and he went up-stairs to get a street coat and his hat.
She had disappeared when he came down again, and he went out to sit on
the sun-warmed veranda while he waited. He had already forgotten what
she had said about the object of the drive--the proving of the
philosophic charge against him--and was looking forward with keenly
pleasurable anticipations to another outing with her, the second for
that day. It had come to this, now; to admitting frankly the charm which
he was still calling sensuous, and which, in the moments of insight
recurring, as often as they can be borne, to the imaginative, and
vouchsafed now and then even to the wayfaring, he was still disposed to
characterize as an appeal to that which was least worthy in him.
Latterly, however, he had begun to question himself more acutely as to
the exact justice of this attitude; and while he was sunning himself on
the veranda and listening for the hoof-beats of the big trap horse on
the stable approach, he was doing it again. In those graver analytical
moments he had called Margery a preternaturally clever little barbarian,
setting his own immense obligation to her aside in deference to what he
assumed to be the immutable realities. In the sun-warming excursion came
another of those precious moments of insight; a moment in which he was
given a sobering glimpse of the deathless Philistine within. Who was he
to be setting his machine-made ideals above the living, breathing, human
fact whose very limitations and shortcomings might figure as angelic
virtues when weighed in any balance save that of the Philistinic ego?
To admit the query was to admit a doubtful distrust of all the charted
anchorages; those sure holding-grounds which he had once believed to be
the very bottoming of facts assured and incontestible. From his lounging
seat the trees on the lawn framed a noble vista of lakescape and
crescent-curved beach drive, the latter with its water-facing row of
modest mansions, the homes of Wahaska's well-to-do elect. At the end of
the crescent he could see the chimneys of the Raymer house rising above
a groving of young maples; and nearer at hand the substantial,
two-storied frame house which Miss Grierson had pointed out to him as
the home of the kindly Doctor Bertie. When he found himself drifting,
his thoughts reverted automatically to Charlotte Farnham. There, if
anywhere, lay the touchstone of truth and the verities; there, he told
himself, was at least one life into which the doubtful distrust of the
anchorages had never come.
Passing easily from Miss Farnham the ideal to Miss Farnham the
flesh-and-blood reality, he was moved to wonder mildly why the fate
which had brought him twice into critically intimate relations with her
was now denying him even a chance meeting. For a week or more he had
been going out daily; sometimes with Miss Grierson in the trap, but
oftener afoot and alone. The walking excursions had led him most
frequently up and down the lakeside drive, but the doctor's house stood
well back in its enclosure, and there was much shrubbery. Once he had
heard her voice: she was reading aloud to some one on the vine-screened
porch. And once again in passing, he had caught a glimpse of a shapely
arm with the loose sleeve falling away from it as it was thrust upward
through the porch greenery to pluck a bud from the crimson rambler
adding its graceful mass to the clambering vines. It was rather
disappointing, but he was not impatient. In the fulness of time the
destiny which had twice intervened would intervene again. He was as
certain of it as he was of the day-to-day renewal of his strength and
vitality; and he could afford to wait. For, whatever else might happen
in a mutable world, neither an ideal nor its embodiment may suffer
change.
As if to add the touch of definitiveness to the presumptive conclusion,
a voice broke in upon his revery; the voice of the young woman whose
most alluring charm was her many-sided changefulness.
"What? no trap yet? Thorsen is outliving his usefulness; he is getting
slower and pokier every added day he lives!" the voice was saying, with
a faintly acid quality in it that Griswold had seldom heard. Then, as if
she had marked his preoccupied gaze and divined its object: "You must
have a little more patience, Mr. Griswold. All things come to him who
waits. When you have left Mereside finally, Doctor Bertie will some time
take you home to dinner with him."
For his own peace of mind, Griswold hastily assured himself that it was
only the wildest of chance shots. Since the day when he had admitted
that he knew Miss Farnham's name without knowing Miss Farnham in person,
the doctor's daughter had never been mentioned between them.
"How did you happen to guess that I was thinking of the good doctor?" he
asked, curiously.
