"The a.s.sociated Press to-day," said young Ward, "has a story to the effect that there is a great boom in certain railroad stocks owing to some secret operations of Mr. Barclay. They don"t know what he is doing, but things are pretty shaky. He refuses to make a statement."
"He"s a queer canny little man," explained Watts. "You never know where he"ll break out next."
"Well, he"s up to some devilment," exclaimed Dolan; "you can depend on that. Why do you suppose he"s laying off the hands at the strip factory?"
The young man shook his head. "Give it up. I asked Mr. Mason and the best I could get out of him was a parrot-like statement that "owing to the oversupply of our commodity, we have decided to close operations for the present. We have, therefore," he said pompously, "given each of our employees unable to find immediate work here, a ticket for himself and family to any point in the United States to which he may desire to go, and have agreed to pay the freight on his household goods also." That was every word I could get out of him--and you know Mr. Mason is pretty talkative sometimes."
"Queer doings for the dusty miller," repeated Dolan.
The group by the bench heard the slap of the checkerboard on its shelf, and General Ward cut into the conversation as one who had never been out of it. "The boy"s got good blood in him; it will come out some day--he wasn"t made a Thatcher and a Barclay and a Winthrop for nothing. Lizzie was over there the other night for tea with them, and she said she hadn"t seen John so much like himself for years."
Young Ward went about his afternoon"s work and the parliament continued its debate on miscellaneous public business. The general pulled the _Times_ from Dolan"s pocket and began turning it over. He stopped and read for a few moments and exclaimed:--
"Boys--see here. Maybe this explains something we were talking about." He began reading a news item sent out from Washington, D.C.
The item stated that the Department of Commerce and Labour had scored what every one in official circles believed was the most important victory ever achieved by the government outside of a war. The item continued:--
"Within the last ten days, the head of one of the largest so-called trusts in this country called at the department, and explained that his organization, which controls a great staple commodity, was going into voluntary liquidation. The organization in question has been the subject of governmental investigation for nearly two years, and investigators were constantly hampered and annoyed by attempts of politicians of the very highest caste, outside of the White House, trying to get inspectors removed or discredited, and all along the line of its investigations the government has felt a powerful secret influence shielding the trust. As an evidence of his good faith in the disorganization, the head of the trust, while he was here, promised to send to the White House, what he called his "political burglar"s kit," consisting of a card index, labelling and ticketing with elaborate cross references and cabinet data, every man in the United States who is in politics far enough to get to his state legislature, or to be a nominee of his party for county attorney.
This outfit, shipped in a score of great boxes, was dumped at the White House to-day, and it is said that a number of the cards indicating the reputation of certain so-called conservative senators and congressmen may be framed. There is a great hubbub in Washington, and the newspaper correspondents who called at the White House on their morning rounds were regaled by a confidential glimpse into the cards and the cabinets. It is likely that the whole outfit will be filed in the Department of Commerce and Labour, and will const.i.tute the basis of what is called around the White House to-day, a "National Rogues" Gallery." The complete details of every senatorial election held in the country during twelve years last past, showing how to reach any Senator susceptible to any influence whatsoever, whether political, social, or religious, are among the trophies of the chase in the hands of the Mighty Hunter for Big Game to-day."
When General Ward had finished reading, he lifted up his gla.s.ses and said: "Well, that"s it, boys; John has come to his turn of the road.
Here"s the rest. It says: "The corporation in question is practically controlled by one man, the man who has placed the information above mentioned in the hands of the government. It is a corporation owning no physical property whatever, and is organized as a rebate hopper, if one may so style it. The head of the corporation stated when he was here recently that he is preparing to buy in every share of the company"s stock at the price for which it was sold and then--" Jake, where is page 3 with the rest of this article on it?" asked the general.
"Why, I threw that away coming down here," responded Dolan.
"Rather leaves us in the air--doesn"t it?" suggested the colonel.
"Well, it"s John. I know enough to know that--from Neal," said the general.
