A year of foreign travel—illicit though it might have been considered in certain obnoxious quarters—had changed Johnathan in many ways, however. For one thing, it had radically revised his ideas about God. The myriad millions of Asia, in their sordid, gnat-like existence, had caused him to wonder just how “personal” God really was. Anyhow, his conscience was clear about leaving home in so far as God was concerned.
In the first place, he had done his full duty by his children. He had given them a home, food for their growing bodies, clothes for their backs. He had made them attend divine services, he had kept their morals clean and their minds pure. It had been an awful ordeal to keep Nathan away from The Sex. Still he had managed it. That Nathan had promptly married at twenty-one had nothing to do with Johnathan. Johnathan had only been responsible for the boy until maturity. Not one moment after! The boy had become a man then. He had passed out of the father’s jurisdiction. If he had made a hard bed, let him lie in it, indeed. It only went to show he should have taken his loving father’s counsel to heart.
As for leaving his wife, they had nothing in common, with the children married. Why, then, should they live together? Beside, had he not left her in undisputed possession of a ten-thousand-dollar house? Let her sell that house if she so desired and live on the money. Ten thousand dollars should keep her the rest of her life. In fact, Johnathan flattered himself he had done rather handsomely by his wife. No cause for self-execration there! Then how about the box-shop? Ah, yes! The box-shop!
Well, it was this way: In the beginning he had saved eighteen hundred dollars of hard-earned money in spite of his wife’s spendthrift habits, and bought the box-shop. He had obligated himself for thirty-two hundred dollars more in notes. And, thank God, somehow he had paid them. But it had been with his own money, before he turned the factory over to the corporation and accepted stock.
He had been very clever in that transfer. He had taken thirteen thousand dollars’ worth of stock for the five thousand equity he had originally held in the business; well, it belonged to him. If he was cute on a trade, it was the other fellow’s fault if the other fellow didn’t watch out and found himself cheated. Then had come those hectic years when his boy’s ramifications had “grayed his hair.”
Johnathan never thought of them but what he grew angry, even in his exile. What he had suffered from that boy—his crazy ideas, his impertinence—his insolence, his refusal to “go into conference” with his father for the good of the business—his hot-headed, know-it-all, don’t-give-a-damn attitude toward the one in all the world who had done so much for him! How had the father ever “stuck them out”—those years? But he had stuck them out. And he had only left the whole miserable mess when it was self-evident that the unnatural son’s bigotry and business inability were going to pile his beautiful business on the rocks at last. That was only the first law of nature,—self-preservation. Even rats desert a sinking ship, and how much more sensible and intelligent should grown men show themselves than rats! Yet what had he taken from that business that was not due him? That was not his own? He had sold his five-thousand-dollar concern for thirteen thousand dollars. Very good! All he had withdrawn at the last was ten thousand dollars. Not a penny more; ten thousand dollars! Three thousand less than the value of his stock. And to show he had no criminal intent, he had duly made out and endorsed his certificates back to the company—back to the corporation’s treasurer—and left them on Nathan’s desk for transfer. Very good, then! He had simply decided he would rather have his money than the stock and made the swap. Nothing crooked about that! If he had carried away the certificates with him and the money—ah, then he would be a criminal in sight of God and man. But he had simply been shrewd. If his boy was so tarnation smart, let him sell the father’s stock to some one about the village and use the money to reimburse the company for what Johnathan had taken. That the “Board of Directors” had not sanctioned such a purchase from the treasury was nothing to Johnathan. Who were the “Board” but Nathan and Charley Newton and Peter Whipple of the Process Works and one or two others? They never would have understood Johnathan’s domestic position anyhow, or appreciated why he should want to leave home forever. How could they know the indignities and quarrels which had been his portion for twenty-five dreary years? What was the mere technicality of recording such a transfer on the books, anyway? If he had told them first, they would only have objected; and he would have had to hold a meeting and use his stock-control to club them into it. That would have aroused the banks and “pulled down the temple,” making the stock worthless.
No, Johnathan had only exercised ordinary Yankee shrewdness. And yet——
The great, bothersome, indefatigable fact remained that the banks and Paris investors would never see the deal in the light in which Johnathan saw it himself. He could not go home!
Not that he wanted to go home, of course. But still, he could not go home. And it bothered him.
Likewise there was the Carlysle woman. Great, fine, much-to-be-desired romance had come into Johnathan’s life at last.