Nancy took him home at last, bewildered and broken, and it was arranged that Luke should come to see him that evening, after he had dined and rested, and tell him more of the grim details.
Glen, left alone with Luke, felt a great uprushing tide of loyalty and admiration engulfing her. No wonder he had become almost a fanatic on work, with this avalanche of debt and treachery sliding down upon the Altonia! No wonder he had seemed ruthless in his zeal to make up for the scandalous losses!
She, too, had liked and trusted old Ben Birdsall, and was shocked at his deep and calculating wickedness, and the whole thing left her dazed and shaken. Timidly, she tried to make Luke see a little of what she was feeling, but he took her words somberly, in a deep preoccupation, and she slipped away, to leave him with his grave and serious responsibilities.
When she came down to breakfast next morning Miss Ada’s eyes, never without the look of recent tears, showed signs of fresh weeping. Mr. ’Gene Carey, after a long evening with his superintendent, had fallen into an uneasy sleep, and at four in the morning had suffered a stroke. One side was paralyzed, and he could not speak.
Glen went down the hill to work in a tight-lipped silence. In view of his dreadful physical calamity, added to his business tragedy, and remembering his stout-hearted loyalty to old Ben, it was impossible to keep on casting him for the villain of the piece. She did not idealize him in the least, but she pitied him, and saw him for what he was—a rather futile and pathetic unit in a vicious feudal system. The bulk of her rage and resentment, hereafter, would center on Peter Parker of Pasadena, and directly she reached the mill she found Black Orlo and held earnest converse with him.
Mr. Carey’s condition, after a week, was more hopeful. Save for a slight thickness of speech, he was able to talk normally, and the doctors promised that he would be getting about with a cane in three months’ time. He was, his daughter told her friends, the vast tribe of Careys and Tenafees and their ilk who “claimed kin,” simply angelic in his patience and gentleness, and he showed a touching and pitiful gratitude to his young henchman, Luke Manders.
The superintendent had confessed that he had been putting his own salary back into the business ever since the revelation of old Ben Birdsall’s duplicity, and the Altonia’s trembling on the brink of ruin: the mill owed him considerably more than a thousand dollars.
“You must keep account, boy,” his employer said brokenly. “You shall have every penny back, and interest—yes, sir, by the eternal. Eight per cent! Just let me get in action again—oh, damn this fool leg—and we’ll work it out! We’ll get her afloat again!”
There was no possible doubt of it, Manders assured him, and he was not to worry about his back pay; his expenses were small, and he had saved a good deal. Any time at all would do; he was in no hurry; Mr. Carey was to forget that, and hurry up and get well again. Miss Ada would have been amazed beyond measure at the gentleness, the respect, the veneration of the young savage; it made Nancy Carey’s hazel gaze grow liquid and tender.
The weeks went on in a dull procession; Mr. Carey improved slowly, Gloriana-Virginia grew slowly worse; Luke Manders made himself slowly more and more necessary to his employer; Glen Darrow began slowly to accumulate a small and austere trousseau. It was a heavy and languid spring, humid and enervating. Gloriana-Virginia seemed visibly to shrink and shrivel, but she lived so completely in her fairy tales that she was quite literally absent from the body and present with the witches and the princess and the ogres.