passengers on the _Belle Julie_; that was the boat the robber escaped
on, you remember. Doctor Bertie told me that. And she was the young
woman who was having the draft cashed in the Bayou State Security. How
do I know? Because her father bought the draft at poppa's bank, and in
the course of time it came back with the Bayou State Security's dated
paying stamp on it. See how easy it was!"
Raymer's laugh was not altogether mirthful.
"You are a witch," he said. "Is there anything that you don't know?"
"Not so very many things that I really need to know," was the mildly
boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr.
Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man;
and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was
disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. Griswold pretty nearly every day."
Raymer nodded. Though he would not have admitted it under torture, the
entire matter figured somewhat as a mountain constructed out of a rather
small mole-hill to a man for whom the subtleties lay in a region
unexplored. He wondered that the clear-minded little "social climber,"
as his sister called her, had ever bothered her nimble brain about such
an abstruse and far-fetched question of identities.
"You said, a few minutes ago, that Griswold calls himself a Socialist.
That isn't quite the word. He is a sociologist."
Miss Grierson ignored the nice distinction in names.
"Socialism goes with being poor, doesn't it?" she remarked. "Since Mr.
Griswold's ship has come in, I suppose he finds it easier, and
pleasanter, to be a theoretical leveller than a practical one."
"That is another thing I have never been quite able to understand," said
the iron-founder. "You say his father left him poor: where did he get
his money?"
"Why, don't you know?" was the innocent query. And then, with a pretty
affectation of embarrassment, real or perfectly simulated: "If he hasn't
told you, I mustn't."
"Of course, I don't want to pry," said Raymer, loyal again.
"I can give you a hint, and that is all. Don't you remember 'My Lady
Jezebel,' the unsigned novel that made such a hit last summer?"
"Why, bless goodness, yes! Did he write that?"
"He has never admitted it in so many words. But I'll divide a little
secret with you. He has been reading bits of his new book to me, and
pshaw! a blind person could tell! I asked him once if he could guess
how much the author of 'My Lady Jezebel' had been paid, and he said,
with the most perfectly transparent carelessness: 'Oh, about a hundred
thousand, I suppose.'"
"Tally!" said Raymer, laughing. "Griswold has put an even ninety
thousand into my little egg-basket out at the plant. But, of course you
knew that, everybody in Wahaska knows it by this time."
"Yes; I knew it."
"I'm glad it's book money," Raymer went on. "If we should happen to go
smash, he won't feel the loss quite so fiercely. I have a friend over in
Wisconsin; he is a laboratory professor in mechanics, and he writes
books on the side. He says a book is a pure gamble. If you win, you have
that much more money to throw to the dicky-birds. If you lose, you've
merely drawn the usual blank."
Miss Grierson did not reply, and for a little while they were both
silent. Then Raymer said:
"I wonder if McMurtry doesn't think I've dropped out on him. I guess I'd
better go and see. Don't wait any longer on my motions, unless you want
to, Miss Margery."
When Raymer had gone, the opportunity which Broffin had so lately craved
was his. Miss Grierson was left alone on the big veranda, and he had
only to step out and confront her. Instead, he got up quietly and went
back through the lobby with his head down and his hands in his pockets,
and the surviving bit of the dead cigar disappeared between his strong
teeth and became a cud of chagrin. There had been a goal in sight, but
Miss Grierson had beat him to it.
And the winner of the small handicap? For the time it took Raymer to
disappear she sat perfectly still, in the attitude of one who stifles
all the other senses that the listening ear may hear and strike the note
of warning or of relief. A group of young people, returning from a
steam-launch circuit of the upper lake, came up the steps to disperse
itself with pleasant human clatterings on the veranda; but in spite of
the distractions the listening ear caught the sound for which it was
straining. With a deep breath-drawing that was almost a sob, Miss
Grierson sprang up, stole a swift confirming glance at the empty chair
behind the window hangings, and crossed the veranda to stand with one
arm around a supporting pillar. And since the battle was fought and won,
and the friendly pillar gave its stay and shelter, the velvety eyes
filled suddenly and the ripe red lips were trembling like the lips of a
frightened child.
