up it was to say: “You are bone of my bone, David, and I thank God for
a son who can see eye to eye with me at a time like this. And yet ...
you are young, David; in many ways you are younger than your years. You
are maturing slowly, just as I did. Sometimes I’ve been afraid--afraid
you might throw yourself into something as a boy throws himself,
without reserve, you know; blind to everything but the one thing,
whatever it might be. If you can only have time to ripen----”
David’s laugh was entirely care free. “That was the way you talked when
I went to college, Dad, and again, when I left for Florida. I haven’t
noticed that I’m particularly raw, compared with other men.”
“It isn’t that,” the father hastened to say, “it’s just that, up
to to-day, you’ve never had to shoulder a man’s load. Perhaps I am
foolishly apprehensive, but the way in which you spoke just now of our
obligation--your obligation--to Eben Grillage.... I don’t know how to
express it, but it made me feel as I have sometimes felt before; that
if anything which you might conceive to be a duty were pushing you,
you’d shut your eyes and go to any length.”
David laughed and shook his head. “Some day, Dad, you’ll wake up and
find that I’m a man grown; or I hope you will. Just the same, we do
owe Mr. Grillage a lot more than we can ever pay, and if it ever comes
in my way to chop the debt down a bit, you may be sure I’ll sharpen my
axe. Now, if you are not too wretchedly tired and worn out, suppose we
turn in and make our plans before we sleep. I told Lucille that we’d
most likely be late coming home and she won’t be sitting up for us.
To-morrow morning you’re going to turn the winding up of this thing
over to me and let me save what I can. That is what Mr. Grillage said I
must do, and it is what I mean to do.”
Deep into the night father and son sat together in the private room in
the rear, poring over the books and bank paper and setting things in
order for the speedy beaching of the outworn business ship. But it was
not until after they had left the bank and were walking home that David
won his final point.
“You shall do as you think best, David,” the father conceded, closing
an argument which had begun at the very outset of the planning. “If it
were left to me, I should probably be too easy with the bank’s debtors,
as I’ve always been. You may retain Oswald, if you think best; only
don’t let him be too hard on the borrowers who are in difficulties.”
The following day saw the beginning of the end for the oldest banking
institution in the county. At nine o’clock in the morning the cue
leading to Winkle’s wicket was formed again; but in an hour or two the
tide showed signs of turning. At Oswald’s suggestion the Vallorys
had posted a notice in the bank window to the effect that Middleboro
Security was going out of business, and inviting all who had claims
upon the bank to present them and get their money. Coincidently with
the posting of this notice, a rumor, starting from nobody knew just
where, began to pass from lip to lip among the anxious depositors.
It was to the effect that Eben Grillage, well known in the town and
currently spoken of by his former townsmen as a multimillionaire, was
backing Adam Vallory. The result was almost magical. First one and then
another dropped out of the line in front of Winkle’s window; and by
noon many of those who had already withdrawn their savings were coming
back to furnish an object-lesson in the mutability of human nature
by begging Adam Vallory to stay in business and reinstate them as
depositors.
Early in the afternoon David persuaded his father to go home, and
himself took the chair at the president’s desk, with Herbert Oswald at
his elbow. By evening a good beginning had been made and the tangle was
simplifying itself.
“Time is the thing we need to save,” said David, as he and the young
lawyer went together to the St. Nicholas for their belated dinner.
“Dad is needing a rest, and I’ve got to strike out and do something
for myself; something better than making maps in a Government surveying
office. Naturally, I can’t go until after things are wound up properly
here, and Dad and Lucille are provided for in some fashion. How long do
you think it is going to take?”
Oswald reserved his answer until after they had found their places in
the café and had given their dinner order.
“As to the time, it will probably ask for more than you will care to
give to it,” he predicted; “that is, if you mean to stay and see it
through. But that isn’t at all necessary. We can shake you loose in a
few days, after we have closed the bank doors and have brought matters
down to a routine settlement with debtors and creditors. I can handle
that part of it myself, as the bank’s counsel.”
In accordance with this outline of Oswald’s, David Vallory stood by
for the few days, taking his father’s place in the bank and doing what
he could to hasten the beaching of the Security ship. The end of that
phase of it came when the last depositor had chequed out his account,
and Winkle had closed his wicket for the final time. Only the deferred
collections remained, and these were turned over to Oswald.
