White Ashes Part 55

"A colossal mistake. Your only objection to me as a son-in-law was on financial grounds. Show me, if you can, any young man you could have picked out as a husband for your daughter, who within a few months could have saved your company three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

No, Mr. Hurd, you've done me a very great injustice. And now, I'm going to ask two things of you."

"And what are they?" inquired Mr. Hurd.

"The first is your order for rewriting the schedule on the traction properties. We'll take up the second when we've finished that."

John M. Hurd gave a half hitch in his chair, and turned his face toward the window, the very cas.e.m.e.nt out of which he had gazed on the day when the fate of Mr. Wilkinson's scheme was first decided. Thoughtfully he looked out and down the busy street. His visitor, by way of gently stimulating his reverie, laid the companies' loss drafts within an inch of his unmoving fingers. Unconsciously those fingers, which had through the long years acquired an inalienable tendency toward the acquisition of legal tender in whatever form proffered--those fingers slowly, almost automatically, but irrevocably, closed upon the little packet.

It seemed as though, from the contact, a soothing hint of balsam-laden pines, of comfort and satisfaction for the soul, must have proceeded from those oblong papers. Charlie, keenly watching, beheld the stony countenance in front of him, as if permeated by some ineffable warmth, stir and become human. The miracle of Galatea was worked in this face before the very gaze of him who had dispensed the beneficent influence.

The grim lines around the mouth lost their inflexible rigor; and slowly, unwillingly, almost shamefacedly there stole into the hard old visage the hint, the wraith, the shadow of a smile.

Wise in his generation, Wilkinson left the work to the magic and sovereign forces now at play; he did not risk marring the alchemy by a single word. After a moment which seemed an hour he found himself once more confronted by the direct observation of his step-uncle.

"You can have your trolley schedule," said John M. Hurd. "You are certainly ent.i.tled to it. What else you want I dare say I can guess. . . . Suppose you bring Isabel up to Beacon Street this afternoon to take tea with her mother--and me."

If Mr. Wilkinson cut a pigeon wing in the outer office, it was only the scion of South Framingham whose amazement is recorded. John M. Hurd, still smiling faintly, sat reflectively eyeing the little pile of checks which his visitor had left, until at last he rang for his cashier.

"Endorse these and have them deposited immediately, Mr. Walsh," he said.

Meanwhile the telephone wires were buzzing under Mr. Wilkinson's energetic advertis.e.m.e.nt of the latest society note.

"Extry! Extry!" he announced to Isabel. "All about the reconciliation of trust magnate with beautiful though erring daughter! Extry! All about the soothing and emollient influence of a little packet of stamped paper! No, I've not gone suddenly insane, and I'll come home about four, for we are due for tea at the residence of Mr. and Mrs.

John M. Hurd."

To Deerfield Street, also, the glad word presently went, to meet there the sincere congratulations of Miss Helen Maitland, who held the other end of the jubilant telephone.

"You'd better come, too, Helen. We'll stop for you. I really think it would be much smoother if you were along. And besides, Charlie says we ought to get father on record before a witness in case a conservative turn takes him again."

"I was rather expecting to have tea here," Miss Maitland confessed, after a moment's hesitancy. "Yes, Mr. Smith said he would probably come. Very well--I will bring him along, if you'd really like to have him, with great pleasure. You'll call for us, Isabel? Au revoir, then."

It was shortly after five o'clock when the Hurds' butler opened the front door to admit a company of four. These intruders, waiting no bidding and ignoring altogether the fact that one of their number had been forbidden the house, made their cheerful way, headed by Mrs.

Wilkinson, into the drawing room, there to greet with effusive welcome a stern-faced, elderly lady, who met them with a broad smile, but who almost instantly, to her own infinite surprise and discomfiture, burst into tears. These rapidly abated, when there was heard a sound in the hall, a sound which the quick ears of Mr. Wilkinson distinguished at once.

