“I don’t know what to give him for Christmas!”
Mrs. Tom looked tragically at the group consulting over their father-in-law in the old-fashioned library. Miss Clara, the unmarried daughter, had left the room.
“We have a picture,” announced Mrs. Andrew complacently; “a cathedral interior, beautifully dark and perspective. Little Mary has a cup and saucer, and Francis a whisk broom.”
“My boys can give black-bordered silk handkerchiefs,” said Mrs. Frank. “Clara suggests that I have that armchair re-covered, the one he never sits in.”
“Malcolm had better get him another dozen cases of mineral water,” said Mrs. Malcolm. “When it’s in the house he drinks it. But that hardly seems enough, father’s so generous to us. I shall buy a small refrigerator for his room—it’s so useful in sickness.”
“What do you think of rubber water-bags in assorted sizes?” suggested Mrs. Walter eagerly. “If he had a pain in two or three places at once they’d be very handy.”
“Ah!” Mrs. Frank lowered her voice. “I dread coming here Christmas afternoon and staying to supper; don’t you? We can get along all right, and the little girls bring their dolls, but boys are so restless—and men, too! It was so different when Kate and her children were living here, but last year——! Clara doesn’t know how to make the house attractive.”
“She worries so now that father has to stay up-stairs,” agreed Mrs. Malcolm feelingly. “The boys love their grandfather, but there’s nothing for them to do. Why, Violet, you’re not going?”
“I must,” answered a girl with reddish hair and pretty, long-lashed eyes, who was Mrs. Arthur. She had risen, and was throwing a white boa around her neck. Her white teeth flashed suddenly in a smile: “I never was of so much importance before. Good-bye, everybody!”
She ran down the hall, looking in at an open doorway to call an audacious “Last tag!” to a tall old man who sat there reading, and receive his quick, amused response before she went swiftly homeward.
Violet’s appointment with the baby was very important indeed. As she sat afterwards in the darkened nursery, with the infant’s little downy head against her warm breast, her thoughts went back to grandfather. Somehow his Christmas prospects depressed her—the dark picture and the mineral water, the re-covered chair, the refrigerator and the rubber bags seemed so unlightsome; there was nothing from which the most willing mind could conjure festivity. Even the perennial handkerchiefs and whisk brooms and cups and saucers failed to cheer her. It seemed dreadful to be so old that you weren’t supposed to want anything anybody else did, to have everything so tiresomely suitable. Violet had an irreverent desire to send her father-in-law a pink necktie or a flippant poster.
There could be no greater contrast to the needs of Age than this softly-curtained place, with its white furniture, and a blue rug in front of the brass andirons on which the pine logs burned aromatically. A blue and white bassinet swung by a gilded rod, and a white willow hamper showed the blue satin-lined tray, filled with miniature ivory toilet articles, and tiny garments, laced and ribboned—all the dainty appanage of a “first” baby.
A silver and mother-of-pearl rattle and a French clown, belled and tinselled, on a white stick, lay upon the blue table-cover, while a large drum, fastened on the wall above, showed that in the pride of welcoming a boy love hadn’t been able to wait for him to grow into his heritage.
Her sisters-in-law characterized Violet fondly as a mere child; in truth she was a jolly little girl, but underneath the jollity were the directness and insight, and the shy, deep feeling of a child, so hidden as to be almost unguessed. Only her husband saw and reverenced that unfathomed sweetness. But even he did not know of those far-off journeys which her spirit took in company with her little new-born son, in the wonder of his soft, warm mouth, his tiny feet, and unconscious, clasping fingers.
The birth of her child had been to Violet also the birth of Thought; she pondered on the mysteries; for the first time she realized the existence of that great chain whose links are composed alternately of life and death, with the coming and the going of generations. In this infant life she saw the time when her own days should be numbered, and grew pale, yet unafraid, as she held him closer, because the goodness of God was so near.
