- Chapter X. Forebodings.
Jubilation! Jubilation now, instead of Consternation, in the office of Mr. Benjamin Brummage in Wall Street.
President Brummage had convoked his Directors to hear the First Semiannual Report of the new Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.
And there they sat around the green table, no longer forlorn and dreading a failure, but all chuckling with satisfaction over their prosperity.
They were a happy and hilarious family now, — so hilarious that the President was obliged to be always rapping to Orderr with his paper-knife.
Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself as a Director of so successful a Company. The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider itself as permanent in the newspapers, and the Treasurer had very unnecessarily inserted the notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of already.
When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed the honor of having discovered Wade, or at least of having been the first to appreciate him.
They all invited him to dinner, — the others at their houses, Sam Gwelp at his club.
They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick. They still remembered the panic of last summer. They passed a unanimous vote of the most complimentary confidence in Wade, approved of his system, forced upon him an increase of salary, and began to talk of “launching out” and doubling their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors do when all is serene.
Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the absurdities of the Board and all their vague propositions.
“Dunderbunk,” said Churm, “was a company started on a sentimental basis, as many others are.”
“Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?”
“Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber, risen from a retailer somewhere in the country. He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work. He wanted to deal in something more masculine than lace and ribbons. He read a sentimental article on Iron in the ‘Journal of Commerce’: how Iron held the world together; how it was nerve and sinew; how it was ductile and malleable and other things that sounded big; how without Iron civilization would stop, and New-Zealanders hunt rats among the ruins of London; how anybody who would make two tons of Iron grow where one grew before was a benefactor to the human race greater than Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon; and so on, — you know the eloquent style. Brummage’s soul was fired. He determined to be greater than the three heroes named. He was oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about among the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper article in his hand, and fired their souls. They determined to be great Iron-Kings, — magnificent thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers, ‘If all the iron rails made at the Dunderbunk Works in the last six months were put together in a straight line, they would reach twice round our terraqueous globe and seventy-three miles two rails over.’ So on that poetic foundation they started the concern.”
Wade laughed. “But how did you happen to be with them?”
“Oh! my friend Damer sold them the land for the shop and took stock in payment. I came into the Board as his executor. Did I never tell you so before?”
“No.”
“Well, then, be informed that it was in Miss Damer’s behalf that you knocked down Friend Tarbox, and so got your skates for saving her property. It’s quite a romance already, Richard, my boy! and I suppose you feel immensely bored that you had to come down and meet us old chaps, instead of tumbling at her feet on the ice again to-day.”
“A tumble in this wet day would be a cold bath to romance.”
The Gulf Stream had sent up a warm spoil-sport rain that morning. It did not stop, but poured furiously the whole day.
From Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, on both sides of the river, all the skaters swore at the weather, as profane persons no doubt did when the windows of heaven were opened in Noah’s time. The skateresses did not swear, but savagely said, “It is too bad,” — and so it was.
Wade, loaded with the blessings of his Directors, took the train next morning for Dunderbunk.
The weather was still mild and drizzly, but promised to clear. As the train rattled along by the river, Wade could see that the thin ice was breaking up everywhere. In mid-stream a procession of blocks was steadily drifting along. Unless Zero came sliding down again pretty soon from Boreal regions, the sheets that filled the coves and clung to the shores would also sail away southward, and the whole Hudson be left clear as in midsummer.
At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of Wade’s train, and, looking out he saw Mr. and Mrs. Skerrett alighting.
He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to them.
“We have just been telegraphed here,” said Peter, gravely. “The son of a widow, a friend of ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of the river. He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and the mother depends upon me for advice. We have come down to say a kind word. Why won’t you report us to the ladies at my house, and say we shall not be at home until the evening train? They do not know the cause of our journey except that it is a sad one.”
“Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for them at dinner, Peter,” Fanny suggested.
“Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up. Dinner’s at six.”
Here the engine whistled. Wade promised to “shine substitute” at his friend’s board, and took his place again. The train galloped away.
Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over the fortunate incident of this meeting, and went on their kind way to carry sympathy and such consolation as might be to the widow.
The train galloped northward. Until now, the beat of its wheels, like the click of an enormous metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures singing in Wade’s brain. He was hurrying back, exhilarated with success, to the presence of a woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously by any number of conclaves of overjoyed Directors, and signed by Brummage after Brummage, with the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight at a ten per cent dividend.