XXIX
ALL THAT A MAN HATH
For four entire days after Margery Grierson had driven home the nail of
the elemental verities in her frank criticism of the new book, and
Charlotte Farnham had clinched it, Wahaska's public places saw nothing
of Griswold; and Mrs. Holcomb, motherly soul, was driven to expostulate
scoldingly with her second-floor front who was pushing the pen
feverishly from dawn to the small hours, and evidently--in the kindly
widow's phrase--burning the candle at both ends and in the middle.
Out of this candle-burning frenzy the toiler emerged in the afternoon of
the fifth day, a little pallid and tremulous from the overstrain, but
with a thick packet of fresh manuscript to bulge in his pocket when he
made his way, blinking at the unwonted sunlight of out-of-doors, to the
great house at the lake's edge.
Margery was waiting for him when he rang the bell: he guessed it
gratefully, and she confirmed it.
"Of course," she said, with the bewitching little grimace which could be
made to mean so much or so little. "Isn't this your afternoon? Why
shouldn't I be waiting for you?" Then, with a swiftly sympathetic
glance for the pale face and the tired eyes: "You've been overworking
again. Let's sit out here on the porch where we can have what little air
there is. There must be a storm brewing; it's positively breathless in
the house."
Griswold was glad enough to acquiesce; glad and restfully happy and
mildly intoxicated with her beauty and the loving rudeness with which
she pushed him into the easiest of the great lounging chairs and took
the sheaf of manuscript away from him, declaring that she meant to read
it herself.
"It will wear you out," he objected, fishing for the denial which would
give the precious fillip to the craftsman vanity.
The denial came promptly.
"Foolish!" she said; "as if anything you have written could make anybody
tired!" And then, with the mocking after-touch he had come to know so
well, and to look for: "Is that what you wanted me to say?"
"You are the spice of life and your name should have been Variety," he
countered feebly. "But I warn you beforehand: there is a frightful lot
of it. I have rewritten it from the beginning."
"So much the better," she affirmed. "You've been doling it out to me in
little morsels, and I've been aching to get it all at one bite." And she
began to read.
It was the first time he had had any of his own work read to him, and
the experience was a pure luxury; at once the keenest and the most
sensuous enjoyment he had ever known. Marvelling, as he was always moved
to marvel, at her bright mind and clever wit and clear insight, he was
driven to the superlatives again to find words to describe her reading.
Artistically, and as with the gifted sympathy of a born actress, she
seemed able to breathe the very atmosphere of the story. None of his
subtle nuances were lost; there was never an emphasis misplaced. Better
still, the impersonation was perfect. By turns she became himself,
_Joan_, _Fidelia_, _Fleming_, or one of the subsidiary characters,
speaking the parts, rather than reading them, with such a sure
apprehension of his meaning that he could almost fancy that she was
reading from his mind instead of following the manuscript.
When it was over; and he could not tell whether the interval should be
measured by minutes or hours; the return to the realities--the hot
afternoon, the tree-shaded veranda, the lake dimpling like a sheet of
molten metal under the sun-glare--was almost painful.
"It is wonderful--simply wonderful!" he said, drawing a deep breath; and
then, with a flush of honest confusion to drive away the work pallor:
"Of course, you know I don't mean the story; I meant your reading of it.
Hasn't any one ever told you that you have the making of a great actress
in you, Margery, girl?"
"No," she said shortly; and, dismissing that phase of the subject in the
single word: "Let's talk about the story. You have bettered it
immensely. What made you do it?"
"I don't know; some convincement that it was all wrong and out of
drawing as it stood, I suppose."
"Who gave you the convincement? Miss Farnham?"
His answer was meant to be truthful, but beauty of the intoxicating sort
is the most mordant of solvents for truth in the abstract.
"No; you did."
"But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never
have made _Fidelia_ all over again, as you have in this rewriting."
"Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have
bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the
inspiration to do it."
She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.
"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making
of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and--and I'm
afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the
right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a
fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing
wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of
help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry
business with Edward Raymer?"
