men did, on a plane of perfect equality and frankness. "We was hoodooed
to beat the band, and Mr. Raymer's got us, comin' and goin'. There
wasn't no orders from the big Federation, at all; and that crooked guy,
Clancy, was a fake!"
"He has gone?" she said.
"He'd better be. If he shows himself 'round here again, there's goin' to
be a mix-up."
Miss Grierson drove on, and at the Iron Works there were more of the
peaceful indications. The gates were open, and a switching-engine from
the railroad yards was pushing in a car-load of furnace coal. By all the
signs the trouble flood was abating.
Raymer saw her when she drove under his window and calmly made a
hitching-post of the clerk who went out to see what she wanted. A moment
later she came down the corridor to stand in the open doorway of the
manager's room.
"I'm back again," she said, and her manner was that of the dainty
soubrette with whom the audience falls helplessly in love at first
sight.
"No, you're not," Raymer denied; "you won't be until you come in and sit
down."
She entered to take the chair he was placing for her, and the soubrette
manner fell away from her like a garment flung aside.
"You are still alone?" she asked.
"Yes; Griswold hasn't shown up since morning. I don't know what has
become of him."
"And the labor trouble: is that going to be settled?"
He looked away and ran his fingers through his hair as one still puzzled
and bewildered. "Some sort of a miracle has been wrought," he said. "A
little while ago a committee came to talk over terms of surrender. It
seems that the whole thing was the result of a--of a mistake."
"Yes," she returned quietly, "it was just that--a mistake." And then:
"You are going to take them back?"
"Certainly. The plant will start up again in the morning." Then his
curiosity broke bounds. "I can't understand it. How did you work the
miracle?"
"Perhaps I didn't work it."
"I know well enough you did, in some way."
She dismissed the matter with a toss of the pretty head. "What
difference does it make so long as you are out of the deep water and in
a place where you can wade ashore? You _can_ wade ashore now, can't
you?"
He nodded. "This morning I should have said that we couldn't; but now--"
he reached over to his desk and handed her a letter to which was pinned
a telegram less than an hour old.
She read the letter first. It was a curt announcement of the withdrawal
of the Pineboro Railroad's repair work. The telegram was still briefer:
"Disregard my letter of yesterday"; this, and the signature, "Atherton."
The small plotter returned the correspondence with a little sigh of
relief. It had been worse than she had thought, and it was now better
than she had dared hope.
"I must be going," she said, rising. "If you will give me my envelope?"
He crossed to the safe and got it for her. His curiosity was still
keen-edged, but he beat it back manfully.
"I wish you wouldn't hurry," he said hospitably. He was searching the
changeful eyes for the warrant to say more, but he could not find it.
"Yes, I really must," she insisted. "You know we have a sick man at
home, and----"
"Oh, yes; how is Mr. Galbraith getting along? He has been having a
pretty hard time of it, hasn't he?"
"Very hard. It is still doubtful if his life can be saved."
"He is conscious?"
"He has been to-day."
"And he understands his condition?"
"Perfectly. He had us wire for some of his bank people this morning. The
cashier can't come, but he is sending a Mr. Johnson--the paying teller,
I believe he is."
"Poor old man!" said Raymer, and his sympathy was real.
She was moving toward the door, and he went with her.
"I know you are not entertaining now--with Mr. Galbraith to be cared
for; but I'd like to come and see you, if I may?" he said, when he had
gone with her through the outer office and the moment of leave-taking
had arrived.
"Why not?" she asked frankly. "You have always been welcome, and you
always will be."
He hesitated, and a blond man's flush crept up under his honest eyes.
"I've been hoping all day that you didn't really mean what you said this
morning--about my mother and sister, you know," he ventured.
"Yes," she affirmed relentlessly; "I did mean it."
"But some day you will change your mind--when you come to know them
better."
"Shall I?" she said, with a ghost of a smile. "Perhaps you are
right--when I come to know them better."
He was obliged to let it go at that; but when they reached the phaeton,
and the horse-holding clerk had been relieved, he spoke of another
matter.
"I'm a little worried about Kenneth," he told her. "He came down this
morning looking positively wretched, but he wouldn't admit that he was
sick. Have you seen much of him lately?"
