“Your father loved Mr. Nelson,” said the mother, after a silence during which the two had sat with clasped hands. “And Mr. White too,” she added.
“And didn’t they love him?”
“Yes, once—before they began to make so much money, and after it,—perhaps—sometimes! I don’t know. Mr. Nelson was moved when he came to see me that first time; he meant to be kind about you. To your father he was always the friend he had loved even when he was cut to the heart with John Nelson’s altered ways. There are some people who are born constant.”
“But don’t you mind,” said the boy, a little wistfully, “that I am thrown out of the place? I walked around the town two hours this morning before I could make up my mind to come and tell you, though I knew it Friday. I was afraid it would be too great a shock to you; and yet you don’t seem to think anything of it at all.”
“You will be taken back with a larger salary,” said his mother quietly. “You need not look so startled, Francis. I know Nelson and White—what they used to be, and what they are now; I know them thoroughly. If there were any other way—— Dear, there are some things that I cannot tell you, but your father’s son shall not be turned from his old firm while I live. They must respect the honour of their name. No, don’t tell me not to go to them! I’ll not shame you. I am not going to beg them to take you back again, I have the right to demand it. Trust me, Francis!”
“I do, mother,” said the boy, but half doubtfully, as he stooped and kissed the face raised to his.
It was a pretty face, with a broad low forehead and clear grey eyes, dark now with a purpose that he could not understand. He felt uncomfortable without knowing why, as he met their gaze. There was something in them that was not like mother.
She looked a small enough figure going down the street in her plain black garments and little black bonnet—a small figure to hold the fate of a big business house in that white envelope in her hands. For two years past she had felt that it would come to this some day. The thrill of definite fulfilment tingled now in every tense nerve. The father’s fate should not be his son’s too.
She remembered her husband’s bright faith in the friends of his youth, when they were first married; how he had worked for them with all the powers of body and mind, the manager who ran the business machinery of the house and whose honesty was like the sun, radiating his every act, and whose justice was tempered with mercy. Heaven only knew—and heaven did know—how many boys he had saved from temptation by the kind word in season, how many men he had heartened by his prompt recognition of work well done. He was a man who gave of himself, unvaryingly, to those with whom he came in daily contact, and was a greater factor in the prosperity of the great house than the members of the firm. She remembered how proud he had been of their commercial honesty, and how he had kept his faith in their own personal friendship for him even after the benumbing influences of trade and the exigencies of prosperity had kept them really aloof from each other for months and years. When there was a child born, or a death in the family, the business mask dropped for a few minutes perhaps, to show the old time faces underneath, and the manager loved them, and talked about them long afterwards to his wife. Some day, when John Nelson and Harry White had time——