"Mind!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
"I am sure you do not!" Prather returned. Now a certain deference and a certain pungency of satire ran together in his tone, the mixture being nicely and pleasurably controlled. "Is it in there, in the drawing-room?"
"And then what else? Where do you mean to end? I thought that--"
"Nothing else," Prather interrupted rea.s.suringly. "Everything is settled, of course. This is sort of a farewell privilege."
"Yes, in there!" snapped John Wingfield, Sr. "It"s the picture on the other side of the mantel. I will wait here--and be quick, quick, I tell you! I want you out of this house! I"ve done enough! I--"
"Thanks! It is very good-natured of you!"
John Prather pa.s.sed leisurely into the drawing-room and John Wingfield, Sr. stood guard by the door, his hand gripping the heavy portieres for support, while his gaze was steadily fixed at a point in the turn of the stairs just below where Jack was obscured in the shadow. His face was drawn and ashen against the deep red of the hangings, and torment and fear and defiance, now one and then the other, were in ascendency over the features which Jack had always a.s.sociated with composed and unchanging mastery until he had seen them illumined with affection only an hour before. And the father had said that he had never met or heard of John Prather! The father had said so quietly, decidedly, without hesitation! This one thought kept repeating itself to Jack"s stunned brain as he leaned against the wall limp from a blow that admits of no aggressive return.
"The ancestor certainly must have been a snappy member of society in his time! It has been delightful to have a look at him," said John Prather, as he came out of the drawing-room.
He paused as he spoke. He was still smiling. The mole on his cheek was toward the stairway; and it seemed to heighten the satire of his smile.
The faces of the young man and the old man were close together and they were standing in much the same att.i.tude, giving an effect of likeness in more than physiognomy. That note of John Prather"s voice that had sounded so familiar to Jack was a note in the father"s voice when he was particularly suave.
"This is the end--that is the understanding--the end?" demanded John Wingfield, Sr.
"Oh, quite!" John Prather answered easily, moving toward the door. He did not offer his hand, nor did John Wingfield, Sr. offer to take it.
But as he went out he said, his smile broadening: "I hope that Jack makes a success with the store, though he never could run it as well as I could. Good-by!"
"Good-by!" gasped John Wingfield, Sr.
He wheeled around distractedly and stood still, his head bowed, his fingers working nervously before his hands parted in a shrugging, outspread gesture of relief; then, his head rising, his body stiffening, once more his arbitrary self, he started up the stairs with the firm yet elastic step with which he mounted the flights of the store.
If Jack remained where he was they would meet. What purpose in questions now? The answer to all might be as false as to one. He was no more in a mood to trust himself with a word to his father than he had been to trust himself with a word to John Prather. He dropped back into the darkness of the dining-room and sank into a chair. When a bedroom door upstairs had closed softly he was sequestered in silence with his thoughts.
His own father had lied to him! Lied blandly! Lied with eyes limpid with appeal! And the supreme commandment on which his mother had ever insisted was truth. The least infraction of it she would not forgive; it was the only thing for which she had ever punished him. He recalled the one occasion when she had seemed harsh and merciless, as she said:
"A lie fouls the mouth of the one who utters it, Jack. A lie may torture and kill. It may ruin a life. It is the weapon of the coward--and never be a coward, Jack, never be afraid!"
At the New England preparatory school which he had attended after he came home, a lie was the abomination on which the discipline of student comradeship laid a scourge. Out on the desert, where the trails run straight and the battle of life is waged straight against thirst and fatigue and distance, men spoke straight.
And nothing had been explained, after all! The phantom was back, definite of form and smiling in irony. For it had a face, now, the face of John Prather! How was he connected with the story of the mother? the father? the Doge?
Then, like a shaft of light across memory, came the recollection of a thing that had been so negligible to Jack at the time. It was Dr.
Bennington"s first question in Jack"s living-room; a question so carelessly put and so dissociated from the object of his visit! Jack remembered Dr. Bennington"s curious glance through his eyebrows as he asked him if he had met John Prather. And Dr. Bennington had brought Jack into the world! He knew the family history! The Jack that now rose from the chair was a Jack of action, driven by the scourge of John Prather"s smile into obsession with the one idea which was crying: "I will know! I will know!"
Downstairs in the hall he learned over the telephone that Dr. Bennington had just gone out on a call. It would be possible to see him yet to-night! An hour later, as the doctor entered his reception-room he was startled by a pacing figure in the throes of impatience, who turned on him without formality in an outburst:
"Dr. Bennington, you asked me in Little Rivers if I had ever met John Prather. I have met him! Who is he? What is he to me?"
The doctor"s suavity was thrown off its balance, but he did not lose his presence of mind. He was too old a hand at his profession, too capable, for that.
"I refuse to answer!" he said quickly and decisively.
