CHAPTER XXXVI
TWO OLD FRIENDS SEEK WAYNE
JOE, swollen with pride at having received a telegram, hurried from the mine to the station with the grime of the pit on his face and his lamp still flaring in his cap. He grinned cheerfully at Walsh and Wingfield as they stepped from the train, the worse for a hot afternoon in a day coach. Wingfield surveyed the town with his habitual austerity as they consulted on the platform. His linen had suffered on the journey and he was conscious of the fact; Walsh, blowing hard, mopped his head freely. The heat of August was trying and no trifling business could have brought these gentlemen to Denbeigh.
“We came to see Mr. Craighill; we want to do it privately. Can you fix it?”
“Sure I can!”
“Understand,” said Wingfield, “that we don’t want to interfere with him or embarrass him in any way. He doesn’t expect us.”
Joe commended them to the ’bus driver and, conscious of the dignity conferred upon himself by their arrival, hurried off.
They passed a colliery a little way from the station and the visitors turned in the rumbling omnibus to look at the blackened walls of the roaring breaker. And they saw, driving his mule team soberly into the colliery yard, a man whose figure at once arrested their attention. Wayne Craighill, bronzed, bearded, clad in jumper and overalls, a cap on the back of his head, had finished his day’s work, and was returning his team to the colliery stables. The pilgrims stared in silence; then they turned toward each other slowly. Wingfield’s face, as usual, expressed no emotion; Walsh grunted “Um” and craned his neck to get a last view of the disappearing teamster through the rear door of the ’bus. His thin lips smiled a trifle; the appearance of Mr. Wayne Craighill as a driver of mules seemed not to have displeased Walsh. Wingfield read the advertisements in the panels over the windows and said nothing. Life, he resolved afresh, is an interesting business.
In the hotel lavatory he made the acquaintance of that dark scroll of our democracy, the roller-towel. He was afraid not to use it, he told Walsh, for fear of being thought haughty; but he promised to report the matter to a Philadelphia friend of his who was a distinguished sanitarian. Joe, honouring the occasion with a white collar, was cooling his heels in the office when they came out from their supper, which had been suffered gloomily by Wingfield, whom the waitress had taken for the advance agent of a circus billed for early appearance in Denbeigh. This idea delighted him, and he confided to her that he had no tickets with him, but that she should not go unprovided for; he was only the monkey trainer, he confessed.
There was a little park about the court-house, and thither Joe led them and discreetly disappeared. Wayne rose from a bench and greeted them. He had donned for the occasion the suit in which he had made the journey from home, and it hung loosely upon him. He was in good spirits and greeted them cordially, with much chaffing of Wingfield for his temerity in venturing so far from his beaten trails. In a few minutes Wingfield strolled away; it was Walsh, then, who had business with him, and Wayne settled himself to listen as the old fellow plunged characteristically to the heart of his errand.
“The Colonel’s in bad shape. Things haven’t improved as he expected; some of the people who helped him out last fall won’t carry him any longer. And he’s sick, too. He’s a good deal broken, the Colonel is. I’ve been trying to help him—spending an hour a day at the office for a week or two.”
“I like that! I suppose he sent for you.”
“Don’t get hot, son; it makes no difference if he did. You want to cut out any feeling you have against your father—it ain’t like you—it never was like you. He’s your father; his blood’s in you, and he’s clear down now.”
Wayne listened in dogged silence as Walsh went into the details of Roger Craighill’s affairs. Much might yet be saved, Walsh held, if this new crisis could be bridged. Wayne chafed under Walsh’s recital; he would not help the old fellow with any expressions of sympathy; but Walsh had expected to address an unsympathetic ear, and he told his story to the end.
“What I want you to do is to go home and give the old man a lift. I ain’t going to argue it with you. Wingfield and I start back at ten o’clock. If you do anything it will have to be done at once. You can come back here afterward if you want to. It ain’t been a bad place for you. Think it over.”
He lighted a cigar, glanced at the clock tower, and walked away to find Wingfield, to whom Joe was disclosing the marvels of his native city.
