Wild Wings Part 36

"That is final, I suppose," he asked after a moment, looking up at the young man.

"Absolutely, Mr. Cressy. I am sorry."

Harrison Cressy lumbered to his feet.

"I am sorry too," he said, "d.a.m.nably sorry for Carlotta and for myself. Will you shake hands with me, Philip? It is good to meet a man now and then."

CHAPTER XXI

HARRISON CRESSY REVERTS

Left to himself, Harrison Cressy discovered to his annoyance that there was no train out of Dunbury for two hours. That was the worst of these little one-horse towns. You might as well be dead as alive in 'em. By the time he had smoked his after-dinner cigar he felt as if he might as well be dead himself. He felt suddenly heavy, old, almost decrepit, though that morning when he had left Boston he had considered himself in the prime of life and vigor. Hang it! He was sixty-nine. A man was about done for at sixty-nine, all but ready to turn into his grave. And he without son or grandson. Lord! What a swindle life was anyway!

Well, there was no use sitting still groaning. He would get up and take a little walk until train time. Maybe it was his liver that made him feel so confoundedly rotten and no count. A little exercise would do him good.

Absentmindedly he noted, as he strolled down the elm-shaded streets, the neatness of the lawns, the gay flower beds, the hammocks and swings out under the trees as if people really lived out of doors here. There were animate evidences of the fact everywhere. Children played here and there in shady s.p.a.ces under big trees. Pretty girls on wide, hospitable-looking porches chatted and drank lemonade and knitted. A lithe, red-haired la.s.s in white played tennis on a smooth dirt court with a tall, clean looking youth. As Mr. Cressy pa.s.sed the girl cried out, "Love all" and the millionaire smiled. It occurred to him it was not so hard to love all in a village like this. It was only in cities that you hated your neighbor and did him first lest you be done yourself.

He hadn't been loose in a country town like this for years. He had almost forgotten what they were like when you didn't shoot through them in a motor car, rus.h.i.+ng always to get somewhere else. His casual saunter down the quiet street was oddly soothing to his nerves, awoke happy, yet half-sad memories.

He had met and loved Carlotta's mother in a country town. The lilacs had been in bloom and the orioles had stood sponsor for his first Sunday call. They had become engaged by the time the asters were out. The next lilac time they had been married. A third spring and the little Carlotta had come. They had both been disappointed at its not being a boy, but the little girl was a wonder, with hair as gold as b.u.t.tercups, eyes like wood violets and a laugh that lilted and gurgled like the little brook down in the meadow.

And then, two years later, the boy had come, come and drifted off to some far place. It had been a bitter blow to Rose as well as to Harrison Cressy, especially as they said there never could be any more children.

Rose grew frail, did not rally or regain her strength. They advised a sanitarium in the Adirondacks for her. She had gone, but it had been of no use. By the time they brought in the first gentians Rose had drifted off after her little son. Carlotta and her father were alone.

By this time Harrison Cressy had begun to show the authentic Midas touch. Only the little Carlotta stood between him and sheer, sordid money grubbing. And even she was an excuse for the getting of always more and more wealth. He told himself Carlotta should be a veritable princess, should go always clad in the finest, have of the best, be surrounded always by the most beautiful. She should know only joy and light and laughter.

Thinking these thoughts, Carlotta's father sighed. For now at last Carlotta wanted something he could not give her, was learning after twenty-two years of cloudless joy the bitter way of tears. Why hadn't that stubborn boy surrendered?

For that matter why didn't Carlotta surrender? This was a new idea to Harrison Cressy. All the time he had been talking to Philip Lambert he had been seeing Carlotta only in relation to Crest House and the Beacon Street mansion. But just now he had been recalling her mother under very different a.s.sociations. Rose had been content with a tiny little cottage set in a green yard gay with bright old fas.h.i.+oned flowers. He and Rose had nested as happily as the orioles in the maples, especially after the gold-haired baby came. Was Carlotta so different from Rose? Was her happiness such a different kind of thing? Were women not pretty much alike at heart? Did they not want about the same things?

