"It's not in the blood!"

The only sound was a slight tinkle of a spoon against the coffee-cup.

Looking at his father he saw a nervous flutter in his cheeks, his lips hard set, his brow drawn down; and the rigidity of the profile was such that Jack was struck by the shiver of a thought that it must have been like his own as others said it was when he had gripped Pedro Nogales's arm. But this pa.s.sed quickly, leaving, however, in its trail an expression of shock and displeasure.

"So it was the girl, that kept you--you were in love!" John Wingfield, Sr. exclaimed, tensely.

"Yes, I was--I am! You have it, father, the unchangeable all of it! I face a wall of mystery. 'It's not in the blood!' she said, as if it were some bar sinister. What could she have meant?"

In the fever of baffled intensity crying for light and help, he was sharing the secret that had beset him relentlessly and giving his father the supreme confidence of his heart. Leaning across the table he grasped his father's hand, which lay still and unresponsive and singularly cold for a second. Then John Wingfield, Sr. raised his other hand and patted the back of Jack's hesitantly, as if uncertain how to deal with this latest situation that had developed out of his son's old life. Finally he looked up good-temperedly, deprecatingly.

"Well, well, Jack, I almost forgot that you are young. It's quite a bad case!" he said.

"But what did she mean? Can you guess? I have thought of it so much that it has meant a thousand wild things!" Jack persisted desperately.

"Come! come!" the father rallied him. "Time, time!"

He gripped the hand that was gripping his and swung it free of the table with a kindly shake. All the effective charm of his personality which he never wasted, the charm that could develop out of the mask to gain an end when the period of listening was over, was in play.

"She excited the opposition of the strength in you," he said. "You ask what did she mean? It is hard to tell what a woman means, but I judge that she meant that it was not in her blood to marry a fellow who went about fighting duels and breaking arms. She would like a more peaceful sort; and, yes, anything that came into her mind leaped out and you were mystified by her strange exclamation!"

"Perhaps. I suppose that may be it. It was just myself, just my devil!"

Jack a.s.sented limply.

"Time! time! All this will pa.s.s."

Jack could not answer that commonplace with one of his own, that it would not pa.s.s; he could only return the pressure when his father, rising and coming around the table, slipped his arm about the son in a demonstration of affection which was like opening the gate to a new epoch in their relations.

"And you would have killed Leddy! You could have broken that Mexican in two! I should like to have seen that! So would the ancestor!" said the father, giving Jack a hug.

"Yes, but, father, that was the horror of it!"

"Not the power to do it--no! I mean, Jack, that in this world it is well to be strong."

"And you think that I am no longer a weakling?" Jack asked strangely; "that I carried out your instructions when you sent me away?"

"Oh, Jack, you remember my farewell remark? It was made in irritation and suffering. That hurt me. It hurt my pride and all that my work stands for. It hurt me as much as it hurt you. But if it was a whip, why, then, it served a purpose, as I wanted it to."

"Yes, it was a whip!" said Jack, mechanically.

"Then all ends well--all quits! And, Jack," he swung Jack, who was unresisting but unresponsive, around facing him, "if you ever have any doubts or any questions to ask bring them to me, won't you?"

"Yes."

"And, Jack, a hundred a week to-morrow! You're all right, Jack!" And he gave Jack a slap on the back as they left the dining-room.

XXIX

A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL

Light sang in the veins and thoughts of a city. Light cleansed the streets of vapors. Light, the light of the sunshine of late May, made a far different New York from the New York under a blanket of March mist of the day of Jack's arrival. The lantern of the Metropolitan tower was all blazing gold; Diana's scarf trailed behind her in the shimmering abandon of her _honi soit qui mal y pense_ chases on Olympus; Admiral Farragut grew urbane, sailing on a smooth sea with victory won; General Sherman in his over-brightness, guided by his guardian lady, still gallantly pursued the tone of time in the direction of the old City Hall and Trinity; and the marble facade of the new library seemed no less at home than under an Agean sky. An ecstasy, blinding eyes to blemishes, set critical faculties to rejoicing over perfections. They graciously overlooked the blotch of red brick hiding the body of St. Patrick's on the way up town in grat.i.tude for twin spires against the sky.

Enveloping radiance gilded the sharp lines of skysc.r.a.pers and swept away the shadows in the chasms between them. It pointed the bows of busy tugs with sprays of diamonds falling on the molten surface of rivers and bays.

It called up paeans of childish trebles from tenement alleys; slipped into the sickrooms of private houses, delaying the advent of c.r.a.pe on the door; and played across the rows of beds in the public wards of hospitals in the primal democracy of the gift of ozone to the earth.

