Firio, despite the protests, would still keep P.D. fit for the trail. He wrote to Jim Galway how immersed he was in his new career, but that he might come for a while–for a little while, with emphasis–if ever Jim wired that he was needed.
“That was a good holiday–a regular week-end debauch away from the shop!” he thought, when the letters were finished.
Soon after this came an event which, for the first time, gave John Wingfield, Sr. a revelation of the side of his son that had won Little Rivers and the interest of the rank and file of the store. Among Jack’s many suggestions, in his aim to carry out his father’s talk about the creative business sense the first night they were together, had been one for a suburban clubbing delivery system. It had been dismissed as fantastic, but Jack had asked that it be given a trial and his father had consented. Its basis was a certain confidence in human nature. Jack and his father had dined together the evening after the master of the push-buttons had gone through the final reports of the experiment.
“Well, Jack, I am going to raise your salary to a hundred a week,” the father announced.
“On the ground that if you pay me more I might make myself worth more?” Jack asked respectfully.
“No, as a matter of business. Whenever any man makes two dollars for the store, he gets one dollar and I keep the other. That is the basis of my success–others earning money for me. Your club scheme is a go. As the accountant works it out, it has brought a profit of two hundred a week.”
“Then I have done something worth while, really?” Jack asked, eagerly, but half sceptical of such good fortune.
“Yes. You have created a value. You have used your powers of observation and your brain. That’s the thing that makes a few men employers while the multitude remains employees.”
“Father! Then I am not quite hopeless?”
“Hopeless! My son hopeless! No, no! I didn’t expect you to learn the business in a week, or a month, or even a year. Time! time!”
Nor did John Wingfield, Sr. wish his son to develop too rapidly. Now that he was so sure of beating threescore and ten, while retaining the full possession of his faculties, if he followed the rules of longevity, he would not have welcomed a son who could spring into the saddle at once. He wanted to ride alone. He who had never shared his power with anyone! He who had never admitted anyone into even a few shares of company partnership in his concern! Time! time! The boy would never fall heir to undivided responsibility before he was forty. John Wingfield, Sr. was pleased with himself; pleased over a good sign; and he could not deny that he was pleased at the sudden change in Jack. For he saw Jack’s eyes sparkling into his own; sparkling with comradeship and spontaneous gratification. Was the boy to be his in thought and purpose, after all? Yes, of course; yes, inevitably, with the approach of maturity. Gradually the flightiness of his upbringing would wear off down to the steel, the hard-tempered, paternal steel.
“You can scarcely realize what a fight it has been for me until you know the life I led out in Arizona, getting strong for you and the store,” Jack began.
“Strong for me! For the store! Yes, Jack!” There was an emphasis on the subjective personal pronoun–for _him_; for the store!
The father’s face beamed a serene delight. This Jack accepted as the expression of sympathy and understanding which he had craved. It was to him an inspiration of fellowship that set the well of his inner being in overflow and the force of his personality, which the father had felt uncannily before the mother’s picture, became something persuasive in its radiance rather than something held in leash as a threatening and volcanic element. Now he could talk as freely and happily of the desert to his father as to Burleigh and Mathewson. He told of the long rides; of Firio and Wrath of God. He made the tinkle of Jag Ear’s bells heard in the silence of the dining-room as it was heard in the silences of the trail. He mentioned how he was afraid to come back after he was strong.
“Afraid?” queried his father.
“Yes. But I was coming–coming when, at the top of the pass, I saw Little Rivers for the first time.”
He sketched his meeting with Mary Ewold; the story of the town and the story of Jasper Ewold as he knew it, now glancing at his father, now seeming to see nothing except visualization of the pictures of his story. The father, looking at the table-cloth, at times playing with his coffee-spoon, made no comment.
“And that first night I saw that Jasper Ewold had met me somewhere before. But–” he went on after going back to the incident of the villa in his childhood–“that hardly explained. How could he remember the face of a grown man from the face of a boy? Jasper Ewold! Do you recall ever having met him? He must have known my mother. Perhaps he knew you, though why he should not have told me I don’t know.”
“Yes, yes–Jasper Ewold,” said the father. “I knew him in his younger days. His was an old family up in Burbridge, the New England town where I came from. Too much college, too much travel, as I remember, characterized Jasper Ewold. No settled point of view; and I judge from what you say that he must have run through his patrimony. One of the ups and downs of the world, Jack. And he never mentioned that he had met me?”
“No.”
“Probably a part of that desert notion of freemasonry in keeping pasts a secret. But why did you stay on after you had recovered from your wound?” he asked penetratingly, though he was looking again at the bottom of his coffee-cup.
“For a reason that comes to a man but once in his life!” Jack answered.
