Flint Part 23

When the good-byes were said, Nora stood a moment watching the Doctor's little figure moving jerkily down the street under its white umbrella. "I believe he was sent," she said to herself. "I must try to be to some other puir soul what he has been to me this day."

At her desk at headquarters Nora found a memorandum of four letters to be written,--three to men in the prison at Sing-Sing. These she despatched speedily, with the aid of a typewriter; but the fourth she wrote with her own hand, for it was in answer to one from an orphan girl who was coming to New York in search of work, and who desired to be put in the way of finding a safe boarding-place. Nora's heart was touched by a peculiar sympathy at the thought of the girl's loneliness, so closely allied to her own, and she wanted her to feel that it was a friend, and not merely an officer of the Army, who responded to her appeal, and held out the right hand of fellowship.

It was eleven o'clock when the letters were written, and Nora ran downstairs to vary her industry by cutting out baby-clothes in the workroom. Just as she was taking the shears in hand, however, news was brought in of an accident to a factory-girl who had crushed her foot in the machinery, and had been brought home to her lodgings in the house on the next corner.

To this house Nora went, and found the girl alone, and weeping more from loneliness than suffering. The doctor had left, promising to come again, and to send an ambulance later in the day, to take the sufferer to the hospital. Nora knocked gently at the chamber door.

"Come in!" a voice from within answered wearily.

The visitor, standing in the doorway, was impressed by the dreariness of disorder which reigned inside. Such a room would have been impossible to Nora herself while hands and knees and a scrubbing-brush were left to her. In one sweeping glance she took in the hastily dumped clothing on the floor, the bureau heaped with mussy finery, the fly-specked window-pane, and soiled bed-spread.

"Who are you?" asked the girl, raising her head from the pillow. "Oh, one of those Salvation Army women," she added, as she caught sight of the dark bonnet.

"Yes," answered Nora, "I heard of your accident and that you were all alone. I have come to try to help you."

"You can't. n.o.body can help me. I wish I was dead." With this the girl buried her face in the pillow and resumed her half-hysterical weeping.

Nora wisely wasted no words in trying to prove her ability to help, but began quietly to hang up the clothes, to slip the soiled lace and bra.s.s chains from the top of the bureau into the drawer, to close the blinds, and fold a towel over a basin on the chair within reach of the sufferer.

"There," she said, "maybe if you could wash you'd feel a bit more comfortable, and I'll run round to my lodgings--they're not far off--and back in no time."

When she reappeared, it was with a snowy white dimity spread taken from her own bed, a pitcher of ice-water, and a large palm-leaf fan.

When the bed was re-made, the self-appointed nurse seated herself by the bedside of the sick girl, promising to stay until the coming of the ambulance, and settling down to listen to all the details of the accident, which seemed to give the victim a grewsome satisfaction in rehearsing.

When the ambulance arrived, and the patient departed, the nurse began to realize that it was three o'clock, and that she had had no food since seven. As the Bible-reading was at four, she had time only for a hastily swallowed cup of tea, and a slice of bread and b.u.t.ter, with a bit of cold meat, before the reading, after which she went home, bathed, rested, and supped, before presenting herself again at headquarters for the night duty, which called her to patrol the streets with a companion officer (a dull, rather coa.r.s.e woman, who "exhorted" and sang through her nose) until after midnight.

Then she went home and to bed, inwardly thanking Heaven for her happy day. She felt, as she would have said, that she had been "awfu'

favored."

CHAPTER XIV

TWO SOUL-SIDES

"Thanks to G.o.d, the meanest of his creatures Boasts two soul-sides--one to face the world with, One to show a woman when he loves her."

A man's character is like the body of a child,--it grows unequally and in sections. Certain qualities in Flint had lain throughout these thirty-three years wholly undeveloped and unaffected by the culture of other characteristics. In his case the dormancy of the sympathetic side of his nature was no doubt largely due to the absence of those close family ties which call out in most of us our first sense of the kinship of the race.