The afternoon sun was shining in the south window of the shop. Dolan started to go. In the doorway McHurdie halted him.
"Jake," he cried, pointing a lean, s.m.u.tty finger at Dolan, "Jake Dolan, if there are only two people in the world, what becomes of me when you begin talking to Mart? If you knew, you would not dodge. In philosophy no man can stand on his const.i.tutional rights. Turn state"s evidence, Jake Dolan, and tell the truth--what becomes of me?"
""Tis an improper question," replied Dolan, and then drawing himself up and pulling down the front of his coat, he added, ""Tis not a matter that may be discussed among gentlemen," and with that he disappeared.
The front door-bell tinkled, and the parliament prepared to adjourn.
The colonel helped the poet close his store and bring in the wooden horse from the sidewalk, and then Molly Brownwell came with her phaeton and drove the two old men home. On the way up Main Street they overhauled Neal Ward. Mrs. Brownwell turned in to the sidewalk and called, "Neal, can you run over to the house a moment this evening?"
And when he answered in the affirmative, she let the old nag amble gently up the street.
"How pretty you are, Aunt Molly," exclaimed Neal, as the gray-haired woman who could still wear a red ribbon came into the room where he sat waiting for her. The boy"s compliment pleased her, and she did not hesitate to say so. But after that she plunged into the subject that was uppermost in her heart.
"Neal," she said, as she drew her chair in front of him so that she could see his face and know the truth, no matter what his lips might say, "we"re partners now, aren"t we, or what amounts to the same thing?" She smiled good-naturedly. "I own the overdraft at the bank and you own the mortgage at the court-house. So I am going to ask you a plain question; and if you say it isn"t any of my business, I"ll attempt to show you that it is. Neal," she asked, looking earnestly into his face, "why do you write to Jeanette Barclay every day of your life and not mail the letters?"
The youth flushed. "Why--Aunt Molly--how did you know?--I never told--"
"No, Neal, you never told me; but this afternoon while you we"re out I was looking for Adrian"s check-book; I was sure we paid Dorman"s bill last April, and that I took the check over myself. I was going through the desk, and I got on your side, thinking I might have left the check-book there by mistake, and I ran into the very midst of those letters, before I knew what I was about. Now, Neal--why?"
The young man gazed at the woman seriously for a time and then parried her question with, "Why do you care--what difference can it make to you, Aunt Molly?"
"Because," she answered quickly, "because I wish to see my partner happy. He will do better work so--if you desire to put it on a cold-blooded basis. Oh, Nealie, Nealie--do you love her that much--that you take your heart and your life to her without hope or without sign or answer every day?"
He dropped his eyes, and turned his face away. "Not every day," he answered, "not every day--but every night, Aunt Molly."
"Why don"t you go to her, Neal, and tell her?" asked the woman. "Is it so hopeless as that?"
"Oh, there are many reasons--why I don"t go to her," he replied.
After a minute"s silence he went on: "In the first place she is a very rich girl, and that makes a difference--now. When she was just a young girl of eighteen, or such a matter, and I only twenty or twenty-one, we met so naturally, and it all came out so beautifully!
But we are older now, Aunt Molly," he said sadly, "and it"s different."
"Yes," admitted Mrs. Brownwell, "it is different now--you are right about it."
"Yes," he continued, repeating a patter which he had said to himself a thousand times. "Yes,--and then I can"t say I"m sorry--for I"m not.
I"d do it again. And I know how Mr. Barclay feels; he didn"t leave me in any doubt about that," smiled the boy, "when I left his office that morning after telling him what I was going to do. So," he sighed and smiled in rather hopeless good humour, "I can"t see my way out. Can you?"
Molly Brownwell leaned back in her chair, and closed her eyes for a minute, and then shook her head, and said, "No, Neal, not now; but there is a way--somehow--I am sure of that."
He laughed for want of any words to express his hopelessness, and the two--the youth in despair, and the woman full of hope--sat in silence.
"Neal," she asked finally, "what do you put in those letters? Why do you write them at all?"
