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THE LAST PENNY

By Edwin Lefevre

Harper And Brothers Publishers

New York And London

1917

[Illustration: 0008]

[Illustration: 0011]




TO THE LAST PENNY




CHAPTER I

THOMAS LEIGH, ex-boy, considered the dozen neckties before him a long
time, and finally decided to wait until after breakfast.

It was his second day at home and his third day out of college. Already
his undergraduate life seemed far away. His triumphs--of personality
rather than of scholarship--lingered as a luminous mist that softened
the sterner realities and mellowed them goldenly. When one is young
reminiscences of one's youth are apt to take on a tinge of melancholy,
but Tommy, not having breakfasted, shook off the mood determinedly. He
was two hundred and fifty-five months old; therefore, he decided that no
great man ever crosses a bridge until he comes to it. Tommy's bridge
was still one long joy-ride ahead. The sign, “Slow down to four miles an
hour!” was not yet in sight. The selection of the necktie was a serious
matter because he was to lunch at Sherry's with the one sister and the
younger of the two cousins of Rivington Willetts.

In the mean time he had an invitation to spend the first half of July
with Bull Wilson's folks at Gloucester, a week with “Van” Van Schaick
for the cruise at Newport, as long as he wished with Jimmy Maitland at
Mr. Maitland's camp in the Adirondacks, and he had given a half promise
to accompany Ellis Gladwin to Labrador for big game in the fall.

He suddenly remembered that he was at his last ten-spot. There was the
Old Man to touch for fifty bucks. And also--sometime--he must have a
heart-to-heart talk of a business nature about his allowance. He and
his friends desired to take a post-graduate course. They proposed to
specialize on New York.

Mr. Leigh always called him Thomas. This had saved Mr. Leigh at least
one thousand dollars a year during Tommy's four at college, by making
Tommy realize that he had no doting father. At times the boy had sent
his requests for an extra fifty with some misgivings--by reason of the
impelling cause of the request--but Mr. Leigh always sent the check for
the exact amount by return mail, and made no direct reference to
it. Instead he permitted himself an irrelevant phrase or two, like,
“Remember, Thomas, that you must have no conditions at the end of the
term.”

Possibly because of a desire to play fair with a parent who had no sense
of humor, or perhaps it was because he was level-headed enough not to
overwork a good thing, at all events Tommy managed, sometimes pretty
narrowly, to escape the conditions. And being very popular, and knowing
that quotable wisdom was expected of him, he was rather careful of what
he said and did.

He knew nothing about his father's business affairs, excepting that Mr.
Leigh was connected with the Metropolitan National Bank, which was a
very rich bank, and that he continued to live in the little house on
West Twelfth Street, because it was in that house that Mrs. Leigh had
lived her seventeen months of married life--it was where Tommy was bom
and where she died. The furniture was chiefly old family pieces which,
without his being aware of it, had made Tommy feel at home in the houses
of the very wealthy friends he had made at college. It is something to
have been American for two hundred years. Family furniture reminds you
of it every day.

Tommy wondered, curiously rather than anxiously, how much his father
would allow him, and whether it would be wiser to argue like a man
against its inadequacy or to plead like a boy for an increase; then
whether he ought to get it in cash Saturday mornings or to have a
checking account at his father's bank. But one thing was certain--he
would not be led into reckless check-signing habits. His boy-financier
days were over. Those of his friends who had multi-millionaire fathers
were always complaining of being hard up. It was, therefore, not an
unfashionable thing to be. He surmised that his father was not really
rich, because he kept no motor, had no expensive personal habits,
belonged to no clubs, and never sent to Tommy at college more money than
Tommy asked for, and, moreover, sent it only when Tommy asked. Since his
Prep-school days Tommy had spent most of his vacations at boys' houses.
Mr. Leigh at times was invited to join him, or to become acquainted with
the families of Tommy's friends, but he never accepted.

Tommy, having definitely decided not to make any plans until after his
first grown-up business talk with his father, looked at himself in the
mirror and put on his best serious look. He was satisfied with it.
He had successfully used it on mature business men when soliciting
advertisements for the college paper.

