Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman Part 21

"I know I'm old-fashioned, Phil--I have a right to be. I come of old-fashioned stock--so do you. All that you tell me of your father convinces me that he was an upright man. He was severe at times, and dominating, but he was honest. Your mother's purity and goodness shine out here," and he pointed to the portrait. "This is your heritage, and your only heritage--something that millions of money cannot buy, and which you cannot sell, no matter what price is paid you for it. You, their son"--Gregg stopped and hesitated, the words seemed to clog in his throat--"must not--_shall not_!" (the way was clear now) "commit a crime which would bring a blush to their cheeks if they were alive to-day. Don't, I beseech you, my boy, lend your young manhood to this swindle. It is infamous, it is d.a.m.nable. It shall not--_cannot_ be.

You love me too well to refuse; promise me you will stop this whole business."

Colton was astounded. In all his intercourse with Gregg he had never seen him moved like this. He knew what had caused it. Gregg's sedentary life, his being so much away from the business side of things had warped his judgment and upset his reasoning powers. Not to make commissions on a loan that the first mining expert in the country had declared good, and which the biggest trust company in the Street and two outside banks were willing to underwrite! Gregg was crazy!

This came of talking business to such a man. He should have confined himself to more restful topics--topics which he really loved best.

After all, it was his fault, not Adam's.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Promise me that you will stop the whole business."]

"All right, old fellow; don't let us talk any more about it," he said in the tone he would have used to pacify a woman who had lost her temper. "Some other time when----"

Adam resumed his walk without listening further. He saw how futile had been his appeal and the thought alarmed him all the more.

"Put down your hat, Phil." The calmness of his voice was singularly in contrast to the tone of the outburst. "Take your seat again. Wait until I lock the door. I have something to say to you and we must not be interrupted."

He turned the key, drew the heavy curtains together, and dragging his chair opposite Phil's so that he could look squarely in his eyes, sat down in front of him.

"My son," he began, "I am going to tell you something which has been locked in my own heart ever since you were a boy of five. Something I have never told you before because it only brought sorrow and suffering to me, and I wanted only the sunny side of life for you and Madeleine, and so I have kept still. I tell you now in the hope that it may save you from an act you will never cease to regret.

"There comes a time in every man's life when he meets the fork in the road. This is his crisis. One path leads to destruction, the other, perhaps, to misery--but a misery in which he can still look every man in the face and his G.o.d as well. You have reached it. You may not think so, but you have. Carry out what you have told me and you are no longer an honest man. Don't be offended. Listen and don't interrupt me. Nothing you could say to me would hurt my heart; nothing I shall say to you should hurt yours. I love you with a love you know not of.

I loved you when you were no higher than my knee."

Phil looked at him in amazement, and was about to speak when Adam waved his hand.

"No, don't speak. Hear me until I have finished. Only to save the boy she loved would I lay bare my heart as I am going to do to you now.

Turn your head! Do you see that picture? I painted it some twenty-five years ago; you were a child then, five years old. I was younger than you are now; full of my art; full of the promise of life. Your father's home was a revelation to me: the comfort of it, the servants, the luxury, the warm welcome he gave me, the way he treated me, not as a stranger, but as a son. A few days after I arrived he left me in charge of his home. Your mother was three years younger than I was; you were a little fellow tugging at her skirts.

"The four weeks that followed, while your father was away and I was painting the portrait, were to me a dream. At the end of it I awoke in torment. I had reached the fork in my road: one path lay to perdition, the other to a suffering that has followed me all my life. Your father was an austere man of about my own age now; it was not a happy union--it was as if Madeleine and I should be married. Your mother, girl as she was, respected and honored him and had no other thought except her duty; I saw it and tried to comfort her. The day of your father's return home he came up into the garret which had been turned into a studio to see the portrait. The scene that followed has always been to me a horror. He denounced her and me. He even went so far as to say the picture was immodest because of the gown, and in his anger turned it to the wall. You can see for yourself how unjust was that criticism. He found out he was wrong and said so afterward, but it did not heal the wound. Your mother was crushed and outraged.

"That night she came up to the studio and poured out her heart to me.

I won't go over it--I cannot. There was in her eyes something that frightened me. Then my own were opened. Down in front of me lay an abyss; around it were the two paths. All night I paced the floor; I laid my soul bare; I pleaded; I argued with myself. I reasoned it out with G.o.d; I urged her unhappiness--the difference in their ages; the harshness of the older man; her patient submission. Then there rose up before me the sterner law--my own responsibility; the trust placed in my hands; her youth, my youth. Gradually the mist in my mind cleared and I saw the path ahead. There was but one road: that I must take!