In the evening of this climaxing day, David and the young attorney were
once more dining together in Vignaux’s café. The strain was off, and
for the first time since his home-coming, David was free to begin the
consideration of his own future. It was Oswald who gave the table talk
its start in the proper direction.
“You are footloose at last, David, and I can imagine that you are
mighty glad of it,” was the way the start was given. “It has been a new
experience for you, and you have certainly buckled down to it like a
man.”
David’s smile was boyishly complacent. “Sure I have; there was no
reason why I shouldn’t. Isn’t that what a man’s son is for, in the last
analysis?”
“Yes, but----”
“But what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. A good many sons don’t seem to see it in that light;
and in your case--well, I’ve known you a long time, David, and I didn’t
think you had it in you.”
“‘Faithful are the wounds of a friend,’” David quoted, with a return of
the good-natured smile. “What have I done to make you think small of
me? Or is it something that I haven’t done?”
“Neither,” was the thoughtful reply. “It’s just--oh, well; I guess it
is because we were boys together, and I couldn’t seem to realize that
you have grown up.”
“You and Dad are the limit. Do you realize it now?”
“Y-yes; to some extent. I’ve been watching you through this business
whirl. You’ve done well; splendidly well. But it was the fighting of
the untrained soldier.”
“Of course it was. What I didn’t know of the actual details of the
business would have filled a library.”
“That isn’t what I meant; I guess I can’t express myself clearly enough
to make you understand just what it is that I do mean. It sizes itself
up something like this: you’re so wholesome and straightforward and
decent, David----”
“Break it off,” laughed David; “you make me blush!”
“That’s it,” said the keen-eyed young fellow across the table; “you do
blush. Which is the proof of the pudding. But I mustn’t devil you when
you’re tired; tired and more or less discouraged.”
“Discouraged? Not a bit of it. Why should I be discouraged?”
“Most fellows would be, in your shoes. You’ve had every reason to
believe that you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth--or at
least, a triple-plated one.”
“I? Not in a thousand years!” grinned the son whose light was of a
proper filial brightness. “I’ve known all along that the Middleboro
Security would have to be wound up some time. Dad is all the fine
things you can say of him, Bert, but he wasn’t cut out for a successful
banker. He knows it as well as anybody.”
Oswald looked up questioningly. “You haven’t any twinges of your own,
Dave? It used to be the town’s idea that you’d some day come back and
marry Judith Fallon and settle down to be Vallory Number Two in the
banking business.”
“Marry Judith? What put that idea into the town’s head--or yours?”
“You did,” said Oswald gravely.
“Great Scott! Can’t a man be just ordinarily chummy with a girl he’s
known all his life without having the gossips of a country-town tie a
tin can to him?”
“With a number of them, yes; but with one, no.”
“Bosh!” said David.
“No, it isn’t ‘bosh.’ You’ve specialized on Judith; I’ve seen it
myself. Candidly, David, I’ve tried to shut my eyes to it, partly
because I hoped it might die out. Judith’s a good girl, and in her own
class she is the prettiest thing that was ever turned loose in a world
of more or less squashy young men. But I can’t seem to see her calling
herself Mrs. Vallory.”
“You needn’t try.”
Oswald’s eyebrows went up. “She has turned you down?”
“Bert, if this place wasn’t so public I should blow up! Good Lord,
man! there has never been anything sentimental between Judith and
me!--nothing on top of earth more than a bit of jolly good-comradeship!”
Being already up, Oswald’s eyebrows stayed in that position.
“On your part, perhaps; but how about Judith? Listen, David: within the
past month I’ve heard half a dozen times that you and Judith were to be
married as soon as you got yourself relocated in some more habitable
place than a Florida swamp. You may howl all you want to about
country-town gossip, but----”
This time David Vallory interrupted with a twist of the square jaw that
took Oswald swiftly back to a day long remembered in Middleboro school
annals when David had plunged, head down, into battle with the leader
of the “factory gang” and had for all time vindicated the superiority
of “town-side” brain over mere brawn.
