The Lords of High Decision

by Meredith Nicholson

Wayne and Joe sat on a bench in the capitol grounds and fed the squirrels. They had inspected the building with care and Joe pronounced it good. The mood of depression with which Wayne had left home clung to him, but Joe, watching him narrowly, felt that the cloud was less dark to-day.

“This is nice grass,” Joe observed. “I wonder why town grass is always nicer than country grass?”

Wayne smiled, and Joe was encouraged.

“You rankest of cockneys! There was good grass in the world before the day of lawn mowers. What do you think we’re going to do now?”

This question had troubled Joe since their flight. He had an immense respect for Wayne; it was inconceivable that Mr. Wayne Craighill, a gentleman of property, a member of clubs, and a person otherwise indulged and favoured by Fortune, should not weary of this idle adventure and go home. He was confident that his companion would come to himself soon, but he would follow him to the world’s end. Just now, as evening stole over the town, Joe was hungry and Wayne’s indifference to the stomach’s pinch was inexplicable. He did not dare propose that they seek food. Wayne was chief of the expedition and it was not for a mere private in the ranks to make suggestions.

“Did you ever try tramping?” Wayne asked presently.

“I can’t say that I ever did, sir. You mean followin’ the railroad and dodgin’ the cops? Sleepin’ in barns and jails and takin’ a hand-out and a dog-bite at back doors. I ain’t choosy, but I ain’t for it, Mr. Wayne. I like the varnished cars myself.”

Wayne did not debate the matter. He did not see his future clearly; the world was bitter in his mouth. He was fumbling the alphabet of life like a child with lettered blocks, soberly piling them in false positions with the X of unknown quantity in the middle. Once more he had suffered defeat at his father’s hands. The newspaper accounts of Andrew Gregory’s death, on which he had pounced the day after his flight, had been the briefest: he had dropped dead while calling at the home of his old friend, Roger Craighill! Cheated again in satisfying his hatred of his father, the knowledge that Roger Craighill had lied to the doctors was poor consolation. He had submitted himself, a willing Isaac, to be laid on Abraham’s altar, but the right to perish had been denied him. He was utterly morbid; there was no health in him. He was still, in Stoddard’s phrase, a man in search of his own soul, though he did not know it. He had stood between the pillars of life without power to shake them down. He sat, as it were, on the steps beneath the high arch, a defeated Samson. But he would never go back; that was definitely determined; and by continuing his exile he might perhaps intensify his father’s penitence, for Roger Craighill had, he assumed, some sort of conscience that would rest uneasy under the suppressed fact that he had laid violent hands on Andrew Gregory.

He felt, at times, a pity for his father’s wife. She knew! And a man of less imagination could not have failed to picture the new relations of Roger Craighill and his wife with the common knowledge of that night hanging over them. There were people who might feel his loss out of their world; there were Wingfield and Walsh, and there was Paddock—he believed they would be sorry and miss him, but one man more or less in the grand sum of things is nothing. He had failed in good as in evil intentions—failed even Jean who had asked him to care for her grandfather and save him from any such catastrophe as that which must now have brought misery upon her, for the old man’s death had undoubtedly interrupted her work, and she must hate him for his worthlessness. He accepted his fate sullenly; his life was ill-starred, its ordering futile.

He recalled Joe from his contemplation of the squirrels and they went to a hotel that Joe had known in other days, and lodged for the night. Wayne had let his beard grow, and his clothes were the worse for rain and dust. But the differences between them were reconciled by these changes, and they looked like two mechanics in search of employment. The thousand dollars with which Wayne had left home had melted slowly. The bulk of the small bills was an embarrassment and he divided them with Joe.