Part 4

Harrington nodded. “Nearly as good. I bought it for a song, and the Company sent out a surveyor and a couple of geologists of their own to look it up, and paid me fifty thousand for it—that is, indirectly, of course. I didn’t appear in the sale and by—I lost every cent in a deal yesterday.” He swore under his breath.

“You used the private information I gave you, I suppose?” said Atterbury in dangerously low tones.

A flicker of a smile crossed Harrington’s moody face.

“Well, yes. You gave me the points, and I used them; any man would.”

“You miserable—sneaking—liar!” said Atterbury very slowly. He rose, and brought both hands down on the table with a gesture that did not lose in power because it made no sound. “No man that lives shall cheat me with impunity. I’ll brand you for what you are!”

“You can’t,” said Harrington insolently.

Atterbury smiled with the scorn which disdained reply, and turned on his heel. He did not see the startled glance of Nichols and Callender as he went over to a place beside them. His wife wondered, as they did, at a new royalty in his tall bearing, as of one used to high command, and bowed herself in adoration before it.

He defeated, he cast down! In that moment of tingling indignation he felt himself a conqueror; nor obstacle, nor loss, nor circumstance, nor treachery should stand in his way. This blow had felled the last barrier that confined a free spirit, superbly at one with the elemental force which displaces atoms and creates new worlds.

The current of a mighty strength was in him, dominant, compelling, that strength which in some mysterious way has a volition of its own, apart from him who possesses it, bending men and events to his uses.

There was a vibrant tone in his voice as he said,

“Mr. Nichols, I want to go to South Africa for you.”

The gaze of the two men met with almost an electric shock.

“But you don’t know the business!”

The protest half invited discussion.

“I can learn it.”

“We don’t want a man _to learn_,” said Callender, speaking for the first time. “You must understand that, Atterbury! We can find men on every street corner who would like to learn. We want some one with a good working knowledge, who has had experience, and is familiar with our machines and our methods—one who can leave his family—and has capital—”

Atterbury shook his head. “No! You want a man like me, one who cannot only handle your machines, but handle men, and has had experience outside of your narrow line. Good heavens, Callender, the man you speak of—barring the capital—can almost be picked up at the street corners. Your house is full of such as he—good, plodding, trustworthy men, who understand what they have been taught about your machines and your accounts and your methods, and who understand nothing else; who stick to their desks year in and year out. Will one like that do for you? You know that it will not! Granted that I _don’t_ know the business as you do—that’s but a detail; I know what business really _is_. Granted that I’ve got no capital—I’ve got the one thing you really need, and that’s the brains and energy to get it for _you_. Take me into your conferences, give me a fighting knowledge of what you want, and I’ll bring in the capital.

“The export trade has a tremendous future; my mind’s been full of it lately. You send me to South Africa—to China—to the Philippines, and I’ll undertake to double the business in three years, but you mustn’t confine yourself to one narrow line; you must broaden out. You ought to be able to distance all your competitors; you ought to be able to merge them in your own company. For many reasons I can be worth more to you than any other man you know. Great Scott, Nichols, can’t you _see_ that I’m the opportunity you want?”

Nichols sat immovable, holding on to the arms of his chair with both hands. Facing the light of Atterbury’s face, the answering light shone in his own. Callender still objected, although plainly under great excitement.

“You haven’t managed your own affairs so well.”

“No,” said Atterbury, turning on him like lightning, “and you know why. You know just what claims the death of Anderson laid upon me, and how I’ve tried to carry them. They will be paid off now. Callender, you’re not worth my powder and shot; you’re just _talking_. Mr. Nichols, I’m speaking to _you_. You know I can handle this thing!”

Both men rose unconsciously and looked at each other, with a long breath between them.

“When will you send me out?” asked Atterbury at last with his brilliant smile.

“Come to me to-morrow at ten,” said Nichols, giving his hand to the other, who grasped it silently. “Mind, I don’t promise anything.”

“No, we don’t promise anything,” agreed the excited Callender.

