Kent's time from Alameda Square to the capitol was the quickest a flogged
cab-horse could make, but he might have spared the horse and saved the
double fee. On the broad steps of the south portico he, uprushing three at
a bound, met the advance guard of the gallery contingent, down-coming. The
House had adjourned.
"One minute, Harnwicke!" he gasped, falling upon the first member of the
corporations' lobby he could identify in the throng. "What's been done?"
"They've taken a fall out of us," was the brusk reply. "House Bill
Twenty-nine was reported by the committee on judiciary and rushed through
after you left. Somebody engineered it to the paring of a fingernail: bare
quorum to act; members who might have filibustered weeded out, on one
pretext or another, to a man; pages all excused, and nobody here with the
privilege of the floor. It was as neat a piece of gag-work as I ever hope
to see if I live to be a hundred."
Kent faced about and joined the townward dispersal with his informant.
"Well, I suppose that settles it definitely; at least, until we can test
its constitutionality in the courts," he said.
Harnwicke thought not, being of the opinion that the vested interests
would never say die until they were quite dead. As assistant counsel for
the Overland Short Line, he was in some sense the dean of the corps of
observation, and could speak with authority.
"There is one chance left for us this side of the courts," he went on;
"and now I think of it, you are the man to say how much of a chance it is.
The bill still lacks the governor's signature."
Kent shook his head.
"It is his own measure. I have proof positive that he and Meigs and
Hendricks drafted it. And all this fine-haired engineering to-night was
his, or Meigs'."
"Of course; we all know that. But we don't know the particular object yet.
Do they need the new law in their business as a source of revenue? Or do
they want to be hired to kill it? In other words, does Bucks want a lump
sum for a veto? You know the man better than any of us."
"By Jove!" said Kent. "Do you mean to say you would buy the governor of a
state?"
Harnwicke turned a cold eye on his companion as they strode along. He was
of the square-set, plain-spoken, aggressive type--a finished product of
the modern school of business lawyers.
"I don't understand that you are raising the question of ethics at this
stage of the game, do I?" he remarked.
Kent fired up a little.
"And if I am?" he retorted.
"I should say you had missed your calling. It is baldly a question of
business--or rather of self-preservation. We needn't mince matters among
ourselves. If Bucks is for sale, we buy him."
Kent shrugged.
"There isn't any doubt about his purchasability. But I confess I don't
quite see how you will go about it."
"Never mind that part of it; just leave the ways and means with those of
us who have riper experience--and fewer hamperings, perhaps--than you
have. Your share in it is to tell us how big a bid we must make. As I say,
you know the man."
David Kent was silent for the striding of half a square. The New England
conscience dies hard, and while it lives it is given to drawing sharp
lines on all the boundaries of culpability. Kent ended by taking the
matter in debate violently out of the domain of ethics and standing it
upon the ground of expediency.
"It will cost too much. You would have to bid high--not to overcome his
scruples, for he has none; but to satisfy his greed--which is abnormal.
And, besides, he has his pose to defend. If he can see his way clear to a
harvest of extortions under the law, he will probably turn you down--and
will make it hot for you later on in the name of outraged virtue."
Harnwicke's laugh was cynical.
"He and his little clique don't own the earth in fee simple. Perhaps we
shall be able to make them grasp that idea before we are through with
them. We have had this fight on in other states. Would ten thousand be
likely to satisfy him?"
"No," said Kent. "If you add another cipher, it might."
"A hundred thousand is a pot of money. I take it for granted the Western
Pacific will stand its pro-rate?"
The New England conscience bucked again, and Kent made his first open
protest against the methods of the demoralizers.
"I am not in a position to say: I should advise against it. Unofficially,
I think I can speak for Loring and the Boston people. We are not more
saintly than other folk, perhaps; and we are not in the railroad business
for health or pleasure. But I fancy the Advisory Board would draw the line
at bribing a governor--at any rate, I hope it would."
"Rot!" said Harnwicke. And then: "You'll reap the benefits with other
interstate interests; you'll have to come in."
Kent hesitated, but not now on the ground of the principle to be defended.
"That brings in a question which I am not competent to decide. Loring is
your man. You will call a conference of the 'powers,' I take it?"
"It is already called. I sent Atherton out to notify everybody as soon as
the trap was sprung in the House. We meet in the ordinary at the Camelot.
You'll be there?"
"A little later--if Loring wants me. I have some telephoning to do before
this thing gets on the wires."
They parted at the entrance to the Camelot Club, and Kent went two squares
farther on to the Wellington. Ormsby had not yet returned, and Kent went
to the telephone and called up the Brentwood apartments. It was Penelope
that answered.
"Well, I think you owe it," she began, as soon as he had given his name.
"What did I do at Miss Van Brock's to make you cut me dead?"
