Flint Part 31

"Yes, Papa."

A silence fell between them after this. At length Winifred rose and turned down the lights. Then she drew a low stool to the side of her father's chair, and sitting down by his knee began to rub her hand gently up and down over the broadcloth.

"Papa," she said after a while, "I haven't been very nice to you; have I?"

"Nonsense, child,--what put such an idea into your head? As if I had had any happiness in all these years since--since your mother died--except through my children!"

"Oh, yes, I know you have found your happiness in taking care of us, but I have found my happiness in being taken care of; and I have enjoyed having my own way and doing the things I liked, and now I would give--oh, so much!--if I had been different."

"What does this mean?" exclaimed Professor Anstice, anxiously fumbling about Winifred's wrist in the vain effort to find her pulse. "Are you ill? You have not had a hemorrhage or anything, have you?"

"Don't worry about me, dear! I shall live to plague you for many a year yet. I'm as well as can be, except for the mind ache." Here she gave a nervous little laugh. The Professor looked down at her, sitting there on the stool, her head drooping to the side as he remembered to have seen it years ago when she was a little chidden child. The waving hair hid her face from his sight,--all but the delicate oval of the cheek and the curve of the full, rounded chin.

"Winifred," he said gently, "I think you have something to tell me."

"Yes, I have, only I don't know how to begin."

"Is it, perhaps, about Mr. Flint?"

"Yes, about Mr. Flint," Winifred admitted.

"He has been asking you to marry him?"

"Yes, asking me to marry him," Winifred repeated, still like a child reciting her catechism.

"And you promised."

"No, I did not," Winifred answered with sudden energy; "I told him I never could, would, or should marry him,--that I would go on being friends with him as long as he liked, but on condition that he gave up the other idea entirely."

Professor Anstice reached out his thin white scholarly fingers and stroked the rebellious waves of his daughter's hair.

"Winifred," he said, "you are always acting on impulse. You never take time to consider anything, but jump and plunge like a broncho. Now let us talk this matter over calmly: I am afraid you have made a mistake--a serious mistake, my dear, though it may not be too late to remedy it."

"There is nothing to remedy," said Winifred, with a tremulous attempt at cheerfulness; "he asked me and I said 'No,' and he said he should never ask me again, and I said I hoped he wouldn't, or something like that, and so the matter ended; and I am always going to live with you and be good to you,--and you won't be sorry for that, will you?"

"I should be very sorry if it came about so. Listen, Winifred. Because you see me a delver in dusty old books, you think perhaps that I don't know what love is; but I tell you as I grow older it comes to fill a larger and larger part of the horizon, to seem perhaps the only reality. I don't mean just the love of a man for a woman, but the great throbbing bond of human affection and sympathy; and of all the kinds of affection, there is none that has the strength and toughness that belong to the love of husband and wife. I wish you to marry, Winifred,--I have always wished it,--only let it be to a true man, my dear,--let it be to a true man!"

"Father, he _is_ a true man," said Winifred, speaking low and with a timidity wholly new to her.

"I think so,--I earnestly believe it. He seems to me to have more ability, more strength, and more tenderness than he has shown yet.

Some wrong ideas have twisted themselves persistently among the very fibres of his life and warped it; but it is not yet too late to tear them away."

"Some one else may do it," said Winifred, in exaggerated discouragement, "I let the opportunity slip by. He will never ask me again, and as for me--do you think I will ever go to any man with the offer of my love? Not if my heart broke for him!"

"He said he would never ask you again?"

"Yes, Papa; he said it twice."

"Well, if he said it twice fifty times, it was a lie, or would have been if he had not believed it himself at the time. Never fear but you will have a chance to tell him that you have changed your mind, and without any wound to your pride either."

"Oh, Papa!" cried Winifred, rising and throwing her arms about his neck, "you are such a comfort!"

The old clock on the landing of the stairway struck one.

"There, it is morning already," said her father. "Off to bed with you, else I shall have no one to pour out my cup of coffee to-morrow." As he spoke, he gently unclasped her arms from about his neck, but she would not go quite yet.

"If--if--all this should ever come about, are you quite sure you would be willing to have me leave you?"

"Quite sure, my dear. It is the natural thing, and what is natural must be right. Now, good-night."

