Читать книгу Ainslee's magazine, Volume 16, No. 3, October, 1905 - Various - Страница 2

The case of the old-fashioned watch snapped together for the fortieth time in John Carrington’s restless hands, and he sighed impatiently.

Not since those days of dread loneliness after his wife’s death, when he had first sent the children abroad, had time dragged so rackingly.

His leonine, iron-gray head moved irritably among the pillows of the bed where he had been “caged,” as he called it, for three interminable weeks.

Mrs. Kipley, tidying up the room with an accentuation of her usual briskness, gave him as indulgent a look as the formation of her rigid cast of countenance would permit.

“Wearin’ out your watch case won’t hurry up that train none,” she observed, as she straightened a china cat on the mantel into an expectant attitude.

It had been her gift the previous Christmas to John Carrington, and her admiration of it extended to the hope that it would pleasingly impress the returning traveler.

“Miss Elenore was fondest of animals, though,” she murmured, absently.

John Carrington’s eyes twinkled appreciatively. He did not share Mrs. Kipley’s admiration for her feline gift.

“Ned will appreciate that cat, though, Mrs. Kipley,” he said, genially. “You know he’s been studying art;” but with the word a shadow came over his face.

“It’s hard on the lad, bringing him back,” he said. “Yellow Dog will look pretty crude to him, I expect.”

He moved his head restlessly, and the leg in its swinging splint became more exasperatingly painful.

Of course it would be only natural for Ned to have grown away from home ties. It was an unspoken thought against which he had braced himself for all these ten days. If the boy came back half-heartedly, contemptuous of the place, indifferent to the mine, alienated from his father – that was the touch of the thumbscrew.

And yet, he told himself wearily, six years was a long time. The boy was talented, cultured, used to all the refinements of an older civilization. What wonder if – And if he, through love for his son, and carrying out his mother’s wishes for his future, had been responsible for the separation which might mean all this?

Ah, well, he was not the first father, nor the last, to think out these same things, and try to see them dispassionately.

“He was real spry about starting,” said Mrs. Kipley.

John Carrington’s face relaxed.

“Caught the first boat,” he said. Then “Is his room ready and comfortable?” he demanded, as he had demanded many times.

“I wouldn’t worry about that room none, if I was you,” said Mrs. Kipley, serenely.

“Did you remember about the cigars and a decanter of whisky?” he asked.

Mrs. Kipley looked at him in a patient exasperation.

“They’s two kinds of cigars, every brand of cigarettes Kipley could lay hands on in Yellow Dog, the biggest decanter full of whisky, the motto ‘Love One Another,’ that my Sunday-school class worked for me last winter; red-white-and-blue soap in the soap dish, and two pincushions with a French motto worked on each of ’em. Hemmy did ’em in black and white pins. She thought’t would make it seem more like Paris to him. One says ‘Vive Napoleon,’ and the other says ‘Veuve Cliquot.’ Kind of twins, you see.”

John Carrington’s mouth twitched. Then he frowned slightly. For would the boy understand? If he were not amused – if he were merely contemptuous!

“Hemmy’s picking some flowers for the house now,” Mrs. Kipley went on, serenely. “And Kipley’s took a saddle horse besides the road wagon, so’s if Mr. Ned wanted to ride over, he could.”

The case of John Carrington’s watch came open once more. If the train was on time, and Ned did choose the saddle horse, another ten minutes – But would he? The lad was a bit of a dandy. Carrington had smiled indulgently over some of his tailor’s bills. Probably you couldn’t coax him on a horse, even in Yellow Dog, unless he was arrayed in all the proper paraphernalia.

But what was that clatter of horse’s hoofs – fast and furious – faster and more furious than any Yellow Dog had heard since the day three weeks ago when the Carrington team, terrorized by a small boy’s premature bunch of firecrackers, had run away, and John Carrington, thrown from the wreckage of his light buggy, had been brought home with a badly fractured leg?

Mrs. Kipley looked out of the window.

“Merciful sakes!” she ejaculated, startled.

Not an accident to Ned, John Carrington prayed, with stiff, dry lips and apprehensive eyes.

“Of all things!” Mrs. Kipley murmured; and her tone indicated that she was now past surprise, and merely numbered with the numb.

Some one was running up the veranda steps; the door was flung open, and a tall, dark, slender boy in a marvelous suit of dull gray velveteens stood on the threshold.

A long, crimson-lined cape was flung over his arm. He tossed it from him. And “Dad!” he cried, exultantly, and was across the room, with his arms around his father’s neck, and had kissed him on both cheeks.

“French fashion, dad!” he laughed, flushing suddenly.

“Now we’ll do it the Anglo-Saxon way;” and he caught both his father’s hands in his own and wrung them heartily. “It’s great to be home again,” he said, buoyantly.

