CHAPTER XXXII
AN ANGRY ENCOUNTER
“I’M LEAVING the office on the first; I’m going down to the mercantile company with Walsh.”
This was the first intimation Wayne had given his father of the proposed change. He had purposely waited until this last hour before making the announcement, to avoid discussing the matter. Colonel Craighill looked up from his desk quickly and compressed his lips before speaking. It was a blow he had not expected and he did not meet it at once. Wayne turned uneasily and as his father made no response he added:
“You remember that I kept my interest there and Tom says I can be of use to him. I am of no use here—and never have been.”
“In other words, you prefer Walsh to me as an ally. Very well, I might have expected it. This is the last irony of my parenthood and it is quite fitting; quite in keeping.”
In the silence following the announcement Wayne’s heart had been tenderer toward his father than in many a day. It was not so easy after all to leave him; at a word he might have relented; but the swords of resentment unsheathed with a sharp clatter and his spirit declared war.
“What’s quite fitting; what’s in keeping?” he demanded.
“Your desertion, your apostasy. After these years of humiliation you have brought me, you throw me off as lightly as though you were a clerk who had worked here a week and left to take another job. But it’s what I deserve for my forbearance. It’s too bad you didn’t go sooner. But it’s quite characteristic that you should wait till there was a chance of your being of some service to me, as age comes on and a son’s right arm would mean much—you wait for a strategic moment and then fire your last volley and leave. No servant ever served me so ill. But I deserve it; go to Walsh; very likely you and he will find yourselves well suited to each other.”
“Walsh did your work for you for twenty years; it’s rather base of you to visit your contempt on him now. If you don’t know it, every man in Pittsburg knows what Tom Walsh was to you—he was your brains.”
Colonel Craighill jumped to his feet, the blood suffusing his face.
“You ungrateful dog—the reason I dispensed with Walsh was that he’s crooked—he’s a man of no principles, he’s a rascal!”
“But it took you twenty years to find it out—twenty years of faithful service and you gave a farewell dinner to a rascal, your rascal, and bade him God-speed.”
“I didn’t know then what he was!” roared Colonel Craighill, “but I have learned since. He lied about the mercantile company to get it away from me. He falsified the statements and I sold to him on an inventory he made himself. No doubt you were in collusion with him and now you’re to be paid for robbing your father. It’s all of a piece; it’s what I have trained you for and my reward for shielding you and bearing with you all these years.”
“For your prayers, your hypocritical snivelling, for wearing the martyr’s crown because you had the ill luck to be my father! Every time I got drunk you re-sanctified yourself; you were glad when I went bad because it brought your own virtue into higher relief. You never met me like a man, because you’re only the outer shell of a man; there’s no heart in you; no soul in you! And don’t be too sure you deceive the people of this town; they know you and just now they’re sneering because they know you’ve been in trouble and they’re glad to find that anything as perfect as you are has clay feet. Walsh never said a word of ill to me of you; he served you with the humility you demanded and the best things you ever did he managed and you got the glory. And he left you because you wanted to sail out into showy schemes like that Mexican fake and he knew where they would land you. The finest testimony of your high character is poor old Gregory who trusted you—trusted you like a child because you were the great Roger Craighill who could do no wrong; and when you had got that Sand Creek deal through you didn’t know him any more, but turned him over to your lawyer. And he’s sitting out there now in the reception room waiting for you to see him; he’s been trying to see you all winter, but you won’t let him in. And Addie, poor Addie up there at the house, you deceived her, too, for she thought she was marrying a man; and the night you went to Boston without her because you were afraid to spring her on the Brodericks, she found you out.”
“I should strike you down for this—for speaking to me of my wife in such infamous terms. The fact that you assume the rôle of her champion is an insult to her—a flagrant, unpardonable insult!”
“It’s you that insulted her; you were ashamed of her; men treat their mistresses better than that! She deserved better of the great Roger Craighill.”
Suspicion and distrust were warmed in the fierce flames of Roger Craighill’s anger.
“Why are you so eager to champion her? How dare you speak of her?”
“I’m sorry for her, that’s the reason; more than that, I knew her before you did—a poor girl with a hideous mother tied about her neck, and she married you in the mistaken belief that you would honour and respect her, and when your passion cooled a little you began to treat her just as you have treated me—as an encumbrance to be borne and suffered. And don’t you believe, because I never told you I had known her, that she’s not a good woman—she’s so superior to you that you are not worthy to fasten her shoes—that’s what I think of her—and this is what I think of you.”