"When the dawn broke I lifted the portrait from where your father had placed it with its face against the wall; kissed it with all the reverence a boy's soul could have for his ideal, crept down the stairs, saddled my horse and rode away.

"Ten years later--after your father's death--I again went to Derwood Manor--in the autumn--in November. I wanted to look into her face once more--even before I looked into my own father's--to see the brook we loved, the hills we wandered over, the porch where we sat and talked.

I had heard nothing of the house being in ruins, or of your mother's death. Everything was gone! Everything--everything!"

Adam rested his head in his hands, his fingers shielding his eyes.

Philip sat looking at him in silence, his face torn with conflicting emotions--astonishment, sympathy, an intense love for the man predominating. Adam continued, the words coming in half-m.u.f.fled tones, from behind his hands, as if he were talking to himself, with now and then a pause.

"You wonder, Phil, why I live alone this way--you often ask me that question. Do you know why? It is because I have never been able to love any other woman. She set a standard for me that no other woman has ever filled. All my young life was bound up in her long after I left her. For years I thought of nothing else; my only hope was in keeping away. I would not be responsible for myself or for her if we ever met again. She wasn't mine; she was your father's. She couldn't be mine as long as he was alive."

He raised his head and resumed his old position, his voice rising, his earnest, determined manner dominating his words.

"I ask you now, Phil, what would have become of you if I had left that stain upon his name and upon yours? Who brought me to myself? She did! How? By her confidence in me; that gave me my strength. I knew that night, as well as I know that I am sitting here, that we could not go on the way we had been going with safety. I knew also that it all rested with me. For me to unsettle her love for your father during his lifetime would have been d.a.m.nable. Only one thing was left--flight--That I took and that you must take. Turn your eyes, Phil, and look at her. She saved me from myself; she will save you from yourself. Do you suppose that anything but purity, goodness, and truth ever came from out those lips? Do you think she would be satisfied with anything else in her boy? Be a man, my son! Strangle this temptation that threatens to stain your soul. No matter what comes--even if you beg your bread--put this thing under your feet.

Look your G.o.d in the face!"

During the long recital Phil's mind had gone back to his childhood's days in confirmation of the strange story. As Adam talked on, his eyes flashing, his voice tremulous with the pathos of the story he was pouring into the young man's astonished ears, one picture after another rose dimly out of the listener's past: The big lounge in the garret where his mother held him in her arms; the high window with the light flooding the floor of the room; the jar of blossoms into which he had thrust his little face.

He did not move when Adam finished, nor for some minutes did he speak.

At last he said in a voice that showed how deeply he had been stirred:

"It's all true. It all comes back to me now. I must have been too young to remember you, but I remember the picture. I looked for it everywhere after she died, but I couldn't find it. Then came the fire and everything was swept away. Some one must have stolen it while we were in Baltimore. And you have loved my mother all these years, Gregg, and never told me?"

He was on his feet now and had his arm around Adam's shoulder.

"Couldn't you trust me, Old Gentleman? Don't you know how close you are to me? Did you think I wouldn't understand? What you tell me about your leaving her is no surprise. You wouldn't--you couldn't do anything else. That's because you are a man and a gentleman. You are doing such things every day of your life; that's why everybody loves you. As to what you want me to do, don't say any more to me"--the tears he was hiding were choking him. "Let me go home. What you have told me of my mother, of yourself--everything has knocked me out. My judgment has gone--I must think it all over. I know every word you have said about the loan is true; but I haven't told you all. The situation is worse than you think. Everything depends on it--Madeleine--her father--all of us. If I could have found some other plan--if you had only talked to me this way before. But I've promised them all--they expect it. No! Don't speak to me. Don't say another word. Let me go home." And he flung himself from the room.

Adam sat still. The confession had wrung his soul; the pain seemed unbearable. What the outcome would be G.o.d only knew. With a quick movement, as if seeking relief, he rose to his feet and walked to the portrait. Then lifting his hands above his head with the movement of a despairing suppliant before the Madonna he cried out:

"Help him, my beloved. Help him as you did me."

