The Return of Peter Grimm, David Belasco [most popular ebook readers TXT] 📗

generations of Grimms. Painfully neat, unpicturesquely ugly, the house stood among its great oaks. It did not nestle among them. It stood. As well expect a breadth of starched brown holland to nestle. To deprive the abode of any lingering taint of picturesqueness, a blue and white signboard, thirty feet long, stretching between it and the main street, flashed to all the passing world the news that this was the headquarters of the celebrated "Grimm's Botanical Gardens and Nurseries."

The interior of the house was as delightful as its outside was hideous. Here, neatness raised to the nth power chanced to strike the keynote of a certain beauty. The big living-room, with its stairway leading to the bedroom gallery above, was a repository of curios that would have set an antiquary mad. From the ancient clock to the priceless old blue china, three-fourths of the room's appointments might have served to deck a Holland museum. The remaining fourth contained such articles as a glaringly modern telephone on a nondescript desk, and a compromise between old and new in the shape of a square piano in the bay window, an ancient table. And several patently twentieth century articles helped still further to rob the place of any harmony or unison in effect.

An altogether charming Dutch maiden was dusting, and occasionally stopping to restore some slightly disarranged article to its mathematically neat position. In her blue Dutch cap, her blue delft gown, and white kerchief, she seemed to have danced down out of the past to strike the one note of vivid life in all that sombre-furnished place.

She paused in the sweep of sunshine that poured through the muslin-curtained bay window. A step had sounded in the passage leading from the rear of the house;--a step she evidently knew. For the full young lips broke into an involuntary smile of expectancy, while the big eyes grew all at once eager and happy. Jim Hartmann, a pen behind his ear, a bundle of mail in his hand, came into the room. He had reached the desk and deposited his packet there before he caught sight of her. Then, wide-eyed, silent, tense, he halted, gazing at the sunshine-bathed figure in the window embrasure. For an instant neither of them spoke. It was the girl who broke the silence, her voice charged with a strange shyness.

"Good-morning, James," she said primly.

"Good-morning, Miss Katie," he answered mechanically, his eyes still wide with the loveliness of the sun-kissed face that so suddenly broke in upon his workaday routine.

"I wondered if you'd gotten back yet," she continued, seeming to hunt industriously for a phrase of sufficiently meaningless decorum.

"I got back ten minutes ago. I reported to Mr. Grimm and brought the morning mail in here to look over for him. It seems strange to find the day so far advanced at this hour," he went on, talking at random. "After a week in New York, where no one thinks of doing business before nine in the morning, it's like coming into another world to be back here where the day's work begins at five."

He sat down, pleasantly regardless of the fact that she was still standing, and began to open and sort the letters before him. The girl noticed that his big hands fumbled at the unfamiliar task. But she noticed far more keenly the strength and massive shapeliness of the hands themselves.

"Do you like being secretary?" she queried.

"Yes, in a way. I've walked 'outside' in the gardens and nurseries so many years, it seems queer to be penned up indoors and have to scribble letters and open mail. But I'd sooner shovel dirt than not be here at all. I couldn't last a month at a job where there wasn't gardening going on all around me and where I couldn't sneak off once in a while and do a bit of it myself."

"That's the way I feel," she said simply, "though I never thought to put it in words before. I must live where things are growing. Where, every time I look out of the window, I can see orchards and shrubs and hothouses. Oh, it's all so beautiful! And, James, our orchids this season--but I forgot. You don't care for orchids."

"They're pretty enough, I suppose," vouchsafed Hartmann. "But the big men in the business are doing wonderful things with potatoes these days. And look at what Father Burbank's done in creating an edible cactus! Sometimes it makes me feel bitter when I think what I might have done with vegetables if I hadn't squandered so much God-given time studying Greek."

"But----"

"Oh, yes. It made a hit with father to have me study a lot of things that would only help a college professor. He's worked in the dirt, in overalls, all his life. And like most people who never had one, he sets a crazy value on so-called 'education.' But all this can't interest you," he finished ruefully.

"It _does_ interest me. You know it does. But there's something I'd like to say to you if you won't be angry."

"At _you_? Why----"

"It's this: I want you so much to get on. Why won't you try harder to--to please Uncle Peter?"

"I do try. I'm square with him. That's the trouble. That's why I don't make more of a hit. He asks me my 'honest opinion' about something or other. I give it. Then he blows up."

"But if you'd try to be more tactful----"

"You said that once before to me, Miss Katie. I asked you what 'tactful' meant. And when you told me----"

"When I told you, you said it was 'just a fancy name for being hypocritical.' But it isn't, a bit. Can't you try not to be quite so--so----?"

"Cranky?"

"No, blunt. It will smooth things over so much with Uncle Peter. He's really the gentlest, dearest----"

"I've noticed it," said Hartmann drily. "But I'll try if you want me to. I promise."

