Kitabı oku: «To Him That Hath», sayfa 17

CHAPTER II
DAVID SEES THE FACE OF FORTUNE

When David had handed Helen into the cab, she had not spoken to him, had not even said, "Thank you," and had rolled away without giving him so much as a backward glance. He now felt it had been brutal, dishonourable, to trap her into denouncing her father and then to strike her with her father's guilt. He was certain she was deeply offended, and this conviction grew as day after day passed without a word from her.

But there were other things to be thought of during these days. There was his future – upon which, uncertain as it was, he saw that Lillian Drew was to be a parasite; for she had made another call (while Kate was out of the office; he was thankful for that) and had carried away the larger fraction of his small store of money. He was again workless – again at the base of that high, smooth wall which before he had been able to surmount only with, as it were, his last gasping effort.

What he should do, he had no idea. But his own future he thrust aside as being a less pressing problem than Rogers's future and Rogers's present. As Rogers had predicted, the fact that he was Red Thorpe quickly reached the ears of his clients, and they all lost no time in withdrawing their property from his charge. The owner who had forced David's dismissal as janitor demanded with the same delicacy that Rogers should vacate the rooms he occupied; but Rogers had a lease and, moreover, had paid a month's rent in advance, so they and their belongings were not tumbled into the street.

These days were for Rogers solid blackness. David had promised to share with him, but he saw that there was doubt of David's having anything to share. Even if David did, his bitter mood now looked upon that portion as charity, and little more agreeable to his pride than public charity – which he saw as a near-looming, shame-laden spectre, feared more than death. That he who had had the brains to achieve independence, who had been on the verge of fortune, should have been crushed to his present extremity – this filled him with wild revolt. Kate, with a subdued gentleness that begged to serve; Tom, with his alert willingness; David, with his constant presence and consideration; the Mayor, with his ever-ready vituperation and bluff words of hope that rang hollow; – they all tried to lift the draping blackness from about him – and failed, because they had nothing but blackness to hang in its place.

But some definite plan for the future had to be made, and Rogers himself made it. Since Colorado was not for him, he would, as soon as his month here was ended, secure as cheap a room as he could find and try to stretch his small funds to reach that final day when he would have no need of more.

Kate's father fell with the rest of the Rogers regime, and from the basement they moved into a couple of cheap rooms a few blocks away. David had often considered the relation between Kate and her father: aside from keeping him alive Kate was of no service to him – he was a terrible drag on her; if they could be separated, with his maintenance secured, he would be no worse off and she would be far better. David now talked the matter over with Rogers; together they talked it over with Kate, who finally yielded; and David enlisted the interest of Dr. Franklin in behalf of getting old Jimmie into an institution for inebriates.

There was little for Kate to do in Rogers's office, but she insisted on remaining and remaining without salary. "It's because of me all this happened – you may need me – I'm going to stay," she said to Rogers. "I've still got most of my last month's wages – two or three weeks will be soon enough to get a job." And nothing Rogers urged could move her.

Tom begged to be allowed to go to work, but David prevailed on him to continue in school. "Something good will surely turn up," David said to the boy. But days went and nothing arose. David was on the point of yielding to Tom, when into the general gloom there shot, for him, a bright shaft of hope. Ten days after he had put Helen into the cab a letter came to him addressed in her handwriting. He hardly dared open it, for he expected reproof – delicately conveyed, of course, but still reproof. When he drew the letter from its envelope an enclosure fell unheeded to the floor. Instead of censure he found this:

"It seems your address was not on your manuscript, so Mr. Osborne has sent the enclosed letter to you in care of me. I can hardly refrain from opening it. I feel certain there is good news in it. I congratulate you in advance!

"You know how interested I am, so I know you'll come and tell me all about it just as soon as you learn the book's fate. You'll find me in almost any time."

David picked up the envelope – stamped in one corner with "William Osborne & Co," a name he had once worshipped from afar off – ripped it open and read the following, signed by Mr. Osborne himself:

"We have been greatly interested in your story. If you will call at your convenience I shall be glad to talk with you about it."

