The doctor gazed abstractedly after the young man as he moved down the street, and he continued to gaze after him until he had passed from sight in the shadows that lay beneath the whispering maples.
CHAPTER XV
PERHAPS it showed lack of proper feeling, but Oakley managed to sleep off a good deal of his emotional stress, and when he left his hotel the next morning he was quite himself again.
His attitude towards the world was the decently cheerful one of the man who is earning a good salary, and whose personal cares are fax from being numerous or pressing. He was still capable of looking out for Cornish's interests, and his own, too, if the need arose.
He went down to the office alert and vigorous. As he strode along he nodded and smiled at the people he met on the street. If the odium of his father's crime was to attach itself to him it should be without his help. Antioch might count him callous if it liked, but it must not think him weak.
His first official act was to go for Kerr, who was unusually cantankerous, and he gave that frigid gentleman a scare which lasted him for the better part of a week. For Kerr, who had convinced himself overnight that Oakley must resign, saw himself having full swing with the Huckleberry, and was disposed to treat his superior with airy indifference. He had objected to hunting up an old order-book Dan wished to see, on the score that he was too busy, whereat, as Holt expressed it, the latter “jumped on him with both feet.” His second official act was to serve formal notice on Branyon that he was dismissed from the shops, the master-mechanic's dismissal not having been accepted as final, for Branyon had turned up that morning with a black eye as if to go to work. He was even harsh with Miss Walton, and took exception to her spelling of a typewritten letter, which he was sending off to Cornish in London.
He also inspected every department in the shops, and was glad of an excuse he discovered to reprimand Joe Stokes, who was stock-keeper in the carpenter's room, for the slovenly manner in which the stock was handled. Then he returned to the office, and as a matter of discipline kept Kerr busy all the rest of the morning hauling dusty order-books from a dark closet. He felt that if excitement was what was wanted he was the one to furnish it. He had been too easy.
He even read Clarence, whom he had long since given up as hopeless, a moving lecture on the sin of idleness, and that astonished youth, who had fancied himself proof against criticism, actually searched for things to do, so impressed and startled was he by the manager's earnestness, and so fearful was he lest he should lose his place. If that happened, he knew his father would send him to school, and he almost preferred work, so he flew around, was under everybody's feet and in everybody's way, and when Oakley left the office at half-past two, Holt forcibly ejected him, after telling him he was a first-class nuisance, and that if he Stuck his nose inside the door again he'd skin him.