FOREBODINGS.
Jubilation! Jubilation now, instead of Consternation, in the office of
Mr. Benjamin Brummage in Wall Street.
President Brummage had convoked his Directors to hear the First
Semi-Annual Report of the new Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.
And there they sat around the green table, no longer forlorn and
dreading a, failure, but all chuckling with satisfaction over their
prosperity.
They were a happy and hilarious family now,--so hilarious that
the President was obliged to be always rapping to Order with his
paper-knife.
Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself as a Director of so
successful a Company. The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider
itself as permanent in the newspapers, and the Treasurer had very
unnecessarily inserted the notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of
already.
When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed the honor of having
discovered Wade, or at least of having been the first to appreciate him.
They all invited him to dinner,--the others at their houses, Sam Gwelp
at his club.
They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick. They still remembered
the panic of last summer. They passed a unanimous vote of the most
complimentary confidence in Wade, approved of his system, forced upon
him an increase of salary, and began to talk of "launching out" and
doubling their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors do when all
is serene.
Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the absurdities of the Board and
all their vague propositions.
"Dunderbunk," said Churm, "was a company started on a sentimental basis,
as many others are."
"Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?"
"Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber, risen from a retailer
somewhere in the country. He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work.
He wanted to deal in something more masculine than lace and ribbons. He
read a sentimental article on Iron in the 'Journal of Commerce': how
Iron held the world together; how it was nerve and sinew; how it was
ductile and malleable and other things that sounded big; how without
Iron civilization would stop, and New Zealanders hunt rats among the
ruins of London; how anybody who would make two tons of Iron grow
where one grew before was a benefactor to the human race greater than
Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon; and so on,--you know the eloquent style.
Brummage's soul was fired. He determined to be greater than the three
heroes named. He was oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about among
the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper article in his hand, and
fired their souls. They determined to be great Iron-Kings,--magnificent
thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers, 'If all the iron rails
made at the Dunderbunk Works in the last six months were put together in
a straight line, they would reach twice round our terraqueous globe and
seventy-three miles two rails over.' So on that poetic foundation they
started the concern."
Wade laughed. "But how did you happen to be with them?"
"Oh! my friend Damer sold them the land for the shop and took stock in
payment. I came into the Board as his executor. Did I never tell you so
before?"
"No."
"Well, then, be informed that it was in Miss Damer's behalf that you
knocked down Friend Tarbox, and so got your skates for saving her
property. It's quite a romance already, Richard, my boy! and I suppose
you feel immensely bored that you had to come down and meet us old
chaps, instead of tumbling at her feet on the ice again to-day."
"A tumble in this wet day would be a cold bath to romance."
The Gulf Stream had sent up a warm spoil-sport rain that morning. It did
not stop, but poured furiously the whole day.
From Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, on both sides of the river, all the
skaters swore at the weather, as profane persons no doubt did when the
windows of heaven were opened in Noah's time. The skateresses did not
swear, but savagely said, "It is too bad,"--and so it was.
Wade, loaded with the blessings of his Directors, took the train next
morning for Dunderbunk.
The weather was still mild and drizzly, but promised to clear. As the
train rattled along by the river, Wade could see that the thin ice
was breaking up everywhere. In mid-stream a procession of blocks was
steadily drifting along. Unless Zero came sliding down again pretty soon
from Boreal regions, the sheets that filled the coves and clung to the
shores would also sail away southward, and the whole Hudson be left
clear as in midsummer.
At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of Wade's train, and, looking
out, he saw Mr. and Mrs. Skerrett alighting.
He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to them.
"We have just been telegraphed here," said Peter, gravely. "The son of a
widow, a friend of ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of the
river. He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and the mother depends upon me
for advice. We have come down to say a kind word. Why won't you report
us to the ladies at my house, and say we shall not be at home until the
evening train? They do not know the cause of our journey, except that it
is a sad one."
"Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for them at dinner, Peter,"
Fanny suggested.
"Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up. Dinner's at six."
Here the engine whistled. Wade promised to "shine substitute" at his
friend's board, and took his place again. The train galloped away.
Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over the fortunate incident
of this meeting, and went on their kind way to carry sympathy and such
consolation as might be to the widow.
The train galloped northward. Until now, the beat of its wheels, like
the click of an enormous metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures
singing in Wade's brain. He was hurrying back, exhilarated with success,
to the presence of a woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any
number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously by any number of
conclaves of overjoyed Directors, and signed by Brummage after Brummage,
with the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight at a ten per
cent dividend.