Flint had no recollection of either father or mother, and he was an only child. On his mother's death, he was sent to the home of an uncle and aunt in Syracuse. They received him without enthusiasm, and only because it was inevitable that the child should be cared for, and there was no one else to undertake the task. Flint sometimes recalled, with a feeling of bitterness against Fate, those early years of repression, when silence and self-obliteration were the only merits or attractions asked for in the orphan boy.

Those formative years might have proved a much drearier period but for the circ.u.mstance that his uncle's house was provided with a library, made up of books of all grades and qualities. To these volumes young Jonathan was at liberty to help himself without let or hindrance, provided he handled them with care.

Mr. Mullett Flint was a collector of books, but not a reader. Elzevirs and Aldines and first editions bound by Riviere pleased him as so much pottery might have pleased him, and he took great pride in relating how the value of his purchases had increased on his hands. His guidance in the paths of literature would not have been of great benefit to his nephew had he been disposed to offer it; but, in fact, he wasted little thought either on the contents of books or on his nephew's mental progress. His tastes, interests, and ambitions lay wholly in the business world, in the making of money, and the handling of mercantile affairs of magnitude. Had Jonathan, as he grew older, shown more sharpness and sagacity, some bond of sympathy, if not attachment, might have formed itself between the two. As it was, they drifted farther and farther apart. The uncle looked with a shrug of his shoulders at the boy curled up in one of the library arm-chairs on a Sat.u.r.day morning, poring over a volume of the Waverley Novels, when he himself was briskly making ready to betake himself to business.

"I wish that boy had any enterprise. I'd rather see him breaking windows or shooting cats out the back door than dawdling like that,"

he said once to his wife.

"Yes," answered that worthy lady,--"and he wears out the furniture so!"

Mrs. Mullett Flint was one of those heavy, apathetic women who seem to have a special attraction for brisk, energetic men of Mr. Flint's type. If he ever made the discovery that apathy and amiability are not identical, he never revealed his disappointment to the world,--perhaps for the same reason that he kept silence over the failure of other investments, lest the rumor should injure his reputation for shrewdness as a business-man.

From the beginning Mrs. Mullett Flint had taken one of her apathetic dislikes to the little Jonathan. He was no kindred of hers, and she thought it rather hard at her time of life to have her housekeeping put about by a boy whose feet were always muddy and who had a reprehensible habit of tucking them under him when he sat down, as he did with utter lack of discrimination in the matter of relative values in furniture. Her manner toward the child was not intentionally unkind, but it was wholly devoid of the tenderness which is as necessary to the growth of a child as air and sunshine to a plant. She always called him by his full name, which sounded strangely prim and formal applied to the little kilted figure with its thatch of black hair. He recalled distinctly once going up to the long pier-gla.s.s between the two windows and stroking his own hair as he had seen a mother across the street do for her boy at the window opposite, and then saying softly, in imitation of supposed maternal tones, "Johnny!

Dear little Johnny!"

Such moods of sentiment were exceedingly rare in Flint's earliest infancy, and grew rarer as he advanced in life. At twelve he was sent to boarding-school, and thence to college, with scarcely an interval of home life. In college he formed several friendships; but in each he was and felt himself the superior, whereby he lost the inestimable privilege of looking up.

There had been a decided difference of opinion between Mr. Mullett Flint and his nephew in regard to the choice of a college. Mr. Flint strongly urged that the family traditions should be preserved, and that Jonathan should pursue his education under the shadow of old Na.s.sau, "where giant Edwards stamped his iron heel." The nephew was as strongly prejudiced against Princeton as the uncle in its favor. He declared that the educative effect of living for four years within sight of his venerated ancestor's grave in President's Row was more than offset by other considerations, and that if the influence of the departed still lingered about the college halls he was as likely to fall under the spell of Aaron Burr as under that of Jonathan Edwards.