And the joyful light in his eyes was unmistakably genuine.

John Carrington’s face softened amazingly. Happiness such as he had not known for six years gripped him. The warm ardor of his son’s embrace, the touch of the soft, boyish lips, unnerved him, but he liked it astonishingly. It was so naïf, so unspoiled, so reassuring against that dread of alienation he had endured, that he felt submerged in the warm, comfortable certitude of his son’s affection. He gripped the lad’s hands strongly, and surveyed him with a proud, fatherly interest.

The blue eyes that looked frankly into his own were like the lad’s mother’s, like Althea’s; the face that smiled gayly at him was alight with youthful energy, and the mouth, though the lips were a trifle full, had firm and resolute lines.

It was no dawdling dreamer that he saw, but an action-lover.

He nodded satisfiedly.

“You’ll do, lad,” he said, briefly.

Then he smiled as he caught sight of Mrs. Kipley, standing with the rigidity of an automaton, dust cloth in hand.

“You remember Mrs. Kipley,” he said, significantly. The boy wheeled instantly.

“Don’t I!” he said, laughingly, and something in his advance galvanized Mrs. Kipley into life again.

“None of your French fashions with me,” she said, severely, extending her right hand to him, less in greeting than as a rampart.

He swept a wonderful bow over it. Bent to it as a courtier might have done, and kissed its wrinkled, work-hardened back lightly. Then he straightened up to look her full in the eyes, and laughed his bubbling laugh once more.

“Do you still make those wonderful twisted doughnuts, Mrs. Kipley?” he asked, gayly. “I’ve bragged about them in Paris till they’re famous.”

Mrs. Kipley was scrutinizing the back of her hand minutely, to see if it was still intact. Finding it apparently uninjured, she drew breath and looked the surprising apparition in the face. Her own relaxed to his handsome, dashing youth and to his praise.

“I guess they’re about the same,” she said, dryly. But John Carrington chuckled to himself. He recognized the subjugation of Mrs. Kipley.

“What will he be with the young women!” he commented, to himself, amusedly.

Then he asked the question that was consuming Mrs. Kipley:

“Ned, are those clothes the style in Paris?”

The boy swung himself lightly into the big armchair beside the bed.

“They’re the badge of my craft, sir,” he said, good-humoredly, settling the soft cravat with deft fingers. “Don’t you like them?”

“Oh, I like them,” said John Carrington. (“Handsome lad!” he was whispering to himself, proudly.) “But I was wondering how they would strike Yellow Dog, that’s all.”

“There did seem to be some little interest in my arrival,” the lad admitted, gleefully.

“Sakes alive! They beat anything I ever see in all my life!” Mrs. Kipley communed with herself.

“And Elenore?” said John Carrington. “How did you leave Elenore?”

The boy stirred slightly in his chair.

“Elenore is well, dad. She wanted to come. I think she was a little disappointed that you didn’t want your daughter instead of your son.”

John Carrington shook his head.

“Yellow Dog is no place for a young lady, Ned,” he said. “It was better for her to stay with her friends. I should have liked to see her, though. She’s quite a woman, from her picture. Time for sweethearts, eh? Your Aunt Sarah wrote a good deal about a young Hastings. She seemed to think it might be serious.”

The boy flushed annoyedly.

“Aunt Sarah loves to fuss and exaggerate,” he said, and there was a slight coolness in his voice. “Maiden aunts are apt to, you know,” he went on, more naturally. He smiled his attractive smile once more. Whatever had perturbed him for the instant was past.

Miss Hematite Kipley, ætat seventeen, coming into the room with a fragrant bowl of syringa blossoms, compared it favorably with any picture her beloved romancers had been able to conjure up.

From the moment when she had seen the picturesque figure dismount and make a rapid way into the house, she had been perishing to make this entrance, but she had restrained herself in accordance with her ideas of propriety and gentility. Miss Kipley strove to be “elegant,” aided by certain open columns in respected periodicals, after which she patterned her conduct and her clothes.

The meeting between father and son she characterized as “a sacred moment,” and she regretted her mother’s continued intrusion upon it with the resigned exasperation of one who had often and fruitlessly pointed out to a primitive parent the proper forms of procedure.

Miss Kipley was rather pretty in a wholesome, buxom, blond way, and the “open columns” had stimulated her to a crisp freshness of attire, and partially reconciled her to the maternal regulations of its enforced simplicity.

She came into the room with her eyelids so demurely lowered that she might have been taken for a sleepwalker.

“Good-morning, Hemmy,” said John Carrington, with an outward courtesy which marked an inward amusement. In spite of her physical bulk, Miss Hematite was mentally transparent.