He was such a very little baby that he was not much of anything as yet to any one but his mother, though his father was indeed unmeasurably proud of him as a son and heir, and regarded him with deeply expectant, if amused, affection. But to Violet he was a wellspring not only of the traditional pleasure but of infinitely more. As one who stands with the ear to a sea-shell, rapt with the sound of the mysterious murmurs of the far-off ocean, so Violet, when she sat bending over her baby, felt a deep, tremulous connection with beautiful, unseen things that were holiness unto the Lord. She was so happy that she longed for every one to be happy; her child-heart even yearned maternally over grandfather, who had lived so many years that people couldn’t see that he was still young. She was a partner in the secret; if she called “Last tag” to him it was because she knew he liked it. He was a kind, wise old man, who submitted patiently to Miss Clara’s fusses and restrictions because he saw the love back of them; and he had lived his life so fully and well that it did not seem worth while to strive to live it now. Yet sometimes, as Violet divined, he was contented to dwell in the past because the present was a little lonely now that the house was no longer the rallying-place for the young, as in the time of his daughter Kate, who had children of her own.
“Little blessedest! I want your grandfather to have a Merry Christmas,” said Violet confidingly to the baby in her arms, who raised his tiny lashes as if in response, and looked at her an instant before the lids fell shut again. She pressed him closer in adoration. “Oh, aren’t you sweet, aren’t you sweet!” and fell to kissing him softly, a process from which she found that mothers gain wisdom.
“Did you decide what to get for father yesterday?” asked her husband the next morning. He was a man of noticeably fine appearance, and a lawyer of repute; it was still a wonder in the family how he had ever come to marry Violet, who yet seemed to suit him exactly.
“No,” answered Violet
“Then I think you’d better get that new dictionary I was speaking of; it’s published by Worden. I’ll leave you the money.”
“I thought he had so many dictionaries.”
“My dear child, that’s just the reason for giving him another.”
“I will not get him a dictionary,” said Violet. Yet she weakened after a tour through the shops. She could find nothing for her father-in-law that appealed in the least to an imagination all ready to be fired. Yet it was joy to be out for Christmas shopping in the crisp air to one who had been so little able lately to go abroad, while before her raptured vision she saw ever a wee sock hung by the nursery hearth, and a tiny lighted tree. Many little children were to be made happy this holy-tide because her child had come to her—Violet’s thank-offering had flowed by many streams to reach unseen baby hands. As she went along now she stopped to slip coins into the palms of longing boys and girls looking in at Christmas-decked windows.
“Oh, Violet!”
It was Mrs. Tom who clutched her. “Isn’t it dreadful—the rush! I’m nearly dragged to pieces. I’ve just bought an inkstand for father, in the shape of a peach, with a thermometer on it—the kind of thing no one ever uses, but I was desperate. I’ve a big woolly sheep for your baby, but if you think he’s too little for it——”
“Oh, no!” cried Violet, her face rosy with pleasure. “How dear of you!” She could have embraced Mrs. Tom before crossing over to the toy store, a ravishing spot, one window of which was given up to regiments and regiments of lead soldiers afoot and on horseback, on a green plain dotted with little round white tents. The other window was filled with dolls sitting at tea-tables, swinging, or lying in pink or blue-and-white beds like the baby’s at home. When Violet was a little girl she had always been taken through this shop at Christmas time; it was one of the delights of the season, but never had it seemed so delightful as now, when she was buying toys for a “first” Christmas, while music-boxes played, and animals squeaked, and rattling, whirring mechanical toys ran riot.
She stopped at last by a counter laden with glittering tree ornaments. Opposite were shelves filled with stationary engines varied with an occasional boat or locomotive. There seemed to be no clerk there, but a small boy, seven or eight years of age, with a white sailor cap pushed back to make a halo around his short golden curls, was walking backward and forward, regarding the display with rapt, angelic eyes, and incidentally putting out the tip of his chubby forefinger to touch a cylinder or an electric battery. Looking up suddenly he caught Violet’s eye; they both smiled, and she came over to him. So might her own little boy look some day.
“Do you like engines?”
“Yes,” said the boy with a deep, indrawn breath. He forestalled criticism: “I’m not too little to have one; my papa says so! He’ll run it for me. He’s down-stairs now.” He pointed to the shelf. “Do you see this one? That’s where you pour the alcohol in—and this is the steam gauge—and here’s the safety-valve. She’s a hummer! And this ’lectric—that’s a hummer, too!”