David stared at the three type-written lines. The letter was not an acceptance – but then neither was it a rejection. A wild hope leaped up within him. Could it be here was a ladder up the unseizable wall? Could it be the success he had failed of five years before was at last about to be won? He dared not let himself be swept to these dizzy heights; he knew how far it was to the ground. So he told himself it could not be possible. Still, was there not a chance?

He slipped away without hinting of his hope to Rogers – there would be time for telling later, if anything was to tell – and at ten o'clock reached a little five-story brick building off Union Square that was the home of William Osborne & Co. At first he had not the courage to enter. He remembered, as he walked on, a manuscript novel he had left here in the long ago – and it came back to him that this was the very manuscript he had been working over on that day, now more than five years gone, when Morton's death had summoned him to St. Christopher's.

When he reached the door again he drove himself in and was swung to the top floor in a little creaking elevator, and before his courage had time to recede he was within a railed-off square in a large room and had given his name to a boy to be carried to Mr. Osborne. In a moment the boy returned and led him across the room, filled with sub-editors, manuscript readers and stenographers, and ushered him into a small private office. Here at a desk sat a white-haired man chatting with two visitors.

The white-haired man rose as David entered and smiled a kindly, spectacled smile. "I'm very glad to see you, Mr. Aldrich. If you'll excuse me for a minute, I'll be right with you."

David sat down in the chair Mr. Osborne indicated and waited with pulsing suspense for the two men to go. There, on one corner of Mr. Osborne's desk, which was littered with letters, manuscripts and magazine page-proofs, he saw his book. He felt, as he waited, almost as he had felt five years before during the suffocating minutes between the return of the jury with its verdict and the verdict's reading. The verdict on the book was ready. What was it to be?

At length the two men went away. Mr. Osborne turned from the door and came toward David, smiling cordially, his hand outstretched.

"Let me congratulate you, Mr. Aldrich!" he said heartily.

David rose and put a nerveless hand into Mr. Osborne's. "You mean – you like it?"

"Indeed I do! If you and I can come to an agreement, we shall be proud to publish it."

David gazed swimmingly at him. There was a whirling, a bubbling, within him – but he managed to say with fair control: "It's hardly necessary to tell an old publisher how happy a new author is to hear that."

Mr. Osborne sat down and David automatically did likewise.

"You, Mr. Aldrich, have particular reason to feel happy. We print a great many well-written, dramatic stories – stories which are just that, and no more. That, of course, is a great deal. But when a book, without impairment to its dramatic and artistic quality, leaves a profound impression regarding some aspect of life – that book has an element of bigness that the other stories lack. Mr. Aldrich, yours is such a story."

David felt he was reeling off his chair. "Yes?" he said.

Mr. Osborne went on to praise the book in detail. After a time he proposed terms. David took in hardly a word of the offer; his mind was over-running with his success, his praise. But he accepted the terms instantly.

This settled, Mr. Osborne picked up several yellowed type-written sheets from his disordered desk. "By the way, are you the David Aldrich that submitted us a novel five or six years ago called 'The Master Knot?'"

"Yes," said David.

"I thought you might be interested in the readers' opinions on that story, so I had them brought in."

He handed the sheets to David, and when he saw David had glanced them through, he remarked: "You see they all amount to the same. 'The author knows how to write, but he does not know life.'" He gazed steadily at David through the kindly spectacles. "Since then, Mr. Aldrich, you have come to know life."

"I think I have." David strained to keep his voice natural.

"Yes, you have come to know life – to feel it." He paused, and considered within himself. For all his warmth, there had been in his tone and manner, caution, reserve. Suddenly these fell away, and he radiated enthusiasm.

"I try never to raise false hopes in a young author," he cried, "but I've got to say more than I've said. Really, I think I've made what a publisher is always looking for, hoping for – a great find, a real writer! You're going to do big things!"

David dared not respond; he knew his voice would not be steady.

"Yes – big things," Mr. Osborne repeated. "But here's another point I wanted to speak of. We can use several short stories from you in our magazine. If you have any, or will write some, that are anywhere near as good as the book, I can guarantee acceptance."