With all the headstrong will of youth he determined to go to Harvard, and carried his point, though not without a degree of friction, which alienated him still farther from his uncle.

It was, therefore, with immense surprise that, on Mr. Flint's death, which occurred in Jonathan's junior year at college, the young man learned that his uncle had left him his library and a substantial share of his fortune. The terms of the will were not flattering. "To my nephew, Jonathan Edwards Flint," so it ran, "I leave this amount, realizing that the money left him by his father is inadequate for his support, and that he will never have the energy to make a living for himself."

The widow wrote a conventional note of combined self-condolence and congratulation for Jonathan over his inheritance. Between the lines Flint quite easily read that her latent aversion to him was augmented by her husband's bequest.

"I have decided," she wrote, "to go at once to London, where I shall probably reside for some years. I shall therefore strip my house of furniture preparatory to renting. I will pack up the books which now belong to you, and await your instructions as to the address to which you would like them forwarded. Should we not meet again--and I presume you will agree with me that it is hardly worth while to interrupt your studies at Cambridge for a trip to New York before the steamer sails--pray accept my best wishes for your future happiness and prosperous career."

With this cool leave-taking Flint's a.s.sociation with his aunt had come to an end. The books, which were his earliest friends, followed him about from place to place, until at length they had found a home on the walls of his study in "The Chancellor."

The work of his first solitary evening after his return from Nepaug was to pull off the sheets and newspapers with which the caretaker of his room had vainly striven to protect them against the all-pervading dust of summer. He sat in his easy-chair, running over the t.i.tles with the endeared eye of long familiarity.

There stood a set of Edwards's treatises, in eight ponderous volumes; their leaves yellow with age, and cut only here and there at irregular intervals. "Freedom of the Will" and "The Nature of Virtue" jostled "Original Sin;" and "The History of Redemption" leaned up against "G.o.d's Last End in the Creation of the World."

On the same shelf, as if with sarcastic attempt to mark the logical sequence, Flint had placed a black-clad row of John Stuart Mill's essays, while Hume and Hobbes looked out above and below. It amused Flint, as he sat there alone, to fancy these polemical gentlemen issuing from their bindings and sitting down together around his evening lamp, to talk things over. "Probably," he mused, with that idle pensiveness which is the lazy man's apology to himself for not thinking, "the thing which would surprise them most would be to see how much they held in common. If they could get rid of the cant of theology and the jargon of metaphysics, they would find that they were not so far apart after all. But I don't know that that would gratify them so much,--certainly not the old parson, for he belonged to the Church Militant if ever any one did, and dearly loved to belabor his enemies with the spiritual weapons too heavy for any but him to handle. Well, it _was_ a temptation to let something fly, be it Bible or brickbat, at the head of the average dullard. How was it that some people did not find the average man dull? There was Winifred Anstice, for instance,--she seemed to find something interesting in every one she met. Perhaps because she did not try to approach them on the intellectual side at all, but took them into her sympathies and soothed their troubles, as he remembered that mother across the way from his uncle's house soothing the little son and wiping away his tears."

_Perhaps, after all, she was right and he was wrong._ It was almost the first time in Flint's life that he had ever definitely formulated a confession that his att.i.tude towards life in general was not what it might be. Once formulated, it began to grow upon him curiously. He found himself reviewing whole courses of conduct, and testing them by new rules and standards.

At first these rules and standards were cold and rigid abstractions; but gradually they took on a faint echo of personality, and he found himself speculating on what Winifred Anstice would have done or said, on occasions when he felt himself to have been harsh and hard. This haunting influence was intensified by the presence of the portrait which he had brought away from Nepaug; the picture of the gray-robed Quakeress, with the soft dark eyes, and the white lace, and the point of flame at her breast.

