He jumped up at once, his knees still a bit unsteady, but his heart as light as a feather, and feeling, as they made their way back toward the motor, that the falling of the dog into the water had sufficed to change the whole course of his fortunes.
That night, at eight o'clock, he was received in Marshall Hamilton's study, and for twenty minutes was subjected to a rapid fire of questions, searching but not unfriendly, and aimed with a skill that made Atherton understand and appreciate why his employer was a successful man. To the matter of his stock losses Mr. Hamilton came back more than once, but apparently he was willing to forgive this indiscretion, for at the end of their talk it was arranged that Atherton should continue as chauffeur until Monday night, and should then be given a chance in one of the factories of the new company to see whether he could reascend the ladder from which he had been so rudely displaced.
So his opportunity had come to him, and as he left the house and made his way back to the stables, bright visions of the future filled his brain, and he dreamed over and over again, as young men have dreamed since the beginning of time, dreams of youth, dreams of fame, and above all else, dreams of love.
CHAPTER XII
[The Flight of Bellingham]
On the narrow balcony outside his room Atherton sat alone in the darkness, looking forth upon the splendor of the night. Above him stretched the velvet blackness of the heavens, jewelled with bright and luminous stars; from the distant woodland sounded, in ceaseless iteration, the music of the whippoorwills; while from the meadows the south wind, bearing the fragrance of the fields, stirred the ivy on the stable walls and murmured nocturnal melody among the branches of the slumbering pines. Beauty everywhere, on earth and in sky; beauty, it seemed to Atherton, in perfect unison with the thoughts which filled his brain.
"Ye shall be born again." The old Biblical phrase, long forgotten, echoed and re-echoed in his mind. And in his case he knew that it was true; that the events of the last three days had altered the whole current of his being. Already the old life--the feverish hours around the ticker, the crowd of gamblers, the close, stale air of the customers' room, the glare and dazzle of the lights--all of these things seemed part and parcel of another world. Now they were gone, and gone, too, was that horrible concentration on points and fractions; quarters and eighths; to Atherton, gazing upon the calm and silent glory of the night, it seemed incredible that he could ever have lived through times like these.
Midway in his mind, between that past hell and this present heaven, lay the memory of his meeting with Blagden and with Mills. And once again, as he recalled that evening, it seemed to him impossible that he could have been a party to the compact they had made. Like a drunkard only half sobered after a debauch, he knew now that although he had not realized it he had still been under the spell of the market, a beaten gambler, yet in the grip of the lure and lust of the game. Yet his agreement caused him no real uneasiness, for though at the time Blagden's magnetism and his ready eloquence had made all that he had said seem plausible and sane, now, viewed from this distance, the idea of three young men, without money and without influence, solemnly banding together to defy the world, appeared quite childish and absurd. And yet, so far as he was concerned, he was compelled to admit that in one particular Blagden's judgment had certainly been correct; a true adventure had awaited him. How, he wondered, had Mills and Blagden fared. It was difficult to imagine Tubby in any very melodramatic role, but Blagden, after his meeting with his fair acquaintance, seemed destined inevitably to encounter some sort of romance or intrigue. And as Atherton thought of the woman at the café, with her splendid beauty so flauntingly for sale, a sudden sequence of comparisons and contrasts flashed through his mind. There was the life of the ticker, feverish, fascinating, fruitless, ringing empty and hollow when set over against the sane and wholesome life of the man who works for his livelihood. And in like manner there was this traffic and barter of illicit love, morbid, exotic, supersensual, paling to quivering shame when compared with true love, something so earthly and yet so celestial, so passionate and yet so ethereal, so bewildering and so enthralling that it would not let him sleep, but kept him here in the darkness, while the clocks struck twelve, and half-past, and one--
Among the shadows surrounding the house occurred a subtle transformation--a change half sound, half motion, and so faint and evanescent that Atherton, still partly in dreamland and only semi-conscious of the real world about him, regarded it incuriously, oblivious of its real significance. But an instant later he became thoroughly awakened as he saw one of the shadows detach itself from the rest and begin to move, cautiously and without noise, in the direction of the stable. Atherton looked on with interest. "Now who the dickens," he wondered, "can that be? And what in the world is he after? This is a cheerful hour for a man to be taking a walk for his health."
The general attitude of the figure, indeed, suggested secrecy, if not something still more sinister. Slowly and warily it advanced, but the stable was evidently not its destination, for as it passed the huge pine in front of the house it approached it, little by little, until at last the shadow of this nocturnal prowler became lost and merged in the lower branches of the tree. At once Atherton's curiosity increased. "I'd better have a look at this," he decided, and stepping into his room, he slipped his revolver into his pocket, passed quietly down the stairs and began making his way toward the tree. At the edge of its lower branches, which swept the ground, he paused to listen, and heard above him faint sounds which seemed to indicate that this midnight marauder was ascending the tree. Completely mystified, he dropped on hands and knees, and as he crawled inward, an occasional descending branch or bit of bark made it evident that his supposition was correct.