Had the father looked up–it was a habit of his in listening to any report to lower his eyes, his face a mask–he might have seen Jack’s face in the supremacy of emotion, as it was when he had called up to Mary from the canyon and when he had pleaded with her on the pass. But John Wingfield, Sr. could not mistake the message of a voice vibrating with all the force of a being let free living over the scene. With the shadows settling over his eyes, Jack came to her answer and to the finality of her cry:
“It’s not in the blood!”
The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup. Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales’s arm. But this passed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an expression of shock and displeasure.
“So it was the girl, that kept you–you were in love!” John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed, tensely.
“Yes, I was–I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I face a wall of mystery. ‘It’s not in the blood!’ she said, as if it were some bar sinister. What could she have meant?”
In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father the supreme confidence of his heart. Leaning across the table he grasped his father’s hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold for a second. Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted the back of Jack’s hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this latest situation that had developed out of his son’s old life. Finally he looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly.
“Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young. It’s quite a bad case!” he said.
“But what did she mean? Can you guess? I have thought of it so much that it has meant a thousand wild things!” Jack persisted desperately.
“Come! come!” the father rallied him. “Time, time!”
He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table with a kindly shake. All the effective charm of his personality which he never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end when the period of listening was over, was in play.
“She excited the opposition of the strength in you,” he said. “You ask what did she mean? It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went about fighting duels and breaking arms. She would like a more peaceful sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were mystified by her strange exclamation!”
“Perhaps. I suppose that may be it. It was just myself, just my devil!” Jack assented limply.
“Time! time! All this will pass.”
Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would not pass; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their relations.
“And you would have killed Leddy! You could have broken that Mexican in two! I should like to have seen that! So would the ancestor!” said the father, giving Jack a hug.
“Yes, but, father, that was the horror of it!”
“Not the power to do it–no! I mean, Jack, that in this world it is well to be strong.”
“And you think that I am no longer a weakling?” Jack asked strangely; “that I carried out your instructions when you sent me away?”
“Oh, Jack, you remember my farewell remark? It was made in irritation and suffering. That hurt me. It hurt my pride and all that my work stands for. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. But if it was a whip, why, then, it served a purpose, as I wanted it to.”
“Yes, it was a whip!” said Jack, mechanically.
“Then all ends well–all quits! And, Jack,” he swung Jack, who was unresisting but unresponsive, around facing him, “if you ever have any doubts or any questions to ask bring them to me, won’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And, Jack, a hundred a week to-morrow! You’re all right, Jack!” And he gave Jack a slap on the back as they left the dining-room.
XXIX
A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL
Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of the day of Jack’s arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all blazing gold; Diana’s scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon of her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and the marble facade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick’s on the way up town in gratitude for twin spires against the sky.
Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skyscrapers and swept away the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays. It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of crape on the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.
The milky glass roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody? he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more restlessness.
At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a conqueror’s triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.
Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see Mary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb in which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in a particular exhibit of fashion’s parade a little distance ahead and going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a rhythm to the music of some past association. The thrall of a likeness, which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a more satisfying glimpse.
The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary Ewold on the pass became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.
“Mary! Mary!” he cried. “My, but you’ve become a grand swell!” he breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.
“Jack!”
There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding their depths, of the slivers of glass on the old barrier. His smile and hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not been any scene on the pass. They were back to the conditions of the protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.
“And you also have become a grand swell!” she said. “Did you expect that I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn’t expect to see you in chaps and spurs.”
It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed it well. And there they were walking together, noted by passers-by for their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.
“How long have you been here?” Jack asked.
“Two weeks,” she answered.
Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!
“Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt,” she explained. “A sudden call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the city again! It has made him young.”
“And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!” Jack put in, teasingly.
“Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!”
“I see you are wearing the sackcloth.”
She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in guilt and appreciation.
“Another whim of father’s.”
“The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!”
“Not a scapegoat–a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared.”
“The veritable curiosity of a Japanese woman getting her first foreign gown!”
“Thank you! That is another excuse.”
“And it certainly looks very well,” Jack declared.
“Do you think so?” Mary flushed slightly. She could not help being pleased. “After six years, could I drop back into the old chrysalis naturally, without awkwardness? Did I still know how to wear a fine gown?”–and the gift for it, as anyone could see, was born in her as surely as certain gifts were born in Jack. “But,” she added, severely, “I have only two–just two! And the cost of them! It will take the whole orange crop!”
Just two, when she ought to have twenty! When he would have liked to put all the Paris models in the store in a wagon and, himself driving, deliver them at her door!
“Having succumbed to temptation, I enjoy it out of sheer respect to the orange crop,” Mary said; “and yes, because I like beautiful gowns; wickedly, truly like them! And I like the Avenue, just as I like the desert.”
