The Red Book Magazine/Volume 5/Number 2/Uncle Mark's Match-Making

Selwyn found to his surprise that he was not alone on the beach when he reappeared in his bathing-suit. A tall, broad-shouldered elderly man was pacing back and forth on the sand, his hands clasped behind him, his eyes bent on the ground. Every few minutes he interrupted his own meditations to gaze expectantly at the row of bath-houses under the bluff. After a while he discovered Selwyn's presence. His keen glance in the latter's direction revealed such an interesting face that Selwyn's eyes opened wide, all his artistic instinct aroused.

The stranger was about sixty, but splendidly preserved. He was of the old-time oratorical type, full-featured and figured, an effect accented by his frock-coat and Panama hat. He would, perhaps, have been too flamboyant a personage with his smooth-shaven cheeks, curling iron-grey hair and the subdued floridity of his coloring, if the ascetic line of his profile and the softening shadows that enlarged his full deep eyes had not made the difference between cheapness and picturesqueness. His expression was, moreover, distinctly benevolent.

Selwyn stared at him with the enthusiastic candor of his twenty-five years and of the painter who has discovered something “paintable.” Evidently the stranger noticed this, for, presently, he came over to his side to ask the usual commonplaces about the tides and the light-houses.

“It's a beautiful day,” he announced, finally. His voice was vibrant and full of round benignant tones, in perfect accord, as Selwyn noted delightedly, with his appearance.

“Oh, glorious,” Selwyn agreed, “stunning painting weather!”

His companion did not answer. He was looking fixedly again in the direction of the bath-houses. The door of one of them had opened and a girl stood in the opening, staring under a slender, shading hand over the stretches of sallow sand beyond the chrysoprase rumpled sea to the luminous reaches of turquoise sky. She was, apparently, a little past twenty—a tall, slender muscular creature with an irregular face, darkly handsome in coloring, humorous and clever in expression. The sunlight turned the virile sweep of her heavy hair from black to purple; it made wells of liquid light of her large brown eyes.

“By Jove! that's Garda Hallowell,” Selwyn exclaimed surprisedly—and then could have bitten his tongue off. Simultaneously it had flashed across him that the elderly stranger could be no other than her guardian-uncle, Mark Hallowell. The situation was, to say the least, embarrassing.

“You know—” his interlocutor was beginning.

“Oh no, no,” Selwyn interrupted quickly, “I've never happened to meet your niece—although the number of times I've nearly done so is ridiculously large. I think I ought to tell you at once, Mr. Hallowell, that my name is Robert Selwyn—Elton Selwyn's son,” he added explainingly, as there was no response in his companion's face.

“Oh, Elton Selwyn,” the latter said understandingly. His expression changed.

“I have never quite understood what your quarrel, with dad was about, originally, Mr. Hallowell,” Selwyn broke in desperately when the pause became monotonous, “and I hope you will not visit the sins of the father unto the second generation—that is to say,” he floundered, “I have no wish to appear disloyal—far from it, but I know that it is father's particular desire that the younger set ignore the difficulty as much as possible.”

The older man smiled courteously. “Then by all means let us ignore it,” he suggested affably, “I have no hesitancy in confessing to Elton Selwyn's son that the whole affair has been a matter of great regret to me, and if I could have seen my way clear at any time, I would—” He broke off with an expansive movement of his white plump hands. “Where is your father at present, Mr. Selwyn?” he asked, after a significant pause.

“In Wenett, I believe.” Selwyn's manner was a little abrupt. “Is Miss Hallowell going in bathing?” he wriggled away from the subject.

“I believe so,” his companion responded absently. His thoughts, evidently the result of their conversation, were miles away. He interrupted himself to leap to his feet. The girl was having some difficulty with the bath-house door. She was pushing violently against it from the inside. Under an appearance of nonchalance Selwyn watched his new acquaintance closely as he hurried over and pulled it open.

He observed the old-fashioned gallantry of the sweeping bow he accorded the lady upon her reappearance and the interested colloquy that followed. The man examined the lock and carefully readjusted it. Then he filled her pail at the water's edge. After that something came up in their conversation that occasioned considerable light talk and laughter. Suddenly Miss Hallowell turned back into her bath-house. She emerged in another second with her pocket-book in her hand. Some sort of money transaction went on between them from which Selwyn politely averted his gaze. When he returned to his observations Miss Hallowell had disappeared into the bath-house again and his new friend was coming towards him.

“We're wondering,” the latter began, “if you will be so good as to break a bill for us, Mr. Selwyn. Neither my niece nor I happen to have any small change. Apparently they can't wrestle with anything bigger than a fifty-cent piece in the village. It's bothered us enormously and I've got to make some purchases on the way back.”

Selwyn hastily retreated to his dressing-room for his pocket-book. Fortunately the fifty dollars in it that, since he had just quarreled with his father, must, in the next month, stand between him and starvation, happened to be in small bills. He rapidly counted out the twenty that his companion needed. The latter accepted it with the courtly inclination that Selwyn had discovered was charmingly frequent with him.

“I hope you will give me the pleasure of allowing me to present you to my niece when she comes out,” he offered sonorously.

“I should be delighted,” Selwyn responded equably. His voice was steady, but his lips twitched so violently into the smiles of his delighted anticipation that he turned his gaze seaward. There the coal-barges, strung out on the gray horizon-line, seemed to perform a grotesque clog-dance before his dazzled eyes. “All things do come to the duffer who waits,” he meditated exultantly. And yet it did not seem possible that the event for which he had been longing for years could occur in this out-of-the-way place and season. He prayed ardently that nothing would happen to prevent a meeting. And nothing did happen.

Presently the bath-house door reopened and Miss Hallowell emerged, tall and trim in her black and white bathing-suit. With a heart thumping so madly against a restraining thorax that he was sure it was visible through his bathing-suit, Selwyn accompanied his companion to her side.

“Oh, by the way,” that gentleman said, modifying the speed of his dignified amble and the long-distance resonance of his remarkable voice, “perhaps it will simplify things if you do not address me by my name—my niece does not understand that I—” He broke off abruptly. There was an irresistible twinkle in his full, deep eyes.

“I understand, Mr. Hallowell,” Selwyn protested, fervently.

His companion murmured something that was lost in the surging in Selwyn's ears and the next thing that he was conscious of was, “I want you two young people to know each other. Allow me to present Mr. Selwyn—Miss Hallowell; Mr. Selwyn.” The beneficent organ-like tones stopped. Selwyn bowed. Some words broke from his dry lips; and suddenly they were all sitting on the sand, chatting as if they had known each other for years.

“How long are you going to be in Scarsett, Miss Hallowell?” Selwyn asked.

“I'm just passing through, really. I've just come from Wenett and I'm on my way to Mexum.”

“Wenett!” Selwyn repeated. He wondered if she had by any chance met his father. That was unlikely, he decided. Their friends in the place all knew of the family feud. “I'm going on to Mexum myself,” he volunteered, “that is—later.” He stopped in embarrassment. He could hardly tell her, in the circumstances, that his going entirely depended on the sale of a batch of paintings that he had just sent to New York. “When do you leave Scarsett?”

“To-night at six.”

Selwyn frowned. Paintings or no paintings, he must get to Mexum. He would have to work hard in the next month. Could fifty dollars last a month? It would have to be resolved swiftly.

The portly third to their brief tête-à-tête had been listening to it with an air of impatience politely suppressed. “Well, now I think I shall have to ask you two young people to excuse me,” he said in the first pause. “I have some telephoning that must be done before I take the 'two' train. The carriage is coming for you, I suppose,” he turned to Miss Hallowell.

“Yes, I'm driving directly to the station. I shall dine in town.”

The two men shook hands with a brief good-bye. “Don't stay in the water too long,” the older man commanded them in his most benign accents as he accorded them a profuse farewell bow.

“Inspired old angel!” was Selwyn's inward comment as he walked down the beach with Miss Hallowell. Turning at the water's edge, he saw that his celestial coadjutor had caught up with a wagon going in the direction of the station. As he looked he pulled his heavy body athletically over the tail-board. There was a brief word to the driver and then the latter whipped up his horses to a gallop.

“By Jove!” Selwyn thought, “I hope his philanthropy has not made him lose his train.”

He spent four golden hours on the sand alone with Garda Hallowell. After a while the talk grew sufficiently confidential for them to count the times when and the places where they had just escaped meeting each other. She even confessed to the disappointment this long series of failures had occasioned her. Later, when, with much outward bravado and more inward trepidation, he begged her to pose for him in the ensuing August at Mexum, she consented with immediate and charming simplicity. The moments of the long June afternoon were, of course, winged ones and he could hardly believe the evidence of his watch when the carriage, that was to bear her to the six train, appeared. He accompanied her to it with a face comically lugubrious. Perhaps it was her sympathy with his incipient loneliness that caused her to bend out from the carriage-seat and to exclaim impulsively, “Oh, Mr. Selwyn, I was so delighted to meet your father.” Then she blushed and bit her lips.

Selwyn flushed uncomfortably. Dad had been in Wenett, then, and she had met him. He wondered if their quarrel were common property, and, more pertinently, if his fair companion had heard of it. His comment was a brief, “Indeed,” and then he changed the subject to the conventional last exhortatory words. It seemed to him that he had never felt so lonely in his life as in the interval after she had disappeared from his horizon. He went rapidly into the house and got out his painting-things. Oh, if some of that last batch would only sell!