The door slammed upon Wayne as he returned for the last time to his own room, and began collecting the papers in his desk. He had burned his bridges and there was no retracing his steps. His heart was still hot; he experienced no contrition, though he regretted immediately his reference to Addie, which could only react upon her. But in the main he was satisfied that he had settled accounts with his father at last.
The door was closed between Roger Craighill and his son, blown shut by the winds of wrath. Colonel Craighill sat staring at the wall that separated them. These last weeks had tried him sorely and his head sank upon his breast and he remained there late, pondering his affairs. The stringency of the fall and winter had pinched hard; his own buoyant optimism had been badly shattered by it. The control of the towering Craighill building had passed from the Colonel’s hands. When the banks demanded additional collateral on loans that had been carried easily for several years he found that the securities in a number of his enterprises were looked upon coldly by discount boards. Even the Hercules National, in which he had been a director since its organization and which had always readily accommodated him, called his loans on a hint, it was said, from the comptroller’s office. It was trying to Colonel Craighill’s pride to be summoned to the private rooms of banks to discuss his own affairs with men who had suddenly ceased to be admiring friends and were now gravely inquisitorial. They did their best for him, though; even his bonds and stock in the Craighill building corporation were “deposited”—that was the disingenuous term—with three trustees for the benefit of creditors and this was a salve to his wounded vanity. With a breathing time and the return of confidence Colonel Craighill declared he would reclaim them. His faith in the great Mexican plantation scheme was unshaken, and his colonial investments would yet prove his wisdom. He begged his inquisitors, in their austere mahogany cabinets, to have patience and all would be well; values were intact; credit only had been stampeded; and he cited world conditions with his accustomed familiarity, which, however, did not relieve the immediate pressing fact that he owed a large sum of money which he could not pay.
An unexpected attack in another quarter had disturbed him greatly; and oddly enough it was the Reverend James Paddock of the parish house at Ironstead who had fired an arrow into the weakest plate of Colonel Craighill’s armour. The minister had written a letter to the authorities directing attention to the vile condition of a group of tenements in Ironstead, not knowing who owned them, and it happened that one of the objectionable buildings belonged to Colonel Craighill. The Mail, a vigorous young independent newspaper, made the most of this opportunity in its reddest ink. The fact that this leading citizen, well known for his labours in behalf of the negroes in the South and for other notable philanthropies far removed from Pittsburg, should thus ignore the squalor at his own door, aroused the Mail’s righteous indignation, and it demanded an investigation by the local branch of the Municipal Service League, of which Colonel Craighill was the national president. “Colonel Craighill”—to quote the Mail—“is an excellent type of the after-dinner reformer, posing in the lime-light abroad, but avoiding the discomforts that attend sincere, vigorous participation in home affairs. It is not our esteemed fellow-citizen we are after; it is the smug complacency and cant of many men of similar high position in our American cities, who wax eloquent in bemoaning our political depravity, but through cowardice or their own culpability are never heard from when there is any real work to be done.”
Paddock was sorry to have caused this explosion and he called on the Colonel to explain; but Colonel Craighill’s rage was not appeased. He wanted to sue the newspaper, but his lawyer advised against it; the conditions in the tenement were about as the Mail’s artist portrayed them, and there was no disputing the fact that the Colonel owned the property, though, to be sure, he had lately mortgaged it. The refusal of the Star to spring to his defense astounded Colonel Craighill. It was not the Star’s business, he learned, to correct the Mail’s mis-statements, and the Star, smarting because the Mail had scored a “beat,” began, out of sheer pique, a vigorous attack on the city administration.
Colonel Craighill believed himself sincere in his devotion to reform work, and the Mail’s assault was unfortunate in that it evoked echoes of the familiar cynicisms against all movements for our political and moral uplift. Gentlemen in white waistcoats at banquet tables cannot re-create mankind by resolution; nor do their failures mean that the people are unsound. Politics and government are practical matters. Democracy is an ideal. And as such it can never be fully realized. It gathers strength through successive experiments and reincarnations. The goal, always a little further on, is sought in faith and abandoned in despair, but its changing light can never outshine the hope in man’s heart.