And all that she liked he could give her! And all that he could give she had stubbornly refused!
The liveliness of her expression, the many shades of meaning that she could set capering with a glance, were now as the personal reflection of the day and the scene. Their gait was a sauntering one. They went as far as the Park and started back, as if all the time of the desert were theirs. They stopped to look into the windows of shops of every kind, from antiques to millinery. When he saw a hat which he declared, after deliberate, critical appraisement, would surely become her, she asked boldly if it were better than the one she wore.
“I mean an extra hat; that one more hat would have the good fortune of becoming you!”
“Almost a real contribution to the literature of compliments!” she answered, unruffled.
He thought, too, that she ought to have a certain necklace in a jeweler’s window.
“To wear over my riding-habit or when I am digging in the flower beds?” she inquired.
When they passed a display of luxuries for masculine adornment, she found a further retort in suggesting that he ought to have a certain giddy fancy waistcoat. He complimented her on her taste, bought the waistcoat and, going to the rear of the shop, returned wearing it with a momentarily appreciated show of jaunty swagger.
“Why be on the Avenue and not buy?” he queried, enthusing with a new idea.
Jim Galway should have a cowpuncher hat as a present. The style of band was a subject of discussion calling on their discriminative views of Jim’s personal tastes. This led to thoughts of others in Little Rivers who would appreciate gifts, and to the purchase of toys for the children, a positive revel. When they were through it was well past noon and they were in the region of the restaurants. The sun in majestic altitude swept the breadth of the Avenue.
“Shall we lunch–yes, and in the Best Swell Place?” he asked, as if it were a matter-of-course part of the programme, while inwardly he was stirred with the fear of her refusal. He felt that any minute she might leave him, with no alternative but another farewell. She hesitated a moment seriously, then accepted blithely and naturally.
“Yes, the Best Swell Place–let’s! Who isn’t entitled to the Best Swell Place occasionally?”
After an argument in comparison of famous names, they were convinced that they had really chosen the Best Swell Place by the fact of a vacant table at a window looking out over a box hedge. Jack told the waiter that the assemblage was not an autocracy, but a parliament which, with a full quorum present, would enjoy in discursive appreciation selections from the broad range of a bill of fare.
A luncheon for two narrows a walk on the Avenue, where you are part of a crowd, into restricted intimacy. He was feeling the intoxication of her inscrutability, catching gleams of the wealth that lay beyond it, across the limited breadth of a table-cloth. He forgot about the unspoken conditions in a sally which was like putting his hand on top of the barrier for an impetuous leap across.
“I wrote you stacks of letters,” he said, “and you never sent me one little line; not even ‘Yours received and contents noted!'”
In a flash all intimacy vanished. She might have been at the other end of the dining-room in somebody else’s party nodding to him as to an acquaintance. Her answer was delayed about as long as it takes to lift an arrow from a quiver and notch it in a bowstring.
“A novel may be very interesting, but that does not mean that I write to the author!”
He imagined her going through the meal in polite silence or in measured commonplaces, turning the happy parliament into a frigid Gothic ceremony. Why had he not kept in mind that sufficient to the hour is the pleasure of it? Famished for her companionship, a foolhardy impulse of temptation had risked its loss. The waiter set something before them and softly withdrew. Jack signaled the unspoken humility of being a disciplined soldier at attention on his side of the barrier and Mary signaled a trifle superior but good-natured acceptance of his apology and promise of better conduct.
They were back to the truce of nonsense, apostrophizing the cooking of the Best Swell Place, setting exclamations to their glimpses of people passing in the street. For they had never wanted for words when talking across the barrier; there was paucity of conversation only when he threatened an invasion.
While a New Yorker meeting a former New Yorker on the desert might have little to tell not already chronicled in the press, a Little Riversite meeting a former Little Riversite in New York had a family budget of news. How high were Jack’s hedges? How were the Doge’s date-trees? How was this and that person coming on? Listening to all the details, Jack felt homesickness creeping over him, and he clung fondly to every one of the swiftly-passing moments. By no reference and by no inference had she suggested that there was ever any likelihood of his meeting or hearing from her again. A thread of old relations had been spun only to be snapped. She was, indeed, as a visitation developed out of the sunshine of the Avenue, into which she would dissolve.
“I was to meet father at a bookstore at three,” she said, finally, as she rose.
“Inevitably he would be there or in a gallery,” said Jack.
“He has done the galleries. This is the day for buying books–still more books! I suppose he is spending the orange crop again. If you keep on spending the same orange crop, just where do you arrive in the maze of finance?”
“I should not like to say without consulting the head book-keeper or, at least, Peter Mortimer!”
