XXVII
BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY
There were to be no stories of Little Rivers at dinner; no questionsasked about desert life. This chapter of Jack's career was a past rung ofthe ladder to John Wingfield, Sr. who was ever looking up to the rungsabove. The magnetism and charm with which he won men to his service nowturned to the immediate problem of his son, whom he was to refashionaccording to his ideas.
"Are you ready to settle down?" he asked, half fearful lest that scene inthe drawing-room might have wrought a change of purpose.
In answer he was seeing another Jack; a Jack relaxed, amiable,even amenable.
"If you have the patience," said Jack. "You know, father, I haven't acash-register mind. I'm starting out on a new trail and I am likely to golame at times. But I mean to be game."
He looked very frankly and earnestly into his father's eyes.
"Wild oats sown! My boy, after all!" thought the father. "Respected hismother! Well, didn't I respect mine? Of course--and let him! It is goodprinciples. It is right. He has health; that is better than schooling."
In place of the shock of the son's will against his, he was feeling it asa force which might yet act in unison with his. He expanded with thepride of the fortune-builder. He told how a city within a city is createdand run; of tentacles of investment and enterprise stretching beyond thestore in illimitable ambition; how the ball of success, once it was setrolling, gathered bulk of its own momentum and ever needed closerwatching to keep it clear of obstacles.
"And I am to stand on top like a gymnast on a sphere or be rolled under,"thought Jack. "And I'll have cloth of gold breeches and a balancing poletipped with jewels; but--but--"
"A good listener, and that is a lot!" thought the father, happily.
Jack had interrupted neither with questions nor vagaries. He was gravelyattentive, marveling over this story of a man's labor and triumph.
"And the way to learn the business is not from talks by me," said hisfather, finally. "You cannot begin at the top."
"No! no!" said Jack, aghast. "The top would be quite too insecure, toodizzy to start with."
"Right!" the father exclaimed, decidedly. "You must learn each departmentof itself, and then how it works in with the others. It will be drudgery,but it is best--right at the bottom!"
"Yes, father, where there is no danger of a fall."
"You will be put on an apprentice salary of ten dollars a week."
"And I'll try to earn it."
"Of course, you understand that the ten is a charge against the store.That's business. But as for a private allowance, you are John Wingfield'sson and--"
"I think I have enough of my own for the present," Jack put in.
"As you wish. But if you need more, say the word. And you shall name thedepartment where you are to begin. Did you get any idea of which you'dchoose from looking the store over to-day?"
"That's very considerate of you!" Jack answered. He was relieved andpleased and made his choice quickly, though he mentioned it half timidlyas if he feared that it might be ridiculous, so uncertain was he aboutthe rules of apprenticeship.
"You see I have been used to the open air and I'd like a little time inwhich to acclimatize myself in New York. Now, all those big wagons thatbring the goods in and the little wagons that take them out--there is anout-of-door aspect to the delivery service. Is that an important branchto learn?"
"Very--getting the goods to the customer--very!"
"Then I'll start with that and sort of a roving commission to look overthe other departments."
"Good! We will consider it settled. And, Jack, every man's labor that youcan save and retain efficiency--that is the trick! Organization andideas, that's what makes the employer and so makes success. Why, Jack, ifyou could cut down the working costs in the delivery department orimprove the service at the present cost, why--" John Wingfield, Sr.rubbed the palms of his hands together delightedly.
Everything was going finely--so far. He added that proviso of _so far_instinctively.
"Besides, Jack," he went on, changing to another subject that was equallyvital to his ego, "this name of Wingfield is something to work for. I wasthe son of a poor New England clergyman, but there is family back of it;good blood, good blood! I was not the first John Wingfield and you shallnot be the last!"
He rose from the table, bidding the servant to bring the coffee to thedrawing-room. With the same light, quick step that he ascended theflights in the store, he led the way downstairs, his face alive with thedramatic anticipation that it had worn when he took Jack out of theoffice to look down from the balcony of the court.
"Ah, we have something besides the store, Jack!" he was saying, in thevery exultation of the pride of possession, as he went to the oppositeside of the mantel from the mother's portrait and turned on the reflectorover a picture.
