Yet these nights were not altogether distasteful to Oliver. Fred had noticed for months that his room-mate no longer entered into the frolics of the club with the zest and vim that characterized the earlier days of the young Southerner's sojourn among them. Our hero had said nothing while the men had held together, and to all outward appearances had done his share not only with his singing, but in any other way in which he could help on the merriment. He had covered the space allotted to him on the walls with caricatures of the several boarders below. He had mixed the salad at Riley's the night of McFudd's farewell supper, with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows and the cook's cap on his head. He had lined up with the others at Brown's on the Bowery; drank his "crystal cocktails"--the mildest of beverages--and had solemnly marched out again with his comrades in a lock-step like a gang of convicts. He had indulged in forty-cent opera, leaning over the iron railing of the top row of the Academy of Music, and had finished the evening at Pfaff's, drinking beer and munching hardtack and pickles, and had laughed and sung in a dozen other equally absurd escapades. And yet it was as plain as daylight to Fred that Oliver's heart was no longer centred in the life about him.
The fact is, the scribe is compelled to admit, the life indulged in by these merry bohemians had begun to pall upon this most sensitive of young gentlemen.
It really had not satisfied him at all. This was not the sort of life that Mr. Crocker meant, he had said to himself after a night at Riley's when Cranch had sounded his horn so loud that the proprietor had threatened to turn the whole party into the street.
Mr. Crocker's temperament was too restful to be interested in such performances. As for himself, he was tired of it.
Nothing of all this did he keep from his mother.
The record of his likes and dislikes which formed the subject-matter of his daily letters was an absorbing study with her, and she let no variation of the weather-vane of his tastes escape her. Nor did she keep their contents from her intimate friends. She had read to Colonel Clayton one of his earlier ones, in which he had told her of the concerts and of the way Cockburn had served the brew that McFudd had concocted, and had shown him an illustration Oliver had drawn on the margin of the sheet--an outline of the china mug that held the mixture--to which that Chesterfield of a Clayton had replied:
"What did I tell you, madame--just what I expected of those Yankees--punch from mugs! Bah!"
She had, too, talked their contents over with Amos Cobb, who, since the confidence reposed in him by the Horn family, had become a frequent visitor at the house.
"There's no harm come to him yet, madame, or he wouldn't write you of what he does. Boys will be boys. Let him have his fling," the Vermonter had replied with a gleam of pleasure in his eye. "If he has the stuff in him that I think he has, he will swim out and get to higher ground; if he hasn't, better let him drown early. It will give everybody less trouble."
The dear lady had lost no sleep over these escapades.
She, too, realized that as long as Oliver poured out his heart unreservedly to her there was little to fear. In her efforts to cheer him she had sought, in her almost daily letters sent him in return, to lead his thoughts into other channels. She knew how fond he had always been of the society of women, and how necessary they were to his happiness, and she begged him to go out more. "Surely there must be some young girls in so great a city who can help to make your life happier," she wrote.
In accordance with her suggestions, he had at last put on his best clothes and had accompanied Tomlins and Fred to some very delightful houses away up in Thirty-third Street, and another on Washington Square, and still another near St. Mark's Place, where his personality and his sweet, sympathetic voice had gained him friends and most pressing invitations to call again. Some he had accepted, and some he had not--it depended very largely on his mood and upon the people whom he met. If they reminded him in any way, either in manners or appointments, of his life at home, he went again--if not, he generally stayed away.
Among these was the house of his employer, Mr. Slade, who had treated him with marked kindness, not only inviting him to his own house, but introducing him to many of his friends--an unusual civility Oliver discovered afterward--not many of the clerks being given a seat at Mr. Slade's table. "I like his brusque, hearty manner," Oliver wrote to his mother after the first visit. "His wife is a charming woman, and so are the two daughters, quite independent and fearless, and entirely different from the girls at home, but most interesting and so well bred."
Another incident, too, had greatly pleased not only Oliver and his mother, but Richard as well. It happened that a consignment of goods belonging to Morton, Slade & Co. was stored in a warehouse in Charleston, and it became necessary to send one of the clerks South to reship or sell them, the ordinary business methods being unsafe, owing to the continued rumblings of the now rapidly approaching political storm--a storm that promised to be infinitely more serious than the financial stringency. The choice had fallen on Oliver, he being a Southerner, and knowing the ways of the people. He had advised with his mother and stood ready to leave at an hour's notice, when Mr. Slade's heart failed him.
"It's too dangerous, my lad," he said to Oliver.
"I could trust you, I know, and I believe you would return safely and bring the goods or the money with you, but I should never forgive myself if anything should happen to you. I will send an older man."
And he did.