"Not very much"--guardedly. "Did you say he had gone home?"
"I don't know where he has gone. He left here about half an hour before
you came, and I haven't seen him since."
"And you are worried because he doesn't look well?"
"Not altogether on that account. I'm afraid he is in deep water of some
kind. I never saw a person change as he has in the past week or so. You
know him pretty well, and what a big heart he has?"
She nodded, half-mechanically.
"Well, there have been times lately when I've been afraid he'd kill
somebody--in this squabble of ours, you know. He has been going
armed--which was excusable enough, under the circumstances--and night
before last, when we were walking up-town together, I had all I could do
to keep him from taking a pot-shot at a fellow who, he thought, was
following us. I don't know but I'm taking all sorts of an unfair
advantage of him, telling you this behind his back, but----"
"No; I'm glad you have told me. Maybe I can help."
He put her into the low basket seat, and tucked the dust-robe around her
carefully. While he was doing it he looked up into her face and said:
"I'd love you awfully hard for what you have done to-day--if you'd let
me."
It was like her to smile straight into his eyes when she answered him.
"When you can say that--in just that way--to the right woman, you'll
find a great happiness lying in wait for you, Edward, dear." And then
she spoke to the Morgan mare and distance came between.
As once before, in the earlier hours of the same day, Miss Grierson took
the roundabout way between the Raymer plant and Mereside, making the
circuit which took her through the college grounds and brought her out
at the head of upper Shawnee Street. The Widow Holcomb was sitting on
her front porch, placidly crocheting, when the phaeton drew up at the
curb.
"Mr. Griswold," said the phaeton's occupant. "May I trouble you to tell
him that I'd like to speak to him a moment?"
Mrs. Holcomb, friend of the Raymers, the Farnhams, and the Oswalds, and
own cousin to the Barrs, was of the perverse minority; and, apart from
this, she had her own opinion of a young woman who would wait at the
door of a young man's boarding-house and take him off for a night drive
to goodness only knew where, and from which he did not return until
goodness only knew when. So there was no stitch missed in the crocheting
when she said, stiffly: "Mr. Griswold isn't in. He hasn't been home
since morning."
Miss Grierson drove on, and the most casual observer might have remarked
the strained tightening of the lips and the two red spots which came and
went in the damask-peach cheeks. But it was not until she had reached
Mereside, and had gained the shelter of the deserted library, that
speech came.
"O pitiful Christ!" she sobbed, dropping into a chair and hiding her
face in the crook of her arm; "he's done it at last!--he's trying to
hide, and that's what they've been waiting for! _And I don't know where
to look!_"
But Matthew Broffin, tilting lazily in his chair on the down-town hotel
porch, knew very well where to look, and he was watching the one outlet
of the hiding-place as an alert, though outwardly disregardful,
house-cat watches a mouse's hole.
XXXVII
THE QUALITY OF MERCY
On no less an authority than that of the great doctor who came again
from Chicago for a second consultation with Doctor Farnham, Andrew
Galbraith owed his life during the two days following his return to
consciousness to the unremitting care and devotion of one person.
Seconding the efforts of the physicians, and skilfully directing those
of the nurses, Margery threw herself into the vicarious struggle with
the generous self-sacrifice which counts neither cost nor loss; and on
the third day she had her reward. Her involuntary guest and charge was
distinctly better, and again, so the two doctors declared, the balance
was inclining slightly toward recovery.
It was in the afternoon of this third day, when she had been reading to
him, at his own request, the sayings of the Man on the Mount, that he
referred for the first time to the details of the accident which had so
nearly blotted him out. Upon his asking, she related the few and simple
facts of the rescue, modestly minimizing her own part in it, and giving
her companion in the catboat full credit.
"The writer-man," he said thoughtfully, when she had finished telling
him how Griswold had worked over him in the boat, and how he would not
give up. "I remember; you fetched him out to the hotel with you one day:
no, you needna fear I'll be forgetting him." Then, with a shrewd look
out of the steel-gray eyes: "How long have you been knowing him, Maggie,
child?"
