"Miss Ewold, you mean?"
"Yes!"
"Jack, I know! I understand! Who should understand if not I?" The father drew Jack's hand into his own, and the fluid force of his desire for mastery was flowing out from his finger-ends into the son's fibres, which were receptively sensitive to the caress. "I know what it is when the woman you love dismisses you! You have her to think of as well as yourself. Your own wish may not be lord. You may not win that which will not be won"—how well he knew that!—"either by protest, by persistence, or by labor. You are dealing with the tender and intangible; with feminine temperament, Jack. And, Jack, it is wise for you, isn't it, to bear in mind that your life has not been normal? With the switch from desert to city life homesickness has crept over you. From to-night things will not be so strange, will they? But if you wish a change, go to Europe—yes, go, though I cannot bear to think of losing you the very moment that we have come to know each other; when the past is clear and amends are at hand.
"And, Jack, if your mother were here with us and were herself, would she want you to go back to take up a rifle instead of your work at my side? I do not pretend to understand Jasper Ewold's or Mary Ewold's thoughts. She has preferred to make another generation's ill-feeling her own in a thing that concerns her life alone. She has seen enough of you to know her mind. For, from all I hear, you have not been a faint-hearted lover. Is it fair to her to follow her back to the desert? Is it the courage of self-denial, of control of impulse on your part? Would your mother want you to persist in a veritable conquest by force of your will, whose strength you hardly realize, against Mary Ewold's sensibilities? And if you broke down her will, if you won, would there be happiness for you and for her? Jack, wait! If she cares for you, if there is any germ of love for you in her, it will grow of itself. You cannot force it into blossom. Come, Jack, am I not right?"
Jack's hands lay cold and limp in his father's; so limp that it seemed only a case of leading, now. Yet there was always the uncertain in the boy; the uncertain hovering under that face of ashes that the father was so keenly watching; a face so clearly revealing the throes of a struggle that sent cold little shivers into his father's warm grasp. Jack's eyes were looking into the distance through a mist. He dropped the lids as if he wanted darkness in which to think. When he raised them it was to look in his father's eyes firmly. There was a half sob, as if this sentimentalist, this Señor Don't Care, had wrung determination from a precipice edge, even as Mary Ewold had. He gripped his father's hands strongly and lifted them on a level with his breast.
"You have been very fine, father! I want you to be patient and go on helping me. The trail is a rough one, but straight, now. I—I'm too brimming full to talk!" And blindly he left the library.
When the door closed, John Wingfield, Sr. seized the telegram, rolled it up with a glad, fierce energy and threw it into the waste-basket. His head went up; his eyes became points of sharp flame; his lips parted in a smile of relief and triumph and came together in a straight line before he sank down in his chair in a collapse of exhaustion. After a while he had the decanter brought in; he gulped a glass of brandy, lighted another cigar, and, swinging around, fell back at ease, his mind a blank except for one glowing thought:
"He will not go! He will give up the girl! He is to be all mine!"
It is said that the best actors never go on the stage. They play real parts in private life, making their own lines as they watch the other players. One of this company, surveying the glint of his bookcases, was satisfied with the greatest effort of his life in his library.