“Drop it, Herbert,” he said quietly; and then: “Let’s get back on the
main track again. You were saying that the town expected me to come
back and follow in Dad’s footsteps. There’s nothing doing. In another
way, I’m as incompetent as he is. Money-handling doesn’t appeal to me;
it never has appealed to me. I’d rather go out as a transit-man on some
building job worth while than to be the president of the biggest bank
in the State. It’s all in the way a man happens to be built.”
“You are beginning at the bottom in your profession, though, aren’t
you?”
“Of course; any man worth his salt begins that way. And that brings us
down to the finances again. Have you carried the figuring far enough
along to be able to guess at what will be left after all the bills are
paid?”
Oswald shook his head. “Your father hasn’t taken either of us fully
into his confidence,” he averred. “He insists that we must try to
realize on the assets so as to have a hundred thousand dollars left to
pay a personal debt which doesn’t appear on the bank’s books. If we
subtract even half of that amount from the most favorable outcome at
present in sight, there will be nothing of any account left for him and
your sister.”
“It will be enough; with what I may be able to add to it,” said David,
neither affirming nor denying the lawyer’s hint that he was not
entirely in his father’s confidence.
“You are going away to look for a job?” Oswald asked.
“As it happens, I don’t have to look for one. I leave for Chicago on
the eleven-fifteen to-night, and my job is waiting for me.”
“Fine!” was the friendly approval. “Is it a secret?”
“Not at all. I’m going to work for the Grillage Engineering Company;
an assistant engineer’s billet on a bridge construction job up in
Wisconsin. There is a reason why I shouldn’t take the job, and a still
stronger reason why I can’t refuse.”
“That’s capital!” said Oswald, ignoring the qualifying part of the
announcement. “You are lucky--or I guess you are. They say Mr. Eben
Grillage can dig his profit out of the shrewdest contract that was ever
drawn and never turn a hair. But as an engineer in the field, you won’t
have anything to do with that part of it.”
David glanced up quickly with a little frown coming and going between
the honest eyes.
“Again I’ll have to ask you to break it off, Bert. Mr. Grillage is my
father’s friend.”
“Of course he is; I forgot for the moment,” was the placative reply. “I
shouldn’t have repeated the gossip--which is only gossip, after all. I
suppose you remember his daughter Vinnie, as a little girl, don’t you?”
“Very well, indeed,” said David, with his eyes on his plate.
“She has grown up to be a raving, tearing, heart-smashing beauty,”
the lawyer went on, entirely unmindful of the sudden change in his
table-mate. “I met her in Indianapolis last summer when I was there on
a business trip. She was stopping with friends, and she gave me exactly
five minutes by the watch--which was all the time she could spare; all
the time a dozen other fellows would let her spare. Somebody told me
she was, or is, going to marry an English title.”
“That is gossip, too,” said David, still looking down.
“I suppose so. You can hear all sorts of things if you’ll only hold
your ears open. Finished your dinner? If you have, let’s go and smoke.”
At this, David Vallory came to life again.
“No; I can’t take the time, Bert. I must go out home and pack my trunk.
And I’m going to ask a favor of you. Will you be at the train to see me
off.”
“Surest thing in the world,” said the young lawyer; and after David
had gone he sauntered out to the office-lobby and bought a cigar with
thoughtful deliberation, recalling, now that he had time to do so,
David’s cryptic remark about the reasons--still unexplained--for and
against his new employment.
V
Gloriana
David Vallory had not been strictly truthful in pleading the journey
preparations as an excuse for leaving Oswald at the dinner-table. It
still wanted three hours of train time; and, as a matter of fact, his
trunk, packed in Florida for the hurried flight northward, had not
since been unpacked. But on no account would he have given Oswald the
real reason for his early defection.
That reason began to define itself when, at the corner beyond the St.
Nicholas, he turned to the left and walked rapidly in a direction
precisely opposite to that in which the home suburb lay. Down to the
railroad yards and across the tracks he fared, turning presently from
the main street into another which led to a region called “Judsontown,”
taking its name from the Judson Foundries and housing the major portion
of Judson’s workmen.
