Joan and Co.
He met her eyes. He had a curious sense of looking deeply into them.
Then she turned away, half afraid of her impulsiveness.
“Just begun,” he repeated.
It was the echo of a new impulse that had been stirring him for the
last few days. With the long, restful nights and the nourishing food,
his physical strength had fast returned. With that had come a new
outlook—an outlook that carried him to such dizzy heights that he had
drawn back, suspicious of it. It made all his former dreams seem feeble
in comparison.
After all, he had never looked very far ahead into the future
because—he faced the truth—because he had been so self-centered. Reed
and his ten thousand represented the climax. Even the return home was
to be in the nature of a personal triumph. Always he saw himself in
that picture as occupying the center of the stage. Then a slow curtain
with music.
These new pictures, as yet but faintly sketched in,—the idle pencil
movements, of an artist feeling his way,—were different. As nearly
as he could make out, he did not, in these, preëmpt the foreground.
Another figure was there. He scarcely dared identify it, except in a
very general way.
In a very general way it was evidently the figure of a woman—a very
beautiful woman with a hint of luxuriant hair. In the forehead and nose
and mouth he caught a general resemblance to some one he knew, though
he did not venture to call her by name. Besides, it was not this which
so greatly mattered. The fact which counted most was that she—whoever
she was—remained always in the foreground.
Yet he himself was not entirely eliminated. Far from it. He was
present, but at some little distance, and struggling toward her like
a figure in an allegory. Just what the meaning of this was he was not
certain. It might be some very broad subject—Youth struggling with
Success—like those in Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress,” except that he was
a great deal too intimately identified with it for that. Whoever the
woman might be, there was no doubt at all but that he was the man. And
with all his might and main he was trying to fight his way closer to
her. He did not even know what for, but there seemed to be some acute
necessity. It was as though everything in life worth while depended
upon his reaching her side. To do that he must accomplish certain
things, and this took him back again to those first weeks in New York
and to the old hopes reborn. Like all new-born things,—like the day
at dawn, like the earth in spring, like a man in love,—these hopes
came to him fresher and keener than ever. But here again there was a
difference. They did not so much concern him—except as a medium—as Her.
They were a feature of the struggle toward Her.
“You’ve just begun,” she said.
It was more than that. He had just been born. The past leading to this
present had been merely a period of conception. He thought he had been
working hard through all those long years, but it was child’s play to
what he felt himself capable of now. If he had felt then as he felt
now, he never would have gone out desperately to find Sawyer as though
that were the end. He would have known it as another beginning. Every
day, every hour, no matter what it brought forth, would be a beginning.
It is not possible to kill a reborn man. He is immortal. You can’t
starve him or freeze him. You can’t even run him down. Perhaps that is
why he was here; because the rebirth was foreordained.
Her words had brought these scattered thoughts which had for several
nights illumined his mind, like isolated rays of light, to a focus.
Instantaneously. Yet when he spoke again there was nothing in his words
to hint of the momentous truth they covered.
“Perhaps you’re right,” he said.
“Men like you—men out in the world—can always do that,” she ran on.
“Yes,” he answered.
“And women like Mildred,” she continued. “If she had lived, she would
have gone right on, beginning fresh every day.”
“And you?”
She hesitated a moment. To answer that involved the confession of
rather intimate details of her life. But if one talks of lives at all
it involves personalities. And that was what she was interested in.
It was just this side of him, that he was a live human being living a
quick life, that appealed to her. He was not merely some one like Dicky
Burnett, tagged and catalogued, circumscribed by his surroundings, and
acting his allotted part in a play. He was Devons. He was a man with
his story as yet unwritten.
“And you?” he repeated.
“Every day is so much like every other day,” she answered wearily. “It
must be so when most of the things worth doing have already been done
for you—years ago.”
“What things?”
“Oh—the fighting things!” she broke out.
He smiled at that. He liked her spirit, but it was the spirit of
an imaginative child who wants to go out and hunt Indians. But it
whetted the desire in him. He, too, would have liked a few Indians to
fight—for her. Those men of the early days who had such opportunities
were to be envied. There is something tangible about an Indian, and
when confronted by them a man had something definite to do. His task
consisted simply of aiming his old blunderbuss and shooting, or, at
close quarters, swinging his good cutlass.
“Grandfather Fairburne was a forty-niner,” she explained proudly.
“And discovered much gold?”
“I don’t know about that. He became a banker.”
“Your father is a banker, then?”
“No,” she replied. “Dad—he—he is only what is called retired.”
She looked as though ashamed of the admission.
“That is the trouble,” she went on.
“The trouble with what?”
“The trouble with the days,” she answered. “It’s why one day is just
like another.”
The clock on the mantel struck five. It struck five times very firmly
and loudly. Nurse Ware rose and thereby announced her presence. Dr.
Nichols had given orders that all visitors should be limited to one
half-hour. Considering the fact that Devons had only the one visitor,
could not possibly have any other visitor, the regulation appeared to
be more personal than is generally the case.