Jack saw a buccaneer under the brush of the gold and the shadows ofSpain; a robust, ready figure on fighting edge, who seemed to say, "Afteryou, sir; and, then, pardon me, but it's your finish, sir!"
"It's a Velasquez!" Jack exclaimed.
"And you knew that at a glance!" said his father.
"Why, yes!"
"Not many Velasquezes in America," said the father, thinking,incidentally, that his son would not have to pay the dealers a heavy tollfor an art education, while he revelled in a surprise that he wasevidently holding back.
"Or many better Velasquezes than this, anywhere," added Jack. "Whatmastery! What a gift from heaven that was vouchsafed to a human being topaint like that!"
He was in a spell, held no less by the painter's art than by the subject.
"Absolutely a certified Velasquez, bought from the estate of CountGalting," continued his father. "I paid a cool two hundred and fiftythousand for it. And that isn't all, Jack, that isn't all that you aregoing to drudge for as an apprentice in the delivery department. I knowwhat I am talking about. I wasn't fooled by any of the genealogists whomanufacture ancestors. I had it all looked up by four experts, checkingone off against another."
"Yes," answered Jack, absently. He had hardly heard his father's words.In fervent scrutiny he was leaning forward, his weight on the ball of thefoot, the attitude of the man in the picture.
"And who do you think he is--who?" pursued John Wingfield, Sr.
"A man who fought face to face with the enemy; a man whom men followed!Velasquez caught all that!" answered Jack.
"That old fellow was a great man in his day--a great Englishman--and hisname was John Wingfield! He was your ancestor and mine!"
After a quick breath of awakening comprehension Jack took a step nearerthe portrait, all his faculties in the throe of beaming inquiry of SenorDon't Care and desert freedom, in the self-same, alert readiness of poseas the figure he was facing.
"They say I resemble him!" The father repeated that phrase which he hadused in benignant satisfaction to many a guest, but now seeing withgreedy eyes a likeness between his son and the ancestor deeper than mereresemblance of feature, he added: "But you--you, Jack, you're the deadspit of him!"
"Yes," said Jack, as if he either were not surprised or were tooengrossed to be interested. To the buccaneer's "After you, sir; and,then, your finish, sir!" he seemed to be saying, in the fully-livedspirit of imagination: "A good epitaph, sir! I'll see that it is writtenon your tombstone!"
The father, singularly affected by the mutual and enjoyed challenge thathe was witnessing, half expected to see a sword leap out of the scabbardof the canvas and another from Jack's side.
"If he had lived in our day," said the father, "he would have builthimself a great place; he would have been the head of a greatinstitution, just as I am."
"Two centuries is a long way to fetch a comparison," answered Jack,hazily, out of a corner of his brain still reserved for conversation,while all the rest of it was centered elsewhere. "He might have been acow-puncher, a revolutionist, or an aviator. Certainly, he would neverhave been a camp-follower."
"At all events, a man of p
ower. It's in the blood!"
"It's in the blood!" Jack repeated, with a sort of staring, lingeringemphasis. He was hearing Mary's protest on the pass; her final,mysterious reason for sending him away; her "It's not in the blood!"There could be no connection between this and the ancestor; yet, in thestirred depths of his nature, probing the inheritance in his veins, herhurt cry had come echoing to his ears.
"Why, I would have paid double the price rather than not have got thatpicture!" the father went on. "There is a good deal of talk about familytrees in this town and a strong tendency in some quarters for secondgenerations of wealth to feel a little superiority over the firstgeneration. Here I come along with an ancestor eight generations back,painted by Velasquez. I tell you it was something of a sensation when Iexhibited him in the store!"
"You--you--" and Jack glanced at his father perplexedly; "you exhibitedhim in the store!" he said.
"Why, yes, as a great Velasquez I had just bought. I didn't advertise himas my ancestor, of course. Still, the fact got around; yes, the fact gotaround, Jack."
While Jack studied the picture, his father studied Jack, whose face andwhose manner of blissful challenge to all comers in the unconcern of easyfatality and ready blade seemed to grow more and more like that of thefirst John Wingfield. At length, Jack passed over to the other side ofthe mantel and turned on the reflector over the portrait of his mother;and, in turn, standing silently before her all his militancy was gone andin its place came the dreamy softness with which he would watch theEternal Painter cloud-rolling on the horizon. And he was like her not infeatures, not in the color of hair or eyes, but in a peculiarsensitiveness, distinguished no less by a fatalism of its own kind thanwas the cheery aggressiveness of the buccaneer.