Wayne sat gloomily pondering what Walsh had said. Walsh’s own magnanimity in having gone to his father’s assistance had impressed him. The old hostility toward his father had lost its edge through successive defeats; but what struck Wayne to-night was the fact that a higher law of compensation than any within his grasp had taken the blade from his hands. He wondered whether it were possible that the ledger of life is self-balancing—whether in our own efforts to bring its accounts into agreement we can do more than confuse the items and blot the leaf. And so he turned it over and over in his mind, sitting there on the park bench, with the street sounds of the town drifting in upon him.
Jean crossed the park on her way to the post-office. Wayne sat erect as he recognized her tall figure in the path. The light of an electric lamp swinging among the trees fell full upon her, but her fine, proud carriage, the lifted head were unmistakable. His lips parted to call her; but she passed on unconscious of his nearness, and her step on the cement walk died away. His feeling of superstitious belief in her as an instrument of fate quickened, giving way to the remembrance of her own high courage, her simple belief in right for right’s sake, her faith that good may somehow come to all. He knew well enough what she would say if he put this new question to her. He sighed and struck his hands together, and went to tell Walsh that he would go back with him.
Wingfield’s story that Wayne had been visiting a friend on a Western ranch served admirably to explain his absence during the summer, and it accounted also for his rugged appearance. Both friends found the man they journeyed with to Pittsburg not the man they had known of old—quieter, more subdued, more given to wide-eyed dreaming.
Walsh had planned various moves in the expectation that Wayne would not refuse him; a brief interview at the Hercules National Bank; a visit to the safety vault where Wayne kept his securities; the transfer of a bundle of these chosen by Walsh to the bank, and the principal business was done. Wayne went a step beyond Walsh’s expectations by taking up his father’s notes aggregating two hundred thousand dollars in several other institutions, and gave his own notes to which he pledged collateral from his own strong box.
“Is that all?” asked Wayne, when Walsh had carried him down to the mercantile company for a smoke and talk. “I’m going back to my job; Joe’s sitting on it for me till I come.”
“No, that isn’t all; not quite. I want you to go up and see the Colonel. I want you to tell him what you’ve done.”
Wayne fidgeted in his chair.
“Look here, Tom; this is rubbing it in! You think what we’ve done will tide him over. If it does, all right; I’m not going up there to ask his blessing. The thought of the house makes me sick.”
“Um! I want you to go up there. Things ain’t right there. The Colonel ain’t well; he hasn’t been himself since old Gregory died there——”
“I shouldn’t think he would be,” snapped Wayne. “He wasn’t square with the old man. I wish you hadn’t spoken of that.”
“Um! And the little woman up there’s troubled. She ain’t happy. It would help them both a lot if you would see them. You can go after dinner to-night, and then back to the mines for you if you’re happier up there. But I wish you would come home now and take your desk in here. You see I had a new one put in for you last spring when I thought it was all fixed; that’s the key, and there’s your desk. When you want to go to work you’ll find the key hanging here.”
Walsh rolled a fat cigar in his mouth and pointed his stubby forefinger at the key suspended from his desk lamp by a piece of twine. Sentiment in Walsh was a new manifestation, and he wore it rather shamefacedly. He went to the outer window of his glass pilot-house and surveyed the scene below.
“You there!” he bellowed.
The loading of a dray had been interrupted by a sparring-match between two porters. Walsh’s wrath descended upon them furiously. He returned to Wayne, mopping his brow and lighted a cigar to compose himself.
“I guess that’s all I got to say to you. You go up and see the Colonel. Tell him what you’ve done for him; do it any way you please, and do it now. I guess you ain’t been in a manicure shop lately, have you, son?”
Wayne laughed and held out his scarred hands for inspection.
“Um! I guess that’ll take the foolishness out of you. Now clear out o’ here! Can’t you see I got to sign this mail? And don’t you come back any more till you’re ready to go to work!”
He rolled his chair in to his desk with much puffing and hid himself in a great cloud of smoke as he grabbed his pen.