IIIEben Grillage
AT his father’s definite acknowledgment of defeat David Vallory rose and thrust the penciled sheets into his pocket, crumpling them absently into a wad.
“I can’t tell you what to do,” he admitted. “I’m too young and too raw; how raw I never realized until to-day. Just the same, everything in me rises up to yell for an endurance fight. Call it stubbornness or anything you like, but I’d rather be knocked out than squeezed out. Some of the bad paper can be made good if we retain an up-to-date lawyer and put the pressure on as if we meant it. In the savings department we can gain time by insisting upon the sixty days’ notice of withdrawal that the law allows. It’s tough to have to go down without mixing it up a little with the enemy, Dad!”
“I know,” was the colorless reply. “But the fight has all been taken out of me, David. Youmustn’t think that I’ve been sitting here in my chair and letting things take their course without making a struggle. It hasn’t been anything like that. I’ve turned and twisted every way; have borrowed to my limit and then tried to borrow more. I’ve even gone practically on my knees to Mugridge, of the new Middleboro National. He was as cold as a fish; told me that I ought to push my collections.”
“Have you consulted a lawyer?”
“Not specifically. Young Oswald has known about how things were going, and he has advised me—as a friend. He would make a legal fight for us if I’d let him.”
“Bert Oswald is going to make himself the rarest combination on earth—or at least he was heading that way when he came out of the law school.”
“A combination?”
“Yes, a man who will be stubbornly honorable and upright in spite of his profession.” David Vallory was prone to magnify his own profession to the detriment of some others, and in the engineering school he had imbibed the technical man’s suspicion of those who draw up contracts and specifications only to leave loopholes of escape. “I don’t believe he would ever take a rascal’s retainer,”he went on, adding: “Why don’t you employ him?”
It was Adam Vallory’s turn to show embarrassment.
“Bert has been coming to the house rather oftener than his boyhood friendship with you would seem to warrant,” he returned half reluctantly. “This morning you gave me your reason for not wishing to take service under Eben Grillage. Can’t you imagine that I may have a somewhat similar reason for not wishing to involve young Oswald in this sorry business of ours?”
This was a new surprise for David. “Lucille?” he queried.
Adam Vallory nodded. “It can come to nothing, of course. Lucille, herself, would be the first to insist that one with her affliction has no right to become a wife and mother. Yet it has been a great comfort to her to have Oswald dropping in at odd moments, or for an evening. He understands her thoroughly, shares her keen love for music, and all that. He has even taught her to play chess and to do a number of things that we have never thought she was able to attempt. For her sake we mustn’t drag him into this mess of ours, David.”
This hesitantly given explanation opened a newfield of dismay for David Vallory. As it seemed, there was a separate and distinct disaster reaching out for each member of the little family of three persons; the grim threat hanging over his father, the indefinite postponement of his own embryo love affair, and now this portentous problem of Lucille’s happiness. His love for the blind sister was deep and tender, as it should have been, and at the moment his own affair shrank to inconsequence, as it was constrained to when he realized how heavily the blow would fall upon one who had been sheltered and protected in every way.
“You have fully made up your mind to wire for the examiner to-night?” he asked, after another interval filled with blind gropings for a helpful suggestion.
Adam Vallory looked away toward the window and through it to the empty country-town street beyond.
“There is no use in prolonging the agony, David. The day of reckoning has come, and a few hours one way or another can make no possible difference. I shall have to face the music in the end; we shall all three have to face it, more is the pity. If there were the slenderest chance of escape——”
The interruption, voices in the adjoining bankingroom, gruff tones raised emphatically, and Winkle’s more moderate ones parroting excuses and explanations came over the half-height partition of the rear office. It culminated now in an abrupt opening of the door of privacy. The intruder, whom Winkle had apparently been trying to bar out, was a big man with a clean-shaven face in which each feature seemed to have been massively exaggerated to make it harmonize with the gigantic figure; a great Roman beak of a nose; a hard-bitted mouth buttressed by a jaw over which the heavy cheeks hung like the dewlaps of a bulldog; strong teeth clamping the blackest of cigars; shrewd eyes that glared from beneath penthouse brows; in short, a man who, in the Stone Age, would have acquired the most commodious of the caves and swung the heaviest of the clubs.
“Adam—you old snipe!” was the giant’s explosive greeting, and his hand-grip fairly lifted the slighter man out of his chair. “Nice kind of a welcome your watch-dog cashier out there was trying to hand me: said you were busy and couldn’t be interrupted! How are you, David, boy”—and now it came David’s turn to wince under the vigorous hand-grasp; at least, until he could summon his athletic training and do a little bone crushing on his own account.
