the town knows. They brought him here sick--she and her father--as I
told you. That was some little time before you came home; perhaps while
you were still on the way up the river. They didn't know who he was; and
oddly enough, there wasn't anything in his clothes or luggage to tell
them. I know that to be a fact because, at Miss Margery's request, I
helped her overhaul his belongings. Afterward, in a talk with him, I
learned that he had been robbed on the train; or at least, that was the
supposition. He said there was money in one of the suit-cases, and we
didn't find any."
"He is an author, they say; I don't seem to recall his name in any of my
reading."
The doctor laughed good-naturedly. "Perhaps he is only one of the
would-be's; I don't think it has got much farther than the hankering, as
yet. There was a book manuscript in one of his valises, and I read a
little of it. It was pretty poor stuff, I thought. But what was your
other shock?"
"It was at the dinner-table; when you were joking him about the
come-down from Mereside to us. Something he said--I couldn't remember, a
minute afterward, just what it was--was spoken exactly in the voice, and
with the same little trick of conciseness, as something that was said to
me that never-to-be-forgotten evening on the saloon-deck promenade of
the _Belle Julie_ ... said by the man whose name was _not_ John Wesley
Gavitt."
"Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be,
you know!"
"I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on
telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at
the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something
to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence,
of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I
couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away
altogether, or come often enough so that--oh, it's all nonsense, all of
it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"
"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large
confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where
their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.
It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the _Lancet_ and was
beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the
threshed-out subject with a belated query.
"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"
"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold
upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the
columns of the English medical journal.
But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he
remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement,
that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young
Griswold was rich--or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."
XXVI
PITFALLS
What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that
Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson
figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to
guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer,
angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty
generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the
fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine
Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous
characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its
possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the
newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.
Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned
heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished
only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a
few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks,
made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for
himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his
money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial
activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the
writing fit was on him and he had no time.
Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid.
In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had
grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the
old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging
deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to
most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which
bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the
frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent
evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later
prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the
other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of
growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and
becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly,
human.
When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter
every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the
last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery
Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping
only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More
than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open
new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve
of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store
of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.
"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he
exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her
in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child
in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other
people would think and do under conditions about which you can't
possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"
"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was
her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode
in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode
forgotten--or at least forgiven. "You know men--a little; but when it
comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at
you, your two heroines--with neither of whom you are really in
love--would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."
"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he
admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always
obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you
didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."
"It _is_ good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling
enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and
that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever
think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your
_Fleming_ is as far beyond me as your _Fidelia_ seems to be beyond you."
"_Fleming_ is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.
"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are
there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met
the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet
him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man
who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar
so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"
"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be
defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold,
mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.
"I know; that is what you say"--this with an adorable uptilt of the
pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had
been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But your _Fleming_ is
going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but
it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with
him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps.
When _Fidelia_ surprises him, _Fleming_ is almost ready to kill her;
not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own
miserable life."
"That is a part of his humanity," insisted the craftsman stubbornly.
"You don't know _Fleming_ yet. Have you ever met _Fidelia_?"
"Not as you have drawn her--no. She is too unutterably fine. If she had
a single shred of humanity about her, I should suspect you of meaning to
fall in love with her, farther along--to the humiliation and despair of
poor _Joan_, who, as you say, is a mere daughter of men."
"But how about _Joan_?" he fretted. "Is she out of drawing, too?"
"Yes; you are distorting her the other way--making her too inhumanly
worldly and insincere." Then, with an abruptness that was like a slap in
the face: "If you didn't spend so many evenings at Doctor Bertie's, you
would get both _Fidelia_ and _Joan_ in better drawing."
He flushed and drew himself up, with the stabbed _amour propre_
prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of
truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how
inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this
charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of her
own choosing.
"That is the first really unkind thing I have ever heard you say," was
the mild reproach which was all that the reactionary second thought
would sanction.
"Unkind to whom?--to you, or to Miss Farnham?"
"Ask yourself," he countered weakly; and she laughed at him.