"The lion comes!" he murmured in Isabel's ear; and an involuntary hush descended upon the company. Thud, thud, thud--the firm steps approached; the arras was drawn back by a deliberate hand; and into the drawing room, his manner as easy and composed as ever, came Mr. Hurd.

Two steps he made inside the room, then stopped. His glance instantly comprehended the little company, and just for a moment the old, cold light shot into his eye. But it was only for a moment.

"My dear Isabel, I am very glad to see you home again."

The greeting which the financier would have extended to his other guests was lost forever in the impulsive rush which landed Mrs.

Wilkinson in her father's arms. Any regret which may have lingered was banished in the shock of this impact; and it was a resigned parent who emerged from this embrace to resume his corner in the reunited world.

It remained for his son-in-law to p.r.o.nounce the valedictory over the vanishing fragments of the family breach.

"Mr. Hurd, ever since the day you flung in my astounded face my character and attainments, depicted in simple but effective words of one syllable, I have felt that there was not only force, but a good deal of truth, in your pungent observations. As I remember telling you at the time, had I appreciated the disgraceful facts as you summed them up, I could only in justice to Isabel have joined my efforts to your own in endeavoring to prevent so fatal an alliance. But it was too late. And now that the thing is done, the child of Mr. Hurd, having inherited some of that gentleman's fixity of purpose and tenacity of idea, is still of the opinion--Isabel, even if I am wrong, please do not contradict me--that she needs the stimulus of my desultory presence to keep her en rapport with life. Isabel has come to find strangely piquant the sensation of uncertainty as to the approaching meal. She has come to feel that certainty in such a matter is a species of bourgeoisie. At all events we are now Mr. and Mrs. Wilkinson; and however deeply we regret the lack of enthusiasm in that connection of my esteemed father-in-law, I can only suggest to him that, although probably no one in the world has as poor an opinion of me as he has, if he keeps that opinion to himself there is no reason why the world in general should ever learn the truth. Certainly it shall be my life work to prevent it; and maybe when in the years to come I am pa.s.sing the plate in some far suburban tabernacle of worship, all will be forgotten. Helen, may I trouble you to hand me those sandwiches?"

Mr. Hurd emitted a dry chuckle.

"For the honor of the family, Charlie, I'll never tell," he said.

It was dark when at last Miss Maitland, under the escort of Smith, started homeward toward Deerfield Street. And even then, not so directly homeward lay their course as the hour might have warranted.

By an impulse which neither resisted, their footsteps turned southeastward toward the place where they had first viewed the land of the fire's reaping. On the steel bridge over the railroad tracks they found themselves at last.

"We didn't really intend to come here, did we?" asked the girl, with a smile.

"Somebody must have intended it," argued her companion; "although I confess that my part in it seemed entirely a pa.s.sive one. Still, it is a good place to come, excepting for the cinders which fly into one's eyes--as one did then."

Northward, under the pale light of the stars, the barren acres stretched away till they reached the point where the builded city recommenced. The wind, fallen to a breeze, brought still a faint hint of smoke out of the ground, as though in insistent reminiscence of the fire's breath. On the edge of this zone gleamed the city's lights, and Smith was vaguely reminded of the lights on the Jersey sh.o.r.e as he could see them from his window.

"Do you remember the night you showed me the lights of New York?" asked Helen, softly.

"I shall never stop remembering it," he answered. "Some day, when I get to be so valuable or valueless that I can be spared from the Guardian, we will go and see the lights of all the other cities of the world. Shall we?"

"There will be none like yours--like ours."

"As there are no lights for me like those within your eyes."

"But I thought we were going to Robbinsville!" said the girl, "to see a harness shop."

"We will go there, too," he answered. "Oh, life will be all too short for you and me!"

It was some time later when the little bridge was left once more to the cinders and to itself. Behind the backs of the two who walked slowly homeward, the plain, which once had been a city, lay gray-black in its ashes beneath the black and gold of the cloud-flecked sky.