Adam Vallory, sunk fathoms deep in the pool of despair but a moment before, made a generous effort to rise to the hospitable requirements.
“You took us completely unawares, Eben; I didn’t dream you were anywhere within a day’s journey of old Middleboro. And Winkle’s eyesight must be getting bad if he didn’t recognize you. Sit down, if you can find a chair big enough to hold you. It’s a pleasure to see your face again; you don’t give me the chance any too often. Now tell us what good wind has blown you back to Middleboro.”
The big man seated himself, and the chair, though it was the stoutest one in the room, whined its protest.
“Business, Adam; always business. We have an order in with your two-by-four equipment factory here for a lot of scrapes and dump-cars, and at the last minute Judson wired that he couldn’t deliver on time. I didn’t happen to have anybody to send, so I came down here to read the riot act to Tom Judson. He’ll ship now; I’ve just been out to see him.” Then to David: “Young man, how soon can I get a train back to Chicago?”
David looked up the required information. The next through train would leave at four minutes past nine o’clock. The visitor glanced at a watchbig enough and thick enough to have been used as a missile.
“That gives us about four hours, Adam,” he rumbled, “and we ought to be able to pull up a good lot of the arrears in that length of time. Shut up your desk and call it a day. We’ll trot over to the hotel and be boys together for a little while. David will stay here and wind up the odds and ends of the day’s business for you.”
Adam Vallory was opening his mouth to protest hospitably against the hotel, but his son broke in ahead of him.
“That’s right, Mr. Grillage; I’m mighty glad you can have a little time with Dad,” he interposed quickly. “We were speaking of you this morning, and I was telling Dad that I had met you for a few minutes one day last winder in Florida. Take him away with you, and I’ll stay and close the bank.”
“Good boy!” was the gruff rejoinder. “By and by, when you get around to it, you may make a sleeper reservation for me on that nine o’clock train. Wire for it, and bring the answer over to the hotel. No, Adam”—to the host who was trying to make himself the entertainer instead of the entertained—“no, you’re not going to take me home with you, this time. I want you all to myself.We’ll go to the St. Nicholas and make old Vignaux give us one of his Frenchy dinners in a private room. Get your hat and come along.”
Left to himself, David Vallory checked over the day’s transactions with Winkle, telegraphed for the big man’s berth in the Chicago sleeping-car, and then walked out to the tree-shaded suburb on the hill to eat his dinner with the sister whom he had not yet seen. To his great satisfaction he found young Herbert Oswald at the house, and the presence of the young lawyer, who was easily persuaded to make a third at the family dinner-table, pushed the disaster explanations, or such of them as might have to be made to the blind girl, a little farther into the future.
Though David forced himself to talk at the table-for-three, his cheerful attempts to keep the conversation in some safe middle-of-the-road channel did not obscure for him the sentimental situation developing under his eyes. Lucille, whose delicate, rose-leaf beauty was a direct inheritance from her father, was more animated than David had ever seen her, and it was doubly hard to realize that the softly lighted eyes, lifted shyly now and again in Oswald’s direction, were sightless. And as for the clean-cut, eager-faced young attorney,there was small effort at concealment on his part.
David Vallory left the house after dinner with a heavy heart. He had known Oswald all his life, and liked him. He was well assured that the young lawyer would stand by and be a very tower of strength to the family in the storm which was about to burst. But the outcome of it all would be a swift conflagration in the sentimental field, and a heart-breaking awakening for the blind sister, who was obviously in love with Oswald without at all realizing it. On the half-mile walk to the St. Nicholas David Vallory told himself in many and sternly emphatic repetitions that something must be done to avert the triple-headed calamity; though what the “something” should be was entirely beyond his powers of imagination.
It was past eight o’clock when he reached the town’s one hotel and found a quiet corner in the small office-lobby where he could smoke and wait for the two who were bringing up the boyhood arrears in a private room above-stairs. When the waiting interval ended, it was only the burly guest-host who appeared, coming down from the private-dining-room suite alone. Catching sight of David, he crossed the lobby, cast his big bodyheavily into a chair, and lighted a cigar, the end of which was already chewed into shapelessness.
“You have sent Dad home?” inquired the son, after he had delivered the telegram assuring one Eben Grillage of a reserved space in the Chicago sleeping-car.