He then decided to breakfast with his father, who had the eccentric habit
of leaving the house at exactly eight-forty a.m.

It was actually only eight-eight when Tommy entered the dining-room.
Maggie, the elderly chambermaid and waitress, in her twenty-second
consecutive year of service, whom he always remembered as the only woman
who could be as taciturn as his father, looked surprised, but served him
oatmeal. It was a warm day in June, but this household ran in ruts.

Mr. Leigh looked up from his newspaper. “Good morning, Thomas,” he said.
Then he resumed his _Tribune_.

“Good morning, father,” said Tommy, and had a sense of having left his
salutation unfinished. He breakfasted in a sober, business-like way,
feeling age creeping upon him. Nevertheless, when he had finished he
hesitated to light a cigarette. He never had done it in the house, for
his father had expressed the wish that his son should not smoke until he
was of age. Tommy's twenty-first birthday had come off at college.

Well, he was of age now.

The smell of the vile thing made Mr. Leigh look at his son, frowning.
Then he ceased to frown. “Ah yes,” he observed, meditatively, “you are
of age. You are a man now.”

“I suspect I am, father,” said Thomas, pleasantly. “In fact, I--”

“Then it is time you heard man's talk!”

Mr. Leigh took out his watch, looked at it, and put it back in his
pocket with a methodical leisureliness that made Tommy realize that Mr.
Leigh was a very old man, though he could not be more than fifty. Tommy
was silent, and was made subtly conscious that in not speaking he was
somehow playing safe.

“Thomas, I have treated you as a boy during twenty-one years.” Mr. Leigh
paused just long enough for Tommy to wonder why he had not added “and
three months.” Mr. Leigh went on, with that same uncomfortable, senile
precision: “Your mother would have wished it. You are a man now and--”

He closed his lips abruptly, but without any suggestion of temper or of
making a sudden decision, and rose, a bit stiffly. His face took on
a look of grim resolution that filled Tommy with that curious form of
indeterminate remorse with which we anticipate abstract accusations
against which there is no concrete defense. It seemed to make an utter
stranger of Mr. Leigh. Tommy saw before him a life with which his
own did not merge. He would have preferred a scolding as being more
paternal, more humanly flesh-and-blood. He was not frightened.

He never had been wild; at the worst he had been a complacent shirker
of future responsibilities, with that more or less adventurous desire
to float on the tide that comes to American boys whose financial
necessities do not compel them to fix their anchorage definitely. At
college such boys are active citizens in their community, concerned
with sports and class politics, and the development of their immemorial
strategy against existing institutions. And for the same sad reason of
youth Tommy could not possibly know that he was now standing, not on a
rug in his father's dining-room, but on the top of life's first hill,
with a pleasant valley below him--and one steep mountain beyond. All
that his quick self-scrutinizing could do was to end in wondering which
particular exploit, thitherto deemed unknown to his father, was to be
the key-note of the impending speech. And for the life of him, without
seeking self-extenuation, he could not think of any serious enough to
bring so grimly determined a look on his father's face.

Mr. Leigh folded the newspaper, and, without looking at his son, said,
harshly, “Come with me into the library.”

Tommy followed his father into the particularly gloomy room at the back
of the second floor, where all the chairs were too uncomfortable for any
one to wish to read any book there. On the small black-walnut table were
the family Bible, an ivory paper-cutter, and a silver frame in which was
a fading photograph of his mother.

“Sit down!” commanded the old man. There was a new note in the voice.

Tommy sat down, the vague disquietude within him for the first time
rising to alarm. He wondered if his father's mind was sound, and
instantly dismissed the suspicion. It was too unpleasant to consider,
and, moreover, it seemed disloyal. Tommy was very strong on loyalty. His
college life had given it to him.

Mr. Leigh looked, not at his son but at the photograph of his son's
mother, a long time it seemed to Tommy. At length he raised his head and
stared at his son.

Tommy saw that the grimness had gone. There remained only calm