They were coming out of the door of the Best Swell Place, now. A word and she would be going in one direction and he in another. How easily she might speak that word, with an electric and final glance of good-will!
“But I must say howdy do to the Doge!” he urged. “I should like to see him buying books. What a prodigal debauch of learning! I cannot miss that!”
“It is not far,” she said, prolonging Paradise for him.
A few blocks below Forty-second Street they turned into a cross street which was the same that led to the Wingfield house; and halfway to Madison Avenue they entered a bookstore. The light from low windows spreading across the counters blended with the light from high windows at the back, and here, on a platform at the head of the stairs, before a big table sat the Doge, in the majesty of a great patron of literature, with a clerk standing by in deftly-urging attentiveness. Mary and Jack paused at the foot of the stairs watching him. Gently he was fingering an old octavo; fingering it as one would who was between the hyperionic desire of possession and a fear that a bank account owed its solvency to keeping the amounts of deposits somewhere in proportion to the amount of withdrawals.
“No, sir! No more, you tempter!” he declared. “No more, you unctuous ambassador from the court of Gutenberg! Why, this one would take enough alfalfa at the present price a ton to bury your store under a haycock as high as the Roman Pantheon!”
The Doge rose and picked up his broad-brimmed hat, prepared to fly from danger. He would not expose himself a moment longer to the wiles of that clerk.
“I’ll wait for my daughter down there in the safe and economical environs of the popular novels fresh from the press!” he said.
Turning to descend the stairs he saw the waiting pair. He stopped stock still and threw up his hand in a gesture of astonishment. His glance hovered back and forth between Jack’s face and Mary’s, and then met Jack’s look with something of the same challenge and confidence of his farewell on the road out of Little Rivers, and in an outburst of genial raillery he began the conversation where he had left off with the final call of his personal good wishes and his salutations to certain landmarks of New York.
“Well, well, Sir Chaps! I saw Sorolla in his new style; very different from the academics of the young Sorolla. He has found his mission and let himself go. No wonder people flocked to his exhibitions on misty days! The trouble with our artists is that they are afraid to let themselves go, afraid to be popular. They think technique is the thing, when it is only the tool. Why, confound it all! all the great masters were popular in their day–Venetian, Florentine, Flemish! Confound it, yes! And not one Velasquez”–evidently he was talking partly to get his bearings after his shock at seeing Jack–“no, not one Velasquez in the Metropolitan! I go home without seeing a Velasquez. They have the Catherine Lorillard Wolfe collection, thousands of square yards of it, and yes, cheer up! Thank heaven, they have some great Americans, Inness and Martin and Homer and our exile Whistler, who annexed Japan, and our Sargent, born in Florence. And I did see the Metropolitan tower. I take off my hat, my broad-brimmed hat, wishing that it were as big as a carter’s umbrella, to that tower. I hate to think it an accident of chaos like the Grand Canyon. I rather like to think of it as majestic promise.”
The Doge had talked so fast that he was almost out of breath. He was ready to yield the floor to Jack.
“I kissed my hand to Diana for you!” said Jack. “And what do you think? The lady in answer shook out her scarf and something white and small fluttered down. I picked it up. It was a note.”
“Did you open that note?” asked the Doge in haughty suspicion.
“Naturally.”
“Wasn’t it marked personal for me?”–this in fine simulation of indignation.
“Without address!”
“I am chagrined and surprised at Diana,” said the Doge ruefully. “It’s the effect of city association. As a matter of course, she ought to have given it to Mercury, or at least to one of the Centaurs, considering all the horseshows that have been held under her skipping toes! Well, what did she say? Being a woman of action she was brief. What did she say?”
“It was in the nature of a general personal complaint. Her costume is in need of repair; it is flaking disgracefully. She said that if you had not forsaken your love of the plastic for love of the graphic arts you would long ago have stolen a little gold off the Eternal Painter’s palette, just to clothe her decently for the sake of her own self-respect–the town having set her so high that its sense of propriety was quite safe.”
“I stand convicted of neglect,” said the Doge, coming down to the floor of the store. “I will shoot her a bundle of gold leaf from the top of the pass on a ray of evening sunshine.”
There, he gave Jack a pat on the shoulder; a hasty, playful, almost affectionate demonstration, and broke off with a shout of:
“Persiflage, sir, persiflage!”
“It is manna to me!” declared Jack, in the fulness and sweetness of the sensation of the atmosphere of Little Rivers reproduced in New York.
“And not a Velasquez in the Metropolitan!” mused the Doge, bustling along the aisle hurriedly. “Well, Mary, we have errands to do. There is no time to spare.”
They were at the door, Jack in wistful insistence, hungry for their 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 Senor 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 Senor 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 Credit 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 Senor 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