companionship, and the Doge and Mary in common hesitancy for a phrase
before parting from him. He was ahead of the phrase.
"But there is a Velasquez, one of the greatest of Velasquezes, just a few
steps from here! It would take only a minute to see it."
"A Velasquez a few steps from here!" cried the Doge. "Where? Be exact,
before I let my hopes rise too high."
"The subject is an ancestor of mine. My father has it."
Jack had looked in the direction of the Wingfield house on the Madison
Avenue corner as he spoke, and the Doge had followed his glance. The
eagerness passed from the Doge's face, but not its intensity. That was
transmuted into something staring and hard.
"A very great Velasquez!" Jack repeated.
"My _amour propre_!" the Doge said, in whispered abstraction, using the
French which so exactly expresses the rightness of an inner feeling that
will not let one do a thing however much he may wish to. Then a wave of
confusion passed over his face, evidently at the echo of his thoughts in
the form of words come unwittingly from his lips. He tried to retrieve
his exclamation in an effort at the forensic: "The _amour propre_ of any
American is hurt by the thought that he must go to a private gallery to
see a Velasquez in the greatest city of the land!"
But it was a lame explanation. Clearly, some old antipathy had been
aroused in Jasper Ewold; and it made him hesitate to enter the big red
brick house on the corner.
"And we have a wonderful Sargent, too, a Sargent of my mother!" Jack
proceeded.
"Yes, yes!" said the Doge, and eagerness returned; a strange, moving
eagerness that seemed to come from the same depths as the exclamation
that had arrested his acceptance of the invitation at the outset. It held
the monosyllables like drops of water trembling before they fell.
"I should like you to see them both," said Jack.
"Yes," said the Doge, the word an echo rather than consent.
"There is no one at home at this hour; you will have all the time you can
spare for the pictures."
In the ascendency of his ardor to retain the joy of their company and in
the perplexity of mystery injected afresh into his relations with Mary,
Jack was hardly conscious that his urging was only another way of saying
that his father was absent. And Mary had not thrown her influence either
for or against going. She was watching her father, curiously and
penetratingly, as if trying to understand the source of the emotion that
he was seeking to control.
"Why, in that case," exclaimed the Doge, "why, you see," he went on to
explain, "we desert folk, though we are used to galleries, are a little
diffident about meeting people who live in big mansions. I mean, people
who have not had the desert training that you have had, Sir Chaps. If it
is only a matter of looking at a picture without any social
responsibilities, and that picture a Velasquez, why, we must take the
time, mustn't we, Mary?"
"Yes," Mary assented.
With Mary on one side of him and Jack on the other, the Doge was walking
heavily and slowly.
"At what period of Velasquez's career?" he asked, vacantly.
"When he was young and the subject was middle-aged, a Northerner, with
fair hair and lean muscles under a skin bronzed by the tropics, and the
unquenchable fire of youth in his eyes."
"That ought to be a good Velasquez," said the Doge.
At the bottom step of the flight up to the entrance to the house he
hesitated. He appeared to be very old and very tired. His face had gone
quite pale. The lids hung heavily over his eyes. Jack dropped back in
alarm to assist him; but his color quickly returned and the old challenge
was in his glance as it met Jack's.
"Now for your Velasquez!" he exclaimed, with calm vigor.
Once in the hall, Jack stood to one side of the door of the drawing-room
to let the Doge enter first. As the old man crossed the threshold his
hands were clasped behind him; his shoulders had fallen together, not in
weariness now, but in a kind of dazed, studious expectancy; and he faced
the "Portrait of a Lady."
"This is the Sargent," he said slowly, his lips barely opening in
mechanical and absent comment. "A good Sargent!"
He was as still as the picture in his bowed and earnest gaze into her
eyes, except for an occasional nervous movement of the fingers. All the
surroundings seemed to melt into a neutral background for the two; there
was nothing else in the room but the scholar in his age and the "Portrait
of a Lady" in her youth. Jack saw the Doge's face, its many lines
expressive as through a mist of time, its hills and valleys in the sun
and the shadow of emotions as variable as the mother's in life, speaking
personal resentment and wrong, admiration and tenderness, grievous
inquiry and philosophy, while the only answer was the radiant, "I give! I
give!" Finally, the Doge tightened the clasp of his hands, with a quiver
of his frame, as he turned toward Jack.
"Yes, a really great Sargent--a Sargent of supreme inspiration!" he said.
"Now for your Velasquez!"
Before the portrait of the first John Wingfield, Jasper Ewold's head and
shoulders recovered their sturdiness of outline and his features lighted
with the veritable touch of the brush of genius itself. He was the
connoisseur who understands, whose joy of possession is in the very
tingling depths of born instinct, rich with training and ripened by time.
It was superior to any bought title of ownership. In the presence of a
supreme standard, every shade of discriminative criticism and appraisal
became threads woven into a fabric of rapture.
"Mary," he said, his voice having the mellowness of age in its deep
appreciation, "Mary, wherever you saw this--skied or put in a corner
among a thousand other pictures, in a warehouse, a Quaker meetinghouse,
anywhere, whatever its surroundings--should you feel its compelling
power? Should you pause, incapable of analysis, in a spell of tribute?"
"Yes, I don't think I am quite so insensible as not to realize the
greatness of this portrait, or that of the Sargent, either," she
answered.
"Good! I am glad, Mary, very glad. You do me credit!"
Now he turned from the artist to the subject. He divined the kind of man
the first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in the
chronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only he
bore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of a
fierce past age, with its survival of the fittest swordsmen and
buccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, and
thinkers it gave to posterity.
"Fire-eating old devil! And the best thing he ever did, the best luck he
ever had, was attracting the attention of a young artist. It's
immortality just to be painted by Velasquez; the only immortality many a
famous man of the time will ever know!"
He looked away from the picture to Jack's face keenly and back at the
picture and back at Jack and back at the picture once more.
"Yes, yes!" he mused, corroboratively; and Jack realized that at the same
time Mary had been making the same comparison.
"Very like!" she said, with that impersonal exactness which to him was
always the most exasperating of her phases.
Then the Doge returned to the Sargent. He was standing nearer the
picture, but in the same position as before, while Jack and Mary waited
silently on his pleasure; and all three were as motionless as the
furniture, had it not been for the nervous twitching of the Doge's
fingers. He seemed unconscious of the passing of time; a man in a maze of
absorption with his thoughts. Jack was strangely affected. His brain was
marking time at the double-quick of fruitless energy. He felt the
atmosphere of the room surcharged with the hostility of the unknown. He
was gathering a multitude of impressions which only contributed more
chaos to chaos. His sensibilities abnormally alive to every sound, he
heard the outside door opened with a latch-key; he heard steps in the
hall, and saw his father's figure in the doorway of the drawing-room.
John Wingfield, Sr. appeared with a smile that was gone in a flash.
His face went stark and gray as stone under a frown from the Doge to
Jack; and with an exclamation of the half-articulate "Oh!" of
confusion, he withdrew.
Jack looked around to see the Doge half turned in the direction of the
door, gripping the back of a chair to steady himself, while Mary was
regarding this sudden change in him in answer to the stricken change in
the intruder with some of Jack's own paralysis of wonder. The Doge was
the first to speak. He fairly rocked the chair as he jerked his hand free
of its support, while he shook with a palsy which was not that of fear,
for there was raging color in his cheeks. The physical power of his great
figure was revealed. For the first time Jack was able to think of him as
capable of towering militancy. His anger gradually yielded to the
pressure of will and the situation. At length he said faintly, with a
kind of abyssmal courtesy:
"Thank you, Sir Chaps! Now I shall not go back to the desert without
having seen a Velasquez. Thank you! And we must be going."
Jack had an impulse, worthy of the tempestuous buccaneer of the picture,
to call to his father to come down; and then to bar the front door until
his burning questions were heard. The still light in Mary's eyes would
have checked him, if not his own proper second thought and the fear of
precipitating an ungovernable crisis. There had been shadows, real
shadows, he was thinking wildly; they were not born of desert imaginings;
and out of the quandary of his anguish came only the desire not to part
from the Doge and Mary in this fashion! No, not until in some way
equilibrium of mind was restored.
Though he knew that they did not expect or want his company, he went
out into the street with them. He would go as far as their hotel, he
remarked, in the bravery of simulated ease. The three were walking in
the same relative positions that they had before, with the Doge's bulk
hiding Mary from Jack's sight. The Doge set a rapid pace, as if under
the impetus of a desire to escape from the neighborhood of the
Wingfield house.
"Well, Sir Chaps," he said, after a while, "it will be a long time before
the provincials come to New York again. Why, in this New York you can
spend a patrimony in two weeks"--this with an affected amusement at his
own extravagance--"and I've pretty nearly done it. So we fly from
temptation. Yes, Mary, we will take the morning train."
"The morning train!" Mary exclaimed; and her surprise left no doubt that
her father's decision was new to her. Was it due to an exchange of
glances between a stark face and a face crimson with indignation which
Jack had already connected with the working out of his own destiny?
"Yes, that is better than spending our orange crop again!" she hastened
to add, with reassuring humor. "I'm fairly homesick for our oasis."
"We've had our fill of the big city," said the Doge, feelingly, "and we
are away to our little city of peace where we turned our pasts under with
the first furrows in the virgin soil."
Then silence. The truce of nonsense was dead. Persiflage was dead. Jack
was as a mute stranger keeping at their side unasked, while the only
glimpse he had of Mary was the edge of her hat and her fingertips on her
father's sleeve. Silence, which he felt was as hard for them as for him,
lasted until they were at the entrance to the quiet little hotel on a
cross-town street where the Ewolds were staying; and having the first
glimpse of Mary's eyes since they had started, he found nothing
fathomable in them except unmistakable relief that the walk was over.
"Thank you for showing me the Velasquez," said the Doge.
"Thank you, Jack," Mary added.
Both spoke in a manner that signaled to him the end of all things, but an
end which he could not accept.
"I--I--oh, there are a thousand questions I--" he broke out, desperately.
The muscles of his face tightened. Unconsciously he had leaned forward
toward the Doge in his intensity, and his attitude had become that of the
Wingfield of the portrait. A lower note of command ran through the
misery of his tone.
