Over the Pass Part 33

More than ever was Jack like David come over the hills in his incarnation of sleeping energy. Instead of a sling he carried the rose. Into the abode of the nicely governed rules of longevity came the atmosphere of some invasive spirit that would make the stake of life the foam on the crest of a charge in a splendid moment; the spirit of Senor Don't Care pausing inquiringly, almost apologetically, as some soldier in dusty khaki might if he had marched into a study unawares.

Jack was waiting, waiting and smiling, for his father to speak. In a swift survey, his features transfixed at first with astonishment, then glowing with pride, the father half rose from his chair, as if in an impulse to embrace the prodigal. But he paused. He felt that something under his control was getting out of his control. He felt that he had been tricked. The boy must have been well for a long time. Yes! But he was well! That was the vital point. He was well, and magnificent in his vigor.

The father made another movement; and still Jack was waiting, inquiring yet not advancing. And John Wingfield, Sr. wished that he had gone to the station; he wished that he had paid a visit to Arizona. This thought working in his mind supplied Jack's att.i.tude with an aspect which made the father hesitate and then drop back into his chair, confused and uncertain for the first time in his own office.

"Well, Jack, you--you surely do look cured!" he said awkwardly. "You see, I--I was a little surprised to see you at the office. I sent the limousine for you, thinking you would want to go straight to the house and wash off the dust of travel. Didn't you connect?"

"Yes, thank you, father--and when you didn't meet me--"

"I--I was very busy. I meant to, but something interrupted--I--" The father stopped, confounded by his own hesitation.

"Of course," said Jack. He spoke deferentially, understandingly. "I know how busy you always are."

Yet the tone was such to John Wingfield, Sr.'s ears that he eyed Jack cautiously, sharply, in the expectancy that almost any kind of undisciplined force might break loose from this muscular giant whom he was trying to reconcile with the Jack whom he had last seen.

"I thought I'd stretch my legs, so I came over to the store to see how it had grown," said Jack. "I don't interrupt--for a moment?"

He sat down on the chair opposite his father's and laid his faded cowpuncher hat and the rose on the desk. They looked odd in the company of the pushb.u.t.tons and the pile of papers in that neutral-toned room which was chilling in its monotony of color. And though Jack was almost boyishly penitent, in the manner of one who comes before parental authority after he has been in mischief, still John Wingfield, Sr.

could not escape the dead weight of an impression that he was speaking to a stranger and not to his own flesh and blood. He wished now that he had shown affection on Jack's entrance. He had a desire to grip the brown hand that was on the edge of the desk fingering the rose stem; but the lateness of the demonstration, its futility in making up for his previous neglect, and some subtle influence radiating from Jack's person, restrained him. It was apparent that Jack might sit on in silence indefinitely; in a desert silence.

"Well, Jack, I hear you had a ranch," said the father, with a faint effort at jocularity.

"Yes, and a great crop of alfalfa," answered Jack, happily.

"And it seems that all the time you were away you have never used your allowance, so it has just been piling up for you."

"I didn't need it. I had quite sufficient from the income of my mother's estate."

"Yes--your mother--I had forgotten!"

"Naturally, I preferred to use that, when I was of so little service to you unless I got strong, as you said," Jack said, very quietly.

Now came another silence, the silence of luminous, unsounded depths concealing that in the mind which has never been spoken or even taken form. Jack's garden of words had dried up, as his ranch would dry up for want of water. He rose to go, groping for something that should express proper contrition for wasted years, but it refused to come. He picked up the rose and the hat, while the father regarded him with stony wonder which said: "Are you mine, or are you not? What is the nature of this new strength? On what will it turn?"

For Jack's features had set with a strange firmness and his eyes, looking into his father's, had a steady light. It seemed as if he might stalk out of the office forever, and nothing could stop him. But suddenly he flashed his smile; he had looked about searching for a talisman and found it in the rose, which set his garden of words abloom again.

"This room is so bare it must be lonely for you," he said. "Wouldn't it be a good idea to cheer it up a bit? To have this rose in a vase on your table where you could see it, instead of riding about in an empty automobile box?"

"Why, there is a whole cold storage booth full of them down on the first floor!" said the father.

"Yes, I saw them in their icy prison under the electric light bulbs. The beads of water on them were like tears of longing to get out for the joy of their swan song under a woman's smiles or beside a sick bed," said Jack, in the glow of real enthusiasm.

"Good line for the ad writer!" his father exclaimed, instinctively. "You always did have fanciful ideas, Jack."

"Yes, I suppose I have!" he said, with some surprise and very thoughtfully. "I suppose that I was born with them and never weeded them out."

"No doubt!" and the father frowned.