"Because it didn't occur to me that you would care to know, I guess," he
answered unsuspectingly. "As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten
it myself."
"Was it a good investment?" she asked guilelessly.
"Yes; that is, I presume it was. I didn't think much about that part of
it."
"What did you think about?"
It was just here that he awoke to the realization that he could hardly
afford to give Jasper Grierson's daughter the real reason for the
investment. So he prevaricated, knowing well enough that he had less
than no chance in an evasive duel with her.
"Raymer had been adding to his plant, and he lacked capital," he said
guardedly. "I had the money, and it was lying idle."
"Mr. Raymer didn't ask you for help?"
"No; it was my own offer."
"But he did tell you that he was in trouble?"
"Y-yes," hesitantly.
"What kind of trouble was it, Kenneth? I have the best right in the
world to know."
Griswold straightened himself in his chair and the work-weariness became
a thing of the past. With the fairly evident fact staring him in the
face from day to day, it had never occurred to him that his friend and
business partner might also be his fellow-prisoner in the house of the
witcheries. The sudden convincement stung a little, the all-monopolizing
selfishness of the craftsman carrying easily over into the field of
sentiment. Yet it was clean friendship for Raymer, no less than for the
daughter of desire, that prompted him to say:
"You can't have a right to know anything that will distress you."
"Foolish!" she chided--and this time the epithet had lost its alluring
softness. "You may as well tell me. Mr. Raymer had borrowed money at
poppa's bank. What was the matter? Did he have to pay it back--all at
once?"
There seemed to be no further opening for evasion. "Yes; I think that
was the way of it," he answered.
Arguing wholly from the newly made discovery, or postulated discovery,
of Raymer's state and standing as an object of Miss Grierson's
solicitude, Griswold expected something in the nature of an outburst.
What he got was a transfixing glance of the passionate sort, quick with
open-eyed admiration.
"And you just tossed your money into the breach as if you had millions
of it, and by now you've almost forgotten that you did it!" she
exclaimed. "Kenneth, dear, there are times when you are so heavenly good
that I can hardly believe it. Are there any more men like you over on
your side of the world?"
At another time he might have smiled at the boyish frankness of the
question. But it was a better motive than the analyst's that prompted
his answer.
"Plenty of them, Margery, girl; too many for the good of the race. You
mustn't try to make a hero out of me. Once in a while I get a glimpse of
the real Kenneth Griswold--you are giving me one just now--and it's
sickening. For a moment I was meanly jealous; jealous of Raymer. It was
only the writing part of me, I hope, but----"
He stopped because she had suddenly turned her back on him and was
looking out over the lake again. When she spoke, she went back to the
business affair.
"When you invest money you ought to look after it," she said
magisterially. "You are a Socialist, aren't you? How do you know that
your money isn't being used to oppress somebody?"
"Oh, I do know that much," was the investor's protest. "Raymer is a good
boss--too good for the crowd he is trying to brother, I'm afraid."
"What makes you say that?"
"A word or two that he has dropped, now and then. When he branched out,
he had to increase his force accordingly. Some of the new men seem
inclined to make trouble."
Again she fell silent, and he saw the brooding look come into the dark
eyes. It was evident that something he had said had started a train of
thought--and the thoughts were not altogether pleasant ones. Analyzing
again, he fancied he could picture the inward struggle to break away
from the unpleasantnesses, and he shook hands enthusiastically with his
own gift of insight when she looked up suddenly and said: "See! the
breeze is freshening out on the water. You are fagged and tired and
needing a bracer. Let's go and do a turn on the lake in the _Clytie_."
From where he was sitting Griswold could see the trim little catboat,
resplendent in polished brass and mahogany, riding at its buoy beyond
the lawn landing-stage. He cared little for the water, but the
invitation pointed to a delightful prolongation of the basking process
which had come to be one of the chief luxuries of the Mereside
afternoons.
"I'm not much of a sailor," he began; but she cut him off.
"You'll do to pull and haul. Wait for me; I'll be ready in less time
than it would take another woman--_Fidelia_, for example--to make up her
mind what she wanted to wear."
