“Yes; they have put the pressure on at a time when it seems unnecessary; but they are all disposed to be over-cautious now, I suppose.”
“I told them all along the stringency was only temporary, and they used me—were glad to use my name—to help uphold the city’s credit; and now—now——”
“Let us forget all that for a minute, father,” said Wayne, kindly. “It’s about these loans that I want to speak to you. Walsh is trying to save the good things until you can realize on them to advantage. The notes now falling due will be cared for.”
“No; they say they won’t renew them! And my friends elsewhere refuse to help.”
“It is all arranged,” said Wayne quietly. “I have taken them up myself and given my own in place of them. You may be at ease about them. I will carry them as long as you want me to. Here are the old notes. They are cancelled, you see.”
He had spoken with a gentleness he had never used to any being before. His father’s helplessness had disarmed any lingering resentment; he faced a sadly decrepit old man in whom there was no spark of hope. Why had their lives been so irreconcilably at variance? In the Virginia hills and at Denbeigh he had thought much of this. Jean had helped him; Paddock and Stoddard had lifted and urged him on; to Walsh and Wingfield he was under definite obligations; and Joe—even Joe—had made sacrifices for him; but his father had never dealt with him as an individual, but rather as a type. Even in his childhood they had never met on any common ground. He had never been conscious of a father’s faith or sympathy. His father, with his head in the clouds, had merely stumbled in annoyance over his son’s playthings.
But he realized now that life nobly lived is not an affair of reprisal and vengeance, or even of measured reciprocity. What he had missed through his father’s vanity and selfishness was nothing when weighed against this new experience of the joy of giving and serving.
He put into his father’s hands the little bundle of notes he had gathered up at the banks, with the cancellation marks stamped upon them. Roger Craighill gazed at them dully. His mind did not at once comprehend what it was that his son had done.
“That is all there is of that, but there is something else I have to say. You are my father. I have used you ill; I have brought shame upon you, and in my bitterness against you I have sought to injure you—in infamous ways that I won’t describe. The night old Gregory died here——”
Colonel Craighill lifted his head quickly and raised his hand in quite his old authoritative manner.