It was a moment before David could trust himself to speak. "I have none, but I should like to write some." Then he suddenly remembered he had not the money to carry him through the period that must elapse before the stories could be written and paid for. "But I fear I'm not in a position to write them just now," he added.

Mr. Osborne had had thirty years' experience with the impecuniosity of authors. "Money?" he queried.

There was no taking offence at the friendly way he asked this. "Yes," David confessed.

"I think we can solve that difficulty. I don't know how the book there is going to sell. I was a publisher before you were born, but after all my experience I have to regard the commercial side of publishing as pretty much of a gambling game. Critically, your book is certain of great success. Financially – I don't know. It may win in a large way; I hope so. But you are sure of at least a moderate sale. Suppose, then, I make you a small advance on your royalty. Say – let's see – well, three hundred. Will that do?"

David felt, as he had felt since he had heard his verdict, that to venture beyond a monosyllable would be to explode. He swallowed. "Yes," he said.

"Very well, then. Do you prefer check or cash?"

"Cash."

Ten minutes later David entered the street, three hundred dollars in his pocket, his heart wild with joy, hope. He wanted to run, to shout, to fly. His glowing face was the visage of triumph.

At last the success he had prayed for – striven for – given up – had come!

He turned northward, to carry the news to Helen. A suggestion of hers flashed into his mind: the book might help pay his debt to the Mission. Obeying impulse he walked into a bank he was at the instant passing, and when he came out there was in an inner coat pocket a draft for two hundred dollars made out to the Reverend Joseph Franklin.

All the way to Helen's door there was no pavement beneath his feet. When he had called here the last time – the time he had read her part of the story; he was a shabby creature then – he had borne himself very humbly toward the footman. Now he asked for Helen with a buoyant ring in his voice and fairly flung his coat and hat upon the astonished servant; and he bowed with a new dignity to Helen's aunt, Mrs. Bosworth, whom he met on the stairway.

Helen met him at the drawing-room door. "I can read the news in your face!" she cried. "I'm so glad!"

He laughed joyously as he caught her hand. "Yes, Mr. Osborne took it!"

"I knew he would! And he likes it? Tell me – how does he like it?"

"You must ask him. But – he likes it!"

"Immensely – I'm certain! Come, you must tell me all!"

They sat down and David told her of his half-hour with Mr. Osborne. Since receiving her note that morning he had not once thought of the end of their last meeting. If he had, and had been aware of the pain that meeting had brought her, he would have marvelled at the ease with which she threw her misery aside for the sake of a mere friend, a dishonoured friend. But he did not wonder; he just drank recklessly of this glorious draught, compounded of her praise and her joy in his joy.

At the end he told her of the three hundred dollars – never thinking that it was barely more than the price of the simple-looking gown she wore, that it was but a penny to the rich furnishings of the drawing-room, that it was her father's income for perhaps less than a quarter of a business hour. And completely abandoned to the boyish happiness that forced him to share everything, he told her of the draft for two hundred dollars.

Her face shadowed; this man, who was paying back, had suddenly brought to mind her father, who was not paying back. But quickly a deep glow came into her eyes.

"You should be as proud of this as of any of the rest," she said.

She gazed at him thoughtfully, her head slightly nodding. "Yes – you are going to win all you started out to win," she went on, her low voice vibrating with belief. "You are going to clear your name; you are going to achieve a personal success; you are going to carry out your dream to help save the human waste. Yes, you are going to do it all."

His success, her words, the glowing sincerity in her brown eyes, swept him to the heights of exaltation. Suddenly his love made another of its trials to burst from him.

He leaned toward her. "And there's something else to tell you."

"Yes?"

But he did not go on. Instantly his love was being fought back. Exalted though he was, the old compelling reasons for silence had rushed into him.

"Yes? What is it?" she asked.

He swallowed hard. "Some other time," he said.

"When the time comes, I shall be glad to hear it."

He looked into her steady eyes, and saw she had no guess of what the thing might be.

"When the time comes – I shall tell," he said. But in his heart was no belief that time would ever come.

CHAPTER III
HELEN'S CONSCIENCE

When David reached home he found the Mayor had just brought over Rogers's lunch and Kate, with the help of Tom, was arranging it on the table. He threw his happiness among them in a score of words.

