CHAPTER XXVI
A CLIMAX
When Winn reached his room that evening, a letter from Jack Nickerson and a clipping from the Market News was awaiting him. The letter said: "Come at once to the city, but keep shady when you arrive. Go to a hotel and send for me. Rockhaven is up to ten, the street is all short of it, and a bear panic may come any day. Have held your stock to unload at top price. May do it to-morrow, but come anyway."
The clipping was as follows: "As we predicted weeks ago, Rockhaven, in spite of countless rumors put forth by the bears, has crept steadily upward. Most of it is in the hands of conservative investors who know its value, and some day those who sold it so freely for five and six will be bidding fifteen and twenty for it. It is a safe purchase now on any weak spot, and good for ten points more."
And Winn, fresh from the spell of Mona's eyes and the tender mood of that afternoon, felt that he had reached a turning-point in his life and that independence and the end of his suspense were in sight. Go to the city he must, and at once, that was certain, and perhaps a small fortune was almost within his grasp! The thought made his pulses leap. All his life long he had been hardly more than a cipher, a poorly paid menial, and now possible freedom and escape from serfdom was near. Then another impulse came, which was a natural sequence of the others. He had never, since boyhood days, felt that he had a home. His aunt's was but a free boarding place, and irksome at that; the city and its ways were not congenial to him—even the thought of going there now was obnoxious; and as this realization grew, there came to him, much like the sound of church bells, the sincerity, the honest friendship, the simple truth of those people he had for three months lived among. And into this appreciation also entered—Mona.
Like all men, he aspired to some wealth and the protection it means; and now, when a little of it seemed within his grasp, there followed a nobler impulse, and that the home-building one. Then when he thought of the city once more, with its social hypocrisy, its vain display of wealth, its cold, heartless life, where none seemed ready to extend a hand to him, he felt more than ever it never was and never could be a home for him. And then in sharp contrast to one city product, Ethel Sherman, came a thought of the girl who that morning had decked the cave with ferns and flowers, that it might seem more worthy of him. And now herself and her life passed in review. He saw her at home, patient with her mother's whims, helping when and where she could; at church bowing in reverence to the simple devotions and joining in the singing; and in the wild gorge where she hid herself away to practice. This last touch of romance seemed to affect him more than all else, and as he thought of those eyes, into which no shadow of falsehood ever entered, and how all that was beautiful in nature, from the roses that grew between the granite ledges of the island to the boundless ocean beating against its cliffs, appealed to her as to him; insensibly, and quite beyond his power to check, came the sweet illusion of love. Gone for the moment was the memory of Ethel Sherman and the bitterness she had meted out to him, and in its place opened a new world. Gone, too, was the influence of the one man who, above all others, had forced his cynicism upon Winn and taught him distrust of womankind. Almost, but not quite, did this gentle thraldom win, and then—the reaction came.
"I will tell Mona, as a big brother should," he thought, "all she has a right to know, and leave the island as I came. I may return and I may not."
But Winn, of wayward impulse and changeful nature, now buoyant, now despondent, knew not his own heart nor its needs, and understood not at all how some straw, some pebble of chance, would inevitably swerve him in spite of all resolution.
It is thus with us all.