Surveying the broad shoulders before him, he was thinking how nothing but aimlessness and fantasies and everything out of harmony with the career to come had been encouraged in the son. But he saw soberness coming into Jack's eyes and with it the pressure of a certain resoluteness of purpose. And now Jack spoke again, a trifle sadly, as if guessing his father's thoughts.

"It will be a case of weeding for me in the future, won't it?" he asked wanly, as he rose. "I am full of foolish ideas that are just bound to run away with me."

"Jack! Jack!" John Wingfield, Sr. put his hands out to the shoulders of his son and gripped them strongly, and for a second let his own weight half rest on that st.u.r.dy column which he sensed under the grip.

His pale face, the paleness of the type that never tans, flushed.

"Jack, come!" he said.

He permitted himself something like real dramatic feeling as he signalled his son to follow him out of the office and led the way to a corner of one of the balconies where, under the light from the gla.s.s roof of the great central court, he could see down the tiers of floors to the jewelry counter which sparkled at the bottom of the well.

"Look! look!" he exclaimed, rubbing his palms together with a peculiar crisp sound. "All selling my goods! All built from the little store where I began as a clerk!"

"It's--it's immense!" gasped Jack; and he felt a dizziness and confusion in gazing at this kind of an abyss.

"And it's only beginning! It's to go on growing and growing! You see why I wanted you to be strong, Jack; why it would not do to be weak if you had all this responsibility."

This was a form of apology for his farewell to Jack, but the message was the same: He had not wanted a son who should be of his life and heart and ever his in faults and illnesses. This was the recognizable one of the shadows between them now recalled. He had wanted a fresh physical machine into which he could blow the breath of his own masterful being and instil the cunning of his experience. He saw in this straight, clean-limbed youth at his side the hope of Jack's babyhood fulfilled, in the projection of his own ego as a living thing after he himself was gone.

"And it is to go on growing and growing, in my name and your name--John Wingfield!"

Jack was swallowing spasmodically; he moistened his lips; he grasped the balcony railing so tight that his knuckles were white k.n.o.bs on the bronze back of his hand. The father in his enthusiasm hardly noticed this.

"What couldn't I have done," he added, "if I had had all this to begin with! All that you will have to begin with!"

Jack managed a smile, rather thin and wavering.

"Yes, I am going to try my best."

"All I ask! You have me for a teacher and I know one or two little things!" said the father, fairly grinning in the transmission of his joke. "Now, you must be short on clothes," he added; "so you can get something ready-made downstairs while you have some making at Thompson's."

"Don't you buy your clothes, your best clothes, I mean, in your own store?" Jack asked. It was his first question in getting acquainted with his future property.

"No. We cater to a little bigger cla.s.s of trade--one of the many twists of the business," was the answer. "And now we'll meet at dinner, shall we, and have a good long talk," he concluded, closing the interview and turning to the door, his mind snapping back to the matter he was about to take up when he had been interrupted with more eagerness than ever, now that his egoism thrilled with a still greater purpose.

"I--I left my hat on your desk," Jack explained, as he followed his father into the office.

"Well, you don't want to be carrying packages about," said John Wingfield, Sr. "That is hardly the fas.h.i.+on in New York, though John Wingfield's son can make it so if he wants to. I'll have that flat-brimmed western one sent up to the house and you can fit out with another when you go downstairs for clothes. That is, I suppose you will want to keep this as a memento, eh?" and he held out the cowpuncher, sweeping it with a sardonic glance.

"No," Jack answered decisively, out of the impulse that came with the sight of the veteran companion that had s.h.i.+elded him from the sun on the trail. It was good to have any kind of an impulse after his giddiness on the balcony at sight of all the phantasmagoria of detail that he must master.

If he were to be equal to this future there must be an end of temptation.

He must shake himself free of the last clinging bit of chrysalis of the old life. His amazed father saw the child of the desert, where convention is made by your fancy and the supply of water in your canteen, go to the window and raise the sash. Leaning out, he let the hat drop into Broadway, with his eyes just over the line of the ledge while he watched it fall, dipping and gliding, to the feet of a messenger boy, who picked it up, waved it gleefully aloft before putting it over his cap, and with mock strides of grandeur went his way.

"That gave him a lot of pleasure--and a remarkably quick system for delivering goods, wasn't it?" said Jack, cheerfully.

"Yes, I should say so!" a.s.sented his father, returning to his seat.

"Dinner at seven!" he called before the door closed; and as his finger sought one of the push-b.u.t.tons it rested for a moment on the metal edge of the socket, his head bowed, while an indefinable emotion, mixed of prophecy and recollection, must have fluttered through the routine channels of his vigorous mind.