Loring

“ Loring dropped his chin abruptly the fraction of an inch, peering keenly about, his lips drawn in a thin and unpleasant smile. Phil Gallatin indicated a chair at one end of the table, into which Loring stiffly sat, with one arm on the table, his bull-neck thrust forward, peering [313] steadily at the younger man, watching every movement, studying his face as though trying by the intentness of his gaze to solve the question as to whether this curiously inconsistent young man was a menace or merely a nuisance. ”

“ His voice gloated. So did his hands and his heavy, dense-blue eyes. He was altogether a rather unpleasantly "gloatful" person, as a lover. Loring quivered with wrath and nausea. He would have liked to tear Cuthbridge "from the scabbard of his limbs."
"Dinner is served," said the old butler.
It was not until the next day at tea-time that Loring got a chance to see Belinda alone. He came in just as she and her mother also returned from a drive. "I must go up to have tea with Grace," said Mrs. Horton. "You give Morry his tea, Linda." ”

“ It was quite the reverse, his safety depended upon her, Jerry thought, but she knew his type. Her need of his help would do more than anything else to clear his mind. She picked up the tin can she had used as a saw and went to the door. She looked back. Beechy was lying with closed eyes, the lines about his mouth relaxed.
The sun had dropped behind a high mountain. The air was sultry. A tinge of rose had replaced the gold of the afternoon coloring. In the southwest an unobtrusive bank of cloud had appeared. The tumbleweed still stirred with every breath of air but everything else was still. ”

“ Then, with her arm about Evilena, Miss Loring ascended the wide stairway, where several portraits of vanished Lorings hung, none of them resembling her own face particularly.
She was what the Countess Biron had likened her to when the photograph was shown––a white lily, slender, blonde, with the peculiar and attractive combination of hazel eyes and hair of childish flaxen color. Her features were well formed and a trifle small for her height. She had the manner of a woman perfectly sure of herself, her position and her own importance. ”

“ When the seven o’clock whistle blew, Loring thought of the gang at the road camp lined up for ten hours of relentless toil, and he breathed deep in contentment.
“It is great to be laid up for a respectable cause,” he thought. Memories of the times that he had spent at an old university in the East came to him. He looked about him at the rough, bare boards, at the eight canvas cots, at the lumps on three of them, where, wearing the inevitable pink or sky blue undershirt, lay sick Mexican miners. He amused himself by mentally filling with his old-time associates each of the empty cots. ”

“ The mental question arrested the footsteps of Miss Loring, ere she had proceeded five paces from the door of her chamber.
"Is not what imprudent?" was answered back in her thoughts.
"What folly is this!" she said, in self-rebuke, and passed onward.
"Miss Loring!" There was too much feeling in Hendrickson's manner. But its repression, under the circumstances, was impossible.
"Mr. Hendrickson!" The voice of Miss Loring betrayed far more of inward disturbance than she wished to appear. ”

“ Loring would admit nothing.
Yet it was of this very matter the Engineer [Pg 265] was thinking one soft still evening soon after his return to department headquarters. His boxes had just arrived. He had found a fairly comfortable room away from the turbulent section of the new and bustling town, and equally distant from the domicile of Stone and his particular set. Loring never gambled and took little interest in cards. He was still "taking his rations" at the hotel, but much disliked it, and was seriously thinking of seeking board in some private family. ”

“ The only real system in all Loring’s habits of life was his custom of rising early enough to have time for a smoke between breakfast and work.
In the afternoon the camp was alive with shouts and hilarity. On the slag dump two baseball games were in progress, of such excitement that the umpires had early withdrawn; while some one had established in the gulch an impromptu shooting gallery, whence the quick rattle of reports told of financial success. ”

