modification of the first one. I was an accredited customer of the bank,
like other business men of the town, and as such I could ask for an
extension of credit on accommodation paper, and Grierson, as president,
was at liberty to grant it if he saw fit. He offered to take my paper
without an endorser if I would cover his personal risk with my stock
collateral, assigning it, not to the bank, but to him. I fell for it
like a woolly sheep. The stock transfers were made, and I signed a note
for one hundred thousand dollars, due in sixty days; Grierson explaining
that two months was the bank's usual limit on accommodation paper--which
is true enough--but giving me to understand that a renewal and an
extension of time would be merely a matter of routine."
Griswold was shaking his head sympathetically. "I can guess the rest,"
he said. "Grierson is preparing to swallow you whole."
"He has as good as done it," was the dejected reply. "The note falls due
to-morrow; and, as I happened to be uptown this afternoon, I thought I
would drop in and pay the discount and renew the paper. To tell the
truth, I'd been getting more nervous the more I thought of it; and I
didn't dare let it go to the final moment. Grierson shot me through the
heart. He gave me a cock-and-bull story about some bank examiner's
protest, and told me I must be prepared to take up the paper to-morrow.
He knew perfectly well that he had me by the throat. I had checked out
every dollar of the loan, and a good bit of our own balance in addition,
paying the building and material bills."
"Of course you reminded him of his agreement?"
"Sure; and he sawed me off short: said that any business man borrowing
money on accommodation paper knew that it was likely to be called in on
the expiration date; that an extension is really a new transaction,
which the bank is at liberty to refuse to enter. Oh, he gave it to me
cold and clammy, sitting back in his big chair and staring up at me
through the smoke of a fat black cigar while he did it!"
"And then?" prompted Griswold.
"Then I remembered the mother and sister, Kenneth, and did what I would
have died rather than do for myself--I begged like a dog. But I might as
well have gone outside and butted my head against the brick wall of the
bank."
Griswold forgot his own real, though possibly indirect, obligation to
Jasper Grierson.
"That is where you made a mistake: you should have told him to go to
hell with his money!" was his acrid comment. And then: "How near can you
come to lifting this note to-morrow, Raymer?"
"'Near' isn't the word. Possibly I might sweep the corners and gather up
twelve or fifteen thousand dollars."
"That will do," said the querist, shortly. "Make it ten thousand, and
I'll contribute the remaining ninety."
Raymer sprang out of his chair as if its padded arms had been suddenly
turned into high-voltage electrodes.
"You will?--you'll do that for me, Griswold?" he said, with a queer
stridency in his voice that made the word-craftsman, always on the watch
for apt similes, think of a choked chicken. But Raymer was swallowing
hard and trying to go on. "By Jove--it's the most generous thing I ever
heard of!--but I can't let you do it. I haven't a thing in the world to
offer you but the stock, and that may not be worth the paper it is
printed on if Jasper Grierson has made up his mind to break me."
"Sit down again and let us thresh it out," said Griswold. "How much of a
Socialist are you, Raymer?"
The young ironmaster sat down, gasping a little at the sudden wrenching
aside of the subject.
"Why, I don't know; enough to want every man to have a square deal, I
guess."
"Including the men in your shops?"
"Putting them first," was the prompt correction. "It was my father's
policy, and it has been mine. We have never had any labor troubles."
"You pay fair wages?"
"We do better than that. A year ago, I introduced a modified plan of
profit-sharing."
Griswold's eyes were lighting up with the altruistic fires.
"Once in awhile, Raymer, a thing happens so fortuitously as to fairly
compel a belief in the higher powers that our fathers included in the
word 'Providence'," he said, almost solemnly. "You have described
exactly an industrial situation which seems to me to offer a solution of
the whole vexed question of master and man, and to be a seed-sowing
which is bound to be followed by an abundant and most humanizing
harvest. Ever since I began to study, even in a haphazard way, the
social system under which we sweat and groan, I've wanted in on a job
like yours. I still want in. Will you take me as a silent partner,
Raymer? I'm not making it a condition, mind you: come here any time
after ten o'clock to-morrow, and you'll find the money waiting for you.
