The Wheat Princess. Jean Webster
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‘Mamma, please let me stay up to dinner wif you to-night.’
For a moment Mrs. Copley looked as if she might consent, but catching sight of Granton’s relentless face, she returned: ‘No, my dear, you have had enough festivity for one evening. You must have your tea and go to bed like a good little boy.’
Gerald abandoned his mother and entrenched himself behind Sybert. ‘‘Cause Sybert’s here, an’ I like Sybert,’ he wailed desperately.
But Granton stormed even this fortress. ‘Come, Master Gerald; your supper’s getting cold,’ and she laid a firm hand on his shoulder and marched him away.
‘There’s the real despot,’ laughed Copley. ‘I tremble before Granton myself.’
Pietro appeared with a plate of toasted muffins and the evening mail. Mr. Copley settled himself in a wicker chair, with a pile of letters on the arm at his right; and, as he ran his eyes over them one by one, he tore them in pieces and formed a new pile at his left. They were begging letters for the most part. He received a great many, and this was his usual method of answering them: not that he was an ungenerous man; it was merely a matter of principle with him not to be generous in this particular way.
As he sat disposing of envelope after envelope with vigorous hands, Copley’s appearance suggested a series of somewhat puzzling contrasts: seriousness and humour; sensitiveness and force—an active impulse to forge ahead and accomplish things, a counter-impulse to shrug his shoulders and wonder why. He was a puzzle to most of his friends; at times even one to his wife; but she had accepted his eccentricities along with his millions, and though she did not always understand either his motives of his actions, she made no complaint. To most men a fortune is a blessing. To Copley it was rather in the nature of a curse. He might have amounted to almost anything had he had to work for it; but for the one field of activity which a fortune in America seems to entail upon its owner—that of entering the arena and doubling and tripling it—he was singularly unfitted both by temperament and inclination. In this he differed from his elder brother. And there was one other point in which the two were at variance. Though their father had been in the eyes of the law a just and upright man, still, in the battle of competition, many had fallen that he might stand, and the younger son had grown up with the knowledge that from a humanitarian standpoint the money was not irreproachable. He had the feeling—which his brother characterized as absurd—that with his share of the fortune he would like, in a measure, to make it up to mankind.
Howard Copley’s first move in the game of benefiting humanity had been, not very originally, an attempt at solving the negro problem; but the negroes were ever a leisurely race, and Copley was a man impatient for results. He finally abandoned them to the course of evolution, and engaged in a spasmodic orgy of East Side politics. Becoming disgusted, and failing of an election, he looked aimlessly about for a further object in life. It was at this point that Mrs. Copley breathlessly suggested a year in Paris for the sake of Gerald’s French; the child was only four, but one could not, as she justly pointed out, begin the study of the languages too early. Her husband apathetically consenting, they embarked for Paris by the roundabout route of the Mediterranean, landed in Naples, and there they stayed. He had found a fascinating occupation ready to his hand—that of helping on the work of good government in this still turbulent portion of United Italy. After a year the family drifted to Rome, and settled themselves in the piano nobile of the Palazzo Rosicorelli with something of an air of permanence. Copley was at last thoroughly contented; he had no racial prejudices, and Rome was as fair a field of reform as New York—and infinitely more diverting. If the Italians did not always understand his motives, still they accepted his services with a fair show of gratitude.
As for Mrs. Copley, she had by no means intended their sojourn to be an emigration, but she reflected that her husband had to be amused in some way, and that reforming Italian posterity was perhaps an harmless a way as he could have devised. She settled herself very contentedly to the enjoyment of the somewhat shifting foreign society of the capital, with only an occasional plaintive reference to her friends in New York and to Gerald’s French.
Marcia, leaning back in her chair, watched her uncle dispose of his correspondence with a visible air of amusement. He had a thin nervous face traced with fine lines, a sharply cut jaw, and a mouth which twitched easily into a smile. To-night, however, as he ripped open envelope after envelope, he frowned oftener than he smiled; and presently, as he unfolded one letter, he suppressed a quick exclamation of anger.
‘Read that,’ he said shortly, tossing it to the other man.
Sybert perused it with no visible change of expression, and leaning over, he dropped it into the open grate.
Marcia laughed outright. ‘Your mail doesn’t seem to afford you much satisfaction, Uncle Howard.’
‘A large share of it’s anonymous, and not all of it’s polite.’
‘That is what you must expect if you will hound those poor old beggars to death.’
The two men shot each other a look of rather grim amusement. The letter in question had nothing to do with beggars, but Mr. Copley had no intention of discussing its contents with his niece.
‘I find that the usual reward of virtue in this world is an anonymous letter,’ he remarked, shrugging the matter from his mind and settling himself comfortably to his tea.
The guest refused the cup proffered him.
‘I haven’t the courage,’ he declared, ‘after Gerald’s revelations.’
‘By the way, Sybert,’ said Copley, ‘I have been hearing some bad stories about you to-day. My niece doesn’t like to have me associate with you.’
Marcia looked at her uncle helplessly; when he once commenced teasing there was no telling where he would stop.
‘I am sorry,’ said Sybert humbly. ‘What is the trouble?’
‘She has found out that you are an anarchist.’
Both men laughed, and Marcia flushed slightly.
‘Please, Miss Marcia,’ Sybert begged, ‘give me time to get out of the country before you expose me to the police.’
‘There’s no cause for fear,’ she returned. ‘I didn’t believe the story when I heard it, for I knew that you haven’t energy enough to run away from a bomb, much less throw one. That’s why it surprised me that other people should believe it.’
‘But most people have a better opinion of me than you have,’ he expostulated.
‘No, indeed, Mr. Sybert; I have a better opinion of you than most people. I really consider you harmless.’
The young man laughed and bowed his thanks, while he turned his attention to Mrs. Copley.
‘I hope that Villa Vivalanti will prove more successful than the one in Naples.’
Mrs. Copley looked at him reproachfully. ‘That horrible man! I never think of him without wishing we were safely back in America.’
‘Then please don’t think of him,’ her husband returned. ‘He is where he won’t trouble you any more.’
‘What man?’ asked Marcia, emerging from a dignified silence.
‘Is it possible Miss Marcia has never heard of the tattooed man?’ Sybert inquired gravely.
‘The tattooed man! What are you talking about?’
‘It has a somewhat theatrical ring,’ Mr. Copley admitted.
‘It is nothing to make light of,’ said his wife. ‘It’s a wonder to me that we escaped with our lives. Three years ago, while we were in Naples,’ she added to her niece, ‘your uncle, with his usual recklessness, got mixed up with one of the secret societies. Our villa was out toward Posilipo, and one afternoon I was driving home at about dusk—I had been shopping in the city—and just as we reached a lonely place in the