sat in the driver's seat; and those who remembered him as a loutish
young farmhand overlooked the educative results of continued success and
marvelled at his gifts, wondering how and where he had acquired them.
While the father was thus gratifying a purely Gothic lust for conquest,
the daughter figured, in at least one small circle, as a beautiful young
Vandal, with a passion for overturning all the well-settled traditions.
At first her attitude toward Wahaska and the Wahaskans had been serenely
tolerant; the tolerance of the barbarian who neither understands, nor
sympathizes with, the homely virtues and the customs which have grown
out of them. Then resentment awoke, and with it a soaring ambition to
reconstruct the social fabric of the countrified town upon a model of
her own devising.
In this charitable undertaking she was aided and abetted by her father,
who indulgently paid the bills. At her instigation he built an imposing
red brick mansion on the sloping shore of Lake Minnedaska, named it--or
suffered her to name it--"Mereside," had an artist of parts up from
Chicago to design the decorations and superintend the furnishings, had a
landscape gardener from Philadelphia to lay out the grounds, and, when
all was in readiness, gave a house-warming to which the invitations were
in some sense mandatory, since by that time he had a finger in nearly
every commercial and industrial pie in Wahaska.
After the house-warming, which was a social event quite without
precedent in Wahaskan annals, Miss Grierson's leadership was tacitly
acknowledged by a majority of the ex-farmers' wives and daughters,
though they still discussed her with more or less frankness in the
sewing-circles and at neighborhood tea-drinkings. Crystallized into
accusation, there was little to be urged against her save that she was
pretty and rich, and that her leaning toward modernity was sometimes a
little startling. But being human, the missionary seamstresses and the
tea-drinkers made the most of these drawbacks, whetting criticism to a
cutting edge now and then with curious speculations about Margery's
mother, and wondering why Jasper Grierson or the daughter never
mentioned her.
Meanwhile, the big house on the lake front continued to set the social
pace. Afternoon teas began to supersede the sewing-circles; not a few of
the imitators attained to the formal dignity of visiting cards with
"Wednesdays" or "Thursdays" appearing in neat script in the lower
left-hand corner; and in some of the more advanced households the
principal meal of the day drifted from its noontide anchorage to
unwonted moorings among the evening hours--greatly to the distress of
the men, for whom even hot weather was no longer an excuse for appearing
in shirt-sleeves.
For these innovations Miss Grierson was indirectly, though not less
intentionally, responsible; and her satisfaction was in just proportion
to the results attained. But in spite of these successes there were
still obstacles to be surmounted. From the first there had been a
perverse minority refusing stubbornly to bow the head in the house
of--Grierson. The Farnhams were of it, and the Raymers, with a following
of a few of the families called "old" as age is reckoned in the Middle
West. The men of this minority were slow to admit the omnipotence of
Jasper Grierson's money, and the women were still slower to accept Miss
Grierson on terms of social equality.
At the house-warming this minority had been represented only by
variously worded regrets. At a reception, given to mark the closing of
Mereside, socially, on the eve of Miss Margery's departure for the
winter in Florida, the regrets were still polite and still unanimous.
Miss Margery laughed defiantly and set her white teeth on a determined
resolution to reduce this inner citadel of conservatism at all costs.
Accordingly, she opened the campaign on the morning after the reception;
began it at the breakfast-table when she was pouring her father's
coffee.
"You know everybody, and everybody's business, poppa: who is the
treasurer of St. John's?" she inquired.
"How should I know?" grumbled the magnate, whose familiarity with church
affairs was limited to certain writings of a legal nature concerning the
Presbyterian house of worship upon which he held a mortgage.
"You ought to know," asserted Miss Margery, with some asperity. "Isn't
it Mr. Edward Raymer?"
Jasper Grierson frowned thoughtfully into space. "Why, yes; come to
think of it, I guess he is the man. Anyway, he's one of their--what do
you call 'em--trustees?"
"Wardens," corrected Margery.
"Yes, that's it; I knew it was something connected with a penitentiary.
What do you want of him?"
"Nothing much of him: but I want a check for five hundred dollars
payable to his order."
