He paused for the effect of his declaration to sink in. Jeanette asked, "Where was the car?"
"What car?" teased the little gray cat.
"Why, our car?"
"My dear, we have no car," he smiled, with the cream of mystery on his lips. Then he licked it off. "I sold the car three weeks ago, when I left the Ridge the last time." He dropped into an eloquent silence, and then went on: "I rode in the chair car to save three dollars. I need it in my business."
His mother"s blue eyes were watching him closely. She exclaimed, "John, quit your foolishness. What have you done?"
He laughed as he said: "Mother, I have returned to you poor but honest. My total a.s.sets at this minute are seventy-five million dollars" worth of stock of the National Provisions Company, tied up in this bundle on the floor here, and five thousand dollars in the Exchange National Bank of Sycamore Ridge which I have held for thirty years. I sold my State Bank stock last Monday to Gabe Carnine. I have thirty-four dollars and seventy-three cents in my pocketbook, and that is all."
The women were puzzled, and their faces showed it. So the little gray cat made short work of the mice.
"Well, now, to be brief and plain," said Barclay, pulling himself forward in his chair and thrusting out an arm and hand, as if to grip the attention of his hearers, "I have always owned or directly controlled over half the N.P.C. stock--representing a big pile of money. I am trying to forget how much, and you don"t care. But it was only part of my holdings--about half or such a matter, I should say.
The rest were railroad bonds on roads necessary to the company, mortgages on mills and elevators whose stock was merged in the company, and all sorts of gilt-edged stuff, bank stock and insurance company stock--all needed to make N.P.C. a dominant factor in the commercial life of the country. You don"t care about that, but it was all a sort of commercial blackmail on certain fellows and interests to keep them from fighting N.P.C." Barclay hitched himself forward to the edge of his chair, and still held out his grappling-hook of a hand to hold them as he smiled and went on: "Well, I"ve been kind of swapping horses here for six months or so--trading my gilt-edged bonds and stuff for cash and buying up N.P.C. stock. I got a lot of it quietly--an awful lot." He grinned. "I guess that was square enough.
I paid the price for it--and a little better than the price--because I had to." He was silent a few moments, looking at the fire. He meditated pleasantly: "There was some good in it--a lot of good when you come to think of it--but a fearful lot of bad! Well--I"ve saved the good. I just reorganized the whole concern from top to bottom--the whole blame rebate hopper. We had some patents, and we had some contracts with mills, and we had some good ideas of organization. And I"ve kept the good and chucked the bad. I put N.P.C.
out of business and have issued stock in the new company to our minority whose stock I couldn"t buy and have squeezed the water out of the whole concern. And then I took what balance I had left--every cent of it, went over the books for thirty years, and made what rest.i.tution I could." He grinned as he added: "But I found it was nearly whittlety whet. A lot of fellows had been doing me up, while I had been doing others up. But I made what rest.i.tution I could and then I got out. I closed up the City office, and moved the whole concern to St. Paul, and turned it over to the real owners--the millers and elevator men--and I have organized an industry with a capitalization small enough to make it possible for them to afford to be honest for thirty years--while our patents and contracts last, anyway." He put an elbow in the hollow of his hand, and the knuckles on his knee as he sat cross-legged, and drawled: "I wonder if it will work--" and repeated: "I wonder, I wonder. There"s big money in it; she"s a dead monopoly as she stands, and they have the key to the whole thing in the Commerce Department at Washington. They can keep her straight if they will." He paused for a while and went on: "But I"m tired of it.
The great hulk of a thing has ground the soul out of me. So I ducked.
Girls," he cried, as he turned toward them, "here"s the way it is; I never did any real good with money. I"m going to see what a man can do to help his fellows with his bare hands. I want to help, not with money, but just to be some account on earth without money. And so yesterday I cleaned up the whole deal forever."
He paused to let it sink in. Finally Jeanette asked, "And are we poor, father--poor?"
