"No," acquiesced the Colonel, this time with an attention which the fervour of his tone attested. "That is very true."
Unhappily true, he might have said without exaggeration. Indeed, were life an opera, and had each person his leit-motif, the Colonel would have taken wherever he went an undertone of jarring excitement. The cymbals would best express the clashing of his hopes and fears; he rose in the night to figure on bits of paper, read the news feverishly each evening, and roused Judith's criticism of his tendency to carry away the stock-market reports. Judith was watching those stocks in which Ellis was interested, but while her concern was merely in the theory of market manipulation, the Colonel's was sadly practical.
And it was on his mind this night that he was near an end; his life's opera was approaching that grand crash when the cymbals were to be drowned by the heavier brasses. In his pocket were barely two hundred dollars in cash, he had placed his last thousand at the broker's, and the broker had sent word that he must have another in the morning. The Colonel looked at his daughters, Beth sweet and Judith proud; he looked at Pease and Ellis, safe from calamity; he looked at Jim with his youth and Mather with his strength. None of them had troubles; he alone was miserable.
And the Colonel, when he could withdraw, went into a corner and brooded over his ill-luck, thus alone, of all the company, failing to remark the special brilliancy of Judith's beauty. Ellis saw it and was proud, for he had caused it; Mather noted it and groaned, for it was not for him; Beth admired; Jim came out of his sulk, swaggered, and made up to her; even Pease was roused to a mild admiration. And Judith herself felt as if she had moved the world a foot from its orbit.
Ellis's news had been important. "Do you remember the advice you gave me?" he had inquired when the two were alone in the little parlour.
"About the corporation lawyer?" she asked eagerly. "Of course! Tell me, have you done anything with him?"
"Anything? Everything!" he responded with enthusiasm. "That magazine told all about him, and I looked him up in New York. He came on here—I don't know how I should have put it through without him."
"Then you have managed it?" she asked.
Indeed he had, he assured her. A man gets—well, misjudged by others, sometimes; there had been a prejudice to overcome before he could affect this consolidation. The others had been unusually shy; the safeguards Ellis offered had not satisfied them. But the lawyer had straightened matters out so that all had gone smoothly, and he, Ellis, had saved money by his means.