It was late autumn; the legitimate racing season had closed. In August
Porter had taken his horses back to Ringwood for the winter.
When a man strives against Fate, when realization laughs mockingly
at his expectations, there comes to him a time when he longs for a
breathing spell, when he knows that he must rest, and wait until the
wheel of life, slow-turning, has passed a little through the groove
of his existence. John Porter had been beaten down at every point.
Disastrous years come to all men, whether they race horses or point the
truthful way, and this year had been but a series of disappointments to
the master of Ringwood. After Lucretia's win in the Eclipse, Porter
did not land another race. Lucretia caught cold and went off. He tried
Lauzanne twice again, but the Chestnut seemed thoroughly soured. Now
he was back at Ringwood, a dark cloud of indebtedness hanging over
the beautiful place, and prospect of relief very shadowy. If Lucretia
wintered well and grew big and strong she might extricate him from
his difficulties by winning one or two of the big races the following
summer. About any of the other horses there was not even this much of
promise.
Thoroughly distrusting Lauzanne, embittered by his cowardice, Porter
had given him away--but to Allis. Strangely enough, the girl had taken
a strong liking to the son of Lazzarone; it may have been because of
the feeling that she was indirectly responsible for his presence
at Ringwood. Allis Porter's perceptions had been developed to an
extraordinary degree. All her life she had lived surrounded by
thoroughbreds, and her sensitive nature went out to them, in their
courage and loyalty, in a manner quite beyond possibility in a
practical, routine-following horseman. To her they were almost human;
the play of their minds was as attractive and interesting as the
development of their muscles was to a trainer. When the stable had been
taken back to Ringwood, she had asked for Lauzanne as a riding horse.
“I'm going to give him away,” her father had replied; “I can't sell
him--nobody would buy a brute with such a reputation.” This word brought
to Porter's mind his chief cause of resentment against the Chestnut.
The public having got into its head that Porter was playing coups,
generously suggested that he was pulling Lauzanne to get him in some big
handicap light.
“I won't feed such a skate all winter,” he declared angrily, after a
little pause.
“Well, give him to me, father,” the girl had pleaded; “I am certain that
he'll make good some day; you'll see that he'll pay you for keeping your
word.”
As Allis rode Lauzanne she discovered many things about the horse;
that instead of being a stupid, morose brute, his intelligence was
extraordinary, and, with her at least, his temper perfect.
Allis's relationship with her father was unusual. They were chums; in
all his trouble, in all his moments of wavering, buffeted by the waves
of disaster, Allis was the one who cheered him, who regirt him in
his armor:--Allis, the slight olive-faced little woman, with the big,
fearless Joan-of-Arc eyes.
“You'll see what we'll do next summer, Dad,” she said cheerily. “You'll
win with Lucretia as often as you did with her mother; and I'll win with
Lauzanne. We'll just keep quiet till spring, then we'll show them.”
Langdon's horses, so silently controlled by Philip Crane, Banker, had
been put in winter quarters at Gravesend, where Langdon had a cottage.
Crane's racing season had been as successful as the Master of
Ringwood's had been disastrous. He had won a fair-class race with The
Dutchman--ostensibly Langdon's horse--and then, holding true to his
nature, which was to hasten slowly, threw him out of training and
deliberately planned a big coup for the next year. The colt was engaged
in several three-year-old stakes, and Crane set Langdon to work to find
out his capabilities. As his owner expected, he showed them in a severe
trial gallop the true Hanover staying-power.
Although Crane had said nothing about it at the time, he had his eye on
the Eastern Derby when he commissioned Langdon to purchase this gallant
son of Hanover. It was a long way ahead to look, to lay plans to win a
race the following June, but that was the essence of Crane's existence,
careful planning. He loved it. He was a master at it. And, after all,
given a good stayer, such as he had in The Dutchman, the mile-and-a-half
run of the Derby left less to chance than any other stake he could have
pitched upon; the result would depend absolutely upon the class and
stamina of the horses. No bad start could upset his calculations, no
little interference in the race could destroy his horse's chance if he
were good enough to win. The Dutchman's races as a two-year-old would
not warrant his being made a favorite, and Langdon, properly directed,
was clever enough to see that The Dutchman was at a comfortable price
for betting purposes.
Many things had crowded into this year of Crane's life. The bank, doing
but a modest business always, was running so smoothly that it required
little attention from the owner. This was one reason why he had thrown
so much subtle energy into his racing; its speculation appealed to him.
The plucking he had received as a moneyed youth rankled in his heart.
