Part 8

"G'night, Mr. Funkelshine--g'night. Sit there till I'm gone."

Feuerstein rose to follow and Dippel struck at him. The waiter seized each by the shoulder and flung them through the swinging doors. Dippel fell in a heap on the sidewalk, but Feuerstein succeeded in keeping to his feet. He went to the assistance of Dippel.

"Don't touch me," shouted Dippel.

"Police! Police!"

Feuerstein looked fearfully round, gave Dippel a kick and hurried away. When he glanced back from a safe distance Dippel was waving to and fro on his wobbling legs, talking to a cabman.

"Close-fisted devil," muttered Feuerstein. "He couldn't forget his money even when he was drunk. What good is money to a brute like him?" And he gave a sniff of contempt for the vulgarity and meanness of Dippel and his kind.

Early the next morning he established a modus vivendi with his landlady by giving her ten dollars on account. He had an elaborate breakfast at Terrace Garden and went to Bloomingdale's, arriving at eleven precisely. Lena Ganser was already there, pretending to shop at a counter in full view of the appointed place. They went to Terrace Garden and sat in the Stube. He at once opened up his sudden romantic passion. "All night I have walked the streets," he said, "dreaming of you." When he had fully informed her of the state of his love-maddened mind toward her, he went on to his most congenial topic--himself.

"You have heard of the Freiherr von Feuerstein, the great soldier?" he asked her.

Lena had never heard of him. But she did not know who was German Emperor or even who was President of the United States. She, therefore, had to be extremely cautious. She nodded assent.

"My uncle," said Feuerstein impressively. His eyes became reflective. "Strange!" he exclaimed in tender accents, soliloquizing--"strange where romance will lead us. Instead of remaining at home, in ease and luxury, here am I--an actor--a wanderer--roaming the earth in search of the heart that Heaven intended should be wedded to mine." He fixed his gaze upon Lena's fat face with the expression that had made Hilda's soul fall down and worship. "And--I have found it!" He drew in and expelled a vast breath. "At last! My soul is at rest."

Lena tried to look serious in imitation of him, but that was not her way of expressing emotion. She made a brief struggle, then collapsed into her own mode--a vain, delighted, giggling laugh.

"Why do you smile?" he asked sternly. He revolted from this discord to his symphony.

She sobered with a frightened, deprecating look. "Don't mind me," she pleaded. "Pa says I'm a fool. I was laughing because I'm happy. You're such a sweet, romantic dream of a man."

Feuerstein was not particular either as to the quality or as to the source of his vanity-food. He accepted Lena's offering with a condescending nod and smile. They talked, or, rather, he talked and she listened and giggled until lunch time. As the room began to fill, they left and he walked home with her.

"You can come in," she said. "Pa won't be home to lunch to-day and ma lets me do as I please."

The Gansers lived in East Eighty-first Street, in the regulation twenty-five-foot brownstone house. And within, also, it was of a familiar New York type. It was the home of the rich, vain ignoramus who has not taste enough to know that those to whom he has trusted for taste have shockingly betrayed him. Ganser had begun as a teamster for a brewery and had grown rapidly rich late in life. He happened to be elected president of a big Verein and so had got the notion that he was a person of importance and attainments beyond his fellows. Too coarse and narrow and ignorant to appreciate the elevated ideals of democracy, he reverted to the European vulgarities of rank and show. He decided that he owed it to himself and his family to live in the estate of "high folks." He bought a house in what was for him an ultra-fashionable quarter, and called for bids to furnish it in the latest style. The results were even more regardless of taste than of expense--carpets that fought with curtains, pictures that quarreled with their frames and with the walls, upholstery so bellicose that it seemed perilous to sit upon.

But Feuerstein was as impressed as the Gansers had been the first time they beheld the gorgeousness of their palace. He looked about with a proprietary sense--"I'll marry this little idiot," he said to himself. "Maybe my nest won't be downy, and maybe I won't lie at my ease in it!"

He met Mrs. Ganser and had the opportunity to see just what Lena would look and be twenty years thence. Mrs. Ganser moved with great reluctance and difficulty. She did not speak unless forced and then her voice seemed to have felt its way up feebly through a long and painfully narrow passage, emerging thin, low and fainting. When she sat--or, rather, AS she sat, for she was always sitting--her mountain of soft flesh seemed to be slowly collapsing upon and around the chair like a lump of dough on a mold. Her only interest in life was disclosed when she was settled and settling at the luncheon table. She used her knife more than her fork and her fingers more than either. Feuerstein left soon after luncheon, lingering only long enough to give Lena a theatrical embrace. "Well, I'll not spend much time with those women, once I'm married," he reflected as he went down the steps; and he thought of Hilda and sighed.

The next day but one he met Lena in the edge of the park and, after gloomy silence, shot with strange piercing looks that made her feel as if she were the heroine of a book, he burst forth with a demand for immediate marriage.

"Forty-eight hours of torment!" he cried. "I shall not leave you again until you are securely mine."

He proceeded to drop vague, adroit hints of the perils that beset a fascinating actor's life, of the women that had come and gone in his life. And Lena, all a-tremble with jealous anxiety, was in the parlor of a Lutheran parsonage, with the minister reading out of the black book, before she was quite aware that she and her cyclonic adorer were not still promenading near the green-house in the park. "Now," said Feuerstein briskly, as they were once more in the open air, "we'll go to your father."

"Goodness gracious, no," protested Lena. "You don't know him--he'll be crazy--just crazy! We must wait till he finds out about you--then he'll be very proud. He wanted a son-in-law of high social standing--a gentleman."

"We will go home, I tell you," replied Feuerstein firmly--his tone was now the tone of the master. All the sentiment was out of it and all the hardness in it.

Lena felt the change without understanding it. "I bet you, pa'll make you wish you'd taken my advice," she said sullenly.

But Feuerstein led her home. They went up stairs where Mrs. Ganser was seated, looking stupidly at a new bonnet as she turned it slowly round on one of her cushion-like hands. Feuerstein went to her and kissed her on the hang of her cheek. "Mother!" he said in a deep, moving voice.

Mrs. Ganser blinked and looked helplessly at Lena.

"I'm married, ma," explained Lena.

"It's Mr. Feuerstein." And she gave her silly laugh.