Over the Pass Part 36

"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have built himself a great place; he would have been the head of a great inst.i.tution, just as I am."

"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack, hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation, while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been a cow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would never have been a camp-follower."

"At all events, a man of power. It's in the blood!"

"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingering emphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pa.s.s; her final, mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!"

There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in the stirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, her hurt cry had come echoing to his ears.

"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got that picture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about family trees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for second generations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the first generation. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back, painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when I exhibited him in the store!"

"You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibited him in the store!" he said.

"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise him as my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact got around, Jack."

While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face and whose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easy fatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of the first John Wingfield. At length, Jack pa.s.sed over to the other side of the mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother; and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone and in its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch the Eternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not in features, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiar sensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind than was the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.

"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swear and could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or live a lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could be before a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargent brought out a soul!"

John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously on the mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white on the dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force in his son, he hastened to change the subject.

"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."

"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.

"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to know everything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "So I set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English and Spanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.

Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."

"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you can build the whole story of him--the story of how he fought and how Velasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexplored land between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, in the transport of wanderl.u.s.t that had sent him away over the sand from Little Rivers. _Si, si_, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! If Senor Don't Care's desert journeys were over--and he had no thought but that they were--there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trails in the ancestor's company.

Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of his men; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain of twenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answer to the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is glorious for one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition even of Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanish amba.s.sador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision; with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court of Spain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with him when the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his time while his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer's joy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away to his studio.

More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighter was gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than of statesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant, a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, according to the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for the wherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit.

To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came back laden with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wife had died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down for good; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard the call of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broiling reaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathing inconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And his son had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in America when Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes of five generations, the poor clergyman was descended.

Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's career had been in keeping with its character and course. He had been spared the slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down in his s.h.i.+p without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one to three. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and in enraptured understanding, it was past midnight.

The s.p.a.ciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted into the s.p.a.ciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Then four walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out the horizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of a blanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suit of pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the first John Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, and in the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.

"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How should you like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"

XXVIII

JACK GETS A RAISE

The next morning Jack went down town with his father in the limousine.

About an hour later, after he had been introduced to the head of the delivery division, he was on his way up town beside a driver of one of the wagons on the Harlem route. He was in the uniform of the Wingfield light cavalry, having obtained a cap with embroidered initials on the front. The driver was like to burst from inward mirth, and Jack was regarding the prospect with veritable juvenile zest.

At dinner that evening John Wingfield, Jr. narrated his experiences of the day to John Wingfield, Sr. with the simplicity and verisimilitude that always make for both realism and true comedy.

"But, Jack, you took me too literally! It is hardly in keeping with your position! You--"

"Why, I thought that the only way to know the whole business was to play every part. Didn't you ever deliver packages in person in your early days?"

"I can't say that I did!" the father admitted wryly.

"Then it seems to me that you missed one of the most entertaining and instructive features," Jack continued. "You cannot imagine the majestic feminine disdain with which you may be informed that a five-cent bar of soap should be delivered at the back door instead of the front door. The most indignant example was a red-haired woman who was doing her own work in a flat. She fairly blazed. She wanted to know if I didn't know what dumb-waiters were for."

"And what did you say?" the father asked wearily; for the ninth John Wingfield had a limited sense of humor.

"Oh, I try, however irritating the circ.u.mstances, to be most courtly, for the honor of the store," said Jack. "I told her that I was very sorry and I would speak to you in person about the mistake."

"You mean that you admitted who you were?"

"Oh, no! The red-haired woman laughed and took the package in at the front door," Jack responded. Anybody in Little Rivers would have understood just how he looked and smiled and why it was that the red-haired woman laughed.

"Jack--now, really, Jack, this is not quite dignified!" expostulated the father. "What do you think your ancestor would say to it?"

"I suspect that he would have made an even more ingratiating bow to the lady than I could," said Jack, thoughtfully. "They had the grand manner better developed in his day than in ours."

