A Perilous Secret | Page 7

her out by a frenzied movement of both hands, though he did not touch her, and spread-eagled himself before the door, with his face and dilating eyes turned toward Colonel Clifford.
The Colonel turned and stepped toward him with the document he had selected at the table. Bartley went to meet him.
The Colonel gave it to him, and said it was a copy of the will.
Bartley took it, and Colonel Clifford expelled his last sentences.
"We have shaken hands. Let us forget our past quarrels, and respect the wishes of the dead."
With that he turned sharply on both heels, and faced the door of the little office before he moved; then marched out in about seven steps, as he had marched in, and never looked behind him for two hundred miles.
The moment he was out of sight, Bartley, with his wife's will in his hand and ice at his heart, went to his child's room. The nurse met him, crying, and said, "A change"--mild but fatal words that from a nurse's lips end hope.
He came to the bedside just in time to see the breath hovering on his child's lips, and then move them as the summer air stirs a leaf.
Soon all was still, and the rich man's child was clay.
The unhappy father burst into a passion of grief, short but violent. Then he ordered the nurse to watch there, and let no one enter the room; then he staggered back to his office, and flung himself down at his table and buried his head. To do him justice, he was all parental grief at first, for his child was his idol.
The arms were stretched out across the table; the head rested on it; the man was utterly crushed.
Whilst he was so, the little office door opened softly, and a pale, worn, haggard face looked in. It was the father of the poor man's child in mortal danger from privation and hereditary consumption. That haggard face was come to ask the favor of employment, and bread for his girl, from the rich man whose child was clay.




CHAPTER III
.
THE TWO FATHERS.
Hope looked wistfully at that crushed figure, and hesitated; it seemed neither kind nor politic to intrude business upon grief.
But if the child was Bartley's idol, money was his god, and soon in his strange mind defeated avarice began to vie with nobler sorrow. His child dead! his poor little flower withered, and her death robbed him of ��20,000, and indeed of ten times that sum, for he had now bought experience in trade and speculation, and had learned to make money out of money, a heap out of a handful. Stung by this vulgar torment in its turn, he started suddenly up, and dashed his wife's will down upon the floor in a fury, and paced the room excitedly. Hope still stood aghast, and hesitated to risk his application.
But presently Bartley caught sight of him, and stared at him, but said nothing.
Then the poor fellow saw it was no use waiting for a better opportunity, so he came forward and carried out Bolton's instructions; he put on a tolerably jaunty air, and said, cheerfully, "I beg your pardon, sir; can I claim your attention for a moment?"
"What do you want?" asked Bartley, but like a man whose mind was elsewhere.
"Only employment for my talent, sir. I hear you have a vacancy for a manager."
"Nothing of the sort. I am manager."
Hope drew back despondent, and his haggard countenance fell at such prompt repulse. But he summoned courage, and, once more acting genial confidence, returned to the attack.
"But you don't know, sir, in how many ways I can be useful to you. A grand and complicated business like yours needs various acquirements in those who have the honor to serve you. For instance, I saw a small engine at work in your yard; now I am a mechanic, and I can double the power of that engine by merely introducing an extra band and a couple of cogs."
"It will do as it is," said Bartley, languidly, "and I can do without a manager."
Bartley's manner was not irritated but absorbed. He seemed in all his replies to Hope to be brushing away a fly mechanically and languidly. The poor fly felt sick at heart, and crept away disconsolate. But at the very door he turned, and for his child's sake made another attempt.
"Have you an opening for a clerk? I can write business letters in French, German, and Dutch; and keep books by double entry."
"No vacancy for a clerk," was the weary reply.
"Well, then, a foreman in the yard. I have studied the economy of industry, and will undertake to get you the greatest amount of labor out of the smallest number of men."
"I have a foreman already," said Bartley, turning his back on him