I
In the fortnight following his encounter with Mills at the Hardens’,
and the later meeting that same night in the storm, Bruce had thrown
himself with fierce determination into his work. There must be no
repetitions of such meetings; they added to his self-consciousness,
made him ill at ease even when walking the streets in which at a turn
of any corner he might run into Mills.
He had never known that he had a nerve in his body, but now he was
aware of disturbing sensations, inability to concentrate on his work,
even a tremor of the hands as he bent over his drawing-board. His
abrupt change from the open road to an office in some measure accounted
for this and he began going to a public golf links on Saturday
afternoons and Sundays, and against the coming of winter he had his
name proposed for membership in an athletic club.
He avoided going anywhere that might bring him again in contact with
the man he believed to be his father. Shepherd Mills he ran into at
the University Club now and then, and he was not a little ashamed of
himself for repelling the young man’s friendly overtures. Shepherd,
evidently feeling that he must in some way explain his silence about
the clubhouse, for which Bruce had made tentative sketches, spoke of
the scheme one day as a matter he was obliged to defer for the present.
“It’s a little late in the season to begin; and father’s doubtful about
it--thinks it might cause feeling among the men in other concerns. I
hadn’t thought of that aspect of the matter----”
Shepherd paused and frowned as he waited for Bruce to offer some
comment on the abandonment of the project. It was none of Bruce’s
affair, but he surmised that the young man had been keenly disappointed
by his father’s refusal.
“Oh, well, it doesn’t matter!” Bruce remarked as though it were merely
a professional matter of no great importance. But as he left Shepherd
he thought intently about the relations of the father and son. They
were utterly irreconcilable natures. Having met Franklin Mills, sat at
his fireside, noted with full understanding the man’s enjoyment of ease
and luxury, it was not difficult to understand his lack of sympathy
with Shepherd’s radical tendencies. Piecing together what he had heard
about Mills from Henderson and Millicent Harden with his own estimate,
Bruce was confident that whatever else Franklin Mills might be he was
no altruist.
After he left Shepherd Bruce was sorry that he had been so brusque. He
might at least have expressed his sympathy with the young man’s wish
to do something to promote the happiness of his workmen. The vitality
so evident in Franklin Mills’s vigorous figure, and his perfect poise,
made Shepherd appear almost ridiculous in contrast.
Bruce noted that the other young men about the club did not treat
Shepherd quite as one of themselves. When Shepherd sat at the big
round table in the grill he would listen to the ironic give and take of
the others with a pathetic eagerness to share in their good fellowship,
but unable to make himself quite one of them. This might have been
due, Bruce thought, to the anxiety of Shepherd’s contemporaries--young
fellows he had grown up with--to show their indifference to the fact
that he was the son of the richest man in town. Or they felt, perhaps,
that Shepherd was not equal to his opportunities. Clearly, however, no
one ever had occasion to refer to Shepherd Mills as the typical young
scion of a wealthy family whose evil ways were bound to land him in the
poorhouse or the gutter.
In other circumstances Bruce would have felt moved to make a friend of
Shepherd, but the fact that they were of the same blood haunted him
like a nightmare.