The Cottage of Delight Part 39

"I know," Reed chuckled. "Well, what do you think about his pay? You know we've hinted at a raise."

Pilcher smiled. "I think he is worth as much to us as he is to any one else, and, as I like the fellow personally, I want to hold on to him.

You can't hire a brain like his very long for nothing, and if we don't come across he may be snapped up by some one else. Carter & Langley's man asked me the other day if we had a contract with him. I lied. I told him yes, and what I want to do now is to sign up with the fellow and know where we stand. He is ambitious, and I never saw such a worker in my life. He often does as much as an ordinary man after the office closes. He works at home. He told me that he did not care for amus.e.m.e.nts, reading, or politics. He has put his little sister in school, and he warms up when he speaks of the child. Outside of his work, she seems to be the only thing he is interested in. He is always quoting something she says or telling amusing things she does. Then he laughs--he seldom smiles over anything else. He is very deep and serious. If he were not so young I'd think he had had a sad love-affair.

I think he must have taken the deaths of his parents and the responsibility of the child very seriously. Well, what do you think?"

"About a contract with him? Yes, I think we ought to come to terms with him. You say he is the man we need. Why not be liberal with him?"

"I've always thought that gradual progress," Pilcher said, "was good for young men. You can spoil them easily by letting them know that you can't do without them. Still, I see your point and agree with you. How about a two years' contract at fifteen hundred a year?"

"Not enough." Reed shook his younger and more progressive head firmly.

"Make it eighteen for a year, with a bonus of three per cent. on our entire net profits."

Pilcher winced and pulled his beard, but finally agreed. "You attend to the details and draw up the contract. I catch your idea of pinning down his personal interest in the work with the bonus. If we make as much money next year as this he will do well."

So it was finally arranged, and when John went home on the following Sat.u.r.day night, after signing the contract, he was in good spirits. Dora was at the table with Betty and Minnie when he arrived, and he sat down with them. They were overflowing with amus.e.m.e.nt about something that had happened at school, and John sat watching Dora's animated face with deep pride and gratification. He was sure she was genuinely happy in her new environment, and he was beginning to feel that he had made no mistake in taking her from her old one. She showed by her fine color and increased weight that she was in splendid health. The new dress which she now wore and which Mrs. McGwire had selected was most becoming. Her abundant hair under constant care had grown more tractable and was always well arranged. Her little hands, once rough and soiled, had grown white, soft, and pliant. Under Betty McGwire's persistent admonitions she had left off using many incorrect and uncouth forms of speech, and, on the whole, deported herself very properly.

Why should John not be proud of her? Indeed, she was all he had in the world to care for, and he lavished the wealth of his saddened and lonely soul upon her. He loved to work in his little room at night when she and Minnie or Betty studied or read in hers, the door between being always open. Frequently they asked him questions which he could not answer--questions pertaining to history, geography, and science, and he found that he himself was learning from the answers which they finally secured from their books, teachers, and elsewhere. Sometimes he went with them to free lectures given at night by the public schools. The only place he refused to go with them was to the church and Sunday-school, but, as the grave-faced Harold always escorted them to these places, they did not need him. Sometimes the boy would speak earnestly to him of the intricate theology he was mastering, but, as John no longer combated such ideas with young or old, he always smiled indulgently and let the subject pa.s.s.

"What does it matter?" he used to ask himself. "Everybody needs a belief of some sort, and Harold's faith in snake- and whale-stories is as good as any other, if it will keep him from stealing and murdering and make him more considerate of his fellow-man. Let the boy preach. If people are willing to pay to listen to him, that is their business and his. As for me, it hit me once and sha'n't get a swipe at me again."

After dinner was over on the night following his promotion, he told the three little girls that he wanted to "celebrate" that evening and would take them to a certain theater where a children's play was being produced.

"To celebrate what?" they noisily asked him, but he kept his joyous secret to himself, and they hurried away to get ready to go out.

While he was waiting for them in the parlor, Harold came down from his room, a book under his arm, and John invited him to go along. But the boy only smiled and held out the book, which was the _Life of Wesley_.

"I have to study this to-night," he said. "I am to be examined on the pioneers of our Church. You know we do not believe in theaters, as a rule, but I understand that this child's play has a good moral. I'm sure it won't do any great harm, and the silly things are up-stairs dancing with joy."