In the ensuing weeks John Wingfield, Sr. dwelt in a kind of infernal wonder about his son. He was cheered when some friend of his world who had met Jack in the garb of his caste, as fitted by Burleigh, would say: "Fine, strapping son you have there, Wingfield!" He was abashed and dumfounded when Jack announced that he had taken Mamie Devore, who sold culinary utensils in the bas.e.m.e.nt, out to luncheon with her "steady company," Joe Mathewson, driver of one of the warehouse trucks.

"They were a little awed at first," Jack explained, "but they soon became natural. I don't know anything pleasanter than making people feel perfectly natural, do you? You see, Joe and Mamie are very real, father, and most businesslike; an ambitious, upstanding pair. They're going to have two thousand dollars saved before they marry.

"'I don't believe that a woman ought to work out after she's married,'

was the way Joe put it. And Mamie, with her eyes fairly devouring him, snapped back: 'No, she'd have enough to do looking after you, you big old bluff!'

"Mamie is a wiry little thing and Joe is a heavyweight, with a hand almost as big as a baseball mit. That's partly why their practical romance is so fascinating. Why, it's wonderful the stories that are playing themselves out in that big store, father! Well, you see Joe is on a stint--two thousand before he gets Mamie. He had been making money on the side nights in boxing bouts. But Mamie stopped the fighting. She said she was not going to have a husband with the tip of his nose driven up between his eyes like a bull-dog's. And what do you imagine they are going to do with the two thousand? Buy a farm! Isn't that corking!"

John Wingfield, Sr. shrugged his shoulders, but did not express his feelings with any remark. It seemed to him that Jack must have been born without a sense of proportion.

With the breaking of spring, when gardens were beginning to sprout, Jack broadened his study to the trails of Westchester, Long Island, and New Jersey, coursed by the big automobile vans of the suburban delivery. To the people of the store, whose streets he traversed at will in unremitting wonder over its varied activities, he had brought something of the same sensation that he had to an Arizona town. He came to know the employees by name, even as he had his neighbors in Little Rivers. He nodded to the clerks as he pa.s.sed down an aisle. They watched for his coming and brightened with his approach and met his smile with their smiles. In their idle moments he would stop and talk of the desert.

Although he was learning to like the store as a community of human beings its business was as the works of a watch, when all he knew was how to tell the time by the face. But he tried hard to learn; tried until his head was dizzy with a whirl of dissociated facts, which he knew ought to be a.s.sociated, and under the call of his utter restlessness would disappear altogether for two or three days.

"Relieving the pressure! It's a safety-valve so I shan't blow up," he explained to his father, sadly.

"Take your time," said John Wingfield, Sr., having in mind a recent talk with Dr. Bennington.

Jack listened faithfully to his father's clear-cut lessons. He asked questions which only made his father sigh; for they had little to do with the economy of working costs. All his suggestions were extravagant; they would contribute to the joy of the employees, but not to profit. And other questions made his father frown in devising answers which were in the nature of explanations. Born of his rambling and humanly observant relations with every department, they led into the very heart of things in that mighty organization. There were times when it was hard for him to control his indignation. There were trails leading to the room with the gla.s.s-paneled door marked "Private" which he half feared to pursue.

Thus, between father and son remained that indefinable chasm of thought and habit which filial duty or politeness could not bridge. No stories of the desert were ever told at home, though it was so easy to tell them to Burleigh or Mathewson, those contrasts in a pale fitter of clothes and a herculean rustler of dry-goods boxes. But echoes of the tales came to the father through his a.s.sistants. He had the feeling of some stranger spirit in his own likeness moving there in the streets of his city under the talisman of a consanguinity that was nominal. One day he put an inquiry to the general manager concretely, though in a way to avoid the appearance of asking another's opinion about his own son.

"He has your gift of winning men to him. There is no denying his popularity with the force," said the general manager, who was a diplomat.