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Page 61
"Let us hear it now," I cried, looking at Perry with triumph.
"Yes, let us," said Perry, nothing to my surprise, for I knew his heart
was in the right place, if his ways were a little rough and
unimpressionable-like. "We have no recitations, no lectures, no
anything, to-morrow, and there is no one else in the restaurant but the
waiter, and he is asleep."
And, in fact, we could hear him snoring.
"No, I would rather not tell it here," George said simply; "but if you
will come with me to the office you shall hear it." And when we had
heard it we respected the feeling that had prompted him to consider even
the walls of such a place as unfit listeners. To be sure, it was a very
comfortable restaurant, where the waiters were always attentive and
skilful and the mutton-chops irreproachable, and many a pleasant evening
had we three had there over our cigars and Milwaukee, and sometimes a
bottle or two of claret. But so had Tom Hagard, the faro-dealer, and
Frank Sauter, who played poker over Sudden's, and Dick Bander, who got
his money from Madame Blank because he happened to be a swashing
slugger, and many another Tom, Dick, and Harry whose reputations were,
to say the least, questionable. Of course we never associated with such
characters, and plenty of estimable people besides ourselves frequented
Bertrand's. The place was not in bad odor at all, but merely a little
miscellaneous, and suited our plebeian fancies all the more on that
account. If young fellows want to be really comfortable in life, we
thought, and see a little at first hand just what sort of people make up
the world, they must not be too particular. So we used to sit down at
the next table to one where a gambler or a horse-jockey would perhaps be
seated, or a man of worse fame, and order our humble repast with a quiet
conscience and a strengthened determination never to become one among
such people. We would even see the gay flutter of skirts sometimes, as
the waiter entered one of the private rooms with an armful of dishes,
and hear the chatter and laughter of the wearers.
We did not wonder, therefore, at George's preference for his own office,
whose four walls had never looked down upon anything but innocent young
fellows smoking and talking whatever harmless nonsense came into their
heads, or playing chess or penny-ante, or upon his own generous thoughts
and solitary contemplations, or hard work on some intricate lawsuit. So
we aroused the sleeping waiter, and walked back to the Academy of Music
building in silence.
"It is rather a long story," said George, when we had at last made
ourselves comfortable, "and I have never told it before. I don't know
why I should tell it now, but somehow I want to. I felt this evening
after I left the Capitol that I would, and I asked leave of Mrs. Herbert
while we were walking to her home together. I knew she would let me: I
am the only friend, I suppose,--the only real friend, I mean, whom she
trusts and treats as an intimate friend,--that she has in the world. I
know I am the only person who knows the whole story of her sad life.
"When I was in the university," he slowly continued, holding his cigar
in the gas-jet and turning it over and over between his fingers, with an
evident air of collating his reminiscences, "Phil Kendall and I were
great friends. I don't know how we ever came to be so: it was natural, I
suppose, for us to like each other. I used to notice that he did not
associate much with the other fellows; and yet he was the best runner
and boxer in the class. He was the only fellow in the university who
could do the giant swing on the bar, and, though he had never taken
lessons, it was next to impossible for any one but Wayland, the
sub-professor in chemistry, to touch him with the foils. Somehow we were
drawn together, and before long were hardly ever apart. We used to get
out our Horace together, he with the pony and text and I with the
lexicon, for he was too impatient to hunt up the words. I believe you
study differently now."
"We still have the pony," said Perry.
"And we used to puzzle our heads together over Mechanics, for we didn't
have election as you do, and take long walks, and play chess, and get up
spreads in our room for nobody but us two. Not such elaborate affairs as
are called spreads now, but I warrant you they were fully as much
enjoyed. I fancy we were rather sentimental. We used to hold imaginary
conversations in the person of some favorite characters in fiction; but
we were very young and boyish."
Perry glanced at me sheepishly, but George went on without noticing:
"Phil's father lived here, and was proprietor of the only wholesale
grocery-store the town then boasted of. He had been captain of a
volunteer company in the war, and, I fancy, had a romance too. At any
rate, his wife had been dead since Phil was a little fellow in
knickerbockers; and not very long after her death a certain Mrs. Preston
had sent a little girl, about a year older than Phil, with a dying
charge to the captain to care for the friendless orphan for the sake of
their early love. No one but Grace could ever get anything out of the
old gentleman about her mother, and she never learned much. Mrs. Preston
had been unhappy at least, and perhaps miserable, in her marriage. We
always thought she had forsaken Mr. Kendall in their youth and made a
hasty marriage; but never a word was uttered by him about Grace's
father.
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