At the gate of a cottage a trifle larger and more commodious than its
neighbors on either hand, David turned in and walked up the slag-paved
path to the porch. There was a light turned low in one room of the
cottage, but no other signs of life. But at his approach there was a
rustle of modish skirts on the porch and a vision appeared; the vision
taking the form of a strikingly handsome young woman, round limbed,
scarlet-lipped, with midnight eyes and hair. The light from the near-by
street lamp framed her in the porch opening for David as he swung up
the path, and it was a picture to stir the blood in the veins of an
anchorite.
“Gloriana!” he said, taking both of her hands, and giving her the name
she had given herself as soon as she was old enough to hate the one her
parents had given her.
“Davie! you’ve come at last, have you?” she breathed. “’Tis long ago
I’d given you up. A week you’ve been back, and but for the papers I’d
never have known it!”
“Don’t scold me, Glo,” he begged. “If you could only know how busy I’ve
been. This is the first spare minute I’ve had in the week, honestly.
Where are your father and mother?”
“They’ve gone up-town to the movie. You’ll be coming in?”
“Just for a little while.”
She led the way into the cottage, into the room of the dimmed light.
It was exactly as David remembered it from a time when he had often
been made at home in it; the big-figured red carpet, the marble-topped
center table with the family Bible, the family photograph album, and a
crocheted mat in the middle for the foot of an ornate parlor lamp with
a crimson shade. Also, there were the same stiff-backed chairs and the
same sofa upholstered in green rep. In one corner was the young woman’s
piano. John Fallon was a foreman in the Judson Foundries and could well
afford to buy his daughter a piano, if he chose. David sat down on one
of the uncomfortable chairs.
“Turn up the light and let me see you, Glo,” he said, and when she did
it: “Jove! but you picked the right name for yourself years ago when we
were kiddies! The movie stars have nothing on you--not one of them.”
“Flatterer!” she laughed, and if there were a faint suggestion of the
“h” after the “t’s” he did not mind. Her Irish accent had always seemed
to harmonize perfectly with her rich, “black-Irish” beauty. Then:
“The two years have been making you into a man, Davie. ’Twas in your
letters when I’d be reading them. Don’t be propping yourself on that
chair; come over here and be yourself.”
He went to sit beside her on the green sofa and was straightway
conscious that he had stepped within a strange aura. Pointedly and of
set purpose he began to talk of commonplace things; Middleboro things
that had happened during his absence. But the subtle distraction
persisted, coming like a veil between the thought and the words until
he scarcely knew at times what he was saying. It was a new experience.
What he had told Oswald was the simple truth; in the old days he and
Judith Fallon had been more like two boys together than a boy and girl,
and the frank comradeship had carried over from childhood to manhood
and womanhood; or it had up to now. But now he could see and feel
nothing but her superb physical beauty. Once, as a college Freshman,
he had permitted himself to be ridiculed into gulping down a drink of
whiskey. “It was like this,” he found himself saying aloud, and the
girl beside him laughed.
“What’s come over you, Davie?” she said. “Half the time you’re talking
nonsense--just nonsense. But for knowing how you hate it, I might think
you’d been drinking!”
“I have,” he returned soberly, suddenly realizing. Then: “Glo, you
ought to pick out some decent young fellow and get married.”
She laughed at this, but the black eyes were hard.
“Why would I want to be getting married?” she demanded.
“Don’t you?”
“I thought I did--two years ago.”
“You were too young then,” he decided gravely. “But now it is time.
You--you’re a living threat, as you are. Don’t you know it?”
“And what would I be threatening, then?”
“The peace of mind of every man who comes near you. You may not know
it, Glo, but you are the kind of woman for whom men, ever since the
world began, have been throwing everything worth while into the
discard; truth, honor, loyalty--anything they had to fling away.”
“Would you just be finding that out, Davie?”
“You--you’re different in some way, Glo; or else I am. What have you
been doing to yourself in these two years?”
“What should I be doing? Is a girl to be waiting always for something
that’s never going to happen?”
A cold horror seized him, but he tried to shake it off; tried to
recall the Gloriana he had grown up with; a frank, outspoken daughter
of the people, strong to attract, but also strong to resist. The
“town-side” boys had jeered him for companying with John Fallon’s
daughter, a “factory-side” girl, but then, as now, he was wont to go
his own way when he was convinced that the way was straight and honest.
The way had been straight, he told himself, because the girl was
straight. But now----
“Glo, I meant what I said a few minutes ago; you ought to get married.
