"You have assumed your father's debts?" I exclaimed. "That seems a needless penalty, Jack."
"My father and I are as one," said he gently. "It was fortunate for me in every way that I was not my father's partner. When I entered Holt & Co. he gave up everything to me. I have the entire business now, and it leaves me little unoccupied time."
"You are doing well, I trust."
"Reasonably well." I knew the look on his heavy, sombre face—a patient but combative look, powerful as Fate itself.
"Do you mind telling me the rest, Jack?" I asked after a time. "If it hurts you don't open your lips."
The veins in his forehead swelled a little, yet he neither flinched nor reddened. "I suppose," he answered, his voice a little less clear and distinct, "you allude to my engagement to Miss Lenox. It was broken off when these troubles came. We were to have been married a year ago in June, but I was not quite free to take her travelling, and it seemed her wish to wait. The wedding-day was quite fixed for a fortnight after the date of my poor father's sickness. Of course I offered her her freedom at once when I realized my scanty prospects of ensuring her a luxurious future. Naturally, everything was broken off. I am hampered by circumstances. I shall never feel myself free to live even in ordinary comfort until my father's debts are paid to the last penny. My first duty is to my father and mother. My sisters are all married, have large families, and, above all, have lost the home feeling. We three are alone in the world in our reverses. When you see our home, Floyd, you won't wonder that I could not ask Georgy to come to it."
"But would she have come, Jack?" I stammered. "Was she faithful to you? would she not wait for you?"
"Georgy is not romantic," he said kindly, "and has not been brought up in a school which inspires the tenderest feelings. I should never have expected that sort of devotion from her, nor am I one to inspire it. I knew at once when the dark days came that everything was over. Blow after blow had struck me: just at that time that she should desert me was but one blow the more."
I threw my arm about him in the old way, but he did not turn now and smile into my face as when we were boys. This gloom was not so easily dispelled.
He himself ended the silence that I could not bring myself to break. "I have heard of a divided duty, but I can have no doubts, no dilemmas, as to mine. I believe that I am not fanciful—that I see realities just as they are. If ever man found work lying close to his hands, I have found it. If ever an entire and undivided responsibility rested upon human creature, it is mine. Every instinct of my heart, every decision of my intellect, alike shows me that my duty lies in the path which I am treading. Nobody on earth, nobody but God, knows just exactly what I have felt the few past months. I couldn't write to you and Harry. Life had always been a pleasant thing to me. My father was not a lovable man, nor was he in his home all that a son longs for in a father. Still, he was rich and respected; he represented a beneficent financial power; he controlled many interests, developed resources, carried out schemes which were useful alike to poor and rich. I used to be proud to hear it said, 'That is young Holt, son of Adam Holt of the —— Mills.' Now I am obliged to bear with meekness, when he is called dishonest, when he is classed with those who have suffered the punishment of convicted felons, when his pitiful infirmity of body and mind is sneered at. We are living in our house as transient guests: as soon as it can be sold we shall seek some humbler shelter. The pleasant household ways are all gone: everything that used to gladden our eyes has been carried away. My mother's eyes rest nowhere save on my father's face or mine: she cannot look at the bare places in the house, for she thinks too much then of her great calamity. All these are troubles which cut me deep: you don't know, Floyd, how disgrace burns into the soul—worse than bereavement, worse than death. I have been bereaved of all, and I seem to have tasted the bitterness of a thousand deaths. Still"—he turned abruptly and looked me in the eyes with a stiff white face—"there are times when I feel but one loss. There is strength in me, and, please God, by and by I shall shape things to their right ends again; but this other loss! I don't need to tell you," he went on huskily, "how above and beyond all other objects on earth Georgy Lenox has been to me. At times, retrievement, success, unsullied honor, all seem to me as nothing, since she is not to be at the end of them."