It was precisely on the day set for the Brentwoods' westward flitting that
the postman, making his morning round, delivered David Kent's asking at
the house in the Back Bay sub-district. Elinor was busy packing for the
migration, but she left Penelope and the maid to cope with the problem of
compressing two trunkfuls into one while she read the letter, and she was
reading it a second time when Mr. Brookes Ormsby's card came up.
"You go, Penelope," she begged. "There is so much to do."
"Not I," said the younger sister, cavalierly; "he didn't come to see me."
Whereupon Elinor smoothed the two small wrinkles of impatience out of her
brow, tucked her letter into her bosom, and went down to meet the early
morning caller.
Mr. Brookes Ormsby, club-man, gentleman of athletic leisure, and inheritor
of the Ormsby millions, was pacing back and forth before the handful of
fire in the drawing-room grate when she entered.
"You don't deserve to have a collie sheep-dog friend," he protested
reproachfully. "How was I to know that you were going away?"
Another time Elinor might have felt that she owed him an explanation, but
just now she was careful, and troubled about the packing.
"How was I to know you didn't know?" she retorted. "It was in the
_Transcript_."
"Well!" said Ormsby. "Things have come to a pretty pass when I have to
keep track of you through the society column. I didn't see the paper.
Dyckman brought me word last night at Vineyard Haven, and we broke a
propeller blade on the _Amphitrite_ trying to get here in time."
"I am so sorry--for the _Amphitrite_," she said. "But you are here, and in
good season. Shall I call mother and Nell?"
"No. I ran out to see if I'm in time to do your errands for you--take your
tickets, and so on."
"Oh, we shouldn't think of troubling you. James can do all those things.
And failing James, there is a very dependable young woman at the head of
this household. Haven't I 'personally conducted' the family all over
Europe?"
"James is a base hireling," said the caller, blandly. "And as for the
capable young woman: do I or do I not recollect a dark night on the German
frontier when she was glad enough to call on a sleepy fellow pilgrim to
help her wrestle with a particularly thick-headed customs officer?"
"If you do, it is not especially kind of you to remind her of it."
He looked up quickly, and the masterful soul of the man, for which the
clean-cut, square-set jaw and the athletic figure were the outward
presentments, put on a mask of deference and humility.
"You are hard with me, Elinor--always flinty and adamantine, and that
sort. Have you no soft side at all?"
She laughed.
"The sentimental young woman went out some time ago, didn't she? One can't
be an anachronism."
"I suppose not. Yet I'm always trying to make myself believe other things
about you. Don't you like to be cared for like other women?"
"I don't know; sometimes I think I should. But I have had to be the man of
the house since father died."
"I know," he said. "And it is the petty anxieties that have made you put
the woman to the wall. I'm here this morning to save you some of them; to
take the man's part in your outsetting, or as much of it as I can. When
are you going to give me the right to come between you and all the little
worries, Elinor?"
She turned from him with a faint gesture of cold impatience.
"You are forgetting your promise," she said quite dispassionately. "We
were to be friends; as good friends as we were before that evening at Bar
Harbor. I told you it would be impossible, and you said you were strong
enough to make it possible."
He looked at her with narrowing eyes.
"It is possible, in a way. But I'd like to know what door of your heart it
is that I haven't been able to open."
She ignored the pleading and took refuge in a woman's expedient.
"If you insist on going back to the beginnings, I shall go back, also--to
Abigail and the trunk-packing."
He planted himself squarely before her, the mask lifted and the masterful
soul asserting itself boldly.
"It wouldn't do any good, you know. I am going with you."
"To Abigail and the trunk-room?"
"Oh, no; to the jumping-off place out West--wherever it is you are going
to hibernate."
"No," she said decisively; "you must not."
"Why?"
"My saying so ought to be sufficient reason."
"It isn't," he contended, frowning down on her good-naturedly. "Shall I
tell you why you don't want me to go? It is because you are afraid."
"I am not," she denied.
"Yes, you are. You know in your own heart there is no reason why you
should continue to make me unhappy, and you are afraid I might
over-persuade you."
Her eyes--they were the serene eyes of cool gray that take on slate-blue
tints in stressful moments--met his defiantly.
"If you think that, I withdraw my objection," she said coldly. "Mother and
Penelope will be delighted, I am sure."
"And you will be bored, world without end," he laughed. "Never mind; I'll
be decent about it and keep out of your way as much as you like."