“Why, Hemmy!” said young Carrington, gayly, “how awfully pretty you have grown!”

Miss Kipley felt an inward commotion which threatened suffocation. Her fingers tightened on the blue bowl in a way which tested its enduring qualities. Mrs. Kipley’s maternal eye became vigilant.

There was a suggestion of a wrinkle on John Carrington’s brow. He hoped the boy would remember that this was not Paris; that the Kipleys represented the survival of a good many New England traits.

But neither parent could find anything to criticise in the way the lad relieved the blushing Hemmy of the bowl, shook her hand in a cordial, unaffected way, and turned to set the white blossoms on the square ledge of the open window, where the breeze converted them into a spicy censer.

As for Hematite, though visibly she stood in a deep pink embarrassment, in fancy she trod the sunny slopes of romance. This was the way things happened in the books over which she pored, palpitant. She sought vainly for some appropriate expression of welcome.

“I guess Hemmy and me will let you have a chance to get acquainted. I can finish dusting by and by,” said Mrs. Kipley, tersely. “Your old room’s all ready for you, Mr. Ned. Come, Hemmy.”

That young person followed her mother mechanically from the room.

“Cat got your tongue?” inquired Mrs. Kipley, severely, in the hall. “For all you are forever reading about the proper way to do things, you can’t even say ‘Glad to see you back.’”

Miss Kipley looked down from the happy heights to which she had mentally withdrawn herself, to the prosaic parent treading the valley of plain realities.

“There are moments beyond words,” she vouchsafed. Then she sped down the garden path to the now sacred syringa.

Mrs. Kipley watched her from the doorway with an anxious air.

“I hope she ain’t caught anything,” she murmured. “That was a terrible fool remark. I don’t know what there is around just now for her to catch.”

But it is characteristic of the disorder which Miss Hematite had so recently acquired that no one save the person afflicted knows it’s around till the case has taken.

* * * * *

The lad had slipped his fingers in his father’s, and they sat a little while in silence. So Althea and John Carrington had often sat, in that silent communion which is the bond of the finest fellowship.

Mr. Abner Kipley, entering suddenly, with Ned’s suit case in hand and a desire to expatiate on recent events oozing from every pore, viewed this singular proceeding as one further extraordinary manifestation emanating from the same remarkable cause.

“Seems you can teach an old dog new tricks,” he communed with himself. “Probably by to-morrow I’ll be holding hands myself.” He chuckled grimly to himself over the impossible thought. But the glance he gave the lad from under his shaggy eyebrows was unwillingly admiring.

Yet Mr. Kipley prided himself on his unerring attitude of judicial criticism.

The boy swung round in his chair to greet him smilingly.

“You walked over, Mr. Kipley, I assume,” he said, mischievously.

“I didn’t try to kill a horse ’n’ get my neck broke,” responded Mr. Kipley, defensively.

“You picked up thet baby nice, though,” he added, with the air of a man willing to be just.

John Carrington looked at him with an air of sudden inquiry.

“It was lucky,” said the lad, languidly; and he lounged over to the open window, as though the subject was finished.

“I’m goin’ to,” said Mr. Kipley, impatiently, to the growing insistence of John Carrington’s look.

He objected to being hurried in the narration of a story which he rejoiced was his to tell.

“When he,” he began, jerking his head in the lad’s direction, “’lected to ride the Colonel home, he threw that red-backed garmint” – no mere black-and-white could reproduce the patronage of Mr. Kipley’s tone – “’cross the saddle in front of him. ’N’ the Colonel, not being used to the fashions in Paris, bolted. They went up the road’s though they was goin’ to glory, ’n’ didn’t have but one chance to ketch the limited. ’N’ I threw his grip in the wagon ’n’ started after ’em.

“It was good ridin’,” said Mr. Kipley, approvingly, “’n’ everybody thet could turned out to see it. It was interestin’ and free.

“Thet curve by Trevanion’s cottage is a mean place,” Mr. Kipley continued, reflectively. “I’ve run the team into several things there myself, includin’ a dog fight, which c’ncluded about the time we run over the principal fighter’s tail.” He switched himself back on the main track. “Thet baby of Trevanion’s was tryin’ to ketch a hen just as the exhibition come along.”

“Well?” said John Carrington, and his voice whistled like a pistol shot.

“Down with his arm, ’n’ half out of the saddle – grab – ’n’ yank up – ’n’ ’bout face – hand the baby to a long-legged girl – ’n’ off he goes, leaving me to destroy my c’nstitution, breathin’ dust all the way home. Thet’s your son’s idea of gettin’ here,” he concluded, dryly.

John Carrington drew a breath of relief.