"You were not thinking of Doctor Bertie; you were thinking of Doctor
Bertie's 'only'," was the laughing contradiction; and Griswold was glad
that the coming of the man with the trap saved him from the necessity of
falling any farther into what might easily prove to be a dangerous
pitfall. Later on, while he was mechanically lifting his hat in
recognition of the many salutations acknowledged by his companion in
their triumphal progress down Main Street, he was still thankful and
still puzzling over the almost uncanny coincidence. It was not the first
time that Miss Grierson had seemed able to read his inmost thoughts.
The short afternoon drive paused at the curb in front of Jasper
Grierson's bank, and, as on former occasions, Margery lightly scorned
the convalescent's up-stretched arms and sprang unhelped to the
pavement. But now her mood was sweetly indulgent and she softened the
refusal. "By and by, after you are quite well and strong again," she
said; and when a horse-holding boy had been found, she led the way into
the bank.
It was Griswold's first visit to the Farmers' and Merchants', and while
his companion was speaking to the cashier he was absently contrasting
its rather showy interior with the severe plainness of the Bayou State
Security; contrasting, and congratulating himself upon the gift of the
artistic memory which enabled him to recall with vivid accuracy all the
little details of the New Orleans banking house--this notwithstanding
the good excuse the observing eye might have had for wandering.
A moment later he found himself bringing up the rear of a procession of
three, led by a young woman with a bunch of keys at her girdle. The
procession halted for the opening of a massive gate in the steel grille
at the rear of the public lobby; after which, with the gate latching
itself automatically behind him, Griswold found himself in the grated
corridor facing the safety deposit vaults.
"Number three-forty-five-A, please," his companion was saying to the
young woman custodian, and he stood aside and admired the workmanship of
the complicated time-locks while the two entered the electric-lighted
vault and jointly opened one of the multitude of small safes. When Miss
Grierson came out, she was carrying a small, japanned document box under
her arm, and her eyes were shining with a soft light that was new to the
man who was waiting in the corridor. "Come with me to one of the
coupon-rooms," she said; and then to the custodian: "You needn't stay;
I'll ring when we want to be let out."
Griswold followed in mild bewilderment when she turned aside to one of
the little mahogany-lined cells set apart for the use of the
safe-holders, saw her press the button which switched the lights on, and
mechanically obeyed her signal to close the door. When their complete
privacy was assured, she put the japanned box on the tiny table and
motioned him to one of the two chairs.
"Do you know why I have brought you here?" she asked, when he was
sitting within arm's-reach of the small black box.
"How should I?" he said. "You take me where you please, and when you
please, and I ask no questions. I am too well contented to be with you
to care very much about the whys and wherefores."
"Oh, how nicely you say it!" she commended, with the frank little laugh
which he had come to know and to seek to provoke. She was standing
against the opposite cell wall with her shoulders squared and her hands
behind her: the pose, whether intentional or natural, was dramatically
perfect and altogether bewitching. "I was born to be your fairy
godmother, I think," she went on joyously. "Tell me; when you bought
your ticket to Wahaska that night in St. Louis, were you meaning to come
here to find work?--the bread-and-butter work?"
"No," he admitted; "I had money, then."
"What became of it?"
"I don't know. I suppose it was stolen from me on the train. It was in
a package in one of my suit-cases; and Doctor Farnham said----"
"I know; he told you that we had searched your suit-cases when you were
at your worst--thinking we owed it to you and your friends, if you had
any."
"Yes; that is what he told me."
"Also, he told you that we didn't find any money?"
"Yes; he told me that, too. We agreed that somebody must have gone
through the grips on the train."
"And you let it go at that? Why didn't you tell me, so that we might at
least try to find the thief?"
He had quite lost sight of the black box on the table by this time, and
was consumed with curiosity to know why she had brought him to such a
place to reproach him for his lack of confidence.
"How often are we able to tell the exact 'why' of anything?" he answered
evasively. "Perhaps I didn't wish to trouble you--you who had already
troubled yourself so generously in behalf of an unknown castaway."