Jasper Grierson's laugh was suggestive of the noise made by a rusty
door-hinge. The tilting of the golden cornucopia had made him a ruthless
money-grubber, but he never questioned his daughter's demands.
"Going in for the real old simon-pure, blue-ribbon brand of
respectability this time, ain't you Madgie?" he chuckled; but he wrote
the check on the spot.
Two hours later, Miss Grierson's cutter, driven by herself, paraded in
Main Street to the delight of any eye æsthetic. The clean-limbed,
high-bred Kentuckian, the steel-shod, tulip-bodied vehicle, and the
faultlessly arrayed young woman tucked in among the costly fur lap robes
were three parts of a harmonious whole; and more than one pair of eyes
looked, and turned to look again; with envy if they were young eyes and
feminine; with frank admiration if they were any age and masculine. For
Miss Grierson, panoplied for conquest, was the latest reincarnation of
the woman who has been turning men's heads and quickening the blood in
their veins since that antediluvian morning when the sons of God saw the
daughters of men that they were fair.
Miss Margery drove daily in good weather, but on this crisp January
morning her outing had an objective other than the spectacular. When the
clean-limbed Kentuckian had measured the length of Main Street, he was
sent on across the railroad tracks into the industrial half of the town,
and was finally halted in front of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works.
Raymer was at his desk when the smart equipage drew up before the office
door; and a moment later he was at the curb, bareheaded, offering to
help the daughter of men out of the robe wrappings.
"Perhaps I'd better not get out," she said. "Duke doesn't stand well.
Can I see Mr. Edward Raymer for a minute or two?"
Raymer bowed and blushed a little. He knew her so well, by eye-intimacy
at least, that he had been sure she knew him in the same way--as indeed
she did.
"I--that is my name. What can I do for you, Miss Grierson?"
"Oh, _thank_ you," she burst out, with exactly the proper shade of
impulsiveness. "Do you know, I was really afraid I might have to
introduce myself? I----"
The interruption was of Raymer's making. One of his employees appearing
opportunely, he sent the man to the horse's head, and once more held out
his hands to Miss Grierson.
"You must come in and get warm," he insisted. "I am sure you have found
it very cold driving this morning. Let me help you."
She made a driver's hitch in the reins and let him lift her to the
sidewalk. The ease with which he did it gave her a pleasant little
thrill of the sort that comes with the realization of a thing hoped for.
When she was not too busy with the social triumphs, strength, manly
strength, was a passion with Miss Grierson.
Raymer held the office door open for her, and in the grimy little den
which had been his father's before him, placed a chair for her at the
desk-end.
"Now you can tell me in comfort what I can do for you," he said,
bridging the interruption.
"Oh, it's only a little thing. I came to see you about renting a pew in
St. John's; that is our church, you know."
Raymer did not know, but he was politic enough not to say so.
"I am quite at your service," he hastened to say. "Shall I show you a
plan of the sittings?"
She protested prettily that it wasn't at all necessary; that any
assignment agreeable to him and least subversive of the rights and
preferences of others would be quite satisfactory. But he got out the
blue-print plan and dusted it, and in the putting together of heads over
it many miles in the gap of unacquaintance were safely and swiftly flung
to the rear.
When the sittings were finally decided upon she opened her purse.
"It is so good of you to take time from your business to wait on me,"
she told him; and then, in naïve confusion: "I--I asked poppa to make
out a check, but I don't know whether it is big enough."
Raymer took the order to pay, glanced at the amount, and from that to
the velvety eyes with the half-abashed query in them. Miss Grierson's
eyes were her most effective weapon. With them she could look anything,
from daggers drawn to kisses. Just now the look was of child-like
beseeching, but Raymer withstood it--or thought he did.
"It is more than twice as much as we get for the best locations," he
demurred. "Wait a minute and I'll write you a check for the difference
and give you a receipt."
But at the word she was on her feet in an eager flutter of protest.
"Oh, please don't!" she pleaded. "If it is really too much, can't you
put the difference in the missionary box, or in the--in the rector's
salary?--as a little donation from us, you know?"
Then Edward Raymer found that he had not withstood the eye-attack and he
surrendered at discretion, compromising on a receipt for the pew-rent.
