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Title:      The Master of The Mill (1944)
Author:     Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948)
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      The Master of The Mill (1944)
Author:     Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948)




I dedicate this book to the memory of W. J. Alexander whose recent
death deprived Canada of its acutest mind and left a void in the
hearts of all who loved him.



CONTENTS


Author's Note to the First Edition

PART ONE

DEATH OF THE MASTER

PART TWO

RESURRECTION OF THE MASTER




AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE FIRST EDITION

Ideas expressed by the characters in this book, especially in its
second part, must be read as their private opinions.  Since none of
these characters is purely imaginary, the author merely records,
without endorsing or refuting, what they think.  The problem
presented is, of course, anything but imaginary.

F. P. G.

Simcoe, Ont.,
August 1939



PART ONE


Death of the Master



Give me a spirit that on this life's rough sea
Lives t'have his sails fill'd with a lusty wind
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water, and her keel ploughs air.

CHAPMAN




CHAPTER I


The two women looked at each other with a smile of comprehension as
the old, old man who, considering his years, was still so amazingly
active, rose restlessly from his arm-chair to go to the northernmost
window of the enormous hall in which they were sitting and to look,
over the west end of the dark lake, at the mill.  He did this night
after night now; but there had been years when he had carefully
avoided that view.

All three were in evening clothes; it was the custom to dress for
dinner, at the great house on the shelf of the hillside overlooking
the two arms of the lake.  The women were busy with embroidery; it
was rare that either of them spoke on these long evenings after
they had risen from table; and if there was occasion for an
exchange of words, they were uttered under their breath.

The younger of the two, Lady Clark or Maud, as she was called by
her intimates was the old man's daughter-in-law.  Though she was
still in her early forties, she had, to all appearance, at least
for an outsider, only one aim left in life, namely to ease the old
man's lapse into that senility which had to come at last, long as
it had been staved off by her husband's unexpected death more than
a decade ago.  The older woman, Miss Charlebois, had once been the
'companion' of Mrs Samuel Clark, the long-dead wife of the old man,
a senator of Canada, who had gone to the window whence he looked at
the mill as if he must watch that nobody walked off with it.

Life in the house, as was natural in a place which stood aside from
the main stream of life, followed a strict routine; and even Lady
Clark lived largely in the past, perhaps for the very reason that,
as far as the mill went, the future was hers; she was its largest
shareholder; and there was now only one other, the old man who had
certainly long since made her his heir.

Yet it was doubtful whether either of the women realized what went
on in the old man as he looked at that mill which towered up,
seventeen stories high, at the foot of the lake, like a huge
pyramid whose truncated apex was in line with the summits of the
surrounding hills.  The mill which, in a physical sense, he had
largely created had been his love before he had owned it; it had
become the object of his hatred after it had become his; it had
always ruled his destiny; it had been, it still was, the central
fact in his life; it had never permitted him to be entirely
himself; it had determined his every action.  The history of the
mill had been his history, beginning with the time when his father
had started to build it; and again beyond the time when his son,
having done something to it of which he himself disapproved, was
killed by the stray shot of a striker.  Whatever had happened to
him, in his inner as well as his outer life, had been contingent
upon its existence.  His father had forced it on him; his son had
thrown it back on his shoulders.  It had led a life of its own,
more potent, more decisive than the life of any mere human being.
The individual destinies connected with it had merely woven
arabesques around it.  But, perhaps naturally, it was these living
arabesques which held the old man's thought.

There it stood, two miles away, seen across the west basin of the
artificial lake which the great power-dam had created by flooding
back the river over its bottom lands which it had drowned.

Its image lay on the mirror-smooth water like a fairy palace
inverted, bathed in light; and beyond the line where the base of
that image touched the white line of the dam, its real counterpart
rose steeply.  It was flooded by the light from two score huge
reflectors which converged their beams upon it, from the dizzy
height of its narrow topmost storey to the wide ground floor with
its eight cave-like openings through which led the tracks of the
trains that carried the wheat in and the flour out, day and night,
never ceasing, year after year.  This vision of light, snow-white--
for the whole tremendous structure was dusted over with flour,
inside and out--closed the valley through which the turbulent North
River had once run, though it was now tamed into the pleasant lake
which, in its bosom, mirrored the stars.

The very perfection of the picture owed something of its beauty to
the fact that the night was inky-black.  Nothing of what lay
between the house and the mill had a more than shadowy existence:
the park sloping down, terraced, to the water's edge where huge
retaining walls of concrete overlaid with marble checked the wash
of rains and waves; and, beyond, the shoulder of the hill which had
become a peninsula, screening the so-called Terrace from view.  The
spot-lights picked the mill out of the darkness, nothing else.  The
trees and slopes which intervened were mere silhouettes against the
double vision of light.

To many people, as the old man was aware, that mill stood as a
symbol and monument of the world-order which, by-and-large, was
still dominant; of a ruthless capitalism which had once been an
exploiter of human labour but had gradually learned, no less
ruthlessly, to dispense with that labour, making itself independent,
ruling the country by its sheer power of producing wealth.

To others, fewer these, it stood as a monument of a first endeavour
to liberate mankind from the curse of toil; for it produced the
thing man needed most, bread, by harnessing the forces of nature.
The amazing thing--incomprehensible to one who had seen different
methods of production--was that that monstrous edifice was filled
with machines only which had come to be by a logic of their own and
which did man's bidding without man's help, supervised by a handful
of skilled workers who watched them, listened to them, oiled them,
adjusted a screw here and there, and wiped accumulating flour dust
from their swift and shining limbs.  The machines worked silently,
or at the worst with no more than a hum to which the human ear
became habituated till it was no longer perceived.  The few men
needed to keep them running were engineers, electricians, chemists
and . . . sweepers.

To still others, fewer again, the old man among them, it was the
abode of gnomes and hobgoblins, malevolent like Alberich, the dwarf
of the Rhinegold, but forced, by a curse more potent than their
own, to do man's work.  The uncanny thing about it was that these
gnomes and hobgoblins--or were they jinn?--had the power of binding
man to their service in turn, or to the service of the machines, as
he, the old man, had been bound; and whenever, in his hoary old
age, he fell under the spell of these dwarfish beings, he
visualized them with two faces: one that of his father, one that of
his son.  In many ways these two had been alike.

Night after night the same thing repeated itself.  He was sitting
with these two women, in utter silence, essentially alone; for even
with his daughter-in-law he communed only when they were by
themselves; and then only about the trivialities of the day; never
when a third person was present.  Night after night he rose at last
and went to the window, here in the hall, or upstairs in the
gallery, to stare at the mill, at first puzzled, but gradually
working out in his mind certain things which, the clearer they
became, the more amazed him.  Till at last, in order to explain
them to himself, he began to review his whole life; or at least
such parts of that life as stood out with sufficient decisiveness.

He could never get away from the feeling that, whatever he had
done, he had done under some compulsion.  Yet it was he who had
determined the development of the mill; but it was, first his
father, then his son who had chosen the time for every change
proposed, thereby twisting his own purpose.  The peculiar thing
about it all was that neither his father nor his son had ever
acknowledged him as the moving spirit.  Even the world had not
acknowledged him.  His father as well as his son had been called
'great men'; he, who had always tried to temper necessity with a
humane purpose, was called the 'octopus'!

It was true, his father, Rudyard Clark, had himself been a man 'of
the people', a workman who had run the mill as it had been for the
greater part of his lifetime by his own labour, aided by a few
helpers and a single foreman; while he had been seeking his place
in the sun, he had been a democrat; but when he had won success, he
had become an autocratic ruler.  His son, Edmund Clark, had done
what he had done with the ultimate purpose of giving the people
what they needed as a gift from above; if he had lived, he might
have revealed himself as a public benefactor; but he had died.
Between them, the two had forced HIM, Samuel Clark, to assume all
the odium attaching to a task which he had not been allowed to
fulfil in his own way.

Somewhat sadly, yet not without a feeling of relief, the old man at
the window, staring at that mill which had come into being like a
fact of nature, helping and harming the good and the bad alike,
with that indifference which is nature's most striking attribute,
realized that what he was doing in thus analysing and finally
reviewing his life was preparing himself for death.  He was setting
his mental and spiritual house in order; not till he had done so
could he rest, could he lie in peace. . . .

When, one night, after an hour or so at the window, he turned back
into the great room with its bright, cheerful light, shed by the
hundreds of bulbs in the central chandelier, and broken by the
cascade of prismatic crystals surrounding them, the older of the
two women, Odette Charlebois, stopping her needlework, glanced up
at him with the benignant smile of the spinster to whom her
employer is perfect.  The younger, Lady Clark, Sir Edmund's widow,
without laying down her embroidery, became conscious of the fact
that in his sunken eyes hung two tears.

In the things of the daily life he had become like a child; and
Lady Clark looked after him in a quiet, unobtrusive way which, to
an outsider, would perhaps not have betrayed the profound affection
which she harboured for him.  The historic bearings of his life
escaped her as they escaped the other woman.  She saw in him simply
a human being that had lived beyond his time, lovable, frail, and
tragic because he who had once been young was old; because he who
had lived and no doubt was still wishing to live was about to take
leave of this world which to her, in spite of all, was a beautiful
and desirable world, for leaves were green, and the stars were
twinkling.  She had married the son of this man without love; she
had lost him without any shattering shock to the foundations of her
being; but she would have thought it a suggestion of treason to her
inner nature if anyone had advised her to snatch at the moment and
let old age take care of itself.  That she must acknowledge the
claim which the father of her dead husband had on her went without
saying.

He, almost tripped by the edge of the deep-napped and enormous rug,
made for a door without stopping: the wrong door as it happened
more and more frequently of late.  She knew where he wanted to go.

But she waited till he was past the chesterfield on which she was
sitting before she dropped her embroidery-frame and quickly rose to
take his arm.  He wished to sleep in the library instead of going
upstairs to his bedroom; he often did; and by a slight pressure of
her hand she directed him, pushing at the same time a button to
summon his valet who was his junior by only fifteen years.



CHAPTER II


Reliving a past life is a different thing from merely reflecting
upon it.  So, when, a few days later, things began to crystallize
in his mind, the senator rose again from his arm-chair to go to the
window and to stare at the mill; his deeply-cut features had been
working for some time, even during dinner, which was taken late in
this house, with three maids, two footmen, and a butler ministering
to the needs of the three members of the household.  For no reason
whatever the old man had led the way to the smallest of the four
drawing-rooms--the 'blue room'--where they had then been sitting
for an hour.

As he rose, his eyes had a faraway look in them, as if, mentally,
he were in another world--as indeed he was.  He was in the world of
1888 when he, though in his thirties, had still been held down by
his father in a quite subordinate position in the old, wooden mill.

As always, when he reached the window, he stared out through the
glass.  But the mill was blurred; it was raining outside; and a
gusty wind blew over the lake, so that the reflection of the
structure on the water was shattered and broken into a million
luminous shards, all blurred by the rain.  The mill itself seemed
to stand behind a veil; which was appropriate enough; for on April
14, 1888, it had been no more than a dream, suggested by him to his
father and eagerly taken up by Rudyard Clark.



At the site of the old portage between two landings where canoes
and scow-boats had once had to unload in order to carry their trade
goods around the rapids of the North River, there had grown up, by
1888, a small village, the village of Langholm, the sole reason for
the existence of which consisted in the rambling, wooden mill at
the foot of the rapids.

At the time, the village was formed of one long street, Main
Street, which sloped steeply from east to west, lined with two or
three stores, butcher shop, drugstore, and a so-called general
store which carried everything from shoe-laces to furniture and
plough-shares; with a blacksmith shop, a lumber yard, a small real-
estate and insurance office thrown in.  At its extreme lower end,
on its north side, stood a diminutive, one-roomed building, painted
white: the office of the mill.  At the upper end of Main Street,
three or four short side-streets ran at right angles, formed by the
houses of the merchants and that of the owner of the mill, Rudyard
Clark.

Since, at the foot of the rapids, the river made a swing to the
north, the mill lay northwest of the village: a ramshackle compound
of structures, all of them low: warehouses filled with flour;
granaries filled with wheat; and, of course, the two mill-units
properly speaking which roared with the rickety machinery driven by
undershot wheels, for the varying volume of water pouring down the
rapids forbade the use of the more efficient overshot wheel.

Across the river, near its north bank, and still farther west,
stood the station, only a little over ten years old; for it was not
till 1875 that the railway had come in; and it had only been three
years ago, in 1885, that it had linked the Atlantic and Pacific
seaboards.  Below the mill, between it and the station, a narrow
steel bridge connected the banks.

Over that bridge a messenger came that morning, making for the
little office of the mill and bearing a telegram.  He delivered it
to the single occupant of the office, a man in his thirties named
Samuel Clark, son of Rudyard Clark--the same who now, as a senator
of Canada, stood there in his extreme old age, looking at the
pyramid of the mill blurred by the driving rain and the wind-tossed
darkness.