“ Day had already come, but no bright sun shone down upon the earth, for leaden clouds were in the sky, and nature was bathed in tears. It was some time before the agitation that accompanied Miss Loring's sudden awakening, had sufficiently subsided to leave her mind composed enough to arise and join the family. When she did so, she found her aunt, Mrs. Loring and her cousins Amanda and Dora, two not over refined school girls, aged fourteen and sixteen, awaiting her appearance.
"You are late this morning, Jessie," said Mrs. Loring. ”

“ Loring was still weak, he said, and a man of sensitive honor might well be wrathful at such insinuations.
And now as Loring clung to the rail upon [Pg 155] the lofty deck and gazed out over the waste of tumbling waters toward the barren shores, he was thinking deeply of that letter, of the strange bent of mind that could dictate such unjustifiable suggestion—if not accusation. He was thinking, too, of Pancha and that little packet in the purser's safe, when suddenly that officer himself came popping up the narrow stairway and poked his unprotected head into the whistling wind. ”

“ Loring never spoke harshly—indeed, he seldom spoke at all the little he was at home, but the attentions he paid were so obviously from a sense of duty, that they fell like ice-drops on the heart of his wounded wife. ”

“ William Richardson’s; best of all were the historic Sunday evenings at the Loring’s on K Street. The elder Miss Loring was a close student of political history. At the Loring salon one met the leading statesmen and diplomats, many of whom, it was said, consulted Miss Loring with reference to the political events she followed so intelligently. I have grateful memories of a son of the house, Doctor Frank Loring, the oculist, who took my friend Helen Gardner and myself under his wing and introduced us to the young dancing set, in whose company we played happily through several blissful weeks. ”

“ An able-bodied man, with your bleeding country calling on you, and no fight in you? Sir, let me tell you, sir, such a pair of legs should have been devoted to the service of your country, sir! Look you, sir, my son Tom Loring was only eighteen years old, when he fought his battle on the Brandywine; and a whole year before, he was ripe for a rub, as he often told me. How comes it, sir, you have grown out of your teens, and never faced an enemy? Zounds, sir, I was beginning to have a good opinion of you! ”

“ And as this was the longest speech Turnbull had ever heard from Loring's lips, except his arraignment of Nevins before the court, the colonel pondered over it not a little. He took the letter and read it when, an hour later, the Idaho was plowing her lazy way southward through a dull and leaden sea. [Pg 130]
"I'm not the first man to be fooled by a slip of a girl, Loring," wrote Blake. "It isn't the first time that a woman has got the better of me, and it may not be the last. ”

“ In what most men count the great things of life, Loring never abused his position; in the small, he became frankly unclubbable. I had known him long enough to laugh at the old-maidish fixed order of incompatibilities that he mistook for a well-regulated life. It was very conservative, very unadaptable, and he had an unanswerable reason for everything. You dined with him at the Elysée because Armand had the finest hand in London for a homard au tartare—the practice and the tribute continued for years after the great chef had bought himself an hotel in Boston and bade farewell to London. ”

“ ORING and Ives and Phelan went off to Colon last night,
And the women on Fourteenth street are sad, and the kids are filled with fright!
At eight last evening Loring came to bid his child “good-bye”;
He picked her up and he kissed her, and you ought to hear him sigh.
“Gee! you’re a pretty kid,” says he, in a tone of voice that was sad;
“Your lips and your skin are mighty good; it’s a pity your hair is bad.” ”

“ But it is with a strange story as with an old pun; it finds fathers, as it travels.
As for Captain Loring, all we have to say of him is, that he lived long enough to rejoice over the union of his daughter with Hyland Falconer as much as he would perhaps have mourned over her early grave, had her destiny wedded her to the unlucky younger brother. He lived also to see, with a rapture that lasted to his dying day, the painter resume the brush, and put the last finish to 'the grand picture of the Battle of Brandywine, and Tom Loring, dying.' ”

“ Hardly had he emerged when there drove by a motor in which, of all people, Lord Peebles was sitting, who waved an absent welcome to him. He saw at once how dangerous had been his visit. Supposing he had asked for letters for George Loring and had staggered out of the shop with a scarcely manageable parcel of gold, to encounter such a meeting, it was distinctly within the bounds of possibility that that nobleman would connect him with George Loring. ”