Jasper Ewold stared at him in a second of scrutiny, at once burningly
analytic and reflective. Then he flushed as he had at sight of the figure
in the drawing-room doorway. His look plainly said: "How much longer do
you mean to harass me?" as if Jack's features were now no less the image
of a hard and bitter memory than those of John Wingfield, Sr. Jack drew
back hurt and dumb, in face of this anger turned on himself. At length,
the Doge mustered his rallying smile, which was that of a man who carries
into his declining years a burden of disappointments which he fears may,
in his bad moments, get the better of his personal system of philosophy.
"Come, Mary!" he said, drawing his arm through hers. He became, in an
evident effort, a grand, old-fashioned gentleman, making a bow of
farewell. "Come, Mary, it's an early train and we have our packing
yet to do."
This time it was, indeed, dismissal; such a dismissal with polite urgency
as a venerable cabinet minister might give an importunate caller who is
slow to go. He and Mary started into the hotel. But he halted in the
doorway to say over his shoulder, with something of his old-time cheer,
which had the same element of pity as his leave-taking on the trail
outside of Little Rivers:
"Luck, Sir Chaps!"
"Luck!" Mary called in the same strained tone that she had called to Jack
when he went over the pass on his way to New York, the tone that was like
the click of a key in the lock of a gate.
XXX
WITH THE PHANTOMS
As Jack left the hotel entrance he was walking in the treadmill mechanics
of a prisoner pacing a cell, without note of his surroundings, except of
dim, moving figures with which he must avoid collision. The phantoms of
his boyhood, bulky and stiflingly near, had a monstrous reality, yet the
ghostly intangibility that mocked his sword-thrusts of tortured inquiry.
At length his distraction centered on the fact that he and his father
were to dine alone that evening.
They dined alone regularly every Wednesday, when Jack made a report of
his progress and received a lesson in business. It was at the last
council of this kind that John Wingfield, Sr. had bidden his son to
bring all questions and doubts to him. Now Jack hailed the weekly
function as having all the promise of relief of a surgeon's knife. Fully
and candidly he would unburden himself of every question beating in his
brain and every doubt assailing his spirit.
By the time that he was mounting the steps of the house his growing
impatience could no longer bear even the delay of waiting on dinner. When
he entered the hall he was the driven creature of an impelling desire
that must be satisfied immediately.
"Will you ask my father if he will see me at once?" he said to the
butler.
"Mr. Wingfield left word that he had to go into the country for the
night," answered the butler. "I am sorry, sir," he added confusedly, in
view of the blank disappointment with which the information was received.
In dreary state Jack dined by himself in the big dining-room, leaving the
food almost untouched. At intervals he was roused to a sense of his
presence at table by the servant's question if he should bring another
course. Without waiting for the last one, he went downstairs to the
drawing-room, and standing near the "Portrait of a Lady," again poured
out his questions, receiving the old answer of "I give! I give!" which
meant, he knew, that she had given all of herself to him. Saying after
saying of hers raced through his mind without throwing light on the
mystery, which had the uncanniness of a conspiracy against him.
And after his mother, Mary had influenced him more than any other person.
She had brought life to the seeds which his mother had planted in his
nature. That new life could not die, but without her it could not
flourish. Her cry of "It's not in the blood!" again came echoing to his
ears. What had she meant? The question sent him to the Ewolds' hotel; it
sent this note up to her room:
"MARY:
"In behalf of old desert comradeship, if I were in trouble wouldn't you
help me all you could? If I were in darkness and you could give me light,
would you refuse? Won't you see me for a few moments, if I promise to
keep to my side of the barrier which you have raised between us? I will
wait here in the lobby a long time, hoping that you will.
"JACK."
"All the light I have to give. I also am in darkness," came the answer in
a nervous, impulsive hand across a sheet of paper; and soon Mary herself
appeared from the elevator, not in the fashion of the Avenue, but in
simple gray coat and skirt, such as she wore at home. She greeted him in
a startled, half-fearful manner, as if her presence were due to the
impulsion of duty rather than choice.
"Shall we walk?" she asked, turning toward the door in the welcome of
movement as a steadying influence in her evident emotion.
There they were in the old rhythm of step of Little Rivers companionship
on a cross-town street. He saw that the costly hat that he had selected
for her in the display of a shop-window after all was not the equal of
the plain model with a fetching turn to the brim and a single militant
feather, which she wore that evening. The light feather boa around her
neck on account of the cool night air seemed particularly becoming. He
was near, very near, her, so near that their elbows touched; but the
nearness was like that of a picture out of a frame which has come to life
and may step back into cold canvas at any moment. Oh, it was hard, in the
might of his love for her, not to forget everything else and cry out
another declaration, as he had from the canyon! But her face was very
still. She was waiting for him to begin, while her fingers were playing
nervously with the tip of her boa.
"I must be frank, very frank," he said.
"Yes, Jack, or why speak at all?"
"From the night of my arrival in Little Rivers, when the Doge at once
recognized who I was without telling me, I saw that, under his politeness
and his kindness, he was hostile to my presence in Little Rivers."
"Yes, I think that in a way he was," she answered.
"I was conscious that something out of the past was between him and me,
and that it included you in a subtle influence that nothing could change.
And this afternoon, while you were at the house and my father came to the
drawing-room door, I could not help noticing how the Doge was overcome.
You noticed it, too?"
"Yes, I never saw my father in such anger before. It seemed to me that
he could have struck down that man in the doorway!" There was a
perceptible shudder, but she did not look up, her glance remaining level
with the flags.
"And on the pass you said, 'It's not in the blood!'" he continued. "Yes,
almost in terror you said it, as if it spelled an impassable gulf between
us. Why? why? Mary, haven't I a right to know?"
As he broke off passionately with this appeal, which was as the focus of
all the fears that had tormented him, they were immediately under the
light of a street lamp. She turned her head toward him resolutely, in the
mustering of her forces for an ordeal. Her face was pale, but there was
an effort at the old smile of comradeship.
"Yes, as I said, the little light that I have is yours, Jack," she began.
"But there is not much. It is, perhaps, more what I feel than what I
know that has influenced me. All that my father has ever said about you
and your father and your relations to us was the night after I returned
from the pass ahead of you, when you had descended into the canyon to
frighten me with the risk you were taking."
"I did not mean to frighten you!" he interjected. "I only followed
an impulse."
"Yes, one of your impulses, Jack," she remarked, comprehendingly. "Father
and I have been so much together--indeed, we have never been apart--that
there is more than filial sympathy of feeling between us. There is
something akin to telepathy. We often divine each other's thoughts. I
think that he understood what had taken place between us on the pass;
that you had brought on some sort of a crisis in our relations. It was
then that he told me who you were, as you know. Then he talked of you and
your father--you still wish to hear?"
"Yes!"
"And you will listen in silence?"
"Yes!"
"I will grant your defence of your father, but you will not argue? I am
giving what you ask, in justice to myself; I am giving my reasons, my
feelings."
"No, I will not argue."
Their tones were so low that a passer-by would have hardly been conscious
that they were talking; but had the passer-by caught the pitch he might
have hazarded many guesses, every one serious.
"Then, I will try to make clear all that father said. You were the image
of your father--a smile and a square chin. The smile could charm and the
chin could kill. He liked you for some things that seemed to spring from
another source, as he called it; but these would vanish and in the end
you would be like your father, as he knew when he saw you break Pedro
Nogales's arm. And you gloried in your strength; as you told me on the
pass and as I saw for myself in the duel. And to you, father said,
victory was the supreme guerdon of life. It ran triumphant and
inextinguishable in your veins."
"I--" he said, chokingly; but remembered his promise not to argue.
"Any opposition, any refusal excited your will to overcome it in the
sheer joy of the exercise of your strength. This had been your father's
story in everything, even in his marriage."
She paused.
"There is nothing more? No further light on his old relations with my
father and mother?" he asked.
"Only a single exclamation, 'It's not in the blood for you to believe in
Jack Wingfield, Mary!' And after that he turned silent and moody. I
pressed him for reasons. He answered that he had told me enough. I had to
live my own life; the rest I must decide for myself. I knew that I was
hurting him sorely. I was striking home into that past about which he
would never speak, though I know it still causes him many days of
suffering."
"But on the desert there is no past!" Jack exclaimed.
"Yes, there is, Jack. There is your own heart. On the desert your past is
not shared with others. But to-night, after I received your note, I did
try, for the second time in my life, to share father's. I told him your
request; I spoke of the scene in your drawing-room; I asked him what it
meant. He answered that you must learn from one nearer you than he was,
and that he never wanted to think of that scene again."
It was she who had chosen the direction at the street corners. They were
returning now toward the hotel. The fingers which had been playing with
the boa had crumpled the end of it into a ball, which they were gripping
so tightly that the knuckles were little white spots set in a blood-red
background. She was suffering, but determined to leave nothing unsaid.
"Jack, when I said 'It's not in the blood' I was more than repeating my
father's words. They expressed a truth for me. I meant not only rebellion
against what was in you, but against the thing that was in me. Why, Jack,
I do not even remember my own mother! I have only heard father speak of
her sadly when I was much younger. Of late years he has not mentioned
her. He and the desert and the garden are all I have and all I know; and
probably, yes--probably I'm a strange sort of being. But what I am, I am;
and to that I will be true. Father went to the desert to save my life;
and broken-hearted, old, he is greater to me than the sum of any worldly
success. And, Jack, you forget--riding over the pass so grandly with your
impulses, as if to want a thing is to get it--you--but we have had good
times together; and, as I said, you belong on one side of the pass and I
on the other. This and much else, which one cannot see or define, is
between us. From the day you came, some forbidding influence seemed at
work in my father's life and mine; and when you had gone another man,
with your features and your smile, came to Little Rivers; one that I
understand even less than you!"
Jack recalled the references to the new rancher by Bob Worther on the day
of his departure for the East and, later, in Jim Galway's letter. But he
did not speak. Something more compelling than his promise was keeping him
silent: her own apprehension, with its story of phantoms of her own.
"And yesterday I saw your father's face," she went on, "as it appeared in
the doorway for a second before he saw my father and was struck with
fear, and how like yours it was--but more like John Prather's. And the
high-sounding preachments about the poverty that might go with fine gowns
became real to me. They were not banal at all. They were simple truth,
free of rhetoric and pretence. I knew that my cry of 'It's not in the
blood' was as true in me as any impulse of yours ever could be in you!"
To the end, under the dominance of her will, she had not faltered; and
with the end she looked up with a faint smile of stoicism and an
invincible flame in her eyes. Anything that he might be able to say would
be as flashing a blade in and out of a blaze. She had become superior to
the resources of barrier or armor, confident of a self whose richness he
realized anew. He saw and felt the tempered fineness of her as something
that would mind neither siege nor prayer.