"So you just let the money go?"
"So I just let it go."
She was laughing again and the bedazzling eyes were dancing with
delight.
"I told you I was going to prove that you are a philosopher!" she
exulted. "Sour old Diogenes himself couldn't have been more superbly
indifferent to the goods the gods provide. Open that box on the table,
please."
He did it half-absently: at the first sight of the brown-paper packet
within, the electric bulb suspended over the table seemed to grow black
and the mahogany walls of the tiny room to spin dizzily. Then, with a
click that he fancied he could hear, the buzzing mental machinery
stopped and reversed itself. A cold sweat, clammy and sickening, started
out on him when he realized that the reversal had made him once again
the crafty, cornered criminal, ready to fight or fly--or to slay, if a
life stood in the way of escape. Without knowing what he did, he closed
the box and got upon his feet, eying her with a growing ferocity that he
could neither banish nor control.
"I see: you were a little beforehand with the doctor," he said, and he
strove to say it naturally; to keep the malignant devil that was
whispering in his ear from dictating the tone as well as the words.
"I was, indeed; several days beforehand," she boasted, still joyously
exultant.
"You--you opened the package?" he went on, once more pushing the
importunate devil aside.
"Naturally. How else would I have known that it was worth locking up?"
Her coolness astounded him. If she knew the whole truth--and the demon
at his ear was assuring him that she must know it--she must also know
that she was confronting a great peril; the peril of one who voluntarily
shuts himself into a trap with the fear-maddened wild thing for which
the trap was baited and set. He was steadying himself with a hand on the
table when he said: "Well, you opened the package; what did you find
out?"
"What did I find out?" He heard her half-hesitant repetition of his
query, and for one flitting instant he made sure that he saw the fear of
death in the wide-open eyes that were lifted to his. But the next
instant the eyes were laughing at him, and she was going on confidently.
"Of course, as soon as I untied the string I saw it was money--a lot of
money; and you can imagine that I tied it up again, quickly, and didn't
lose any more time than I could help in putting it away in the safest
place I could think of. Every day since you began to get well, I've been
expecting you to say something about it; but as long as you wouldn't, I
wouldn't."
Slowly the blood came back into the saner channels, and the whispering
demon at his ear grew less articulate. Was she telling the truth? Could
it be possible that she had not opened the packet far enough to see and
read the damning evidence of the printed bank-slips which, in a very
bravado of carelessness, as he now remembered, he had neglected to
remove and destroy? He was searching the dark eyes for the naked soul
behind them when he ventured again.
"You--you and your father--must have thought it very singular that a
sick man should be knocking about the country with so much money carried
carelessly in a suit-case?"
"My father knows nothing about it; nor does any one else. And it wasn't
my place to gossip or to wonder. I found it, and I took care of it for
you. Are you glad, or sorry?"
He took the necessary forward step and stood before her. And his answer
was no answer at all.
"Miss Grierson--Margery--are you telling me the truth?--all of it?" he
demanded, seeking once again to pinion the soul which lay beyond the
deepest depth of the limpid eyes.
Her laugh was as cheerful as a bird song.
"Telling you the truth? How could you suspect me of such a thing! No, my
good friend; no woman ever tells a man the whole truth when she can help
it. I didn't find your money, and I didn't lock it up in poppa's vault:
I am merely playing a part in a deep and diabolical plot to----"
Griswold forgot that he was her poor beneficiary; forgot that she had
taken him in as her guest; forgot, in the mad joy of the reactionary
moment, everything that he should have remembered--saw nothing, thought
of nothing save the flushed face with its glorious eyes and tempting
lips: the eyes and lips of the daughter of men.
She broke away from him hotly after he had taken the flushed face
between his hands and kissed her; broke away to drop into the chair at
the other side of the table, hiding the flashing eyes and the burning
cheeks and the quivering lips in the crook of a round arm which made
room for itself on the narrow table by pushing the japanned money-box
off the opposite edge.
