account for a stranger thing than that."
"She is more than pretty," said Griswold, impulsively; "she has the
beauty of those who have high ideals, and live up to them."
"I thought you said you didn't know her," was the swift retort.
"I said I hadn't met her, and that she doesn't know me."
"Oh," said the small fitter of deduction pegs; and afterward she talked,
and made the convalescent talk, pointedly of other things.
This occurred in the forenoon of a pleasant day in May. In the afternoon
of the same day, Miss Grierson's trap was halted before the door of the
temporary quarters of the Wahaska Public Library. Raymer saw the trap
and crossed the street, remembering--what he would otherwise have
forgotten--that his sister had asked him to get a book on orchids.
Miss Margery was in the reference room, wading absently through the
newspaper files. She nodded brightly when Raymer entered--and was not in
the least dust-blinded by the library card in his hand.
"You are just in time to help me," she told him. "Do you remember the
story of that daring bank robbery in New Orleans a few weeks ago?--the
one in which a man made the president draw a check and get it cashed for
him?"
Raymer did remember it, chiefly because he had talked about it at the
time with Jasper Grierson, and had wondered curiously how the president
of the Farmers' and Merchants' would deport himself under like
conditions.
"Do you remember the date?" she asked.
Since it was tied to his first business interview with Grierson _père_,
Raymer was able to recall the date, approximately, and together they
turned the file of the _Pioneer Press_ until they came to the number
containing the Associated Press story of the crime. It was fairly
circumstantial; the young woman at the teller's window figured in it,
and there was a sketchy description of the robber.
"If you should meet the man face to face, would you recognise him from
the description?" she flashed up at Raymer.
"Not in a thousand years," he confessed. "Would you?"
"No; not from the description," she admitted. Then she passed to a
matter apparently quite irrelevant.
"Didn't I see Miss Farnham's return noticed in the _Wahaskan_ the other
day?"
With Charlotte's father a daily visitor at Mereside, it seemed
incredible that Miss Grierson had not heard of the daughter's
home-coming. But Raymer answered in good faith.
"You may have seen it some time ago. She and Miss Gilman have been home
for three or four weeks."
"Somebody said they were coming up the river by boat; did they?"
"Yes, all the way from New Orleans."
"That must have been delightful, if they were fortunate enough to get a
good boat. I've been told that the table is simply impossible on some of
them."
"So it is. But they came up as far as St. Louis on one of the Anchor
Lines--the _Belle Julie_--and even Miss Gilman admits that the
accommodations were excellent."
She nodded absently and began to turn the leaves of the newspaper file.
Raymer took it as his dismissal and went to the desk to get the orchid
book. When he looked in again on his way to the street, Miss Grierson
had gone, leaving the file of the _Pioneer Press_ open on the reading
desk. Almost involuntarily he glanced at the first-page headings,
thrilling to a little shock of surprise when one of them proved to be
the caption of another Associated Press despatch giving a twenty-line
story of the capture and second escape of the Bayou State Security
robber on the levee at St. Louis.
The reading of the bit of stale news impressed him curiously. Why had
Miss Margery interested herself in the details of the New Orleans bank
robbery? Why--with no apparent special reason--should she have
remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for
the two newspaper references?
Raymer left the library speculating vaguely on the unaccountable
tangents at which the feminine mind could now and then fly off from the
well-defined circle of the conventionally usual. On rare occasions his
mother or Gertrude did it, and he had long since learned the folly of
trying to reduce the small problem to terms of known quantities
masculine.
"Just the same, I'd like to know why, this time," he said to himself, as
he crossed the street to the Manufacturers' Club. "Miss Grierson isn't
at all the person to do things without an object."
XX
THE CONVALESCENT
After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly
contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she
was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for
the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master
of Mereside.
The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond
the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert
currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to
serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.
For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable
first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled
his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced,
heavy-browed man at the end of the café table--"crudely strong,
elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage:
the gray-wolf type"--and he found no present reason for changing the
record.
Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the
Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than
a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the
manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be
Margery's latest and least accountable fad.
Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the
banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper
Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant
struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the
one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than
half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after
that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the
plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an
experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not
outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept
down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no
peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.
"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer
any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a
fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."
"But why not to-day?" he complained.
"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'--what
shall I say; patient, or guest, or--friend?" she laughed, garbling the
quotation to fit the occasion.
"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.
"And so shall I," she gibed--but the gibe itself was almost a caress.
"Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a
peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why
I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny
little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be
fresh and rested for it."
"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his
finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity
patient, and----"
"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine
affectation of austere hostess-ship. "_I_ say you are to come
down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will
come."
"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering
afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made
himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library
stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which
promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.
It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure
weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting
it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side;
easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man
Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the
social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.
For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious
double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng
of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was
immediately able to lose himself--and any lingering trace of
self-consciousness--in a company which, if appearances were to be
trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map.
Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the
prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting
and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of
self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there
could be no possible Wahaskan demand.
"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to
be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little
concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of
you"--piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making
him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and
you needn't meet any more people than you want to."
When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still
later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting
mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different,
strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the
piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise
conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum
of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not
in bad taste--on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste.
Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to
something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a
church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote
was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.
And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat
Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond
them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where
the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there
was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of
types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold,
groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself
that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal
harmonies; she was always "in character."
Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful
caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the
broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the
later charm might be subtly sensuous--he refused to analyze it too
closely--it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger
life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating
thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide.
True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past
imaginings. She might even be the _Aspasia_ to Charlotte Farnham's
_Saint Cecilia_. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well
beloved of men and of heroes?
It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a
grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had
gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made
room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of
the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness
intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least
partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.
"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let
us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you
feel like it."
"Indeed, I'm not at all tired," he protested. "It is all very comforting
and homelike; so vastly--" he hesitated, seeking thoughtfully for the
word which should convey his meaning without laying him open to the
charge of patronizing superciliousness, and she supplied it promptly.
"So different from what you were expecting; I know. You have been
thinking of us as barbarians--outer barbarians, perhaps--and you find
that we are only harmless provincials. But really, you know, we are
improving. I wish you could have known Wahaska as it used to be."
"Before you took it in hand?" he suggested. "I can imagine it."
"Can you? I don't have to imagine it--I can remember: how we used to sit
around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we
could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do
it yet, sometimes; but I won't let them do it here."
Once more Griswold let his gaze go at large through the stately rooms.
He understood now. His prefigurings had not been so wide of the mark,
after all. He had merely reckoned without his hostess.
"It is a miracle," he said, giving her full credit. "I'd like to ask how
you wrought it, only I mustn't keep you from your duties."
She laughed joyously, with a little toss of the shapely head which was
far more expressive than many words.
"I haven't any duties; I have taught them to amuse themselves. And they
are doing it very creditably, don't you think?"
"They are getting along," he admitted. "But tell me: how did you go
about it?"
"It was simple enough. When we came here we found a lot of good people
who had fallen into the bad habit of boring one another, and a few who
hadn't; but the few held themselves aloof. We opened our house to the
many, and tried to show them that a church sewing-circle isn't precisely
the acme of social enjoyment. That is all."
Griswold saw in his mind's eye a sharply etched picture of the rise and
progress of a village magnate cleanly struck out in the two terse
sentences, and his respect for his companion in the wide window-seat
increased in just proportion. Verily, Miss Margery had imagination.
"It is all very grateful and delightful to me," he confessed, at length.
"I have been out of the social running for a long time, but I may as
well admit that I am shamelessly Epicurean by nature, and an ascetic
only when the necessities drive."
"I know," she assented, with quick appreciation. "An author has to be
both, hasn't he?--keen to enjoy, and well hardened to endure."
He turned upon her squarely.
"Where did you ever learn how to say such things as that?" he demanded.
