But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline’s features though in decay; Caroline’s figure, if brittle and stiff in movement; Caroline’s manner, unmistakably compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline’s voice, broken and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.
She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.
“What’s that?” she cried. The words were not a question—they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision. She tarried over them scarcely an instant. “Stand up!” she said to her grandson, “stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!”
The young man looked at her in trepidation.
“Blow!” she commanded.
He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.
“Blow!” she repeated, more peremptorily than before.
He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.
“Do you realize,” she went on briskly, “that you’ve forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?”
Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained standing—even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.
“Young ass!” cried Caroline. “Once more, just once more and you leave college and go to work.”
This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.
“Do you think I don’t know what you and your brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I’m senile. You think I’m soft. I’m not!” She struck herself with her fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. “And I’ll have more brains left when you’ve got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day than you and the rest of them were born with.”
“But Grandmother——”
“Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren’t for my money might have risen to be a journeyman barber out in the Bronx—Let me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber—you presume to be smart with me, who once had three counts and a bona-fide duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city of Rome to the city of New York.” She paused, took breath. “Stand up! Blow’!”
The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to Caroline.
“Found you at last,” he cried. “Been looking for you all over town. Tried your house on the ’phone and your secretary told me he thought you’d gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight—”
Caroline turned to him irritably.
“Do I employ you for your reminiscences?” she snapped. “Are you my tutor or my broker?”
“Your broker,” confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. “I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and five.”
“Then do it.”
“Very well. I thought I’d better—”
“Go sell it. I’m talking to my grandson.”
“Very well. I—”
“Good-by.”
“Good-by, Madame.” The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the shop.
“As for you,” said Caroline, turning to her grandson, “you stay just where you are and be quiet.”
She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.
“It’s the only way,” she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. “The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful and have ugly sisters.”
“Oh, yes,” chuckled Merlin. “I know. I envy you.”
She nodded, blinking.
“The last time I was in here, forty years ago,” she said, “you were a young man very anxious to kick up your heels.”
“I was,” he confessed.
“My visit must have meant a good deal to you.”
“You have all along,” he exclaimed. “I thought—I used to think at first that you were a real person—human, I mean.”
She laughed.
“Many men have thought me inhuman.”
“But now,” continued Merlin excitedly, “I understand. Understanding is allowed to us old people—after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain night when you danced upon a table-top you were nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.”
Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream.
“How I danced that night! I remember.”
“You were making an attempt at me. Olive’s arms were closing about me and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment. It came too late.”
“You are very old,” she said inscrutably. “I did not realize.”
“Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then—I no longer knew how.”
“And now you are so very old.”
With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.
“Yes, leave me!” he cried. “You are old also; the spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and rich; to remind me that my son hurls my gray failure in my face?”
“Give me my book,” she commanded harshly. “Be quick, old man!”
Merlin looked at her once more and then patiently obeyed. He picked up the book and handed it to her, shaking his head when she offered him a bill.
“Why go through the farce of paying me? Once you made me wreck these very premises.”
“I did,” she said in anger, “and I’m glad. Perhaps there had been enough done to ruin me.”
She gave him a glance, half disdain, half ill-concealed uneasiness, and with a brisk word to her urban grandson moved toward the door.
Then she was gone—out of his shop—out of his life. The door clicked. With a sigh he turned and walked brokenly back toward the glass partition that enclosed the yellowed accounts of many years as well as the mellowed, wrinkled Miss McCracken.
Merlin regarded her parched, cobwebbed face with an odd sort of pity. She, at any rate, had had less from life than he. No rebellious, romantic spirit popping out unbidden had, in its memorable moments, given her life a zest and a glory.
Then Miss McCracken looked up and spoke to him:
“Still a spunky old piece, isn’t she?”
Merlin started.
“Who?”
“Old Alicia Dare. Mrs. Thomas Allerdyce she is now, of course; has been, these thirty years.”
“What? I don’t understand you.” Merlin sat down suddenly in his swivel chair; his eyes were wide.
“Why, surely, Mr. Grainger, you can’t tell me that you’ve forgotten her, when for ten years she was the most notorious character in New York. Why, one time when she was the correspondent in the Throckmorton divorce case she attracted so much attention on Fifth Avenue that there was a traffic tie-up. Didn’t you read about it in the papers.”
“I never used to read the papers.” His ancient brain was whirring.
“Well, you can’t have forgotten the time she came in here and ruined the business. Let me tell you I came near asking Mr. Moonlight Quill for my salary, and clearing out.”
“Do you mean, that—that you saw her?”
“Saw her! How could I help it with the racket that went on. Heaven knows Mr. Moonlight Quill didn’t like it either but of course he didn’t say anything. He was daffy about her and she could twist him around her little finger. The second he opposed one of her whims she’d threaten to tell his wife on him. Served him right. The idea of that man falling for a pretty adventuress! Of course he was never rich enough for her even though the shop paid well in those days.”
“But when I saw her,” stammered Merlin, “that is, when I thought saw her, she lived with her mother.”
“Mother, trash!” said Miss McCracken indignantly. “She had a woman there she called ‘Aunty’, who was no more related to her than I am. Oh, she was a bad one—but clever. Right after the Throckmorton divorce case she married Thomas Allerdyce, and made herself secure for life.”
“Who was she?” cried Merlin. “For God’s sake what was she—a witch?”
“Why, she was Alicia Dare, the dancer, of course. In those days you couldn’t pick up a paper without finding her picture.”
Merlin sat very quiet, his brain suddenly fatigued and stilled. He was an old man now indeed, so old that it was