He waited; and when she came down, a few minutes later, crisply boyish
in the nattiest of yachting costumes, he wondered how she could appear
in so many different characters, fitting each in succession and
contriving always to make the latest transformation, while it lasted,
the one in which she figured as the most enticingly adorable.
"Did you look in the glass before you came down?" he asked, standing up
to get the artistic effect of the shapely little figure backgrounded
against the dull reds of the house wall.
"Naturally," she laughed. "Why, please? Is my face dirty?"
He ignored the flippancy.
"If you did, I don't need to tell you how irresistibly dazzling you
are."
"Why shouldn't you, if you feel like it? Of course, I'd know you didn't
mean it. If you were describing me to somebody else, or in the book,
you'd say, 'Um, yes; rather fetching; pretty enough to--' But we all
like to be sugared a little now and then; and there's one thing you
must always remember: a woman's dressing-glass can't talk. Are you
ready? Open the window screen and drop the manuscript inside. It will be
safe until we come back, and the _Clytie_ might be tempted to throw cold
water on it if we should take it along. She's a wet little boat in a
sea."
This for the outsetting: light-hearted badinage, a fair summer
afternoon, a zephyrish breeze coming in tiny cat's-paws out of the
north-west, and a cloudless sky. At the landing-stage Griswold made
himself useful, paying out the sea-line of the movable mooring buoy and
hauling on the shore-line until the handsome little craft lay at their
feet. Strictly under orders he made sail on the little ship, and when
the captain had taken her place at the tiller he shoved off.
For a little time the breeze was lightly baffling, and Griswold
confessed that if he had been at the helm they would have gone
ingloriously aground. But the small person in the correct yachting
costume was an adept in boat handling, as she seemed to be in everything
else; and when the sandy bottom was fairly yellowing under the
_Clytie's_ counter, there was a quick juggling of the tiller, a deft
haul at the sheet, and the big main-sail filled slowly to the rippling
song of the little seas splitting themselves upon the catboat's sharp
cut-water.
Once clear of the shallow bay, the helmswoman laid the course up the
lake; and Griswold, luxuriously lazy now that the working strain was
off, stretched himself comfortably on the cockpit cushions which he had
rummaged out of the cuddy cabin, and asked permission to light his pipe.
The permission given and the pipe filled and lighted, he pillowed his
head in his clasped hands and a great contentment, flowing into all the
interstices and levelling all the inequalities, lapped him in its
soothing flood. When the pipe had gone out there was joy enough left in
the pure relaxation; in that and in the contemplation through
half-closed eyelids of the pretty picture made by the tiller maiden
braced in the stern-sheets, her shining hair breeze-blown and flying
free under the captivating little yachting hat, and her eyes dancing....
Under such conditions a reflective analyst might conceivably wrench the
switch aside in front of the jogging train of thought to send it down a
shaded street to the lake-fronting house framed in shrubbery; to the
house and to the serene young house-mistress who had voluntarily stepped
from her goddess pedestal to become a flesh-and-blood woman to be loved
and cherished. He knew that Charlotte Farnham's readjustment of their
relations had in no wise modified her opinion of the _Joans_, or of the
men who were weak enough or besotted enough to be taken in the nets of
beguiling.... What would she think of him if she could see him lying at
Margery Grierson's feet, frankly and joyously revelling in the
triumphantly human charm of one of the _Joans_, and wishing with all his
heart--for the time being, at least--that there were no such things in
a world of effort as the higher ideals or any shackling requirement to
live up to them?
He was still playing whimsically with the query when he was made to
realize that the murmuring rush of water under the catboat's forefoot
had changed into a series of resounding thumps; that the wind was
rising, and that the summer afternoon sky had become suddenly overcast.
The pretty tiller maiden was pushing the helm down with her foot and
hauling in briskly on the sheet when he sat up.
"What's this we're coming to?" he asked, thinking less of the changed
weather conditions than of the charming picture she made in action.
"Weather," she said shortly. "Look behind you."
He looked and saw a huge storm cloud rising out of the north-west and
spreading like a great gray dust curtain from horizon to zenith. With
the sun blotted out, a brazen light filled all the upper air, and in the
heart of the cloud fleecy masses of vapor were writhing and twisting
like formless giants in battle.
