Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/615



RS. BUXTON'S face took on an anticipatory frown: she was about to become a business woman. If such a thing as a mercantile dress had existed, she would have donned it ceremoniously; but only the frown was available. She took the broker's letter from the mantelpiece with a sort of solemn nonchalance—conscious of her pose and thrilled by it—to read it for the twenty-second time that week. But there were no witnesses to the visibleness of her financial cogitations, and she permitted, all unconsciously, her eyebrows to relax. She replaced the letter, unread, on the mantelpiece.

She walked with a calm untroubled mind to the east window and looked out into the neighbor's lawn. Her gaze, roaming aimlessly, exhausted the landscape in three sweeps, and she withdrew from the window by degrees. She spied a bit of paper on the floor by the hearth. It was a fragment of the broker's envelope, torn off with so much handling. Absentmindedly she put it to her mouth. The touch of it awakened her wits, and she looked intelligently at the enlarged photograph of her late husband. It made her think of the letter from her brokers. They were hers now, and his business perplexities had been transferred to her—she assured herself commiseratingly—together with the three hundred shares of Lakeside and Western stock. She put on her business frown and read the letter again:

—We beg to enclose herewith check for $375, quarterly dividend on 300 shares of Lakeside and Western stock. In this connection we would say that the stock to-day sold at 115. It now looks as if it would go higher, though we have not much faith in the present movement, which appears to us to be entirely speculative.

We beg to remain, Yours truly,

She folded the letter meditatively and returned it to the envelope, nodding her head as though a haunting suspicion had been confirmed. She said aloud: "The stock sold at 115 to-day. That was Thursday; no, Wednesday." She nodded once more, correctingly. Then she whispered, loudly enough for her to hear her own voice—a new habit grown upon her since her husband had left her for a tickerless world: "Fred always thought a great deal of that Lakeside stock. And now they are speculating! Poor Fred!"

She sighed deeply; it was a circuitous way of pitying herself. Out of the corner of her eyes she could see the enlarged photograph. She rose, and confronting it, repeated, "Poor Fred!" Her memory made it live. As she gazed, it spoke to her, and her soul heard familiar phrases and unforgotten reproaches, until she said aloud to it, with a sort of tender indignation: "I did acknowledge the receipt of it, the very same day I got it!" Her eyes filled with tears and she walked hastily out of the room, to the flower-bed before the porch, where the sunlight made the tears evaporate more quickly.

Frederick Buxton had been a railroad man, well known in the Middle West, where everybody called him "Fred" from his fourth day to his forty-fourth year. He died "Fred" Buxton, superintendent of the Indiana Division of the Pittsburg, Indianapolis, and Chicago Railroad. He left the neat little frame house in Indianapolis, a reputation as a good fellow