This Samuel Clark, overawed by his father, had, in his early days,
attended college at Winnipeg where he had taken a degree in
engineering.  But his gruff, autocratic father, though secretly
proud of his son's academic accomplishments, had promptly set him
to work, under Rogers, his foreman, who had successively put him
through his paces in every department of the mill, as a common
workman, till he had learned the small-scale milling business from
the ground up,--though occupied most of the time with dreams and
often fuming in revolt against his father.  After several years of
such labour he had been put in charge of the office where, in
addition to him, a man by name of William Swann was employed as a
part-time bookkeeper.  There, his father told him to 'go to it'
and, according to his dreams, solicit orders by mail.  In this he
had been amazingly successful, for, with the opening of the west
for settlement, the east had prospered and expanded.

As, standing in the window of the great hall, he saw himself in
that office, he felt strangely moved.  He had been young then; and
now he was old.  He had been ardent, ambitious, and callow; he had
been rebellious; for, till he had proved himself to be an efficient
salesman, drawing modest emoluments in the form of commissions, his
father had used his labour, his ability, his inventiveness as if
they had been his own; he had paid him no salary but had handed him
an occasional five-dollar bill, perhaps twice a month.  When the
young man had protested, he had been told that he was being fed and
lodged, and that his fourteen-dollar suits were being paid for.
These suits, too large, for the Clarks were small men, had formed
an additional item in his indictment of the father, for he had
hated them.

He had been a dreamer.

The eyes of the old man narrowed, losing their focus, thereby
blurring still further the picture of what had come of those
dreams: that colossal mill at the foot of the lake.

His efforts at selling the output of the mill by mail had, at
first, been slow and up-hill work; but at last they had borne
fruit.  Here was that telegram: an order from an Ontario firm of
bakers--so large that he did not dare to hand the waiting messenger
his acceptance without having asked his father whether he could
fill it.  He rose and reached for his hat to cross over to the
mill.

That mill was no longer what his grandfather Douglas had made it.
In his day it had been a purely local affair, buying wheat from the
straggling and struggling farmers in the bush, grinding it, and
selling it at a slight advance to the people of the town; its main
income, however, had come from chopping feed and cleaning seed.
But when the great Interoceanic Railway had been built, touching
the little village as a tangent touches a curve, for it had
remained north of the river, it had brought a change, first in
outlook, then in fact.  A year later, Rudyard Clark, Sam's father,
had built the first addition; and from 1880 on warehouses and
granaries had gone up in a planless, haphazard way, makeshift after
makeshift, every one designed to enlarge capacity for the moment,
without plan or thought of a greater future.

The first vision had been Sam's; just as the vision of the dam had
been his; and slowly he had imposed it upon his father: the vision
of a mill capable of being enlarged as needed without destroying
the architectural and technical unity of the whole.  When, in the
course of time, Rudyard Clark had carried it out, however, he had
never given his son the slightest acknowledgement; in fact, he had
kept him jealously away from any participation in his counsels.

That morning, as Sam approached the central part of the wooden
compound, the original mill which his grandfather had built, he
saw, with impatience and irritation, that a farm wagon piled with
bags was drawn up along the loading platform.  His father was
standing in the open slide-door, small, spare, naturally grey and,
like the mill and everything near it, dusted white with flour.  His
right hand was raised to the door-post; his left, resting on his
hip.  In dealing with farmers, Rudyard Clark had a quick, testy,
absent-minded way which, people said, did not help his trade.  Yet
Sam slowed down; if he intruded, the old man, fifty-odd, might
flare up and treat him like a child.

But when Rudyard saw his son, he dropped his hand from the door-
post and flung it out sideways, with a decisive gesture.  "No," he
said in the tone of finality without raising his grating voice.
"Not at that price.  I don't care to buy retail anyway."

Sam concluded that his approach at this precise moment was not
unwelcome.  The farmer had apparently had a few bags of grain
ground into meal, at five cents a hundredweight, a sort of business
for which Rudyard no longer made any bid; and incidentally he had
offered the miller last year's wheat crop, at 'the market'.  But
Rudyard never bought wheat locally at 'the market'.  If the farmer
sold through the regular channels, brokerage and transportation had
to come out of the market price; and the farmer had to wait for his
money.  Under the pretext that he disliked to interfere with those
regular channels, Rudyard made it a point to exact a profitable
discount.

But there was something else.  It was quite true that Sam's father
did not care to buy retail.  Farms in this country of rock and
forest were small; their crops ran to two or three hundred bushels;
since he had found a market in the east, Rudyard had begun to buy
by the carload.  Sam had seen him watching the great grain trains
go by, from the prairies where wheat was beginning to be grown on
the large scale: trains of a hundred cars each, every one of them
filled with wheat.  The West was revealing itself as the last great
wheat area of the world; millions of acres awaited the settler.
These trains would multiply till there was a steady stream of them:
another idea which Sam had implanted in his father.  All this
grain, this potential wealth, would pour past the little Langholm
mill: Langholm might become a sort of gateway between East and
West.  Behind the father's restless, flickering eyes a new dream
had germinated: stop that wheat at Langholm; buy all the West could
produce; grind it; sell it to the East, to Europe even; levy a toll
on every bushel.  What, in comparison, did the local trade amount
to?  Not that SAM cared about the profits.  It was a dream.

In the way of the realization of that dream stood one obstacle:
could the mill ever grow to handle that wheat?  Could it grow to
handle even an appreciable fraction of it?

"Well," the farmer said, frustrated and resentful, "getting high
and mighty around this shebang, are you?  Might feel the pinch one
day if we farmers cease to bring in our chopping."

"I'll risk that," Rudyard said to the upper air with a sneer.
"That sort of trade costs more in bookkeeping than it's worth."

"I guess you know your own business," the farmer said, clicking his
tongue to his horses.

"I ought to," said Rudyard, unmoved, and turned to his son.

When Sam handed him the telegram, the old man, having glanced at
it, said with a sudden alacrity, "Wait.  I'll see."  And with quick
strides he entered the vast white dimness of the mill.

Sam, one elbow propped on the loading platform, stood looking into
the wide valley to the east the whole bottom of which, the flood
plain, was russet with the stems of dwarf red willows and dusted
over with the yellow pollen of the catkins; for it was April.

A minute later his father reappeared out of the cavelike structure.
"All right," he said.  "Wire your acceptance.  We'll work double
shift till June."



The vision faded, a thought remained.  It was his father who had
seized the opportunity; but it was his grandfather Douglas who had
created it.  Had he known what he was doing?  Or was it mere chance
that, coming from a little Ontario town, coming, in the last
resort, from Devonshire, he had set up his business in this
wilderness?

It was only at the time into which the old senator had glanced just
now that the supreme wisdom of the choice had become apparent.
Douglas himself had prospered in a modest way only by dint of hard
work and an unlimited capacity for going without.

Of the few score settlers of his day not half a dozen were left.
Most of them, having wasted substance and effort, had 'pulled out'
after two or three years.  Those that remained in 1888 did so
because they lacked even the means of moving their chattels.

But Rudyard, Douglas's only son, had reaped where his father had
sown.  The supreme wisdom of that choice rested on the fact that
the railway, originally surveyed along a line twenty miles north,
had, by the pencil stroke of a chief engineer, changed its route so
as to utilize the valley of the North River which, apart from the
Langholm rapids, had a singularly level course.

Had Douglas foreseen that?  Or would he, had he lived, have been as
much surprised as Rudyard had been when his son pointed out those
stupendous calculations which were to change the old wooden mill
with all its additions into that colossal industrial enterprise
which had its ramifications throughout a continent and its markets
overseas?

For, so the old senator at the window pursued his thought with a
sinking of the heart, the acceptance of that order of Friday, April
14, 1888, had had to be cancelled on Monday, April 24.

Most opportunely, the whole mill, with all its additions, grain-
bins, warehouses, repair shops, and milling units, had, during the
night from Sunday to Monday, been burned to the ground.

And that had cleared the way for the building of the first four and
of all the subsequent units of the new mill; for the building of
the great dam, repeatedly raised; for the erection of the grain
elevators holding hundreds of thousands of bushels of wheat; for
the construction of the great office pile, the 'Flour Building' on
Main Street and of the equally towering Palace Hotel opposite; as
well as for the mushroom growth of the village of Langholm into a
city.

Incomprehensibly, on the day after the fire, Rudyard Clark had done
what he had never done before: he had handed his son a cheque for
$200 and told him to take a month's holiday.  At the time of this
retrospect the senator knew, of course, that this had been a
stratagem to get him out of the way.



CHAPTER III


The whole house was upset.  The senator was in a vile temper and
found fault with everything.  He was a poor sleeper; and at night
he often looked at his watch to see how far it was from daylight.
For that purpose he insisted on using a flashlight which was
supposed to stand upright in a certain spot on the floor by his
bed; but when he was in a given mental state, neither the maid that
looked after his rooms nor his old valet who had been with him for
forty years could place it in the right position.  Only Lady Clark
could do that; and it so happened that, last night, he had gone up
before her.  It was a week after the evening when he had seen
himself and his father at the loading platform of the old mill; and
in the interval another grand conspectus of a phase of his life had
prepared itself in his subconscious mind, only trifles, so far,
emerging into full view.  The fact that things seemed to elude his
grasp made him impatient and unappreciative of the efforts which
his servants put forth to do things in a way to please him.  The
few who had known his father, like the valet, saw in him, on such
occasions, a reincarnation of the founder of the mill; but, since,
throughout their long term of service, he had almost invariably
been the personification of kindness, they overlooked, and forgave
him his occasional lapses into testiness and dissatisfaction.

On the morning in question, having grumblingly told the old valet
that, during the night, he had groped and groped for the
flashlight; having next scowled at the maid whose special duty it
was to make him comfortable in his bedroom, he betrayed the same
temper at the breakfast table, in spite of the fact that his
daughter-in-law, who, in his view, could do no wrong, presided and
greeted him cheerfully.  He frowned at Miss Charlebois who was
late.  And when he reached for his cup which the footman had
filled, it was only just in time that Lady Clark read the signs.

Quickly she reached for that cup, forestalling her father-in-law,
and lifted it to her lips.  "The hot water," she said to the
footman; "and let me see the toast before you serve it."  Having
added a few drops from the silver jug and glanced at the toast
which she approved, she handed the cup back; and the old man
drained it without comment and began to nibble at the single slice
of toast, unbuttered, which Dr Sherwood allowed him for his morning
meal.

After breakfast, an hour or two went by during which the senator
went hither and thither, without plan or purpose.  For a while he
sat at a small desk in the library where he rummaged about in the
almost empty drawers as if in search of what he could not find.
Nobody interfered.  Lady Clark was dressing for their daily drive.
On the days of his 'moods' it was always doubtful whether her
father-in-law would accompany her.  Yet it would have been a
mistake to count on his refusal.  One could never be sure.

Having opened every drawer, the old man sat at the desk in evident
perplexity.  Shaking his head, with its remnant of carefully
brushed snow-white hair, he rose and resumed the restless
wanderings characteristic of extreme old age.  Snatches of thought
flitted through his mind, mirrored in the sunken features of his
face.  Sometimes he stopped and stood perfectly still as if to give
them a chance to define themselves without letting muscular
sensations interfere.

At ten o'clock a footman came and stood deferentially, waiting for
the senator to notice him.  It was in the large room-like recess of
the gallery upstairs which separated the two apartments once used
as the masters' suites--the one formerly occupied by the senator's
wife, now by Lady Clark, to the left; the other, once occupied by
himself, and later by Sir Edmund, now vacant.  The far wall of this
recess, which was furnished like a sitting-room, was taken up by a
fireplace; and above it hung a large, life-sized painting.  Whoever
saw that painting for the first time, mistook it for a portrait of
Lady Clark in her twenties; it was the brilliantly executed copy of
a painting in the Manchester Art Gallery in England, representing
Stella, the famous Dean's lifelong friend, at the moment of
receiving the letter which seemed to prove the Dean's unfaithfulness.
The uncanny resemblance had something mysterious about it; and it
still puzzled the senator.

Suddenly, becoming conscious of the footman's presence, he asked
irritably, without stirring, "What is it?"

"Captain Stevens is waiting in the library, sir."

"What does he want?"

Which, considering that Captain Stevens called daily at that hour,
to report on the business of the mill, was an irrational question.
Once, hearing it, a young footman had smiled to himself; and he had
instantly been dismissed.  This morning, the valet had tipped the
butler off; and the butler had warned every member of the household
staff to be careful.  To this butler, himself a newcomer in the
house, the vagaries of the old master were not pathetic but comic;
but since Lady Clark punished any lapse in the respect shown to her
father-in-law by discharging the offender, he humoured the old man.

"He didn't tell me, sir," replied the young footman.

"Ask him to wait.  I'll be down."

As the mill stood, all its executives were old men, none less than
seventy; but, as they knew very well, they had no longer any real
power.  The senator was president, Captain Stevens general manager
only in name.  The latter had once been general manager in fact; he
had even held that position in fact before he had held it in name.
He had never had any great respect for the senator, had never
thought him 'any great shakes' as he expressed it.  Himself had
been a 'find' of old Mr Rudyard Clark's.  After the latter's death,
he had been eclipsed; but when young Sir Edmund had ousted the
senator from the position of supreme power, he had come into his
own, though not for many years; for, with Sir Edmund's death, the
'logic of circumstance' had deprived him as well as everybody else
of the substance of power, leaving him only the empty shell.  Now
it was the engineers who did what they judged should be done.  If
new invention or accumulating experience demanded a change, they
made it, letting Captain Stevens know ex post facto; and he
invariably gave his approval to the accomplished fact.  He was wise
in the ways of the world and liked to go on drawing his comfortable
salary of fifty thousand a year.  He knew that, had he chosen to
assert his nominal power against the engineers, the consequences
would have been appalling, to say the least.  If only in the
interests of the Canadian export trade in flour, the federal
government would have had to step in; it might have taken over the
mill and all its subsidiaries.