“Oh,” said Violet. She sought for more definite accomplishment. “What do they do?”
“They go!” answered the little boy. “And they set other things going, too, if you want ’em.” He indicated an array near by: fountains, a man sawing wood, a printing press, and the like. “You ’tach ’em by a thread. See that one up there?” He pointed to a large cylinder of grey burnished steel. His tone fell to one of reverence. “It pumps water!”
“Goodness!” exclaimed Violet with delightful appreciation. “I’m so glad to talk to you because I have a little boy myself, but he isn’t as big as you—he’s only six weeks old.”
“Gee!” said the little boy with his angelic smile. “I never knew any one as little as that.” He stopped disapprovingly. “Why, that’s only a baby!”
“Ah, that’s what people call him,” said Violet, sagely; “they think he can’t even talk. Of course he doesn’t really say anything, but we have long conversations together—I always know what he means.”
The little boy nodded. “My mamma and I talk that way too,” he said simply.
“Then there’s another one—I wish you’d tell me what to buy for him—he’s about seventy or eighty years older.”
“But that’s an old man!” cried the boy in wonder.
Violet shook her head. “Oh, no! Of course, that’s what people call him,” she explained again, tolerantly; “but we know better.”
The boy looked at her debatingly. “Is it ‘Once Upon a Time,’ or is it ‘A True Story’?” he asked.
“It’s both,” said Violet.
Their eyes met this time in the joyousness of mutual understanding.
“I like you, I like you,” cried the little boy, and tucked his hand into hers, jumping along with both feet in short flying leaps. “Come here! I’ll show you what to buy for him, I’ll show you; that! Oh, there’s my papa beckoning to me!”
He dropped her hand and disappeared like a flash in the crowd by the stairs.
“Well,” said Violet to herself, staring in front of her. “Well—why not?”
“I couldn’t get here a minute sooner—I had to lie down after I got them all out of the house.”
Mrs. Tom, arriving late at the paternal mansion on Christmas afternoon, was taking off her wraps in the hall as she looked in at the circle of sisters-in-law sitting around the fire in the drawing-room, warm with the smell of cedar, and bedecked with scarlet holly. Through the open doorway beyond the mahogany table, set with the old white-and-gold china, showed promise of good things to come.
“How cozy you all look in here—but where are the others?” asked Mrs. Tom.
Miss Clara spread out her hands with a gesture of dismay, belied by her beaming face.
“Well, you’ll never guess—every man and boy is up-stairs with father, trying to run that crazy engine Violet sent him; it’s one of those dreadful electrical things. If I’d had the remotest idea what was in the box—and she never even told Arthur! You can’t get one of them out of that room, except to—— Listen to that!”
A boy’s footsteps came hurtling down the back stairs, and a moment later an excited voice called:
“Will it work?”
“No,” came from above.
“Oh, I see what’s the matter. Will it work now?”
“No.”
“Wait a moment till I come up.”
“They’ve been doing that for two mortal hours,” said Mrs. Malcolm placidly. “They have miles of wire trying to attach something—don’t ask me what, for I haven’t the faintest idea. Of course it won’t work; engines never do; if they did all the occupation would be gone. My husband is just as bad as the rest. They all have engines at home, but they say Violet’s beats the lot. Just hear that child laugh; she’s been up there all the afternoon. We’ve been having the most beautifully restful time down here by ourselves. I haven’t seen father look so happy in months, and in all that clatter! Did you hear that Kate is coming back?”
“Will you listen to that!” said Mrs. Walter.
The inevitable footsteps were clattering again madly down-stairs, with the accompanying voice:
“Will it work?”
“No.”
“Oh, I guess I see what’s the matter with it this time. Will it work now?”
“No.”
“Wait till I come up!”