But into this joyous mood of Wade's the thought of death suddenly
intruded. He could not keep a picture of death and drowning out of his
mind. As the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth after breadth
of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting files of ice-blocks, he
found himself staring across the dreary waste and forever fancying some
one sinking there, helpless and alone.
He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy boy, venturing out
carelessly along the edges of the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives
way, the little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a fragment,
struggles a moment, is borne along in the relentless flow of the chilly
water, stares in vain shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of
agony, and is gone.
But whenever this inevitable picture grew before Wade's eyes, as the
drowning figure of his fancy vanished, it suddenly changed features, and
presented the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond succor.
Of course he knew that this was but a morbid vision. Yet that it came at
all, and that it so agonized him, proved the force of his new feeling.
He had not analyzed it before. This thought of death became its
touchstone.
Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated, straightforward,
isolated, judge men and women as friends or foes at once and once for
all. He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a heart as true,
whole, noble, and healthy as his own. A fine instinct had told him that
she was waiting for her hero, as he was for his heroine.
So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly; for all his life, and
all his lesser forgotten or discarded passions, had been training him
for this master one.
He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it had only been a beautiful
bewilderment of uncomprehended delight, until this haunting vision of
her fair face sinking amid the hungry ice beset him. Then he perceived
what would be lost to him, if she were lost.
The thought of Death placed itself between him and Love. If the love
had been merely a pretty remembrance of a charming woman, he might have
dismissed his fancied drowning scene with a little emotion of regret.
Now, the fancy was an agony.
He had too much power over himself to entertain it long. But the grisly
thought came uninvited, returned undesired, and no resolute Avaunt, even
backed by that magic wand, a cigar, availed to banish it wholly.
The sky cleared cold at eleven o'clock. A sharp wind drew through the
Highlands. As the train rattled round the curve below the tunnel through
Skerrett's Point, Wade could see his skating course of Christmas-Day
with the ladies. Firm ice, glazed smooth by the sudden chill after the
rain, filled the Cove and stretched beyond the Point into the river.
It was treacherous stuff, beautiful to the eyes of a skater, but sure
to be weak, and likely to break up any moment and join the deliberate
headlong drift of the masses in mid-current.
Wade almost dreaded lest his vision should suddenly realize itself,
and he should see his enthusiastic companion of the other day sailing
gracefully along to certain death.
Nothing living, however, was in sight, except here and there a crow,
skipping about in the floating ice.
The lover was greatly relieved. He could now forewarn the lady against
the peril he had imagined. The train in a moment dropped him at
Dunderbunk. He hurried to the Foundry and wrote a note to Mrs. Damer.
"Mr. Wade presents his compliments to Mrs. Damer, and has the honor to
inform her that Mr. Skerrett has nominated him carver to the ladies
to-day in their host's place.
"Mr. Wade hopes that Miss Damer will excuse him from his engagement to
skate with her this afternoon. The ice is dangerous, and Miss Damer
should on no account venture upon it."
Perry Purtett was the bearer of this billet. He swaggered into Peter
Skerrett's hall, and dreadfully alarmed the fresh-imported Englishman
who answered the bell, by ordering him in a severe tone,--
"Hurry up now, White Cravat, with that answer! I'm wanted down to the
Works. Steam don't bile when I'm off; and the fly-wheel will never buzz
another turn, unless I'm there to motion it to move on."
Mrs. Damer's gracious reply informed Wade "that she should be charmed to
see him at dinner, etc., and would not fail to transmit his kind warning
to Miss Damer, when she returned from her drive to make calls."
But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon, her mother was taking a
gentle nap over the violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red
stripes of a gorgeous Afghan she was knitting. The daughter heard
nothing of the billet. The house was lonely without Fanny Skerrett. Mr.
Wade did not come at the appointed hour. Mary was not--willing to say to
herself how much she regretted his absence.
Had he forgotten the appointment?
No,--that was a thought not to be tolerated.
"A gentleman does not forget," she thought. And she had a thorough
confidence, besides, that this gentleman was very willing to remember.
She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house
uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did
not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained in town.
This point settled, she took her skates, put on her pretty Amazonian hat
with its alert feather, and went down to waste her beauty and grace on
the ice, unattended and alone.