There were a few people—discerning souls—who looked deeper than this and even felt pity for the man. They said that his state of frozen composure was unnatural, and that there was somewhere a reason for it; he had received some shock, he had a secret trouble, or had been disappointed in love, or had in some way lost faith in his fellow-men, or perhaps, it was hinted, his brain might be affected. It was a well-known fact that he had been a cheerful lad, a little sober in his ways, inasmuch as he had begged his father to take him from school and give him a seat in his office, yet still a lad happy and companionable in his tastes, and showing no sign of the prematurely grave and reserved man that he was so suddenly to become.
This change in him dated from the time that the firm suffered so heavily from the defalcations of the French bookkeeper, and most people believed that this was the true cause of Stanton Armour’s peculiarities. He had been very much attached to the Frenchman, and his sudden falling into crime had given him a terrible shock. And stepping into the disgraced man’s shoes as soon as he did, would have been an occurrence to sober a much more flighty lad than he had ever been. From the day of Étienne Delavigne’s departure, Stanton Armour in spite of his youth, had begun to take upon himself a strange interest and oversight of his father’s business, and in an incredibly short space of time was admitted to a partnership in the house.
As the years went by, though his father was still nominally head of the firm, he it was who managed all important transactions. Very quietly this went on, and only the devoted servants of the house saw the persistent pushing of the father out of the places of responsibility by his youthful, talented, and apparently intensely ambitious son.
Outsiders, when the fact became impressed upon them, supposed it was Colonel Armour’s good pleasure that his son should be master in place of himself, but such was not the case. The head of the house had been primarily a man of pleasure, but he also loved his business, and had thrown himself into it with a zeal and relish and a skill for making money that had made him the envy and despair of men less fortunate than himself. Then, after the lapse of years, he found himself quietly excluded from the excitements of business life. His son reigned while he was yet alive. He resented this at first, with a wickedness and fury and a sense of impotence that had at times made him feel like a madman, but in late years more wisdom had come to him, and for Stanton to mention a thing was to have his father’s ready acquiescence.
The members of the family and intimate friends of the house knew that there was no sympathy between father and son, and very little intercourse. They rarely spoke to each other, except in the presence of strangers. Stanton was master in the business and master at home. He occupied the seat of honor at the table, and his father was as a guest. Colonel Armour did not even sleep under his own roof, though this was his own doing, and of his usual place of sojourn we have to speak.
The grounds at the back of Pinewood sloped gradually down to that beautiful inlet of the sea—the Northwest Arm. Behind the house were on the one side, a flower garden, a tennis lawn, and a boat house; and on the other a semicircular stretch of pines, that began in front of the house, and with a growth of smaller evergreens formed a thick, wedge-shaped mass down to the water’s edge.
A few places there were where lanes had been cut among the trees and gravel walks formed. The broadest of the walks led to a handsome cottage, where dwelt Colonel Armour, at such times as he was neither away from home, nor up at the large house, his usual attendant being a Micmac Indian rejoicing in the name of Joe Christmas.
Joe would not sleep under the roof of a substantially built house. That would be too great a stretch of Indian devotion. The Micmacs do not take kindly to indoor life, and every night when his day’s work was done, Joe paddled himself in his small canoe across the Arm, where he had a solitary wigwam among the firs and spruces of a bit of woodland belonging to the Armours.
Valentine Armour made a constant jest of the Indian’s wildwood habits. “Plenty trees, Joe,” he would say, pointing to the pines about the house. “Build wigwam here.”
“No, no;” and Joe would shake his head, and show his tobacco-stained teeth in amusement. “Too near big house. Too much speakum.”