The end of a holiday is the dearest part of a happy one, when the jewels are counted over, to be strung on the silver thread of memory. The lights were turned down low in the nursery, so that the flames of the fire of aromatic pine were reflected rosily from the white surface of the enamelled furniture, as Violet sat there in her loose blue gown, her reddish hair half curling over her shoulders, rocking her little son with his head pressed against her white bosom. After all the merry Christmas Day, after all the clatter, and jollity, and family chatter, the supper, the plum pudding, and the lighted candles, and the children’s carols of the Child Divine, she was back here once more with her little, little son—the life that was mysteriously her life too. Ah, not because of the feasting and the presents, nor the merry companionship, not all because of the inspiring engine even, had the day been Christmas indeed to an old man and those who felt the sweetness, unknowing. Through Violet’s happiness had come the Angel Note.
The drum hung upon the wall, and set out on the blue rug was a small farmyard of animals, with the large white woolly sheep and a brown tin cow on wheels, towering above them. On the table stood a tiny Christmas tree, decked with a red, a blue and a yellow candle, a little horse, a little horn, a candy hen and a glittering star, and on the mantel was a paper angel in white and tinsel with dovelike wings and floating hair.
Violet’s husband coming through the room put his hand tenderly on her hair as he passed.
“Little mother!” he said.
She leaned her head back against his hand, her eyes mutely acknowledging his caress, before she withdrew once more into that holy place where she lived to-night with the child, and where even the man she loved could not follow her.
“So you’ve lost your place,” said his mother.
She looked with tender thoughtful eyes at the lad before her, and smoothed his fair hair with a hand that had to reach up to touch it, for she was a little woman.
“Yes,” said the boy, with a lip that he could not keep from quivering a little. “Somehow I didn’t expect it. Of course, I know lots of the fellows have been turned off lately; times are dull just now, and the firm always cut down the force when they can. It’s easy enough to take on new men when they want them, and those who have been there longest have first right to stay. I know that. But somehow I had thought that father’s work with them——”
“Yes,” said his mother. She sat down in a low chair, and with a gesture drew the boy to her side. “You say you had not expected to be turned away, Francis. Neither had I thought of it! There were reasons—— Your father thought that your future was assured, at least, if only—only as an atonement to him. The firm did not promise me to take care of you, to be sure, but it was understood. They sent at once, you know, and offered you the position. It was only right that you should begin at the bottom of the ladder.”
“The bottom of the ladder is about under ground there,” said the boy with a whimsical shake of his head. “It’s pretty low down, I can tell you! Why there are firms not a quarter so rich as they who pay their boys more—enough for car-fare and shoes and lunch, anyway—of course, though that’s one of the ways they get rich. I’m not complaining. But I thought to-day if father were the head of the business, and I had been one of Mr. Nelson’s boys——”
“Your father loved Mr. Nelson,” said the mother, after a silence during which the two had sat with clasped hands. “And Mr. White too,” she added.
“And didn’t they love him?”
“Yes, once—before they began to make so much money, and after it,—perhaps—sometimes! I don’t know. Mr. Nelson was moved when he came to see me that first time; he meant to be kind about you. To your father he was always the friend he had loved even when he was cut to the heart with John Nelson’s altered ways. There are some people who are born constant.”
“But don’t you mind,” said the boy, a little wistfully, “that I am thrown out of the place? I walked around the town two hours this morning before I could make up my mind to come and tell you, though I knew it Friday. I was afraid it would be too great a shock to you; and yet you don’t seem to think anything of it at all.”
“You will be taken back with a larger salary,” said his mother quietly. “You need not look so startled, Francis. I know Nelson and White—what they used to be, and what they are now; I know them thoroughly. If there were any other way—— Dear, there are some things that I cannot tell you, but your father’s son shall not be turned from his old firm while I live. They must respect the honour of their name. No, don’t tell me not to go to them! I’ll not shame you. I am not going to beg them to take you back again, I have the right to demand it. Trust me, Francis!”
“I do, mother,” said the boy, but half doubtfully, as he stooped and kissed the face raised to his.
It was a pretty face, with a broad low forehead and clear grey eyes, dark now with a purpose that he could not understand. He felt uncomfortable without knowing why, as he met their gaze. There was something in them that was not like mother.