The milky gla.s.s roof of the central court of the Wingfield store acted as a screen to the omnipotent visitor, but he set unfiltered patches of delight in the aisles and on the counters near the walls. Mamie Devore and Burleigh and Peter Mortimer and many other clerks and employees asked if this were like a desert day and Jack said that it was. He longed to be free of all roofs and feel the geniality of the hearth-fire of the planetary system penetrating through his coat, his skin, his flesh, into his very being. Why not close the store and make a holiday for everybody?

he asked himself; only to be amazed, on second thought, at such a preposterous suggestion from a hundred-dollar-a-week author of created profits in the business. He was almost on the point of acting on another impulse, which was that he and his father break away into the country in a touring car, not knowing where they were going to stop until hunger overtook an inn. This, too, he dismissed as a milder form of the same demoralizing order of heresy, bound to be disturbing to the new filial relations springing from the night when he had told his desert story over the coffee, which, contrary to the conventional idea of an exchange of confidences clearing the mind of a burden, had only provoked more restlessness.

At least, he would fare forth for a while on the broad asphalt trail that begins under the arch of the little park and runs to the entrance of the great park. Even as the desert has its spell of overawing stillness in an uninhabited land, so this trail had its spell of congested human movement in the heart of habitations. A broad, luminous blade lay across the west side of the street and left the other in shade; and all the world that loved sunshine and had no errands on the east side kept to the west side. There was a communism of inspiration abroad. It was a conqueror's triumph just to be alive and feel the pulse-beat of the throng. The very over-developed sensitiveness of city nerves became something to be thankful for in providing the capacity for keener enjoyment as compensation for the capacity for keener pain.

Womankind was in spring plumage. The mere consciousness of the value of light to their costumes, no less than the elixir in their nostrils, gave vivacity to their features. As usual, Jack was seeing them only to see Mary. The creation of no _couturier_ could bear rivalry with the garb in which his imagination clothed her. He found himself suddenly engrossed in a particular exhibit of fashion's parade a little distance ahead and going in the same direction as himself, a young woman in a simplicity of gown to which her carriage gave the final touch of art. Her steps had a long-limbed freedom and lightness, with which his own steps ran in a rhythm to the music of some past a.s.sociation. The thrall of a likeness, which more and more possessed him, made him hasten to draw near for a more satisfying glimpse.

The young woman turned her head to glance into a shop-window and then there could be no mistaking that cheek and chin and the peculiar relation of the long lashes to the brow. It was the profile whose imprint had become indelible on his mind when he had come round an elbow of rock on Galeria. The Jack of wild, tumultuous pleading who had parted from Mary Ewold on the pa.s.s became a Jack elate with the glad, swimming joy of May sunshine at seeing and speaking to her again.

"Mary! Mary!" he cried. "My, but you've become a grand swell!" he breathed delectably, with a fuller vision of her.

"Jack!"

There was a nervous twitching of her lips. He saw her eyes at first in a blaze of surprise and wonder; then change to the baffling sparkle, hiding their depths, of the slivers of gla.s.s on the old barrier. His smile and hers in unspoken understanding said that two comrades of another trail had met on the Avenue trail. There had not been any Leddy; there had not been any scene on the pa.s.s. They were back to the conditions of the protocol he had established when they started out from the porch of the Ewold bungalow in the airiest possible mood to look at a parcel of land.

"And you also have become a grand swell!" she said. "Did you expect that I should be in a gray riding-habit? Certainly I didn't expect to see you in chaps and spurs."

It was brittle business; but with a common resource in play they managed it well. And there they were walking together, noted by pa.s.sers-by for their youth and beaming oblivion to everything but themselves.

"How long have you been here?" Jack asked.

"Two weeks," she answered.

Two weeks in the same town and this his first glimpse of her! What a maze New York was! What a desert waste of two weeks!

"Yes. Our decision to come was rather abrupt," she explained. "A sudden call to travel came to father; came to him like an inspiration that he could not resist. And how happily he has entered into the spirit of the city again! It has made him young."

"And it has been quite like martyrdom for you!" Jack put in, teasingly.

"Terrible! Sackcloth and ashes!"

"I see you are wearing the sackcloth."

She laughed outright, with a downward glance at her gown, at once in guilt and appreciation.

"Another whim of father's."

"The Doge a scapegoat for fashion!"

"Not a scapegoat--a partisan! He insisted on going to one of the best places. Could I resist? I wanted to see how I felt, how I appeared."