Part 4 (1/2)
”That Hardscrabbler's young 'un,” he said. ”She was crying quietly to herself, in the darkness outside the jail, poor little tyke. So I picked her up, and” (with a sort of tender awkwardness) ”she was glad to come with me. Seemed to kind of take to me. Kiddies generally do.”
”Do they? That's curious.”
”I suppose you think so,” replied the quack, without rancor.
”What are you going to do with her?”
”I'll see, later. At present I'm going to keep her here with us. She's only seven, and her mother's dead. Are you staying here to-night?”
”Got to. Missed my connection.”
”Then at least you'll let me pay your hotel bill, if you won't take my money.”
”Why, yes: I suppose so,” said the other grudgingly. ”I'll look at the boy in the morning. But he'll be all right. Only, don't take up your itinerating again for a few days.”
”I'm through, I tell you. Give me a growing city to settle in and I'll go in for the regular proprietary manufacturing game. Know anything about Worthington?”
”Yes.”
”Pretty good, live town?”
”First-cla.s.s, and not too critical, I suppose, to accept your business,”
said Dr. Elliot dryly. ”I'm on my way there now for a visit. Well, I must get my little girl.”
The itinerant opened the door, looked, and beckoned. The boy lay on his pillow, the girl was curled in her chair, both fast asleep. Their hands were lightly clasped.
Dr. Elliot lifted his ward and carried her away. The itinerant, returning to the Hardscrabbler girl, took her out to arrange the night's accommodation for her. So, there slept that night under one roof and at the charge of Professor Andrew L. Certain, five human beings who, long years after, were destined to meet and mingle their fates, intricate, intimate strands in the pattern of human weal and woe.
CHAPTER II
OUR LEADING CITIZEN
The year of grace, 1913, commended itself to Dr. L. Andre Surtaine as an excellent time in which to be alive, rich, and sixty years old.
Thoroughly, keenly, ebulliently alive he was. Thoroughly rich, also; and if the truth be told, rather ebulliently conscious of his wealth. You could see at a glance that he had paid no usurious interest to Fate on his success; that his vigor and zest in life remained to him undiminished. Vitality and a high satisfaction with his environment and with himself as well placed in it, radiated from his bulky and handsome person; but it was the vitality that impressed you first: impressed and warmed you; perhaps warned you, too, on shrewder observation. A gleaming personality, this. But behind the radiance one surmised fire. Occasion given, Dr. Surtaine might well be formidable.
The world had been his oyster to open. He had cleaved it wide.
Ill-natured persons hinted, in reference to his business, that he had used poison rather than the knife wherewith to loosen the stubborn hinges of the bivalve. Money gives back small echo to the cries of calumny, however. And Dr. Surtaine's Certina, that infallible and guaranteed blood-cure, eradicator of all known human ills, ”famous across the map of the world,” to use one of its advertising phrases, under the catchword of ”Professor Certain's Certina, the Sure-Cure” (for he preserved the old name as a trade-mark), had made a vast deal of money for its proprietor. Worthington estimated his fortune at fifteen millions, growing at the rate of a million yearly, and was not preposterously far afield. In a city of two hundred thousand inhabitants, claimed (one hundred and seventy-five thousand allowed by a niggling and suspicious census), this is all that the most needy of millionaires needs. It was all that Dr. Surtaine needed. He enjoyed his high satisfaction as a hard-earned increment.
Something more than satisfaction beamed from his face this bl.u.s.tery March noon as he awaited the Worthington train at a small station an hour up the line. He fidgeted like an eager boy when the whistle sounded, and before the cars had fairly come to a stop he was up the steps of the sleeper and inside the door. There rose to meet him a tall, carefully dressed and pressed youth, whose exclamation was evenly apportioned between welcome and surprise.
”Dad!”
”Boy-ee!”
To the amus.e.m.e.nt of the other pa.s.sengers, the two seized each other in a bear-hug.
”Oof!” panted the big man, releasing his son. ”That's the best thing that's happened to me this year. George” (to the porter), ”get me a seat. Get us two seats together. Aren't any? Perhaps this gentleman,”