“Will you take three or four thousand? Will you take five?”
“I will not.”
“Goodbye, then; I’m off to my broker.”
With a bound, the little man shot through the door and disappeared as he had come—like the wind—leaving behind him the ruins of a castle in Spain and three people buried beneath them.
Mr. Sisseton was ashen; Jenny pale as a ghost re-arisen; Hugh alone a trifle flushed.
“That man,” he declared, “knew my people, I am convinced.”
“Perhaps so,” Mr. Sisseton muttered; “he appears to have been a great traveler.”
Then at once, without preamble, he told the whole story. Hugh and Jenny listened without interruption. The preceding incidents had made it all quite clear, and when the tale was ended, there was silence in that little room.
Hugh was the first to speak.
“How shall it matter after all? You have returned the money; it was your duty to do so, no one expected you to do anything else, and I am sure you must be convinced that had Jenny and I been married, and the money in our possession, we would have returned it as you have done.”
“I am sure of it,” Mr. Sisseton answered. “I know you to be honest as the day, and I wish, even now, you could be, as I had hoped, my son-in-law.”
“But I shall be.”
“You won’t,” the old man answered, and in his withered face and sunken eyes there was the obstinacy of a mule. “What I have said I have said. Jenny shall not marry a poor man. Would you take her into that rathole of yours and watch privation, sickness, fever and death visit her one by one. No, sir, not while I am alive.”
“If that be the case,” Hugh in fine fury retorted, “what did you come into my rathole for at all?”
“Because Jenny was in love with you.”
“And do you suppose she is going to stop now?”
“I don’t know, but you shan’t have her. You are poor and so is she.”
“But if love and matrimony were only permitted to the rich the earth would crumble.”
“Let her crumble. You shan’t have my daughter. She is as like her mother as two peas. I won’t have her die of want. You shan’t have her, I say.”
“But consider the difference. You were a clerk in a grocery-shop. However hard you may have worked, you couldn’t earn a dollar more than your salary. Whereas I am a painter, and my brush will bring me both fortune and fame.”
“I hope it may, but by that time Jenny will be gray-headed. No, sir, you shan’t have her.”
“I shall.”
“You shall not.”
“Mr. Sisseton, remember this: you can’t help yourself. Your daughter is of age, the law prevents you from interfering.”
“It does, does it? Well, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. The law makes this my castle, and I order you hence. Begone!”
“Mr. Sisseton—”
“Begone, I say!”
“Very good, sir, I will go since you command it, but I will return with a summons. Jenny, my love, my chosen, but not mine, be brave.”
And therewith this hotheaded young fellow, his head erect, stalked from the room.
VI
In high indignation at the old man’s mulish obstinacy Hugh strode out into the street and on and beyond into other regions of the city. He was vastly annoyed, and his annoyance was increased by the fact that he had permitted it to be apparent. He should have been calm, he told himself, calm, though authoritative, and he should have displayed, with cogent reasonings, the folly of supposing that at the tail-end of the nineteenth century a young woman could be sequestrated and kept apart from her lover. It was that he should have made manifest, and with it his ability to provide not only for Jenny, but for her father, her grandfather—for as many Sissetons as could be produced. And instead of that, instead of showing the slightest tact, the merest spark of common sense, he had threatened the old man with a summons and made him an enemy for life. There was now but one course left for him to pursue: to apologize as abjectly as he knew how, and that failing, to elope with Jenny on the spot. That she would go with him he did not doubt for an instant, and already he saw himself, another Lochinvar, bearing off the girl of his heart in a green car to the nearest parsonage available.
In dreams forecast he turned and retraced his steps. He would have it out with the old man at once, he determined; and on reaching Tompkins Square he marched straight upstairs and knocked, gently and deferentially at the Sisseton door. Save the beating of his own heart there was not a sound to be heard. He knocked again, a trifle more resolutely, yet still there was no reply. He peered through the keyhole. Not a glimmer of light was to be seen.
“It is I,” he called—“Hugh Hyrtl. Won’t you let me in, Mr. Sisseton? I am sorry for the way I spoke.”
But there was no answer to his appeal. Again he knocked, loudly, boisterously, calling to Jenny, calling to her father and calling in vain. From the floor below a voice mounted bidding him cease that racket. He tried the door; it was locked.
“You must let me in,” he insisted. “I shall stay here until you do.”
Again the protest mounted, with it the fall of a step that he knew, and Mrs. O’Hassadam, a broom in one hand, a candle in the other suddenly appeared.
“My! my!” that lady exclaimed, “if I didn’t think it was the police. They’re after him anyway, and good riddance it is.”
“After whom?”
“The ex-convict, to be sure; who would they be after? He was off like that! But they’re on his track, he can’t have got far at all whatever, he and his blooming daughter. It was wrong you were, Mr. Hyrtl, to consort with the likes of them.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“What do I mean, Mr. Hyrtl? Indeed, and I mean
