"Well, I don"t know what"s come to him," Mollie complained. "Who does he think he is? Did anybody leave him a fortune over night? It was the Donovan boy."
A few minutes after Neil"s encounter with Mollie, when Mr. Theodore Burr admitted him listlessly after his third knock at Judge Saxon"s door, he could see no evidence that any one had left the Donovan boy a fortune over night, but did note a change in him. There was something appealingly grave and sedate about his face, as if a part of its youth, the freakish, unconquerable laughter of it, that had defied and antagonized Mr. Burr, were gone forever, burned away, somehow, in a night. It was a look Mr. Burr was to grow well used to in the next few months. Perhaps the unaccountable affection he was to feel for the boy in the course of them was born then and there.
Neil emerged from the Judge"s private office after a briefer talk than usual, and the Judge did not escort him to the door in his accustomed, friendly fashion. Mr. Burr did, and made him clumsy and unwonted confidences there.
"The old man"s not quite fit to-day," he said. "I ought to have told you. It"s a poor time to get anything out of him. Been shut up there by himself doping out something. Won"t say two words to me."
"Then he must be in a bad way, Theodore," said the boy, with the ghost of his old, mocking smile, which Mr. Burr somehow did not find annoying at all.
"Look here, Neil," he surprised himself by saying, "I like you. I always did. You deserve a square deal. You"re too good for the Brady gang.
You"re too good for the town. If there was anything I could do for you----"
"Maybe there is, Theodore," the boy turned in the corridor to say.
"Cheer up. You"ll have a chance to see. I"m coming to work for the Judge, I start in next week."
"But the Judge turned you down." Mr. Burr"s brain struggled with the problem, thinking out loud for the sake of greater clearness, but too evidently not achieving it. "The Judge likes you, too, but he couldn"t take you in if he wanted to. He talked of it, but gave it up. He"d be afraid to. Everard----"
"I start in next week," repeated Mr. Donovan.
"But what did you say to him?" demanded Mr. Burr. "What did he say to you? How did you dare to ask him again?"
"I didn"t ask him. Don"t worry, Theodore. I haven"t been trying any black magic on the Judge. I don"t know any. Maybe I"ll learn some. I"m going to learn a good deal. I"ve got to. n.o.body knows how much. Even the Judge don"t know. I"m coming to work for the Judge, that"s all, but I didn"t ask him." Mr. Burr, listening incredulously, did not know that this was a faithful if condensed account of his talk with the Judge and more, the key to much that was to happen to this pale and determined young man, the secret of all his success. He gave it away openly, and without pride:
"I just told him so."
Neil started in the next week. If Mr. Burr watched his young a.s.sociate somewhat jealously at first in the natural belief that a boy who had changed the course of his life in a five-minute interview would do something equally spectacular next, and if the Judge, who had said to him at last, "Well, it"s my bad morning, son, and your good morning, so you get your way, but you"re climbing on a sinking ship, and remember I told you so. And I"ll tell you something else. It will be poor pickings here for all of us, and I"m sorry, but I"m the sorriest for you," was inclined to follow him furtively over the top of his spectacles with a look that held all the pathetic apology of age to youth in his kind, near-sighted eyes, this was only at first.
Colonel Everard, returning a few weeks later from one of his sudden, unexplained absences from town, and making an early morning visit to his attorney, was admitted by a young man whom he recognized, but pretended not to.
"Who are you?" he inquired, "the office boy?"
"Just about that, sir," the young man admitted, as if he had no higher ambition, but the Judge, entering the room with more evidence of beginning the day with the strength that the day required, than he had been showing lately in his carriage and look, put a casual hand on the boy"s shoulder, and kept it there.
"The last time we discussed enlarging my office force, you didn"t advocate it, Everard," he said rather formally.
"So you aren"t discussing it with me now?"
"Do you think you"d better discuss it?"
"Do you?"
"I think you are in no position to discuss it. You"ve been recently furnished with much more important material to discuss. I haven"t seen you since your garden party, have I?"
"No." Both men seemed to have forgotten the boy"s existence, but now the Colonel recalled it, and apparently without annoyance, and flashed a disarming smile at him, giving up gracefully, as he always did if he was forced to give up at all. "Well, you"re right, Hugh. You"re always right. Do as you please. But this boy"s got a temper of his own and--quite a flow of speech. Runs in his family, evidently. Properly handled, these are a.s.sets, but----"
"I"m sorry, sir," Neil found himself stammering. "I shouldn"t have spoken to you as I did that day. I"m sorry."
"Next time be sure of your facts." The voice was friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel"s eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure."
"I will, sir," said Neil deliberately, but very courteously. Then the Colonel disappeared into the private office with his arm about his trusted attorney"s shoulders, and the young man for whose sake his attorney had openly defied him for the first time in years began to empty the office waste-baskets.
