Rich Man, Poor Man. Foster Maximilian
woman, Mr. Jessup tenanted Mrs. Tilney's second-floor back. Briefly he was a bookkeeper in the National Guaranty's R to Z Department; and looking up from his soup as Varick entered, Mr. Jessup had stared.
"Phew!" he'd whistled, whereat Mrs. J. had nudged him with her elbow. "Don't blow in your soup, Joe!" she'd admonished; "it isn't manners!"
A lot he cared! Months before, when Varick's father had died, Jessup had been called in to help untangle the old man's bank accounts. That they had been as involved as all this, though, he had not even dreamed. A Varick in a boarding house! Again Mr. Jessup had whistled. However, not even this vicissitude seemed to have crushed the young man. A quick smile lit up his face when the bookkeeper ventured to address him.
"Of course I remember you!" he exclaimed. Then he had turned to the bookkeeper's chubby lady in the same frank, friendly way. "Delighted to meet you, Mrs. Jessup!"
Thus it was that, impressed, a little awed perhaps, Mrs. Tilney's other guests learned they had a Varick among them. Not that Varick had tried either to awe or to impress. Like Jessup, he too was merely an employee in a bank now, and he made no bones of saying so. The bank was the Borough National. It was in Broad Street and it paid him twelve dollars a week. That was another reason why Varick was at Mrs. Tilney's.
But not even this—the fact, that is, of the twelve dollars and its contingent relation to his presence in the boarding house—seemed in the least to have marred his cheerfulness. Bab felt heartily she had never met anyone so responsive, so entertaining. As she went on down the stairs, hurrying to her task in the dining-room, she was still smiling, humming softly to herself the while the air she had heard him singing.
A few minutes later, while she was arranging the last knives and forks, the dining-room door opened and Varick himself stood there. His face lit instantly as he saw her.
"Hello, Bab!" he greeted. "I thought I heard you come down!"
He was in evening dress, his attire spick and span save for the one particular of his necktie. This, with its two ends askew, clung to his collar in a rumpled knot.
"Busy?" he inquired.
Bab laughed.
"You want your tie tied, I suppose!" she returned, warned by former experience. "I thought the last time I gave you a lesson!"
Varick nodded.
"I know. What I need, though, is not lessons—it's less thumbs. Now be a good fellow, won't you?"
Bab laughed again; and laying down the knives and forks in her hands, she reached up and began pulling and patting the soft lawn into shape. Finally she had it to her satisfaction.
"There!" she murmured.
Varick did not move away. Instead he stood looking down at her, his gray eyes dwelling on hers, and in them was a gleam of interest she had seen there more than once of late. It was as if recently Varick had found in her face something he had not found there before. That something, too, seemed to inspire in him a growing look of reflection.
Bab, in spite of her good looks, was not vain. At the same time, though, neither was she blind. She gazed at Varick curiously.
"Well?" she inquired presently.
Varick seemed suddenly to recollect.
"Thanks!" he said; and in turn she laughed back: "You're welcome!"
She had just spoken when out in the dimly lighted hall Bab saw Mr. Mapleson emerge suddenly from the stairway, and on stealthy tiptoes dart out of view toward the kitchen. A muffled exclamation escaped her, and as he heard it Varick looked at her vaguely.
"I beg pardon?" he inquired.
"Nothing—it was just someone in the hall," Bab evasively answered; and her face thoughtful now, she finished arranging the table. Planted on the hearthrug, Varick watched her. However, though she was quite conscious of this, she gave little heed to it. Her brow puckered itself still more in thought.
"You're not going to be home tonight, are you?" she inquired presently. When Varick said no, that he'd be out all the evening, Bab perched herself on the serving table in the corner, and sat swinging her shapely, slender heels. "I suppose you're going to a party, aren't you?" she suggested.
Again he smiled.
"Why, yes, Bab—why?"
"Oh, I don't know," she murmured as aimlessly. Then her eyes growing vague, she drew a little breath.
"There'll be a tree, I suppose?" Varick nodded. Yes, there would be a tree. "And you'll dance besides, I shouldn't wonder?" added Bab, drawing in her breath again, a pensive sigh. "I imagine, too, there'll be a lot of girls there—pretty girls?"
She could see him stare, curious at her tone, her questioning; but now she hardly cared. There was something Bab meant to ask him presently, though how she was to do it she still was not quite sure.
"Funny," she murmured, her tone as if she mused; "do you know, I've never been at a dance!"
Varick stared anew. "Really?"
"Honor bright!" said Bab, aware of his astonishment. She had a way, when others amused her, of drolly twisting up one corner of her mouth; and then as her smile broadened, rippling over her face, Bab's small nose would wrinkle up like a rabbit's, obscuring temporarily the freckles on each side of it. "Give you my word!" she avowed.
Leaning back, then, she sat clicking her heels together, her eyes roving toward the ceiling.
"Don't laugh," she murmured; "but often I've wondered what a dance was like—a real dance, I mean. You see, ever since I was a kid everyone round me has been too busy or too tired to think of things like that. Sometimes they've been too worried too; so the only dances I've ever been at have been just dream dances—make-believes. You know how it is, don't you, when you have no other children to play with? I'd make believe I was in a huge ballroom, all alone, and then somewhere music would begin to play! Oh, I can hear it yet—Strauss, the Blue Danube!" Bab's look was misty, rapt; and then with a slender hand upraised she began to beat time to the sensuous measure of the melody drifting in her mind. "Lights, music, that huge ballroom," she laughed at the memory; "music, the Blue Danube. Yes—and then I'd dance all alone, all by myself! Can't you see me—me in my pigtails and pinafore, dancing! Funny, wasn't it?"
i27
"'Do you know, I've never been at a dance!'"
"Funny?" repeated Varick, and she saw his face was grave. "I don't think so. Why?"
But Bab did not heed. Her face rapt, she still sat smiling at the ceiling.
Strangers often wondered about Bab. It was not only her face, however, that roused, that held their interest. They marveled, too, that in the dim and dingy surroundings of the boarding house the landlady's little ward had acquired an air, a manner so manifestly above her surroundings. But Bab's history, vague as it was, gave a hint of the reason. Her mother, a woman who had died years before at Mrs. Tilney's, leaving her child in Mrs. Tilney's hands, manifestly had been a woman of refinement. In other words, despite environment Bab's blood had told; and that it had was evidenced by Varick's interest in her. During his months at Mrs. Tilney's he had, in fact, managed to see a good deal of his landlady's pretty ward.
However, not even this interest, the pleasure he had found in her company, had obscured in the least Bab's perception of the facts. She knew thoroughly her own position. She knew, too, his—that and the gulf it put between them. Young, attractive, a man; the fact that he now was poor had not much altered his social standing. It would remain as it was, too, until he married. Then when he did, his position would be rated by the wealth—that or the lack of it—of the woman who became his wife.
So, though Varick single might exist with propriety in a boarding house, there was a vast difference between that and a Varick married—a Varick setting