"I am not afraid," she said, "and I know that you are not. It is all
right!" Then she added, with a desperate coolness, but still clasping the
boa rigidly: "The hotel is only a block away, and to-morrow you will be
back in the store and I shall soon be on my side of the pass."
This was her right word for a situation when his temples were throbbing,
harking back, with time's reversal of conditions, to a situation after
the duel in the _arroyo_ was over and he had used the right word when her
temples were throbbing and her hands splashed. If retribution were her
object, she had repaid in nerve-twitch of torture for nerve-twitch of
torture. The picture that had been alive and out of its frame was back on
cold canvas. Even the girl he had known across the barrier, even the girl
in armor, seemed more kindly. But one can talk, even to a picture in a
frame; at least, Jack could, with wistful persistence.
"You don't mind if I tell you again--if I speak my one continuous thought
aloud again?" he asked. "Mary, I love you! I love you in such a way that
I"--with a faint bravery of humor as he saw danger signals--"I would
build mud-houses all day for you to knock to pieces!"
"Foolish business, Jack!" she answered.
"Or drag a plow."
"Very hard work!"
"Or set out to tunnel a mountain single-handed, with hammer and chisel."
"I think you would find it dreadfully monotonous at the end of the
first week."
He had spoken his extravagances without winning a glance from her. She
had answered with a precision that was more trying than silence.
"_I_ shouldn't find it so if you were in the neighborhood to welcome
me when I knocked off for the day," he declared. "You see, I can't
help it. I can't help what is in me, just as surely as the breath of
life is in me."
"Jack!" she flashed back, with arresting sharpness, but without looking
around, while her step quickened perceptibly, "suppose I say that I am
sorry and I, too, cannot help it; that I, too, have temperament, as well
as you;" her tone was almost harsh; "that even you cannot have everything
you command; that for you to want a thing does not mean that I want it;
that I cannot help the fact that I do not--"
With a quick interruption he stayed the end of the sentence, as if it
were a descending blade.
"Don't say that!" he implored. "It is too much like taking a vow that
might make you fearfully stubborn in order to live up to it. Perhaps the
thing will come some day. It's wonderful how such a thing does come. You
see, I speak from experience," he went on, in wan insistence, with the
entrance to the hotel in sight. "Why, it is there before you realize it,
like the morning sunshine in a room while you are yet asleep. And you
open your eyes and there is the joyous wonder, settling itself all
through you and making itself at home forever. You know for the first
time that you are alive. You know for the first time that you were born
into this world merely because one other person was born into it."
"Very well said," she conceded, in hasty approval, without vouchsafing
him a glance. "I begin to think you get more inspiration for compliments
on this side of the pass than on the other,"--and they were at the hotel
door. Precipitately she hastened through it, as if with her last display
of strength after the exhaustion of that walk.
XXXI
PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT
When he returned to the house, Jack found a letter that had come in the
late mail from Jim Galway:
"First off, that story you sent for Belvy," Jim wrote. "We've heard it
read and reread, and the more it's worn with reading the fresher it gets
in our minds. As I size up the effect on the population, we folks in the
forties and fifties got more fun out of it than anybody except the folks
in the seventies and the five-to-twelve-year-olds. Some of the thirteen
and fourteen-year-olds were inclined to think at first that it wasn't
quite grown up enough for them, until they saw what fashionable
literature it was becoming. Then their dignified maturity limbered up a
little. Jack, it certainly did us a world of good. It seemed as if you
were back home again."
"Back home again!" Jack repeated, joyously; and then shook his head at
himself in solemn warning.
"And those of us that don't take our meat without salt sort of needed
cheering up," Jim went on. "Only a few days after I wrote you, the Doge
and Mary suddenly started for New York. Maybe he has looked you up." (The
"maybe" followed an "of course," which had been scratched through.) "And
maybe if he has you know more about what is going on here than we do. We
practically don't know anything; but I've sure got a feeling of that
uncertainty in the atmosphere that I used to have before a cyclone when I
lived in Kansas. This Prather, that so many thought at first looked like
you, has also gone to New York.
"He left only two days ago. Maybe you will run across him. I don't know,
but it seems to me he's gone to get the powder for some kind of a blow-up
here. Jack, you know what would happen if we lost our water rights and
you know what I wrote you in my last letter. Leddy and Ropey Smith are
hanging around all the time, and since the Doge went a whole lot of
fellows that don't belong to the honey-bee class have been turning up and
putting up their tents out on the outskirts, like they expected something
to happen. If things get worse and I've got something to go on and we
need you, I'm going to telegraph just as I said I would; because, Jack,
though you're worth a lot of millions, someway we feel you're one of us.
"Very truly yours for Little Rivers,
"JAMES R. GALWAY.
"P.S.--Belvy said to put in P.S. because P.S.'s are always the most
important part of a letter. She wants to know if you won't write
another story."
"I will!" said Jack. "I will, immediately!"
He made it a long story. He took a deal of pains with it in the very
relief of something to do when sleep was impossible and he must count the
moments in wretched impatience until his interview with the one person
who could answer his questions.
As he went down town in the morning the very freshness of the air
inspired him with the hope that he should come out of his father's office
with every phantom reduced to a figment of imagination springing from the
abnormality of his life-story; with a message that should allay Mary's
fears and soften her harshness toward him; with the certainty that the
next time he and his father sat together at dinner it would be in a
permanent understanding, craved of affection. Mary might come to New
York; the Doge might spend his declining years in leisurely patronage of
bookshops and galleries; and he would learn how to run the business,
though his head split, as became a simple, normal son.
These eddying thoughts on the surface of his mind, however, could not
free him of a consciousness of a deep, unsounded current that seemed to
be the irresistible, moving power of Mary's future, the store's, his
fathers, Jasper Ewold's and his own. With it he was going into a gorge,
over a cataract, or out into pleasant valleys, he knew not which. He knew
nothing except that there was no stopping the flood of the current which
had its source in streams already flowing before he was born. When the
last question had been asked his future would be clear. Relief was ahead,
and after relief would come the end of introspection and the beginning of
his real career.
But another question was waiting for him in the store. It was walking the
streets of his father's city in the freedom of a spectator who comes to
observe and not to buy. Crossing the first floor as he came to the
court, Jack saw, with sudden distinctness among the many faces coming and
going, a profile which, in its first association, developed on his vision
as that of his own when he shaved in front of the ear in the morning. He
had only a glimpse before it was turned away and its owner, a young man
in a quiet gray suit, started up the stairs.
Jack studied the young man's back half amusedly to see if this, too, were
like his own, and laughed at himself because he was sure that he would
not know his own back if it were preceding him in a promenade up the
Avenue. In peculiar suspense he was hoping that the young man would pause
and look around, as his father always did and shoppers often did, in a
survey of the busy, moving picture of the whole floor. But the young man
went on to the top of the flight. There he proceeded along the railing of
the court. His profile was again in view under a strong light, and Jack
realized that his first recognition of a resemblance was the recognition
of an indisputable fact.
"Have I a double out West and another in New York?" he thought. "It gives
a man a kind of secondhand feeling!"
Then he recalled Jim's letter saying that John Prather had gone to New
York. Was this John Prather? He had no doubt that it was when the object
of his scrutiny, with full face in view, stopped and leaned over the
balcony just above the diamond counter. There was a mole patch on the
cheek such as Jack remembered that the accounts of John Prather had
mentioned.
"I am as much fussed as the giant was at the sight of yellow!"
Jack mused.
But for the mole patch the features were his own, as he knew them,
though no one not given to more frequent personal councils with mirrors
than Señor Don't Care of desert trails knows quite the lights and shadows
of his own countenance, which give it its character even more than does
its form. John Prather was regarding the jewelry display, where the
diamonds were scintillating under the light from the milk glass roof,
with a smile of amused contemplation. His expression was unpleasant to
Jack. It had a quality of satire and of covetousness as its owner leaned
farther over the rail and rubbed the palms of his hands together as
gleefully as if the diamonds were about to fly into his pockets by
enchantment.
All the time Jack had stood motionless in fixed and amazed observation.
He wondered that his stare had not drawn the other's attention. But John
Prather seemed too preoccupied with the dazzle of wealth to be
susceptible to any telepathic influence.
"Great heavens! I am gaping at him as if he were climbing hand over hand
up the face of a sky-scraper!" Jack thought. It was time something
happened. Why should he get so wrought up over the fact that another man
looked like him? "I'll get acquainted!" he declared, shaking himself free
of his antipathy. "We are both from Little Rivers and that's a ready
excuse for introducing myself."
As he started across the floor toward the stairs, Prather straightened
from his leaning posture. For an instant his glance seemed to rest on
Jack. Indeed, eye met eye for a flash; and then Prather moved away. His
decision to go might easily have been the electric result of Jack's own
decision to join him. Jack ran up the stairs. At the head of the flight
he saw, at half the distance across the floor, Prather's back entering an
elevator on the down trip. He hurried forward, his desire to meet and
speak with the man whose influence Jim Galway and Mary feared now
overwhelming.
"Hello!" Jack sang out; and this to Prather's face after he had turned
around in the elevator.
In the second while the elevator man was swinging to the door, Jack
and Prather were fairly looking at each other. Prather had seen that
Jack wanted to speak to him, even if he had not heard the call. His
answer was a smile of mixed recognition and satire. He made a
gesture of appreciative understanding of the distinction in their
likeness by touching the mole on his cheek with his finger, which
was Jack's last glimpse of him before he was shot down into the
lower regions of the store.
"He did it neatly!" Jack gasped, with a sense of defeat and chagrin. "And
it is plain that he does not care to get acquainted. Perhaps he takes it
for granted that I am not friendly and foresaw that I would ask him a lot
of questions about Little Rivers that he would not care to answer." At
all events, the only way to accept the situation was lightly, his reason
insisted. "Having heard about the likeness, possibly he came to the store
to have a look at me, and after seeing me felt that he had been libeled!"
But his feelings refused to follow his reason in an amused view.
"I do not like John Prather!" he concluded, as he took the next elevator
to the top floor. "Yes, I liked Pete Leddy better at our first meeting. I
had rather a man would swear at me than smile in that fashion. It is
much more simple."
The incident had had such a besetting and disagreeable effect that Jack
would have found it difficult to rid his mind of it if he had not had a
more centering and pressing object in prospect in the citadel of the
push-buttons behind the glass marked "Private."
