“Oh yes,” sighed Mrs. Corey. “It’s natural, and it’s right.” But she added, “I suppose they’re glad of him on any terms.”
“That is what I have been taught to believe,” said her husband. “When shall we see our daughter-in-law elect? I find myself rather impatient to have that part of it over.”
Mrs. Corey hesitated. “Tom thinks we had better not call, just yet.”
“She has told him of your terrible behaviour when you called before?”
“No, Bromfield! She couldn’t be so vulgar as that?”
“But anything short of it?”
XXI
Lapham was gone a fortnight. He was in a sullen humour when he came back, and kept himself shut close within his own den at the office the first day. He entered it in the morning without a word to his clerks as he passed through the outer room, and he made no sign throughout the forenoon, except to strike savagely on his desk-bell from time to time, and send out to Walker for some book of accounts or a letter-file. His boy confidentially reported to Walker that the old man seemed to have got a lot of papers round; and at lunch the bookkeeper said to Corey, at the little table which they had taken in a corner together, in default of seats at the counter, “Well, sir, I guess there’s a cold wave coming.”
Corey looked up innocently, and said, “I haven’t read the weather report.”
“Yes, sir,” Walker continued, “it’s coming. Areas of rain along the whole coast, and increased pressure in the region of the private office. Storm-signals up at the old man’s door now.”
Corey perceived that he was speaking figuratively, and that his meteorology was entirely personal to Lapham. “What do you mean?” he asked, without vivid interest in the allegory, his mind being full of his own tragicomedy.
“Why, just this: I guess the old man’s takin’ in sail. And I guess he’s got to. As I told you the first time we talked about him, there don’t anyone know one-quarter as much about the old man’s business as the old man does himself; and I ain’t betraying any confidence when I say that I guess that old partner of his has got pretty deep into his books. I guess he’s over head and ears in ’em, and the old man’s gone in after him, and he’s got a drownin’ man’s grip round his neck. There seems to be a kind of a lull—kind of a dead calm, I call it—in the paint market just now; and then again a ten-hundred-thousand-dollar man don’t build a hundred-thousand-dollar house without feeling the drain, unless there’s a regular boom. And just now there ain’t any boom at all. Oh, I don’t say but what the old man’s got anchors to windward; guess he has; but if he’s goin’ to leave me his money, I wish he’d left it six weeks ago. Yes, sir, I guess there’s a cold wave comin’; but you can’t generally ’most always tell, as a usual thing, where the old man’s concerned, and it’s only a guess.” Walker began to feed in his breaded chop with the same nervous excitement with which he abandoned himself to the slangy and figurative excesses of his talks. Corey had listened with a miserable curiosity and compassion up to a certain moment, when a broad light of hope flashed upon him. It came from Lapham’s potential ruin; and the way out of the labyrinth that had hitherto seemed so hopeless was clear enough, if another’s disaster would befriend him, and give him the opportunity to prove the unselfishness of his constancy. He thought of the sum of money that was his own, and that he might offer to lend, or practically give, if the time came; and with his crude hopes and purposes formlessly exulting in his heart, he kept on listening with an unchanged countenance.
Walker could not rest till he had developed the whole situation, so far as he knew it. “Look at the stock we’ve got on hand. There’s going to be an awful shrinkage on that, now! And when everybody is shutting down, or running halftime, the works up at Lapham are going full chip, just the same as ever. Well, it’s his pride. I don’t say but what it’s a good sort of pride, but he likes to make his brags that the fire’s never been out in the works since they started, and that no man’s work or wages has ever been cut down yet at Lapham, it don’t matter what the times are. Of course,” explained Walker, “I shouldn’t talk so to everybody; don’t know as I should talk so to anybody but you, Mr. Corey.”
“Of course,” assented Corey.
“Little off your feed today,” said Walker, glancing at Corey’s plate.
“I got up with a headache.”
“Well, sir, if you’re like me you’ll carry it round all day, then. I don’t know a much meaner thing than a headache—unless it’s earache, or toothache, or some other kind of ache. I’m pretty hard to suit, when it comes to diseases. Notice how yellow the old man looked when he came in this morning? I don’t like to see a man of his build look yellow—much.”
About the middle of the afternoon the dust-coloured face of Rogers, now familiar to Lapham’s clerks, showed itself among them. “Has Colonel Lapham returned yet?” he asked, in his dry, wooden tones, of Lapham’s boy.
“Yes, he’s in his office,” said the boy; and as Rogers advanced, he rose and added, “I don’t know as you can see him today. His orders are not to let anybody in.”
“Oh, indeed!” said Rogers; “I think he will see me!” and he pressed forward.
“Well, I’ll have to ask,” returned the boy; and hastily preceding Rogers, he put his head in at Lapham’s door, and then withdrew it. “Please to sit down,” he said; “he’ll see you pretty soon;” and, with an air of some surprise, Rogers obeyed. His sere,