“If anything had happened to that baby, we should have had the devil’s own time,” he said. “Trevanion has been sullen ugly ever since his wife died – took his trouble that way – and the baby is the only thing in the world he cares for. If – well, we might have lost the best shift boss in the country.”

Young Carrington stood very still, looking out of the window. If the incident had shaken him a bit, there was at least no outward sign of it.

Mr. Kipley drew nearer to the bed.

“There’s good stuff in him,” he said, semi-confidentially, as though recent residence in a foreign land unfitted one to hear undertone, “’n’ grit. But, for the sake of Moses, get those clo’s offen him.”

Upon which advice, he retired hastily from the room.

John Carrington looked across the room at his son with a smile that was at once quizzical and affectionate.

“Yellow Dog finds you a trifle too picturesque, boy,” he said, and his tone suggested that he at any rate was satisfied. “How about you? Pretty big trial to come back?”

“I should have come, whether you sent for me or not, when I knew you were hurt,” said the boy, and there was a defiant little ring in his voice. “Where should I be, or want to be, but at home and with you?”

John Carrington’s heart beat proudly. This was the kind of son to have. He said “home” as though he meant it. He was loyal. Now he, John Carrington, had an heir to show to some people —

“I needed you,” he said, quietly. “Not on account of this confounded leg; though it’s been hard to be shut up for the first time in my life – hung up to mend, like a china plate. But it made me think I was just mortal, after all. And of your future and Elenore’s. And it’s only fair to you to let you decide how you’d rather have things.”

The look the boy gave him now was a quiet, concentrated attention.

“Without going into details about our mine, that no one but a mining man could understand,” Carrington went on, with a restful security engendered by that look, “I want to tell you the straight facts. It’s characteristic of this region that in sinking every now and then you strike a big hole filled with water – a vug, they call it. Now, we can take care of what we strike ourselves, but the Tray-Spot, which is newer and shallower, is letting us take care of theirs. Instead of pumping it up, they let the water seep through to the Star, and we lift it. It cuts off profits, and makes our mine dangerous. The two mines ought to be under the same management, anyway. Expenses could be cut almost in two. So I wrote the owner of the Tray-Spot – an Easterner – never comes out here – to ask him what he’d sell for. Richards, the superintendent, is a good deal of a scoundrel, and responsible for all the trouble. Of course mining is just a business proposition to those Easterners. They haven’t fought things out here in the early days, as some of us have. And this man had never even been on the ground. Bought the mine from Riley when he went to smash. And he’s childless. No second generation to take it up.

“That’s practically what I wrote him,” Carrington went on, doggedly, “and why it should have struck him just wrong, and turned him pig-head and ugly is beyond me. But he wrote back that if he had never been here, he wasn’t too old to come now. And that if he didn’t have a son, he had a nephew, who was a first-class business man and smart as a steel trap, whom he proposed to bring out here, and to keep on the ground. And that, as he understood from his superintendent that the one son I had was spending his time in Paris studying art, the mines would be better off with his heir than mine. And would I put a selling price on the Star? The Star, that I’ve put my lifeblood into! And that letter” – there was the rage of a wounded lion now – “was the first thing they read me after I came out from the ether to find myself tied up like – like this – ” he finished, at a loss for any adequate comparison.

“We’ve got to fight or to sell,” he finished, “and if anything happened to me, what would you children know about disposing of it? That’s what I’ve thought as I’ve lain here. Hadn’t I better leave things safe for you, if I do have to kill time for a few years myself?”

His eyes looked worn. How many times he had gone over it! How many times affection for his children had warred against his pride in the mine he had discovered, developed, managed, owned! It all seemed a part of long, restless nights, of narcotics and anodynes that brought nightmares as often as oblivion; nights in which the young mine doctor seemed mixed up with the obstinate Easterner who owned the Tray-Spot, and the pain throbs and the pumping apparatus at the mine seemed to have some curious relationship.

“Sell! Never!” the fresh young voice flung back instantly, and the timbre of it was a battle-cry. “We’ll fight, dad – for our rights first, and then – then we’ll buy!”

He stood erect, every curve of fine youthfulness buoyant with victories to come, his head flung a trifle back and his mouth resolute.

Fatherly pride, exultation, triumph, swung John Carrington up on his elbow from his pillows in a certain fierce joy, and something glistened on his cheek – something that pain and fatigue and loneliness had never crystaled there.

“I have a son to stand by me,” he said, and it was the dignity of a king to the crown prince.

The leonine old head was lifted proudly, and the hand that he stretched out might have held a scepter.

Then reaction of the strain came swiftly, and the lad leaped to him, as he dropped back limp and white against the pillows, with a sudden film drawn over the eyes so lately keen of sight, and the rushing of many waters in the ears that had heard so happily.