Of course, Sam--Captain Stevens still called the senator by that
name, to himself--had never approved, would never approve, of him,
Captain Stevens; just as he, Captain Stevens, did not approve of
Sam.  To Captain Stevens nothing counted except that abstract
being, the mill.  No personal consideration, for administration or
men, had ever mattered; just as it had not mattered to old Mr
Rudyard or young Sir Edmund.  The mill was supreme.  If, at this
time, he accepted what the engineers did without consulting him, he
acted not from mere worldly wisdom alone, but from a fanatical
devotion to something beyond him.

In spite of his seventy years, the captain was still a dapper
little man; he still wore loud-checked suits, brilliantly flame-
coloured neckties, smart, heavy-soled English shoes of brown
leather, a gold-headed cane.  He still bore himself very erect; he
still gesticulated sparingly with his free hand which clasped a
pair of new and immaculate lemon-coloured dog-skin gloves.

When the senator entered the library, the caller was sitting on the
forward edge of a leather-bottomed chair, both hands on the knob of
his cane, his chin resting on the knuckles of his upper hand.

"Good morning, good morning, senator," he said without rising.  "I
hope you slept well, sir?"

"I didn't sleep a wink," the old man said.

"Sorry to hear it.  No fun, I suppose, lying awake at night.  Never
happens to me, I'm glad to say.  Sleep like a log."

"You're lucky," said the senator.  "Anything new?"

"Not a thing.  I've got the production sheets here.  Want me to
read them?"

"What's the use?"

"That's what I say.  No news is good news."  And the little man
rose to take his leave.  "Till tomorrow."

"Till tomorrow."

And they issued into the enormous hall which reached through two
stories, surrounded, on the second floor, by the gallery.

As the captain made for the vestibule which separated the hall from
the porte cochère under which his high-powered car was waiting, the
same footman who had announced him stepped forward, holding his
light silk-faced topcoat.

A moment later, the senator still standing in the hall, the car,
driven by a liveried chauffeur, slipped smoothly away; and
instantly its place was taken by another, a Lincoln limousine,
olive-green.

The senator turned to glance at the grand stairway; and indeed,
Lady Clark was descending, dressed for the drive.

The sight softened the old man's mood.  He remembered how, decades
ago, in 1919 or 1920, he had first heard of her through his lawyer
who had met her at Toronto where he had gone to argue a case.
Already there had been rumours of an impending match between Miss
Maud Fanshawe, daughter of Sir Alphonso Fanshawe, the late
chancellor of Eastern University and the then Mr Edmund Clark.
Asked to describe her, the lawyer had pondered for a moment as if
at a loss.  "She's a great beauty," he had said at last.  "There's
only one word in the English language which fittingly describes
her . . ."--"That word?" Mr Samuel Clark had asked.  Slowly and
impressively the lawyer had rolled the word on his tongue.  "That
word is 'regal'."  Regal she looked today, her beauty matured but
unimpaired.

A minute later, a footman holding the door, they entered the car.

Whether it was that something in Captain Stevens's manner had
touched a spring in the senator's memory; or that the interval
since his last excursion into the past had simply become ripe, the
senator's face, the moment he reclined in his corner of the
tonneau, assumed a closed expression which warned Maud that he must
not be disturbed.  She was not certain what his mood signified; but
she knew its effect on him and respected it; and thus it was that
the whole drive of two hours was made in silence.

Between these two there was a relation which caused them to
observe, with regard to each other, a considerate and affectionate
politeness, poised between, on his part, the attitude of fatherly
love and the homage he still rendered to beauty and elevation of
character; on hers, of reverence and motherly indulgence.  When
they spoke, it was often what stood between the words which
counted.  He had tones which vibrated with unspoken things; her
voice, a soprano, deepened into a contralto.  Neither had ever let
the other witness tears; but it was easy to see that, in the
contemplation, by each, of the other's fate, there was a
comprehension which, under circumstances of lessened restraint,
might have caused them to join in an effusion over the tragedies
hidden below the smooth aspect of the days.

The drive took them up the south hill, through the park, and, by
way of the columnar gate of basalt and wrought iron, out on Hill
Road which led down to the town, past the Terrace.  This Terrace
lay to the right, between lake and road, but at a lower level.  The
vast agglomeration of the charred ruins of workmen's cottages,
burned in the second great fire of Langholm, was nearly vacant; for
most of the mill-hands had left when automatic operation had been
introduced; in fact, only those who, by reason of old age or
infirmity, or because the workmen's compensation act had made them
pensioners of the mill, found it to their advantage to remain still
occupied their old quarters; and there were less than fifty of
them.  The senator, sole owner of the Terrace, had long since
ceased to collect rents.  When the mill, assuming the town as a
private property, had become the sole owner of its institutions,
paying off its debentures, the Terrace, once valued at two
millions, had become a total loss.

In the descent of Hill Road, below which the Terrace lay spread
like a map, with only here and there a few garments fluttering from
clothes-lines in the breeze, they were bound to reach a point
whence the mill came into view.  But before that point was reached,
the chauffeur turned left or south.  Instead of entering the once
populous Main Street, they passed, in two or three successive
turns, through what had been the best residential quarter, spread
over the hill that reached down from the wooded plateau in the
south.  Through Clark Street, where the Clark House of forty years
ago was still standing, boarded up now, they swung out on the
highway which led straight south, cleared, graded, and paved by the
senator for the express purpose of providing the ladies of his
household with a driveway of one hundred miles; for, by means of
three more turns, it led through the woods back to the park-gate of
the present Clark House.



CHAPTER IV


During the drive, swift and smooth, the senator relaxed till he sat
as if his body were unsupported by a skeleton.  Maud never looked
at him; she knew it might break the train of his thought.

This is what passed through his mind.

After Captain Stevens had been taken into the concern as chief
clerk, by the senator's father, he had soon held a high and
responsible position for one so young.  Simultaneously, the
senator, then universally called Mr Sam, had engaged a young lady,
younger even than Mr Stevens, as his private secretary.  That had
been two years before Mr Rudyard Clark's sudden death.

These two, Mr Stevens and Miss Dolittle, were destined to play
opposite if complementary parts in the history of the mill;
whenever either rose, the other sank; for, as Mr Stevens had
loyally aligned himself with all the policies of the founder of the
mill, so Miss Dolittle had, from no calculation of future
advantage, but rather from temperament and inclination, championed
the cause of his son.

Had Mr Rudyard Clark lived, Mr Stevens would most likely have moved
up into the inner circle of those who, in that interval between
Edmund's birth and death, determined the development of the mill.
For, while Mr Rudyard Clark kept his son in entire ignorance of the
financial and administrative structure of the concern, Mr Stevens
had rapidly risen to all sorts of confidential posts--that of the
head of the employment bureau, for instance, which enabled him to
engage and dismiss, with few exceptions, the whole personnel of the
office staff as well as the superintendents, foremen, bosses, and
hands employed at the mill as such--till he had finally become the
secretary-treasurer, a paid, not an elected functionary, of the
vast concern and all its subsidiary enterprises.  Had Mr Rudyard
Clark lived, he would undoubtedly have made him one of the three
chief executives.

But Mr Rudyard Clark had died, and his son had taken his place; and
so it was Miss Dolittle who, backed by the son, assumed the title
and the somewhat empty function of the vice-presidency.  At the
time, during the last years of the century, it was an extraordinary
thing for a woman to rise, by sheer ability, to such a height in
the business world.  In any enterprise like that of the mill there
are two fundamental and opposite activities: producing and selling;
and production depended on sales.  From the start Mr Clark junior
had been in charge of the sales-organization; but as, with the
growth of the mill, brought about by his very success in selling,
the ramifications became ever more complex, till there was an
organization, international in scope, with offices at New York,
London, and half a dozen capitals of European countries, Miss
Dolittle had come into her own; and since this growth had coincided
with the partial assumption, by Mr Clark junior, of the functions
of a general manager, due to Mr Clark senior's accident--he had
been caught up by a belt and hurled against the wall--Miss
Dolittle, nominally private secretary to the vice-president, had
imperceptibly assumed all his duties as sales-manager, till,
feeling that he was losing touch with things, he had turned the
sales-office over to her entirely, engaging Miss Albright as her
successor in his own office.  For two reasons, however, he had
retained the nominal sales-managership: in the first place, his
father would have asked awkward and sarcastic questions if he had
openly resigned, for, coming from an era when he had held every
executive office 'under his hat' as he expressed it, that father
would have said his son was trying to shirk.  While he, the father,
had organized the mill and had provided for the channels and
methods of its growth; while he had, with a grasp and cunning
amazing in a 'man of the people', so split up the manifold
functions of the vast enterprise that no outsider and few
shareholders ever could unravel the structure as a whole, he had
entirely failed to realize the complication and the multiplication
of details taken care of by subordinates, whether they were his
son, Mr Stevens, Mr Brook, 'superintendent of works', or Miss
Dolittle.  He had never realized, as had his son, that, if any one
of these left, there would have been serious disturbances.  He
would indignantly have denied that he depended on them; to the very
end he considered himself as the all-sufficient source of power.
In the second place, the sales-crews, consisting now of several
hundred men all over the country, and in foreign countries as well,
would, at the time, still have resented being directed by a woman;
and so all letters leaving the general sales-office, even those of
which Mr Clark junior remained in ignorance, were signed with a
rubber-stamp of his signature so cunningly made that only a
graphological expert could have said that the signature was not
written by hand and in ink.

After Mr Rudyard Clark's death, Mr Clark junior assuming the
presidency, the vice-presidency had become vacant; and the choice
for that office stood between Mr Stevens and Miss Dolittle; to the
vast surprise of outsiders, it had promptly fallen to the lady.

Mr Stevens and Miss Dolittle, both still in their twenties, had,
each in his own sphere, been geniuses.  But for Mr Clark junior
there had never been any hesitation.

He was in his forties at the time; and for years he had been a
dreamer.  He had never spoken of his dreams; but by a sort of
divination, he had felt that Miss Dolittle understood and
applauded.  Like himself, and unlike Mr Stevens, she belonged to
that younger generation--spiritually younger--which was more
sensitive, more vulnerable, less sure of itself, and certainly more
interesting than the older generation of the fathers had been.
Those fathers, for instance, had bluntly spoken out to convey their
meaning; to the younger people, a glance, or a motion, sufficed:
such as lifting a finger or drawing up an eyebrow, both gestures
familiar to the new president.  They were more complex, more
difficult, perhaps cleverer, too; and certainly less confident;
they did not have so robust a conscience.

Nobody knew, of course, that, had he not been married before he
came to know her, Miss Dolittle might in many ways have been an
inspiration to him; he would more openly have allowed her to fight
his battles.  He had never admitted this even to himself; but thus
it had been.  The time was to come, and to the senator reclining in
the car as it shot through the woods it was already present, when
another woman, trying to break down his resistance to her own
attack on him, boldly asserted that Miss Dolittle was in love with
him and that, behind her loyalty, stood the plain, sexual fact.  He
was to feel then that he might have succumbed had it not been for
that allusion to Miss Dolittle.  Yes, as he sat there in the car,
reviewing those facts, a still later time was present to him, a
time at which, after the death of his wife, many years later, he
would gladly have taken her to himself had it not suddenly been too
late.  Why had it been too late?  An idle question.  All questions
beginning with 'why' were idle.  Nothing counted but fact.

Theoretically he would, in his old age, say that he and Miss
Dolittle had been socialists; and socialists are dreamers.

What had that dream of his been?  One day, so he had said to
himself before his father's death, HE would be the master; HE would
direct the fortunes of the mill for the good of mankind.  To do so,
he would have to buy out the other shareholders till the mill was
his property.  Whether that would be possible, he did not know;
for, beyond the fact that there were outside shareholders, he knew
nothing of the mill; his father, with his secretive ways, had never
allowed him a glimpse into anything that was not a matter of public
record; and public record was fragmentary.  It was characteristic
that, when he had been promoted to the vice-presidency formerly
held by a 'dummy', and when, therefore, it had become necessary for
him to be a shareholder, his father had given him one 'qualifying
share', making him sign a paper which appointed him, the father,
his son's proxy in matters requiring a vote.

He had dreamt of many things; above all of the Terrace, that vast
flat covered with cottages in which the mill-hands lived.  They
were all exactly alike, four-roomed, closely packed, distinguished
from each other by their numbers only, in six parallel streets.
All had diminutive front and back yards with lanes between them;
all had running water, tiny bathrooms, and a fireplace each.  Any
single one might have been called convenient, compact, sanitary.
In their agglomeration they were a horror.  Unfortunately he had
been down there, had seen how cramped they were, had breathed the
disheartening atmosphere of worry and trouble which filled these
little abodes of men who worked and slept and at best knew one
recreation: to get drunk at intervals.

