Part 17

“Look here,” said the editor good-naturedly, “I'd like to oblige you, but it isn't BUSINESS, you know,--and this IS, you understand,--PROPRIETOR'S BUSINESS too! Of course I see it might stand in the way of your making up to the old man afterwards and coming in for a million. Well! you can tell him it's ME. Say I WOULD put it in. Say I'm nasty--and I AM!”

“Then it must go in?” said John Milton with a white face.

“You bet.”

“Then I must go out!” And writing out his resignation, he laid it before his chief and left.

But he could not bear to tell this to his wife when he climbed the hill that night, and he invented some excuse for bringing his work home. The invalid never noticed any change in his usual buoyancy, and indeed I fear, when he was fairly installed with his writing materials at the foot of her bed, he had quite forgotten the episode. He was recalled to it by a faint sigh.

“What is it, dear?” he said looking up.

“I like to see you writing, Milty. You always look so happy.”

“Always so happy, dear?”

“Yes. You are happy, are you not?”

“Always.” He got up and kissed her. Nevertheless, when he sat down to his work again, his face was turned a little more to the window.

Another serious incident--to be also kept from the invalid--shortly followed. The article in the “Clarion” had borne its fruit. The third day after his resignation a rival paper sharply retorted. “The cowardly insinuations against the record of a justly honored capitalist,” said the “Pioneer,” “although quite in keeping with the brazen 'Clarion,' might attract the attentions of the slandered party, if it were not known to his friends as well as himself that it may be traced almost directly to a cast-off member of his own family, who, it seems, is reduced to haunting the back doors of certain blatant journals to dispose of his cheap wares. The slanderer is secure from public exposure in the superior decency of his relations, who refrain from airing their family linen upon editorial lines.”

This was the journal to which John Milton had hopefully turned for work. When he read it there seemed but one thing for him to do--and he did it. Gentle and optimistic as was his nature, he had been brought up in a community where sincere directness of personal offense was followed by equally sincere directness of personal redress, and--he challenged the editor. The bearer of his cartel was one Jack Hamlin, I grieve to say a gambler by profession, but between whom and John Milton had sprung up an odd friendship of which the best that can be said is that it was to each equally and unselfishly unprofitable. The challenge was accepted, the preliminaries arranged. “I suppose,” said Jack carelessly, “as the old man ought to do something for your wife in case of accident, you've made some sort of a will?”

“I've thought of that,” said John Milton, dubiously, “but I'm afraid it's no use. You see”--he hesitated--“I'm not of age.”

“May I ask how old you are, sonny?” said Jack with great gravity.

“I'm almost twenty,” said John Milton, coloring.

“It isn't exactly vingt-et-un, but I'd stand on it; if I were you I wouldn't draw to such a hand,” said Jack, coolly.

The young husband had arranged to be absent from his home that night, and early morning found him, with Jack, grave, but courageous, in a little hollow behind the Mission Hills. To them presently approached his antagonist, jauntily accompanied by Colonel Starbottle, his second. They halted, but after the formal salutation were instantly joined by Jack Hamlin. For a few moments John Milton remained awkwardly alone--pending a conversation which even at that supreme moment he felt as being like the general attitude of his friends towards him, in its complete ignoring of himself. The next moment the three men stepped towards him. “We have come, sir,” said Colonel Starbottle in his precisest speech but his jauntiest manner, “to offer you a full and ample apology--a personal apology--which only supplements that full public apology that my principal, sir, this gentleman,” indicating the editor of the “Pioneer,” “has this morning made in the columns of his paper, as you will observe,” producing a newspaper. “We have, sir,” continued the colonel loftily, “only within the last twelve hours become aware of the--er--REAL circumstances of the case. We would regret that the affair had gone so far already, if it had not given us, sir, the opportunity of testifying to your gallantry. We do so gladly; and if--er--er--a FEW YEARS LATER, Mr. Harcourt, you should ever need--a friend in any matter of this kind, I am, sir, at your service.” John Milton gazed half inquiringly, half uneasily at Jack.

“It's all right, Milt,” he said sotto voce. “Shake hands all round and let's go to breakfast. And I rather think that editor wants to employ you HIMSELF.”