“ George Loring had probably done this sort of thing before, and it might be supposed that though poor and desperate, he retained from the fruits of his last crime clothes of a flashy and ill-fitting description. Such as he would certainly wear a gaudy check suit and cheap patent leather boots. His tie, of the Brussels carpet type, would assuredly be pinned with something too magnificent to be possibly valuable; detachable cuffs and dicky, a hat with a furrow in it would complete his detestable array. ”

“ Loring,” I replied, “once upon a time there was a fox, who was caught in a trap, and had his tail cut off. After that——”
“Ah well, I suppose you know your own mind. But, Mr. Butterfield”—she leaned over, and spoke quite low—“I believe you make out your young days—and Loring’s—to have been much worse than they were. Do you not, now?”
Mrs. Loring had a little beauty-spot on her conscience which she thought was a stain.
II
A HYPOTHETICAL CASE Carrie and I were placidly surveying, from either end of my little dining-table, the creditable wreck we had made of a rather neat little dinner. ”

“ Sustain him by the divine power of truth. Let Thy Word be a staff in his hand when travel-worn, and a sword when the enemy seeks his life. In his own strength he cannot walk in this way; in his own strength he cannot battle with his foes—but in Thy strength he will be strong as a lion, and as invincible as an army."
After rising from her knees, Miss Loring, over whose spirit a deep quietude had fallen, re-opened Hendrickson's letter and read it again; and not once only but many times, until every word and sentence were written on her memory. ”

“ Low as she tried to speak, the words reached Loring, who listened, and Delaven, glancing across, perceived that he listened.
“In love with the Marquise? Bless your heart, we were all of course.”
“But my brother?” insisted Evilena.
172
“Well, now he might have been the one exception––in fact he always did get out of the merely social affairs when he could, over there.”
“Showed his good sense,” decided Loring, emphatically. “I don’t approve of young people running about Europe, learning their pernicious habits and customs; I’ve had my fill of foreign places and foreign people.” ”

“ There was considerable meaning in Loring’s voice, careless as it was. Julian became very still, and into his eyes there crept an eager, hungry light which harmonised ill with the fixed nonchalance of the rest of his features as he answered with a laugh:
“I don’t know the fellow who could refuse to admit that soft impeachment! We’re all in the same boat as far as that goes, I take it. You haven’t got a good thing up your sleeve, old man, have you?” ”

“ Traynor, the purser, though fair Inez was but languid and unresponsive still, and kept her veil about her face, and Colonel Turnbull came and poured champagne for both with lavish hand, and vowed it was specific against further assaults of the salty seas, and still Mr. Loring never spoke a word. With the sparkling sunshine of yet another day, the little maid was early on the shining deck, fresh from its matutinal ablutions, and there was Loring taking his early exercise, striding up and down, up and down, and drinking in the glorious, invigorating sea air ”

“ I never imagined that Loring could do the work he is now doing, which is superhuman, and therefore cannot last. At the "Soap Works," a crazy old place, Darbishire seems to be creeping up, and his stroke is most assuredly telling on the Harvard energy and fire. Oxford is now pulling 40, and the cheers are deafening from the shore, while cries and exclamations and yells of encouragement come from the countless wherries, stationary barges, and craft of all kinds that line the Surrey side. ”

“ Peggy Glamorgan asked as she, her sister and Benson sat at luncheon three hours later. The table was spread on the broad, shadowy veranda on the north side of the ranch-house. The sun beat down upon fields and white roads; insects droned lazily to the accompaniment of the faint roar of the stream swollen by the heavy rain of the night before. "Ye gods! If here isn't Abdul the Great," she mocked saucily as Courtlandt appeared at the door. "Are his humble slaves to be honored with his presence at the noonday meal? Allah, oh Allah! Jerry, aren't you overwhelmed at this tribute to our charms?" ”