“But you needn't talk of it like THAT!” insisted the mother, plaintively. “It's not—it's not—”
“No, it's not,” said Mary. “I know that!”
“How did they happen to ask you to dinner?” Mr. Vertrees inquired, uneasily. “'Stextrawdn'ry thing!”
“Climbers' hospitality,” Mary defined it. “We were so very cordial and easy! I think Mrs. Sheridan herself might have done it just as any kind old woman on a farm might ask a neighbor, but it was Miss Sheridan who did it. She played around it awhile; you could see she wanted to—she's in a dreadful hurry to get into things—and I fancied she had an idea it might impress that Lamhorn boy to find us there to-night. It's a sort of house-warming dinner, and they talked about it and talked about it—and then the girl got her courage up and blurted out the invitation. And mamma—” Here Mary was once more a victim to incorrigible merriment. “Mamma tried to say yes, and COULDN'T! She swallowed and squealed—I mean you coughed, dear! And then, papa, she said that you and she had promised to go to a lecture at the Emerson Club to-night, but that her daughter would be delighted to come to the Big Show! So there I am, and there's Mr. Jim Sheridan—and there's the clock. Dinner's at seven-thirty!”
And she ran out of the room, scooping up her fallen furs with a gesture of flying grace as she sped.
When she came down, at twenty minutes after seven, her father stood in the hall, at the foot of the stairs, waiting to be her escort through the dark. He looked up and watched her as she descended, and his gaze was fond and proud—and profoundly disturbed. But she smiled and nodded gaily, and, when she reached the floor, put a hand on his shoulder.
“At least no one could suspect me to-night,” she said. “I LOOK rich, don't I, papa?”
She did. She had a look that worshipful girl friends bravely called “regal.” A head taller than her father, she was as straight and jauntily poised as a boy athlete; and her brown hair and her brown eyes were like her mother's, but for the rest she went back to some stronger and livelier ancestor than either of her parents.
“Don't I look too rich to be suspected?” she insisted.
“You look everything beautiful, Mary,” he said, huskily.
“And my dress?” She threw open her dark velvet cloak, showing a splendor of white and silver. “Anything better at Nice next winter, do you think?” She laughed, shrouding her glittering figure in the cloak again. “Two years old, and no one would dream it! I did it over.”
“You can do anything, Mary.”
There was a curious humility in his tone, and something more—a significance not veiled and yet abysmally apologetic. It was as if he suggested something to her and begged her forgiveness in the same breath.
And upon that, for the moment, she became as serious as he. She lifted her hand from his shoulder and then set it back more firmly, so that he should feel the reassurance of its pressure.
“Don't worry,” she said, in a low voice and gravely. “I know exactly what you want me to do.”
CHAPTER VI
It was a brave and lustrous banquet; and a noisy one, too, because there was an orchestra among some plants at one end of the long dining-room, and after a preliminary stiffness the guests were impelled to converse—necessarily at the tops of their voices. The whole company of fifty sat at a great oblong table, improvised for the occasion by carpenters; but, not betraying itself as an improvisation, it seemed a permanent continent of damask and lace, with shores of crystal and silver running up to spreading groves of orchids and lilies and white roses—an inhabited continent, evidently, for there were three marvelous, gleaming buildings: one in the center and one at each end, white miracles wrought by some inspired craftsman in sculptural icing. They were models in miniature, and they represented the Sheridan Building, the Sheridan Apartments, and the Pump Works. Nearly all the guests recognized them without having to be told what they were, and pronounced the likenesses superb.
The arrangement of the table was visibly baronial. At the head sat the great Thane, with the flower of his family and of the guests about him; then on each side came the neighbors of the “old” house, grading down to vassals and retainers—superintendents, cashiers, heads of departments, and the like—at the foot, where the Thane's lady took her place as a consolation for the less important. Here, too, among the thralls and bondmen, sat Bibbs Sheridan, a meek Banquo, wondering how anybody could look at him and eat.
Nevertheless, there was a vast, continuous eating, for these were wholesome folk who understood that dinner meant something intended for introduction into the system by means of an aperture in the face, devised by nature for that express purpose. And besides, nobody looked at Bibbs.
He was better content to be left to himself; his voice was not strong enough to make itself heard over the hubbub without an exhausting effort, and the talk that went on about him was too fast and too fragmentary for his drawl to keep pace with it. So he felt relieved when each of his neighbors in turn, after a polite inquiry about his health, turned to seek livelier responses in other directions. For the talk went on with the eating, incessantly. It rose over the throbbing of the orchestra and the clatter and clinking of silver and china and glass, and there was a mighty babble.
“Yes, sir! Started without a dollar.” … “Yellow flounces on the overskirt—“… “I says, 'Wilkie, your department's got to go bigger this year,' I says.” … “Fifteen per cent. turnover in thirty-one weeks.” … “One of the biggest men in the biggest—“… “The wife says she'll have to let out my pants if my appetite—“… “Say, did you see that statue of a Turk in the hall? One of the finest things I ever—“… “Not a dollar, not a nickel, not one red cent do you get out o' me,' I says, and so he ups and—“… “Yes, the baby makes four, they've lost now.” … “Well, they got their raise, and they went in big.” … “Yes, sir! Not a dollar to his name, and look at what—“… “You wait! The population of this town's goin' to hit the million mark before she stops.” … “Well, if you can show me a bigger deal than—”
And through the interstices of this clamoring Bibbs could hear the continual booming of his father's heavy voice, and once he caught the sentence, “Yes, young lady, that's just what did it for me, and that's just what'll do it for my boys—they got to make two blades o' grass grow where one grew before!” It was his familiar flourish, an old story to Bibbs, and now jovially declaimed for the edification of Mary Vertrees.
It was a great night for Sheridan—the very crest of his wave. He sat there knowing himself Thane and master by his own endeavor; and his big, smooth, red face grew more and more radiant with good will and with the simplest, happiest, most boy-like vanity. He was the picture of health, of good cheer, and of power on a holiday. He had thirty teeth, none bought, and showed most of them when he laughed; his grizzled hair was thick, and as unruly as a farm laborer's; his chest was deep and big beneath its vast facade of starched white linen, where little diamonds twinkled, circling three large pearls; his hands were stubby and strong, and he used them freely in gestures of marked picturesqueness; and, though he had grown fat at chin and waist and wrist, he had not lost the look of readiness and activity.
He dominated the table, shouting jocular questions and railleries at every one. His idea was that when people were having a good time they were noisy; and his own additions to the hubbub increased his pleasure, and, of course, met the warmest encouragement from his guests. Edith had discovered that he had very foggy notions of the difference between a band and an orchestra, and when it was made clear to him he had held out for a band until Edith threatened tears;