The children liked the play, the people, the lights, the music, and John sat feasting on their animated faces. Once, however, a pang of keen pain shot through him at the thought that he was having a pleasure that could not be shared with the little toiling woman who had once been his wife. If all had gone well, he might have brought Tilly to the great city and lavished the results of his work and ability on her. As it was, she would perhaps remain in the backwoods for the rest of her life. She would no doubt marry-- Here he shuddered and tried to banish the thought from his mind.

After the play he took his little guests to an attractive cafe and they had some ice-cream and cakes. While they ate they chattered vivaciously about the plot and characters of the drama. Betty displayed good critical ability, and John saw from Dora's face that she was seeing her new friend in a fresh light and no doubt determining to emulate her in this, as in other things. He told himself that that quality in his foster-sister would help her enormously in acquiring the social culture which he himself had missed in his youth.

Little Minnie was becoming sleepy. Her eyelids were drooping, and John started home with them. For a while he led Minnie by the hand, and then, noting her lagging steps, he took her into his arms and carried her the rest of the way. He felt her soft cheek settle down against his, and from her warm, moist breathing he knew that she was asleep. He liked the sensation caused by the limp form in his embrace. Betty and Dora walked by his side. Young as he was, he felt a sort of paternal interest in all three of them.

Reaching home, he bore the sleeping child up to her little white bed in her mother's room. Mrs. McGwire was there, hemming sheets for the house, and was deeply touched by his act.

"It was awfully kind of you," she said, and then she began to cry. "I'm a fool," she whimpered, wiping her eyes, "but you were carrying her just as her father did only a week before he died."

However, she dried her eyes quickly and hastened to disrobe Minnie, who was still asleep.

"You have been a G.o.dsend to us all, Mr. Trott," Mrs. McGwire declared.

"The children wors.h.i.+p you. Did you know it? Every night they listen for your coming, and they often go into the kitchen to inquire if you are getting exactly what you like to eat. I am telling you this because I like to have children love me, and these love you very deeply."

One day John had to go to the office of a great newspaper directory where files were kept of almost all the papers in the United States, his object being to look over the advertised offers for bids on public buildings in a certain New Jersey town. He was sent into the bas.e.m.e.nt of the establishment, where he found the files arranged in compartments in shelves on both sides of a long room. An attendant handed him a catalogue of the papers with the numbered key to their locations, and he soon secured the information he desired. He was about to leave when a terrible thought took hold of him, and he ran his eye over the catalogue. Yes, there it was. _The Cranston News_. He went to the indicated compartment himself, took down the file it contained, and bore it to the table and seat set aside for patrons. It was a tiny, half-stereotyped weekly, and on that account its compartment held a longer file than otherwise would have been the case. He put the stack of papers on the table before him. Should he look for the thing the mere thought of which seemed to deaden his brain? He knew the time that the item would naturally appear, and with cold, fumbling fingers he drew out the issue under that date. He held it a moment unopened.

"What good would it do?" something seemed to admonish him. "Don't rasp a healing wound."

The attendant noticed his apparent indecision and approached politely.

"Is there something else you want to see?" he asked.

"No, thanks; these are all," John answered, and he opened the paper. The clerk left him and he allowed his glance to sweep the columns of local happenings.

It was there. The mere head-line in bold type was sufficient: "Annulment of Young Bride's Marriage and Tragic End of Husband."

John read the crudely considerate item through, folded the sheet, and restored the file to its place. Then he started back to his office. How pitiless seemed the street scene in the garish light of the midday sun!

The push-cart men, the newsboys, the hurrying throng, the rattling of the overhead trains, seemed to belong to an earthly hades. And why, he wondered, should he suffer so over a thing that he had already accepted as a fact, and partly conquered? He couldn't have answered, though a psychologist might have cla.s.sed it under the head of autosuggestion, or called it a mere backward twist of a morbid imagination fed by unsubdued, subconscious longings for things the subject once possessed.

That night strange, dazzling dreams fell to John's portion. If by his hard work he was enabled through the day to keep his old life out of his conscious thought to any extent, it was often otherwise when he slept, and to-night, following the shock he had had that morning, he was living only too vividly over the period in which he had known Tilly. Again he was entranced by her illumined face and thrilled by her mellow treble voice as she read from the Bible that first night of his acquaintance with her. Again he and she were on the lonely, moonlit mountain road together. He felt her loving pressure on his arm, and as by the light of heaven caught her tender, upward glance. Then she became his wife--actually his wife. They were on the train together--in the cab at Ridgeville, and then in that cottage of dreams and delight, shut in from the uncomprehending world without.

