“But what makes it sad for YOU?”
“I don’t know,” she said, in a lighter tone. “Perhaps it’s a kind of useless foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may be that—or it may be poor papa.”
“You ARE a funny, delightful girl, though!” Russell laughed. “When your father’s so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!”
“He does too much walking,” Alice said. “Too much altogether, over at his new plant. But there isn’t any stopping him.” She laughed and shook her head. “When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his family don’t appear to have much weight with him. He’ll walk all he wants to, in spite of them.”
“I suppose so,” Russell said, absently; then he leaned forward. “I wish I could understand better why you were ‘sadly’ happy.”
Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could on this point, the man ambitious to be a “multi-millionaire” was indeed walking too much for his own good. He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise early for a long day’s work, but he could not rest, and now, in his nightgown and slippers, he was pacing the floor of his room.
“I wish I DID know,” he thought, over and over. “I DO wish I knew how he feels about it.”
CHAPTER XVIII
That was a thought almost continuously in his mind, even when he was hardest at work; and, as the days went on and he could not free himself, he became querulous about it. “I guess I’m the biggest dang fool alive,” he told his wife as they sat together one evening. “I got plenty else to bother me, without worrying my head off about what HE thinks. I can’t help what he thinks; it’s too late for that. So why should I keep pestering myself about it?”
“It’ll wear off, Virgil,” Mrs. Adams said, reassuringly. She was gentle and sympathetic with him, and for the first time in many years he would come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished his day’s work. He had told her, evading her eye, “Oh, I don’t blame you. You didn’t get after me to do this on your own account; you couldn’t help it.”
“Yes; but it don’t wear off,” he complained. “This afternoon I was showing the men how I wanted my vats to go, and I caught my fool self standing there saying to my fool self, ‘It’s funny I don’t hear how he feels about it from SOMEbody.’ I was saying it aloud, almost—and it IS funny I don’t hear anything!”
“Well, you see what it means, don’t you, Virgil? It only means he hasn’t said anything to anybody about it. Don’t you think you’re getting kind of morbid over it?”
“Maybe, maybe,” he muttered.
“Why, yes,” she said, briskly. “You don’t realize what a little bit of a thing all this is to him. It’s been a long, long while since the last time you even mentioned glue to him, and he’s probably forgotten everything about it.”
“You’re off your base; it isn’t like him to forget things,” Adams returned, peevishly. “He may seem to forget ‘em, but he don’t.”
“But he’s not thinking about this, or you’d have heard from him before now.”
Her husband shook his head. “Ah, that’s just it!” he said. “Why HAVEN’T I heard from him?”
“It’s all your morbidness, Virgil. Look at Walter: if Mr. Lamb held this up against you, would he still let Walter stay there? Wouldn’t he have discharged Walter if he felt angry with you?”
“That dang boy!” Adams said. “If he WANTED to come with me now, I wouldn’t hardly let him, What do you suppose makes him so bull-headed?”
“But hasn’t he a right to choose for himself?” she asked. “I suppose he feels he ought to stick to what he thinks is sure pay.
As soon as he sees that you’re going to succeed with the glue-works he’ll want to be with you quick enough.”
“Well, he better get a little sense in his head,” Adams returned, crossly. “He wanted me to pay him a three-hundred-dollar bonus in advance, when anybody with a grain of common sense knows I need every penny I can lay my hands on!”
“Never mind,” she said. “He’ll come around later and be glad of the chance.”
“He’ll have to beg for it then! I won’t ask him again.”
“Oh, Walter will come out all right; you needn’t worry. And don’t you see that Mr. Lamb’s not discharging him means there’s no hard feeling against you, Virgil?”
“I can’t make it out at all,” he said, frowning. “The only thing I can THINK it means is that J. A. Lamb is so fair-minded—and of course he IS one of the fair-mindedest men alive I suppose that’s the reason he hasn’t fired Walter. He may know,” Adams concluded, morosely—“he may know that’s just another thing to make me feel all the meaner: keeping my boy there on a salary after I’ve done him an injury.”
“Now, now!” she said, trying to comfort him. “You couldn’t do anybody an injury to save your life, and everybody knows it.”
“Well, anybody ought to know I wouldn’t WANT to do an injury, but this world isn’t built so’t we can do just what we want.” He paused, reflecting. “Of course there may be one explanation of why Walter’s still there: J. A. maybe hasn’t noticed that he IS there. There’s so many I expect he hardly knows him by sight.”
“Well, just do quit thinking about it,” she urged him. “It only bothers you without doing any good. Don’t you know that?”
“Don’t I, though!” he laughed, feebly. “I know it better’n anybody! How funny that is: when you know thinking about a thing only pesters you without helping anything at all, and yet you keep right on pestering yourself with it!”
“But WHY?” she said. “What’s the use when you know you haven’t done anything wrong, Virgil? You said yourself you were going to improve the process so much it would be different from the old one, and you’d REALLY have a right to it.”
Adams had persuaded himself of this when he yielded; he had found it necessary to persuade himself of it—though there was a part of him, of course, that remained unpersuaded; and this discomfiting part of him was what made his present trouble. “Yes, I know,” he said. “That’s true, but I can’t quite seem to get away from the fact that the principle of the process is a good deal the same—well, it’s more’n that; it’s just about the same as the one he hired Campbell and me to work out for him. Truth is, nobody could tell the difference, and I don’t know as there IS any difference except in these improvements I’m making. Of course, the improvements do give me pretty near a perfect right to it, as a person might say; and that’s one of the things I thought of putting in my letter to him; but I was afraid he’d just think I was trying to make up excuses, so I left it out. I kind of worried all the time I was writing that letter, because if he thought I WAS just making up excuses, why, it might set him just so much more against me.”
Ever since Mrs. Adams had found that she was to have her way, the depths of her eyes had been troubled by a continuous uneasiness; and, although she knew it was there, and sometimes veiled it by keeping the revealing eyes averted from her husband and children, she could not always cover it under that assumption of absent-mindedness. The uneasy look became vivid, and her voice was slightly tremulous now, as she said, “But what if he SHOULD be against you—although I don’t believe he is, of course—you told me he couldn’t DO anything to you, Virgil.”
“No,” he said, slowly. “I can’t see how he could do anything. It was just a secret, not a patent; the thing ain’t patentable. I’ve tried to think what he could do—supposing he was to want to—but I can’t figure out anything at all that would be any harm to me. There isn’t any way in the world it could be made a question of law. Only thing he could do’d be to TELL people his side of it, and set ‘em against me. I been kind of waiting for that to happen, all along.”