Part 31 (2/2)
”Oh, Papa!” cried Winifred, rising and throwing her arms about his neck, ”you are such a comfort!”
The old clock on the landing of the stairway struck one.
”There, it is morning already,” said her father. ”Off to bed with you, else I shall have no one to pour out my cup of coffee to-morrow.” As he spoke, he gently unclasped her arms from about his neck, but she would not go quite yet.
”If--if--all this should ever come about, are you quite sure you would be willing to have me leave you?”
”Quite sure, my dear. It is the natural thing, and what is natural must be right. Now, good-night.”
Winifred wiped away the tears which had been hanging on the fringe of her eyelashes, and after a parting hug gathered up her wraps and swept away to her room. Her father watched her tenderly till the last trace of her gown had vanished up the stairs; then he closed the door softly, took a miniature from its case in the drawer, laid it on the table, and bowed his head on both arms above it.
”'Father and Mother both.' Yes, that was what I promised, and that is what I must be so far as I can, and may G.o.d help me!” he murmured.
CHAPTER XIX
A SLUM POST
”Sounding bra.s.s and a tinkling cymbal.”
Despair fells; suspense tortures. The forty odd hours which lay between the ending of the Grahams' dinner and the promised interview with Winifred Anstice stretched out into an eternity to the impatience of Flint. By turns he tried occupation and diversion; yet his ear caught every tick of the clock, which seemed to his exaggerated fancy to have r.e.t.a.r.ded its movement. He found it so impossible to work at his office that he packed up his papers and started for home.
”What! going so early?” called Brooke from his desk.
”Yes, a man cannot do any work here with this everlasting steam-drill outside.”
”You are growing too sensitive for this world, Flint. We shall have to build you a padded room, like Carlyle's, on top of the building.”
Flint vouchsafed no answer. He posted out and up Broadway as if he were in mad haste. Then suddenly recollecting that his chief purpose was to kill time, he moderated his stramming gait to a stroll. At a jeweller's on Union Square he paused, and turned in, ostensibly to order some cards; but pa.s.sing out he stopped surrept.i.tiously before the case of jewels. The rubies interested him most. How well they would look against a certain gray-silk gown! Should he ever dare-- He caught a meaning smile on the face of the clerk, and bolted out of the door.
He paused again at a fas.h.i.+onable florist's shop tucked deftly in among the theatres of central Broadway. The men at the counter were busily engaged over curiously incongruous tasks,--one binding up a cross of lilies, another a wreath for a baby's coffin, and a third preparing a beribboned basket, gay with chrysanthemums, for a dinner-table.
Heedless, like us all, of every one's experiences but his own, Flint stood by, waiting impatiently for the clerk who was putting the last lily in the cross. From the great heaps of roses which stood about he selected an overflowing boxful of the longest-stemmed and most fragrant. The clerk smiled as he watched his recklessness. ”I've seen 'em like that,” he said to himself, ”and two or three years after they'll come in and ask for carnations, and say it doesn't matter if they _were_ brought in yesterday.”
Unconscious of the florist's cynical reflections, Flint tossed him his card, and emerged once more to add one to the moving ma.s.s of humanity on the street. At Madison Square he dropped in at the club and looked over the latest numbers of ”Life” and ”Punch.”
Still time hung heavy on his hands. He looked at his watch; it was just five o'clock,--exactly the time when that objectionable Blathwayt was to call in Stuyvesant Square. Still two hours before dinner.
He left the club, crossed over to Broadway, and jumped onto the platform of the moving cable-car at imminent peril to life and limb.
He rode on in a sort of daze, till he was roused by a sudden jerk and the conductor's call of: ”Central Park--all out here!” Moving with the moving stream of pa.s.sengers, he stepped out of the car, and refusing a green transfer ticket he crossed the street and entered the park at the Seventh Avenue gate, where the path makes a sudden dip from the level of the street. The sun was near its setting, and the chilly wind had swept the walks clear of tricycles and baby carriages. The gray-coated guardian of the peace blinked at him from his sentry box.
Otherwise he had the park to himself, and found an intense pleasure in the solitude, the keen air, and the sharp outlines of the dreary autumn branches against the gorgeous sky.
The west had that peculiar brilliancy which the dwellers on Manhattan would recognize as characteristic of their island in November, if there were not so few who ever get a peep at the sky except perpendicularly at noonday, as they emerge from rows of brownstone houses or overshadowing buildings of fabulous height. Flint was in no mood to sentimentalize over sunsets. The intensely human interests before him drove Nature far away, as a cold abstraction akin to death; yet half unconsciously the scene imprinted itself upon his senses, and long afterward he recalled distinctly the pale grayish-blue of the zenith shading into the rare, cold tint of green, and that again barred over with light gossamer clouds, beneath which lay the glowing bands of orange, red, and violet.
As the sun dropped, the temperature followed it. The wind whistled more keenly through the bare branches. Flint turned up the collar of his overcoat, thrust his hands into his pockets, and quickened his pace.
<script>