“No,” said Atterbury jubilantly, “that’s all right. We’ve got a great future before us, my friends.”

As he wheeled around he caught sight of Harrington, whom he had momentarily forgotten.

“Ah,” he said airily, “do either of you own any stock in our host’s Company? It may be just as well for you to investigate a little; you may find that as the treasurer he’s been speculating with the funds. I’ll give you my reasons for this also—to-morrow.”

“Come,” he said to Agnes, “we must be going.” As they stepped out once more into the darkness, the wind nearly hurled them off their feet; a million icy points of snow pricked and stung the face. She clung to him, and he put his arm around her and swept her through the storm as a lover might his bride, unknowing of it.

Yet for all that warm clasp, she subtly felt the severance of his thought from her, and when they were safely landed in the hall, she said nervously,

“What was that I heard you saying to Mr. Nichols? You’re not going to _leave_ me!”

Her tone had in it the universal protest of womankind, to whom the bodily desertion is less than the spiritual one that makes it possible.

He bent his ardent eyes upon her with a glow which she had never seen in them even in the earliest days of their love.

“Ah, but it will be only to come back to _you_,” he said with a leap forward to a joy that made parting dim, and she looked up at him with a soul so steeped in love that for the moment she could only desire what he did.

The evidences of a clinging domesticity were again around them; fierce blasts of heat from the furnace showed that Katy had peacefully forgotten the dampers; the water dripped, dripped into the kitchen sink from the thawing pipes. A hollow clanging cough from the upper regions told that poor little Gwendolen’s post-festive croup had indeed set in, but even this no longer appeared a bitter and blasting ill to Atterbury, but merely a temporary discomfort, to be gone with the morrow.

In the Reign of Quintilia

In the Reign of Quintilia

AS Mr. Nichols sped on his homeward way to the suburbs by boat and train, the abstraction which the clerks had noted grew upon him. At forty-six, his leonine locks streaked with gray, the comfortable, solid, prosperous father of a family, the president of one corporation and member of Heaven only knows how many governing boards, Mr. Nichols was in love—deeply and irremediably in love—with his youngest daughter, an infant of parts.

She was the sixth child, not the seventh, whom tradition surrounds with the mysterious opportunities of good fortune. She was, moreover, the fifth girl in unbroken succession, and her father, like many another man in like case, had not even looked at the baby until she was nearly a week old, only to fall a victim to the charms of the little warm, helpless being after he had once held it in his arms and felt the tiny rose-leaf fingers close over one of his. As he gazed intently at the face with its miniature features, the blue eyes suddenly opened and gazed at him unwinkingly for a space of seconds. Then the lids closed over them peacefully, and a long sigh issued from the parted lips, in its reflex breathing giving the indication of a ridiculous dimple at one corner of the mouth. When Mr. Nichols looked at his wife, who had been observing him, they both smiled, with a tightening of a new bond of affection between them.

“Pretty nice sort of a girl, isn’t she?” he remarked as he handed the child back to the waiting nurse, and when he went downstairs his wife heard him whistling a tune that had been a part of their early betrothal days, and hid her face in the pillow with a happy glow on it, although she was a staid and respectable matron.

It was noticed after this that Mr. Nichols contracted a habit of coming in each night and gazing at the child intently when he thought himself unobserved, and that he seemed to derive great and increasing satisfaction from the perusal. As the baby grew older her face lighted up for him as for no one else, and before she had reached her present age of two years they were sweethearts indeed, with a passion on his part which made it unbearable pain to him if she bumped her head or pinched her finger.

“How is Quintilia?”

The voice of a near neighbor arrested Mr. Nichols’s attention. A slow smile overspread his countenance at the mention of the beloved name, with which the doctor had playfully christened this fifth girl, to the exclusion of her lawful cognomen.

“Oh, she’s all right. At least I hope she is to-night—she hasn’t been very well for a couple of days; it’s bothered me a good deal.”

“My wife says that she grows prettier every day,” continued the obliging neighbor.