But I do hope you won't turn me down."
Raymer was gripping the arms of his chair again, but this time they were
not unpleasantly electrified.
"If I had only myself to consider, I shouldn't keep you waiting a
second," he returned, heartily. "But it may take a little time to
persuade my mother and sister. If they could only know you"--then,
forgetting the crossed wire and his late overhearings--"why can't you
come out to dinner with me to-night?"
"For the only reason that would make me refuse; I have a previous
bidding. But I'll be glad to go some other day. There is no hurry about
this business matter; take all the time you need--after you have made
Mr. Grierson take his claws out of you."
Raymer had filled the borrowed pipe again and was pulling at it
reflectively. "About this partnership; what would be your notion?" he
asked.
"The simplest way is always the best. Increase your capital stock and
let me in for as much as my ninety thousand dollars will buy," said the
easily satisfied investor. "We'll let it go at that until you've had
time to think it over, and talk it over with your mother and sister."
The iron-founder got up and reached for his hat.
"You are certainly the friend in need, Griswold, if ever there was one,"
he said, gripping the hand of leave-taking as if he would crack the
bones in it. "But there is one thing I'm going to ask you, and you
mustn't take offense: this ninety thousand; could you afford to lose
it?--or is it your whole stake in the game?"
Griswold's smile was the ironmaster's assurance that he had not
offended.
"It is practically my entire stake--and I can very well afford to lose
it in the way I have indicated. You may call that a paradox, if you
like, but both halves of it are true."
"Then there is one other thing you ought to know, and I'm going to tell
it now," Raymer went on. "We do a general foundry and machine business,
but a good fifty per cent of our profit comes from the Wahaska &
Pineboro Railroad repair work, which we have had ever since the road was
opened."
Griswold was smiling again. "Why should I know that, particularly?" he
asked.
"Because it is rumored that Jasper Grierson has been quietly absorbing
the stock and bonds of the road, and if he means to remove me from the
map----"
"I see," was the reply. "In that case you'll need a partner even worse
than you do now. You can't scare me off that way. Shall I look for you
at ten to-morrow?"
"At ten to the minute," said the rescued plunger; and he went
down-stairs so full of mingled thankfulness and triumph that he mistook
Doctor Farnham's horse for his own at the hitching-post two doors away,
and was about to get into the doctor's buggy before he discovered his
mistake.
XXV
THE BRIDGE OF JEHENNAM
Doctor Farnham had been about to make his daily call upon old Mrs.
Breda, two doors up the street from the Widow Holcomb's, when he had
climbed the stair of literary aspirations to give the convalescent his
dinner bidding.
Griswold had accepted gratefully on the spur of the moment; and it was
not until after Raymer had come and gone that sober second thought began
to point out the risk he would run in meeting Charlotte Farnham face to
face under conditions which would give her the best conceivable
opportunity to recognize him, if recognition were possible.
The more he thought of it, the more he regretted his haste in consenting
to incur the risk. Reflectively weighing the chances for and against, he
made sure that in characterizing the young woman whose life-thread had
been so strangely tangled with his own he had not overrated her
intelligence. Giving heredity its due, with the keen-witted little
physician for her father she could scarcely fail to measure up to the
standard of those whose gifts are apperceptive. For many days she had
had ample opportunity to familiarize herself with all the little
identifying individualities of the deck-hand: reasoning from cause to
effect, it might be assumed that her crushing responsibility had driven
her to make use of it. Having recognized him once, under conditions far
less favorable than those he was about to hazard, was it not more than
probable that she would be able to do it again?
Griswold took a final look at himself in his dressing-case mirror before
going to keep his evening appointment at the doctor's down-town office.