The winter weeks in the Judge"s office pa.s.sed without even moments of repressed drama like this. There was little to prove that they were the most important weeks of his life to Neil. At first they were lonely weeks. Mr. Burr, unusually prompt, reached the office one crisp September morning in time to find him staring out of the window at a straggling procession pa.s.sing on its way up the hill to the schoolhouse, hurrying on foot in excited groups, or crowded into equipages of varying sizes and degrees of elegance, properly theirs or pressed into service.
"First day of school," said Neil, and did not need to explain further, even to Mr. Burr. From to-day on new faces would look out of the many-paned windows of the old, white-painted building. New voices would sing in the night on their way home from barge rides and dances. There were to be new occupants of the seats of the mighty; a new crowd would own the town. The door of the country of the young was shut in this boy"s face from to-day, and that is always a hard day, but it was peculiarly hard in Green River, where the country of the young was the only unspoiled and safe place to live. And there were signs of a private and more personal hurt in the boy"s faraway eyes.
"What"s that letter?" said Mr. Burr.
"Seed catalogue."
"Don"t she write to you every day?"
"Who?"
"Is she too proud, or did she forget all about you? She"ll have time to, away half the summer, and not coming home for vacations. She won"t see you till next June."
"If you mean Judith Randall," her late cla.s.s-mate replied in a carefully expressionless voice, "why should she write to me, and why shouldn"t she forget all about me?" There was a faint, reminiscent light in his eyes, as if he were not seriously threatened with the prospect, but it died away quickly, and his face grew very grave.
"I"m a business man now, Theodore."
"You are," said his newest friend, "and we couldn"t keep house without you now. You"re in a cla.s.s by yourself."
This was true. Neil did not take his big chance at life as other boys equally in need of it would have done. He did not lose his head. He showed no pride in it. Green River, soon seeing this, rewarded him in various ways, each significant in its own fashion. Nondescript groups round the stove in his uncle"s little store ceased to look for signs that he felt superior to them, and welcomed him as before, restoring to him his privilege of listening to talk that was more important than it seemed, public sentiment uncoloured and without reserve, the real voice of the town. Mrs. Saxon, of the old aristocracy of the town, with inborn social prejudices stronger than any acquired from the Everards, broke all her rules and invited him to Sunday-night supper.
"The boy"s not spoiled," his old friend Luther Ward said to the Judge approvingly. "He knows his place."
"That"s the surest way to climb out of it," said Judge Saxon, advisedly, for it was the Judge who had the closest and most discerning eyes upon Neil Donovan"s career. Listlessly at first, because he had looked on at too many uphill and losing fights against the world, but later with interest, forced from him almost against his will, he watched it grow.
To a casual observer the boy would have seemed to be fitting himself not for an ornament to the legal profession, but for the office boy Colonel Everard had called him, but he would have seemed a willing office boy.
He spent hours uncomplainingly looking up obscure points of law for some purpose n.o.body explained to him. He devoted long, sunny afternoons to looking up t.i.tles connected with some mortgage loan which n.o.body gave him the details of, and he seemed satisfied with his occupation, and equally satisfied to devote a morning to plodding through new-fallen snow delivering invitations to some party of Mrs. Saxon"s.
When he was actually studying, he lost himself in the Judge"s out-of-date reference books, as if they contained some secret as vital as the elixir of youth, and might yield it at any moment. Mr. Burr, at first ridiculing pupil and course of instruction alike, and with some show of reason, began shamefacedly and afterward openly to give him what benefit he could from the more modern education which had been wasted upon him. Between his two teachers the boy arrived at conclusions of his own. Neil was studying law by the old method which evolved so many different men of letters and keen-witted lawyers, a method obsolete as the Judge"s clothes, but Neil gave allegiance to it ardently, as if it had been invented for him.
"What do you get out of this?" the Judge demanded, coming upon Neil late one afternoon, poring over the uninspired pages of Mr. Thayer by the fading light. "What do you hope to get?"
"All there is in it," said the boy simply, and without oratorical intent.
"Suppose you do pa.s.s your bar examinations. What then? What will you do with it?"
"I"ll wait and see then. I had to begin somewhere."
"Why?" said the Judge, and as he asked the question, the answer to it, which he had once known so well and forgotten, looked at him in the boy"s pale face and glowing eyes, the great answer not to be silenced, youth, and the wonderful, wasteful urge of youth. "Don"t you know this town"s sick?" he demanded abruptly. "It"s dirty. You can"t clean it up.
Don"t you ever try. Don"t you stir things up. Don"t you dig in too deep.
I suppose you know the town"s got no room for you?"
"Yes, sir, I know."
"Where do you expect to end?" the Judge began irritably, "in the poorhouse? You"re so d.a.m.n young," he grumbled. "It"s a good thing I didn"t know you when I was young. I"d have listened to you then."
"You will now, sir," said the boy, and the Judge did not contradict him, but instead, under shy pretence of groping for the switch of the desk lamp, found the boy"s hand and gripped it.