Again she made the little gesture of petulant impatience.
"You are continually placing me in a false position. Can't you leave me
out of it entirely?"
It is one of the prime requisites of successful mastership to know when to
press the point home, and when to recede gracefully. Ormsby abruptly shut
the door upon sentiment and came down to things practical.
"It is your every-day comfort that concerns me chiefly. I am going to take
all three of you in charge, giving the dependable young person a
well-earned holiday--a little journey in which she won't have to chaffer
with the transit people. Have you chosen your route to the western
somewhere?"
Miss Brentwood had the fair, transparent skin that tells tales, and the
blue-gray eyes were apt to confirm them. David Kent's letter was hidden in
the folds of her loose-waisted morning gown, and she fancied it stirred
like a thing alive to remind her of its message. Ormsby was looking past
her to the old-fashioned ormolu clock on the high mantel, comparing the
time with his watch, but he was not oblivious of the telltale flush.
"There is nothing embarrassing about the choosing of a route, is there?"
he queried.
"Oh, no; being true Americans, we don't know one route from another in our
own country," she confessed. "But at the western end of it we want to go
over the Western Pacific."
Ormsby knew the West by rail routes as one who travels much for
time-killing purposes.
"It's a rather roundabout cow-path," he objected. "The Overland Short Line
is a good bit more direct; not to mention the service, which is a lot
better."
But Elinor had made her small concession to David Kent's letter, and she
would not withdraw it.
"Probably you don't own any Western Pacific stock," she suggested. "We do;
and we mean to be loyal to our salt."
Ormsby laughed.
"I see Western Pacific has gone down a few points since the election of
Governor Bucks. If I had any, I'd wire my broker to sell."
"We are not so easily frightened," she asserted; adding, with a touch of
the austerity which was her Puritan birthright: "Nor quite so
conscienceless as you men."
"Conscience," he repeated half absently; "is there any room for such an
out-of-date thing in a nation of successfulists? But seriously; you ought
to get rid of Western Pacific. There can be no possible question of
conscience involved."
"I don't agree with you," she retorted with prompt decision. "If we were
to sell now it would be because we were afraid it might prove to be a bad
investment. Therefore, for the sake of a presumably ignorant buyer, we
have no right to sell."
He smiled leniently.
"All of which goes to prove that you three lone women need a guardian. But
I mustn't keep you any longer from Abigail and the trunks. What time shall
I send the expediters after your luggage?"
She told him, and went with him to the door.
"Please don't think me ungrateful," she said, when she had thrown the
night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."
"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am as
conscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'll
meet you all at the station."
As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under
fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.
Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she
forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She was
a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness;
a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become
panic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction,
it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the
passivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.
Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of
her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring's
summing-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and the
humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her native
hills takes polish--reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner
granular structure.
"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way
you do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father's
daughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in either
of you, I do believe."
Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under her
mother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in her
veins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she said
nothing.
"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copper
business in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you know
it," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care so
much for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go back
to nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'd
both starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that you
can't tolerate him."
"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily.
"Please let's not go over it all again, mother."
Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.
"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himself
this winter?"
The temptation to equivocate for pure perversity's sake was strong upon
Elinor, and she yielded to it.
"How should I know? He has the _Amphitrite_ and the Florida coast, hasn't
he?"
Mrs. Brentwood groaned.
"To think of the way he squanders his money in sheer dissipation!" she
exclaimed. "Of course, he will take an entire house-party with him, as
usual, and the cost of that one cruise would set you up in housekeeping."
Penelope laughed with a younger daughter's license. She was a statuesque
young woman with a pose, ripe lips, flashing white teeth, laughing eyes
with an imp of mischief in them, and an exquisitely turned-up nose that
was neither the Brentwood, which was severely classic, nor the Grimkie,
which was pure Puritan renaissance.
"Which is to intimate that he won't have money enough left to do it when
he comes back," she commented. "I wish there were some way of making him
believe he had to give me what remains of his income after he has spent
all he can on the Florida cruise. I'd wear Worth gowns and be lapped in
luxury for the next ten years at the very least."
"He isn't going to Florida this winter," said Elinor, repenting her of the
small quibble. "He is going West."
Mrs. Brentwood looked up sharply.
"With us?" she queried.
"Yes."
Penelope clasped her hands and tried to look soulful.
"Oh, Ellie!" she said; "have you----"
"No," Elinor retorted; "I have not."