It was true, for when that night he climbed eagerly the steep homeward hill he carried with him the written offer of an engagement on the “Pioneer.” As he entered the door his wife's nurse and companion met him with a serious face. There had been a strange and unexpected change in the patient's condition, and the doctor had already been there twice. As he put aside his coat and hat and entered her room, it seemed to him that he had forever put aside all else of essay and ambition beyond those four walls. And with the thought a great peace came upon him. It seemed good to him to live for her alone.

It was not for long. As each monotonous day brought the morning mist and evening fog regularly to the little hilltop where his whole being was now centred, she seemed to grow daily weaker, and the little circle of her life narrowed day by day. One morning when the usual mist appeared to have been withheld and the sun had risen with a strange and cruel brightness; when the waves danced and sparkled on the bay below and light glanced from dazzling sails, and even the white tombs on Lone Mountain glittered keenly; when cheery voices hailing each other on the hillside came to him clearly but without sense or meaning; when earth, sky, and sea seemed quivering with life and motion,--he opened the door of that one little house on which the only shadow seemed to have fallen, and went forth again into the world alone.

CHAPER VII.

Mr. Daniel Harcourt's town mansion was also on an eminence, but it was that gentler acclivity of fashion known as Rincon Hill, and sunned itself on a southern slope of luxury. It had been described as “princely” and “fairy-like,” by a grateful reporter; tourists and travelers had sung its praises in letters to their friends and in private reminiscences, for it had dispensed hospitality to most of the celebrities who had visited the coast. Nevertheless its charm was mainly due to the ruling taste of Miss Clementina Harcourt, who had astonished her father by her marvelous intuition of the nice requirements and elegant responsibilities of their position; and had thrown her mother into the pained perplexity of a matronly hen, who, among the ducks' eggs intrusted to her fostering care, had unwittingly hatched a graceful but discomposing cygnet.

Indeed, after holding out feebly against the siege of wealth at Tasajara and San Francisco, Mrs. Harcourt had abandoned herself hopelessly to the horrors of its invasion; had allowed herself to be dragged from her kitchen by her exultant daughters and set up in black silk in a certain conventional respectability in the drawing-room. Strange to say, her commiserating hospitality, or hospital-like ministration, not only gave her popularity, but a certain kind of distinction. An exaltation so sorrowfully deprecated by its possessor was felt to be a sign of superiority. She was spoken of as “motherly,” even by those who vaguely knew that there was somewhere a discarded son struggling in poverty with a helpless wife, and that she had sided with her husband in disinheriting a daughter who had married unwisely. She was sentimentally spoken of as a “true wife,” while never opposing a single meanness of her husband, suggesting a single active virtue, nor questioning her right to sacrifice herself and her family for his sake. With nothing she cared to affect, she was quite free from affectation, and even the critical Lawrence Grant was struck with the dignity which her narrow simplicity, that had seemed small even in Sidon, attained in her palatial hall in San Francisco. It appeared to be a perfectly logical conclusion that when such unaffectedness and simplicity were forced to assume a hostile attitude to anybody, the latter must be to blame.

Since the festival of Tasajara Mr. Grant had been a frequent visitor at Harcourt's, and was a guest on the eve of his departure from San Francisco. The distinguished position of each made their relations appear quite natural without inciting gossip as to any attraction in Harcourt's daughters. It was late one afternoon as he was passing the door of Harcourt's study that his host called him in. He found him sitting at his desk with some papers before him and a folded copy of the “Clarion.” With his back to the fading light of the window his face was partly in shadow.

“By the way, Grant,” he began, with an assumption of carelessness somewhat inconsistent with the fact that he had just called him in, “it may be necessary for me to pull up those fellows who are blackguarding me in the 'Clarion.'”

“Why, they haven't been saying anything new?” asked Grant, laughingly, as he glanced towards the paper.

“No--that is--only a rehash of what they said before,” returned Harcourt without opening the paper.

“Well,” said Grant playfully, “you don't mind their saying that you're NOT the original pioneer of Tasajara, for it's true; nor that that fellow 'Lige Curtis disappeared suddenly, for he did, if I remember rightly. But there's nothing in that to invalidate your rights to Tasajara, to say nothing of your five years' undisputed possession.”