Carlotta loved this lad of hers as Rose had loved himself. Was it her own father who was cheating her out of happiness because he had taught her to believe that money and limousines and great houses and many servants and silken robes are happiness? If he had talked to her of other things, told her about her mother and the happy old days among the lilacs and orioles, with little but love to nest with, couldn't he have made her see things more truly, shown her that love was the main thing, that money could not buy happiness? One could not buy much of anything that was worth buying Harrison Cressy thought. One could purchase only the worthless. That was the everlasting failure of money.

He remembered the boy's, "I love Carlotta. But I don't love her enough to let her or you buy me." It was true. Neither he nor his daughter had been able to purchase the lad's integrity, his good faith, his ideals. And Harrison Cressy was thankful from the bottom of his heart that it was so.

He turned his steps back to the village and as he did so an oriole flashed out of the shrubbery near him, and pa.s.sed like a flame out of sight among the trees. This was a good sign. Orioles had nested every year in the maple tree by the little white house where Carlotta had been born. Carlotta herself had always loved them. "Pretty, pretty, birdie!"

she had been wont to call out. "Come, daddy, let's follow him and see where he goes."

He would go home and tell Carlotta all this, make her see that her happiness was in her own hands. No, it was the boy's story. If Carlotta would not follow the orioles and her own heart for Philip Lambert she would not for any argument of his.

By this time a distant puff of smoke gave evidence that the Boston train was already on its way, leaving Harrison Cressy in Dunbury. Not that he cared. He had business still to transact ere he departed, a new battle to fight. He walked with the firm elastic step of a youth back to town. What did it matter if you were sixty-nine when the best things of life were still ahead of you?

Accordingly Phil was a second time that day surprised by the unheralded arrival of Carlotta's father, a rather dusty, weary and limp-looking gentleman this time, but exuding a sort of benignant serenity that had not been there early in the day.

"h.e.l.lo," greeted the millionaire blandly. "Missed my train--got to browsing round the town like an old billy goat. Not sorry though. It is a nice little town. Mind if I sit down? I'm a bit blown." And dropping on a stool Mr. Cressy fanned himself with his panama and grinned at Philip, a grin the young man could not quite fathom. What new trick had the clever old financier at the bottom of his mind? Phil hoped he had not got to go through the thing again. Once had been quite enough for one day.

"Let me send out for something cool to drink, Mr. Cressy. You must be horribly hot. It is warm in here, even with all the fans going. Hi, there, Tommy!" Philip summoned a freckled, red-haired youth from somewhere in the background. "Run over to Greene's and get a lemonade for this gentleman, will you?"

"Right, Mr. Phil." The boy saluted--an odd salute, Mr. Cressy noted. It was rendered with the right hand, the three middle fingers held up, the thumb bent over touching the nail of the little finger. The saluter stood very straight as he went through the ceremony and looked very serious about it. "Queer!" thought the onlooker. The messenger boys he knew did not behave like that when you gave them an order.

Philip excused himself to attend to a customer and in a moment the red-haired lad was back with a tall gla.s.s of lemonade clinking delightfully with ice. Mr. Cressy took it and set it down on the counter while he fumbled for his wallet and produced a dollar bill.

To his amazement the boy's grin faded, and he drew himself up with dignity.

"No, thank you, sir," he said to the proffered greenback. "I'm a Scout and Scouts don't take tips."

"What!" gasped Harrison Cressy. In all his life he did not recall meeting a boy who ever refused money before. He began to think there was something uncanny about this town of Dunbury. First a young man who could not be bought at any price. And now a boy who wouldn't take a tip for service rendered.

"I said I was a Scout," repeated the lad patiently. "And Scouts don't take tips. We are supposed to do one good turn every day, anyway, and I hadn't gotten mine in before. I'm only a Tenderfoot but I'm most ready for my second cla.s.s tests. Mr. Phil's going to try me out in first aid as soon as he gets time."

"Mr. Phil! What's he got to do with it?" inquired Mr. Cressy, after a long, satisfying swig of lemonade.

"He is our Scout-master and a peach of a one too. He is going to take us on a hike tomorrow."

"Tomorrow? Tomorrow is Sunday, young man." The Methodist in Harrison Cressy rose to the surface.

"I know. We all go to church and Sunday school in the morning. Mr. Phil won't take us unless we do. But in the afternoon he thinks it is all right to go on a hike. We don't practise signaling and things like that, but we get in a lot of nature study. I can identify all my ten trees now and a whole lot more besides, and I've got a bird list of over sixty."

