"We ought to have had that thing fixed up. And if it had been handled right, it would have been fixed up now," he said.
Whereat the President, with one of his flashes of clear vision, replied suavely, "And who gave Smith his instructions?"
It was only a chance shot on Mr. Wintermuth's part, but it went straight to the mark, and it rankled. O'Connor knew—or felt reasonably sure—that Smith had not mentioned the matter to any one but himself, yet the chief had struck unerringly the nail's head. And all this endeared Smith but little to the man who had never liked him.
It is none too comfortable to work for a man who will covertly begrudge you your successes and indifferently conceal his satisfaction at your mistakes; for the stoutest hearted it is a discouraging business. This Smith found it, and he would have found it still more discouraging had it not been for the exuberance of his enthusiasm for his profession and his healthy appetite for most real things that came his way—real work, real pleasures, real sport, and perhaps a few real follies. Many times, after a bad hour spent in a futile defense against the only half-perceptible hostility of O'Connor, he would find himself seriously questioning whether he would not do more wisely to leave the Guardian and hazard a new fortune in another field. Yet all the while he knew that this course of speculation was idle and a waste of time and cerebral tissues. He was a Guardian man, and with the Guardian he was going to stay—unless the Company itself took a different view. Of course there was a time coming when Mr. Wintermuth would lay down his badge of office, but before that time much would occur. Sufficient unto that day would be its own evil, without enhancing it by imaginary additions. So Smith stood by his post, but there was at times an expression in his face which gave F. Mills O'Connor himself cause for careful consideration.
But to Darius Howell, somewhat awkwardly saying good-by at the
Guardian's door, Smith's smile was as sunny as the skies of Schuyler,
Maine. For troubles often turned out to be largely imaginary, while
Darius was indubitably real.
CHAPTER VI
Promptly at nine o'clock in the morning of every business day for fifteen years, Hannibal G. Pelgram, uncle of Stanwood Pelgram, had seated himself at his desk in the office of the Pelgram Plumbers' Supply Company, and it was rarely that he left before his stenographer had begun to show signs of impatience and anxiety. But in the sixteenth year of his reign his liver, which up to that time had acted with the most commendable regularity, began to develop alarming eccentricities of behavior. Mr. Pelgram became gradually less certain in his attendance, and finally his struggle with the refractory liver ended in the victory of that inconspicuous but important organ, and he passed peacefully away at a German spa in the course of taking a cure which would very likely have killed him even had he been in perfectly normal health.
His will began by the customary direction to his executor to pay his just debts and funeral expenses—exactly as though the executor was assumed to be a thoroughly unscrupulous person who, although not benefiting himself in the least by his dishonesty, would try in every possible way to evade settlement with all the dead man's legitimate creditors, including the undertaker. Then he left a small bequest to a faithful cook and another to an endowed retreat for tuberculous Baptists which already had more money than it could hope ever to use. The residue, consisting principally of stock in the Plumbers' Supply Company, went to Stanwood, with the earnest wish that his nephew enter and eventually assume the direction of the business with which the family name had been so long and so honorably identified.
Stanwood received the news with modified rapture. He was grateful for financial independence, but the idea of taking up the bathtub business struck him with dismay. So with prudent forethought he sought out Amory Carruth, a lawyer of his acquaintance; and to him explained his dilemma. It required some measure of specious ingenuity to explain his errand as he wished; but Mr. Carruth, being used to squirming legatees, understood and came to the point with a candor which made Pelgram wince. After first flippantly suggesting that the plumbing business would at least afford Pelgram the chance to indulge his taste in porcelains, he eased the artist's mind by a phrase as soothing as it was noncommittal.
"You can follow your uncle's will as regards the disposition of his property. That part is sane enough. Whether it was equally sagacious, equally sane, to try to plunge you into the plumbing business is not so clear. We are, therefore, clearly justified if we say that he knew how he wished to dispose of his estate, but his mental condition was such that his legatee felt justified in modifying—in some degree—certain of his requests."