She looked a small enough figure going down the street in her plain black garments and little black bonnet—a small figure to hold the fate of a big business house in that white envelope in her hands. For two years past she had felt that it would come to this some day. The thrill of definite fulfilment tingled now in every tense nerve. The father’s fate should not be his son’s too.
She remembered her husband’s bright faith in the friends of his youth, when they were first married; how he had worked for them with all the powers of body and mind, the manager who ran the business machinery of the house and whose honesty was like the sun, radiating his every act, and whose justice was tempered with mercy. Heaven only knew—and heaven did know—how many boys he had saved from temptation by the kind word in season, how many men he had heartened by his prompt recognition of work well done. He was a man who gave of himself, unvaryingly, to those with whom he came in daily contact, and was a greater factor in the prosperity of the great house than the members of the firm. She remembered how proud he had been of their commercial honesty, and how he had kept his faith in their own personal friendship for him even after the benumbing influences of trade and the exigencies of prosperity had kept them really aloof from each other for months and years. When there was a child born, or a death in the family, the business mask dropped for a few minutes perhaps, to show the old time faces underneath, and the manager loved them, and talked about them long afterwards to his wife. Some day, when John Nelson and Harry White had time——
Then the policy of the house changed. The manager’s salary was cut down; he was no longer called into the confidences of the firm. His wife remembered with hot cheeks and clenched hands how that had hurt him. It was the thought that they could have done it; he would have lived on a pittance willingly if they had needed money. But he defended them, of course; it was his way. He was a very proud man, so proud that his friends’ honour was as his very own; who doubted it, insulted him.
And then—ah, that was hardest! to know that what you love is rotten at the core. That man had no business to tell her husband, but every one in the house told George more even of their own private affairs than he cared to hear. Nothing that went on, for or against their prospects, for or against the good of the business, nay, for or against himself, but was brought to his knowledge for comfort, advice, or denial. He had always borne his full freight of other people’s troubles.
But this thing—— His wife knew how the burden of it had brought the beginning of his illness. It struck at the life of the firm; they had survived, but the blow had killed him. They had used his honesty to cheat with, and had offered him as the sacrifice when they were on the point of detection. Johnson, who partly in horror, partly in protesting doubt, had shown him, with trembling adjurations to utter secrecy, the incriminating paper, did not know that George held the other half of the clue. To have used it in his own defense was to betray one who trusted him, and defile the fair name of the firm.
His widow clasped the envelope tighter in her hands. She had been to her husband the priestess of his heart’s inmost confessional; he had given her a sacred confidence.
But her whole soul rose in rebellion to the thought that her boy was to be sacrificed as her husband had been, with no hand upraised to help him. Her hand was small, but it held a mighty truth in it! All the sense of wrong, and yearning heart-break of years, surged within, to bring with them a fierce avenging joy. Her promise to her husband? He had not known to what it would bind her; she felt herself fully absolved. Nelson and White, Nelson and White, their day of reprisal had come at last. The powerful fetich of their name would crumble into dust, when she struck it!
The dingy brick building with its gaping doorway gave her a shock as she came suddenly upon it. She had not seen it for over two years. That was the doorway under which George used to pass, the steep, worn, wooden staircase, that up which he was wont to climb daily. She had sometimes stopped here for him on her way home. She held her breath with a sickness of heart as she traversed the familiar ways again, looking perforce in at the windowed door behind which his desk used to stand. She was to climb higher to-day, to the sacred rooms of the Firm, the mighty power that had brought into being those rows and rows of clerks at the desks below.
She took her seat on a wooden settle outside the door of the office, which, open at the top, was screened off with ground glass in one corner of the long room, and waited her turn for an audience. She hardly saw the inquiring glances given her from time to time by the clerks; she was full of an intensity of purpose that cut through conventions like a knife. But presently the conversation carried on by the rising voices of men within the office forced itself upon her consciousness unpleasantly.
“Mein Gott! then I lose twenty t’ousand dollar! Consider what that means to me, shentlemen. At this time, at this time, it is ruin!”
“You should have looked out for that before, Hartmann,” answered a cold voice, that the listener recognized as Nelson’s. “We gave you opportunity to examine the goods—you cannot say we did not. If your man was a fool it’s not our fault. We gave you opportunity.”