It was comfortably reassuring. So far as he could determine, there was
little in the clean-shaven, square-shouldered, correctly garmented young
fellow who faced him in the mirror to suggest either the bearded outcast
of New Orleans or the unkempt and toil-soddened roustabout of the _Belle
Julie_. If only she had not made him speak to her: he had a sharp
conviction that the greatest of all the hazards lay in the chance that
she might remember his voice.
He found the cheery little doctor waiting for him when he had walked the
few squares to the Main Street office.
"I was beginning to be afraid you were going to be fashionably late,"
said the potential host; and then, with a humorous glance for the
correct garmenting: "Regalia, heh? Hasn't Miss Grierson told you that
Wahaska is still hopelessly unable to live up to the dress-coat and
standing collar? I'm sure she must have. But never mind; climb into the
buggy and we'll let old Bucephalus take us around to see if the
neighbors have brought in anything good to eat."
The drive was a short one, and it ended at the gate through which
Matthew Broffin had preceded by only a few hours the man whose eventual
appearance at the Farnham home he had so confidently predicted. As at
many another odd moment when there had been nothing better to do,
Broffin was once more shadowing the house in which, first or last, he
expected to trap his amateur MacHeath; and when the buggy was halted at
the carriage step he was near enough to mark and recognize the doctor's
companion.
"Not this time," he muttered, sourly, when the two had passed together
up the gravelled path and the host was fitting his latch-key to the
front door. "It's only the sick man that writes books. I wonder what
sort of a book he thinks he's going to write in this inforgotten,
turkey-trodden, come-along village of the Reuben yaps!"
Griswold, waiting on the porch while Doctor Farnham fitted his key, had
a nerve-tingling shiver of apprehension when the latch yielded with a
click and he found himself under the hall lantern formally shaking hands
with the statuesque young woman of the many imaginings. It gave him a
curious thrill of mingled terror and joy to find her absolutely
unchanged. Having, for his own part, lived through so many experiences
since that final glimpse of her standing on the saloon-deck guards of
the _Belle Julie_ at St. Louis, the distance in time seemed almost
immeasurable.
"You are very welcome to Home Nook, Mr. Griswold; we have been hearing
about you for many weeks," she was saying when he had relinquished the
firm hand and was hanging his coat and hat on the hall-rack. And then,
with a half-embarrassed laugh: "I am afraid we are dreadful gossips; all
Wahaska has been talking about you, you know, and wondering how it came
to acquire you."
"It hasn't acquired anything very valuable," was the guest's modest
disclaimer, its readiness arising out of a grateful easing of strains
now that the actual face-to-face ordeal had safely passed its
introductory stage. "And you mustn't say a word against your charming
little city, Miss Farnham," he went on. "It is the friendliest, most
hospitable----"
The doctor's daughter was interrupting with an enthusiastic show of
applause.
"Come on out to dinner, both of you," she urged; and then to Griswold:
"I want you to say all those nice things to Aunt Fanny, and as many more
as you can think of. She has never admitted for a single moment that
Wahaska can be compared with any one of a dozen New Hampshire villages
she could name."
In the progress to the cozy, home-like dining-room, Griswold found
himself at once in an atmosphere of genuine comfort and refinement; the
refinement which speaks of generations of good breeding chastened and
purified by the limitations of a slender purse; in the present instance
the purse of the good little doctor whose attempted charity in the
matter of his own fee was fresh in the mind of the castaway. Griswold
had the writing craftsman's ingathering eye: he saw that the furnishings
were frugally well-worn, that the sitting-room rug was country-woven,
and that the spotless dining-room napery was soft and pliable with age.
The contrast between the Farnham home and the ornate mansion three
streets away on the lake front was strikingly apparent; as cleanly
marked as that between Margery Grierson and the sweetly serene and
conventional young person who was introducing him to her aunt across the
small oval dining-table.