"Oh, for quite a long time," she hastened to say. "He came here, sick
and helpless, one day last spring, and--well, there isn't any hospital
here in Wahaska, you know, so we took him in and helped him get over the
fever, or whatever it was. This was his room while he stayed with us."
Andrew Galbraith wagged his head on the pillow.
"I know," he said. "And ye're doing it again for a poor auld man whose
siller has never bought him anything like the love you're spending on
him. You're everybody's good angel, I'm thinking, Maggie, lassie."
Though he did not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day
nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was
easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long
pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down
to a spike--this writer-man, when ye found him, was he?"
She shook her head. "No; I have never seen him with a beard."
The sick man turned his face to the wall, and after a time she heard him
repeating softly the words which she had just read to him. "But if ye
forgive not men ... neither will your Father forgive...." And again,
"Judge not that ye be not judged." When he turned back to her there were
new lines of suffering in the gray old face.
"I'm sore beset, child; sore beset," he sighed. "You were telling me
that MacFarland and Johnson will be here to-night?"
"Yes; they should both reach Wahaska this evening."
Another pause, and at the end of it: "That man Broffin: you'll remember
you asked me one day who he was, and I tell 't ye he was a special
officer for the bank. Is he still here?"
"He is; I saw him on the street this morning."
Again Andrew Galbraith turned his face away, and he was quiet for so
long a time that she thought he had fallen asleep. But he had not.
"You're thinking something of the writer-man, lassie? Don't mind the
clavers of an auld man who never had a chick or child of his ain."
Her answer was such as a child might have made. She lifted the
big-jointed hand on the coverlet and pressed it softly to her flushed
cheek, and he understood.
"I thought so; I was afraid so," he said, slowly. "You say you have
known him a long time: it canna have been long enough, bairnie."
"But it is," she insisted, loyally. "I know him better than he knows
himself; oh, very much better."
"Ye know the good in him, maybe; there's good in all men, I'm thinking
now, though there was a time when I didna believe it."
"I know the good and the bad--and the bad is only the good turned upside
down."
Again the sick man wagged his head on the pillow and closed his eyes.
"Ye're a loving lassie, Maggie, and that's a' there is to it," he
commented; and after another interval: "What must be, must be. We spoke
of this man Broffin: I must see him before Johnson comes. Can ye get him
for me, Maggie, child?"
She nodded and went down-stairs to the telephone, returning almost
immediately.
"I was fortunate enough to catch him at the hotel. He will be here in a
few minutes," was the word she brought; and Galbraith thanked her with
his eyes.
"When he comes, ye'll let me see him alone--just for a few minutes," he
begged; and beyond that he said no more.
It was after the click of the gate latch had announced Broffin's arrival
that Margery drew the shades to shut out the glare of the afternoon sun,
lowering the one at the bed's head so that the light no longer fell upon
the instruments of the small house-telephone-set mounted upon the wall
beside the door.
"Mr. Broffin is here, and I'll send him up," she said. "But you mustn't
let him stay long, and you mustn't try to talk too much."
The sick man promised, and as she was going away she turned to repeat
the caution. Andrew Galbraith's eyes were closed in weariness, and he
did not see that she was standing with her back to the wall while she
admonished him, or that, when she had gone to send the visitor up, the
ear-piece of the house-telephone-set had been detached from its hook and
left dangling by its wire cord.
Miss Grierson went on into the library after she had met the detective
at the door and had told him how to find the up stairs room. When the
sound of a cautiously closed door told her that Broffin had entered the
sick-room, she snatched the receiver of the library house 'phone from
its hook and held it to her ear. For a little time keen anxiety wrote
its sign manual in the knitted brows and the tightly pressed lips. Then
she smiled and the dark eyes grew softly radiant. "The dear old saint!"
she whispered; "the dear, _dear_ old saint!" And when Broffin came down
a few minutes later, she went to open the hall door for him, serenely
demure and with honey on her tongue, as befitted the rôle of
"everybody's good angel."
"Did you find him worse than you feared, or better than you hoped?" she
asked.
"He's mighty near the edge, I should say--what? But you never can tell.
Some of these old fellows can claw back to the top o' the hill after all
the doctors in creation have thrown up their hands. I've seen it. What
does Doc Farnham say?"
"What he always says; 'while there's life, there's hope.'"
Broffin nodded and went his way down the walk, stopping at the gate to
take up the cigar he had hidden on his arrival.
"So Galbraith's out of it, lock, stock and barrel," he muttered, as he
strode thoughtfully townward. "I reckoned it'd be that-a-way, as soon as
I heard the story o' that shipwreck. And now I ain't so blamed sure that
it's Raymer a-holdin' the fort in them pretty black eyes. The old man
talked like a man that had just been honeyfugled and talked over and
primed plum' up to the muzzle. Why the blue blazes can't she take her
iron-moulder fellow and be satisfied? She can't swing to _both_ of 'em.
Ump!--the old man wanted me to skip out on a wild-goose chase to 'Frisco
in that bond business, and take the first train! Sure, I'll go--but not
to-day; oh, no, by grapples; not this day!"
It was possibly an hour beyond Broffin's visit when Margery, having
successfully read the sick man to sleep, tiptoed out of the room and
went below stairs to shut herself into the hall telephone closet. The
number she asked for was that of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works,
and Raymer, himself, answered the call.
"Are you awfully busy?" she asked.
"Up to my chin--yes. But that doesn't count if I can do anything for
you."
"Have you heard anything yet from Mr.--from our friend?"
"Not a word. But I'm not worrying any more now."
"Why aren't you?"
"Because I've been remembering that he is the happy--or
unhappy--possessor of the 'artistic temperament' and that accounts for
anything and everything. I'd forgotten that for a few minutes, you
know."
"Well?" she said, with the faintest possible accent of impatience.
"He has gone off somewhere to plug away on that book of his; I'm sure of
it. And he hasn't gone very far. I'm inclined to believe that Mrs.
Holcomb knows where he is--only she won't tell. And somebody else knows,
too."
"Who is the somebody else?"
Though the wire was in a measure public, Raymer risked a single word.
"Charlotte."
None of the sudden passion that leaped into Margery Grierson's eyes was
suffered to find its way into her voice when she said: "What makes you
think that?"
"Oh, a lot of little things. I was over at the house last night, and
there is some sort of a tea-pot tempest going on; I couldn't make out
just what. But from the way things shaped up, I gathered that our friend
was wanted in Lake Boulevard, and wanted bad--for some reason or other.
I had to promise that I'd try to dig him up, before I got away."
"Well?" went the questioning word over the wires, and this time the
impatient accent was unconcealed.
"I promised; but this morning Doctor Bertie called me up to say that it
was all right; that I needn't trouble myself."
"And I needn't have troubled you," said the voice at the Mereside
transmitter. "Excuse _me_, as Hank Billingsly used to say when he
happened to shoot the wrong man. Come over when you feel like it--and
have time. You mustn't forget that you owe me two calls. Good-by."
After Margery Grierson had let herself out of the stifling little closet
under the hall stair, she went into the darkened library and sat for a
long time staring at the cold hearth. It was a crooked world, and just
now it was a sharply cruel one. There was much to be read between the
lines of the short telephone talk with Edward Raymer. The trap was
sprung and its jaws were closing; and in his extremity Kenneth Griswold
was turning, not to the woman who had condoned and shielded and paid the
costly price, but to the other.
"Dear God!" she said softly, when the prolonged stare had brought the
quick-springing tears to her eyes; "and I--_I_ could have kept him
safe!"
XXXVIII
THE PENDULUM-SWING
To a man seeking only to escape from himself, all roads are equal and
all destinations likely to prove uniformly disappointing. Turning his
back upon the Iron Works in the day of defeat, with no very clear idea
of what he should do or where he should go, Griswold pushed through the
strikers' picket lines, and, avoiding the militant suburb, drifted by
way of sundry outlying residence streets and a country road to the high
ground back of the city.
In deserting Raymer he was actuated by no motive of disloyalty. On the
contrary, so much of the motive as had any bearing upon his relations
with the young iron-founder sprang from a generous impulse to free
Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn
all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the
gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and
tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served
to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil
spell, and Raymer could well spare him.
