Jackson nodded.
“I see.”
“What price?” asked MacDowell mildly.
“No price.”
His visitor’s mouth dropped open in surprise.
“That from you?” he demanded.
John Jackson got to his feet.
“I’ve decided not to be me local goat any more,” he announced steadily. “You threw out the only fair, decent plan because it interfered with some private reservations of your own. And now that there’s a snag, you’d like the punishment to fall on me. I tear down my warehouse and hand over some of the best property in the city for a song because you made a little ‘mistake’ last year!”
“But last year’s over now,” protested MacDowell. “Whatever happened then doesn’t change the situation now. The city needs the station, and so”—there was a faint touch of irony in his voice—”and so naturally I come to its leading citizen, counting on his well-known public spirit.”
“Go out of my office, MacDowell,” said John Jackson suddenly. “I’m tired.”
MacDowell scrutinized him severely.
“What’s come over you today?”
Jackson closed his eyes.
“I don’t want to argue,” he said after a while.
MacDowell slapped his fat upper leg and got to his feet.
“This is a funny attitude from you,” he remarked. “You better think it over.”
“Good-by.”
Perceiving, to his astonishment, that John Jackson meant what he said, MacDowell took his monstrous body to the door.
“Well, well,” he said, turning and shaking his finger at Jackson as if he were a bad boy, “who’d have thought it from you after all?”
When he had gone Jackson rang again for his clerk.
“I’m going away,” he remarked casually. “I may be gone for some time—perhaps a week, perhaps longer. I want you to cancel every engagement I have and pay off my servants at home and close up my house.”
Mr. Fowler could hardly believe his ears.
“Close up your house?”
Jackson nodded.
“But why—why is it?” demanded Fowler in amazement.
Jackson looked out the high window upon the gray little city drenched now by slanting, slapping rain—his city, he had felt sometimes, in those rare moments when life had lent him time to be happy. That flash of green trees running up the main boulevard—he had made that possible, and Children’s Park, and the white dripping buildings around Courthouse Square over the way.
“I don’t know,” he answered, “but I think I ought to get a breath of spring.”
When Fowler had gone he put on his hat and raincoat and, to avoid anyone who might be waiting, went through an unused filing room that gave access to the elevator. The filing room was actively inhabited this morning, however; and, rather to his surprise, by a young boy about nine years old, who was laboriously writing his initials in chalk on the steel files.
“Hello!” exclaimed John Jackson.
He was accustomed to speak to children in a tone of interested equality.
“I didn’t know this office was occupied this morning.”
The little boy looked at him steadily.
“My name’s John Jackson Fowler,” he announced.
“What?”
“My name’s John Jackson Fowler.”
“Oh, I see. You’re—you’re Mr. Fowler’s son?”
“Yeah, he’s my father.”
“I see.” John Jackson’s eyes narrowed a little. “Well, I bid you good morning.”
He passed on out the door, wondering cynically what particular ax Fowler hoped to grind by this unwarranted compliment. John Jackson Fowler! It was one of his few sources of relief that his own son did not bear his name.
A few minutes later he was writing on a yellow blank in the telegraph office below:
“ELLERY JACKSON, CHAPEL STREET, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT.
“THERE IS NOT THE SLIGHTEST REASON FOR COMING HOME, BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO HOME TO COME TO ANY MORE. THE MAMMOTH TRUST COMPANY OF NEW YORK WILL PAY YOU FIFTY DOLLARS A MONTH FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE, OR FOR AS LONG AS YOU CAN KEEP YOURSELF OUT OF JAIL.
“JOHN JACKSON.”
“That’s—that’s a long message, sir,” gasped the dispatcher, startled. “Do you want it to go straight?”
“Straight,” said John Jackson, nodding.
III
He rode seventy miles that afternoon, while the rain dried up into rills of dust on the windows of the train and the country became green with vivid spring. When the sun was growing definitely crimson in the west he disembarked at a little lost town named Florence, just over the border of the next state. John Jackson had been born in this town; he had not been back here for twenty years.
