Part 1 (1/2)
Miss Dividends.
by Archibald Clavering Gunter.
BOOK I.
THE GIRL FROM NEW YORK.
CHAPTER I.
MR. WEST.
”Five minutes behind your appointment,” remarks Mr. Whitehouse Southmead in kindly severity; then he laughs and continues: ”You see, your oysters are cold.”
”As they should be, covered up with ice,” returns Captain Harry Storey Lawrence. A moment after, however, he adds more seriously, ”I had a good excuse.”
”An excuse for keeping _this_ waiting?” And Whitehouse pours out lovingly a gla.s.s of Chateau Yquem.
”Yes, and the best in the world, though probably not one that would be considered good by a lawyer.”
”Aha! a woman?” rejoins Mr. Southmead.
”The most beautiful I have ever seen!” cries Lawrence, the enthusiasm of youth beaming in his handsome dark eyes.
”Pooh!” returns the other, ”you have only been from the Far West for three days.”
”True,” remarks Lawrence. ”Three days ago I was incompetent, but am not now. You see, I have been living in a mining camp in Southern Utah for the last year, where all women are scarce and none beautiful. For my first three days in New York, every woman I met on the streets seemed to me a houri. Now, however, I am beginning to discriminate. My taste has become normal, and I p.r.o.nounce the young lady whose fan I picked up on the stairs a few moments ago, just what I have called her. Wouldn't you, if she had eyes----”
”Oh, leave the eyes and devote yourself to the oysters,” interjects the more practical Southmead. ”You cannot have fallen in love with a girl while picking up her fan; besides, I have business to talk to you about this evening,--business upon which the success of your present transaction may depend.”
”You do not think the financial effort France is making to pay its war indemnity to Germany will stop the sale of my mine?” says the young man hurriedly, seating himself opposite his companion, and the two begin to discuss the charming _pet.i.t souper_, such as one bachelor gave to another in old Delmonico's on Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue before canvas-back ducks had become quite as expensive as they now are, and terrapin had become so scarce that mud-turtles frequently masquerade for diamond-backs, even in our most expensive restaurants. For this conversation and this supper took place in the autumn of 1871, before fas.h.i.+onable New York had moved above Twenty-third Street, when Neilson was about to enter into the glory of her first season at the Academy, when Capoul was to be the idol of the ladies, and dear little Duval was getting ready to charm the public by her polonaise in ”Mignon.”
This year, 1871, had marked several changes in the business of these United States of America. During the War of the Confederacy, speculators, under the guise of Government contractors, had stolen great sums from Uncle Sam. In 1865 the Government changed its policy, and began to make presents of fortunes to speculators, thus saving them the trouble of robbing it.
In 1868 it had just finished presenting a syndicate of Boston capitalists with the Union Pacific Railway, many millions of dollars in solid cash, and every alternate section of Government land for twenty miles on each side of their thousand miles of track. It had, also, been equally generous to five small Sacramento capitalists, and had presented them with the Central Pacific Railway, the same amount of Government land, and some fifty-five millions of dollars, and had received in return for all this--not even thanks.
The opening of these railroads, however, had brought the West and East in much more intimate connection. Mines had been developed in Utah and Colorado, and the Western speculator, with his indomitable energy, had opened up a promising market for various silver properties in the West, not only in New York and other Eastern cities, but in Europe itself.
One of the results of this is the appearance in New York of the young man, Captain Harry Storey Lawrence, who has come to complete the negotiations for the sale of a silver property in which he is interested, to an English syndicate, the lawyer representing the same in America being Mr. Whitehouse Southmead, who is now seated opposite to him.
As the two men discuss their oysters, champagne, partridges and salad, their appearances are strikingly dissimilar. Southmead, who is perhaps fifty, is slightly gray and slightly bald, and has the characteristics of an easy-going family lawyer,--one to whom family secrets, wealth and investments, might be implicitly trusted, though he is distinctly not that kind of advocate one would choose to fight a desperate criminal case before a jury, where it was either emotional insanity or murder.
The man opposite to him, however, were he a lawyer, would have been just the one for the latter case, for the most marked characteristic in Harry Storey Lawrence's bearing, demeanor and appearance is that of resolution, unflinching, indomitable,--not the resolution of a stubborn man, but one whose fixed purpose is dominated by reason and directed by wisdom.
He has a broad, intellectual forehead, a resolute chin and lower lip.
These would be perhaps too stern did not his dark, flas.h.i.+ng eyes have in them intelligence as well as pa.s.sion, humanity as well as firmness. His hair is of a dark brown, for this man is a brunette, not of the Spanish type, but of the Anglo-Saxon. His mustache, which is long and drooping, conceals a delicate upper lip, which together with the eyes give softness and humanity to a countenance that but for them would look too combative. His figure, considerably over the middle height, has that peculiar activity which is produced only by training in open air,--not the exercise of the athlete, but that of the soldier, the pioneer, the adventurer; for Harry Lawrence has had a great deal of this kind of life in his twenty-nine years of existence.
Leaving his engineering studies at college, he had entered the army as a lieutenant at the opening of the rebellion, and in two years had found himself the captain of an Iowa battery--the only command which gives to a young officer that independence which makes him plan as well as act.