The possession of such a faithful jackal as Langdon carried him to
greater lengths than he would have gone had the obnoxious details been
subject to his own execution. Though conscienceless, he was more or less
fastidious. Had a horse broken down and become utterly useless, he would
have ordered him to be destroyed without experiencing any feeling of
compassion--he would have dismissed the matter entirely from his mind
with the passing of the command; but rather than destroy the horse
himself, he probably would have fed him. And so it was with men. If they
were driven to the wall because of his plans, that was their own look
out; it did not trouble Philip Crane.
Porter he had known simply in a business way. From the first he had felt
that Ringwood would pass out of its owner's possession, and he had begun
to covet it. The Lauzanne race had been Langdon's planning altogether.
Crane, cold-blooded as he was, would not have robbed a man he had
business dealings with deliberately. He had told his trainer to win,
if possible, a race with Lauzanne, and get rid of him. That Langdon's
villainous scheme had borne evil fruit for John Porter was purely a
matter of chance selection. There was a Mephistophelean restitution in
not striving to wrest the Eclipse from Lucretia with The Dutchman.
And now, in this year, had come the entirely new experience of an
affection--his admiration for Allis Porter. It conflicted with every
other emotion that governed his being. All his life he had been
selfish--considering only Philip Crane, his mind unharrassed by anything
but business obstacles in his ambitious career. Love for this quiet,
self-contained girl, unadorned by anything but the truth, and honesty,
and fearlessness that were in her big steadfast eyes, had come upon him
suddenly and with an assertive force that completely mastered him. By
a mere chance he had heard Allis give her recitation, “The Run of
Crusader,” in the little church at Brookfield. Crane was not an
agnostic, but he had interested himself little in church matters; and
the Reverend Dolman's concert, that was meant to top down many weeds
of debt that were choking the church, had claimed him simply because an
evening in Brookfield had come to hang heavily on his hands. Now when
the Reverend Dolman received Philip Crane's check for fifty dollars the
next day, to be applied to the church encumbrance, he sought to allay
his surprise by attributing the gift to his own special pleading that
evening, of course backed up by Providence. If anybody had stated that
the mainspring of the gift had been the wicked horse-racing poem of
their denunciation he would have been scandalized and full of righteous
disbelief. It is quite likely that even Crane would have denied that
Allis's poem had inspired him to the check; but nevertheless it had.
The world of feeling and sympathy and goodness that had hung in her
voice had set a new window in his soul slightly ajar--so slightly ajar
that even now, months afterward, the lovelight was only beginning to
stream through. When love comes to a man at forty he is apt to play the
game very badly indeed; he turns it into a very anxious business, and
moves through the light-tripping measure with the pedantic dignity of
a minuet dancer. But Philip Crane was not given to making mistakes; he
knew that, like Crusader, “His best racing days (in the love stakes)
were over”--especially where the woman was but a girl. So he sat down
and planned it all out as he planned to win the Brooklyn Derby months
later. And all the time he was as sincerely in love as if he had
blundered into many foolishness; but his love making was to be
diplomatic. Even now all the gods of Fate stood ranged on his side;
Allis's brother was in his bank, more or less dependent upon him;
Ringwood itself was all but in the bank; he stood fairly well with John
Porter, and much better with Allis's mother, for already he had begun to
ingratitate himself with Mrs. Porter. He would cast from the shoulders
of the Reverend Dolman a trifle more of the load he was carrying. He
would send the reverend gentleman another check.
Why he should think it necessary to prepare his suit with so much
subtlety he hardly knew; in all reason he should be considered a fair
match for Allis Porter. He was not a bad man as the world understood
him; he did not profess Christianity, but, on the other hand, his life
was extremely respectable; he did not drink; he was not given to
profane language; even in racing his presence seemed to lend an air of
respectability to the sport, and it was generally supposed that he raced
purely for relaxation. In truth, it seemed to him that his marriage with
Allis would be a deuced good thing for the Porters.
In actuality there were just two things that stood in the way--two
things which his position and wealth could not obviate--his age, and the
Porter pride. If Porter had not been dubbed “Honest John” early in life,
he might have been saddled with “Proud Porter” later on. The pride
had come up out of old Kentucky with all the other useless things--the
horse-racing, and the inability to make money, and the fancy for keeping
a promise. Something whispered to Crane that Allis would never come to
him simply out of love; it might be regard, esteem, a desire to please
her parents, a bowing to the evident decree of fate. Perhaps even the
very difficulty of conquest made Crane the more determined to win, and
made him hasten slowly.