Quickly he measured the hazards. The _Clytie_ was fairly in mid-lake,
with plenty of sea room to leeward. There was an intervening island to
shut off the down-lake view, but though its forested bluffs and abrupt
headland were uncomfortably close at hand, a bit of skilful
manoeuvring would put it to windward. Beyond the island he could see
the breeze-blown smoke trail of the summer-resort hotel's steam launch
evidently making for its home port at full speed.
"There's a good bunch of wind in that cloud," he said, springing to help
his companion with the slatting main-sail. "Hadn't we better lie up
under the island and let it blow over?"
"No," she snapped. "We'll have to reef, and be quick about it. Help me!"
He helped with the reefing, and the great main-sail had been
successfully reduced to its smallest area and hoisted home again before
the trees on the western shore began to bow and churn in the precursor
blasts of the coming storm.
"It will hit us in less than a minute: how about weathering that
island?" he asked.
"We've _got_ to weather it," was the instant decision; "we can't go
around." Then, the catboat still hanging in the wind's eye: "Help me get
her over."
Together they held the shortened sail off at an angle, and slowly, very
slowly, the boat's bow fell off toward the island. Griswold was enough
of a sailor to know that it was the thing to do, but there was a
perilously narrow margin. The storm squall was already tearing across
from the western shore, blackening the water ahead of it and picking up
a small tidal wave as it came. If it should strike them before they were
ready for it, it meant one of two things: a capsize, or an instant
driving of the catboat upon the hazard of the island head.
The crisis was upon them almost as soon as its threat could be measured.
Of the two, it was the young woman who met it with skilful purpose.
While the man could only scramble, choked and half-blinded, to windward
to throw his weight on the careening gunwale, the helmswoman had pounced
upon the tiller and was standing knee-deep in the water pouring over the
submerged lee rail to pay out and steer and miss the island headland by
a shearing hand's-breadth.
The worst was over in a moment, and under the lee of the small island
there was a brief respite for pumping and bailing. The girl's black eyes
were shining with excitement and fearless daring, and Griswold would
have given much for time and leisure in which to catch and fix the
fleeting inspiration of the instant. But there was little space for the
artistic appreciation.
"Hurry!" she cried; "we'll have to take it again in a minute or two!"
and there was still a bucketing of the shipped sea to thrash about in
the cockpit when the island withdrew its friendly shelter and the
_Clytie_, going free and sailed as Griswold had never seen a catboat
sailed before, wallowed out into the smother.
For a little time there was not much to choose between drowning and
being hammered to death by the leaping plunges and alightings of the
frail cockle-shell which seemed to be blown bodily from crest to crest
of the short, high-pitched seas. The wind, heavily rain-laden, came in
furious gusts, flattening the reefed canvas until the bunt of the sail
dragged in the trough. Griswold climbed high on the weather rail,
leaning far out to help hold the balance between the heaving seas and
the pounding blasts. In the momentary lulls he had flitting glimpses of
the far-away town shore, with the storm-torn waste of waters
intervening. With the wind veering more and more to the west, it was a
fair run to the shelter of the home bay. But Margery was laying the
course far to the right, though to do it she was holding the catboat
cockpit-deep in the smother and taking the chance of a capsize with
every recurring gust. Griswold edged his way aft as far as he dared.
"Hadn't you better let her fall off a little more and run for it?" he
suggested, and he had to shout it into the pink ear nearest to him to
make himself heard above the roaring of the wind and the crashing
plunges of the boat.
She shook her head and made an impatient little gesture with her elbow
toward the storm-lashed raceway over the bows. Griswold winked the spray
out of his eyes and looked. At first he saw nothing but the wild waste
of whitecaps, but at the next attempt he made out the hotel steam
launch, half-way to the entrance of the southern bay and a little to
leeward of the _Clytie's_ course. The small steamer was evidently no
sea-boat, and with more courage than seamanship, its steersman was
driving straight for the Inn bay without regard for the direction of the
wind and the seas.