The young man with his eyes upon the floor began, "Well--they"re just letters, Aunt Molly--just letters--such as I used to write before--don"t you know." His voice was dull and pa.s.sionless, and he went on: "I can"t tell you more about them. They"re just letters." He drew in a quick long breath and exclaimed: "Oh, you know what they are--I want to talk to some one and I"m going to. Oh, Aunt Molly," he cried, "I"m not heart-broken, and all that--I"m infinitely happy.
Because I still hold it--it doesn"t die. Don"t you see? And I know that always it will be with me--whatever may come to her. I don"t want to forget--and it is my only joy in the matter, that I never will forget. I can be happy this way; I don"t want to give any other woman a warmed-over heart, for this would always be there--I know it--and so I am just going to keep it." He dropped his voice again after a sigh, and went on: "There, that"s all there is to it. Do you think I"m a fool?" he asked, as the colour came into his face.
"No, Neal, I don"t," said Molly Brownwell, as she stood beside him.
"You are a brave, manly fellow, Neal, and I wish I could help you. I don"t see how now--but the way will come--sometime. Now," she added, "tell me about the paper."
And then they went into business matters which do not concern us; for in this story business conjures up the face of John Barclay--the tanned, hard face of John Barclay, crackled with a hundred wrinkles about the eyes, and scarred with hard lines about the furtive crafty mouth; and we do not wish to see that face now; it should be hidden while the new soul that is rising in his body struggles with that tough, bronzed rind, gets a focus from the heart into those glaring bra.s.s eyes, and teaches the lying lips to speak the truth, and having spoken it to look it. And so while John Barclay in the City is daily slipping millions of his railroad bonds into the market,--slipping them in quietly yet steadily withal, mixing them into the daily commerce of the country, so gently that they are absorbed before any one knows they have left his long grasping fingers,--while he is trading to his heart"s content, let us forget him, and look at this young man, that September night, after he left Molly Brownwell, sitting at his desk in the office with the telephone at his elbow, with the smell of the ink from the presses in his nostrils, with the silence of the deserted office becalming his soul, and with his heart--a clean, strong, manly heart--full of the picture of a woman"s face, and the vision without a hope. In his brain are recorded a thousand pictures, and millions of little fibres run all over this brain, conjuring up those pictures, and if there are blue eyes in the pictures, and lips in the pictures, and the pressure of hands, and the touch of souls in the pictures,--they are Neal Ward"s pictures, --they are Mr. Higgin"s pictures, and Mrs. Wiggin"s pictures, and Mr.
Stiggin"s pictures, my dears, and alack and alas, they are the pictures of Miss Jones and Miss Lewis and Miss Thomas and Miss Smith, for that matter; and so, my dears, if we would be happy we should be careful even if we can"t be good, for it is all for eternity, and whatever courts may say, and whatever churches may say, and whatever comes back with rings and letters and trinkets,--there is no divorce, and the pictures always stay in the heart, and the sum of the pictures is life.
So that September night Neal Ward went back over the old trail as lovers always will, and then his pen began to write. Now in the nature of things the first three words are not for our eyes, and to-night we must not see the first three lines nor the first thirty, nor the last three words nor the last three lines nor the last thirty lines. But we may watch him write; we may observe how longingly he looks at the telephone, as if tempted to go to it, and tell it what is in his breast. There it sits, all shiny and metallic; and by conjuring it with a number and a word, he could have her with him. Yet he does not take it up; because--the crazy loon thinks in the soul of him, that what he writes, some way, in the great unknown system of receivers and recorders and transmitters of thought that range through this universe, is pouring into her heart, and so he writes and smiles, and smiles and writes--no bigger fool than half the other lovers on the planet who, talking to their sweethearts, holding their hands and looking squarely into their eyes, deceive themselves that what they say is going to the heart, and not going in one ear and out of the other.