All that he would change.  He would begin by building a huge hall
with a gymnasium, with rooms for games and reading, with a
swimming-pool and a lecture hall.  He would raise wages and give
the men a voice in the administration.

He had dreamt of the farmers whose wheat was bought by the mill.
His father, of course, had always bought in the cheapest market,
depressing that market by every device known to human cunning;
never, for instance, letting it be known that the best-milling
wheat was not the coveted grade Number One Northern, but a mixture
into which a lower grade, Number Three, entered largely.  That same
father had raised the price of his product to the consumer by every
means in his power: by price-agreements with other producers; by
price-wars eliminating competitors; by refusing to let dealers
handle his flour unless they agreed to handle no other.

It was true, that father had never made any personal use of the
resulting wealth; he had used his son and his daughter-in-law,
spending vicariously.

All that he, Sam, was going to change.  He was going to pay the
farmer a price for his wheat commensurate with the price the milled
flour fetched in the market; he would sell flour at a price which
would just ensure the prosperity of the mill and yield a modest
income for himself.

Producers, mill-hands, and consumers, all were to profit.  That had
been his dream.

When his father had died, he had suddenly become the master of the
mill.  Had he?  On the very threshold of this new era he had
encountered the sinister figure of William Swann.



CHAPTER V


At various stages of his career prior to his assuming power he had
met Swann under puzzling circumstances; and as the car ran swiftly
along the road between the walls of primeval forest, he reviewed
those circumstances to himself, in brief glimpses.

The first time had been on the day when the first four units of the
mill had been inaugurated by letting the water from behind the dam
into the great turbines which set the dynamos spinning.

It was on that day, too, that he had met Miss Maud Carter,
realizing with a shock that he was not, after all, to be entirely
master of his fate.  He had just now been thinking of Miss Dolittle
and of what she might have been to him; but she would never have
upset him in all his notions as Miss Carter had done precisely
because she had taken the mill, had taken him as one of the
millers, ironically only.  But there had been something else.  At
first sight he had felt that Miss Maud Carter concerned him with a
fearful immediacy.  In this retrospect he could even say that the
region of his own self, and probably the region of her self, which
were in some mysterious fashion stirred by their mutual sight were
not within their consciousness at all, certainly not within those
parts of their being that were under their control or directed by
thought and reflection.

At the time there had not yet been any thought of Miss Dolittle who
was no more than a school-girl.  But, so the old man reflected, the
one had gripped him by the things which were beyond, whether above
or below, all reason; whereas the other, the younger and later, had
left all that the former had stirred as if it did not exist.  It
was tragic that the older woman, who became his wife, should have
turned out to be primarily mind; whereas the younger who, in him,
called forth the mind, was, in her relation to him, primarily heart
and instinct.  He could not explain it; but, with the clairvoyance
of old age looking back on youth, he saw that it had been so.

Having seen Miss Carter, having led her through the mill, he had
felt that he must, must see her again before she went to join her
mother on her way to the Pacific coast; and when, timidly, he had
suggested that he drop around to the little hotel where she was to
spend the early half of the night with her brother, before boarding
the midnight train, he had been amazed at the laughing frankness
with which she had encouraged him.

So, the ceremony of the inauguration over, he had gone home to what
for the first time in his life appeared to him as his father's
miserable little house on Fourth Street.  But his father had not
yet arrived.  It being a great occasion for that father, he, the
son, had been reluctant to sit down at the table.  Yet, impatient
at being delayed, he had paced the floor in dining-room and
adjacent parlour.  Every now and then Mrs Leffler, the slatternly
housekeeper, had peered in from the kitchen.

At last, after an unconsciously long half hour, he went impulsively
to the curtained bay-window of the parlour; and, drawing one
curtain aside, he saw, to his vast surprise, his father standing on
the wooden sidewalk, engaged in an angry exchange of words with his
former part time bookkeeper, Bill Swann, dismissed after the fire.
What in the world could the two have to say to each other?

Both moved.  The old man did not dismiss the man at the gate.
Swann followed him to the door of the house and into it.

To see what this meant, Sam stepped into the hall.

"Had yer supper?" his father asked grimly.

"I was waiting for you."

"I don't want to eat.  I want the house to myself.  Have a bite and
get out."

Sam saw his father was dangerously excited: the Clarks had high
blood pressure and were subject to strokes.  But without a word he
turned back into the dining-room, calling for his tea, taking with
him the picture of Swann, of a man under stress, the bald dome of
his head beaded with sweat; but also of a man who stood like a rock
over which an angry sea was breaking.  Like doom he stood: broad,
high-chested, flesh-padded: powerful, flabby and shabby; silent,
ominous, evil.

The father entered.  "Finished?"

His appetite gone, Sam rose, wiping his mouth.  "I'm going."

The old man who had not meant his single word as a question but as
a command paid no attention, proceeded to the kitchen door, and
spoke to the housekeeper who stood in the passage, dressed in a
skirt that hung unevenly about her shanks, her none-too-clean apron
tucked up diagonally by a corner.  "I want ye to go home," he said.

"I've got to wash up," she objected shrilly.

"Ye'll wash up tomorrow."  His tone forestalled contradiction.

Without a word she untied her apron strings.

"Are ye going?" the old man asked, turning to Sam.

Sam risked a question.  "What does he want?"

"None of yer business.  Don't come back inside the hour."

Sam, taking his hat, passed out through the door; and his father
shot the bolt home.

Sam was profoundly disturbed.  He suffered from a bad conscience.
Decades ago, when he was a child, his father had never allowed him
to forget that he had been the cause of his mother's death.  Any
encounter with his father renewed that memory; and in this
unsettled state he went to stare at the girl who had stirred in him
he knew not what.

For years Sam had not seen Swann again, for he himself had gone
east as a salesman for the mill.  He had made a success of his
work; he had married and continued to live in the east; even when
he had taken a holiday, he had not felt the urge to go home to
Langholm, in spite of the fact that the mill had grown without a
break.  Unexpectedly a summons had come through Mr Stevens whom he
did not yet know.

The accident which had laid his father low had dislocated certain
vertebrae of the spine; Sam had to act as his father's deputy at
the mill.  At first he had gone alone, leaving Maud in the east;
but, seeing that his father's disability would be slow to remedy,
and having become moderately well-to-do himself meanwhile, by means
of an overriding commission of one half per cent on all sales
effected by his staff, he had built the house on Clark Street, a
palace compared with any other house so far erected at Langholm.

He had returned into a town transformed.  Langholm had become a
city.

The first thing which, on alighting from the train, he had seen was
the mill which, being in process of enlargement, made a lopsided,
truncated impression.  It consisted of eleven completed units
instead of the four he had known, arranged in three tiers of six,
three, and two units, the latter squatting at the north end like a
hood.  He calculated the present aim as being one of twenty units.

The second thing that struck him as, on foot, he made for the old
Queen's Hotel on Main Street, before going to see his father, had
been the new track vaulting the river: a curving viaduct standing
on tapering steel trestles as on stilts.  He knew it had been
built: he had suggested its construction seven years ago; had made
the drawing for it, but he had never seen it.  Always, as an
engineer, he had suggested; others had carried out.

And the third thing to amaze him had been the sight of Main Street
itself, crowded with stores and office buildings, all of stone
quarried nearby, grey, fossiliferous limestone which underlay the
whole district.  This change in the aspect of Main Street was due
to the activities of a new firm called Langholm Real Estate of
which Mat Tindal was president, the insurance agent who had handled
the insurance of the old wooden mill.  Dick Carter, Maud's brother,
too, had had his hand in it all, having designed almost every one
of these new buildings.  Uncannily, Sam recognized in them his own
influence; for the whole town had assumed a façade of steel-framed
fenestration between pillars of concrete; only the chief bank was a
Greek temple.

Among the buildings on Main Street, still uncompleted, were two
which promised to rival the mill in impressiveness: one whose
hoardings, on the south side of the street, proclaimed it to be the
future Palace Hotel; the other, opposite, on the site of the old
little wooden office, though occupying two lots in addition, was
the 'Flour Building' in which all the administrative departments of
the mill were to be housed.  In passing, Sam noticed that the lower
floor, still screened by the hoardings, was already in use and
bore, in huge gold letters, above its plate-glass windows, the
legend, 'Langholm Light and Power'.  That, he said to himself, was
of course part of the mill, for the power was produced in the
vaults at the foot of the dam.

He had, that night, seen his father who was in a cast but perfectly
clear in his mind; and he had received his instructions.  It was
only a week since the accident; but already there were hundreds of
letters to be answered.  Casually his father mentioned that a
telegraph office had been installed on the ground floor of the
Flour Building, behind the show-rooms of Langholm Light and Power.

Next morning, he was awakened in the dingy hotel room by the
fearful din of pneumatic riveting machines which made the valley
resound with their abomination of noise.

All which had been bewildering; but the most bewildering thing came
when, around nine o'clock, going over to the Flour Building, he
met, in the entrance between the hoardings, Bill Swann who stood
there with a proprietorial air, hands in his pockets, a cigar
hanging from his mouth.

Seeing him, Swann removed the cigar, smiled, and bowed obsequiously.
"Mr Sam!" he said.  "I've often wished to show you over the place."
His voice was clear and distinct above the enveloping clangour.

Sam's eyes narrowed.  "Are you employed here?" he asked.

"I am the manager of this concern"--with a wave of his hand towards
the two small signs on the inward-slanting windows of the entrance.
"Won't you come in?"

Mistrustfully Sam followed the man as he led the way into the
display rooms crowded with such electrical appliances as were in
use at the time.  Behind, spacious offices were arranged like the
cages in a bank:  'New Subscribers', 'Pay Clerk', 'Complaints and
Adjustments'.  Everything glittered with brass and plate-glass.

"So this is where you hang out?" Sam said.

"I am in charge here."

"Did you leave Ticknor's store?"

"Years ago."

"You bettered yourself?"

"Very much so," Swann replied with a jerky bow of his loose, heavy
body--a motion which detached a bead of sweat from his shiny
forehead.

Involuntarily Sam's eye followed that bead until it formed a star-
shaped splash on the tiled floor of the place.



But even that Sam had come to accept without serious question.
He had always disliked the man; but his necessities had been
notorious.  His wife was paralysed; he had a daughter ambitious to
be a teacher but forced to stay at home because Mrs Swann could not
be left alone; the expense of keeping a nurse had been prohibitive
for a man earning less than fifty dollars a month even though he
held down three part time jobs at once.  One of these he had lost
with the burning of the mill for which he used to post the ledger,
once a week, besides making out the weekly stock-sheet required by
the insurance company.

All this had been a matter of public knowledge; for the little two-
roomed shack where the Swanns had lived had had to be exempted from
taxation, so that his financial affairs had once a year to be raked
over by the town council.  Sam, with his humanitarian views and
socialist leanings, had theoretically pitied the man; but his
personal dislike had neutralized that feeling.  Still, being
himself at last a highly paid official of the mill, he tried to
convince himself, without quite succeeding, that he was glad to see
the man provided for.  He heard that Swann had built a house of his
own, on Argyle Street, next to the manorial town hall; that he kept
a maid as well as a nurse; that his daughter attended high school.

Daily, henceforth, he passed the man's 'hangout'; often he met him
in the great hall of the office building on the second floor of
which he had his own temporary quarters.  Ultimately all the
executives of the mill were to be moved to the sixth floor now
under construction.

A year went by.  Maud had moved to Langholm, into the house on
Clark Street which Sam had built for her.  Strangely, Maud, the
aristocrat, formed a close friendship with his father, the parvenu
who, from obscure origins, had risen to a position of wealth and
power, influencing legislation in Dominion and province.

Then, one night, his father lying in the parlour of his house, a
strange thing happened.  Two trim nurses were in charge there,
though Mrs Leffler still looked after kitchen and dining-room,
dressed in clean clothes now, forced to be so by an ultimatum from
Maud.

It was Maud who, when Sam had come home for dinner, had given him a
message from his father, to the effect that the old man wanted to
see him.  Dick Carter, her brother, was in England at the time,
evolving plans for Clark House.  Maud had already two saddle horses
and a fine carriage-and-pair, gifts of the 'old gentleman' as he
was now called.  Sam and Maud had both urged him to let them take
care of him in their house; he had refused.

When, after dinner, Sam, already the quiet, reserved, well-dressed
man of his later years, had gone over to his father's, he had found
him in a state of strange disquiet.  While the night nurse remained
in the room, nothing was said of the purpose of the summons.  When
she left, Sam, ascribing his father's condition to physical causes,
followed her into the hall.

"No," the nurse said in reply to his question.  "Dr Cruikshank was
in this afternoon and said things were going famously at last; he
promised to have Mr Clark on his feet inside two months, though he
might never walk without crutches; and again he might.  The cause
of Mr Clark's condition is mental.  He's been restless since Mr
Swann's call."

"Mr Swann's call?" Sam echoed sharply.

"Every time he comes we have to use sleeping powders."

"Does he come frequently?"

"Every now and then."

