Chapter X: Part II: He Finds Himself (3)

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 Señor 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.