"There is another of your failings, Kenneth. You haven't always the
courage of your convictions. What you are thinking is that I am a
spiteful little cat. Why don't you say it out loud, like a man?"
"Because I'm not thinking it," he denied, adding: "But I do think you
are a little inclined to be unfair to Miss Charlotte."
"Am I? Let us see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish
devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read
her the chapter before this one: where _Fidelia_ goes down to the
dining-room at midnight and finds _Fleming_ breaking into the
silver-safe where the money is hidden?"
"I'm not reading the story to her," he admitted, and again she laughed.
"But you do talk it over with her; you couldn't help doing that," she
persisted.
"Sometimes," he allowed.
"Well, what did she say when you came to that part where _Fidelia_ makes
_Fleming_ sit down while she tries to convince him that house-breaking
is a crime. You don't dare tell me what she said."
Griswold did it, with a firm convincement that he was thereby breaking a
sacred confidence. But the alluring lips and eyes were irresistible when
he was fairly within their influence.
"I merely suggested the scene as something that might be done," he
explained. "She did not approve of it. Her objection was that the
_Fidelias_ in real life don't do such things."
"They don't," was Miss Margery's flippant agreement. "And your letting
your _Fidelia_ do it is the one redeeming thing you have done in your
drawing of her. Just the same, with all your ingenuity you leave one
with the firm conviction that she will never, under any circumstances,
do such an unconventional thing again; never, never, never! And that is
a false note."
"Why is it?"
"Because it leaves out the common sex-factor; the one that is shared
alike by the _Fidelias_ and the _Joans_ and all the rest of us."
"And that is----"
"Just plain, every-day inconsistency--our dearest heritage from good old
Mother Eve. Being a mere man, you can't understand that, so you neglect
to put it into your women."
"But I can't let that stand," he objected. "You must allow the ideal
some little latitude. _Fidelia_ was not inconsistent, either in striving
with _Fleming_, or in betraying him."
Miss Grierson's perfect shoulders twitched in a little shrug of
impatience.
"Not that time, maybe; with _Fleming_ standing by to tell her that she
must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time--if
she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking
into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and
misquoted a couplet from Riley for him:
"'There, little boy, don't cry;
I have broken your doll, I know!'"
"Break some more of them if you can," he urged. "A few more casualties
won't make any difference."
"There is only the boy-doll left; and I don't like to break boy-dolls."
"_Fleming_, you mean? I give you leave. Hammer him until he bleeds
sawdust, if the spirit moves you."
Miss Grierson had been curled up like a comfortable kitten in the depths
of a great lounging chair--her favorite attitude while he was reading to
her. But now she sat up and locked her fingers over one knee.
"I said a little while ago that I'd never met _Fleming_, and I haven't.
But I like him, and I'm sorry to see him putting himself in for such a
savage hereafter. He is a good man, like other good men, with the single
difference that he thinks he isn't bound by the traditions. He believes
he can commit what the traditionary people call a crime without paying
the penalties. He can't: nobody can."
Griswold's smile was the superior smile of the writing craftsman. "That
is merely a matter of invention," he asserted. "He can escape the
penalties if he is smart enough."
"You mistake me," she interposed. "I don't mean the physical penalties;
though as to these the old saying that murder will out must have some
foundation in fact. Let that go: we'll suppose him clever enough to make
his escape and to outwit or outfight his enemies. I don't say he
couldn't do it successfully; but I do say that, with the hazards
confronting him at every turn, he will find the real criminal in him
growing and possessing him, making him think things and do things of the
utter depravity of which he has never had any doubt."
While she was speaking Griswold could feel the change she was describing
stealing over him like a nightmare, and when she stopped he passed his
hand over his eyes as one awaking from a vaguely terrifying dream.
"You mean that there is a real criminal in every man?" he questioned,
and the question seemed to say itself of its own volition.
"In every man and in every woman: how can you be a writer and not know
that? Ask yourself. You admit the existence of the good and the bad, and
ordinarily you choose the good and shudder at the bad: tell me--haven't
there been times when the most horrible crimes were possible to
you?--times when, with the littlest tipping of the balance, you could
have killed somebody? You needn't answer: I know you have looked over
that brink, because I have looked over it myself, more than once. And,
sooner or later, _Fleming_ will find himself looking over it--with all
the horrors of the penalties pushing and shoving at him to tumble him
into the gulf."