"Yes, father," he said, "that old ruffian forebear of ours could swearand could kill. But he had the virtue of truth. He could not act or livea lie. And I guess something else--how supremely gentle he could bebefore a woman like her. Velasquez brought out a joyous devil and Sargentbrought out a soul!"
John Wingfield, Sr., who stood by the grate, was drumming nervously onthe mantel. The drumming ceased. The fingers rested rigid and white onthe dark wood. Alive to another manifestation of the lurking force inhis son, he hastened to change the subject.
"I had almost forgotten that you always had a taste for art, Jack."
"Yes, from her;" which was hardly changing the subject.
"As for the first John Wingfield, you may be sure that I wanted to knoweverything there was to know about the old fellow," said the father. "SoI set a lot of bookworms looking up the archives of the English andSpanish governments and digging around in the libraries after material.Then I had it all put together in proper shape by a literary sharp."
"You have that!" cried Jack. "You have the framework from which you canbuild the whole story of him--the story of how he fought and howVelasquez came to paint him? Oh, I want to read it!" With an unexploredland between gilt-tooled covers under his arm he went upstairs early, inthe transport of wanderlust that had sent him away over the sand fromLittle Rivers. _Si, si_, Firio, outward bound, camp under the stars! IfSenor Don't Care's desert journeys were over--and he had no thought butthat they were--there was no ban on travelling in fancy over sea trailsin the ancestor's company.
Jack was with the buccaneer when he boarded the enemy at the head of hismen; with him before the Board of Admiralty when, a young captain oftwenty-two, he refused to lie to save his skin; with him when, in answerto the scolding of Elizabeth, then an old woman, he said: "It is gloriousfor one who fought so hard for Your Majesty to have the recognition evenof Your Majesty's chiding in answer to the protest of the Spanishambassador," which won Elizabeth's reversal of the Admiralty's decision;with him when, in a later change of fortune, he went to the court ofSpain for once on a mission which required a sheathed blade; with himwhen the dark eye of Velasquez, who painted men and women of his timewhile his colleagues were painting Madonnas, glowed with a discoverer'sjoy at sight of this fair-haired type of the enemy, whom he led away tohis studio.
More than once was there mention of the fact that this terrible fighterwas gentle with women and fonder of the company of children than ofstatesmen or courtiers. He had married the daughter of a great merchant,a delicate type of beauty; the last to fascinate a buccaneer, accordingto the gossips of the time. Rumor had it that he had taken her for thewherewithal to pay the enormous debts contracted in his latest exploit.To disprove this he went to sea in a temper with a frigate and came backladen with the treasure of half a dozen galleons, to find that his wifehad died at the birth of a son. He promised himself to settle down forgood; but the fog of London choked lungs used to soft airs; he heard thecall of the sun and was away again to seek adventure in the broilingreaches of the Caribbean. A man of restless, wild spirit, breathinginconsistencies incomprehensible to the conventions of Whitehall! And hisson had turned a Cromwellian, who, in poverty, sought refuge in Americawhen Charles II. came to the throne; and from him, in the vicissitudes offive generations, the poor clergyman was descended.
Thus ran the tale in its completeness. The end of the ancestor's careerhad been in keeping with its character and course. He had been sparedthe slow decay of faculties in armchair reminiscence. He had gone down inhis ship without striking his colors, fighting the Spaniards one tothree. When Jack closed the cover on the last page tenderly and inenraptured understanding, it was past midnight.
The spaciousness of the sea under clouds of battle smoke had melted intothe spaciousness of the desert under the Eternal Painter's canopy. Thenfour walls of a bedroom in Madison Avenue materialized, shutting out thehorizon; a carpet in place of sand formed the floor; and in place of ablanket roll was a canopied bed upon which a servant had laid out a suitof pajamas. In the impulse of a desire to look into the face of the firstJohn Wingfield in the light of all he now knew, Jack went downstairs, andin the silence of the house drank in the portrait again.
"You splendid old devil, you!" he breathed, understandingly. "How shouldyou like to start out delivering goods with me in the morning?"
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