead with the grass growing over him—here he is writing me to do that good turn. Humph! A voice from the past. Yes, sir! that is what it is. Queer enough!”
Esther was interested. For the moment she forgot Paris—even Bob Griffin and Paris.
“Who is he, Uncle Foster?” she asked.
“Eh? Oh, he’s a man named Covell—Seymour Covell. When I knew him he was head of a meat and provision firm on Commercial Street in Boston. Used to take contracts to fit out ships and all that. Later on he went out to Chicago and got in on the ground floor with a crowd that were killing hogs and beef cattle on a big scale. He is with ’em yet, judging from this letter, commodore of the fleet or something like that.”
“And he writes to you for money?”
Townsend laughed aloud. “Money!” he repeated. “He must be a millionaire a dozen times over. No, no! he doesn’t want money. He wants me to help him with his son, a young fellow in the twenties. Had a kind of hard time with him, I guess. Here, you read yourself what he says. It will save time. Read it out loud.”
He handed her the letter. It was a long one and she read it through, aloud, as requested. It began by calling the writer to Foster Townsend’s memory, speaking of old acquaintanceship and the like. Seymour Covell, it appeared, was a widower with one child, a son, now twenty-seven years of age. The requested favor had to do with the latter.
“I have had a devil of a time with him,” Covell had written. “He and I don’t seem to pull well together, for some reason or other. Maybe it is partly my fault, I don’t know. While his mother lived she spoiled him, I guess, and I probably did my share. I don’t think he is bad; naturally I wouldn’t. He has had the best of everything I could buy for him, expensive preparatory school—he was fired from one but he graduated from another—college, although he did not finish that. He thought he wanted to be an artist, paint pictures, you know.”
“Like old ’Lisha’s grandson,” broke in Townsend, with a sardonic chuckle. “Regular disease, that seems to be. Go ahead, Esther.”
His niece continued her reading. “‘So,’ she read, ‘I sent him to Paris, where they teach that sort of thing. He learned a lot over there, but not altogether about pictures. Then he studied in New York. He paints some, when he feels like it, but he hasn’t sold anything yet. For the past six months he has been here at home in Chicago, and that isn’t doing him any good. He isn’t too well, but he isn’t sick either. I am about at my wit’s end and I have thought of you, Townsend. When I knew you you were a real man and, from what I have taken pains to find out about you lately, I judge you have reached the position I expected you to reach. I wonder if you can’t find something for Seymour to do. Yes, he is named after me; his mother started in to handicap him at the very beginning, you see. I wonder if you couldn’t get him some sort of a job—never mind what or what it pays—in your part of the country. Something that would keep him out of doors a part of the time and build him up, and, more than all, get him away from the hothouse crowd he is traveling with. If you could it would be worth more money than I have got—to him and to me. I don’t care much what it is, not at first. Get him out of the city and away from city tricks and manners. If you cared to let him come and visit you a week or two in the beginning, so that you might look him over and size him up, that, I should think, would be a good idea. Under a man like you, a driver, and as good a judge of men and the best handler of men I ever knew, we might make something of him yet. God knows I want him to be worth while. What do you think? Give me your advice, at least.’”
There was more, but not much. The letter was written upon paper bearing the name of one of the largest packing-houses in the country and was signed, “Your old-time friend, Seymour T. Covell.”
Esther, having finished her reading, looked at her uncle. He was, apparently, thinking deeply, pulling at his beard, his brows drawn together.
“How strange that he should write like this—to you,” she said. “About his personal affairs, and his own son. Did you use to know this Mr. Covell very well, Uncle Foster?”
“No-o—and yes. I didn’t know him so very long, but for a time we were pretty close together, considering that he had made his start and I was just trying to make mine. It is queer that he should think enough of my opinion to ask me to help him in such a private job as managing his own boy. Losing his mind, is he, do you think?”
“I guess not. This letter doesn’t read as if he were. I think he means just what he says when he calls you the best handler of men he ever knew. He must have known a great many men—and big men, too. It is a wonderful tribute to you, his remembering you and asking your help and advice, after all these years. What will you do, Uncle Foster?”
Townsend was plainly puzzled and concerned.
“I give it up,” he said. “What can I do? I might get the young fellow a job in Boston, with some of my friends up there, maybe; but I should hardly like to recommend a chap I didn’t know to any of them. His own father’s recommendations aren’t too strong, if you read between the lines.”
“That is true. And, besides, Mr. Covell doesn’t ask you to find him work in a city. He asks if there isn’t something which will take him away from cities.”
“So he does. And what is there down here for Seymour Covell’s son? I doubt if digging clams or hauling lobster pots would suit him, or his father. And,” with a chuckle, “I doubt just as much if he could fill either bill if he tried. I can’t do anything, as I see it now. And yet—yet, by the Lord Harry, I hate to say no to the man who never said it to me.... I don’t know what to do—or say. Wish I did. See any light through the fog, Esther?”
She was rereading portions of the long letter.
“He suggests that his son might come here for a short visit,” she reminded him. “He seems to think that, after you had seen him, and ‘sized him up’ as he says, you might be better able to judge what could be done—if anything. Why don’t you invite him here for a few weeks? It looks to me as if you would have to do that, at least.”
He nodded.
“Afraid you’re right,” he agreed. “I shall have to, of course. Humph! It’s a blasted nuisance, isn’t it. I don’t want company—strangers—around the house—just now. I want to have you all to myself the short time you are going to be here. I can’t spare a minute of you; haven’t got many left. You’ll be sailing in a fortni’t.”
She had an inspiration. She leaned toward him, eagerly.
“Why, Uncle Foster!” she cried. “I tell you what to do! Write and ask him to visit you, but plan to have him arrive just after I have gone. You will want some one here then, some one to talk to and keep you interested. You won’t be half as lonely and I shall feel ever so much more contented, knowing that you aren’t sole alone—or with no one but Nabby and Varunas. Come; that is a good idea, isn’t it?”
He hesitated; then he nodded once more. “Good as any, I guess,” he admitted. “I don’t know but I’d just as soon be alone as with a young cub I’m supposed to keep a weather eye on and that, nine chances out of ten, I’ll hate the sight of from the minute I lay eyes on him.... But I’ll write and ask him. I’ll write now, to-day.”
She was turning over the sheets of Covell’s letter. Now she uttered an exclamation.
“Here is something else,” she exclaimed. “Something we haven’t read. A postscript, written on the back of this last page. It says: ‘I think you will like the boy, when you meet him. He has a knack of making people like him at first sight. When they are the right people it is a valuable knack.’ There, Uncle Foster, you see! You won’t hate him, you will like him. I am ever so glad he is coming.”
Just then there was a knock at the door leading from the kitchen. Varunas appeared with a yellow envelope in his hand.
“Telegram for you, Cap’n Foster,” he announced. “Seth Canby’s boy just fetched it up. Hope ’tain’t no bad news. Nobody dead or nothin’ like that.”
Townsend took the envelope. “What do you mean by ‘nothing like that’?” he observed. “I never saw anything like being dead except being dead, did you, Varunas?”
Nabby, who had followed her husband into the room, sniffed.
“You never saw him about gettin’ up time of a winter mornin’, then, Cap’n Foster,” she declared. “If he ain’t dead then he’s a turrible good imitation.”
Foster Townsend had torn open a yellow envelope. Now he threw the telegram upon the table and rose from his chair.
“Bah!” he snorted, disgustedly. “Can’t they let me alone for two days running? I’ve got to go to Ostable this minute. Lawyer business again.... Well, what must be must. The train has gone long ago so I shall have to drive. Want to go with me, Esther?”
His niece shook her head. “I can’t, Uncle Foster,” she answered. “I promised Mr. Colton I would attend a meeting of the Welfare Society. Mrs. Wheeler and Mrs. Snow and ever so many more are to be there. They are thinking of getting up another entertainment of some kind to raise money. Of course I can’t take part because I am going abroad, but I must help as long as I can.”
Foster Townsend sniffed. “All right,” he said. “If you promised you’ll have to be there, I suppose. Well, I can’t stand here. Hitch up the team, Varunas.” Then thrusting the packet of unopened mail matter into his pocket, he added, “I’ll read this after I get there. There’ll be plenty of time. I never broke my back chasing over to that law office yet that I didn’t have to wait for somebody else who hadn’t taken the trouble to break his.... Good-by, Esther.”
He kissed her and hurried through the library to the hatrack in the hall. She called after him.
“You are going to write Mr. Covell and invite his son for that visit, aren’t you, Uncle Foster?” she asked.
“Yes,” he shouted in reply. “Got to, so far as I can see. I’ll write him to-day, from over there. I’ll have time enough for that, too, unless there has been a miracle and the whole crowd is on time for once.”
After he had gone Esther remembered that she had not told him of Bob’s proposed European trip. She would do it that evening. She wondered what he would say. A suggestion of Nabby Gifford’s, made on the morning following Bob’s last call but one, had lingered in her mind, although she had done her best to forget it. It was silly, it was outrageous, it was everything but sane and sensible, but she had not been able to dismiss it entirely from her thoughts. What would her uncle say when he learned that Bob Griffin was to be in Paris during her stay there? Well, she would soon know, for she would tell him as soon as he returned.