Griswold did not reply. He was gathering up the scattered pages of his
manuscript and replacing them in order. When he spoke again it was of a
matter entirely irrelevant.
"I had an odd experience the other evening," he said. "I had been dining
with the Raymers and was walking back to Shawnee Street. A little
newsboy named Johnnie Fergus turned up from somewhere at one of the
street crossings and tried to sell me a paper--at eleven o'clock at
night! I bought one and joked him about being out so late; and from that
on I couldn't get rid of him. He went all the way home with me, talking
a blue streak and acting as if he were afraid of something or somebody.
I remembered afterward that he is the boy who takes care of your boat.
Is there anything wrong with him?"
Miss Grierson had left her chair and had gone to stand at one of the
windows.
"Nothing that I know of," she said. "He is a bright boy--too bright for
his own good, I'm afraid. But I can explain--a little. Johnnie has taken
a violent fancy to you for some reason, and he has fallen into the
boyish habit of weaving all sorts of romances around you. I think he
reads too many exciting stories and tries to make you the hero of them.
He told me the other day that he was sure somebody was 'spotting' you."
Griswold looked up quickly. Miss Grierson was still facing the window,
and he was glad that she had not seen his nervous start.
"'Spotting' me?" he laughed. "Where did he get that idea?"
"How should I know? But he had made himself believe it; he even went so
far as to describe the man. Oh, I can assure you Johnnie has an
imagination; I've tested it in other ways."
"I should think so!" said the man who also had an imagination, and
shortly afterward he took his leave.
An hour later the same afternoon, Broffin, from his post of observation
on the Winnebago porch, saw the writing-man cross the street and enter a
hardware shop. Having nothing better to do, he, too, crossed the street
and, in passing, looked into the open door of Simmons & Kleifurt's. What
he saw brought him back at the end of a reflective stroll around the
public square. When he entered the shop the clerk was putting a
formidable array of weapons back into their show-case niches. Broffin
lounged up and began to handle the pistols.
"If I knew enough about guns to be able to tell 'em apart, I might buy
one," he said half-humorously. And then: "You must've been having a
mighty particular customer--to get so many of 'em out."
"It was Mr. Griswold, Mr. Ed. Raymer's new partner," said the clerk.
"And he _was_ pretty particular; wouldn't have anything but these
new-fashioned automatics. Said he wanted something that would be quick
and sure, and I guess he's got it--I sold him two of 'em."
Broffin played with the stock long enough to convince the clerk that he
was only a counter lounger with no intention of buying. "Took two of
'em, did he?--for fear one might make him sick, I reckon," he said, with
the half-humorous grin still lurking under the drooping mustaches.
"Automatic thirty-twos, eh? Well, _I_ ain't goin' to try to hold your
Mr.--Griscom, did you call him?--up none after this. He might git me."
Whereupon, having found out what he wanted to know, he lounged out again
and went back to the hotel to smoke another of the reflective cigars in
the porch chair which had come to be his by right of frequent and
long-continued occupancy.
XXVII
IN THE SHADOWS
Not counting the vague and rather pointless disturbment which had
culminated in the purchase of a pair of pistols, Griswold had left the
Mereside library considerably shaken, not in his convictions, to be
sure, but in his confidence in his own powers of imaginative analysis.
For this cause it required a longer after-dinner stay at the Farnhams'
than he had been allowing himself, to re-establish the norm of
self-assurance.
This was coming to be the net result of a better acquaintance with
Charlotte Farnham; a growth in the grace of self-containment, and in a
just appreciation of the mighty power that lies in propinquity--the
propinquity of an inspiring ideal. Miss Farnham was never enthusiastic;
that, perhaps, would be asking too much of an ideal; but what she lacked
in warmth was made up in cool sanity, backed by a moral sense that
seemed never to waver. Unerringly she placed her finger upon the human
weaknesses in his book-people, and unfalteringly she bade him reform
them.