Thus the small matter of business was concluded; but Miss Margery was
not yet ready to go. From St. John's and its affairs official she passed
deftly to the junior warden of St. John's and his affairs personal. Was
the machine works the place where they made steam-engines and things?
And did the sign, "No Admittance," on the doors mean that no visitors
were allowed? If not, she would so much like to----
Raymer smiled and put himself once more at her service, this time as
guide and megaphonist. It was all very noisy and grimy, but if she
cared to go through the works he would be glad to go with her.
He did not know how glad he was going to be until they had passed
through the clamorous machine-shop and had reached the comparatively
quiet foundry. One of Miss Margery's gifts was the ability to become for
the moment an active and sympathetic sharer in any one's enthusiasms. In
the foundry she looked and listened, and was unsophisticated only to the
degree that invites explanation. It was a master-stroke of finesse. A
man is never so transparent as when he forgets himself in his own
trade-talk; and Raymer was unrolling himself as a scroll for Miss
Grierson to read as she ran.
"And you say that is one of the columns for poppa's new block?" she
asked, while they stood to watch the workmen drawing a pattern out of
the sand of the mould.
"No; that is the pattern: that is wood, and it is used to make the print
in the sand into which the melted iron is poured. This part of the mould
they are lifting with the crane is called the 'cope,' and the lower half
is the 'drag.' When they have drawn the patterns, they will lock the two
halves together and the mould will be ready for the pouring. You ought
to come some afternoon while we are pouring; it would interest you if
you've never seen it."
"Oh, may I? I shall remember that, when I come back from Florida."
"You are going away?" he said quickly.
"Yes; for a few weeks."
"Wahaska will miss you."
"Will it? I wish I could believe that, Mr. Raymer. But I don't know.
Sometimes----"
"You mustn't doubt it for a moment. When you drove up a few minutes ago
I was thinking that you were the one bit of redeeming color in our
rather commonplace picture."
She let him look into what she wished him to believe were the very
ultimate depths of the velvety eyes when she said: "You shouldn't
flatter, Mr. Raymer. For one thing, you don't do it easily; and for
another, it's disappointing."
They were passing out of the foundry on their way back to the office and
he held the weighted door open for her.
"A bit of honest praise isn't flattery," he protested. "But supposing it
were a mere compliment--why should you find it disappointing?"
"Because one has to have anchors of some sort; anchors in sincerity and
straightforwardness, in the honesty of purpose that will say, '_No-no!_'
and slap the best-beloved baby's hands, if that's what is needed. That
is your proper rôle, Mr. Raymer, and you must never hesitate to take
it."
It was the one small lapse from the strict conventionalities, but it
sufficed to cut out all the middle distances. The tour of the works
which had begun in passing acquaintance ended in friendship, precisely
as Miss Grierson had meant it should; and when Raymer was tucking her
into the cutter and wrapping her in the fur robes, she added the
finishing touch, or rather the touch for which all the other touches
had been the preliminaries.
"I'm so glad I had the courage to come and see you this morning. We have
been dreadfully remiss in church matters, but I am going to try to make
up for it in the future. I'm sorry you couldn't come to us last evening.
Please tell your mother and sister that I _do_ hope we'll meet,
sometime. I should so dearly love to know them. Thank you so much for
everything. Good-by."
Raymer watched her as she drove away, noted her skilful handling of the
fiery Kentuckian and her straight seat in the flying cutter, and the
smile which a day or two earlier might have been mildly satirical was
now openly approbative.
"She is a shrewd little strategist," was his comment; "but all the same
she is a mighty pretty girl, and as good and sensible as she is shrewd.
I wonder why mother and Gertrude haven't called on her?"
Having thus mined the Raymer outworks, Miss Grierson next turned her
batteries upon the Farnhams. They were Methodists, and having learned
that the doctor's hobby was a struggling mission work in Pottery Flat,
Margery called the paternal check-book again into service, and the
cutter drew up before the doctor's office in Main Street.
"Good-morning, doctor," she began cheerfully, bursting in upon the head
of the First-Church board of administrators as a charming embodiment of
youthful enthusiasm, "I'm running errands for poppa this morning. Mr.