Devons scowled at the nurse.
“Oh, you’re there, are you?” he growled.
“Yes, Mr. Devons. It’s five o’clock.”
“I can count,” answered Devons.
Joan rose hurriedly. She knew what an autocrat Nichols was.
“I’ll try to find something more interesting to read to-morrow,” she
promised.
“Don’t,” he warned. “Besides, I’m going to get out of this bed before
long.”
“You mustn’t.”
“I must. I want to get to work.”
“But Dr. Nichols says—”
“Hang Dr. Nichols!” cut in Devons. “He doesn’t know what I have to do.”
Nurse Ware rustled forward, her starched skirts sounding like a distant
Gatling gun.
“Good-night,” said Joan.
CHAPTER X
AT HOME
Burnett Senior, one evening early in February, sat in his library after
dinner, as was his custom, and, lighting a stogie, adjusted himself
comfortably in his big leather chair, picked up the evening paper,
and turned to the financial page. His wife sat just beyond him on the
other side of a fireplace filled with crackling wood. She was a quiet
body with graying hair, and wore a plain gown of black taffeta which
emphasized her age. She held in her lap the latest work of an English
novelist. In a week she had not succeeded in getting beyond the twelfth
chapter, chiefly because she had held it in her lap most of the time
that she thought she was reading.
For the last twenty years she had joined her husband immediately after
dinner, and sat like this while he read the financial news. And most
of the time she spent this hour wondering about Dicky; first, as a
baby sound asleep upstairs in his cradle; then as a youngster in his
trundle-bed, tired out after his day of romping; then as a schoolboy;
then as a young man away at college; and now as a full-grown man at
home once again. She had looked forward for four years to the time when
he would be back home, as she knew her husband had; and yet, now that
he was back, she found herself going over and over again those earlier
years rather than the present. For, somehow, he seemed to be slipping
more and more out of her life. She blamed no one for that, Dicky
least of all, for she realized that his interests were with his own
generation. She realized that better than her husband did. The latter
was tempted at times to judge the boy harshly and this worried her a
good deal.
Dicky, she knew, was in many ways a disappointment to his father—more
of a disappointment than the boy understood. Dicky failed to appreciate
how large a share of himself his father had put into the business—what
an acutely personal matter this business was with him. The boy did not
have the background she had. Her memory took her to the beginnings—to
those lean, hard years when Dicky was sleeping peacefully in his cradle
in other surroundings than these, while she watched her husband at work
over figures seemingly perverse. Burnett was putting in some sixteen
hours a day of himself then. Even after the figures began to be more
amenable to discipline, there were sudden reverses that made him pace
the floor until morning and kept her with her heart in her mouth.
It all came out right in the end, of course, but Burnett had left
something of himself behind—something in the business. All Dicky had
ever seen was the triumphant result. And he had never heard his father
talk, as she had heard him talk, of how he looked forward to the day
when he should be able to relinquish the reins to “my son” and watch
the business respond to the younger life. Perhaps she herself had been
more or less at fault for not having repeated these things to the boy,
but she had wanted him to have his youth—the youth of which Burnett
himself had been in a large measure deprived. So she had said nothing.
Well, Dicky had his youth. He was having it now; and yet, for the last
month or so she had felt as though something was going wrong with it.
She had seen him getting serious. She had thought at first it was the
new responsibilities of the business. She had said as much to her
husband one evening.
“Dicky is taking hold, isn’t he?”
“Of what?” Burnett snapped.
“Of the business?”
“If he wasn’t a son of mine I’d fire him to-morrow. That’s how much
he’s taking hold,” he replied.
“He—he will some day, Richard,” she ventured to declare in order to
pacify him.
“That isn’t even a good gamble,” answered Burnett.
Yet it was a fact that the boy was getting serious. In the last few
weeks she had seen him maturing, though she had little opportunity
of seeing him at all; often no more than a glimpse of him as he came
downstairs dressed to go out. But last night he had stopped and kissed
her. It brought the color to her cheeks. He was seldom as demonstrative
as that.
To-night she had not seen him at all. As Burnett put down his paper to
relight his cigar, she asked:
“Do you know where Dicky is going this evening?”
“Eh?”
“I haven’t seen him go out.”
“I haven’t seen him since lunch. He wouldn’t let me have anything but
crackers and milk to-day.”
Burnett picked up his paper again, and then put it down.
“Anything strange about not seeing him?” he demanded.
“No. Only—”
“Well?”
“I thought he had been looking kind of sober lately.”
“It’s a girl,” grunted Burnett.
“Not—”
“Nothing but a plain fool girl. He asked her to marry him and she
refused. That proves she’s a fool, doesn’t it?”
“You know her, then?”
“That’s all I know, except that she’s a Fairburne—one of the four
hundred—and thinks she is too good for him.”
“Why—why didn’t he tell me?”
“There, Mother,” Burnett returned, with a note of tenderness one might
not have suspected was there, “it’s only because he’s feeling rather