“Oh, oppo-chunity,” moaned Hartmann. “Mein Gott, what oppo-chu-nity! And the whole cargo rotten! Consider, shentlemen, that it is ruin.”
White’s high shrill tones broke in with an imprecation, “Consider—as you’re so fond of the word—that you tried to cheat us, and got caught; consider that you tried to cut our throat, and we’ve cut yours. You might have known you hadn’t a ghost of a chance with us. We know you’re ruined, and we don’t care. Understand that. We don’t care. Any one who thinks he can work that game on us gets left. You’ve got the rotten cargo, and we’ve got your twenty thousand dollars, and we’re going to keep it. If I were you I wouldn’t talk too much about the story, you don’t show up any too well in it.”
“But my wife, my shildrens,” moaned the man.
“See here, Hartmann,” said Nelson, with dignity, “this is business. Either you talk business, or get out of here. On second thoughts you get out of here anyway. We’ve had enough of you for one day. You think so, too, White? Shall I get somebody to put you out, Hartmann? No? Then go!”
He held the office door open, with a compelling gesture of his free hand and a little man, bowed together, weeping and mumbling by turns, came stumbling out as if blinded. As he did so, a boy with papers slipped into the office, and behind him came a tall, pale clerk, with shabby clothes, and a gentle, anxious face.
“Ah, Cramer,” said Nelson, half looking up from the papers as he scanned them quickly in turn before affixing his signature. “What can I do for you to-day?”
“I was told that you wanted to speak to me, sir,” said Cramer.
“Mr. White, I believe, takes your department in hand. White!”
“The fact is,” said White, “we shall not need you after the first of the month, Mr. Cramer. You asked for an increase of salary.”
“I cannot live on what I get now,” said Cramer. “I have others to support.”
“Exactly. We are sorry, but you must understand that we cannot run a charitable institution. This is strictly business. On inquiry, we find that other men in similar positions are willing to live on less than you are getting now, and it is our principle to reduce our expenses whenever we can. You must know that.”
The listener inferred that Cramer bowed. “My services have been satisfactory, irrespective of salary?” he asked.
“Oh, certainly. We shall be glad to recommend you. That is all at present, Mr. Cramer.”
He had gone. Mrs. Stannard sitting out there felt a strange discomposure—pity, and a helpless revolt against this iron system of injustice: an injustice that hurt her idea of the promoters of it more than those under them—they had been her husband’s friends.
“There’s a lady waiting outside,” said the boy, who was going out with the papers. She rose perforce.
“Mrs. Stannard! Nelson, here is Mrs. Stannard.” White handed out a chair from a dark corner, and Nelson came forward cordially. Both men looked worn and tired, Nelson tall and thin and dark, with deeply-lined face; White, short and slight and fair. Both gave an effect of trying to brush off an habitual and haunting care, to welcome this unexpected visitor. She had known them since her girlhood; Nelson used to write poetry, and White had even been in love with her sister once. He was such a tender-hearted fellow then, he couldn’t bear to have the least of God’s creatures suffer pain. She answered mechanically the usual inquiries as to her health, while she was thinking of these things.
“We are glad you happened to come in, Mrs. Stannard,” said Nelson. “We have just found that there was a little money due your husband still on that last patent. Write out a check for fifty-six dollars, if you please, White, for Mrs. Stannard. There, that’s right, I think. There is so much that’s disagreeable in the business that we’re glad to have something pleasant to communicate occasionally.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Stannard. She added after a moment, “Thank you.” She was looking at the appurtenances of the little office, and at the two men in it. This was where George used to stand when he came here to talk to them, in this dusty cramped space, the high office desks half shutting out the light. What had been his feelings? How he had loved them, Nelson and White—Nelson and White who had killed him!
Something hard in her eyes seemed to strike White.
“We are sorry that we had to dismiss Francis,” he said apologetically. “It is always hard to have to make changes of that kind, but we depend entirely on Mr. Ulmer’s arrangements in that department. As I understand, it was a choice between him and Griggs, and Griggs had the better handwriting. Francis should improve. It is simply a matter of business.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Stannard again. She sat there, a small, unpretending figure in her black gown, very fair and young looking in the dingy office surroundings. She was twisting the white envelope in her fingers, the weapon that George had unwittingly left her that she was to wield in behalf of his son—if she wanted to.