Rodney was telling us about that little First-Church mission in Pottery
Flat, and poppa wanted to help. But we are not Methodists, you know, and
he was afraid--that is, he didn't quite know how you might----"
It was an exceedingly clever bit of acting, and the good doctor
capitulated at once, discrediting, for the first time in his life, the
intuition of his home womankind.
"Now that is very thoughtful and kind of you, Miss Margery," he said,
wiping his glasses and looking a second time at the generous figure of
the piece of money-paper. "I appreciate it the more because I know you
must have a great many other calls upon your charity. We've been wanting
to put a trained worker in charge of that mission for I don't know how
long, and this gift of yours makes it possible."
"The kindness is in allowing us to help," murmured the small diplomat.
"You'll let me know when more is needed? Promise me that, Doctor
Farnham."
"I shouldn't be a good Methodist if I didn't," laughed the doctor. Then
he remembered the Mereside reception and the regrets, and was moved to
make amends. "I'm sorry we couldn't be neighborly last night; but my
sister-in-law is very frail, and Charlotte doesn't go out much. They are
both getting ready to go to Pass Christian, but I'm sure they'll call
before they go South."
"I shall be ever so glad to welcome them," purred Miss Margery, "and I
do hope they will come before I leave. I'm going to Palm Beach next
week, you know."
"I'll tell them," volunteered the doctor. "They'll find time to run in,
I'm sure."
But for some reason the vicarious promise was not kept; and the Raymers
held aloof; and the Oswalds and the Barrs relinquished the new public
library project when it became noised about that Jasper Grierson and his
daughter were moving in it.
Miss Margery possessed her soul in patience up to the final day of her
home staying, and the explosion might have been indefinitely postponed
if, on that last day, the Raymers, mother and daughter, had not
pointedly taken pains to avoid her at the _lingerie_ counter in
Thorwalden's. It was as the match to the fuse, and when Miss Grierson
left the department store there were red spots in her cheeks and the
dark eyes were flashing.
"They think I'm a jay!" she said, with a snap of the white teeth. "They
need a lesson, and they're going to get it before I leave. I'm not going
to sing small all the time!"
It was surely the goddess of discord who ordained that the blow should
be struck while the iron was hot. Five minutes after the rebuff in
Thorwalden's, Miss Grierson met Raymer as he was coming out of the
Farmers' and Merchants' Bank. There was an exchange of commonplaces, but
in the midst of it Miss Margery broke off abruptly to say: "Mr. Raymer,
please tell me what I have done to offend your mother and sister."
If she had been in the mood to compromise, half of the deferred payment
of triumph might have been discharged on the spot by Raymer's
blundering attempt at disavowal.
"Why, Miss Margery! I don't know--that is--er--really, you must be
mistaken, I'm sure!"
"I am not mistaken, and I'd like to know," she persisted, looking him
hardily in the eyes. "It must be something I have been doing, and if I
can find out what it is, I'll reform."
Raymer got away as soon as he could; and when the opportunity offered,
was besotted enough to repeat the question to his mother and sister.
Mrs. Raymer was a large and placid matron of the immovable type, and her
smile emphasized her opinion of Miss Grierson.
"The mere fact of her saying such a thing to you ought to be a
sufficient answer, I should think," was her mild retort.
"I don't see why," Raymer objected.
"What would you think if Gertrude did such a thing?"
"Oh, well; that is different. In the first place Gertrude wouldn't do
it, and----"
"Precisely. And Miss Grierson shouldn't have done it. It is because she
can do such things that a few of us think she wouldn't be a pleasant
person to know, socially."
"But why?" insisted Raymer, with masculine obtuseness.
It was his sister who undertook to make the reason plain to him.
"It isn't anything she does, or doesn't do, particularly; it is the
atmosphere in which she lives and moves and has her being. If it weren't
for her father's money, she would be--well, it is rather hard to say
just what she would be. But she always makes me think of the bonanza
people--the pick and shovel one day and a million the next. I believe
she is a frank little savage, at heart."