Mr. Nichols beamed. “She does. I’m coming home a little earlier to-night to see how she is. Her mother usually keeps her up for me when she’s well.”

He could not tell how much he hoped against hope that she _would_ be up and looking out for him. He knew so well how the little lovely white thing with the starry eyes and glinting curls would run to the stairway in her nightgown, and sitting down on the top step with all the delicious fluttering and sidling motions of her babyhood, would thrust her plump, bare pink foot up against his rough cheek with the delighted cry of,

“Pa-pa, _kiss_ a footie! Kiss a footie, pa-pa!”

Then how he would mumble and kiss that darling foot, and pretend to eat it, finally snatching the adored baby in his arms, laughing and struggling, to cuddle close to him when he pressed her to his heart, with the infinitely tender gentleness of the strong, as he carried her to her crib and laid her in it. His wife was always there, too, watching him with an indulgent smile. All love between them seemed to have grown deeper since it merged in this sixth child, whose advent had called forth a large offering of honest condolence from mistaken friends, and who had brought a joy which at first the parents decorously—nay, guiltily—concealed, to revel in it almost indecently afterwards.

The novelty of the first-born, a boy, had hindered complete enjoyment, and with him, as with the four girls who followed close after, it was a matter of such supreme importance that all the small rules which governed the infantile world should be strictly observed.

Even as a young woman Mrs. Nichols was a serious and conscientious mother, who read all the literature bearing on family health and education. The infants were trained with adamantine firmness from their birth, and as they grew older Mrs. Nichols attended kindergarten meetings where the child was meditated upon with deep graspings of the intellect, and also painstakingly sat through recitations mixed with exasperating calisthenics in the higher schools. In fine, she so ordered her days that when pussy-cats were under discussion in the morning classes to which Ethel and Edith belonged, she could still lead their thoughts intelligently pussywards in the afternoon, besides holding the fourteen-year-old Stan to that hour’s exercise in spelling which was also like an exercise in breaking stone.

To the higher rule Quintilia promised from the first to be an exception. She made her own laws. When she lifted her little arms to be “taken up” it was not in the heart of mortal to resist her; food was given her when she cried for it, and for the life of her Mrs. Nichols could not always combat the temptation to hold the dear little clinging form in her arms, with the damp head and its thistledown curls nestling on her shoulder, and rock and sing her baby to sleep in the old-fashioned way.

“No, I don’t think she’s any worse.” Mr. Nichols’s wife had met him at the door with the peaceful kiss of possession before reassuring him for the non-appearance of Quintilia. She was a woman of medium height, rather stout, with somewhat large features, a fresh complexion, thick black hair, brown eyes, and an expression that was at once pleasant and capable. The heart of her husband trusted in her implicitly, and her tone was a relief to him.

“What did the doctor say?”

“He thinks that it’s only a cold, but she must be kept very quiet. The nurse came this afternoon, but she doesn’t seem very—What is it, Miss Candy?”

Mr. Nichols looked up at the stairs, and his tense gaze involuntarily softened. A pretty girl in a blue and white cambric uniform appears to most men as an angel of healing. This one had large and appealing eyes, and little brown fuzzy curls in front under her white cap. There was a slip of paper in the hand held forward.

“Would you kindly have this prescription filled at once? I forgot it when you sent out last.”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Nichols with alacrity. “I’ve got my coat on. I’ll go for it now.”

“Oh, thank you! And would you mind bringing home some alcohol? I think there ought to be some in the house.”

“There is a bottle of alcohol,” interpolated Mrs. Nichols.

“I’m so sorry, but I just tipped it over accidentally. Would you please send one of the maids to sweep up the broken glass? Thank you.”

The vision of the pretty face supported Mr. Nichols but insubstantially while he waited half an hour in the drug-store in contemplation of a deserted soda fountain, fly-specked packages of brown headache cure, a white and bony array of tooth-brushes, and some open boxes of flabby cigars in a glass case under an electric lighter. A suburban drug-store is not exactly an enlivening spot, and he was to become fatally well acquainted with it in the next few days.