He had lost all appreciation of its artistic qualities. The mottled softness of the curtained background against the folds of the woollen stuff gave him no pleasure now,--at least, he never thought of it. His whole attention was absorbed in that faint hint of resemblance to Winifred Anstice which lay chiefly in the full eyelids and the subtle, shadowy, evanescent smile which said at once so much and so little.

He could not tell how it fell out, but at last the time came when he admitted the source of its charm. He recalled the time sharply long after, and how he had risen hastily, and paced the floor with his hands thrust deep into his pockets. That it should come to this--he, Jonathan Flint, a man whose gray hairs--here he stepped before the mirror and studied the tuft of prematurely white locks upon his forehead--whose gray hairs ought to have brought with them wisdom, or at least common sense,--that he should fall to sitting for hours in front of a picture like any schoolboy of eighteen! Really, it was too absurd!

He would send off the portrait to the cleaner to-morrow, and then when it was properly framed, it should be sent to Miss Anstice with his compliments, and so an end of the whole matter. He would never see it again.

_Nor the original?_

This query was so insistent that it seemed to come from outside his consciousness, and to demand an answer. He stopped short in his walk as it struck him. Then, alone as he was, he colored to the temples, and gave a little gasp. Like an overwhelming tidal wave there swept over him the realization that his will was mastered by a power above it, mightier than itself; that his seeing Winifred Anstice again was hardly a question of volition any longer, any more than breathing was a matter of will--that he _must_ see her--that the chief question of his future was whether she cared to see him.

This train of thought did not tend to anything very cheerful. One after another he recalled their interviews, on the road, in the boat, on the beach, and again at Flying Point. Her manner on each of these occasions had been sufficiently p.r.o.nounced to leave him in no doubt of her opinion; and at the last two meetings her words had been even more explicit. She had called him a man of ice. She had taxed him with the narrow limits of his sympathies. "Well," said Reason, "did you not give her cause for all she said and more? Weren't you an odious, crabbed, supercilious cad?"

Flint took a savage satisfaction in admitting every accusation which he could bring against himself, in recalling the light irony with which Winifred Anstice had witnessed his blunders, and the direct, downright anger with which she had dealt out her judgments there at the Point. Only one drop of comfort could Flint extract from the memory of that interview, and he smiled cynically as he remembered the warmth which marked her description of her friend, the editor of the "Trans-Continental." When the surprises of the sudden enlightenment and the emotion of the moment had pa.s.sed away, which feeling, he asked himself, would remain in her mind,--the liking for the ideal or the disliking of the experienced? For both there was not room, yet each was intense. It was a curious psychological problem. At a further remove it would have afforded him a keen intellectual pleasure to speculate upon the probable working of a woman's heart under such conditions. As it was, he found himself incapable either of solving the problem or of letting it alone. His mind dwelt upon it continuously. He was almost inclined, like Eugene Aram, to tell his story disguised to strangers, and listen to their idle speculations.

Brady was a comfort at this time. He was so responsive in his sympathies and so obtuse in his perceptions. It was possible to talk all round a subject to him with no fear that his imagination would travel a step farther than it was led. It needed no urging, either, for he appeared to have a sentiment of his own for Nepaug and all its a.s.sociations, and drew towards it as naturally as a moth to a flame or a woman to a mirror.

Indeed, Brady often dwelt spontaneously upon the various episodes of the days at the beach,--the fireworks, the shipwreck, the evening at Flying Point. He was a capital mimic, and loved to imitate Dr. Cricket striding up and down the room, with his hands clasping his elbows behind his back and his chin-whiskers thrust out before as a herald of his approach. Then casting aside all the scruples which should have been raised within him by ties of blood, he would give a burlesque of Miss Standish peering out from beneath her little gray curls at the world, and rapping out her opinion of those around her in good set terms.

After her came Mr. Anstice, looking busily in every corner for the book he had in his hand. This the mimic followed by a representation of Ben Bradford, with hand propped on knee and chin on hand, glooming from his corner upon Winifred Anstice, when she ventured to address some one else.