And now let us put on our seven-league boots and walk from September"s green and brown, through October"s gold and crimson, into that season of the year 1906 when Nature is shifting her scenery, making ready for the great spring show. It is bleak, but not cold; barren, but not ugly,--for the stage setting of the hills and woods and streams, even without the coloured wings and flies and the painted trees and gra.s.s, has its fine simplicity of form and grouping that are good to look upon. Observe in the picture a small man sitting on a log in a wood, looking at the stencil work of the brown and gray branches, as its shadows waver and shimmer upon the gray earth. He is poking reflectively in the earth with his cane. His boat is tied to some tree roots, and he doesn"t breathe as regularly as a man should breathe who is merely thinking of his next dinner or his last dollar. He delves into himself and almost forgets to breathe at all, so deep is his abstraction. And so he sits for five minutes--ten minutes--half an hour--and save that he edges into the sun as the shadow of the great walnut tree above catches him, an hour pa.s.ses and he does not move.
Poking, poking, poking his stick into the mould, he has dug up much litter in an hour, and he has seen his whole life thrown up before him. In those leaves yonder is a battle--a b.l.o.o.d.y battle, and things are blistered into his boyish heart in that battle that never heal over; that tuft of sod is a girl"s face--a little girl"s face that he loved as a boy; there is his first lawsuit--that ragged pile of leaves by the twig at the log"s end; and the twig is his first ten thousand dollars. All of it lies there before him, his victories and his defeats, his millions come, and his millions going--going?--yes, all but gone. Yonder that deep gash in the sod at the left hides a woman"s face--pale, wasted, dead on her pillow; and that clean black streak on the ebony cane--that is a tear, and in the tear is a girl"s face and back of hers shimmers a boy"s countenance. All of John Barclay"s life and hopes and dreams and visions are spread out before him on the ground. So he closes his eyes, and braces his soul, and then, having risen, whistles as he limps lightly--for a man past fifty--down to the boat. He rows with a clean manly stroke--even in an old flat-bottomed boat--through the hazy sunset into the dusk.
"Jeanette," he said to his daughter that evening at dinner, "I wish you would go to the phone, pretty soon, and tell Molly Culpepper that I want her to come down this evening. I am anxious to see her. The colonel isn"t at home, or I"d have him, mother," explained Mr Barclay.
And that is why Miss Barclay called "876, Please--yes, 8-7-6;" and then said: "h.e.l.lo--h.e.l.lo, is this 876? Yes--is Mrs. Brownwell in?
Oh, all right." And then, "54, please; yes, 5-4. Is this you, Aunt Molly? Father is in town--he came in this morning and has spent the afternoon on the river, and he told me at dinner to ask you if you could run down this evening. Oh, any time. I didn"t know you worked nights at the office. Oh, is Mr. Ward out of town?--I didn"t know.
All right, then--about eight o"clock--we"ll look for you."
And that is why at the other end of the telephone, a pretty, gray-haired woman stood, and looked, and looked, and looked at a plain walnut desk, as though it was enchanted, and then slipped guiltily over to that black walnut desk, unlocked a drawer, and pulled out a whole ap.r.o.nful of letters.
And so the reader may know what Molly Brownwell had in that package which she put in the buggy seat beside her when she drove down to see the Barclays, that beautiful starry November night. She put the package with her hat and wraps in Jeanette"s room, and then came down to the living room where John Barclay sat by the roaring fire in the wide fireplace, with a bundle beside him also. His mother was there, and his daughter took a seat beside him.
"Molly," said Barclay, with a deep sigh, "I sent for you, first, because, of all the people in the world, it is but just that you should be here, to witness what I am doing; and second, because Jane would have had you, and I want you to be with Jeanette when I tell her some things that she must know to-night--she and mother."
He was sitting in a deep easy chair, with one foot--not his lame foot--curled under him, a wiry-looking little gray cat of a man who nervously drummed on the mahogany chair arm, or kept running his hands over the carving, or folding and unfolding them, and twirled his thumbs incessantly as he talked. He smiled as he began:--
"Well, girls, father got off the chair car at Sycamore Ridge this morning, after having had the best sleep he has had in twenty years."