Читать книгу The Carcellini Emerald, With Other Tales онлайн

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As a matter of fact, while the general public languished in ignorance of Carmichael’s antecedents, there were two or three individuals in New York who could have told his story from A to Z, but preferred for various reasons to keep their mouths shut. One of these was Tom Oliver, Carmichael’s chum at college and his sponsor in the initiatory steps of worldly progress. Another was Tom’s sister Eunice, now pretty Mrs. Arden Farnsworth, who, in days of lang syne, had been engaged to her brother’s handsome friend.

The third was a brave, hard-working young woman journalist on the staff of a great city newspaper; a girl who never troubled Carmichael with her presence, although she bore his name, and had given all her little patrimony to help her only brother through the university and provide him a start in life.

It was at the beginning of senior year, when Tom Oliver came back to college to surprise his friends by the announcement of his rich father’s insolvency. Up to that time Tom had been regarded as a prince of generosity and good-fellowship. His liberal allowance was lavished upon college subscriptions and other fellows’ debts as soon as it came into his hands. Before the end of the month he was as impecunious as the rest of them. The blow of his sudden change of prospects did not, therefore, afflict him as much as might have been expected. As for the democratic, happy-go-lucky band who for three years had made him their hero, it seemed, if anything, to bring him nearer to their level. As a rule, the chaps of their brotherhood were the sons of toilers, accustomed to scant means and modest ways of life, who looked forward to opening the world’s oyster with their own swords, or nobody’s. The man who appeared most to feel the hero’s altered circumstances was his room-mate, known as Ash Carmichael, a fellow the crowd had taken in among them through a not unnatural delusion that his being so intimate with Tom made him of Tom’s sort. Oliver and he had drifted together in freshman year, and Ash was indebted to Tom for a long list of solid benefits bestowed with the same recklessness of consequences and loyalty of affection that had marked every kind action of the young man’s life.