"You don't say so?" Harrison Cressy was plainly impressed. "So your Mr.

Phil gives a good deal of time to that sort of thing, does he?" he added, his eyes seeking Philip Lambert in the distance.

"Should say he did. I guess he gives about all the time he has outside of the store. He's a dandy Scout-master. What he says goes, you betcher."

Remembering the scene at the luncheon table that day, Harrison Cressy thought it quite probable. What Philip had said had gone "you betcher" on that occasion with a vengeance. So young Lambert gave his off hours to business of this sort. Most of Carlotta's male friends gave most of theirs to polo, jazz, and chorus girls. He began to covet Philip more than ever for a possible, and he hoped probable, son-in-law.

It played into his purposes excellently that Philip on returning invited him to supper on the Hill that night. He wanted to meet the boy's people, especially the mother. Carlotta had told him once that Philip's mother was the most wonderful person in the world.

Seated at the long table in the Lambert dining-room Harrison Cressy enjoyed a meal such as his chef-ridden soul had almost forgotten could exist--a meal so simple yet so delectable that he dreamed of it for days afterward.

But the food, excellent as it was, was only a small part of the significance of the occasion. It was a revelation to the millionaire to know that a family could gather around the board like this and have such a thoroughly delightful time all round. There was gay talk and ready laughter, a fine flavor of old-fas.h.i.+oned courtesy and hospitality and good will in everything that was said or done.

The Lambert girls--the pretty twins and the younger, slim slip of a la.s.sie, Elinor--were charming, fresh, natural, unspoiled, very different from and far more to his taste than most of the young women who came to Crest House--hot-house products, over-sophisticated, cynical, too familiar with rouge and cigarettes and the game of love and lure, huntresses more or less, the whole pack of them. It seemed girls could still be plain girls on this enchanted Hill--girls who would make wonderful wives some day for some lucky men.

But the mother! She was the secret of it all, quite as remarkable as Carlotta had said. She was extraordinarily well read, talked well on a dozen subjects as to which he was himself but vaguely informed, and she was evidently even more extraordinarily busy. There was talk of a Better Babies movement in which she was interested, of a Red Cross Chapter at which she had spent the afternoon, of a committee meeting of the local Woman's Club which was bringing a noted English poet-lecturer to town.

There were Chatauqua plans in view, and a new children's reading room in the public library with a story-telling hour of which Clare was to be in charge. A hundred things indicated that Mrs. Lambert was by no means confined to the four walls of her home for interests and activities. Yet her home was exquisitely kept and she was a mother first of all. One could see that every moment. It was "Mums, this" and "Mums, that" from them all. The life of the home clearly pivoted about her.

Harrison Cressy found himself wis.h.i.+ng that Carlotta could have known a motherhood like that. Rose had gone so soon. Carlotta had never known what she missed. Perhaps Mr. Cressy himself had not known until he saw Mrs. Lambert and realized what a mother might be. Poor Carlotta! He had given her a great deal. At least, until this, afternoon, he had thought he had. But he had never given her anything at all comparable to what this quiet village store-keeper and his wife had given to their son and daughters. He hadn't had it to give. He had been poor, after all, all along. Though he hadn't suspected it until now.

After supper Stuart Lambert had slipped quickly away, bidding his son stay up on the Hill a little longer with their guest. Phil had demurred, but had been quietly overruled and had acquiesced perforce. Poor Dad!

There had not been a moment all day to relieve his mind about Mr.

Cressy's offer. Not once had the father and son been alone. Phil was afraid his father was taking the thing a good deal to heart, and it worried him. He had counted on talking it over together as they went back to the store but his father had willed otherwise.

It was with Carlotta's father instead of his own that Philip talked first after all.

"See here, Philip," began Mr. Cressy as they descended the Hill in "Lizzie." "I went at this all wrong. So did Carlotta. I understand better now. I've been back in the past this afternoon, remembering what it means to live in the country and love and mate there in the good old-fas.h.i.+oned way as Carlotta's mother and I did. It is what I want her to do with you. Do you get that, boy? I want her to come to Dunbury. I want her to have a piece of your mother. Carlotta never knew what it was to have a mother. It is mostly my fault she doesn't see any clearer. You mustn't blame her, lad."