It was the normal Griswold who picked up the box and put it in the other
chair, gravely and methodically. Then he stood before her again with
his back to the wall, waiting for what every gentle drop of blood in his
veins was telling him he richly deserved. His punishment was long in
coming; so long that when he made sure she was crying, he began to
invite it.
"Say it," he suggested gently, "you needn't spare me at all. The only
excuse I could offer would only make the offence still greater."
She looked up quickly and the dark eyes were swimming. But whether the
tears were of anger or only of outraged generosity, he could not tell.
"Then there was an excuse?" she flashed up at him.
"No," he denied, as one who finds the second thought the worthier;
"there was no excuse."
She had found a filmy bit of lace-bordered linen at her belt and was
furtively wiping her lips with it.
"I thought perhaps you might be able to--to invent one of some sort,"
she said, and her tone was as colorless as the gray skies of an autumn
nightfall. And then, with a childlike appeal in the wonderful eyes: "I
think you will have to help me a little--out of your broader experience,
you know. What ought I to do?"
His reply came hot from the refining-fire of self-abasement.
"You should write me down as one who wasn't worthy of your
loving-kindness and compassion, Miss Grierson. Then you should call the
custodian and turn me out."
"But afterward," she persisted pathetically. "There must be an
afterward?"
"I am leaving Mereside this evening," he reminded her. "It will be for
you to say whether its doors shall ever open to me again."
She took the thin safety-deposit key from her glove and laid it on the
table.
"You have made me wish there hadn't been any money," she lamented, with
a sorrowful little catch in her voice that stabbed him like a knife. "I
haven't so many friends that I can afford to lose them recklessly, Mr.
Griswold."
"Damn the money!" he exploded; and the malediction came out of a full
heart.
"If you would only say you are sorry," she went on sadly, groping only
half-purposefully for the bell-push which would summon the custodian.
"You are sorry, aren't you?"
Unconsciously he had taken her former pose, with his back to the wall
and his hands behind him.
"I ought to be decent enough to lie to you and say that I am," he
returned, hardily. "I know you can't understand; you are too good and
innocent to understand. I'm ashamed; that is, the civilized part of me
is ashamed; but that is all. Knowing that he ought to be in the dust at
your feet, the brutal other-man is unrepentant and riotously jubilant
because, for a brief second or two, he was able to break away and----"
Her fingers had found the bell-push and were pressing it. When the
custodian opened the door, Miss Grierson was her poiseful self again.
"Number three-forty-five-A is Mr. Kenneth Griswold's box, now," she
announced briefly. "Please register it in his name, and then help him to
put it away and lock it up."
Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman
half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary
undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a
millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of
degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance
its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive
barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had
each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. Was it to be
always thus? Could it be even remotely possible that in a candidly
material world there could still be standing-room for the myths and
portents and superstitious traditions?
He was trying to persuade himself that there could not be standing-room
when he rejoined Margery--herself the best imaginable refutation of the
old-wives' tales--at the gate in the great steel grille. Man-like, he
was ready to be forgiven and comforted; and there was at least oblivion
in her charming little shudder as the custodian shot the bolts of the
gate to let them out.
"_Br-r-r!_" she shivered, "I can never stand here and look at the free
people out there without fancying myself in a prison. It must be a
dreadful thing to be shut away behind bolts and bars, forgotten by
everybody, and yet yourself unable to forget. Do you ever have such
foolish thoughts, Mr. Griswold?"
For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no
better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the
eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately
suffered another relapse into the pit of self-despisings.
"You have made me your poor prisoner, Miss Grierson," he said, speaking
to his own thought rather than to her question. And when they reached
the sidewalk and the trap: "May I bid you good-by here and go to my own
place?"
"Of course not!" she protested. "Mr. Raymer is coming to dinner to-night
and he will drive you over to Mrs. Holcomb's afterward, if you really
think you must go."
And for the first time in their comings and goings she let him lift her
to the high driving-seat.
XXIII
CONVERGING ROADS
Matthew Broffin had been two weeks and half of a third an unobtrusive
spy upon the collective activities of the Wahaskan social group which
included the Farnhams before he decided that nothing more could be
gained by further delay.