“We have missed George a great deal in these last two years,” said Nelson with a change of tone, and an obvious effort of recollection. “Nobody had the interest in the firm that he had, Mrs. Stannard. His only fault was that he was not quite up to date in matters of management; he was a splendid organizer, but he let his feelings run away with him too much. This recognizing individual ability is all very well in its way, but if you are going in to make money the interests of the house must come first. George never could drive a really sharp bargain—I don’t mind saying it, Mrs. Stannard, for he owned it himself—and it was a credit to his heart, of course—he could not keep up to date in that way. The modern methods of business require tremendous concentration of purpose. White and I”—he glanced at White, who stood near him, gazing seriously at the visitor—“have been quite worn out with our efforts lately, but we have been very successful. Of three firms who were in competition with us at the beginning of the year, two have broken up and had to give in to our terms already, and the third will before long. It’s a pretty fair record. George’s only fault—and that was a credit to his heart—was that he was not good at such transactions, he let his feelings run away with him.”
“Yes, that was his only fault,” said White.
Oh, if they only would not speak of George! She suddenly felt that it was the one thing she could not bear.
“How is your wife, Mr. Nelson?” she asked hurriedly.
“My wife? She was well when I last heard from her. She and the children have been in Dresden—she is there for their education, you know—expects to be gone three years.”
“It must be very lonely for you. Why don’t you go over, too?” she hazarded.
“Work, work! That’s what keeps me here. I give you my word, Mrs. Stannard, the business is so immense now, the operations of the house so large, that I can hardly take even a day off. Here’s White trying to get away to his sick boy up in Minnesota for a couple of weeks, and yet we can’t see how to manage it, just at this time, without losing the firm a deal that will give us enormous profit.”
“Is your boy ill?” asked Mrs. Stannard, turning sympathetically to White. His only child was the age of her Francis.
White nodded, with his boyish face suddenly turned grey and haggard, like that of an old, old man.
“He—he’s crippled,” he answered. “He had a bad fall. Didn’t you hear? Hurt himself racing. The doctors give us some hope, there’s no immediate danger, but his strength seems to be going. That’s the main point, you know—strength. I’ve thought if I could get up to Minnesota just now, to help his mother—— But I can’t seem to make it out Of course, business comes first.”
“God help you, Harry!” said Mrs. Stannard, softly. She had risen and he stretched out his hand and took hers in it, and held it for a moment in a tight grip, with his head turned away.
“You were always good, Clara,” he said huskily. “I hope He will.”
“You have dropped your letter,” said Nelson, coming forward. “Or perhaps you do not want it?”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Stannard. “No, I do not want it now.” Send Francis here, where if he would be successful he must learn to fight against every impulse of his higher nature? What would his father have said? She tore the paper into small pieces with fingers that were firmly tense. “May I put these in your scrap basket? I know that I have taken up too much of your time, Mr. Nelson, I will say good-bye.”
“I am glad to have seen you, Mrs. Stannard,” he said. He looked at his partner, who stood, turned from them, his arms resting on the tall desk, and his head buried in them, and then looked back again at her. She made a movement of comprehension, and slipped quietly out of the door, and pulling her veil quickly over her face, went down the long stairs again that her husband had been wont to traverse, feeling that the dear form was somehow at her side. But she saw nothing, for her eyes were blinded by tears, not for White’s sorrow, not for her husband’s death, but for another and irremediable loss; tears that overflowed and ran down her cheeks, and seemed to keep welling up exhaustlessly from her heart; tears from a pity so deep that it had its source in every happiness of high thought and noble aim and unselfish love that had made her life.
No need to break her faith with the dead! She would not have her boy back in that house of corruption, for all the gifts of Fortune. No need, no need, for her to strike at the name of the firm! That name, so loved, so honoured, slaved for, died for—God in heaven, for what did the Name of the Firm stand?