Bertram Copes Year | Page 3

want it. Tell Amy to put it on a plate."
"Amy?"
"Yes, Amy. My Amy."
"Your Amy?"
"Off with you,--parrot! And bring a fork too."
Cope lapsed back into his frown and recrossed the room. The girl behind the samovar felt that her hair was unbecoming, after all, and that her ring, borrowed for the occasion, was in bad taste. Cope turned back with his plate of cake and his fork. Well, he had been promoted from a "boy" to a "fellow"; but must he continue a kind of methodical dog-trot through a sublimated butler's pantry?
"That's right," declared Mrs. Phillips, on his return, as she looked lingeringly at his shapely thumb above the edge of the plate. "Come, we will sit down together on this sofa, and you shall tell me all about yourself." She looked admiringly at his blue serge knees as he settled down into place. They were slightly bony, perhaps; "but then," as she told herself, "he is still quite young. Who would want him anything but slender?--even spare, if need be."
As they sat there together,--she plying him with questions and he, restored to good humor, replying or parrying with an unembarrassed exuberance,--a man who stood just within the curtained doorway and flicked a small graying moustache with the point of his forefinger took in the scene with a studious regard. Every small educational community has its scholar manqué--its haunter of academic shades or its intermittent dabbler in their charms; and Basil Randolph held that role in Churchton. No alumnus himself, he viewed, year after year, the passing procession of undergraduates who possessed in their young present so much that he had left behind or had never had at all, and who were walking, potentially, toward a promising future in which he could take no share. Most of these had been commonplace young fellows enough--noisy, philistine, glaringly cursory and inconsiderate toward their elders; but a few of them--one now and then, at long intervals--he would have enjoyed knowing, and knowing intimately. On these infrequent occasions would come a union of frankness, comeliness and élan, and the rudiments of good manners. But no one in all the long-drawn procession had stopped to look at him a second time. And now he was turning gray; he was tragically threatened with what might in time become a paunch. His kind heart, his forthreaching nature, went for naught; and the young men let him, walk under the elms and the scrub-oaks neglected. If they had any interest beyond their egos, their fraternities, and (conceivably) their studies, that interest dribbled away on the quadrangle that housed the girl students. "If they only realized how much a friendly hand, extended to them from middle life, might do for their futures...!" he would sometimes sigh. But the youthful egoists, ignoring him still, faced their respective futures, however uncertain, with much more confidence than he, backed by whatever assurances and accumulations he enjoyed, could face his own.
"To be young!" he said. "To be young!"
Do you figure Basil Randolph, alongside his portière, as but the observer, the raisonneur, in this narrative? If so, you err. What!--you may ask,--a rival, a competitor? That more nearly.
It was Medora Phillips herself who, within a moment or two, inducted him into this role.
A gap had come in her chat with Cope. He had told her all he had been asked to tell--or all he meant to tell: at any rate he had been given abundant opportunity to expatiate upon a young man's darling subject--himself. Either she now had enough fixed points for securing the periphery of his circle or else she preferred to leave some portion of his area (now ascertained approximately) within a poetic penumbra. Or perhaps she wished some other middle-aged connoisseur to share her admiration and confirm her judgment. At all events----
"Oh, Mr. Randolph," she cried, "come here."
Randolph left his doorway and stepped across.
"Now you are going to be rewarded," said the lady, broadly generous. "You are going to meet Mr. Cope. You are going to meet Mr.----" She paused. "Do you know,"--turning to the young man,--"I haven't your first name?"
"Why, is that necessary?"
"You're not ashamed of it? Theodosius? Philander? Hieronymus?"
"Stop!--please. My name is Bertram."
"Never!"
"Bertram. Why not?"
"Because that would be too exactly right. I might have guessed and guessed----!"
"Right or wrong, Bertram's my name."
"You hear, Mr. Randolph? You are to meet Mr. Bertram Cope."
Cope, who had risen and had left any embarrassment consequent upon the short delay to Basil Randolph himself, shot out a hand and summoned a ready smile. Within his cuff was a hint for the construction of his fore-arm: it was lean and sinewy, clear-skinned, and with strong power for emphasis on the other's rather short, well-fleshed fingers. And as he gripped, he beamed; beamed just as warmly, or just as coldly--at all events, just as speciously--as he had