John Wingfield, Sr. looked up from his desk in covert watchfulness to
detect his son's mood, and he was conscious of a quality of manner that
recalled the returning exile's entry into the same room upon his arrival
from the West.
"Well, Jack," the father said, with marked cheeriness, "I hear you have
been taking a holiday. It's all right, and you will find motoring beats
pony riding."
"In some ways," Jack answered; and then he came a step nearer, his hand
resting on the edge of the desk, as he looked into his father's eyes with
glowing candor.
John Wingfield, Sr.'s eyes shifted to the pushbuttons and later to a
paper on the desk, with which his fingers played gently. He realized
instantly that something unusual was on Jack's mind.
"Father," Jack went on, "I want a long talk quite alone with you. When it
is over I feel that we shall both know each other better; we can work
together in a fuller understanding."
"Yes, Jack," answered the father, cautiously feeling his way with a
swift upward glance, which fell again to the paper. "Well, what is it
now? Come on!"
"There are a lot of questions I want to ask--family questions."
"Family questions?" The fingers paused in playing with the paper for an
instant and went on playing again. The soft hands were as white as the
paper. "Family questions, eh? Well, there isn't much to our family except
you and I and that old ancestor--and a long talk, you say?"
"Yes. I thought that probably this would be a good time; you could give
me an hour now. It might not take that long."
Jack's voice was even and engaging and respectful. But it seemed to fill
the room with many echoing whispers.
"I have a very busy day before me," the father said, still without
looking up. He was talking to a little pad at one corner of the green
blotter which had a list of his appointments. "Your questions are not so
imperative that they cannot wait?"
"Then shall it be at dinner?" Jack asked.
"At dinner? No. I have an engagement for dinner."
"Shall you be home early? Shall I wait up for you?" Jack persisted.
"Yes, that's it! Say at nine. I'll make a point of it--in the library at
nine!" John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand slipped away from the papers and
patted the back of Jack's hand. "And come on with your questions. I will
answer every one that I can." He was looking up at Jack now, smilingly
and attractively in his frankness. "Every one that I can, from the first
John Wingfield right down to the present!"
But the hand that lay on Jack's was cold and its movement nervous and
spasmodic.
"Thank you, father. I knew you would. I haven't forgotten your wish that
I should bring all my doubts and questions to you," said Jack, happily.
And in an impulse which had the devoutness of a rising hope he took that
cold, soft hand in both of his and gave it a shake; and the feel of the
son's grip, firm and warm, remained with John Wingfield, Sr. while he
stared at the door through which Jack had passed out. When he had pulled
himself together he asked Mortimer to connect him with Dr. Bennington.
"Doctor, I want a little talk with you to-night before nine," he said.
"Could you dine with me--not at the house--say at the club?
Yes--excellent--and make it at seven. Yes. Good-by!"
XXXII
A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY
A library atmosphere was missing from the Wingfield library, with its
heavy panelling and rows of red and blue morocco backs. Rather the
suggestion was of a bastion of privacy, where a man of action might make
his plans or take counsel at leisure amid rich and mellow surroundings.
Here, John Wingfield, Sr. had gained points through post-prandial
geniality which he could never have won in the presence of the battery of
push-buttons; here, his most successful conceptions had come to him;
here, he had known the greatest moments of his life. He was right in
saying that he loved his library; but he hardly loved it for its books.
When he returned to the house shortly before nine from his session with
Dr. Bennington, it was with the knowledge that another great moment was
in prospect. He took a few turns up and down the room before he rang for
the butler to tell Jack that he had come in. Then he placed a chair near
the desk, where its occupant would sit facing him. After he sat down he
moved the desk lamp, which was the only light in the room, so that its
rays fell on the back of the chair and left his own face in shadow--a
precaution which he had taken on many other occasions in adroitness of
stage management. He drew from the humidor drawer of his desk a box of
the long cigars with blunt ends which need no encircling gilt band in
praise of their quality.
As Jack entered, the father welcomed him with a warm, paternal smile. And
be it remembered that John Wingfield, Sr. could smile most pleasantly,
and he knew the value of his smile. Jack answered the smile with one of
his own, a little wan, a little subdued, yet enlivening under the glow of
his father's evident happiness at seeing him. The father, who had
transgressed the rules of longevity by taking a second cigar after
dinner, now pushed the box across the desk to his son. Jack said that he
would "roll one"; he did not care to smoke much. He produced a small
package of flake tobacco and a packet of rice paper and with a deftness
that was like sleight of hand made a cigarette without spilling a single
flake. He had not always chosen the "makings" in place of private stock
Havanas, but it seemed to suit his mood to-night.
"That is one of the things you learned in the West," the father observed
affably, to break the ice.
"I can do them with one hand," Jack answered. "But you are likely to
have an overflow--which is all right when you have the whole desert for
the litter. Besides, in a library it would have the effect of gallery
play, I fear."
He was seated in a way that revealed all the supple lines of his figure.
However relaxed his attitude before his father, it was always suggestive
of latent strength, appealing at once to paternal pride and paternal
uncertainty as to what course the strength would take. His face under the
light of the lamp was boyish and singularly without trace of guile.
The father struck a match and held it to light his son's cigarette;
another habit of his which he had found flattering to men who were
brought into the library for conference. Jack took a puff slowly and,
after a time, another puff, and then dropped the cigarette on the ash
receiver as much as to say that he had smoked enough. Something told John
Wingfield, Sr. that this was to be a long interview and in no way
hurried, as he saw the smile dying on the son's lips and misery coming
into the son's eyes.
"These last two days have been pretty poignant for me," Jack began, in a
simple, outright fashion; "and only half an hour ago I got this. It was
hard to resist taking the first train West." He drew a telegram from his
pocket and handed it to his father.
"We want you and though we don't suppose you can come, we simply had to
let you know.
"JAMES R. GALWAY."
"It is Greek to me," said the father. "From your Little Rivers
friends, I judge."
"Yes. I suppose that we may as well begin with it, as it drove everything
else out of my mind for the moment."
John Wingfield, Sr. swung around in his chair, with his face in the
shadow. His attitude was that of a companionable listener who is prepared
for any kind of news.
"As you will, Jack," he said. "Everything that pertains to you is my
interest. Go ahead in your own way."
"It concerns John Prather. I don't know that I have ever told you about
him in my talks of Little Rivers."
"John Prather?" The father reflectively sounded the name, the while he
studied the spiral of smoke rising from his cigar. "No, I don't think you
have mentioned him."
It was Jack's purpose to take his father entirely into his confidence; to
reveal his own mind so that there should be nothing of its perplexities
which his father did not understand. He might not choose a logical
sequence of thought or event, but in the end nothing should be left
untold. Indeed, he had not studied how to begin his inquiries. That he
had left to take care of itself. His chief solicitude was to keep his
mind open and free of bitterness whatever transpired, and it was evident
that he was under a great strain.
He told of the coming of John Prather to Little Rivers while he was
absent; of the mention of the likeness by his fellow-ranchers; and of the
fears entertained by Jim Galway and Mary. When he came to the scene in
the store that afternoon it was given in a transparent fulness of detail;
while all his changing emotions, from his first glimpse of Prather's
profile to the effort to speak with him and the ultimatum of Prather's
satirical gesture, were reflected in his features. He was the
story-teller, putting his gift to an unpleasant task in illumination of
sober fact and not the uses of imagination; and his audience was his
father's cheek and ear in the shadow.
"Extraordinary!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed when Jack had finished,
glancing around with a shrug. "Naturally, you were irritated. I like to
think that only two men have the Wingfield features--the features of the
ancestor--yes, only two: you and I!"
"It was more than irritation; it was something profound and disturbing,
almost revolting!" Jack exclaimed, under the disagreeable spell of his
vivid recollection of the incident. "The resemblance to you was so
striking, father, especially in the profile!" Jack was leaning forward,
the better to see his father's profile, dim in the half light. "Yes,
recognizable instantly--the nose and the lines about the mouth! You have
never met anyone who has seen this man? You have never heard of him?" he
asked, almost morbidly.
John Wingfield, Sr. broke into a laugh, which was deprecatory and
metallic. He looked fairly into Jack's eyes with a kind of inquiring
amazement at the boy's overwrought intensity.
"Why, no, Jack," he said, reassuringly. "If I had I shouldn't have
forgotten it, you may be sure. And, well, Jack, there is no use of being
sensitive about it, though I understand your indignation--especially
after he flaunted the fact of the resemblance in such a manner and
refused to meet you. From what I have heard about that fight with
Leddy--Dr. Bennington told me--I can appreciate why he did not care to
meet you." He laughed, more genially this time, in the survey of his
son's broad shoulders. "I fear there is something of the old ancestor's
devil in you when you get going!" he added.
So his father had seen this, too--what Mary had seen--this thing born in
him with the coming of his strength!
"Yes, I suppose there is," he admitted, ruefully. "Yes, I have reason to
know that there is."
His face went moody. Any malice toward John Prather passed. He was
penitent for a feeling against a stranger that seemed akin to the dormant
instinct that had made him glory in holding a bead on Pete Leddy.
"And I am glad of it!" said John Wingfield, Sr., with a flash of stronger
emotion than he had yet shown in the interview.
"I am not. It makes me almost afraid of myself," Jack answered.
"Oh, I don't mean firing six-shooters--hardly! I mean backbone," he
hastened to add, almost ingratiatingly. "It is a thing to control, Jack,
not to worry about."
"Yes, to control!" said Jack, dismally.
He was hearing Ignacio's cry of "The devil is out of Señor Don't Care!"
and seeing for the thousandth time Mary's horrified face as he pressed
Pedro Nogales against the hedge. Now poise was all on the side of the
father, who glanced away from Jack at the glint of the library cases in
the semi-darkness in satisfaction. But only a moment did the son's absent
mood last. He leaned forward quivering, free from his spell of
reflection, and his words came pelting like hail. He was at grip with the
phantoms and nothing should loosen his hold till the truth was out.
"Father, I could not fail to see the look on your face and the look on
Jasper Ewold's when you found him in the drawing-room!"
At the sudden reversal of his son's attitude, John Wingfield, Sr. had
drawn back into the shadow, as, if in defensive instinct before the force
that was beating in Jack's voice.
"Yes, I was startled; yes, very startled! But, go on! Speak everything
that you have in mind; for it is evident that you have much to say. Go
on!" he repeated more calmly, and turned his face farther into the
shadow, while he inclined his head toward Jack as if to hear better. One
leg had drawn up under him and was pressing against the chair.