Sam nodded and returned to the parlour where the bed had been set
up by his own instruction.  After a glance at his father he asked,
much as his father had used to speak to him about the past, "What's
Swann been bothering you about?"

His father gave him a mistrustful look and said, nagging,
"Don't stand there.  Sit down.  I can't talk to you while ye're
standing . . ."  Then, Sam having obeyed, "Ye'll find my chequebook
in the upper right-hand drawer over there.  I want ye to make out
a cheque.  Make it payable to yerself.  I want ye to bring me the
cash in hundred-dollar bills, before eleven tomorrow morning."

Sam did as he was bidden.  "What sum?" he asked.

"Two thousand."

"What's that for?"

"None of yer business," the old man replied with his favourite
phrase, signing the cheque and promptly turning to the wall.



CHAPTER VI


And then, the senator reflected, as the car in which he sat with
his daughter-in-law turned the last but one corner on the way home,
there had followed that brief but shattering series of events which
centered around his father's death in 1898.

As if to defy Dr Cruikshank, Rudyard Clark had recovered till he
was able once more to walk without crutch or cane.

Clark House had been built; and, little Edmund having been born, it
had been made over to Maud, together with a sum running into six
figures, to be held in trust, the interest to be used for the
upkeep of the place which was to go to the wife of every future
eldest son.

The mill, its symmetry restored, consisted of twenty units, resting
on a base of six, with one unit less for every storey, ending with
a fifth storey of two units only; there was talk of further
expansion to come shortly.  The Flour Building was completed, the
sixth or uppermost floor now holding the private offices of the
president and the vice-president, their secretarial staffs, and the
huge boardroom in the centre, lighted by a skylight of enormous
dimensions.  Opposite the Flour Building stood the great Palace
Hotel, erected by an international syndicate, and holding such
dining- and ball-rooms as would serve the rising plutocracy of
Langholm for their social needs.

One evening, late in the year, Sam, his wife, just recovered from
her difficult confinement, Mrs Carter, Maud's mother, Dick Carter,
her brother, and Dr Cruikshank were sitting around the fireplace of
the big hall at Clark House, humouring Maud who, in her newly
recovered consciousness of health was reluctant to go to bed.

With a somewhat grim setting of his lips the senator remembered how
he, in his former self, had still felt uncomfortable amid the
luxuries of his surroundings which were so new to him.  It seemed
unnatural to step on that gold-coloured, hand-made Chinese rug
sixty feet long by forty broad which covered the centre of the
floor of the hall; it seemed wrong that, upstairs, in the sitting-
room recess opposite the grand stairway abutting on the gallery, a
portrait of Maud was hanging, painted, on his father's order, by
Langereau, a Montreal artist who had charged two thousand dollars
for it; it seemed incongruous that he, the son of a working miller,
received, when he left the house, hat and cane from the hands of a
liveried footman.

It had just struck eleven when Perkins, the butler, huge in girth
and carefully balanced, entered the hall and, bending by his side,
whispered to him.

"What's that?" Sam asked.  "Swann?  What's he want?"  But he had
already risen and was following the butler to the vestibule.

There, on the wide step leading down into the porte cochère, Swann,
the ominous manager of Langholm Light and Power, stood broad,
flesh-padded, the shining dome of his bald skull beaded with sweat,
in spite of the cold wind blowing from the west and striking Sam in
his evening clothes through the plate-glass door which a footman
held open.

"Come on in, Swann," Sam said testily.  "Come in and close the
door."

Swann having entered, Sam started sharply at his first word.
"What's that?  My father?  Wait.  I'm coming."  And, returning to
the archway of the hall, "Cruikshank, come on.  Something's
happened to my father."

The little doctor promptly joined him in the cloak-room where a
footman held his coat for him; he liked being waited on.

"Had I better come, too?" Dick Carter asked.

"Sam," Maud's voice rang out, "what is it?"

"I don't know.  Nothing serious, I hope.  Swann found my father
lying on the ground, on Hill Road.  Sounds like a stroke.  Yes,
better come, Dick.  Lie down, Maud.  Please do.  Don't wait up for
me.  I'll ring for your maid."

Swann leading, a lantern swinging from his hand, the four men
hurried up the winding driveway which rose south and southwest
between two hills, close to the crest of the declivity which fell
away to the Terrace.  From the mill, two miles away, came a
diffused radiance.

A few minutes later, having turned east on the road and jumped the
ditch to its south, where he searched the ground by the light of
his lantern, Swann said, "There he is."

The others followed him.

And there lay the old man in his worn but carefully brushed black
suit, without an overcoat, staring with open eyes at the four men.

"Come on, dad," Sam said, bending down.  "It seems you fell.  Could
you walk if we helped you to your feet?"

The old man did not answer, did not stir.

"Here, Dick, help me lift him."

He stood.  But when they withdrew their support, he would have
pitched forward.

They carried him down to the gardener's lodge just inside the park-
gate which was never closed when the family was at home.  Having
wakened the inmates by a knock and a shout, they deposited the old
man on a couch in the dining-room, the gardener and his wife
helping to arrange things, both having hurriedly, if partially,
dressed.  From the kitchen wide-eyed children in their nightwear
stared at the formidable little man, terrified and excited.

Sam ordered all doors closed, and he and Dr Cruikshank stripped the
old man to the waist.  By a black shoelace a key was hanging from
his neck.  The doctor, drawing up a chair, began his examination
with stethoscope and thermometer, the only instruments he carried
in the pockets of his overcoat.  In their evening clothes, the
three men formed a weird contrast to their surroundings.

The doctor looked up.  "A cerebral haemorrhage is the only
explanation."

An intensification of the stricken man's stare betrayed that his
ears still heard, his mind understood.  Sam touched the doctor on
the shoulder, summoning him outside by a nod.

They ran into Swann whom Sam despatched to the stables of Clark
House to fetch a carriage.

In the chill of the night, under the still, faintly rustling
cotton-woods, there followed a brief exchange of words.

"Any idea of what may have caused it?"

"Overexertion or overexcitement; or both."

"Would the climb uphill explain it?"

"If it was hurried."

But why should the old man have climbed the hill?  Since he had
gone past the gate, Clarke House had not been his destination.

"Any sign of foul play?"

"Not the slightest.  One thing is suspicious.  There is sand on his
clothes; he was lying on grass; that's not where he fell."

"I had noticed that," Sam said.

Shivering with the cold, they returned inside.

A few minutes later the wheels of a carriage were heard crunching
over the gravel of the driveway.  The doctor turned to Sam.

"Before we move him, I'd like to run down to the hospital to get a
hypodermic and a bit of camphor.  Wait for me here, will you?"

Sam nodded.  "Take Dick and Swann along.  No use keeping them here.
You and I can handle him."

Left alone with his father, Sam turned back to the couch, with a
sudden misgiving of something catastrophic taking place there.  The
eyes of the old man were straining, as if trying to convey a
message.

At that moment Sam's eyes fell on the key hanging from the
corrugated neck; and there recurred to him certain instructions
which his father had given him years ago.  Should sudden death
overtake him, he had said in his gruff and at best forbidding
manner, Sam was at once to possess himself of that key which would
open the small private safe in his office.  Thence, at the earliest
possible moment, he was to remove a certain account book which,
having studied its contents, he was to destroy.  Money he found
there he might consider as a gift.

Sam picked the key up and untied it.

At once the old man relaxed.  Within ten minutes, before the doctor
returned, he had quietly died on his couch.



The car was on the home stretch now, on the last of the four sides
of a square described by the paved road through the woods south of
Langholm which, in the household, was called 'The Loop'.

The old man who, in his revisualization of the nocturnal scene on
the hill, had become tense, relaxed in his corner.  The memory
excited him more deeply than the reality had done in the past; a
future having supervened, every trifle had revealed its hidden
significance.

Thus, had he, on the morning after the funeral, not gone down to
the Flour Building to obey the instructions of the dead man to the
letter; had he ignored them and never opened the safe; had he,
instead, walled it up, for with the old man's death it had become
useless, then his whole life, and with it that of everybody
connected with him, yes, the development of the mill would have
taken a different course.  The old man, being buried, would not
have re-arisen; he would never have made him, his son, the slave of
the mill.  The will, which was read a day later, in the presence of
the family, could not have done that, for the few relevant clauses
would have remained meaningless.

He, Sam, having taken certain measures, would have left the
administration of the vast concern, the vastness of which was still
hidden from him, to others.  Being a very rich man now, he would
have done what his wife had wished him to do; he would have gone to
Europe and become a dilettante in music, a collector of paintings
and articles of virtu, a patron, perhaps, of the arts; and he would
have been happy.  Perhaps his wife would have ceased seeing in him
a plodding mediocrity, well-meaning, faithful to a trust, but
without imagination or creative force.



They were rapidly approaching the gate to the park; and only a few
flashes of vision intervened before they turned in.

He saw himself sitting in his swift open landau, dressed in a black
morning coat and stiff bowler hat, with his striped trousers hidden
by the camel-hair rug thrown over his knees.  He remembered how,
turning into Main Street, he had reflected that, fifteen years ago,
Langholm had been a village of wood; whereas now it was a city of
limestone, new, showy, crude in its newness, but full of a surging
life.

There had been no grief, no sense of bereavement; on the contrary,
the feeling had been of relief.  At last he would do what he had
dreamt of.  But first of all he must familiarize himself with the
thousand-and-one details of administration.  As soon as he had done
so . . .

Within a night, within half a night, sitting by his father's body,
he had matured by years.  A sense of responsibility had settled on
him; he was no longer the rebel; he was the master now, at forty-
three; his turn had come; no longer was he going to allow himself
to be used. . . .

To be used!

With that word, his carriage turning into Main Street, a sort of
synopsis and condensation of an earlier scene had arisen in his
mind, gone almost as soon as it had come.

The occasion was this.  The mill was to be enlarged on a scale
unheard-of even for this fast-growing concern: seven units were to
be added; and in addition three grain-elevators were to be erected,
with a storage capacity of 600,000 bushels.  His father had called
a special shareholders' meeting to discuss ways and means.  It had
been a year or two before his death; and he had tipped his son off
in advance: certain statements would be needed, estimates of the
growth of the market, especially overseas.  He relied on Sam who
would be present on that occasion by special invitation.

The scene was set in the huge boardroom of the Flour Building,
around the long walnut table.  Under the blinding light of many
clusters of unshaded electric bulbs sat a strange assembly of men.

Next to Rudyard Clark who was in the chair sat Mat Tindal, the
former insurance agent, now president of a million-dollar concern
called Langholm Real Estate; then Rodney Ticknor, general merchant,
whose one-roomed store had become a five-storey department store of
imposing proportions; then Gaylord, once a blacksmith, now owner
and editor of the local paper, the Langholm Lynx.  Art Selby was
there, manager of the leading bank in town, huge, square, slow to
move; above all, there was Mr Cole from Winnipeg, a short, thick-
set, choleric man without a neck who held proxies for a score of
small shareholders.  Besides, of course, there had been Charles
Beatty, Q.C., solicitor for the mill, a medium-sized, slender man
with a face resembling a death's head.

At the upper end of the table sat a whole staff of stenographers,
lorded over by Mr McNally, the former secretary-treasurer recently
replaced by Mr Stevens.

Sam, who had been told to be there at nine sharp, was at once
called upon by his father to give his report.

"That'll convince ye," his father said when his son sat down.  "The
question is how best to finance.  We can increase capital and sell
stock; or we can borrow.  If we needed less than a hundred
thousand, the directors would have gone ahead on their own
responsibility, according to by-law.  But we need three-quarters of
a million.  If we borrow we shall have to repay; that means no
dividends for a year."

"You've sold your stock on the understanding that there will be no
break in dividends," Mr Cole objected.

"After a while dividends will rise to twice the old rate.  The
market value of the stock will double.  That should be satisfactory."

"You can't borrow," Mr Cole insisted.  "Who'd loan you that much?"

This question Rudyard Clark treated as negligible.  "It's all
arranged," he said.  "Mr Selby's here.  His bank has agreed."

"Gentlemen," Art Selby said, rolling his bulk around in his chair
to face Mr Cole at his right.  "Our Bank has a great faith in the
future of the west.  We are prepared to commit ourselves heavily.
I am instructed to take any reasonable risk.  If it were a question
of an ordinary accommodation, we'd grant it unconditionally.  But
the demand is for a very large and indeterminate sum, for an
undefined time.  So the directorate has seen fit to tie a string to
its consent.  They will grant the loan if the present shareholders
endorse all notes personally, pro rata of their holdings."

"Out of the question!" Mr Cole exploded.  "Even if I were willing
to agree for myself, which I am not, I could not commit those for
whom I am acting."

Rudyard Clark did not reply.  There was a long pause.

Then empty-headed Mat Tindal tried to pour oil on troubled waters.
"Mr Clark, I'd be inclined to favour the issue of new stock.  Any
Langholm offer is readily snapped up by the investing public.
Langholm Real Estate issued half a million three months ago.  It
was oversubscribed in a week.  We could sell above par."

Rudyard Clark had nothing to say.

"That's sense," said Mr Cole.  "Why in the world borrow when the
capital is there, begging to be used?"

"Because I won't give my consent."

"Why not?"