"I don't," the brother contended, doggedly. "She may be a trifle new and
fresh for Wahaska, but she is clever and bright, and honest enough to
ignore a social code which makes a mock of sincerity and a virtue of
hypocrisy. I like her all the better for the way she flared out at me.
There isn't one young woman in a thousand who would have had the nerve
and the courage to do it."
"Or the impudence," added Mrs. Raymer, when her son had left the room.
Then: "I do hope Edward isn't going to let that girl come between him
and Charlotte!"
The daughter laughed.
"I should say there is room for a regiment to march between them, as it
is. Miss Gilman took particular pains to let him know what train they
were leaving on, and I happen to know he never went near the station to
tell them good-by."
XVI
GOOD SAMARITANS
Since she had undertaken to show Wahaska precisely how to deport itself
in the conventional field, Miss Grierson took a maid and a chaperon with
her when she went to Florida. But when she returned in April, the maid
had been left behind to marry the gamekeeper of one of the millionaire
estates on Lake Worth, and little Miss Matthews, the ex-seamstress
chaperon, had been dropped off in Illinois to visit relatives.
This is how it chanced that Margery, unwilling to set the Wahaskans a
bad example, had telegraphed her father to meet her in St. Louis. Also,
it shall account as it may for the far-reaching stroke of fate which
seated the Griersons at Griswold's table in the Hotel Chouteau café, and
afterward made them his fellow travellers in the north-bound
sleeping-car _Anita_.
When Jasper Grierson travelled alone he was democratic enough to be
satisfied with a section in the body of the car. But when Margery's
tastes were to be consulted, the drawing-room was none too good. Indeed,
as it transpired on the journey northward from St. Louis, the _Anita's_
drawing-room proved to be not good enough.
"It is simply a crude insult, the way they wear out their old,
broken-down cars on us up here!" she was protesting to her father, when
they came back from the late dining-car breakfast. "You ought to do
something about it." Miss Margery was at the moment fresh from "Florida
Specials" and the solid-Pullman vestibuled luxuries of eastern winter
travel.
Jasper Grierson's smile was a capitalistic acquirement, and some of his
fellow-townsmen described it as "cast-iron." But for his daughter it was
always indulgent.
"I don't own the railroad yet, Madgie; you'll have to give me a little
more time," he pleaded, clipping the tip from a black cigar of heroic
proportions and reaching for the box of safety matches.
"I'll begin now, if you are going to smoke that dreadful thing in this
stuffy little den," was the unfilial retort; and the daughter found a
magazine and exchanged the drawing-room with its threat of asphyxiation
for a seat in the body of the car.
For a little while the magazine, or rather the pictures in it, sufficed
for a time-killer. Farther along, the panorama of eastern Iowa unrolling
itself beside the path of the train served as an alternative to the
pictured pages. When both the book and the out-door prospect palled upon
her, Miss Margery tried to interest herself in her immediate
surroundings.
The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section
diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and
restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car,
and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section
opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of
it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and
bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her
eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section
undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting.
The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car
waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize
the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away.
With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking
thought--the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed.
When she was leaving the _Anita_ with her father, the explanation
suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be
ill.
Luncheon over, there was nothing to remind her of the probable invalid
in Number Six until late in the afternoon when, looking through the open
door of the drawing-room, she saw the porter carrying a glass of water
to the invisible sufferer. Quite suddenly her interest became acute. Who
was the sick one? and why was he, or she, travelling without an
attendant?
With Margery Grierson, to question was to ascertain; and the Pullman
conductor, once more checking his diagrams in Section Eleven, offered
the readiest means of enlightenment. A few minutes later Margery
rejoined her father in the private compartment.
"Do you remember the nice-looking young man who sat at the table with us
in the Chouteau last night?" she began abruptly.
The gray-wolf Jasper nodded. He had an excellent memory for faces.
"What did you think of him?" The query followed the nod like a nimble
boxer's return blow.
"I thought he paid a whole lot more attention to you than he did to his
supper. Why?"
"He is on this car; sick with a fever of some kind, and out of his head.
He is going to Wahaska."
"How do you know it's the same one?"
"I made the conductor take me to see him. He talked to me in Italian and
called me '_Carlotta mia_.'"