Jack waited a moment to gather his thoughts. When he spoke his
passion was gone.
"We have always been as strangers, father," he began. "I have no
recollection of you in childhood until that day you came as a stranger to
the house at Versailles. I was seven, then. My mother was away, as you
will recall. I remember that you did not kiss me or show any affection.
You did not even say who you were. You looked me over, and I was very
frail. I saw that I did not please you; and I did not like you. In my
childish perversity I would speak only French to you, which you did not
understand. When my mother came home, do you remember her look? I do. She
went white as chalk and trembled. I was frightened with the thought that
she was going to die. It was a little while before she spoke and when she
did speak she was like stone. She asked you what you wanted, as if you
were an intruder. You said: 'I have been looking at the boy!' Your
expression told me again that you were not pleased with me. Without
another word you departed. I can still hear your steps on the walk as you
went away; they were so very firm."
"Yes, Jack, I can never forget." The tone was that of a man racked. "What
else?" he asked. "Go on, Jack!"
"You know the life my mother and I led, study and play together. And
that was the only time you saw me until I was fourteen. I was mortally in
awe of you then and in awe of you the day I went West with your message
to get strong. But I got strong; yes, strong, father!"
"Yes, Jack," said the father. "Yes, Jack, leave nothing unsaid--nothing!"
Now Jack swept back to the villa garden in Florence, the day of the
Doge's call; and from there to the Doge's glance of recognition that
first night in Little Rivers; then to the scene in front of the
bookstore, when the Doge hesitated about going to see the Velasquez. He
pictured the Doge's absorption over the mother's portrait; he repeated
Mary's story on the previous evening.
All the while the profile, so dimly outlined in the outer darkness beyond
the lamp's circle of light, to which he had been speaking, had not
stirred. The father's cigar had gone out. It lay idly in his fingers,
which rested on the arm of the chair, above a tiny pile of ashes on the
rug. But there was no other sign of emotion, except his half affirmative
interjections, with a confessional's encouragement to empty the mind of
its every affliction.
"Why were my mother and myself always in exile? What was this barrier
between you and her? Why was it that I never saw you? Why this bitterness
of Jasper Ewold against you? Why should that bitterness be turned against
me? I want to know, father, so that we can start afresh and right. I no
longer want to be in the dark, with its mystery, but in the light, where
I can grapple with the truth!"
There was no rancor, no crashing of sentences; only high tension in the
finality of an inquiry in which hope and fear rose together.
"Yes, Jack!" exclaimed John Wingfield, Sr., after a silence in which he
seemed to be passing all that Jack had said in review. "I am glad you
have told me this; that you have come to the one to whom you should come
in trouble. You have made it possible for me to speak of something that I
never found a way to speak about, myself. For, Jack, you truly have been
a stranger to me and I to you, thanks to the chain of influences which
you have mentioned."
Very slowly John Wingfield, Sr. had turned in his chair. Distress was
rising in his tone as he leaned toward Jack. His face under the rim of
light of the lamp had a new charm, which was not that of the indulgent or
flattering or winning smile, or the masterful set of his chin on an
object. He seemed pallid and old, struggling against a phantom himself;
almost pitiful, this man of strength, while his eyes looked into Jack's
with limpid candor.
"Jack, I will tell you all I can," he said. "I want to. It is duty. It is
relief. But first, will you tell me what your mother told you? What her
reasons were? I have a right to know that, haven't I, in my effort to
make my side clear?" He spoke in direct, intimate appeal.
Jack's lips were trembling and his whole nature was throbbing in a
new-found sympathy. For the first time he saw his father as a man of
sensitive feeling, capable of deep suffering. And he was to have the
truth, all the truth, in kindness and affection.
"After you had left the house at Versailles," said Jack, "she took me in
her arms and said that you were my father. 'Did you like him?' she asked;
and I said no, realizing nothing but the childish impression of the
interview. At that she was wildly, almost hysterically, triumphant. I was
glad to have made her so happy. 'You are mine alone! You have only me!'
she declared over and over again. 'And you must never ask me any
questions, for that is best.' She never mentioned you afterward; and in
all my life, until I was fourteen, I was never away from her."
Again the palm of John Wingfield, Sr.'s hand ran back and forth over his
knee and the foot that was against the chair leg beat a nervous tattoo;
while he drew a longer breath than usual, which might have been either of
surprise or relief. His face fell back behind the rim of the lamp's rays,
but he did not turn it away as he had when Jack was talking.
"You know only the Jasper Ewold who has been mellowed by time," he began.
"His scholarship was a bond of companionship for you in the isolation of
a small community. I know him as boy and young man. He was very
precocious. At the age of eight, as I remember, he could read his Caesar.
You will appreciate what that meant in a New England town--that he was
somewhat spoiled by admiration. And, naturally, his character and mine
were very different, thanks to the difference in our situations; for the
Ewolds had a good deal of money in those days. I was the type of boy who
was ready to work at any kind of odd job in order to get dimes and
quarters for my little bank.
"Well, it is quite absurd to go back to that as the beginning of Jasper
Ewold's feelings toward me; but one day young Wingfield felt that young
Ewold was patronizing him. We had a turn at fisticuffs which resulted in
my favor. Jasper was a proud boy, and he never quite forgave me. In fact,
he was not used to being crossed. Learning was easy for him; he was
good-looking; he had an attractive manner, and it seemed only his right
that all doors should open when he knocked. Soon after our battle he went
away to school. Not until we were well past thirty did our paths cross
again. He was something of a painter, but he really had had no set
purpose in life except the pleasures of his intellectual diversions. I
will not say that he was wild, but at least he had lived in the abundant
freedom of his opportunities. He fell in love at the same time that I did
with Alice Jamison. You have seen your mother's picture, but that gives
you little idea of her beauty in girlhood."
"I have always thought her beautiful!" Jack exclaimed spontaneously.
"Yes. I am glad. She always was beautiful to me; but I like best to think
of her before she turned against me. I like to think of her as she was in
the days of our courtship. Fortune favored me instead of Jasper Ewold. I
can well understand the blow it was to him, that she should take the
storekeeper, the man without learning, the man without family, as people
supposed then, when he thought that she belonged entirely to his world.
But his enmity thereafter I can only explain by his wounded pride; by a
mortal defeat for one used to having his way, for one who had never known
discipline. Your mother and I were very happy for a time. I thought that
she loved me and had chosen me because I was a man of purpose, while
Jasper Ewold was not."
John Wingfield, Sr. spoke deliberately, measuring his thought before he
put it into words, as if he were trying to set himself apart as one
figure in a drama while he aimed to do exact justice to the others.
"It was soon after you were born that your mother's attitude changed. She
was, as you know, supersensitive, and whatever her grievances were she
kept them to herself. My immersion in my affairs was such that I could
not be as attentive to her as I ought to have been. Sometimes I thought
that the advertisement with our name in big letters in every morning
paper might be offensive to her; again, that she missed in me the
education I had had to forfeit in youth, and that my affection could
hardly take its place. I know that Jasper Ewold saw her occasionally, and
in his impulse I know that he said things about me that were untrue. But
that I pass over. In his place I, too, might have been bitter.
"The best explanation I can find of your mother's change toward me is one
that belongs in the domain of psychology and pathology. She suffered a
great deal at your birth and she never regained her former strength. When
she rose from her bed it was with a shadow over her mind. I saw that she
was unhappy and nervous in my presence. Indeed, I had at times to face
the awful sensation of feeling that I was actually repugnant to her. She
was especially irritable if I kissed or fondled you. She dropped all her
friends; she never made calls; she refused to see callers. I consulted
specialists and all the satisfaction I had was that she was of a
peculiarly high-strung nature and that in certain phases of melancholia,
where there is no complete mental and physical breakdown, the patient
turns on the one whom she would hold nearest and dearest if she were
normal. The child that had taken her strength became the virtual passion
of her worship, which she would share with no one.
"When she proposed to go to Europe for a rest, taking you with her, I
welcomed the idea. I rejoiced in the hope that the doctors held out that
she would come back well, and I ventured to believe in a happy future,
with you as our common object of love and care. But she never returned,
as you know; and she only wrote me once, a wild sort of letter about what
a beautiful boy you were and that she had you and I had the store and I
was never to send her any more remittances.
"I made a number of trips to Europe. I could not go frequently, because
in those days, Jack, I was a heavy borrower of money in the expansion of
my business, and only one who has built up a great business can
understand how, in the earlier and more uncertain period of our banking
credits, the absence of personal attention in any sudden crisis might
throw you on the rocks. Naturally, when I went I wrote to Alice that I
was coming; but I always found that she had gone and left no address for
forwarding mail from the Crédit Lyonnais. Once when I went without
writing she eluded me, and the second time I found that she had a cottage
at Versailles. That, as you know, was the only occasion when I ever saw
you or her until I came to bring you home after her sudden death."
"Yes," Jack whispered starkly. "That day I had left her as well as
usual and came home to find her lying still and white on a couch, her
book fallen out of her hand onto the floor and--" the words choked in
his throat.
"And the stranger, your father, who came for you seemed very hard and
forbidding to you!"
"Yes," Jack managed to say.
"But, Jack, when my steps sounded so firm the day I left you at
Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the
inevitable. For I had seen your face. It was like mine, and yet I had to
give you up! I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again;
knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against
me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice
and for me. Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she
should have. And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had
my point of view. I had my moments of reproach against fate; my moments
of bitterness and anger; my moments when I set all my mind with, volcanic
energy into my affairs in order to forget my misfortune. I had to build
for the sake of building. Perhaps that hardened me.
"When you came home I saw that you were mine in blood but not mine in
heart. All your training had been foreign, all of estrangement from the
business and the ways of the home-country; which you could not help, I
could not help, nothing now could help. But, after all, I had been
building for you; that was my new solace. I wanted you to be equal to
what was coming to you, and that change meant discipline. To be frank
with you, as you have been with me, you were sickly, hectic, dreamy; and
when word came that you must go to the desert if your life were to be
saved--well, Jack, I had to put affection aside and consider this blow
for what it was, and think not of kind words but of what was best for you
and your future. I knew that my duty to you and your duty to yourself was
to see you become strong, and for your sake you must not return until you
were strong.