It was an opening for mockery and good-natured raillery, but she did not
make use of it. Instead, she let him look as deeply as he pleased into
the velvety eyes when she said: "It is given to some of us to see and to
understand where others have to learn slowly, letter by letter. Surely,
your own gift has told you that, Mr. Griswold?"
"It has," he acknowledged. "But I have found few who really do
understand."
"Which is to say that you haven't yet found your other self, isn't it?
Perhaps that will come, too, if you'll only be patient--and not expect
too many other gifts of the gods along with the one priceless gift of
perfect sympathy."
"When I find the one priceless gift, I shall confidently expect to find
everything else," he asserted, still held a willing prisoner by the
bewitching eyes.
She laughed softly. "You'll be disappointed. The gift you demand will
preclude some of the others; as the others would certainly preclude it.
How can you be an author and not understand that?"
"I am not an author, I am sorry to say," he objected. "I have written
but the one book, and I have never been able to find a publisher for
it."
"But you are not going to give up?"
"No; I am going to rewrite the book and try again--and yet again, if
needful. It is my message to mankind, and I mean to deliver it."
"Bravo!" she applauded, clapping her hands in a little burst of
enthusiasm which, if it were not real, was at least an excellent
simulation. "It is only the weak ones who say, 'I hope.' For the truly
strong hearts there is only the one battle-cry, 'I will!' When you get
blue and discouraged you must come to me and let me cheer you. Cheering
people is _my_ mission, if I have any."
Griswold's pale face flushed and the blood sang liltingly in his veins.
He wondered if she had been tempted to read the manuscript of the book
while he was fighting his way back to consciousness and life. If they
had been alone together, he would have asked her. The bare possibility
set all the springs of the author's vanity upbubbling within him. There
and then he promised himself that she should hear the rewriting of the
book, chapter by chapter. But what he said was out of a deeper, and
worthier, underthought.
"You have many missions, Miss Margery: some of them you choose, and some
are chosen for you."
"No," she denied; "nobody has ever chosen for me."
"That may be true, without making me a false prophet. Sometimes when we
think we are choosing for ourselves, chance chooses for us; oftener than
not, I believe."
She turned on him quickly, and for a single swiftly passing instant the
velvety eyes were deep wells of soberness with an indefinable underdepth
of sorrow in them. Griswold had a sudden conviction that for the first
time in his knowing of her he was looking into the soul of the real
Margery Grierson.
"What you call 'chance' may possibly have a bigger and better name," she
said, gravely. "Had you ever thought of that?"
"Give it any name you please, so long as you admit that it is something
beyond our control," he conceded.
As had happened more than once before, she seemed to be able to read his
inmost thought.
"You are thinking of the chain of incidents that brought you here? It is
only the details that have 'happened.' You meant to come to Wahaska;
you were carrying out a definite purpose of your own that night in St.
Louis when you took your ticket. And coming here, sooner or later you
would have found your way to this house--to a seat on these cushions. I
could tell you more, but my prophetic soul warns me that Agatha
Severance is protesting to Mr. Wamble that she can't _possibly_ play the
particular song he is asking for without the music. I'm going to
convince her that she can."
Some little time after this, Raymer, who had been one of the men
introduced by Jasper Grierson, turned up again in the invalid's corner.
"Sit down, won't you?" said Griswold, making a move to share the
cushions with the young ironmaster; and it was thus that the door to a
friendship was opened. Farther on, when they had gotten safely beyond
the commonplaces, Raymer suggested the smoking-room and a cigar, and
Griswold went willingly.
"I was wondering if you were like me in that, Mr. Raymer," he said. "I
never feel properly acquainted with a man until I have smoked with him."
"Or with a woman until she has made a cup of tea for you?" laughed the
native. "That is Miss Margery's try-out. She has taught us the
potentialities that lie in a cup of tea well brewed and skilfully
sweetened."
From that on, the path to better acquaintance was the easiest of
short-cuts, even as the mild cigar which Raymer found in his pocket-case
paved the way for a return of the smoker's zest in the convalescent.