To-night he went up and looked at the baby on his return; she was asleep, with cheeks flushed to a beautiful rose. She was breathing very hard, but still she slept, with her head thrown back, and the soft rings of hair spread out over the pillow; the curves of the little round body were carved out in the white bedclothes. The light in the room was shaded, and the nurse sat by the table under it, writing out her official report with a gold pencil held in her taper fingers; but his wife sat and watched the child. A sudden ache invaded the man’s heart.

“Is she all right?” he whispered.

His wife nodded. “Oh, yes. Doesn’t she look _darling_?”

But Mr. Nichols did not answer. The nurse came forward and smoothed little Quintilia’s pillow professionally.

“She seems to take an interest,” he whispered to his wife as they left the room. He felt the tenderness which a good man has for a young girl who has to earn her own living; she is somewhat on the same plane as himself, and it is a state of being of which he appreciates the difficulties. He realized that his wife’s silence was distinctly unsympathetic.

The children were very noisy that evening, without their mother’s presence, in the hour allotted them before bedtime. The youngest, Loulou, who was next to the baby, was seven years old—a stubby, chubby, black-haired child, with that genius for saying the wrong thing in the wrong place which is a mother’s woe. As she climbed on her father’s knee to-night she kept saying:

“Quintilia’s sick, father. Quintilia’s sick! Do you think she’ll be worse, to-morrow, father?” she grinned at him pleasantly, showing a mouth with three front teeth missing.

Mr. Nichols resisted a strong impulse to set her down forcibly. His attitude toward Loulou was a continual reproach to him. He knew, as his wife often reminded him, that Loulou had been his pet when she was a baby; he knew that he really loved her, and that if she were ill his fatherly affection would assert itself in the utmost care for her; but now her presence in rude and awkward health annoyed and irritated him beyond expression.

“If Quintilia dies, I’ll be the baby!”

“For shame, Loulou!” said the eldest girl, Christine, who had her mother’s own gentle manner. “You mustn’t talk like that. Ethel and Edith, don’t make so much noise. They can’t go to bed, father dear, until Ann comes back; she’s just gone to the village for something Miss Candy wanted.”

“Miss Candy is awful pretty!” said the bounding Loulou. “Stan waited by the stairs to-night to see her come down. She calls him Mr. Stanley, and he’s been going errands for her all the afternoon. And he put on his best jacket!”

“I didn’t,” blurted Stan, with a very red face, regardless of the chorus of horrified ohos! from the rest of the children. “Well, if I did, it was because the old one was torn.”

“If Quintilia dies, I’ll be the baby.” Loulou reverted to the first idea.

Stan cried, “Shut up, will you?” and threw his book at her, being a boy on whom years of training had had no appreciable effect; but Christine came and put her arm around her father’s neck and kissed him, with her soft braid of yellow hair falling across his shoulder, and he pressed the little comforter to him fondly.

Anxiety about Quintilia had grown by morning. Mrs. Nichols came down to breakfast in a brown cambric gown, with her hair brushed severely back from her forehead, and hurriedly drank a cup of coffee. The tense expression of her face, which she strove to render cheerful, took some of the charm for Mr. Nichols from Miss Candy’s curls and crispness. He left the house with a load upon him, which grew heavier—and lighter—heavier—and lighter, with rhythmical regularity, as hope or fear predominated.

Nearly a week passed, and still the baby’s life hung wavering in the balance; the president had come down town every day, looking grayer and quieter each morning.

He came to the office mechanically, and attended mechanically to the business that had to be transacted. He was dulled to a strange and abnormal gentleness both there and at home. He thanked those who performed the usual services for him in the office with punctilious politeness.

The children at home went unreproved by him. The chatter of poor little Loulou had ceased to irritate, although it occasionally gave him a spasm of pain. They were nothing to him, mere simulacrums of what had once power to please or displease. Even Stan did not come in for the usual disapprobation on the dirty hands, the slouching walk, or the uncouth expressions which characterized him. To Mr. Nichols his wife was the only real person in the house, and there was but one thought between them—the thought of Quintilia.