"Well, my dear," he expanded, "your grandmother Barclay has always owned this house. An Omaha syndicate owns the mill. I own $5,000 in bank stock, and the boy who marries you for your money right now is going to get badly left."
"You aren"t fooling me, are you, John?" asked his mother as she rose from her chair.
"No, mother," answered the son, "I"ve got rid of every dirty dollar I have on earth. The bank stock I bought with the money the Citizens"
Committee subscribed to pay me for winning the county-seat lawsuit. As near as I can figure it out, that was about the last clean money I ever earned."
The mother walked toward her son, and leaned over and kissed him again and again as she sobbed: "Oh, John, I am so happy to-night--so happy."
In a moment he asked, "Well, Jeanette, what do you think of it?"
"You know what I think, father--you know very well, don"t you?"
He sighed and nodded his head. Then he reached for the package on the floor and began cutting the strings. The bundle burst open and the stock of the National Provisions Company, issued only in fifty-thousand-dollar and one-hundred-thousand-dollar shares, littered the floor.
"Now," cried Barclay, as he stood looking at the litter, "now, Molly, here"s what I want you to do: Burn it up--burn it up," he cried. "It has burned the joy out of your life, Molly--burn it up! I have fought it all out to-day on the river--but I can"t quite do that. Burn it up--for G.o.d"s sake, Molly, burn it up."
When the white ashes had risen up the chimney, he put on another log.
"This is our last extravagance for some time, girls--but we"ll celebrate to-night," he cried. "You haven"t a little elderberry wine, have you, mother?" he asked. "Riley says that"s the stuff for little boys with curvature of the spine--and I"ll tell you it put several kinks in mine to watch that burn."
And so they sat for an hour talking of old times while the fire burned. But Molly Brownwell"s mind was not in the performance that John Barclay had staged. She could see nothing but the package lying on her cloak in the girl"s room upstairs. So she rose to go early, and the circle broke when she left it. She and Jeanette left John standing with his arms about his mother, patting her back while she wept.
As she closed the door of Jeanette"s room behind her, Molly Brownwell knew that she must speak. "Jeanette," she said, "I don"t know just how to say it, dear; but, I stole those--I mean what is in that package--I took it and Neal doesn"t know I have it. It"s for you,"
she cried, as she broke the string that tied it, and tore off the wrapping.
The girl stared at her and asked: "Why, Aunt Molly--what is it? I don"t understand."
The woman in pulling her wrap from the chair, tumbled the letters to the floor. She slipped into her cloak and kissed the bewildered girl, and said as she stood in the doorway: "There they are, my dear--they are yours; do what you please with them."
She hurried down the stairs, and finding John sitting alone before the fire in the sitting room, would have bidden him good night as she pa.s.sed through the room, but he stopped her.
"There is one thing more, Molly," he said, as he motioned to a chair.
"Yes," she answered, "I wondered if you had forgotten it!"
He worried the fire, and renewed the blaze, before he spoke. "What about Neal--how does he feel?"
"John," replied the woman, turning upon him a radiant face, "it is the most beautiful thing in the world--that boy"s love for Jennie! Why, every night after his work is done, sitting there in the office alone, Neal writes her a letter, that he never mails; just takes his heart to her, John. I found a great stack of them in his desk the other day."
Barclay"s face crinkled in a spasm of pain, and he exclaimed, "Poor little kids--poor, poor children."
"John--" Molly Brown well hesitated, and then took courage and cried: "Won"t you--won"t you for Ellen"s sake? It is like that--like you and Ellen. And," she stammered, "oh, John, I do want to see one such love affair end happily before I die."
Barclay"s hard jaw trembled, and his eyes were wet as he rose and limped across the great room. At the foot of the stairs he called up, "Don"t bother with the phone, Jeanette, I"m going to use it." He explained, "The branch in her room rings when we use this one," and then asked, "Do you know where he is--at home or at the office?"
"If the ten o"clock train is in, he"s at the office. If not, he"s not in town."
But Barclay went to the hall, and when he returned he said, "Well, I got him; he"ll be right out."