"Now, as for the scene in the drawing-room the other day: I could not
forget what Jasper Ewold had said of me. That was one thing. Another was
that I had detected his influence over you; an influence against the
purpose and steadiness that I was trying to inculcate in you; and
suddenly coming upon him in my own house, in view of his enmity and the
way in which he had spoken about me, I was naturally startled and
indignant and withdrew to avoid a scene. That is all, Jack. I have
answered your questions to the best of my knowledge. If others occur to
you I will try my best to answer them, too;" and the father seemed ready
to submit every recess of his mind to the son's inquisition.
"You have answered everything," said Jack; "everything--fairly,
considerately, generously."
There was a flash of triumph in the father's eyes. Slowly he rose and
stood with his finger-ends caressing the blotting-pad. Jack rose at
the same time, his movement automatic, instinctively in sympathy with
his father's. His head was bowed under stress of the emotion,
incapable of translation into language, which transfixed him. It had
all been made clear, this thing that no one could help. His feeling
toward his mother could never change; but penetrating to the depths in
which it had been held sacred was a new feeling. The pain that had
brought him into the world had brought misery to the authors of his
being. There was no phantom except the breath of life in his nostrils
which they had given him.
Watchfully, respecting the son's silence, the father's lips tightened,
his chin went out slightly and his brows drew together in a way that
indicated that he did not consider the battle over. At length, Jack's
head came up and his face had the strength of a youthful replica of the
ancestor's, radiant in gratitude, and in his eyes for the first time, in
looking into his father's, were trust and affection. There was no word,
no other demonstration except the steady, liquid look that spoke the
birth of a great, understanding comradeship. The father fed his hunger
for possession, which had been irresistibly growing in him for the last
two months, on that look. He saw his son's strength as something that had
at last become malleable; and this was the moment when the metal was at
white heat, ready for knowing turns with the pincers and knowing blows of
the hammer.
The message from Jim Galway was still on the table where the father had
laid it after reading. Now he pressed his fingers on it so hard that the
nails became a row of red spots.
"And the telegram, Jack?" he asked.
Jack stared at the yellow slip of paper as the symbol of problems that
reappeared with burning acuteness in his mind. It smiled at him in the
satire of John Prather triumphing in Little Rivers. It visualized
pictures of lean ranchers who had brought him flowers in the days of his
convalescence; of children gathered around him on the steps of his
bungalow; of all the friendly faces brimming good-will into his own on
the day of his departure; of a patch of green in desert loneliness, with
a summons to arms to defend its arteries of life.
"They want me to help--I half promised!" he said.
"Yes. And just how can you help?" asked his father, gently.
"Why, that is not quite clear yet. But a stranger, they made me one of
themselves. They say that they need me. And, father, that thrilled me. It
thrilled the idler to find that there was some place where he could be of
service; that there was some one definite thing that others thought he
could do well!"
The father proceeded cautiously, reasonably, with his questions, as one
who seeks for light for its own sake. Jack's answers were luminously
frank. For there was always to be truth between them in their new
fellowship, unfettered by hopes or vagaries.
"You could help with your knowledge of law? With political influence?
Help these men seasoned by experience in land disputes in that region?"
"No!"
"And would Jasper Ewold, whom I understand is the head and founder of the
community, want you to come? Has he asked you?" the father continued,
drawing in the web of logic.
"On the contrary, he would not want me."
"And Miss Ewold? Would she want you?"
There Jack hesitated. When he spoke, however, it was to admit the fact
that was stabbing him.
"No, she would not. She has dismissed me. But--but I half promised," he
added, his features setting firmly as they had after Leddy had fired at
him. "It seems like duty, unavoidable."
The metal was cooling, losing its malleability, and the father proceeded
to thrust it back into the furnace.
"Then, I take it that your value to Little Rivers is your cool hand
with a gun," he said, "and the summons is to uncertainties which may
lead to something worse than a duel. You are asked to come because you
can fight. Do you want to go for that? To go to let the devil, as you
call it, out of you?"
Now the metal was soft with the heat of the shame of the moment when Jack
had called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and of the moment when he
saw Pedro Nogales's limp, broken arm and ghastly face.
"No, no!" Jack gasped. "I want no fight! I never want to draw a bead on a
man again! I never want to have a revolver in my hand again!"
He was shuddering, half leaning against the desk for support. His
father waited in observant comprehension. Convulsively, Jack
straightened with desperation and all the impassioned pleading to Mary
on the pass was in his eyes.
"But the thing that I cannot help--the transcendent thing, not of logic,
not of Little Rivers' difficulties--how am I to give that up?" he cried.
"Miss Ewold, you mean?"
"Yes!"
"Jack, I know! I understand! Who should understand if not I?" The father
drew Jack's hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for
mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son's fibres, which
were receptively sensitive to the caress. "I know what it is when the
woman you love dismisses you! You have her to think of as well as
yourself. Your own wish may not be lord. You may not win that which will
not be won"--how well he knew that!--"either by protest, by persistence,
or by labor. You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with
feminine temperament, Jack. And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn't it, to
bear in mind that your life has not been normal? With the switch from
desert to city life homesickness has crept over you. From to-night things
will not be so strange, will they? But if you wish a change, go to
Europe--yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very
moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and
amends are at hand.
"And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she
want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side? I
do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold's or Mary Ewold's thoughts. She
has preferred to make another generation's ill-feeling her own in a thing
that concerns her life alone. She has seen enough of you to know her
mind. For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover. Is
it fair to her to follow her back to the desert? Is it the courage of
self-denial, of control of impulse on your part? Would your mother want
you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose
strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold's sensibilities? And if
you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and
for her? Jack, wait! If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love
for you in her, it will grow of itself. You cannot force it into blossom.
Come, Jack, am I not right?"
Jack's hands lay cold and limp in his father's; so limp that it seemed
only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the
boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was
so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle
that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes
were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if
he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look
in his father's eyes firmly. There was a half sob, as if this
sentimentalist, this Señor Don't Care, had wrung determination from a
precipice edge, even as Mary Ewold had. He gripped his father's hands
strongly and lifted them on a level with his breast.
"You have been very fine, father! I want you to be patient and go on
helping me. The trail is a rough one, but straight, now. I--I'm too
brimming full to talk!" And blindly he left the library.
When the door closed, John Wingfield, Sr. seized the telegram, rolled it
up with a glad, fierce energy and threw it into the waste-basket. His
head went up; his eyes became points of sharp flame; his lips parted in a
smile of relief and triumph and came together in a straight line before
he sank down in his chair in a collapse of exhaustion. After a while he
had the decanter brought in; he gulped a glass of brandy, lighted another
cigar, and, swinging around, fell back at ease, his mind a blank except
for one glowing thought:
"He will not go! He will give up the girl! He is to be all mine!"
It is said that the best actors never go on the stage. They play real
parts in private life, making their own lines as they watch the other
players. One of this company, surveying the glint of his bookcases, was
satisfied with the greatest effort of his life in his library.
XXXIII
PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT
It did not occur to Jack to question a word of the narrative that had
reduced a dismal enigma to luminous, connected facts. With the swift
processes of reason and the promptness of decision of which he was
capable on occasion, he had made up his mind as to his future even as he
ascended the stairs to his room. The poignancy of his father's appeal had
struck to the bed-rock of his affection and his conscience, revealing
duty not as a thing that you set for yourself, but which circumstances
set for you.
Never before had he realized how hopelessly he had been a dreamer. Firio,
P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear became the fantastic memory of another
incarnation. His devil should never again rejoice in having his finger on
a trigger or send him off an easy traveller in search of gorgeous
sunrises. His devil should be transformed into a backbone of unremitting
apprenticeship in loving service for the father who had built for him in
love. Though his head split, he would master every detail of the
business. And when Jack stepped into the Rubicon he did not splash around
or look back. He went right over to the new country on the other bank.
But there were certain persons whom he must inform of the crossing.
First, he wrote a telegram to Jim Galway: "Sorry, but overwhelming duty
here will not permit. Luck and my prayers with you." Then to Firio a
letter, which did not come quite so easily: "You see by now that you are
mistaken, Firio. I am not coming back. Make the most of the ranch--your
ranch--that you can." The brevity, he told himself, was in keeping with
Firio's own style. Besides, anything more at length would have opened up
an avenue of recollections which properly belonged to oblivion.
And Mary? Yes, he would write to her, too. He would cut the last strand
with the West. That was best. That was the part of his new courage of
self-denial stripping itself of every trammeling association of
sentiment. Other men had given up the women of their choice; and he could
never be the man of this woman's choice. Somehow, his father's talk had
made him realize an inevitable outcome which had better be met and
mastered in present fortitude, rather than after prolonged years of
fruitless hope centering two thousand miles away. He started a dozen
letters to Mary, meaning each to be a fitting _envoi_ to their
comradeship and a song of good wishes. Each one he wrote in the haste of
having the task quickly over, only to throw away what he had written when
he read it. The touch that he wanted would not come. He was simply
flashing out a few of a thousand disconnected thoughts that ran away
incoherently with his pen.
But wasn't any letter, any communication of any kind, superfluous? Wasn't
it the folly of weak and stupid stubbornness? She had spoken her final
word in their relations at the hotel door. There was no Little Rivers;
there was no Mary; there was nothing but the store. To enforce this fiat
he had only to send the wire to Jim and post the letter to Firio. This he
would do himself. A stroll would give him fresh air. It was just what he
needed after all he had been through that evening; and he would see the
streets not with any memory of the old restlessness when he and his
father were strangers, but kindly, as the symbol of the future.
His room was on the second floor. As he left it, he heard the door-bell
ring, its electric titter very clear in the silence of the house. No
doubt it meant a telegram for his father. At the turn of the stairs on
the first floor he saw the back of the butler before the open door.
Evidently it was not a matter of a telegram, but of some late caller.
Jack paused in the darkness of the landing, partly to avoid the bother of
having to meet anyone and partly arrested by the manner of the butler,
who seemed to be startled and in doubt about admitting a stranger at that
hour. Indistinctly, Jack could hear the caller's voice. The tone was
familiar in a peculiar quality, which he tried to associate with a voice
that he had heard frequently. The butler, apparently satisfied with the
caller's appearance, or, at least, with his own ability to take care of a
single intruder, stepped back, with a word to come in. Then, out of the
obscurity of the vestibule, appeared the pale face of John Prather. Jack
withdrew farther into the shadows instinctively, as if he had seen a
ghost; as if, indeed, he were in fear of ghosts.
"I will take your card to Mr. Wingfield," said the butler.