So far, all was going well. Griswold, with a pleasant word for the frail
little woman opposite and a retort in kind now and then for the doctor's
raillery, still had time to be narrowly observant of the signs and
omens. But a little later, when the Swedish maid was serving the meat
course, he had his first warning shock. Through the bouillon and the
fish the doctor had borne the brunt of the table-talk, joking the guest
on his humiliating descent from Mereside and the luxuries to a country
doctor's table, and laughing at Griswold's half-hearted attempts to
decry the luxuries. What word or phrase or trick of speech it was that
served to stir the sleeping memories, Griswold could not guess; but it
became suddenly apparent that the memories were stirring. In the midst
of a half-uttered direction to the serving-maid, Miss Farnham stopped
abruptly, and Griswold could feel her gaze, wide-eyed and
half-terrified, seemingly fixed upon him.
It was all over in the turning of a leaf: there had been no break in
the doctor's genial raillery, and the breathless little pause at the
other end of the table was only momentary. But Griswold fancied that
there was a subtle change in the daughter's attitude toward him dating
from the moment of interruptions.
Farther along, he decided that the change was in himself, and was merely
the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less
continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When
the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room,
little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and
the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest
and himself, was called away professionally. Griswold saw himself
confronting the really crucial stage of the ordeal, and prudence was
warning him that it would be safer to make his adieux and to go with his
host. It was partly Miss Farnham's protest, but more his own
determination to prove the bridge of peril to the uttermost, that made
him stay.
Miss Gilman, least obtrusive of chaperones, had been peacefully napping
for a good half-hour in her low rocker under the reading-lamp, and the
pictures in a thick quarto of Gulf Coast views had pleasantly filled the
interval for the two who were awake, when Griswold finally assured
himself that the danger of recognition was a danger past. As a mental
analyst he knew that the opening of each fresh door in the house of
present familiarity was automatically closing other doors opening upon
the past; and it came to him with a little flush of the seer's
exaltation that once again his prefigurings were finding their exact
fulfilment. In a spirit of artistic daring he yielded to a sudden
impulse, as one crossing the flimsiest of bridges may run and leap to
prove that his theory of safety-stresses is a sufficient guarantee of
his own immunity.
"You were speaking of first impressions of places," he said, while they
were still turning the leaves of the picture-book. "Are you a believer
in the absolute correctness of first impressions?"
"I don't know," was the thoughtful reply; but its after-word was more
definite: "As to places, I'm not sure that the first impression always
persists; in a few instances I am quite certain it hasn't. I didn't like
the Gulf Coast at all, at first; it seemed so foreign and different and
unhomelike. As to people, however----"
She paused, and Griswold entered the breach hardily.
"As to people, you are less easily converted from the original
prejudice--or prepossession. So am I. I have learned to place the utmost
confidence in the first impression. In my own case it is invariably
correct, and if for any reason whatever I suffer any later
characterization to take its place, I am always the loser."
She was regarding him curiously over the big book which still lay open
between them.
"Is that a part of the writing gift?" she asked.
"No, not specially; most people have it in some more or less workable
quantity, though for many it expresses itself only in a vague attraction
or repulsion."
"I've had that feeling," she answered quickly.
"I know," he affirmed. "There have been times when, with every
reasonable fibre in you urging you to believe the evil, a still stronger
impulse has made you believe in the good."
"How can you know that?" she asked; and again he saw in the expressive
eyes the flying signals of indeterminate perplexity and apprehension.
Resolutely he pressed the hazardous experiment to its logical
conclusion. Once for all, he must know if this young woman with the
sympathetic voice and the goddess-like pose could, even under
suggestion, be led to link up the past with the present.
"It is my trade to know," he said quietly, closing the book of views and
laying it aside. "There have been moments in your life when you would
have given much to be able to decide a question of duty or expediency
entirely irrespective of your impressions. Isn't that so?"