They did not sell, as it happened, but a subsequent lot, painted under the stimulus of his desire for another sight of Garda Hallowell, were snapped up immediately. August found him in Mexum, glued apparently to Miss Hallowell's side. September found him as unescapably established at the same place. In the middle of October their engagement was announced. Selwyn wrote of the event to his father. Elton Selwyn did not deign to take notice of his son's letter, but he wrote several charming notes to Garda. Later, through other friends, Selwyn heard, to his great surprise and delight, that the breach between his father and Mark Hallowell had been entirely healed, and that, in fact, they were frequently seen together. He did not mention the matter to Garda, as she had never made any allusion to the quarrel and he preferred to have her open the subject. October faded opulently away and still there was no word from the elder Selwyn. The matter did not worry his son. His plans were all made.

He was to spend the winter in New York, where Garda would be for most of the season; his studio was already engaged. If everything went flourishingly they were to be married in the spring.

A month later, in Garda's New York home, they were making out a list of guests for a studio-tea.

“First and foremost,” Selwyn pronounced emphatically, pounding on the sofa-cushion that he was adjusting for his knees, “we must have your Uncle Mark.”

“Oh, yes,” Garda agreed, “we must surely have Uncle Mark, but considering the circumstances, I think your father ought to be the guest of honor.”

“That's nonsense, you know,” Selwyn commented, a little impatiently. “Dad has held no communication with me for months, whereas your Uncle Mark—”

“Oh, Uncle Mark's a perfect dear about writing and all that. But I have a sentiment about the matter. I shall never forget that it was your duck of a father who introduced us.”

“Well, I like that,” Selwyn declared, disgustedly. “Don't ever tell me again that women remember birthdays and anniversaries and all kinds of fool dates. But if there is one thing that I should expect a girl to be up on, it's the time she meets her future husband—especially when it's a regular Romeo and Juliet business—healing the family feud and all that sort of thing.”

Garda's big eyes began to blaze ominously. “I don't know what you're talking about, Robert,” she said, her voice deepening indignantly. “I can certainly describe as minutely as you every circumstance connected with our first meeting. It was on Scarsett beach—”

“Good guess!”

“Your father came over while I was struggling with the bath-house door—”

“My father—your grandmother!” Selwyn interrupted, disrespectfully. “You mean your uncle.”

“What are you talking about, Robert Selwyn?” She stared for a silent instant of perplexed wrath. Then her face changed. “Wasn't that elderly gentleman who wore the Panama hat and the anachronistic frock-coat your father?”

Selwyn gasped. “Wasn't he your uncle?”

“Of course he wasn't. Why, he told me he was your father.”

“If you will permit me—I think I do know my own father when I see him. I never saw him before.”

“Well, he was an escaped lunatic then. I never saw him before either.”

Selwyn sat up. “Good Lord! I wrote to dad that your uncle had been extremely courteous to me. I didn't mention exactly how, I remember now, but I said that your uncle was very sorry that there had been such a quarrel and was more than willing to meet him half-way.”

“I wrote Uncle Mark that your father had been awfully good to me and he wrote me that he immediately made overtures to him. He said that he was really very glad the foolish misunderstanding was over, that of course it wasn't his place to open relations, but as long as your father”

“Merciful Heavens!” Selwyn groaned. “They're reconciled on the strength of events that never happened. But then, of course, it's the nicest thing”

“But what was the man's idea?” Garda went on thoughtfully. “'I am Elton Selwyn'—those were his exact words. Then he asked if he might introduce you to me, and I said that I would be delighted. He asked me not to call him by his name, as his son felt that he was intruding in view of the circumstances. It all seemed natural enough to me. I trusted him absolutely and then I was so rattled at the thought of meeting you.”

Selwyn rubbed his head and frowned. “Well, of all things! What on earth was the old duffer up to?” Suddenly his jaw dropped. “By Jove!” he exclaimed, electrically, “that's it, as sure as you live. I'd forgotten all about it.”

“What's it?”

“Why, he was a blamed scoundrel! He asked me to change a twenty for him. Of course, I was crazy to do anything for your uncle. When I came to pass the bill I found that it was counterfeit. Again, as he was your uncle, I didn't say anything about it. Maybe I didn't economize up to the nines in those six weeks in which I had to live on thirty dollars. It's lucky he didn't ask for any more.”

He stopped and looked at his companion. She was struggling with some inundating emotion; striving, it gradually developed, to keep back a laugh. A picture suddenly flashed into his mind of Garda diving into the bath-house and returning with her pocket-book in her hand.

“Did you change any money for that hoary-headed old villain?” he demanded sternly.

Garda collapsed hysterically. “Ten dollars,” she admitted.