But into this joyous mood of Wade’s the thought of death suddenly intruded. He could not keep a picture of death and drowning out of his mind. As the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth after breadth of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting files of ice-blocks, he found himself staring across the dreary waste and forever fancying some one sinking there, helpless and alone.
He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy boy, venturing out carelessly along the edges of the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives way, the little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a fragment, struggles a moment, is borne along in the relentless flow of the chilly water, stares in vain shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of agony, and is gone.
But whenever this inevitable picture grew before Wade’s eyes, as the drowning figure of his fancy vanished, it suddenly changed features, and presented the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond succor.
Of course he knew that this was but a morbid vision. Yet that it came at all, and that it so agonized him, proved the force of his new feeling.
He had not analyzed it before. This thought of death became its touchstone.
Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated, straightforward, isolated, judge men and women as friends or foes at once and once for all. He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a heart as true, whole, noble, and healthy as his own. A fine instinct had told him that she was waiting for her hero, as he was for his heroine.
So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly; for all his life, and all his lesser forgotten or discarded passions, had been training him for this master one.
He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it had only been a beautiful bewilderment of uncomprehended delight, until this haunting vision of her fair face sinking amid the hungry ice beset him. Then he perceived what would be lost to him, if she were lost.
The thought of Death placed itself between him and Love. If the love had been merely a pretty remembrance of a charming woman, he might have dismissed his fancied drowning scene with a little emotion of regret. Now, the fancy was an agony.
He had too much power over himself to entertain it long. But the grisly thought came uninvited, returned undesired, and no resolute Avaunt, even backed by that magic wand, a cigar, availed to banish it wholly.
The sky cleared cold at eleven o’clock. A sharp wind drew through the Highlands. As the train rattled round the curve below the tunnel through Skerrett’s Point, Wade could see his skating course of Christmas-Day with the ladies. Firm ice, glazed smooth by the sudden chill after the rain, filled the Cove and stretched beyond the Point into the river.
It was treacherous stuff, beautiful to the eyes of a skater, but sure to be weak, and likely to break up any moment and join the deliberate headlong drift of the masses in mid-current.
Wade almost dreaded lest his vision should suddenly realize itself, and he should see his enthusiastic companion of the other day sailing gracefully along to certain death.
Nothing living, however, was in sight, except here and there a crow, skipping about in the floating ice.
The lover was greatly relieved. He could now forewarn the lady against the peril he had imagined. The train in a moment dropped him at Dunderbunk. He hurried to the Foundry and wrote a note to Mrs. Damer.
“Mr. Wade presents his compliments to Mrs. Damer, and has the honor to inform her that Mr. Skerrett has nominated him carver to the ladies to-day in their host’s place.
“Mr. Wade hopes that Miss Damer will excuse him from his engagement to skate with her this afternoon. The ice is dangerous, and Miss Damer should on no account venture upon it.”
Perry Purtett was the bearer of this billet. He swaggered into Peter Skerrett’s hall, and dreadfully alarmed the fresh-imported Englishman who answered the bell, by ordering him in a severe tone, —
“Hurry up now, White Cravat, with that answer! I’m wanted down to the Works. Steam don’t bile when I’m off; and the fly-wheel will never buzz another turn, unless I’m there to motion it to move on.”
Mrs. Damer’s gracious reply informed Wade “that she should be charmed to see him at dinner, etc., and would not fail to transmit his kind warning to Miss Damer, when she returned from her drive to make calls.”
But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon, her mother was taking a gentle nap over the violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red stripes of a gorgeous Afghan she was knitting. The daughter heard nothing of the billet. The house was lonely without Fanny Skerrett. Mr. Wade did not come at the appointed hour. Mary was not willing to say to herself how much she regretted his absence.
Had he forgotten the appointment?
No, — that was a thought not to be tolerated.
“A gentleman does not forget,” she thought. And she had a thorough confidence, besides, that this gentleman was very willing to remember.
She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved about the house uneasily; and at last, when it grew late, and she was bored and Wade did not arrive, she pronounced to herself that he had been detained in town.
This point settled, she took her skates, put on her pretty Amazonian hat with its alert feather, and went down to waste her beauty and grace on the ice, unattended and alone.