For one flitting instant he thought he had gone too far. In the hardy
determination to win all or lose all, he had been holding her eyes
steadily, as the sure mirror in which he should be able to read his
sentence, of acquittal or of condemnation. This time there was no
mistaking the sudden widening of the pupils to betray the equally sudden
awakening of womanly terror.
"Don't be afraid," he began, and he had come thus far on the road to
open confession when he saw that she was not looking at him; she was
looking past him toward one of the windows giving upon the porch. "What
is it?" he demanded, turning to look with her.
"It was a man--he was looking in at the window!" she returned in low
tones. "I thought I saw him once before; but this time I am certain!"
Griswold sprang from his chair and a moment later was letting himself
out noiselessly through the hall door. There was nothing stirring on the
porch. The windless night was starlit and crystal clear, and the silence
was profound. As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his
eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with
this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he
did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single
searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and
Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy
appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home
hitching-post.
"Hello, Mr. Griswold; is that you?" called the cheery one, when he saw a
bareheaded man beating the covers in his front yard.
Griswold met his host at the gate and walked up the path with him.
"Miss Charlotte thought she saw some one at one of the front windows,"
he explained; and a moment afterward the daughter was telling it for
herself.
"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and
again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this
time----"
Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when,
under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for
benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night
walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now
quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was
going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from
life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the
character of _Fidelia_ in the book. Moreover, she would be his
touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might,
if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the
mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever
slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was
a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping
memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the
gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as
the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the
deck-hand of the _Belle Julie_.
Thus the complacent, musing upper thought in the mind and on the lips of
the proletary as he wended his way through the quiet and well-nigh
deserted streets to the older part of the town. How much it might have
been modified if he had known that the man whose face Miss Farnham had
seen at the window was silently tracking him through the tree-shadowed
streets is a matter for conjecture. Also, it is to be presumed that
much, if not all, of the complacency would have vanished if he could
have been an unseen listener in the Farnham sitting-room, dating from
the time when little Miss Gilman pattered off to bed, leaving the father
and daughter sitting together under the reading-lamp.
At first their talk was entirely of the window apparition; the daughter
insisting upon its reality, and the father trying to push it over into
the limbo of things imagined. Driven finally to give all the reasons for
her belief in the realities, Charlotte related the incident of the
afternoon.
"You may remember that I told you over the 'phone that I had a caller
this afternoon," she began.
The doctor did remember it, and said so.
"You can imagine how frightened I was when I tell you that it was a
man--a detective from New Orleans who has, or at least who says he has,
been travelling thousands of miles to find me."
Doctor Bertie was tickling his bearded chin thoughtfully. "He should
have come to me first," he said, frowning a little at the invasion of
his home. "It was about that bank robbery, I suppose?"
"Yes; he thought I could tell him the man's real name. It seems that
they have no identity clew to work upon. I knew at the time that
'Gavitt' was an assumed name; the man as good as told me so, you
remember. This Mr. Broffin wouldn't believe that I couldn't tell him the
real name, and along toward the last he grew quite angry and
threatening. He insisted upon it that I knew the robber--that I had
known him before the crime was committed; and he intimated pretty
broadly that I am still in communication with him. Of course, it is all
very absurd; but it is also very annoying to think that somebody is
spying upon you all the time. I didn't want to speak of it before Mr.
Griswold; but it was this detective who came twice to look in at our
windows this evening."
By this time the good Doctor Bertie had become the indignant Doctor
Bertie.
"We can't have that at all!" he said incisively. "You did your whole
duty in that bank matter; and it was a good deal more than most young
women would have done. I'm not going to have you persecuted and
harassed--not one minute! Where is this fellow stopping?"
The daughter shook her head. "I don't know. He gave me his card, but it
has the New Orleans address only."
"Give it to me and I'll look him up to-morrow."
The card changed hands, and for a few minutes neither of them spoke.
Then the daughter began again.
"I've had another shock this evening, too," she said, speaking this time
in low tones and with eyes downcast. "This Mr. Griswold: tell me all you
know about him, father."