"I owe no man a reason."

"Ah, ah!" cried Mr Cole, getting red in the face.  "I'll tell you,
Mr Clark.  You hold a precarious control.  If we issue new stock,
that control might be in danger."

Rudyard Clark gave a grim laugh.  "That's so.  It's my perfect
right to oppose any measure for any reason.  You know that I can."

"Unfortunately," Mr Cole sighed.  "On the other hand, no power on
earth can force us to put our signatures on those notes.  That's
the one thing in which control doesn't help you.  Even if those
present agreed, you'd have to get the consent of the absent ones."

"The bank would waive the endorsement of minor shareholders--say
those who own no more than ten shares," Art Selby said impartially.

Everybody realized that this placed the issue squarely between the
two chief opponents.  Mr Cole was the only western shareholder
whose holdings ran into six figures.

Rudyard Clark gave another grim laugh.  "Ye reproach me with
scheming to retain control," he said.  "I'll tell ye what's behind
it all.  Ye want to get that control out of my hands.  Ye can't
have any doubt, from what my son's told ye, that the loan will be
repaid.  But let me tell ye; this mill is going to run with me in
control; or not at all."

This was a bombshell.  Everybody in the room, except Charles
Beatty, sat up.  Sam divined that Mr Beatty had advised that
procedure.

Mr Cole became very quiet.  "How is that?" he asked.

"I'd cut the power off."

"I knew it!" Mr Cole cried, thumping the table.  But he also knew,
as did everybody else, that he was beaten.



This scene rose before the senator as it had arisen before Sam,
forty years ago, not in any detail, but, as it were, in the form of
a single fact.

And just as they were turning into the gate of the park, the
senator closed his eyes in his corner.

He saw himself alighting in front of the Flour Building.  A huge
Negro in olive-green livery, with yellow trimmings, jumped forward
to offer his arm; another, behind him, held the door to the hall.
Opposite the Flour Buildings, of equal height, no less supercilious,
stood the Palace Hotel, its face closed.

"Don't wait," Sam said curtly to the driver who saluted.

Then he entered the hall of the building, constructed, outside, of
concrete over steel, inside, of coloured and highly polished
marbles.

In this hall, crowded with comings and going, two Negroid
attendants sprang up from a black-marble bench in the centre of the
right-hand wall which was of plate glass, permitting a survey of
the premises where Swann had his 'hangout'.  Both, at Sam's sight,
dived rearward where one of them entered the third elevator cage,
while the other, saluting, stood ready to close its grilled slide-
door the moment Sam had taken his stand inside.  Both of them wore
the same olive-green livery trimmed with yellow as the two at the
outer door.  This third elevator was the 'express', never used by
those whose business was below the sixth floor.

Sam paid no attention to the commotion about him.  Even to the
saluting attendants he gave only the briefest nod in reply.  But he
took note of the proud, disdainful bearing they observed with
regard to all but the highest executives; it was the bearing which
Rudyard Clark had demanded from menials serving the business.  HE
would change all that. . . .

His father, on the other hand, had never hesitated to talk to these
men about their private and intimate affairs; or to correct them if
their manner did not meet with his entire approval.  How strange,
the senator thought, that his father, the autocrat, the never-to-
be-contradicted master, should have shown himself more affable,
ready even to jest and to laugh with his subordinates; and that he
should have commanded an all the more unquestioning obedience, yes,
an affectionate anticipation of his desires.  Did these men know
that he, the son, sympathized with everyone in servitude?  That he
planned, and spent sleepless nights in planning, how to better
their lot?

From the vantage point of his great age, the senator pitied the man
he had been.  For, though the magnificent Negroids of that day lay
in their graves or nursed a decrepit old age as pensioners of the
mill, they had been replaced by others: he had become used to them
when his own great purpose had been broken as he might break a
match.



CHAPTER VII


The car came to a stop under the porte cochère.

Leaning on the extended arm of a footman, Lady Clark alighted.

It took the old man longer to follow her; but he, too, at last took
the single step to the floor of the vestibule, the young butler
holding the door for him.

This young butler, engaged a few years ago by Lady Clark, the
senator still regarded as an intruder; for thirty years old Perkins
had held his place: huge, Falstaffian Perkins, between whom and his
master there had been a tacit understanding that the social
distinctions were mere pretence; could not a duke and lord, in a
play, consent to take the part of an underling?  Perkins had been
the lord; he, the senator, barely his equal.  Maud, of course, his
long-dead wife, had never known that; or she would have laughed and
laughed. . . .

It did not matter.  But the senator could not yet, when he met him,
refrain from staring for a moment at this new butler, as if to make
sure he was real; or as if he expected him to say something, to
betray at least by a gesture what, in his heart, he thought of this
world of his masters.  No such gesture ever came; it was
disconcerting.

This time the senator found it so disturbing that HE stopped as if
to say something; and the butler bent forward as if to catch a
command like a ball which he expected the other to pitch to him.
It was this attitude of submissive readiness which struck the
senator dumb; for he had actually intended to say something.

As if on second thought, he did speak.  "Make my excuses to the
ladies.  I want another drive."

"Very good, sir," said the butler.  "Had I better call McAllister
to take the wheel, sir?"

"McAllister?" the senator repeated.  "Wasn't it McAllister. . . ."

"No, sir.  Excuse me, sir.  It was Waugh who was driving her
ladyship."

This correction, in spite of its impeccable form, irritated the
senator who seemed to scent in it the insolence of the young to the
old.  "Well," he said testily.  "Call him.  I'm waiting."

The young butler, letting go of the door, strode over to the
telephone connecting house and drive-sheds.  "McAllister wanted,"
he said.  "To drive the senator."  Then, half-turning, "Same car,
sir?"

"Any car."

Since the matter was thus left to himself, the young butler,
thinking of the fact that the Lincoln was dusty, said briefly into
the transmitter, "The Rolls-Royce."

Which again the senator chose to take as an impertinence, for the
Rolls-Royce was the oldest of the big cars available.  But it was
not worth while to object.  Let it be the Rolls-Royce.

The reason for this scene which remained unnoticed by Lady Clark--
for, out of consideration for the old man's mood, she had at once
withdrawn--was simply the reluctance of the senator to return
abruptly to the world of the living.  He wanted to remain with his
thoughts.

The car having been brought around, and the senator having taken
his seat, he was in the past again.

But the butler had followed him.  "We won't hold lunch, sir?"

The senator, disturbed, almost barked.  "Didn't I tell you to make
my excuses?"  And, McAllister having pushed back the glass-slide
between cab and tonneau, he added, still irately, "Around the
loop."

The car shot forward; the senator was in the hall of the Flour
Building on Main Street.

It was the morning after the funeral.  The three days that had
elapsed since the death had served to confirm him in all his old
plans.  HE was the master now; he never doubted that, apart from
minor bequests, the bulk of his father's estate, ensuring control,
would fall into his hands as if the old man had died intestate.
Now he must promptly carry out the dead man's instructions with
regard to the safe, thereby winning his freedom, cutting himself
loose from the past, breaking with a system which he hated.

While entering the elevator, he was conscious of a girl in a niche
opposite the cage reaching for a telephone.  No doubt she was
signalizing his arrival to his subordinates upstairs; and so,
reaching the top floor, he was not surprised to see Miss Albright
coming out to meet him in the boardroom.

It had puzzled him how he was going to get into his father's
office.  Miss Albright solved that problem for him.

"Mr Clark," she said, sweeping towards him, "I have taken the
liberty of moving you into the president's suite.  Have I done
right?  The late Mr Clark had left nothing in his desk.  The
drawers were open."

"Quite," Sam replied without surprise at the last statement; the
old man had always believed in working from memory.

"There wasn't time to move myself and the stenographers," Miss
Albright went on, following him as he entered, through the
anteroom, into his father's office to the left.  "The telephone in
the drawer connects with the one on my desk.  I am within call.
Pending arrangements, the late Mr Clark's staff and ours are
doubling up for the day."

Sam had turned and was hanging overcoat and hat on the cloak-rack
behind the door; so he stood revealed in morning coat and striped
trousers.  With a familiar gesture he raised one eyebrow and said,
"Let's get through with the routine.  I want to be undisturbed."

"There is only Miss Dolittle," Miss Albright said.

"Let her come."  And he sat down at the desk in the centre of the
room.  A leather-covered armchair stood by its side, a straight-
backed chair facing it.  The floor was covered with a Persian rug.

Miss Albright withdrew; and he noticed her flowing dress of black
satin; she was a large girl, too florid for his taste.

On the glass-topped mahogany desk stood two wire trays, one filled
with opened letters; the other with daily papers from east and
west.

Without touching either, he rose again when he was alone, going to
the wide windows, four of them in a row.  They gave on the lower
end of the lake, with the wooded hills beyond, mill and dam in the
foreground.  Though only five stories high, the mill towered above
the Flour Building, for each of its stories rose twenty-five feet.
To the left or west he had a glimpse of the elevators, past a
shoulder of the mill.  Everything visible, even the dam, was dusted
white with flour.

All which he knew.  During his father's illness he had often gone
here for that view.  Somewhere he had read a phrase in the story of
a medieval mystic which had stuck in his memory:  Ecce animula
tua!--"There stands your little soul!"  He had been in the habit of
repeating it to himself whenever he saw the mill.  Through his
father's death, his aesthetic appreciation of the buildings before
him had, at a blow, become a moral one; the responsibility was his
now--the responsibility for making the mill a blessing or a curse
to mankind.  And another thing became clear: the mill was not a
man-made thing: it was an outgrowth of the soil, the rock, the
earth, subject to laws of growth of its own, independently of
himself.  All the more. . . .

He turned back into the room with a feeling familiar to him, a
feeling of the futility of human effort.  What, in a moral sense,
was this mill, this whole enterprise which the old man had called
into being during the last short years of his life?  What was this
town which, for its very existence and subsistence, depended on the
mill?  His confidence, his far-reaching plans paled.  Mill, dam,
and town were the work of the man who was dead--who had supplied
the driving power to call them into actual being.  He, Sam, was
nothing.  He planned, he did not carry out.  He was the engineer;
his father had been the 'entrepreneur'.

That feeling he must overcome; it was still part of the effect
which his father had had on him.

Idly turning to the desk, he opened one or two of the papers and
folded and dropped them again.  He had not thought of the publicity
which would attach to the event of his father's death.  Here it
was: flaring headlines reported the end of the 'Flour King'.
Inconspicuous little man he had been, his father was mourned as a
'national figure'.  One obituary called him a 'Titan of Finance'.

Sam sat down again and stared at the pages.  He was not reading; he
was thinking.  Who are we?  What is the reality in us?  That which
we feel ourselves to be?  Or that which others conceive us to be?
The things that surround us are known to us by the way they affect
us.  Their inner reality is as mysterious to us as the universe
itself, or as life and death.  What was the reality?  Was there a
reality?  The man whom he, his son, had known by that sympathy of
the blood which, in spite of all their antagonisms, had united
them: a man of fears, of doubts, of hesitations, scruples,
forebodings?  Or the bold buccaneering adventurer who had been
successful; whom the world saw expressed in his work, in that dam
out there, in this vast organization which he had created and held
together?  Nothing but the latter lived in the reports of the death
at which Sam stared with unseeing eyes: HE only would live on in
his work and in legend.  For the moment his father became even to
Sam an august stranger.

Nobody ever knocked at a door on this sixth floor of the Flour
Building; the theory was that nobody could enter unannounced.

Sam became conscious of the fact that Miss Dolittle was in the
room.  He rose and faced her from the windows.

As always, her mere presence cheered him; after all, he was not
absolutely alone.  It was to be the first-fruit of his power to
give her a position nominally next in authority to his own.

The girl, medium-sized, extraordinarily good-looking--though, no
doubt, she would get stout in later life--above all vital to her
fingertips, greeted her chief with a half confidential smile and
handed him a large sheet of stiff, squared paper exhibiting graphs
in three colours.

Sam scanned it.  "How," he asked after a while, "are we going to
meet that demand?"  With a pointing finger he traced a red line
which soared over the blue line indicating production.

Miss Dolittle, still as if discussing personal rather than business
matters, gave a shrug.

"How about Western Flour Mills?" Sam asked.

"Full up.  Running to capacity, day and night.  We have reserves
for a month or two.  Shall I send Mr Eckel up?"

"Not this morning.  I am busy."

"Of course."

Western Flour Mills was a subsidiary concern operating four
comparatively small mills in western centres.  Mr Eckel was Chief
Chemist, in charge of buying.

"But perhaps Mr Eckel will be able to advise.  Consult him.
Meanwhile draw on reserves.  We shall have to build again."

"Very well."

"Sit down a moment," Sam said, his tone changing.

She obeyed.

"There is the problem of my signature," Sam went on, still
standing.

"Of course."  Again Miss Dolittle understood at a word.

"Suppose Mr Stevens' rubber stamp takes the place of mine?"

Miss Dolittle gave a slight laugh.  "Mr Stevens!"

Sam also understood.  Bob Stevens, very efficient in his sphere,
was unpopular.  "Too bad you were not born a man," he said,
smiling.

"Is it? . . .  Well, I don't like the idea of reporting to him."