The mother worked untiringly, while Miss Candy curled her hair, and wrote interminable reports, and stood in charming professional attitudes when the doctor was present, and sent the household individually and collectively for belated prescriptions, and bottles that were “just out,” and glycerine, and boracic acid, and camphorated oil, and disinfectants, and oiled silk, and medicine-droppers, and rubber water-bags, and absorbent cotton, and whisky, and malted milk, and biscuits, and candles, and lime-water, and all the various foods so chemically prepared that they are warranted to be retained by the weakest stomach, and of which no invalid can ever be persuaded to swallow more than the first teaspoonful. The doctor studied Miss Candy’s reports—patently composed from memory—with an imperturbable face, and questioned Mrs. Nichols closely afterwards. Mr. Nichols, as a mortal man, still derived a vague satisfaction in her presence, although he spent his tired evenings in going errands for her; she looked so pretty that he always felt as if Quintilia must be better.

Sometimes he was allowed to sit by the child while his wife took a short rest. He knew, most humbly, his deficiencies in the sick-room—by some ulterior influence when he moved fire-irons fell over, bottles broke, papers rattled, his shoes made an earthquake, whatever he touched creaked. He would sit in a rigidly quiet attitude until his wife returned, with his head on his hand, watching the little pinched face, the half-closed eyes, listening to the breathing, the rise and fall of the little chest. Oh, God, the hours by a sick child!

A night came that was long to be remembered in the Nichols household—a night of ringing bells and shutting doors and hurried running up and down stairs, with the scared children in their white night-gowns peeping out of the bedroom door after their tearful prayers for little sister.

In the small hours the doctor’s steady tread could be heard in the sick-room, or on the landing where he came to give brief orders. Mr. Nichols sat on a couch in the wide hall outside the door. Sometimes his wife came from the sick-room and sat down by him for a few seconds, and they were together in an anguish of dreadful love. When she was gone he remained with his head on his breast thinking.

He thought of the years of happiness they had had; he thought of the beloved sleeping children around them and of honest, clumsy Stan, and troublesome, inconsequent Loulou with special tenderness; he thought of all the blessings that had been his.

It was as if life were brought to a close, and he humbly confessed to himself the unfaithfulness of his own part in it, his faults of temper, his neglect of opportunities to make others happy. He might have been drowning. His gaze, brought back to land once more, questioned those who passed him in the hall. Miss Candy went by once with red eyes, her cap pushed to one side, and her pretty hair all out of curl. She did not even see him as she passed.

“Father dear!”

He looked up—it was the little eldest daughter of the house, Christine. “Father dear, I can’t go to sleep, and I’ve been lying in bed so long!”

She sat down beside him and slipped her hand into his; her blue eyes had the depth that comes from lying awake in darkness. “I’m thinking all the time of baby. Mayn’t I stay here with you, father dear? I want to stay with you so much.”

“Yes, my darling.” He took the steamer-rugs his wife had left beside him and wrapped them around the woman-child, yellow braid and all, and they stayed there together. Once she whispered,

“You’re praying, too, father dear, aren’t you? I feel that you’re praying;” and he held her closer and whispered, “Yes.” By-and-by she fell asleep, and he held her still.

The first streaks of dawn filtered through the rooms, strange to those who sat bound in darkness and the shadow of death, a household prepared only for the night. Then an electric current seemed to run through the breathing souls in it.

The doctor came out in the hall and said, “She will live!” A door opened farther down—one flashed to another, “She will live!” The message flew from lip to lip, from heart to heart. The returning breath of the little ruler of the house revivified all within it. The awakened children ran out for a moment to whisper the gladness, the servants stole down the back stairs to clatter in the kitchen and make preparations for an early breakfast, one could hear the cocks crowing, and the sunshine grew strong and gathered into a long bar of light. Quintilia would live.