“No!”—disgustedly. “Some crazy farmer broke in on us a few minutes ago and insisted on taking your father over to the bank. Said he had an option on a piece of land, and was obliged to get his money to-night to make good on it.”
David winced. He knew perfectly well that the excuse given had been only an excuse; that the intruding farmer was merely one of the badly frightened depositors in the Middleboro Security who was afraid to wait for another day. He was wondering how much or how little his father had told Grillage of the threatened disaster when the big man went on.
“There is something the matter with your father, David. All evening he’s been acting like a man with a clot on his brain. Hasn’t been sick, has he?”
This was one question that the son could answer without reservations: “No; he hasn’t been side.”
“Humph! Then it’s business. How long haveyou been home, and how much do you know about his banking affairs?”
“I’ve been here only one day, but I know all there is to know, I guess,” said David, looking down at the worn pattern of the linoleum on the lobby floor.
The head of the Grillage Engineering Company twisted himself in his chair and bored into the young man at his side with the masterful eyes.
“Huh! Been here only one day, and yet you know it all. That means that he’s up against it. I knew it; it was bound to come sooner or later. Anywhere else but in Middleboro he would have gone on the rocks years ago; I’ve always told him that. Shake it loose, young man, and give me the facts.”
David hesitated in some manly fashion. If his father had not seen fit to confide in the tried friend of his youth, it was not for the son to take matters into his own hands.
“I don’t know that I have a right to do that, Mr. Grillage,” he began. “I——”
“See here!” was the explosive interruption; “if you knew me a little better, you wouldn’t make a break like that. When I ask a man to loosen up, he loosens, and that’s all there is to it. Dump it out—all of it.”
David, untried enough to feel that any sharing of the dreadful thing would be a relief, hesitated no longer. The secret would be published broadcast in a day or two at most, so nothing mattered much. In a few words he told the story of the threatening catastrophe, exaggerating nothing, minimizing nothing. Eben Grillage heard him through without interrupting, shifting the chewed cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other as he listened. But at the end of the story he was scowling ferociously.
“Your father is still the same kind of a tender-hearted fool that he has always been!” he rapped out. “Sat through an hour-and-a-half dinner with me—dammit!—and never once opened his head about this bog hole he’s mired in!” Then he dragged out the biscuit-like watch. “We’ve got barely fifteen minutes, young man. You go and get Judson, the scrapers-and-dump-car man, on the ’phone, while I do a bit of figuring. Jump for it!”
David Vallory obeyed blindly, with his brain in a whirl. It took several of the hastening minutes to locate Judson at his home in the northern suburb, and when the telephone connection was finally made, the hotel porter was calling the Chicago train and Eben Grillage was at the desk, payinghis bill and growling out orders about his hand-baggage. A moment later David had handed the telephone receiver to the big-bodied man and was listening mechanically to the audible half of the conversation which began with shot-like directness.
“Yes, this is Grillage.... No, I don’t want to talk about the shipment; I want to know where you do your banking.... With the Middleboro National, you say? Well, this time you’ll do it through my bank—the Middleboro Security. Get that? Attach your draft to bill of lading and give it to Adam Vallory. Otherwise you don’t get your money. That’s all. Good-night.”
“Train time, Mr. Grillage,” interrupted the hotel clerk, in his most deferential tone.
“That’s all right; you hold that ’bus until I get ready!” snapped the departing guest. Then, thrusting a slip of paper into David’s hand: “Take that to your father, with my love. And a word to you, my boy”—this in a rumbling aside: “After this ’phone talk of mine gets handed about, your father will have all the credit he needs; but just the same, if you’ve got the level head that you seem to have, you’ll stand by and wind this bank business up, once for all. Your father’s too damned good to be a banker in any such wicked world as the one we’re living in. Dig up a goodlawyer, push the crooked borrowers to a settlement, and see if you can’t screw enough out of it to square up and leave your father and sister a little something to live on. When it’s done, you let me know by wire, and I’ll give you a job where you can make good if you’ve got it in you. That’s all I’ve got to say. Tell your father good-by for me; I shan’t have time to stop at the bank.”
It was not until after the crazy omnibus had rattled away, bearing the St. Nicholas’s departing guest in galloping haste for the train, that David Vallory ventured to glance at the slip of paper which had been shoved into his hand. For an instant the figures on it dazzled him and he had a rush of blood to the brain that made the electric lights in the hotel lobby coruscate and take on many-colored halos.
The slip of paper was Eben Grillage’s personal cheque on a Chicago bank for the round sum of one hundred thousand dollars.