"Thank you," she answered.

And, perhaps to seal the pledge, their hands met. The sealing of a pledge is not a matter to slur over with careless haste, but requires due time. And it was but natural that the handclasp should be symbolic of that deliberation. Indeed, it is hard to say just how long his big hand and her little one might have remained clasped together had inclination been allowed to prevail. But, as usual in Hartmann's life, inclination was not consulted. The door behind them opened sharply, and the clasped hands parted as if at a signal. Hartmann slipped back into his chair at the desk, while the girl busied herself with a new and commendable activity in her task of setting the immaculate room to rights.

Both seemed to realise without turning around that one more of their too brief interviews had been unceremoniously cut short.

The man whose advent caused the curtailment of the promise's sealing was as foreign looking as the room itself. Dapper, dressed in a sort of elaborate carelessness, his figure alone carried with it an air of assurance that Hartmann always found almost as irritating as the man's gracefully exaggerated manner and speech. His blonde hair was brushed back from a high, narrow forehead. A turned-up moustache and a close-trimmed and pointed Van Dyke beard added to the foreign aspect.

The newcomer took in the scene with a glance that apparently grasped none of its details. He nodded curtly to Hartmann, then crossed to where the girl was dusting.


CHAPTER II


THE HEIR

"Hello, Kitty," he said. "Good-morning."

"Good-morning, Frederik," responded the girl, and started toward the stairs.

But the man intercepted her. Catching her playfully by the arm he tried to draw her toward him.

"You're pretty as a June rose to-day," he laughed.

Hartmann, instinctively, had half-risen from his chair. The girl, noting his movement and the frown gathering on his face, checked her impulse to retort, quietly disengaged herself from the newcomer's familiar grasp, and ran up the short stair flight that led into the gallery.

In no way offended, the man glanced after her with another short laugh, then turned to Hartmann.

"Where's my uncle?" he asked.

Hartmann looked up with elaborate slowness from the notes he was making of the newly opened mail. His eyes at last rested on the dapper figure before him, with the impersonal, faintly irritated gaze one might bestow on a yelping puppy.

"Mr. Grimm is outside," he answered. "He's watching my father spray the plum trees. The black knot's getting ahead of us this year."

"I wonder," grumbled Frederik, lounging across to the window, "if it's possible once a year to ask a simple question of any inmate of this cursedly dreary old place without getting a botanical answer."

"That's what we are here for--those of us that work," said Hartmann, returning to his note making.

"Work, work, work!" mocked Frederik. "When I inherit my beloved uncle's fortune, I shall buy up all the dictionaries and have that wretched word crossed out of them."

Hartmann made no reply. He did not seem to have heard. But Frederik, absently ripping to atoms a Richmond rose from the window table vase, continued his muttered tirade. An inattentive audience was better than none.

"Work!" he growled. "When people here aren't talking about it, they're doing it. Grubby, earthy work. And it was to prepare for this sort of thing that I loafed through Leyden and Heidelberg! Yes, and loafed through, creditably, too; even if Oom Peter did bully me into making a specialty of botany. Botany! Dry as dust. After the University and after my _wanderjahr_, I thought it would be another easy task to come here, and 'learn the business.' Easy! As easy as the treadmill. And as congenial."

"I wonder you don't tell Mr. Grimm all that. I'm sure it would interest him."

"My dear, worthy uncle, who builds such wonderful hopes on me? Not I. It would break his noble heart. I hope you quite understand, Hartmann, that I keep quiet only through fear of wounding him and not with any fear that he might bequeath the business elsewhere."

"Quite," returned Hartmann drily. "That's why I keep my mouth shut when he holds you up to me as a paragon of zeal and industry and asks me why I don't pattern myself after you. But, for all that, you're taking chances when you talk to me about him as you do."

"I'm not," contradicted Frederik. "I may not know botany. But I know men. You love me about as much as you love smallpox. But you belong to the breed that doesn't tell tales. Besides, I've got to speak the truth to some one, once in a while, if I don't want to explode. You're a splendid safety valve, Hartmann."

The secretary bent over his notes. His forehead veins swelled, and his face darkened. But he gave no overt sign of offence. Frederik, watching keenly, seemed disappointed.

"In New York," he pursued with a sigh, "they're just about thinking of waking up. And look at the time _I'm_ routed out of bed! Say, Hartmann, I wish you would give Oom Peter a hint to oil his shoes. Every morning he wakes me up at five o'clock, creaking down the stairs. It's a sort of pedal alarm clock. Creak! Creak! Creak!--_Ach, Gott!_ Even yet I can hardly keep one eye open. If ever it pleases Providence to give me my heritage, the first thing I'll do will be to sleep till noon. And then to go to sleep again."

He stared moodily out of the