On the long tramp to the hills the events of the past few months
marshalled themselves in accusing review. No human being, save one, of
all those with whom he had come in contact since the day of
dragon-bearding in the New Orleans bank had escaped the contaminating
touch, and each in turn had suffered loss. The man Gavitt had given his
name and identity; the mate of the _Belle Julie_ had sacrificed what
little respect he may have had for law and order by becoming,
potentially, at least, a criminal accessory. The little Irish cab-driver
had sold himself for a price; and the negro deck-hand had earned his
mess of fried fish. The single exception was Charlotte Farnham, and he
told himself that she had escaped only because she had done her duty as
she saw it.
And as the bedeviling thing had begun, so it had continued, losing none
of its potency for evil. In the little world of Wahaska, which was to
have been the theatre of Utopian demonstration, the curse had persisted.
The money, used with the loftiest intentions, had served only as a means
to an end, and the end had proved to be the rearing of an apparently
impassable wall of bitter antagonism between master and men. And the
secret of the money's origin and acquisition, which was to have been so
easily cast aside and ignored, had become a soul-sickness incurable and
even contagious. Griswold was beginning to suspect that it had attacked
Margery Grierson; that it had subconsciously, if not otherwise, thrust
itself into Charlotte Farnham's life; and the night of horror so lately
past had shown him into what depths it could plunge its wretched
guardian and slave.
Now that the plunge had been taken and he had been made to understand
that he must henceforth reckon with a base and cowardly under-self which
would not stop short of the most heinous crime, he told himself that he
must have time to think--to plan.
Caring nothing for its roughness, and scarcely noting the direction in
which it was leading him, he followed the country road in its winding
descent into a valley forest of oaks. After an hour of aimless tramping
he began to have occasional near-hand glimpses of the lake; and a little
farther along he came out upon the main-travelled road leading to the
summer-resort hotel at the head of De Soto Bay.
Still without any definite purpose in mind he pushed on, and upon
reaching the hotel he went in and registered for a room. The luncheon
hour was past, but not even the long tramp had given him an appetite.
Choosing the quietest corner of the lake-facing veranda he tried to
smoke; but the tobacco had lost its flavor, and a longing for completer
solitude drove him to his room. Here he drew the window shades and lay
down, deliberately wishing that he might fall asleep and wake in some
less poignant world; and since the week of strife had been cutting
deeply into the nights, the first half of the wish presently came true.
While the poignancies were still asserting themselves acutely, sleep
stole upon him, and when he awoke it was evening and a cheerful clamor
in the dining-room beneath told him that it was dinner-time.
It is a trite saying that many a gulf, seemingly impassable, has been
safely bridged in sleep. Bathed, refreshed and with the tramping stains
removed, Griswold went down to dinner with the lost appetite regained. A
leisurely hour spent in the restorative atmosphere of the well-filled
dining-room added its uplift, and at the end of it the troublesome
perplexities and paradoxes had withdrawn--at least far enough so that
they could be held in the artistic perspective. Afterward, during the
cigar-smoking on the cool veranda, he struck out his plan. In the
morning he would send in town to Mrs. Holcomb for a few necessaries, and
telephone to Raymer. After which, he would try what a fallow day or two
would do for him; an interval in which he could weigh and measure and
think, and possibly recover the lost sense of proportion.
As the plan was conceived, so it was carried out. Early on the following
day he sent a note to Mrs. Holcomb by one of the Inn employees; but the
copy of the _Daily Wahaskan_ laid beside his breakfast plate made it
unnecessary to telephone Raymer. The paper had a full account of the
sudden ending of the lock-out and the resumption of work in the Raymer
plant, and he read it with a curious stirring of self-compassion. As he
had reasoned it out, there was only one way in which the result could
have been attained so quickly. Had Raymer taken that way, in spite of
his wrathful rejection of the suggestion? Doubtless he had; and on the
heels of that conclusion came a sense of deprivation that was fairly
appalling, and the healthy breakfast appetite vanished. Griswold knew
what it meant, or he thought he did. Margery Grierson was gone out of
his life--gone beyond recall.