The Clarion Part 4

"That Hardscrabbler's young 'un," he said. "She was crying quietly to herself, in the darkness outside the jail, poor little tyke. So I picked her up, and" (with a sort of tender awkwardness) "she was glad to come with me. Seemed to kind of take to me. Kiddies generally do."

"Do they? That's curious."

"I suppose you think so," replied the quack, without rancor.

"What are you going to do with her?"

"I'll see, later. At present I'm going to keep her here with us. She's only seven, and her mother's dead. Are you staying here to-night?"

"Got to. Missed my connection."

"Then at least you'll let me pay your hotel bill, if you won't take my money."

"Why, yes: I suppose so," said the other grudgingly. "I'll look at the boy in the morning. But he'll be all right. Only, don't take up your itinerating again for a few days."

"I'm through, I tell you. Give me a growing city to settle in and I'll go in for the regular proprietary manufacturing game. Know anything about Worthington?"

"Yes."

"Pretty good, live town?"

"First-cla.s.s, and not too critical, I suppose, to accept your business,"

said Dr. Elliot dryly. "I'm on my way there now for a visit. Well, I must get my little girl."

The itinerant opened the door, looked, and beckoned. The boy lay on his pillow, the girl was curled in her chair, both fast asleep. Their hands were lightly clasped.

Dr. Elliot lifted his ward and carried her away. The itinerant, returning to the Hardscrabbler girl, took her out to arrange the night's accommodation for her. So, there slept that night under one roof and at the charge of Professor Andrew L. Certain, five human beings who, long years after, were destined to meet and mingle their fates, intricate, intimate strands in the pattern of human weal and woe.

CHAPTER II

OUR LEADING CITIZEN

The year of grace, 1913, commended itself to Dr. L. Andre Surtaine as an excellent time in which to be alive, rich, and sixty years old.

Thoroughly, keenly, ebulliently alive he was. Thoroughly rich, also; and if the truth be told, rather ebulliently conscious of his wealth. You could see at a glance that he had paid no usurious interest to Fate on his success; that his vigor and zest in life remained to him undiminished. Vitality and a high satisfaction with his environment and with himself as well placed in it, radiated from his bulky and handsome person; but it was the vitality that impressed you first: impressed and warmed you; perhaps warned you, too, on shrewder observation. A gleaming personality, this. But behind the radiance one surmised fire. Occasion given, Dr. Surtaine might well be formidable.

The world had been his oyster to open. He had cleaved it wide.

Ill-natured persons hinted, in reference to his business, that he had used poison rather than the knife wherewith to loosen the stubborn hinges of the bivalve. Money gives back small echo to the cries of calumny, however. And Dr. Surtaine's Certina, that infallible and guaranteed blood-cure, eradicator of all known human ills, "famous across the map of the world," to use one of its advertising phrases, under the catchword of "Professor Certain's Certina, the Sure-Cure" (for he preserved the old name as a trade-mark), had made a vast deal of money for its proprietor. Worthington estimated his fortune at fifteen millions, growing at the rate of a million yearly, and was not preposterously far afield. In a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, claimed (one hundred and seventy-five thousand allowed by a niggling and suspicious census), this is all that the most needy of millionaires needs. It was all that Dr. Surtaine needed. He enjoyed his high satisfaction as a hard-earned increment.

Something more than satisfaction beamed from his face this bl.u.s.tery March noon as he awaited the Worthington train at a small station an hour up the line. He fidgeted like an eager boy when the whistle sounded, and before the cars had fairly come to a stop he was up the steps of the sleeper and inside the door. There rose to meet him a tall, carefully dressed and pressed youth, whose exclamation was evenly apportioned between welcome and surprise.

"Dad!"

"Boy-ee!"

To the amus.e.m.e.nt of the other pa.s.sengers, the two seized each other in a bear-hug.

"Oof!" panted the big man, releasing his son. "That's the best thing that's happened to me this year. George" (to the porter), "get me a seat. Get us two seats together. Aren't any? Perhaps this gentleman,"

turning to the chair back of him, "wouldn't mind moving across the aisle until we get to Worthington."

"Certainly not. Glad to oblige," said the stranger, smiling. People usually were "glad to oblige" Dr. Surtaine whether they knew him or not.

The man inspired good will in others.

"It's nearly a year since I've set eyes on my son," he added in a voice which took the whole car into his friendly confidence; "and it seems like ten. How are you feeling, Hal? You look chirp as a cricket."

"Couldn't possibly feel better, sir. Where did you get on?"

"Here at State Crossing. Thought I'd come up and meet you. The office got on my nerves this morning. Work didn't hold me worth a cent. I kept figuring you coming nearer and nearer until I couldn't stand it, so I banged down my desk, told my secretary that I was going to California on the night boat and mightn't be back till evening, hung the sc.r.a.p-basket on the stenographer's ear when she tried to hold me up to sign some letters, jumped out of the fifth-story window, and here I am. I hope you're as tickled to see me as I am to see you."

The young man's hand went out, fell with a swift movement, to touch his father's, and was as swiftly withdrawn again.

"Worthington's just waiting for you," the Doctor rattled on. "You're put up at all the clubs. People you've never heard of are laying out dinners and dances for you. You're a distinguished stranger; that's what you are. Welcome to our city and all that sort of thing. I'd like to have a bra.s.s band at the station to meet you, only I thought it might jar your quiet European tastes. Eh? At that, I had to put the boys under bonds to keep 'em from decorating the factory for you."

"You don't seem to have lost any of your spirit, Dad," said the junior, smiling.

"Noticed that already, have you? Well, I'm holding my own, Boyee. Up to date, old age hasn't scratched me with his claws to any noticeable extent--is that the way it goes?--see 'Familiar Quotations.' I'm getting to be a regular book-worm, Hal. Shakespeare, R.L.S., Kipling, Arnold Bennett, Hall Caine--all the high-brows. And I _get_ 'em, too. Soak 'em right in. I love it! Tell me, who's this Balzac? An agent was in yesterday trying to make me believe that he invented culture. What about him? I'm pretty hot on the culture trail. Look out, or I'll overhaul you."

"You won't have to go very far or fast. I've got only smatterings." But the boy spoke with a subdued complacency not wholly lost upon the shrewd father.

"Not so much that you'll think Worthington dull and provincial?"

"Oh, I dare say I shall find it a very decent little place."

But here Hal touched another pride and loyalty, quite as genuine as that which Dr. Surtaine felt for his son.

"Little place!" he cried. "Two hundred thousand of the livest people on G.o.d's earth. A gen-u-wine American city if there ever was one."

"Evidently it suits you, sir."

"Couldn't suit better if I'd had it made to order," chuckled the Doctor.

"And I did pretty near make it over to order. It was a dead-and-alive town when we opened up here. Didn't care much about my business, either.

Now we're the biggest thing in town. Why Certina is the cross-mark that shows where Worthington is on the map. The business is sim-plee BOOMING." The word exploded in rapture. "Nothing like it ever known in the proprietary trade. Wait till you see the shop."

"That will be soon, won't it, sir? I think I've loafed quite long enough."

"You're only twenty-five," his father defended him. "It isn't as if you'd been idling. Your four years abroad have been just so much capital. Educational capital, I mean. I've got plenty of the other kind, for both of us. You don't need to go into the business unless you want to."

"Being an American, I suppose I've got to go to work at something."

"Not necessarily."

"You don't want me to live on you all my life, though, I suppose."

"Well, I don't want you to want me to want you to," returned the other, laughing. "But there's no hurry."