The taxi driver, whom he recognized, silently, as a certain George Stirling, playmate of his youth, drove him to a battered hotel, where, to the surprise of the delighted landlord, he engaged a room. Leaving his raincoat on the sagging bed, he strolled out through a deserted lobby into the street.
It was a bright, warm afternoon, and the silver sliver of a moon riding already in the east promised a clear, brilliant night. John Jackson walked along a somnolent Main Street, where every shop and hitching post and horse fountain made some strange thing happen inside him, because he had known these things for more than inanimate objects as a little boy. At one shop, catching a glimpse of a familiar face through the glass, he hesitated; but changing his mind, continued along the street, turning off at a wide road at the corner. The road was lined sparsely by a row of battered houses, some of them repainted a pale unhealthy blue and all of them set far back in large plots of shaggy and unkempt land.
He walked along the road for a sunny half mile—a half mile shrunk up now into a short green aisle crowded with memories. Here, for example, a careless mule had stamped permanently on his thigh the mark of an iron shoe. In that cottage had lived two gentle old maids, who gave brown raisin cakes every Thursday to John Jackson and his little brother—the brother who had died as a child.
As he neared the end of his pilgrimage his breath came faster and the house where he was born seemed to run up to him on living feet. It was a collapsed house, a retired house, set far back from the road and sunned and washed to the dull color of old wood.
One glance told him it was no longer a dwelling. The shutters that remained were closed tight, and from the tangled vines arose, as a single chord, a rich shrill sound of a hundred birds. John Jackson left the road and stalked across the yard knee-deep in abandoned grass. When he came near, something choked up his throat. He paused and sat down on a stone in a patch of welcome shade.
This was his own house, as no other house would ever be; within these plain walls he had been incomparably happy. Here he had known and learned that kindness which he had carried into life. Here he had found the secret of those few simple decencies, so often invoked, so inimitable and so rare, which in the turmoil of competitive industry had made him to coarser men a source of half-scoffing, half-admiring surprise. This was his house, because his honor had been born and nourished here; he had known every hardship of the country poor, but no preventable regret.
And yet another memory, a memory more haunting than any other, and grown strong at this crisis in his life, had really drawn him back. In this yard, on this battered porch, in the very tree over his head, he seemed still to catch the glint of yellow hair and the glow of bright childish eyes that had belonged to his first love, the girl who had lived in the long-vanished house across the way. It was her ghost who was most alive here, after all.
He got up suddenly, stumbling through the shrubbery, and followed an almost obliterated path to the house, starting at the whirring sound of a blackbird which rose out of the grass close by. The front porch sagged dangerously at his step as he pushed open the door. There was no sound inside, except the steady slow throb of silence; but as he stepped in a word came to him, involuntary as his breath, and he uttered it aloud, as if he were calling to someone in the empty house.
“Alice,” he cried; and then louder, “Alice!”
From a room at the left came a short, small, frightened cry. Startled, John Jackson paused in the door, convinced that his own imagination had evoked the reality of the cry.
“Alice!” he called doubtfully.
“Who’s there?”
There was no mistake this time. The voice, frightened, strange, and yet familiar, came from what had once been the parlor, and as he listened John Jackson was aware of a nervous step within. Trembling a little, he pushed open the parlor door.
A woman with alarmed bright eyes and reddish gold hair was standing in the center of the bare room. She was of that age that trembles between the enduring youth of a fine, unworried life and the imperative call of forty years, and there was that indefinable loveliness in her face that youth gives sometimes just before it leaves a dwelling it has possessed for long. Her figure, just outside of slenderness, leaned with dignified grace against the old mantel on which her white hand rested, and through a rift in the shutter a shaft of late sunshine fell through upon her gleaming hair.
When John Jackson came in the doorway her large gray eyes closed and then opened again, and she gave another little cry. Then a curious thing happened; they stared at each other for a moment without a word, her hand dropped from the mantel and she took a swaying step toward him. And, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, John Jackson came forward, too,