IX

At the offices of Philip Colton & Co., just off Wall Street, an unusual stir was apparent--an air of expectancy seemed to pervade everything. The cashier had arrived at his desk half an hour earlier than usual, and so had the stock clerk and the two book-keepers. This had been in accordance with Mr. Colton's instructions the night before, and they had been carried out to the minute. The papers in the big copper loan, he had told the stock clerk, were to be signed at half-past eleven o'clock the next morning, and he wanted all the business of the preceding day cleaned up and out of the way before the new deal went through. This accomplished, he said to himself, Mr.

Eggleston would be able to retire a part if not all of his special capital, and his dear Madeleine, to quote a morning journal, find a place by the side of "one of the bright young financiers of our time."

Mr. Eggleston, in tan-colored waistcoat, white gaiters and shiny silk hat, a gold-headed cane in one hand--the embodiment of a prosperous man of affairs--also arrived half an hour earlier--ten o'clock, really, an event that caused some astonishment, for not twice in the whole year had the special partner reached his son's office so early in the day.

Young Eggleston reached his desk a few minutes after his father. His dress was as costly as his progenitor's, but a trifle more insistent.

The waistcoat was speckled with red; the scarf a brilliant scarlet decorated with a horseshoe set in diamonds, and the shoes patent leather. He was one size smaller than his father and had one-tenth of his brains. With regard to every other measurement, however, there was not the slightest doubt but that in a few years he would equal his distinguished father's outlines, a fact already discernible in his middle distance. In looking around for the missing nine-tenths of gray matter his father had found it under Philip Colton's hat, and the formation of the firm, with himself as special and his son as junior, had been the result.

At half-past ten Mr. Eggleston began to be nervous. Every now and then he would walk out into the main office, interview one of the clerks as to his knowledge of Phil's whereabouts and return again to his private office, where he occupied himself drumming on the desk with the end of his gold pencil, and watching the clock. The junior had no such misgivings--none of any kind. He had a game of polo that afternoon at three, and was chiefly concerned lest the day's work might intervene.

The signing of similar papers had once kept him at the office until five.

At eleven o'clock a messenger with a bank-book fastened to his waist by a steel chain, brought a message. "The treasurer of the Seaboard, with the company's attorney, would be at Mr. Eggleston's office," the message read, "in half an hour, to sign the papers. Would he be sure to have Mr. Philip Colton present." (The special's social and financial position earned him this courtesy; most of the other magnates had to go to the trust company to culminate such transactions.)

The character of the message and Philip's continued delay only increased Mr. Eggleston's uneasiness. The stock clerk was called in, as well as one of the book-keepers. "What word, if any, had Mr. Colton given the night before?" he asked impatiently. "What hour did he leave the office? Did any one know of any business which could have detained him? had any telegram been received and mislaid?"--the sum of the replies being that neither word, letter nor telegram had been received, to which was added the proffered information that judging from Mr. Colton's instructions the night before that gentleman must certainly be ill or he would have "showed up" before this.

A few minutes before half-past eleven the treasurer and his attorney were shown into the firm's office, the former a man of sixty, with a cold, smooth-shaven face, ferret eyes and thin, straight lips, thin as the edges of a tight-shut clam, and as bloodless. He was dressed in black and wore a white necktie which gave him a certain ministerial air. His companion, the attorney, was younger and warmer looking, and a trifle stouter, with bushy gray locks under his hat brim, and bushy gray side-whiskers under two red ears that lay flat against his head.

He was anything but ministerial, either in deportment or language.

What he didn't know about corporation law wouldn't have been of the slightest value to anybody--not even to a would-be attorney pa.s.sing an examination. Both men were short in their speech and incisively polite, with a quick step-in and step-out air about them which showed how thoroughly they had been trained in the school of Street courtesy--the wasting of a minute of each other's valuable time being the unpardonable sin.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Eggleston," exclaimed the treasurer, with one finger extended, into which the special hooked his own. The official did not see the junior partner; he dealt only with princ.i.p.als.

"Our attorney," he continued, nodding to his companion, "has got the papers. Are you all ready? Where is Mr. Colton?" and he looked around.

"I'm expecting him every minute," replied the special in a nervous tone; "but we can get along without him. My son is here to sign for the firm."

"No, we can't get along. I want him. I have some questions to ask him; these are President Stockton's directions."

Before Eggleston could reply the door of the private office was thrust open and Philip stepped in.

Mr. Eggleston sprang from his chair, and a combination smile showing urbanity, apology, and contentment, now that Phil had arrived, overspread his features.

"We had begun to think you were ill, Colton," he said in a relieved tone. "Anything the matter?"