The Turmoil Part 40

"Not you--oh no!"

"You could forgive me, Mary?"

"Oh, a thousand times!" Her right hand went out in a faltering gesture, and just touched his own for an instant. "But there's nothing to forgive."

"And you can't--you can't--"

"Can't what, Bibbs?"

"You couldn't--"

"Marry you?" she said for him.

"Yes."

"No, no, no!" She sprang up, facing him, and, without knowing what she did, she set her hands upon his breast, pushing him back from her a little. "I can't, I can't! Don't you SEE?"

"Mary--"

"No, no! And you must go now, Bibbs; I can't bear any more--please--"

"MARY--"

"Never, never, never!" she cried, in a pa.s.sion of tears. "You mustn't come any more. I can't see you, dear! Never, never, never!"

Somehow, in helpless, stumbling obedience to her beseeching gesture, he got himself to the door and out of the house.

CHAPTER x.x.x

Sibyl and Roscoe were upon the point of leaving when Bibbs returned to the New House. He went straight to Sibyl and spoke to her quietly, but so that the others might hear.

"When you said that if I'd stop to think, I'd realize that no one would be apt to care enough about me to marry me, you were right," he said. "I thought perhaps you weren't, and so I asked Miss Vertrees to marry me.

It proved what you said of me, and disproved what you said of her. She refused."

And, having thus spoken, he quitted the room as straightforwardly as he had entered it.

"He's SO queer!" Mrs. Sheridan gasped. "Who on earth would thought of his doin' THAT?"

"I told you," said her husband, grimly.

"You didn't tell us he'd go over there and--"

"I told you she wouldn't have him. I told you she wouldn't have JIM, didn't I?"

Sibyl was altogether taken aback. "Do you supose it's true? Do you suppose she WOULDN'T?"

"He didn't look exactly like a young man that had just got things fixed up fine with his girl," said Sheridan. "Not to me, he didn't!"

"But why would--"

"I told you," he interrupted, angrily, "she ain't that kind of a girl!

If you got to have proof, well, I'll tell you and get it over with, though I'd pretty near just as soon not have to talk a whole lot about my dead boy's private affairs. She wrote to Jim she couldn't take him, and it was a good, straight letter, too. It came to Jim's office; he never saw it. She wrote it the afternoon he was hurt."

"I remember I saw her put a letter in the mail-box that afternoon," said Roscoe. "Don't you remember, Sibyl? I told you about it--I was waiting for you while you were in there so long talking to her mother. It was just before we saw that something was wrong over here, and Edith came and called me."

Sibyl shook her head, but she remembered. And she was not cast down, for, although some remnants of perplexity were left in her eyes, they were dimmed by an increasing glow of triumph; and she departed--after some further fragmentary discourse--visibly elated. After all, the guilty had not been exalted; and she perceived vaguely, but none the less surely, that her injury had been copiously avenged. She bestowed a contented glance upon the old house with the cupola, as she and Roscoe crossed the street.

When they had gone, Mrs. Sheridan indulged in reverie, but after a while she said, uneasily, "Papa, you think it would be any use to tell Bibbs about that letter?"

"I don't know," he answered, walking moodily to the window. "I been thinkin' about it." He came to a decision. "I reckon I will." And he went up to Bibbs's room.

"Well, you goin' back on what you said?" he inquired, brusquely, as he opened the door. "You goin' to take it back and lay down on me again?"

"No," said Bibbs.

"Well, perhaps I didn't have any call to accuse you of that. I don't know as you ever did go back on anything you said, exactly, though the Lord knows you've laid down on me enough. You certainly have!" Sheridan was baffled. This was not what he wished to say, but his words were unmanageable; he found himself unable to control them, and his querulous abuse went on in spite of him. "I can't say I expect much of you--not from the way you always been, up to now--unless you turn over a new leaf, and I don't see any encouragement to think you're goin' to do THAT! If you go down there and show a spark o' real GIT-up, I reckon the whole office'll fall in a faint. But if you're ever goin' to show any, you better begin right at the beginning and begin to show it to-morrow."

"Yes--I'll try."

"You better, if it's in you!" Sheridan was sheerly nonplussed. He had always been able to say whatever he wished to say, but his tongue seemed bewitched. He had come to tell Bibbs about Mary's letter, and to his own angry astonishment he found it impossible to do anything except to scold like a drudge-driver. "You better come down there with your mind made up to hustle harder than the hardest workin'-man that's under you, or you'll not get on very good with me, I tell you! The way to get ahead--and you better set it down in your books--the way to get ahead is to do ten times the work of the hardest worker that works FOR you. But you don't know what work is, yet. All you've ever done was just stand around and feed a machine a child could handle, and then come home and take a bath and go callin'. I tell you you're up against a mighty different proposition now, and if you're worth your salt--and you never showed any signs of it yet--not any signs that stuck out enough to bang somebody on the head and make 'em sit up and take notice--well, I want to say, right here and now--and you better listen, because I want to say just what I DO say. I say--"

He meandered to a full stop. His mouth hung open, and his mind was a hopeless blank.

Bibbs looked up patiently--an old, old look. "Yes, father; I'm listening."

"That's all," said Sheridan, frowning heavily. "That's all I came to say, and you better see't you remember it!"

He shook his head warningly, and went out, closing the door behind him with a crash. However, no sound of footsteps indicated his departure.

He stopped just outside the door, and stood there a minute or more.

Then abruptly he turned the k.n.o.b and exhibited to his son a forehead liberally covered with perspiration.

"Look here," he said, crossly. "That girl over yonder wrote Jim a letter--"

"I know," said Bibbs. "She told me."

"Well, I thought you needn't feel so much upset about it--" The door closed on his voice as he withdrew, but the conclusion of the sentence was nevertheless audible--"if you knew she wouldn't have Jim, either."

And he stamped his way down-stairs to tell his wife to quit her frettin'

and not bother him with any more fool's errands. She was about to inquire what Bibbs "said," but after a second thought she decided not to speak at all. She merely murmured a wordless a.s.sent, and verbal communication was given over between them for the rest of that afternoon.

Bibbs and his father were gone when Mrs. Sheridan woke, the next morning, and she had a dreary day. She missed Edith woefully, and she worried about what might be taking place in the Sheridan Building. She felt that everything depended on how Bibbs "took hold," and upon her husband's return in the evening she seized upon the first opportunity to ask him how things had gone. He was non-committal. What could anybody tell by the first day? He'd seen plenty go at things well enough right at the start and then blow up. Pretty near anybody could show up fair the first day or so. There was a big job ahead. This material, such as it was--Bibbs, in fact--had to be broken in to handling the work Roscoe had done; and then, at least as an overseer, he must take Jim's position in the Realty Company as well. He told her to ask him again in a month.

But during the course of dinner she gathered from some disjointed remarks of his that he and Bibbs had lunched together at the small restaurant where it had been Sheridan's custom to lunch with Jim, and she took this to be an encouraging sign. Bibbs went to his room as soon as they left the table, and her husband was not communicative after reading his paper.

She became an anxious spectator of Bibbs's progress as a man of business, although it was a progress she could glimpse but dimly and only in the evening, through his remarks and his father's at dinner.

Usually Bibbs was silent, except when directly addressed, but on the first evening of the third week of his new career he offered an opinion which had apparently been the subject of previous argument.