"I didn't say you were to report to him.  Suppose you were put
entirely on your own feet?"

She looked up at him, anticipation suffusing her cheeks.  "As a
mere formality . . .  If it is not presumption . . .  Is Mr Stevens
going to take your place?"

"No.  Matters will, of course, have to be ratified by a directors'
meeting.  But since, most likely, I shall hold control. . . ."

Miss Dolittle squirmed a little, her fine mouth half open.

And Sam betrayed, as he rarely did, that he was human.  "Mr Stevens
is indispensable as secretary-treasurer," he said tantalizingly.
Which could only mean that he was to rise no higher.  "Of course,
we shall need a new vice-president.  The former arrangement worked
well?"

"You mean the vice-president being nominally sales-manager also?"

"Exactly."

"Yes.  But I don't see. . . ."

It was rare for Sam to play on a woman's feelings; but he enjoyed
the experience.  "Well," he said, "I can't be my own employee.  How
would it be if we made the real sales-manager the nominal vice-
president?"

Miss Dolittle looked up sideways.  Her smile would have given most
men a thrill.  "I am not a shareholder. . . ."

"Neither is Mr Stevens."

"You mean. . . ."

"You need one qualifying share.  It is true, the stock stands at
eight forty-five."

"Oh," Miss Dolittle cried.  "If the ban is lifted. . . ."

"The ban will be lifted in the rarest cases.  It is all predicated,
of course, on my being my father's heir."

"There can't be a doubt about that, can there?"

"I don't think so; but I don't know.  I am presuming on the fact.
Such an arrangement would convince Mr Stevens, would it not, that
his stamp under your letters is the merest formality?"

"It would settle all possible objections."

"Very well, then," Sam said in the tone of finality.

Miss Dolittle rose as if in confusion.  "There is nothing else?"

"Nothing, thanks."



That, the senator reflected, had been the last time for many years
that he had stood face to face with a woman unselfconscious.



But instantly he was back in the past.

He stood in that office, absent-mindedly fingering a key in his
vest-pocket.  Before him stood Miss Albright.  "Take this
correspondence away," he said.  "I shall want it again.  Just now I
want to be undisturbed till noon."

"Very well, Mr Clark."  And the secretary vanished.

Unreasonably, Sam felt annoyed with the girl as if she pursued him.

But the click of the door brought him face to face with his task.
He took the key from his pocket; for the first time, in the
execution of his father's instructions, he felt hesitation.  In the
light of the sudden death, those instructions had taken on the
nature of the expression of a last will which must be obeyed.  He
was to open the private safe, to take what it contained in cash, as
a gift inter vivos, to make himself familiar with the contents of
an account book, and to destroy it.  The task went against his
inclination.  Evasively he asked himself whether it was wise to
undertake it in daytime, during office hours, with the vast hive of
the building humming.  But would it not cause even more damaging
comment if he returned to the building after hours?  What with
three watchmen circling through it at night, he was as good as
certain to be seen.  He needed a light which would be exposed to
full view from the mill.  He would be suspected of trying to
discover assets which he ought not to touch till the will was
known.

As for surprise, he felt safe.  The operator downstairs had by this
time been told not to let anyone pass; a sign 'Private' was hung to
the grilled and closed door of the express elevator below; its cage
was on the top floor, the Negro drowsing on his stool.  The whole
staff, Miss Albright at its head, was on the lookout.

With a shrug he looked at the celluloid tag attached to the key and
read the combination.  Squatting down before the low door of the
safe, in the wall faced by the desk, he twirled the button.

A moment later, the door of the safe gaped open.

To the right, two open compartments; to the left, two deep drawers.

Sam turned his attention to the latter.  One held three bankbooks,
a small envelope with a key in it, marked 'Safety Deposit Box', and
a large number-ten manilla envelope marked 'Swann'; the other, a
not inconsiderable sum of specie in small linen bags: gold of
English coinage, silver dollars of historic dates.  Apparently his
father had collected numismatic rarities.  The balances of the
bankbooks totalled close to a hundred thousand.  He returned them
to their drawer and transferred the cash, including the manilla
envelope, to the desk.

Then he examined the upright compartments.  One contained three
sheaves of papers dated 1899, 1905, 1920 respectively.  Examination
showed them to be plans and specifications for the expansion of the
mill.  That expansion his father had mapped out for over twenty
years!  Was he, Sam, after all, not going to be the undisputed
master?

The other compartment held a single book of the type which, in
small business houses, is used as a journal.  It must be the
account book referred to in his father's instructions.  He took it
to the desk and sat down.

A dull sort of excitement invaded him.  What could this book
contain which demanded its immediate destruction?

As far as a preliminary scrutiny revealed, it contained a record of
the dead man's personal earnings and expenditures, beginning with
October 1867 when Sam's grandfather Douglas had died of stroke.



The senator, in his corner of the tonneau of the car which was
swiftly travelling over the road of 'The Loop', meeting a town car
now and then, for the driveway was open to the public, felt
reinvaded by that excitement of forty years ago.  In pursuing his
evocation of the past, he closed his eyes, one hand grasping the
other.



Many things came back to the man at the desk as he turned the
pages.  For the nineteen years following the opening date the
entries showed a multitude of small, often negligible sums drawn
from the business for the most various purposes: household
expenses, telegraph fees, postage, equipment for the mill.  Up to
1880 the yearly totals were insignificant, now rising above, now
falling below $400.  Then they increased; there was a building
account.  All equipment for the expansion of the mill was
apparently bought second-hand; there was one item, "Lower
Grindstone, $75.00".  There came another, a sum spent on the
acquisition, from the Crown, of a large tract of land, several
square miles of it: the land now covered by, and bordering on, the
lake: it was bought at a nominal price.

In spite of the fact that business expenditure ceased to be
entered, larger and larger sums appeared.  There were increasing
entries on the credit side, too, running into thousands of dollars;
and each was balanced by a corresponding outgo.  Many referred to
safe investments; others were harder to understand.  Till, with the
effect of a sudden enlightenment, the fact stood revealed that the
ageing man had been speculating in wheat, first on a small, then an
ever larger scale.  As he began to grind for the eastern market, he
had used his growing knowledge and taken advantage of seasonal
fluctuations; and he had done so shrewdly and successfully.  There
were entries of wheat purchased by "Rudyard Clark, Private", resold
to "Rudyard Clark, Miller".  This manoeuvre made Sam smile: it
foreshadowed the Napoleonic skill with which the old man must have
marshalled his assets in 1888 when, on the basis of his slender
private holdings, he had launched a three-million-dollar concern in
such a way as to retain control.  Though, come to think, were his
private holdings so small?  Even the total of the profits made on
wheat deals between "Rudyard Clark, Private" and "Rudyard Clark,
Miller" ran into six figures.

Sam knew that the land covered by the lake stood on the books at a
valuation of $100 an acre; whereas he could now verify that it had
cost his father precisely ten cents.  Without the land, the dam
could not have been built; without the dam, the river could not
have turned the turbines; without the turbines, the mill could not
have been run.

Sam's admiration was mingled with a peculiar misgiving.  The thing
was magnificent; but in some indefinable way it was ruthless.

Besides, it was "Finance".  Was that panegyrist right who had
called his father a Titan of Finance?  In practical things, in the
working-out of the plan, the old man had relied on others: on
engineers, on architects, on chemists: on Mr Eckel, Dick Carter,
and, yes, on him, Sam, who, after all, had furnished every fruitful
idea, often in a round about way, working through Dick Carter or
the engineers.  To what extent had his father known of the part his
son had played in determining the structure of the mill?  The
pyramidal outline, for instance; the layout in units; the flood-
lighting: ideas actually put forward by Dick Carter, though
originated by Sam.

A line in red ink across the last page of this chapter of the
record brought it to an abrupt close:


"Mill destroyed by fire, April 23-24, 1888."


As Sam went through the remainder of the record, he found ever
larger items, culminating in an entry of $250,000, without comment,
balanced by another, recording the sale of 1000 shares in Langholm
Real Estate, yielding slightly more than that sum.  That was the
money spent on Clark House.  Another entry, balanced by another
sale of stock in the same concern, recorded, at the very end, that
$200,000 had been placed to the credit of "Maud Clark, née Carter,
wife of my beloved son Samuel, in trust, for the upkeep of said
property".

In this part of the record there was one puzzling thing.

Seven entries, each of $2,000 or over, all on the credit or
expenditure side, were made without comment, totalling $15,000.
Nothing explained what they stood for; but each of them was marked,
in pencil, with a figure enclosed in a circle:

267.  Sam wondered.

He could not see a single reason why this account book should be
destroyed; on the contrary, it was a valuable document throwing
light on the genesis of the mill.  Since the mill bade fair to
become a great institution of national and even international
importance, the document should be preserved in the archives at
Ottawa.



At this moment the unexpected, the unheard-of happened: a caller
slipped past the watchers and burst into the presidential room.

This was Dick Carter, Sam's brother-in-law, designer of mill, Flour
Building, Clark House, Palace Hotel, and many other edifices in
town.

Sam looked up, startled.  Behind the intruder he saw three women,
Miss Albright leading, trying to restrain him; but Dick,
irrepressible, waved a happy hand at them, laughing a gold-flashing
laugh, and closed the door behind his back.

Sam frowned.  Behind the caller gaped the open safe; on the desk
lay account book, money, and manilla envelope.  The book he closed
quickly.

"Hello," Dick sang out cheerfully.  He was a medium-sized, gay-
looking man of Sam's age; somehow, in spite of signs of dissipation
in his face, he looked younger.  "I've a hurry-call to Vancouver.
I'm leaving by the noon train.  May go on to Seattle."  At this
point the fact that he had to name the man whom they had buried but
yesterday recalled the mournful occasion to him; and he subdued his
exuberance which, Sam suspected, was partly due to his having had a
bottle of wine.  "You know," he went on, "the old gentleman"--had
he been living, he would have called him 'the old codger'--"had
asked for additional plans and an elevation.  Any hurry about that?
I'm off on the biggest job yet."

"Elevation?" Sam asked, puzzled.

"Hadn't he discussed the thing with you?"

"Not a word."

"Well, well . . .  It's this way."  And he reached for the pad on
which Sam had been figuring.  "This of any account?"  And, Sam
shaking his head, he tore the top sheet off and let it flutter to
the desk.  Then, with a gold pencil from his pocket, he sketched
the outline of an elevation comprising thirty-five units, with an
illegible legend running from side to side along the fifth tier.
"Here," Dick added, "he wanted two lines of twenty-foot letters in
black marble.  See what I mean?  That's what he was playing with in
his mind."

Appalled, Sam asked, "And what was the legend?"

"Clark Flour Mills.  The Home of Canada's Flour."

Sam fairly jumped in his seat.  "No," he cried in distress.  "No!"

"Well," Dick said doubtfully.  "You're the boss now."

"The Home of . . ." Sam said with ineffable scorn in his voice.

Dick made a volte-face.  "Ridiculous, isn't it?  He probably knew
you'd object . . ."  He was on the point of adding, The sly old
dog!' but changed it into "He was secretive, wasn't he?"

"Of course," Sam said, "we have to enlarge.  You may be needed for
the floor plans.  But I don't think there's any immediate hurry."

"You won't want blue-prints within a week?"

"Not within a week.  I shall let you know.  Usual address?"

"Usual address.  If I leave there, I shall give instructions to
forward.  So long, then."  And, with a thrust of his arm, he threw
the pad back on the desk.

Now, in this movement of his, a button of his cuff caught behind
the stiff cover of the account book which had refused to lie flat;
the book was brushed to the floor.

"Sorry," Dick said, bending down; but Sam had forestalled him.



Sam was alone again.  Dick did not matter.  Most likely he had not
even noticed the open safe; if he had, he had given it no thought.

There was no reason to destroy the book.  He would return it to its
resting place in the safe.

But, having risen to do so, a peculiar circumstance struck him as
he reached for the book.  In being tossed back on the desk, it had
fallen on its spine and opened at a point where a brief series of
entries had so far escaped him.  That series stood on a page near
the end of the book; and the page bore the number 267.

Sam dropped back to his seat.  He felt weak-kneed with foreboding;
a new wave of excitement ran through him.  A glance showed the page
contained every entry from the front part of the book which had
been marked with the encircled number.  In his father's fine,
flowing hand it bore the heading:

"Account of William Swann."

Beyond that, it made no disclosure.  Sam compared the entries with
those he had jotted down on the slip of paper.  They tallied.

That the book had opened at this page was readily explained: it had
been carefully flattened.

Sam was startled.

The senator, in recalling it, felt his hands tremble; for this had
been the most decisive moment in his life; all else had flowed from
it: Swann was raising his head again.  What was his connection with
his father?  In his mind he saw him as he had seen him in the
narrow hall of his father's house; broad-shouldered, heavy, middle-
aged; as if he were built for manual labour, not for clerical work.
Even as a bookkeeper Sam had disliked him: he was too oilily
subservient, too much given to obsequious bowing.

He felt more profoundly disturbed than ever before in his life;
vague misgivings flooded his mind.  He turned back to the book.