For his _Fidelia_, as he described her, she exhibited a gentle
affection, tempered by a compassionate pity for her weaknesses and
waverings; an attitude, he fatuously told himself, forced upon her
because her own standards were so much higher than any he could
delineate or conceive. For _Joan_ there was also compassion, but it was
mildly contemptuous.
"If I did not know that you are incapable of doing such a thing, I might
wonder if you are not drawing your _Joan_ from the life, Mr. Griswold,"
she said, a little coldly, on this same evening of rehabilitations.
"Since such characters are to be found in real life, I suppose they may
have a place in a book. But you must not commit the unpardonable sin of
making your readers condone the evil in her for the sake of the good."
"May we not sometimes condone a little evil for the sake of a great
good?" he pleaded in extenuation.
Her answer was rather disconcerting.
"Life is full of just such temptations; the temptation to bargain with
expediency. We can only pray blindly to be delivered in the hour of
trial."
They were sitting together on the vine-sheltered porch, and the street
electrics with the lamplight from the sitting-room windows served merely
to temper the velvety gloom of the summer night. He would have given
much to be able to see her face, but the darkness came between.
"That opens the door to the larger question which is always asking for
its answer," he said, letting the thought that was uppermost slip into
speech. "At its very best, life is a compromise, not necessarily
between good and evil, but between the thing possible and the thing
impossible. It is not until we are strong enough to break the shacklings
of the traditions that we are free to drive the best obtainable bargain
with destiny."
As at other times, he was once more yielding to the impulse which was
always prompting him to apply the acid test to the pure gold of the
ideal. Heretofore the test had revealed no trace of earthly alloy; but
now the result filled him with vague dismay.
"So you have said many times before," she rejoined, and her voice was as
the voice of one groping in the dark. "I--I have a confession to make,
Mr. Griswold: I have held out against you, knowing all the time that you
were right; that life is full of these bitter compromises which we are
forced to accept. Please forget what I have said about your _Fidelia_
and--and your _Joan_. You are trying to make them human, and that is as
it should be."
Griswold could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. He told
himself fiercely that he would never believe, without the convincement
of fact, that the ideal could step down from its pedestal.
"You are meaning to be kind to me now, at the expense of your
convictions, Miss Charlotte," he protested warmly.
"No," she denied gravely. "Listen, and you shall judge. Once, only a
short time ago, I was brought face to face with one of these terrible
compromises. In a single instant, and by no fault of my own, the
dreadful shears of fate were thrust into my hands, and conscience--what
I have been taught to call the Christian conscience--told me that with
them I must snip the thread of a man's life. Are you listening?"
His lips were dry and he had to moisten them before he could say: "Yes,
go on; I am listening."
"The man was a criminal and he was a fugitive from justice.
Conscience--_my_ conscience--insisted that it was my plain duty to raise
the hue and cry. For a long time I couldn't do it; and then----"
He waited until the silence had grown unbearable before he prompted her.
"And then?"
"And then chance threw us together. A new world was opened to me in
those few moments. I had thought that there could be no possible
question between simple right and wrong, but almost in his first word
the man convinced me that, whatever I might think or the world might
say, _his_ conscience had fully and freely acquitted him. And he proved
it; proved it so that I can never doubt it as long as I live. He made me
do what _my_ conscience had been telling me I ought to do--just as your
_Fleming_ makes _Fidelia_ do."
"You denounced him?" he said, and he strove desperately to make the
saying completely colorless.
"Yes."
"And he was taken?"
"He was; but he made his escape again, almost at once. He is still a
free man."
Instantly the primitive instinct of self-preservation, the instinct of
the hunted fugitive, sprang alert in the listener.
"How can you be sure of that?" he asked, and in his own ears his voice
sounded like the clang of an alarm bell.
Again a silence fell, surcharged, this one, with all the old frightful
possibilities. Once more the loathsome fever quickened the pulses of the
man at bay, and the curious needle-like prickling of the skin came to
signal the return of the homicidal fear-frenzy. The reaction to the
normal racked him like the passing of a mortal sickness when his
accusing angel said in her most matter-of-fact tone: