Free Watchfires by Louis Auchincloss Page A

be incarcerated while the family lawyer lays down ridiculous terms to her friends!"
    "There is no more to be said, Mr. Bleeker. Kindly leave my house."
    When Bleeker, seizing his hat from the rack in the hall, had stamped his irate way out of the front door, Dexter looked about for some way to vent his feelings. His eye fell upon the crystal bowl in which his visitor had had the impudence to deposit the ashes of his cigar. Hurrying to the table, he seized it and dashed it to pieces in the fireplace.
    "That must have given you great satisfaction!" came a voice from the hall stairway.
    It was Rosalie.

7

    D EXTER SAT ALONE with his father-in-law after dinner in the latter's library at 417 Fifth Avenue. The book shelves, behind glassed doors and beneath flat tops on which rested bronzes of stricken or striking animals—elk torn by wolves, bear fighting bear, lions crouched to spring—gleamed with the gold-tinted, backs of old folios and volumes of prints. The walls above were hung with dark Madonnas and dusky biblical scenes, relics of Mr. Handy's "grand tour" in 1817. The tables, under lace covers, were cluttered with baubles and memorabilia: lapis lazuli, intaglios and daguerreotypes of dim, dead Handys and Howlands. Dexter's eyes always sought the charming miniature by Jarvis of Rosalie's mother as a girl. Her large, haunted eyes and pale, heart-shaped face suggested the premonition of early demise.
    Charles Handy busied himself at the sideboard where a flock of decanters, with silver labels hung about their long necks, offered themselves to his choice. His roving, glinting, staring gray-blue eyes were the features that redeemed—or perhaps simply decorated, if ameliorated were too strong a term—the sternness of his aquiline nose, square chin and thin, retentive lips.
    "Joanna thinks it's hard on the ladies for the gentlemen to desert them when it's only a family dinner. But frankly, my boy, I feel the need to get away from her at times. She's been quite impossible ever since this last trip to Boston. Raving like the worst type of Yankee abolitionist! It seems she actually met Wendell Phillips. Some privilege! And when I ask her to kindly change the subject, she simply sits and stares at me with woebegone eyes."
    Dexter always liked it when the old man abused his daughters. It made him feel intimate and preferred. But that night he was disturbed by the implications.
    "Of course, she must hear some pretty dreadful stories from her friends up there."
    "Those stories lose nothing in the telling; you can be sure of that. I'm willing to wager that ninety percent of the negroes in the South are better off than they would be in the jungles they were taken from."
    "Did that justify us in bringing them over?"
    "Us? Where do you get that us'? My dear fellow, no Handy, and no Fairchild, I'll be bound, had anything to do with such filthy practices. I'm proud to say that no Handy ever owned a slave, even in the days when half your old New York families did. Oh, our record is pure! But that doesn't mean that I believe in telling our Southern friends and neighbors how to run their lives." Here Mr. Handy, turning to his son-in-law, drew the lid of one eye slowly down over the eyeball, like a chicken. This stately wink, against a countenance of absolute sobriety, gave a ludicrous effect, perhaps intentional, to his irony. "Particularly when they command the loyalty of most of our army and navy!"
    "The officers, I suppose you mean."
    "Well, whom else would you count on in a showdown? What are your abolitionists going to fight with, besides their own bad breath? Some way to save a union!"
    "It's another union that I want to discuss with you tonight, sir. I'm afraid there's bad blood between Annie and Charles."
    "Tell me about it."
    Mr. Handy seated himself and leaned back in his leather armchair, holding his head stiffly erect as he watched his interlocutor. He hardly twitched a muscle as Dexter related the sorry tale. Then he