Prather made a perfunctory movement as if for a card-case, but
apparently changed his mind under the prompting suggestion that it was
superfluous.
"My name is John Prather," he announced. "Mr. Wingfield knows who I am
and I am quite sure that he will see me."
While the butler, after rapping cautiously, went into the library with
the message, John Prather stood half smiling to himself as he looked
around the hall. The effect seemed to please him in a contemplative
fashion, for he rubbed the palms of his hands together, as he had in his
survey of the diamond counters. He was serenity itself as John Wingfield,
Sr. burst out of the library, his face hard-set.
"I thought you were going this evening!" he exclaimed. "By what right do
you come here?"
He placed himself directly in front of Prather, thus hiding Prather's
figure, but not his face, which Jack could see was not in the least
disturbed by the other's temper.
"Oh, no! The early morning train has the connections I want for Arizona,"
he answered casually, as if he were far from being in any hurry. "I was
taking a walk, and happening to turn into Madison Avenue I found myself
in front of the house. It occurred to me what a lot I had heard about
that ancestor, and seeing a light in the library, and considering how
late it was, I thought I might have a glimpse of him without
inconveniencing any other member of the family. Do you mind?"
He put the question with an inflection that was at once engaging and
confident.
"Mind!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
"I am sure you do not!" Prather returned. Now a certain deference and a
certain pungency of satire ran together in his tone, the mixture being
nicely and pleasurably controlled. "Is it in there, in the drawing-room?"
"And then what else? Where do you mean to end? I thought that--"
"Nothing else," Prather interrupted reassuringly. "Everything is settled,
of course. This is sort of a farewell privilege."
"Yes, in there!" snapped John Wingfield, Sr. "It's the picture on the
other side of the mantel. I will wait here--and be quick, quick, I tell
you! I want you out of this house! I've done enough! I--"
"Thanks! It is very good-natured of you!"
John Prather passed leisurely into the drawing-room and John Wingfield,
Sr. stood guard by the door, his hand gripping the heavy portieres for
support, while his gaze was steadily fixed at a point in the turn of the
stairs just below where Jack was obscured in the shadow. His face was
drawn and ashen against the deep red of the hangings, and torment and
fear and defiance, now one and then the other, were in ascendency over
the features which Jack had always associated with composed and
unchanging mastery until he had seen them illumined with affection only
an hour before. And the father had said that he had never met or heard of
John Prather! The father had said so quietly, decidedly, without
hesitation! This one thought kept repeating itself to Jack's stunned
brain as he leaned against the wall limp from a blow that admits of no
aggressive return.
"The ancestor certainly must have been a snappy member of society in his
time! It has been delightful to have a look at him," said John Prather,
as he came out of the drawing-room.
He paused as he spoke. He was still smiling. The mole on his cheek was
toward the stairway; and it seemed to heighten the satire of his smile.
The faces of the young man and the old man were close together and they
were standing in much the same attitude, giving an effect of likeness in
more than physiognomy. That note of John Prather's voice that had sounded
so familiar to Jack was a note in the father's voice when he was
particularly suave.
"This is the end--that is the understanding--the end?" demanded John
Wingfield, Sr.
"Oh, quite!" John Prather answered easily, moving toward the door. He
did not offer his hand, nor did John Wingfield, Sr. offer to take it.
But as he went out he said, his smile broadening: "I hope that Jack
makes a success with the store, though he never could run it as well as
I could. Good-by!"
"Good-by!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
He wheeled around distractedly and stood still, his head bowed, his
fingers working nervously before his hands parted in a shrugging,
outspread gesture of relief; then, his head rising, his body stiffening,
once more his arbitrary self, he started up the stairs with the firm yet
elastic step with which he mounted the flights of the store.
If Jack remained where he was they would meet. What purpose in questions
now? The answer to all might be as false as to one. He was no more in a
mood to trust himself with a word to his father than he had been to trust
himself with a word to John Prather. He dropped back into the darkness
of the dining-room and sank into a chair. When a bedroom door upstairs
had closed softly he was sequestered in silence with his thoughts.
His own father had lied to him! Lied blandly! Lied with eyes limpid with
appeal! And the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted
was truth. The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the
only thing for which she had ever punished him. He recalled the one
occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as she said:
"A lie fouls the mouth of the one who utters it, Jack. A lie may torture
and kill. It may ruin a life. It is the weapon of the coward--and never
be a coward, Jack, never be afraid!"
At the New England preparatory school which he had attended after he came
home, a lie was the abomination on which the discipline of student
comradeship laid a scourge. Out on the desert, where the trails run
straight and the battle of life is waged straight against thirst and
fatigue and distance, men spoke straight.
And nothing had been explained, after all! The phantom was back,
definite of form and smiling in irony. For it had a face, now, the face
of John Prather! How was he connected with the story of the mother? the
father? the Doge?
Then, like a shaft of light across memory, came the recollection of a
thing that had been so negligible to Jack at the time. It was Dr.
Bennington's first question in Jack's living-room; a question so
carelessly put and so dissociated from the object of his visit! Jack
remembered Dr. Bennington's curious glance through his eyebrows as he
asked him if he had met John Prather. And Dr. Bennington had brought Jack
into the world! He knew the family history! The Jack that now rose from
the chair was a Jack of action, driven by the scourge of John Prather's
smile into obsession with the one idea which was crying: "I will know! I
will know!"
Downstairs in the hall he learned over the telephone that Dr. Bennington
had just gone out on a call. It would be possible to see him yet
to-night! An hour later, as the doctor entered his reception-room he was
startled by a pacing figure in the throes of impatience, who turned on
him without formality in an outburst:
"Dr. Bennington, you asked me in Little Rivers if I had ever met John
Prather. I have met him! Who is he? What is he to me?"
The doctor's suavity was thrown off its balance, but he did not lose
his presence of mind. He was too old a hand at his profession, too
capable, for that.
"I refuse to answer!" he said quickly and decisively.
"Then you do know!" Jack took a step toward the doctor. His weight was on
the ball of his foot; his eyes had the fire of a command that was not to
be resisted.
"Heavens! How like the ancestor!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.
"Then you do know! Who is he? What is he to me?"
It seemed as if the ceiling were about to crack. The doctor looked away
to avoid the bore of Jack's unrelenting scrutiny. He took a turn up and
down, rapidly, nervously, his fingers pressed in against the palms and
the muscles of his forearms moving in the way of one who is trying to
hold himself in control by an outward expression of force against inward
rebellion.
"I dined with your father to-night!" he exclaimed. "I counseled him to
tell you the truth! I said that if he did not want to tell it for its own
sake, as policy it was the only thing to you! I--I--" he stopped, facing
Jack with a sort of grisly defiance. "Jack, a doctor is a confessor of
men! He keeps their secrets! Good-night!" And he strode through the
office door, which he closed behind him sharply, in reminder that the
interview was at an end.
As Jack went down the steps into the night, the face of John Prather,
with a satirical turn to the lips, was preceding him. Now he walked madly
up and down and back and forth across town to the river fronts, with
panting energy of stride, as he fastened the leash of will on quivering
nerves. When dawn came it was the dawn of the desert calling to a brain
that had fought its way to a lucid purpose. It started him to the store
in the fervor of a grateful mission, while a familiar greeting kept
repeating itself in his ears on the way:
"You won't forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you
ever go out West again, will you?"
The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain
employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry
wastes yielding abundance.
"But you must work very hard," he had told them. "Not until you have
callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a
desert sunrise or sunset. After that, you will be able to stand erect and
look destiny in the face."
"No February slush!" Burleigh, the fitter, had said. "No depending on
one man to hold your job!"
"Your own boss! You own some land and you just naturally get what you
earn!" according to Joe Mathewson.
"And from what I can make out," observed one of the automobile van
drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, "it requires
about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you'd call a
first-class, a number one desert Rube, Jack!"
"Yes," Jack told him. "The process that makes the earth fruitful is not
less complicated than a motor, simply because it is one of the earliest
inventions. You mix in nature's carbureter light and moisture with the
chemical elements of the soil."
"I'm on!" the chauffeur rejoined. "If a man works with a plow instead of
a screwdriver, it doesn't follow that his mind is as vacant as a cow that
stands stockstill in the middle of the road to show you that you can't
fool her into thinking that radiators are good to eat."
In explaining the labor and pains of orange-growing, which ended only
with the careful picking and packing, Jack would talk as earnestly as his
father would about the tedious detail which went into the purchase and
sale of the articles in any department of the store. He might not be able
to choose the best expert for the ribbon counter, but he had a certain
confidence that he could tell the man or the woman who would make good in
Little Rivers. No manager was more thorough in his observation of clerks
for promotion than Jack in observing would-be ranchers. He had given his
promise to one after another of a test list of disciples; and at times he
had been surprised to find how serious both he and the disciples were
over a matter that existed entirely on the hypothesis that he was not
going to stay permanently in New York.
This morning he was at the store for the last time, arriving even before
the delivery division, to circulate the news that he was returning to
Little Rivers. Trouble was brewing out there, he explained, but they
could depend on him. He would make a place for them and send word when he
was ready; and all whom he had marked as faithful were eager to go. Thus
he had builded unwittingly for another future of responsibilities when he
had paused in the midst of the store's responsibilities to tell stories
of how a desert ranch is run.
But one disciple did not even want to wait on the message. It was Peter
Mortimer, whom Jack caught on his way to the elevator at eight, his usual
hour, to make sure of having the letters opened and systematically
arranged when his employer should appear.
"So you are going, Jack! And--and, Jack, you know?" asked Peter
significantly.
"Yes, Peter. And I see that you know."
"I do, but my word is given not to tell."
Through that night's march Jack had guessed enough. He had guessed his
fill of chill misery, which now took the place of the hunger of inquiry.
The full truth was speeding out to the desert. It was with John Prather.
"Then I will not press you, Peter," he said. "But, Peter, just one
question, if you care to answer; was it--was it this thing that drove my
mother into exile?"
"Yes, Jack."
Then a moment's silence, with Peter's eyes full of sympathy and Jack's
dull with pain.
"And, Jack," Peter went on, "well, I've been so long at it that suddenly,
now you're going, I feel choked up, as if I were about to overflow with
anarchy. Jack, I'm going to give notice that I will retire as soon as
there is somebody to take my place. I want to rest and not have to keep
trying to remember if I have forgotten anything. I've saved up a little
money and whatever happens out there, why, there'll be some place I can
buy where I can grow roses and salads, as you say, if nothing more
profitable, won't there?"