Some wise person has said that all men and women can be divided into
two classes: those who need not marry unless they choose to, and those
who must. You are one of those who must. It’s your harbor of safety.”
Her low laugh was like an invitation to a sensuous dance.
“Since when have you turned preacher, Davie?” she mocked. “What’s got
into you to-night? Put your head down here and let me comb it, the way
I used to when you wore knee stockings.”
“No,” he refused.
She leaned toward him and slipped a round arm across his shoulders. He
reached up and disengaged it gently.
“No,” he said again. “You shouldn’t do things like that, Glo. You used
to do them once, and it didn’t matter. But now you are not the same.”
This time her laugh had an edge to it.
“The fishes have nothing on you for the cold blood, Davie. But you’re
like all the men. After you’ve made what you like out of a girl, you
slap her in the face.”
Vaguely he understood that she was accusing him of something.
“I’m wishing for nothing but your happiness, Glo; can’t you understand
that? I’ve never wished for anything else.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said:
“’Tis to a convent I should have gone, Davie, instead of to the
public--to run with boys, and with you. ’Twas you taught me things a
girl shouldn’t know.”
“I?” said David, still more horror-stricken.
“’Tis so. I was a woman grown whilst you were yet but a boy. You didn’t
know. If your lady mother had lived she might have told you more about
girls and women. I was loving you, Davie, long before ever you put a
razor to your face.”
For the first time in his life David the man found it easeful and
fitting to curse David the boy. “Warm-hearted,” he had called Judith
in those other days, and thought no more of it. But now ... he had been
as one who tosses a careless match aside and passes on, only to turn
and find a forest ablaze.
“Tell me what you care to, Glo,” he said gravely.
“’Tis an old story, I’m thinking. Whilst I could be writing to you and
knowing you’d be coming back from the college the bad heart of me kept
still. But when you went to that place in Florida the bad heart was
empty--empty for a man. The man came, Davie; I’m thinking he always
comes.”
David had to moisten his lips before he could say: “Who was it, Glo?”
“’Twas young Tommy Judson.”
“God!” said David. The exclamation was half prayer and half execration.
He knew Judson; all Middleboro knew him as the country town’s most
faithful imitation of gilded youth and its degeneracy. After a time he
said: “Somebody ought to kill him, Glo; I ought to kill him.”
“’Tis little good that would do now. He’s gone away, and my father
would be getting a raise in his pay, little knowing why he got it.”
Though the windows were open to the summer night breeze David felt
as if he were suffocating. Springing to his feet he began to pace the
narrow limits of the little sitting-room.
“Glo,” he said chokingly, “this is the most awful thing I’ve ever had
to face. I came here to-night just as I used to come years ago. I meant
to tell you that I had found the girl that I hoped some day to marry.
And now you tell me that I led you up to the edge and left you where
the next man who came along could push you over.”
“No, Davie, dear; I’m not blaming you,” came from the green-covered
sofa.
“But I am blaming myself.” He stopped abruptly before her. “Let me see
your face, Glory: have you been trying to tell me that I ought to marry
you?”
She would not look up. “And you with another girl in your heart? I’m
not that wicked, Davie.”
“Then at least you must let me talk to you as we used to talk in the
other days; straight from the shoulder. I was wiser than I knew, a
little while ago, Glory, when I said that your safety was in marriage.
Can’t you forget and start afresh? There are plenty of young fellows
here in your part of town who would never ask you to turn back a single
leaf of your life book for them; can’t you marry one of them and make
him a good wife, Glory?”
She shook her head. “I can not,” she said shortly.
He drew out his watch and held its dial to the lamp light. It was time
to be gone.
“I must go; I am leaving town to-night, and the kindest thing I can
hope for you is that you’ll never see my face again. It doesn’t help
matters any, but if you have suffered, I shall suffer, too. You have
put a mark on me that I shall carry to my grave.”
She got up without a word and walked with him to the door and down the
slag-paved path to the gate. But at the moment of parting, when he was
again seeking vainly for some word of heartening, she flung her arms
around his neck and kissed him twice, thrice.
“_That’s_ why I can’t marry another man!” she panted; and before he
could reply she had darted up the path and into the cottage and had
slammed the door.