Without calling himself a reformer, the young ironmaster proved to be a
practical sociologist. Wherefore, when Griswold presently mounted his
own sociological hobby, he was promptly invited to visit the Raymer
Foundry and Machine Works, to the end that he might have some of his
theories of the universal oppression of wage-earners charitably
modified.
"Of course, I don't deny that we're a long way from the Millennium,
yet," was Raymer's summing up of the conditions in his own plant. "But I
do claim that we are on a present-day, living footing. So far as the men
understand loyalty, they are loyal; partly to my father's memory;
partly, I hope, to me. We have never had a strike or an approach to one,
or a disagreement that could not be adjusted amicably. Whether these
conditions can be maintained after we double our capacity and get in a
lot of new blood, I can't say. But I hope they can."
"You are enlarging?" said Griswold.
Raymer waited until the only other man in the smoking-den had gone back
to the drawing-rooms before he said: "Yes; I caught the fever along with
the rest of them a few weeks ago, and I'm already beginning to wish that
I hadn't."
"You are afraid of the market?"
"N-no; times are good, and the market--our market, at least--is daily
growing stronger. It is rather a matter of finances. I am an engineer,
as my father was before me. When it comes to wrestling with the money
devil, I'm outclassed from the start."
"There are a good many more of us in the same boat," said Griswold,
leaving an opening for further confidences if Raymer chose to make them.
But the young ironmaster was looking at his watch, and the confidences
were postponed.
"I'm keeping you up, when I daresay you ought to be in bed," he
protested; but Griswold held him long enough to ask for a suggestion in
a small matter of his own.
Now that he was able to be about, he was most anxious to relieve Miss
Grierson and her father of the charge and care of one whose obligation
to them was already more than mountain-high: did Raymer happen to know
of some quiet household where the obligated one could find lodging and a
simple table?
Raymer, taking time to think of it, did know. Mrs. Holcomb, the widow of
his father's bookkeeper, owned her own house in Shawnee Street. It was
not a boarding-house. The widow rented rooms to two of Mr. Grierson's
bank clerks, and she was looking for another desirable lodger. Quite
possibly she would be willing to board the extra lodger. Raymer,
himself, would go and see her about it.
"It is an exceedingly kind-hearted community this home town of yours,
Mr. Raymer," was the convalescent's leave-taking, when he shook hands
with the ironmaster at the foot of the stairs; and that was the thought
which he took to bed with him after Raymer had gone to make his adieux
to the small person who, in Griswold's reckoning, owned the kindest of
the kind hearts.
XXI
BROFFIN'S EQUATION
Having Clerk Maurice's telegram to time the overtaking approach, Broffin
found the _Belle Julie_ backing and filling for her berth at the
Vicksburg landing when, after a hasty Vicksburg breakfast, he had
himself driven to the river front.
Going aboard as soon as the swing stage was lowered, he found Maurice,
with whom he had something more than a speaking acquaintance, just
turning out of his bunk in the texas.
"I took it for granted you'd be along," was Maurice's greeting. "What
bank robber are we running away with now?"
Broffin grinned.
"I'm still after the one you took on in the place of John Gavitt."
"Humph!" said the clerk, sleepily; "I thought that one _was_ John
Gavitt."
"No; he merely took Gavitt's place and name. Tell me all you know about
him."
"I don't know anything about him, except that he was fool enough to pull
Buck M'Grath out of the river just after M'Grath had tried to bump him
over the bows."
This was a new little side-light on the characteristics of the man who
was wanted. Broffin pulled gently at the thread of narrative until he
had all the particulars of the humane mutiny and the near-tragedy in
which it had terminated.
"Stuck to him and kept him from drowning till you could pick 'em up, did
he--what?" was his commentary on the story. "Then what happened?"
"Oh, nothing much--or nothing very different. Of course, Mac favored the
fellow all he could, after that; gave him the light end of it when there
was any light end. But he didn't get his chance to even up right until
we got to St. Louis."
Here, apparently, was another overlooked item in the list of things to
be considered, and Broffin grappled for it.