The Mayor stepped forward, his face ruddied with a smile. "Friend, put 'er there!" invited his gruff diaphragm, and David put his hand to bed in the big, mattress-soft palm. "Well, sir, I'm certainly happy – that's me! On the level, when I first heard you were tryin' to write a book, said I to myself, private-like, 'he'd better be makin' tidies.' But you're the goods, friend! Every man and woman on the Avenue has got to buy one o' your books, you bet!"

"Say, pard, you're certainly it!" cried Tom, who had seized him from the other side. "Dat puts you on top – way up where you belongs. An' no more worryin' about de coin!"

"I'm glad too, – you know that, Aldrich!" said Rogers, grasping David's hand. Rogers's face was drawn; David's success had freshened, emphasised, his own failure. "I wish both of us could have pulled out. But if only one of us could, it's best that that one is you. I'm glad, Aldrich!"

David felt the pain behind Rogers's words, felt their pathos, and he suddenly was ashamed of his success. "It's because I was doing something where the world did not have to trust me," he said apologetically.

"It's because you are the exceptional man, doing the exceptional thing. They have a chance. The others have not."

Kate had not moved since David had announced his good fortune. She stood with her hands on the table and leaning slightly against it, her white, strained face fastened on David. "I'm glad, too," she now said, in a voice that had a trace of tremolo; and, turning abruptly, she went into the office.

In there, alone, she sat at her desk with her cheeks in her hands. Soon, with a little burst of despair, she cried out: "Why did this have to happen!" And she added, with a moan: "Oh, David, this puts you such a long ways off!"

That afternoon and evening David could settle to nothing; and that night he slept not a minute for sweeping joy, for flashing ideas for stories, for swift, vivid visions of the future.

The next morning he had a note from Helen asking him to call in the afternoon. "You remember my speaking to you about the check for twenty thousand dollars my father gave me," she said, when he had come. Her face was pale and she spoke with an effort. "I've decided what to do with it. I want you to help me."

"If I can," he said.

"I've been thinking a great deal about Mr. Rogers." She paused, then went on, her voice more strained. "He should not have lost that money. I have cashed the check. I want to give the money to Mr. Rogers – not as a gift, but as property that belongs to him."

He looked wonderingly into her pained eyes. "You're in earnest?" he said slowly.

"I am – I must do it. And I want you to take the money to him, from" – she obeyed a sudden instinct of blood-loyalty – "from my father."

His anger against her father suddenly flamed up. "From your father? I know how much your father knows of this plan!"

She went on as if she had not heard him, though she had quivered at his words. "I want you to take the money to Mr. Rogers. You will know what to say."

The full significance of what she had said was just dawning upon him. He gazed at her, wondering what must have been passing in her mind these last few days.

"Mr. Rogers is very proud," he said. "He'll not take the money – at least not from me."

"You're certain?"

"From me – never."

"Then I must take it to him myself." She rose. "I'll be ready in a few minutes. You must go with me."

He rose also. Her white face, that met his so squarely, told him how deeply she felt, how strong her determination was.

"Yes, I'll go with you," he said.

When she re-entered the library she was dressed in the suit of autumn brown and the brown hat with its single rose, which she had worn the day they had met at St. Christopher's. He knew she felt the matter of her errand too keenly to speak of it, and too absorbingly to speak of anything else; and so, in silence, they went out into the street.

Half an hour later they entered Rogers's office. "Just wait a minute, while I tell him you're here," whispered David, and went into the living room where Rogers was. Presently he brought her in, introduced her to Rogers, and withdrew.

Helen had never seen Rogers. Her picture of him was purely of the imagination, and imagination had put in its vague portrait the hard lines, the hang-dog look, the surly bearing that might well remain with a reformed criminal. So she was totally unprepared for the slight figure with the wasted, intellectual face that rose from an easy-chair by the air-shaft window, and for the easy gesture and even voice with which he asked her to be seated. She recognised instantly that to make him accept the money would prove a harder task than she had counted.