By this time he knew all there was to be known about Miss Farnham; the
houses she visited, the somewhat limited circle of her intimates and the
vastly wider one of her acquaintances, her comings and goings in the
town, her preference for church dissipations over the other sort, and
for croquet over lawn tennis.
Also, he had a more minute knowledge which would have terrified her if
she had suspected that any strange man was keeping an accurately
tabulated note-book record of her waking employments. He knew at what
hour she breakfasted, what time in the forenoons she spent upon her
Chautauqua readings, how much of her day was given to the care of her
invalid aunt, and, most important item of all, how, in the afternoons,
when her father was at his town office and the invalid was taking a nap
in her room, Miss Charlotte was usually alone in the living-rooms of
the two-storied house in Lake Boulevard: practically so for four days
out of the seven; actually so on Wednesdays and Fridays when Hilda
Larsen, the Swedish maid of all work, had her afternoons off.
Having his own private superstition about Friday, Broffin chose a
Wednesday afternoon for his call at the house on the lake front. It was
a resplendent day of the early summer which, in the Minnesota latitudes,
springs, Minerva-like, full-grown from the nodding head of the wintry
Jove of the north. In the doctor's front yard the grass was vividly
green, gladioli and jonquils bordered the path with a bravery of color,
and the buds of the clambering rose on the porch trellis were swelling
to burst their calyxes.
Broffin turned in from the sidewalk and closed the gate noiselessly
behind him. If he saw the bravery of colors in the path borders it was
only with the outward eye. There was a faint stir on the porch, as of
some one parting the leafy screen to look out, but he neither quickened
his pace nor slowed it. While he had been three doors away in the
lake-fronting street, a small pocket binocular had assured him that the
young woman he was going to call upon was sitting in a porch rocker
behind the clambering rose, reading a book.
She had risen to meet him by the time he had mounted the steps, and he
knew that her first glance was appraisive. He had confidently counted
upon being mistaken for a strange patient in search of the doctor, and
he was not disappointed.
"You are looking for Doctor Farnham?" she began. "He is at his
office--201 Main Street."
Broffin was digging in his pocket for a card. It was not often that he
was constrained to introduce himself formally, and for an awkward second
or two the search was unrewarded. When he finally found the bit of
pasteboard he was explaining verbally.
"I know well enough where your father's office is, but you are the one I
wanted to see," he said; and he gave her the round-cornered card with
its blazonment of his name and employment.
He was watching her narrowly when she read the name and its underline,
and the quick indrawing of the breath and the little shudder that went
with it were not thrown away upon him. But the other signs; the pressing
of the even teeth upon the lower lip and the coming and going of three
straight lines between the half-closed eyes were not so favorable.
"Will you come into the house, Mr.----" she had to look at the card
again to get the name--"Mr. Broffin?" she asked.
"Thank you, Miss; it's plenty good enough out here for me if it is for
you," he returned, beginning to fear that the common civilities were
giving her time to get behind her defences.
She made way for him on the porch and pointed to a chair, which he took,
damning himself morosely when he caught his foot in the porch rug and
knocked the book from its resting-place on the railing.
"It is no matter," she said, when he would have gone outside to recover
the book; but he knew from that moment that whatever advantage a fair
beginning may give was gone beyond recall.
"I guess we can take it for granted that you know what I want, Miss
Farnham," he began abruptly, when he had shifted his chair to face her
rocker. "Something like three months ago, or thereabouts, you went into
a bank in New Orleans to get a draft cashed. While you were at the
paying teller's window a robbery was committed, and you saw it done and
saw the man that did it. I've come to get you to tell me the man's
name."
If he had thought to carry the defences by direct assault he was quickly
made to realize that it could not be done. Miss Farnham's
self-possession was quietly convincing when she said:
"I have told it once, in a letter to Mr. Galbraith."
Broffin nodded. "Yes; in a letter that you didn't sign: we'll come to
that a little later. The name you gave was John Wesley Gavitt, and you
knew that wasn't his right name, didn't you?"