Winifred wiped away the tears which had been hanging on the fringe of her eyelashes, and after a parting hug gathered up her wraps and swept away to her room. Her father watched her tenderly till the last trace of her gown had vanished up the stairs; then he closed the door softly, took a miniature from its case in the drawer, laid it on the table, and bowed his head on both arms above it.

"'Father and Mother both.' Yes, that was what I promised, and that is what I must be so far as I can, and may G.o.d help me!" he murmured.

CHAPTER XIX

A SLUM POST

"Sounding bra.s.s and a tinkling cymbal."

Despair fells; suspense tortures. The forty odd hours which lay between the ending of the Grahams' dinner and the promised interview with Winifred Anstice stretched out into an eternity to the impatience of Flint. By turns he tried occupation and diversion; yet his ear caught every tick of the clock, which seemed to his exaggerated fancy to have r.e.t.a.r.ded its movement. He found it so impossible to work at his office that he packed up his papers and started for home.

"What! going so early?" called Brooke from his desk.

"Yes, a man cannot do any work here with this everlasting steam-drill outside."

"You are growing too sensitive for this world, Flint. We shall have to build you a padded room, like Carlyle's, on top of the building."

Flint vouchsafed no answer. He posted out and up Broadway as if he were in mad haste. Then suddenly recollecting that his chief purpose was to kill time, he moderated his stramming gait to a stroll. At a jeweller's on Union Square he paused, and turned in, ostensibly to order some cards; but pa.s.sing out he stopped surrept.i.tiously before the case of jewels. The rubies interested him most. How well they would look against a certain gray-silk gown! Should he ever dare-- He caught a meaning smile on the face of the clerk, and bolted out of the door.

He paused again at a fashionable florist's shop tucked deftly in among the theatres of central Broadway. The men at the counter were busily engaged over curiously incongruous tasks,--one binding up a cross of lilies, another a wreath for a baby's coffin, and a third preparing a beribboned basket, gay with chrysanthemums, for a dinner-table.

Heedless, like us all, of every one's experiences but his own, Flint stood by, waiting impatiently for the clerk who was putting the last lily in the cross. From the great heaps of roses which stood about he selected an overflowing boxful of the longest-stemmed and most fragrant. The clerk smiled as he watched his recklessness. "I've seen 'em like that," he said to himself, "and two or three years after they'll come in and ask for carnations, and say it doesn't matter if they _were_ brought in yesterday."

Unconscious of the florist's cynical reflections, Flint tossed him his card, and emerged once more to add one to the moving ma.s.s of humanity on the street. At Madison Square he dropped in at the club and looked over the latest numbers of "Life" and "Punch."

Still time hung heavy on his hands. He looked at his watch; it was just five o'clock,--exactly the time when that objectionable Blathwayt was to call in Stuyvesant Square. Still two hours before dinner.

He left the club, crossed over to Broadway, and jumped onto the platform of the moving cable-car at imminent peril to life and limb.

He rode on in a sort of daze, till he was roused by a sudden jerk and the conductor's call of: "Central Park--all out here!" Moving with the moving stream of pa.s.sengers, he stepped out of the car, and refusing a green transfer ticket he crossed the street and entered the park at the Seventh Avenue gate, where the path makes a sudden dip from the level of the street. The sun was near its setting, and the chilly wind had swept the walks clear of tricycles and baby carriages. The gray-coated guardian of the peace blinked at him from his sentry box.

Otherwise he had the park to himself, and found an intense pleasure in the solitude, the keen air, and the sharp outlines of the dreary autumn branches against the gorgeous sky.

The west had that peculiar brilliancy which the dwellers on Manhattan would recognize as characteristic of their island in November, if there were not so few who ever get a peep at the sky except perpendicularly at noonday, as they emerge from rows of brownstone houses or overshadowing buildings of fabulous height. Flint was in no mood to sentimentalize over sunsets. The intensely human interests before him drove Nature far away, as a cold abstraction akin to death; yet half unconsciously the scene imprinted itself upon his senses, and long afterward he recalled distinctly the pale grayish-blue of the zenith shading into the rare, cold tint of green, and that again barred over with light gossamer clouds, beneath which lay the glowing bands of orange, red, and violet.

As the sun dropped, the temperature followed it. The wind whistled more keenly through the bare branches. Flint turned up the collar of his overcoat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and quickened his pace.