"Yes, Peter. I know other fertile valleys besides that of Little Rivers,
though none that is its equal. I shall have a garden in one of them and
you shall have a garden next to mine."
"Then I feel fixed comfortable for life!" said Peter, with a perfectly
wonderful smile enlivening the wrinkles of his old face, which made Jack
think once more that life was worth living.
Later in the morning, after he had bought tickets for Little Rivers, Jack
returned to the house. When he stood devoutly before the portrait, whose
"I give! I give!" he now understood in new depths, he thought:
"I know that you would not want to remain here another hour. You would
want to go with me."
And before the portrait on the other side of the mantel he thought,
challengingly and affectionately:
"And you? You were an old devil, no doubt, but you would not lie! No,
you would not lie to the Admiralty or to Elizabeth even to save your
head! Yes, you would want to go with me, too!"
Tenderly he assisted the butler to pack the portraits, which were put in
a cab. When Jack departed in their company, this note lay on the desk in
the library, awaiting John Wingfield, Sr.'s return that evening:
"Father:
"The wire to Jim Galway which I enclose tells its own story. It was
written after our talk. When I was going out to send it I saw John
Prather and you in the hall. You said that you knew nothing of him. I
overheard what passed between you and him. So I am going back to Little
Rivers. The only hope for me now is out there.
"I am taking the portrait of my mother, because it is mine. I am taking
the portrait of the ancestor, because I cannot help it any more than he
could help taking a Spanish galleon. That is all I ask or ever could
accept in the way of an inheritance.
"Jack."
XXXIV
"JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--"
John Wingfield, Sr. had often made the boast that he never worried;
that he never took his business to bed with him. When his head touched
the pillow there was oblivion until he awoke refreshed to greet the
problems left over from yesterday. Such a mind must be a reliably
co-ordinated piece of machinery, with a pendulum in place of a heart. It
is overawing to average mortals who have not the temerity to say
"Nonsense!" to great egos. Yet the best adjusted clocks may have a lapse
in a powerful magnetic storm, and in an earthquake they might even be
tipped off the shelf, with their metal parts rendered quite as helpless
by the fall as those of a human organism subject to the constitutional
weaknesses of the flesh.
It was also John Wingfield, Sr.'s boast to himself that he had never been
beaten, which average mortals with the temerity to say "Nonsense!"--that
most equilibratory of words--might have diagnosed as a bad case of
self-esteem finding a way to forget the resented incidental reverses of
success. Yet, even average mortals noted when John Wingfield, Sr.
arrived late at the store the morning after Jack's departure for the West
that he had not slept well. His haggardness suggested that for once the
pushbutton to the switch of oblivion had failed him. The smile of
satisfied power was lacking. In the words of the elevator boy,
impersonal observer and swinger of doors, "I never seen the old man like
that before!"
But the upward flight through the streets of his city, if it did not
bring back the smile, brought back the old pride of ownership and
domination. He still had a kingdom; he was still king. Resentment rose
against the cause of the miserable twelve hours which had thrown the
machinery of his being out of order. He passed the word to himself that
he should sleep to-night and that from this moment, henceforth things
would be the same as they had been before Jack came home. Yes, there was
just one reality for him. It was enthroned in his office. This morning
was to be like any other business morning; like thousands of mornings to
come in the many years of activity that stretched ahead of him.
"A little late," he said, explaining his tardiness to his secretary; a
superfluity of words in which he would not ordinarily have indulged. "I
had some things to attend to on the outside."
With customary quiet attentiveness, Mortimer went through the mail with
his employer, who was frequently reassuring himself that his mind was as
clear, his answers as sure, and his interest as concentrated as usual.
This task finished, Mortimer, with his bundle of letters and notes in
hand, instead of going out of the room when he had passed around the
desk, turned and faced the man whom he had served for thirty years.
"Mr. Wingfield--"
"Well, Peter?"
John Wingfield, Sr. looked up sharply, struck by Mortimer's tone, which
seemed to come from another man. In Mortimer's eye was a placid,
confident light and his stoop was less marked.
"Mr. Wingfield, I am getting on in years, now," he said, "and I have
concluded to retire as soon as you have someone for my place; the sooner,
sir, the more agreeable to me."
"What! What put this idea into your head?" John Wingfield, Sr. snapped.
Often of late he had thought that it was time he got a younger man in
Peter's place. But he did not like the initiative to come from Peter; not
on this particular morning.
"Why, just the notion that I should like to rest. Yes, rest and play a
little, and grow roses and salads," said the old secretary, respectfully.
"Roses and salads! What in--where are you going to grow them?"
There was something so serene about Peter that his highly imperious,
poised employer found it impertinent, not to say maddening. Peter had a
look of the freedom of desert distances in his eyes already. A lieutenant
was actually radiating happiness in that neutral-toned sanctum of power,
particularly this morning.
"I am going out to Little Rivers, or to some place that Jack finds
for me, where I am to have a garden and work--or maybe I better call
it potter around--out of doors in January and February, just like it
was June."
Peter spoke very genially, as if he were trying to win a disciple on his
own account.
"With Jack! Oh!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr. He struck his closed fist
into the palm of his hand in his favorite gesture of anger, the
antithesis of the crisp rubbing of the palms, which he so rarely used of
late years. Rage was contrary to the rules of longevity, exciting the
heart and exerting pressure on the artery walls.
"Yes, sir," answered Peter, pleasantly.
"Well--yes--well, Jack has decided to go back!" Then there rose strongly
in John Wingfield, Sr.'s mind a suspicion that had been faintly signaled
to his keen observation of everything that went on in the store. "Are any
other employees going?" he demanded.
"Yes, sir, I think there are; not immediately, but as soon as he finds a
place for them."
"How many?"
"I don't think it is any secret. About fifty, sir."
"Name some of them!"
"Joe Mathewson, that big fellow who drives a warehouse truck, and
Burleigh;" and Peter went on with those of the test proof list
whom he knew.
Every one of them had high standing. Every one represented a value. While
at first John Wingfield, Sr. had decided savagely that Mortimer should
remain at his pleasure, now his sense of outraged egoism took an opposite
turn. He could get on without Mortimer; he could get on if every employee
in the store walked out. There were more where they came from in a city
of five millions population; and no one in the world knew so well as he
how to train them.
"Very good, Peter!" he said rigidly, as if he were making a declaration
of war. "Fix up your papers and leave as soon as you please. I will have
one of the clerks take your place."
"Thank you. That is very kind, Mr. Wingfield!" Mortimer returned, so
politely, even exultantly, that his aspect seemed treasonable.
John Wingfield, Sr. tried to concentrate his attention on some long and
important letters that had been left on his desk for further
consideration; but his mind refused to stick to the lines of typewriting.
"This one is a little complicated," he thought, "I will lay it aside."
He tried the second and the third letters, with no better results. A
tanned face and a pair of broad shoulders kept appearing between him and
the paper. Again he was thinking of Jack, as he had all night, to the
exclusion of everything else. Unquestionably, this son had a lot of
magnetic force in him; he had command of men. Why, he had won fifty of
the best employees out of sheer sentiment to follow him out to the
desert, when they had no idea what they were in for!
His gaze fell and rested for some time on the bunch of roses on his desk.
Every morning there had been a fresh bunch, in keeping with the custom
that Jack had established. The father had become so used to their
presence that he was unconscious of it. For all the pleasure he got out
of them, they might as well have been in the cornucopia vase in the
limousine. His hand went out spasmodically toward the roses, as if he
would crush them; crush this symbol of the thing drawn from the mother
that had invaded the calm autocracy of his existence. The velvety
richness of the petals leaning toward him above the drooping grace of
their stems made him pause in realization of the absurdity of his anger.
A feeling to which he had been a stranger swept over him. It was like a
breaking instinct of dependableness; and then he called up Dr.
Bennington.
"Well, he has gone!" he told the doctor, desperately.
"You did not tell him the truth!" came the answer; and he noted that the
doctor's voice was without its usual suavity. It was as matter-of-fact to
the man of millions as if it had been advising an operation in a
dispensary case.
"No, not exactly," John Wingfield, Sr. confessed.
"I told you what his nature was; how it had drawn on the temperament of
his mother. I told you that with candor, with a decently human humility
appealing to his affections, everything was possible. And remember, he is
strong, stronger than you, John Wingfield! There's a process of fate in
him! John Wingfield, you--" The sentence ended abruptly, as if the doctor
had dropped the receiver on the hooks with a crash.
Phantoms were closing in around John Wingfield, Sr.... His memory
ranged back over the days of ardent youth, in the full tide of growing
success, when to want a thing, human or material, meant to have it....
And in his time he had told a good many lies. The right lie, big and
daring, at the right moment had won more than one victory. With John
Prather out of the way, he had decided on an outright falsehood to his
son. Why had he not compromised with Dr. Bennington's advice and tried
part falsehood and part contrition? But no matter, no matter. He would
go on; he was made of steel.
Again the tanned face and broad shoulders stood between him and the
page. Jack was strong; yes, strong; and he was worth having. All the old
desire of possession reappeared, in company with his hatred of defeat.
He was thinking of the bare spot on the wall in the drawing-room in place
of the Velasquez. There would be an end of his saying: "The boy is the
spit of the ancestor and just as good a fighter, too; only his abilities
are turned into other channels more in keeping with the spirit of the
age!" An end of: "Fine son you have there!" from men at the club who had
given him only a passing nod in the old days. For he was not displeased
that the boy was liked, where he himself was not. The men whom he admired
were those who had faced him with "No!" across the library desk; who had
got the better of him, even if he did not admit it to himself. And the
strength of his son, baffling to his cosmos, had won his admiration. No,
he would not lose Jack's strength without an effort; he wanted it for his
own. Perhaps something else, too, there in the loneliness of the office
in the face of that bunch of roses was pulling him: the thrill that he
had felt when he saw the moisture in Jack's eyes and felt the warmth of
his grasp before Jack left the library.
And Jack and John Prather were speeding West to the same destination!
They would meet! What then? There was no use of trying to work in an
office on Broadway when the forces which he had brought into being over
twenty years ago were in danger of being unloosed out on the desert, with
Jack riding free and the fingers of the ancestor-devil on the reins. John
Wingfield, Sr. called in the general manager.
"You are in charge until I return," he said; and a few hours later he was
in a private car, bound for Little Rivers.