The first payment had been made in the fall of 1888, shortly after
the first units of the mill had been put into operation: $2,000;
the last less than half a year ago; and in addition there was that
manilla envelope.  It being unsealed, he examined its contents
which consisted of twenty one-hundred-dollar bills.

Worriedly he picked the account book up again and turned the pages,
coming, almost at once, upon a list of receipts written in the dead
man's hand and signed by Swann in a bold, calligraphic script:

"Received, from Mr Rudyard Clark, the sum of ............... in
payment of blackmail."

Sam's first impulse was to press the button under his desk and to
have the man summoned.  But on second thought he refrained.  He
must ponder the matter.  He would go home, to return after
luncheon.

He trembled as he rose; but, controlling himself, he replaced all
but the cash in the safe which he relocked.  Sitting down once
more, he made out a deposit slip for the money which he counted,
stowed gold and silver in his pockets, and put on his coat.

In the boardroom, Miss Albright met him, flushed.  "Shall I ring
for the carriage, Mr Clark?"

He shook his head.  "I'll walk."

"About Mr Carter, Mr Clark.  He happened to be on the fifth floor
and used the stairs.  That's why we could not stop him."

Sam, with a nod, made for the waiting elevator cage.



On the way home he dropped in at the bank with the Grecian front,
to deposit the cash he carried.  It was the noon hour; and he had
to tip his hat to a score of people.  But the bank was deserted.

Art Selby, the manager, who, like the Clarks, had his lunch at a
later hour, saw Sam through the open door of his office, and,
pushing his glasses up on his capacious forehead, came to meet him.

"Anything I can do for you, Sam?"

"I have a certain amount of cash in my pockets; from my father's
safe."

The manager chuckled.  "Succession duties are the devil," he said.

Sam felt acutely that he was in a false position and resented the
fact.  His voice was icy when he said, "Let's go to your office."

Which acted as a sufficient check on the other's facetiousness to
make him do what had to be done in silence and with despatch.

Within a few minutes Sam was back in the street, half wishing he
had sent for the carriage after all.  He was not used to moving in
crowds; it interfered with his effort to clear his thought.



CHAPTER VIII


It so happened that, on that very morning Odette Charlebois and
Lady Clark had met in the upstairs living-room which served as an
ante-chamber to the senator's bedroom suite.  Both, for a moment,
glanced at the portrait of the senator's late wife painted by
Langereau.

As if talking to herself, Odette said, "That picture gives her to
the life."

"Does it?" Lady Clark asked.  "It's a fine painting.  But it tells
me nothing of her real being.  I look and I look.  I cannot but
admire.  I think I'd have adored her; and suddenly I am repelled."

"She and I were classmates at college.  She ruled us all by sheer
force of personality and an indomitable will.  She was fascinating."

"Did she have charm?"

The older woman pondered.  "I don't think you'd call it charm.  She
was a great beauty.  She was an aristocrat, like yourself."

"Myself!"

"Yes," Miss Charlebois insisted.  "But she lacked something you
have.  She was always ironic.  I wish I could put her before you in
action. . . ."

"Try to think of some little incident."

"I will," Miss Charlebois said.



A few hours later, the senator being on his second turn around the
loop, the two women met again, half an hour before luncheon.  Being
both at leisure, and Odette betraying the desire to continue their
conversation, they sat down, close to each other, in the hall.

"I think I have it," said Odette Charlebois.

"It was a few weeks after the birth of your late husband.  But it
is not self-explanatory.  I must reach back in time.

"You know how they had met?  Miss Carter was the sister of Dick
Carter, the young architect who was in charge of the building
operations when the new mill replaced the old.  He built the dam,
too, of course; and later the endless additions to the mill; and
the office building; and the hotel; the elevators; and numberless
houses in town; and this house; in fact, he built Langholm; and
Langholm built him.

"In his way he was a remarkable man, I believe; his sister always
gave him credit for it all.  But during his early years, up to his
disastrous marriage, he invariably called the senator the genius;
he made no secret of it that it was the senator who had evolved the
plan whereby the mill could go on growing and growing, so that you
never could say, This is old; this is new.  At the time of the
meeting there were only the four lower north units; but the senator
had already visualized the present structure with its one hundred
and seventy.  Yet the lower part of the present north wall is still
the original one.  It had been placed where it is because of what
the engineers said; they could not go further north because the
river-bed consists of shale and quicksand, down to a depth to which
no struts could be set.  The mill had to stand on the bed-rock with
which it forms a monolith.  All growth had to be to the south where
the so-called vaults which hold the turbines and the dynamos were
blasted out of the living rock.

"I mention all this because it was that north wall with its
concave, buttressed sweep from bed-rock up to the first floor of
the mill which brought Mr and Mrs Clark together in a common
enthusiasm.  There was an old foreman employed in the mill, a Mr
Rogers who, having worked in the wooden mill, had privileges,
especially after he had been retired.  He used to come up here and
walk in the park; and so he told me one day that the senator used
to go out there, both before and after his marriage, through the
huge, copper-studded door which leads from the vaults into the old
river-bed; and thence he looked up at that sweep of concrete wall
with a strange, rapt expression on his face; not once but many
times.

"Now it so happened that Miss Maud Carter, being in the west, with
her mother, came down to Langholm to be with her brother on the day
on which the dam was inaugurated; it was not yet of its present
height, of course; and in the course of the day it fell to Mr Clark
junior to show her over the mill as far as it was completed.  As
was natural, Mr Clark wished to show her the wall which he so much
admired.  He took her through that copper-studded door into the dry
river-bed, floored, as it is today, with huge limestone slabs.
What she said when she saw that tremendous curved and upward sweep
she has told me herself.  Like Mr Clark she experienced a thrill.
'Magnificent!' she cried.  'I shouldn't have thought that Dick had
it in him!'  Dick being her brother's first name.  And she added,
'It's the most impressive thing I have seen made by man.'

"You can see one side of her in that; she looked at everything from
an aesthetic point of view.  As you know, the senator, too, has
that aesthetic sense.  I believe this common feature attracted them
to each other.  Aesthetic sensibility is, of course, only one side
of the senator's composition.  Her, I believe, it summed up pretty
well.  I know that, if I had not had my share of good looks, she
would never have thought of engaging me for her companion after her
marriage.

"That marriage did not come about till a year or two later.  Mr
Clark went east almost immediately, to take charge of the sales-
organization of the new mill.  They met again at Toronto where her
parents lived, her father being the senior partner in the firm of
engineering architects of which Dick Carter was the junior.  After
the marriage they lived for a number of years at Montreal where Mr
Clark made his headquarters.  It was there I met Mrs Clark again.

"Then old Mr Clark, Mr Rudyard, had an accident which, for the time
being, crippled him.  The young people had to come home; and I came
with them; Mr Sam, as we called him, had to relieve his father of
the routine work at the office.  They moved into that house on the
southern hillside, on Clark Street, which Mr Sam had built, a fine
enough place, though, of course, not to be compared with this.

"Strange to say, Mrs Clark, Maud as I still called her from our
college days, and old Mr Rudyard took to each other in a most
extraordinary way.  'Strange' because Mr Clark senior was 'a man of
the people', rough in his ways, outspoken when he had something to
say, and lacking in the social graces to which Maud had been
accustomed.  Old Mr Clark lavished on her all the affection of
which he was capable, indulging her in everything.  He never went
to office or mill except afoot; but he not only gave HER saddle and
driving horses but even connived at Mr Sam driving to the office
and back because she insisted on it.

"And then, I believe it was in 1896, he built her this house.  By
that time he was reputed to be enormously wealthy.  The mill grew
from year to year; on its south side there was always a new tier of
units under construction; and it had already the outline of a
pyramid.  The business was expanding at a fabulous rate, now of its
own momentum.  But old Mr Clark was still living in his little
frame house on Fourth Street where a slatternly woman, a Mrs
Leffler, kept house for him.

"I don't know whether the old gentleman knew what he was letting
himself in for when he undertook the building of this house.  But
Maud persuaded him to send her brother Dick to England to study the
layout of great country estates and to work out the most lavish
plans.  These plans were predicated upon a household conducted on a
scale unheard-of even among the wealthy in Canada.  A butler would
be needed; three footmen, coachmen, grooms, gardeners, maids by the
dozen; all which was quite against Mr Sam's inclination.  But old
Mr Clark not only did not object; he openly approved.  One day he
said to Maud, in my presence, 'I'm building that place.  If, before
I die, you present me with a grandson, it's yours; and I'll settle
funds enough on you for its upkeep.  Not Sam's, mind you, but
yours.'

"Mr Sam was at that time very keen about the mill; he was always
poring over plans for its improvement.  You see he was the last of
the Clarks to be a miller."

Lady Clark looked up at the older woman who was smiling as if she
had expected this movement of surprise.

"Well," Miss Charlebois explained, "your husband was only a mill-
owner.  Mr Sam could have taken charge of any machine, any
operation in the mill.  Sir Edmund's interests were too scattered;
he directed things; I doubt whether he could have originated a new
process; for that a practical knowledge was needed which Mr Sam was
the last of the Clarks to have.  Am I right?"

"Very likely.  I had not thought of it in that way."

"Few people have.  That's why I lay stress on it.  The senator has
never received his due.  His father treated him like a cog in the
machine; his wife never abandoned her superior attitude; his son
ascribed growth and success of the mill to his grandfather only.
Yet, as it stands, it is the senator's creation; though I have an
idea that there was a time when it assumed a life of its own and
took charge; when it was directing Mr Sam rather than being
directed by him.  But the power of assuming that life of its own
had been imparted to it by Mr Sam himself who was always too modest
to claim any credit.  There were never more than three people who
saw that.  Dick Carter was one, though only in his early days,
before his marriage; and I was another."

"Who was the third?" Lady Clark asked when Miss Charlebois stopped.

The older woman looked strangely at the younger; and it was half a
minute before she replied.  "It was the second Maud in his life."

"Maud Dolittle!" Lady Clark exclaimed.  "But . . ."

"I know.  I know.  But don't you see . . ."

"I don't."

"In certain ways the three Clarks were so exactly alike."

"You mean . . ."

"When Mr Edmund returned from the war, he was, physically, Mr Sam
resurrected."

"But that is not what the senator says.  According to him my
husband was a reincarnation of his grandfather."

"In his methods.  But physically they were all three alike."

"I have often wished to know more of Maud Dolittle.  I saw her
once, in the railway station at Montreal, when Sir Edmund and I
were engaged to be married.  It's of no use, of course, to try to
hide anything from you who have seen it all.  Suspecting that there
was something between the two, I could not very well ask my future
husband for enlightenment; with my father-in-law I have never dared
to touch on the subject.  It was the briefest of glimpses I had of
her; but I thought then, and I still think that, if I could have
become acquainted with her, I should have admired, perhaps I should
have loved her."

"She is still living, you know.  She has a house in the Gatineau
Valley.  I have no reason to be grateful to her; perhaps I'll tell
you about it one day; there was a time when I had my own dreams.  I
will say this.  She was the most dynamic woman I had ever met.  But
at the time of which we are speaking she was a star newly risen in
the mill.  Hers was the most spectacular career; she came as a
clerk; within three years she was vice-president of the whole
concern.  She had only two passions.  One was the mill; the other
she shared with all the women who lived in contact with Mr Sam."

"Is it possible?" Lady Clark cried.

"Granted that she was a genius, Mr Sam inspired her."

Lady Clark sat pensive.

"But we are digressing," the older woman went on.  "I must come to
the point.  This house was built at last; and Mr Sam and Maud Clark
were living in it with a retinue of two score servants and
retainers like myself.  After six or seven years of married life
little Edmund was born; and a few weeks later Mr Rudyard had a
stroke and died.  No doubt you have heard of Mr Swann . . ."

"I haven't.  But go on."

"He was an employee in one of the concerns connected with the mill.
It was an open secret that, in some mysterious way--I've never
succeeded in clearing it up for myself--this Mr Swann and old Mr
Rudyard had been connected.  At any rate, one night late in the
fall, it was Mr Swann who brought the news of the old man's stroke
to this house.  I'll tell you the details another time.

"That death had national reverberations.  From coast to coast the
newspapers were full of it, calling the dead man a Titan of
Finance.  Nobody mentioned Mr Sam, except to say that likely he
would be the new president.  The mill, as you know, was owned at
the time by a stock company, not, as now, by the family.  Many
expected that the end of its growth had come.

"The old gentleman was buried at last; and the day after the
funeral Mr Sam drove down to the Flour Building to take over.  For
some reason or other he came home afoot, at noon; and I had hardly
set eyes on him when I knew that he had gone through some
shattering experience.  I remember thinking that it must have had
something to do with his having passed the Terrace, walking."

"You mean the workmen's town."

"Yes.  That long, flat stretch of 'back-to-backs' as Mr Sam called
them.  He hated them as a flaw in the scheme of things; they always
moved him; he preferred not to look at them.  But, this house
standing where it did, he had to pass the abomination whenever he
went to office or mill.  I remember his mentioning, one day, over
the dinner table, very briefly, as he always spoke when he spoke of
himself, that he had had to go down there because a mill-hand had
been injured.  'When one comes to think about it,' he added, 'the
contrast of that sort of life and . . .'  His glance embraced the
dining-room where we were sitting, the 'small' d