Then he awoke and, like the hail of javelins from an omnipotent enemy, the tragic facts of his existence hurtled down upon him. Smothering a cry like that of a wounded beast in a jungle, he found his pillow wet with tears which he had shed against his will or knowledge--tears of joy, or tears of grief, which were they? He sprang from his bed and stood before the window of his boxlike room.

"It is my yellow streak again," he muttered, wiping his eyes and grinding his teeth. "It can't down me awake, and so it coils about me in dreams. Be a man, John Trott! Life was never made for happiness. It was for pain, struggle, and conquest."

He heard a sound in Dora's room. He wondered if anything was wrong, and as an anxious mother might have done, he listened attentively. He heard a low, rippling laugh, followed by prattling tones. The child was talking in her sleep. Her dreams must have been pleasant, for her lilting voice rang out again.

"It is beautiful on you, Betty! Maybe brother John will get me one, too.

Then we can wear them to the church sociable, eh, Betty?"

"Brother John!" he echoed, softly. It was sweet and vaguely comforting to know that the little waif relied upon him even in her dreams. He crept into her room on his tiptoes, bent over Dora, and looked at her.

What an angelic, spritelike creature she seemed in her white gown and golden hair! How delicate and refined her features and tapering hands!

In the half-light he saw that she was smiling. Smiling! She had never smiled like that in the old house at Ridgeville. She had begun to smile and laugh and jest under his love and care, and he told himself that it should always be so.

He went back to his bed, turned his damp pillow over, and laid his head on a dry spot. As he lay trying to sleep, the visions of his dream began to hover over him, and, wincing and writhing with pain, he cried:

"Be a man, John Trott! It is your yellow streak again. Kill it now, or it will down you in the end!"

PART II

CHAPTER I

Ten eventful years of toil and struggle for John Trott went by. True to the prophecy of Cavanaugh and other practical men, he succeeded. Step by step he rose till, on the death of Mr. Pilcher, he became an equal partner with Reed in the business. He and Dora still lived with the McGwires in the old house, which was now kept for roomers only. John could have well afforded to give Dora a more expensive home, but both he and she had become inseparably attached to these first friends of theirs in New York.

Dora, a tall, slender girl of nineteen, while not exactly pretty, was quite attractive. John had sent her to a select school for young ladies, and the polish and education she had received had not spoiled her. She was not ashamed of the fact that she and John had once been what they were. In fact, the McGwires knew all the circ.u.mstances connected with their clandestine flight from the South, and guarded well their secret.

Not once, even indirectly, had either John or Dora heard from their former home. Dora had almost entirely forgotten it, and, while John could not possibly do so, it had become like a dream of blended joy and pain which he persistently put aside. But at times a grim cert.i.tude fixed itself on him, that, having once loved, he could never love again.

He never met a marriageable woman, no matter how attractive or willing she might be to receive his attentions, without feeling the presence of a certain barrier of contrast to an ideal embedded in his tragic past.

There was a vast store of love and tenderness in him, and this he poured out on his foster-sister. He was a natural man and yielded to sensual temptations, but always with the after-result of feeling vaguely soiled and lowered, and was in continual strife with his pa.s.sions. To-day they were conquered, to-morrow they held temporary sway. And there was a rebuke, always a rebuke which no reasoning could set aside--a rebuke rising out of the mystic sanct.i.ty of the short union between him and his bride. "Tilly!" The very name crept upon him unawares as from the exquisite mental pictures he was always trying to suppress. "Tilly!" He caught himself applying it to Dora, a slip of the tongue, which, better than anything else, revealed to him the psychic bonds between him and a personality lost to him forever. Once Dora asked him if he thought, by any chance, that Tilly might have died. He started, reflected for a moment, and then answered in a way that was a surprise even to himself.

"No, she's living," he said. "If she were dead I'd feel it."

"That is no criterion to go by," answered Dora, who had become quite religious and was now a member of the Methodist Church. "Do you know what Harold would say about that?"