"Thank you," she said, and sitting down she studied Rogers's face for the moment she was adjusting her faculties to the new difficulty. "Did Mr. Aldrich tell you why I wished to see you?"

"No." He would be courteous to her for the sake of the request David had made to him, but his hatred of her father allowed him only a monosyllabic reply.

To speak words that would show warm sympathy for him and no disloyalty to her father, this was her problem. "Mr. Aldrich has told me of your land enterprise and how – it failed," she said with a great effort, feeling that her words were cold and ineffective. "He told me how you lost a large sum that you had practically gained. He told me that it was – my father – who made you lose it."

Her first effort would carry her no further. He nodded.

She clutched the arms of her chair, breathed deeply, and drove herself on. "You should not have lost it. I have come to bring you – to ask you to let me return to you" – a brown-gloved hand drew a roll of bills from the bag in her lap "this money that belongs to you."

She held the elastic-bound roll out to him. His interlocked hands did not move from his lap.

"I don't just understand," he said slowly. "You mean that this money is the equivalent of what I should have made in the land deal?"

"Yes."

His face tinged faintly with red, his bright eyes (he had discarded glasses, now that a disguise no longer served him) darted quick flames, and he leaned toward her.

"Do you think I can take as a gift that which I honestly earned?" he demanded in a low, fierce voice.

"But it is not offered as a gift. It is restitution."

"Restitution! So you want to make restitution? Can you restore the strength despair has taken from me? My good name was built on deception, but I had worked hard for it and it was dear to me. Can you restore my good name? I've lost everything! Can you restore everything?"

The ringing bitterness of his voice, the wasted face working with the passion of despair, the utter hopelessness of the future which her quick vision showed her – all these stirred a great emotion which swept her father from her mind. Before, she had sympathised with Rogers abstractly; now her sympathy was for a hopeless soul, bare and agonising beneath her eyes.

Her words rushed from her, in them the throb of her heart. "No! No! I can't give them back – no one can. Oh, what a wrong it was!"

He stared at her. The wrath and bitterness on his face slowly gave place to surprise.

"Oh, but it was a shame!" she cried, her face aflame, her voice aquiver. And then a sense of the irretrievableness of this wreck laid hold upon her and a quick sob broke forth. She felt a sympathetic agony for Rogers, and an agony that she, through her blood, was the cause of his wrecked life.

"Oh, it was terrible, terrible! You are right! Restitution cannot be made – only the pitiful restitution of money. But you must let me make that – you must!"

He felt that he was speaking to a friend, and it was as to a friend that he said quietly: "I can't."

"But you must!" She was now thinking of but one thing, how to force him to take the bills. "I'm not doing you a favour. I'm asking a favour from you. I come to you in humility, contrition. The money I bring is not my money – it is your money. My father entered your house and took it; I bring it back to you. You merely accept your own. You see that, don't you? Surely you see that!"

Rogers did not answer at once. He was so dazed by the rush of her words – words that sprang from complete sympathy and understanding, words that might have come from his own heart – that he could not.

She had risen and now stood above him. "You understand, don't you?" she went on imploringly. "My father has done wrong; I feel it just as though I had done it. I must repair the wrong as far as I can. You must take this money for my sake, don't you see?"

He rose and started to speak, but she cut him off. "I know what is in your heart; your pride wants you to refuse. If you refuse, you do only one thing: you deny me the relief of partially correcting a wrong. That is all. Is it right for you to deny me that? Will you yourself not be doing a wrong?"

He was trembling; she had taken the only road to his consent. But he made no motion toward the money in her outstretched hand.

"For my sake – I beg you – I implore you." She spoke tremulously, simply.

He held out a thin hand, and she laid the money in it. "For your sake," he breathed.

"Thank you," she said.

Helen felt herself growing weak and dizzy. The reaction was setting in. "I must go. I can't ask you to forgive me – but won't you let me, as one that would like to be regarded as a friend, wish that there may be brightness ahead which you don't see."

She held out her hand, timidly. He grasped it. He could not speak.

"Thank you," she whispered, and slowly turned away. At the door she paused, and looked back. "My best wishes are with you," she said, and went out.