"Then you do know!" Jack took a step toward the doctor. His weight was on the ball of his foot; his eyes had the fire of a command that was not to be resisted.
"Heavens! How like the ancestor!" the doctor exclaimed involuntarily.
"Then you do know! Who is he? What is he to me?"
It seemed as if the ceiling were about to crack. The doctor looked away to avoid the bore of Jack"s unrelenting scrutiny. He took a turn up and down, rapidly, nervously, his fingers pressed in against the palms and the muscles of his forearms moving in the way of one who is trying to hold himself in control by an outward expression of force against inward rebellion.
"I dined with your father to-night!" he exclaimed. "I counseled him to tell you the truth! I said that if he did not want to tell it for its own sake, as policy it was the only thing to you! I--I--" he stopped, facing Jack with a sort of grisly defiance. "Jack, a doctor is a confessor of men! He keeps their secrets! Good-night!" And he strode through the office door, which he closed behind him sharply, in reminder that the interview was at an end.
As Jack went down the steps into the night, the face of John Prather, with a satirical turn to the lips, was preceding him. Now he walked madly up and down and back and forth across town to the river fronts, with panting energy of stride, as he fastened the leash of will on quivering nerves. When dawn came it was the dawn of the desert calling to a brain that had fought its way to a lucid purpose. It started him to the store in the fervor of a grateful mission, while a familiar greeting kept repeating itself in his ears on the way:
"You won"t forget, Jack, about giving me a chance to come along if you ever go out West again, will you?"
The question was one in answer to a promise; a reminder from certain employees into whom he had fused his own spirit of enthusiasm about dry wastes yielding abundance.
"But you must work very hard," he had told them. "Not until you have callouses on your hands can you succeed or really know how to enjoy a desert sunrise or sunset. After that, you will be able to stand erect and look destiny in the face."
"No February slush!" Burleigh, the fitter, had said. "No depending on one man to hold your job!"
"Your own boss! You own some land and you just naturally get what you earn!" according to Joe Mathewson.
"And from what I can make out," observed one of the automobile van drivers whom Jack had accompanied on the suburban rounds, "it requires about as much brains as running an automobile to be what you"d call a first-cla.s.s, a number one desert Rube, Jack!"
"Yes," Jack told him. "The process that makes the earth fruitful is not less complicated than a motor, simply because it is one of the earliest inventions. You mix in nature"s carbureter light and moisture with the chemical elements of the soil."
"I"m on!" the chauffeur rejoined. "If a man works with a plow instead of a screwdriver, it doesn"t follow that his mind is as vacant as a cow that stands stockstill in the middle of the road to show you that you can"t fool her into thinking that radiators are good to eat."
In explaining the labor and pains of orange-growing, which ended only with the careful picking and packing, Jack would talk as earnestly as his father would about the tedious detail which went into the purchase and sale of the articles in any department of the store. He might not be able to choose the best expert for the ribbon counter, but he had a certain confidence that he could tell the man or the woman who would make good in Little Rivers. No manager was more thorough in his observation of clerks for promotion than Jack in observing would-be ranchers. He had given his promise to one after another of a test list of disciples; and at times he had been surprised to find how serious both he and the disciples were over a matter that existed entirely on the hypothesis that he was not going to stay permanently in New York.
This morning he was at the store for the last time, arriving even before the delivery division, to circulate the news that he was returning to Little Rivers. Trouble was brewing out there, he explained, but they could depend on him. He would make a place for them and send word when he was ready; and all whom he had marked as faithful were eager to go. Thus he had builded unwittingly for another future of responsibilities when he had paused in the midst of the store"s responsibilities to tell stories of how a desert ranch is run.
But one disciple did not even want to wait on the message. It was Peter Mortimer, whom Jack caught on his way to the elevator at eight, his usual hour, to make sure of having the letters opened and systematically arranged when his employer should appear.
"So you are going, Jack! And--and, Jack, you know?" asked Peter significantly.
"Yes, Peter. And I see that you know."
"I do, but my word is given not to tell."
Through that night"s march Jack had guessed enough. He had guessed his fill of chill misery, which now took the place of the hunger of inquiry.
The full truth was speeding out to the desert. It was with John Prather.
"Then I will not press you, Peter," he said. "But, Peter, just one question, if you care to answer; was it--was it this thing that drove my mother into exile?"
"Yes, Jack."
Then a moment"s silence, with Peter"s eyes full of sympathy and Jack"s dull with pain.
"And, Jack," Peter went on, "well, I"ve been so long at it that suddenly, now you"re going, I feel choked up, as if I were about to overflow with anarchy. Jack, I"m going to give notice that I will retire as soon as there is somebody to take my place. I want to rest and not have to keep trying to remember if I have forgotten anything. I"ve saved up a little money and whatever happens out there, why, there"ll be some place I can buy where I can grow roses and salads, as you say, if nothing more profitable, won"t there?"