Molly was standing by the fire. "What are you going to say, John?" she asked.
"Oh, I don"t know. There"ll be enough for me to say, I suppose," he replied, as he looked at the floor.
She gave him her hand, and they stood for a minute looking back into their lives. They walked together toward the door, but at the threshold their eyes met and each saw tears, and they parted without words.
Neal Ward found Barclay prodding the fire, and the gray little man, red-faced from his task, limped toward the tall, handsome youth, and led him to a chair. Barclay stood for a time with his back to the fire, and his head down, and in the silence he seemed to try to speak several times before the right words came. Then he exclaimed:
"Neal, I was wrong--dead wrong--and I"ve been too proud and mean all this time--to say so."
Neal stared open-eyed at Barclay and moistened his lips before language came to him. Finally he said: "Well, Mr. Barclay--that"s all right. I never blamed you. You needn"t have bothered about--that is, to tell me."
Barclay gazed at the young man abstractedly for a minute that seemed interminable, and then broke out, "d.a.m.n it, Neal, I can"t propose to you--but that"s about what I"ve got you out here to-night for."
He laughed nervously, but the young face showed his obtuseness, and John Barclay having broken the ice in his own heart put his hands in his pockets and threw back his head and roared, and then cried merrily: "All we need now is a chorus in fluffy skirts and an orchestra with me coming down in front singing, "Will you be my son-in-law?" for it to be real comic opera."
The young man"s heart gave such a bound of joy that it flashed in his face, and the father, seeing it, was thrilled with happiness. So he limped over to Neal"s chair and stood beaming down upon the embarra.s.sed young fellow.
"But, Mr. Barclay--" the boy found voice, "I don"t know--the money--it bothers me."
And John Barclay again threw his head back and roared, and then they talked it all out. He told Neal the story of his year"s work. It was midnight when they heard the telephone ringing, and Barclay, curled up like an old gray cat in his chair before the fire, said for old times"
sake, "Neal, go see who is ringing up at this unholy hour."
And while Neal Ward steps to the telephone, let us go upstairs on one last journey with our astral bodies and discover what Jeanette is doing. After Molly"s departure, Jeanette stooped to pick up what Molly had left. She saw her own name, "Jeanette Barclay," and her address written on an envelope. She picked it up. It was dated: "Written December 28," and she saw that the package was filled with letters in envelopes similarly addressed in Neal Ward"s handwriting. She dropped the letter on her dressing-table and began to undo her hair. In a few minutes she stopped and picked up another, and laid it down unopened.
But in half an hour she was sitting on the floor reading the letters through her tears. The flood of joy that came over her drowned her pride. For an hour she sat reading the letters, and they brought her so near to her lover that it seemed that she must reach out and touch him. She was drawn by an irresistible impulse to her telephone that sat on her desk. It seemed crazy to expect to reach Neal Ward at midnight, but as she rose from the floor with the letters slipping from her lap and with the impulse like a cord drawing her, she saw, or thought she saw, standing by the desk, a part of the fluttering shadows, a girl--a quaint, old-fashioned girl in her teens, with--but then she remembered the dream girl her lover had described in the letter she had just been reading, and she understood the source of her delusion. And yet there the vision moved by the telephone, smiling and beckoning; then it faded, and there came rushing back to her memory a host of recollections of her childhood, and of some one she could not place, and then a memory of danger,--and then it was all gone and there stood the desk and the telephone and the room as it was.
She shuddered slightly, and then remembered that she had just been through two great nervous experiences--the story of her father"s changed life, and the return of her lover. And she was a level-headed, strong-nerved girl. So the joy of love in her heart was not dampened, and the cord drawing her to the desk in the window did not loosen, and she did not resist. With a gulp of nervous fear she rang the telephone bell and called, "54, please!" She heard a buzzing, and then a faint stir in the receiver, and then she got the answer. She sat a-tremble, afraid to reply. The call was repeated in her ear, and then she said so faintly that she could not believe it would be heard, "Oh, Neal--Neal--I have come back."