PAGE 11
Young Robin Gray
by
“I’m thinkin’ that the atmosphere is not so pure here. It is deficient in ozone. I noticed it myself in the early morning. No! it was not the confinement of the shop, for she never cared to go out.”
He received the announcement of his good fortune with unshaken calm and great practical consideration of detail. He would guarantee his identity to the consul. As for James Gow, it was no more than fair; and what he had expected of him. As to its being an equivalent of his loss, he could not tell until the facts were before him.
“Miss Ailsa,” suggested the consul venturously, “will be pleased to hear again from her old friend, and know that he is succeeding.”
“I’m not so sure that ye could call it ‘succeeding,'” returned the old man, carefully wiping the glasses of a pair of spectacles that he held critically to the light, “when ye consider that, saying nothing of the waste of valuable time, it only puts James Gow back where he was when he went away.”
“But any man who has had the pleasure of knowing Mr. and Miss Callender would be glad to be on that footing,” said the consul, with polite significance.
“I’m not agreeing with you there,” said Mr. Callender quietly; “and I’m observing in ye of late a tendency to combine business wi’ compleement. But it was kind of ye to call; and I’ll be sending ye the authorization.”
Which he did. But the consul, passing through the locality a few weeks later, was somewhat concerned to find the shop closed, with others on the same block, behind a hoarding that indicated rebuilding and improvement. Further inquiry elicited the fact that the small leases had been bought up by some capitalist, and that Mr. Callender, with the others, had benefited thereby. But there was no trace nor clew to his present locality. He and his daughter seemed to have again vanished with this second change in their fortunes.
It was a late March morning when the streets were dumb with snow, and the air was filled with flying granulations that tinkled against the windows of the Consulate like fairy sleigh-bells, when there was the stamping of snow-clogged feet in the outer hall, and the door was opened to Mr. and Miss Callender. For an instant the consul was startled. The old man appeared as usual–erect, and as frigidly respectable as one of the icicles that fringed the window, but Miss Ailsa was, to his astonishment, brilliant with a new-found color, and sparkling with health and only half-repressed animation. The snow-flakes, scarcely melting on the brown head of this true daughter of the North, still crowned her hood; and, as she threw back her brown cloak and disclosed a plump little scarlet jacket and brown skirt, the consul could not resist her suggested likeness to some bright-eyed robin redbreast, to whom the inclement weather had given a charming audacity. And shy and demure as she still was, it was evident that some change had been wrought in her other than that evoked by the stimulus of her native sky and air.
To his eager questioning, the old man replied briefly that he had bought the old cottage at Loch Dour, where they were living, and where he had erected a small manufactory and laboratory for the making of his inventions, which had become profitable. The consul reiterated his delight at meeting them again.
“I’m not so sure of that, sir, when you know the business on which I come,” said Mr. Callender, dropping rigidly into a chair, and clasping his hands over the crutch of a shepherd-like staff. “Ye mind, perhaps, that ye conveyed to me, osteensibly at the request of James Gow, a certain sum of money, for which I gave ye a good and sufficient guarantee. I thought at the time that it was a most feckless and unbusiness-like proceeding on the part of James, as it was without corroboration or advice by letter; but I took the money.”