“Now, father,” laughed the girl, “once more! There! Why, you step off like a major!”
They were familiar figures, out there in the park, for almost daily during the past few weeks they might have been seen, as the girl laughingly said, “practicing their steps.” And daily the man’s control became firmer; daily that limp left arm and leg seemed increasingly to manifest life.
On a bench near by sat a dark-featured woman. About her played her boy, filling the air with his merry shouts and his imperfect English.
“There, father, comes Josè after us,” announced the girl, looking off with love-lit eyes at an approaching automobile. “And Lewis is with him. Now, mind, you are going to get into the car without any help!”
The man laughed, and declared vehemently that if he could not get in alone he would walk home. A few minutes later they had gone.
The profound depth of those changes which had come into the rich man’s life, he himself might not fathom. But those who toiled daily with him over his great ledgers and files knew that the transformation went far. There were flashes at times of his former vigor and spirit of domination, but there were also periods of grief that were heart-rending to behold, as when, poring over his records for the name of one whom in years past he had ruthlessly wrecked, he would find that the victim had gone in poverty beyond his power to reimburse him. And again, when his thought dwelt on Avon, and the carnal madness which had filled those new graves there, he would sink moaning into his chair and bury his drawn face in his hands and sob.
And yet he strove madly, feverishly, to restore again to those from whom he had taken. The Simití company was revived, through his labors, and the great La Libertad restored to its reanimated stockholders. Work of development had begun on the property, and Harris was again in Colombia in charge of operations. The Express was booming, and the rich man had consecrated himself to the carrying out of its clean policies. The mills at Avon were running day and night; and in a new location, far from the old-time “lungers’ alley,” long rows of little cottages were going up for their employes. The lawyer Collins had been removed, and Lewis Waite was to take his place within a week. Father Danny, now recovered, rejoiced in resources such as he had never dared hope to command.
And so the rich man toiled––ah, God! if he had only known before that in the happiness of others lay his own. If only he could have known that but a moiety of his vast, unused income would have let floods of sunshine into the lives of those dwarfed, stunted children who toiled for him, and never played! Oh, if when he closed his mills in the dull months he had but sent them and their tired mothers to the country fields, how they would have risen up and called him blessed! If he could have but known that he was his brother’s keeper, and in a sense that the world as yet knows not! For he is indeed wise who loves his fellow-men; and he is a fool who hates them!
The great Fifth Avenue mansion was dark, except where 262 hung a cluster of glowing bulbs over the rich mahogany table in the library. There about that table sat the little group of searchers after God, with their number augmented now in ways of which they could not have dreamed. And Hitt, great-souled friend of the world, was speaking again as had been his wont in the days now gone.