"Why, nothing at all, I'm sure. I--I was looking for Mr. Ormsby, and----"
"Not when I saw you," she broke in flippantly. "You were handing Miss
Portia an ice. Are you still looking for Mr. Ormsby?"
"I am--just that. Is he with you?"
"No; he left here about twenty minutes ago. Is it anything serious?"
"Serious enough to make me want to find him as soon as I can. Did he say
he was coming down to the Wellington?"
"Of course, he didn't," laughed Penelope. And then: "Whatever is the
matter with you this evening, Mr. Kent?"
"I guess I'm a little excited," said Kent. "Something has
happened--something I can't talk about over the wires. It concerns you and
your mother and sister. You'll know all about it as soon as I can find
Ormsby and send him out to you."
Penelope's "Oh!" was long-drawn and gasping.
"Is any one dead?" she faltered.
"No, no; it's nothing of that kind. I'll send Ormsby out, and he will tell
you all about it."
"Can't you come yourself?"
"I may have to if I can't find Ormsby. Please don't let your mother go to
bed until you have heard from one or the other of us. Did you get that?"
"Ye-es; but I should like to know more--a great deal more."
"I know; and I'd like to tell you. But I am using the public telephone
here at the Wellington, and--Oh, damn!" Central had cut him out, and it
was some minutes before the connection was switched in again. "Is that
you, Miss Penelope? All right; I wasn't quite through. When Ormsby comes,
you must do as he tells you to, and you and Miss Elinor must help him
convince your mother. Do you understand?"
"No, I don't understand anything. For goodness' sake, find Mr. Ormsby and
make him run! This is perfectly dreadful!"
"Isn't it? And I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."
Kent hung up the receiver, and when he was asking a second time at the
clerk's desk for the missing man, Ormsby came in to answer for himself.
Whereupon the crisis was outlined to him in brief phrase, and he rose to
the occasion, though not without a grimace.
"I'm not sure just how well you know Mrs. Hepzibah Brentwood," he
demurred; "but it will be quite like her to balk. Don't you think you'd
better go along? You are the company's attorney, and your opinion ought to
carry some weight."
David Kent thought not; but a cautious diplomatist, having got the idea
well into the back part of his head, was not to be denied.
"Of course, you'll come. You are just the man I'll need to back me up. I
shan't shirk; I'll take the mother into the library and break the ice,
while you are squaring things with the young women. Penelope won't care
the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion's that you
are fitter to cope with than I am. After, if you can give me a lift with
Mrs. Hepzibah, I'll call you in. Come on; it's getting pretty late to go
visiting."
Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed. It
was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby
made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.
"I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes," he began.
"Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?"
Penelope "arranged" it, not without another added pang of curiosity,
whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a
silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.
"Is it to be a Quaker meeting?" asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence
had grown awe-inspiring.
Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.
"One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I,"
he said; and then he went on to explain. "It's about your Western Pacific
stock, you know. To-day's quotations put it a point and a half above your
purchase price, and we've come to persuade you to unload, _pronto_, as the
member from the Rio Blanco would say."
"Is that all?" said Penelope, stifling a yawn. "Then I'm not in it: I'm an
infant." And she rose and went to the piano.
"You haven't told us all of it: what has happened?" queried Elinor,
speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.
He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the
probabilities.
"Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be," he
qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of
dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable
enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of
those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed
and carried through for that very purpose."
She smiled.
"I have understood you were in the opposition. Are you speaking
politically?"
"I am stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her
coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into
office than we have here in this State at the present moment."
He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of
an equal antagonist.
"I can't agree with your inference," she objected. "As a people we are
neither obsequious nor stupid."
"Perhaps not. But it is one of the failures of a popular government that
an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of
shrewd rascals. That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this
bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the
faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."
"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true
leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said
half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"
She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of
disappointment in them.
"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of
my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."
"To purify them?"
"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and
well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too.
But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who
_could_ and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."
"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.
"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will
put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of
justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men
nowadays?"
"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it.
It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind
of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."
She contradicted him firmly.
"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold
with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish
temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following--be
the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."
Kent shook his head slowly.
"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call
patriotism."
"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to
understand.
"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to
have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of
patriotism to make him do his best."
"But that would be self-seeking again."
"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a
beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would
have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what
appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."
"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.
"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your
ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly
spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he
will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a
political constituency."
She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the
nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.
Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was
searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.
They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made
sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As
many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry
there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling
down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.
Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field
of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash,
it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she
had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small
field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his
training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had
been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is
transmitted in terms of self-seeking.
He turned upon her suddenly.
"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.
"How absurd!"
"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me
out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."
"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.
"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a
worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been
trying to be a money-getter."
"You can be something vastly better."
"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."
Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on
his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now
what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his
way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call
out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone,
of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in
keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire
him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There
would be time enough to drain it farther on.
"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said,
breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I----"
She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of
apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.
"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother
will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always
do."
David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive
responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon
summer for a background.
It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many
things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however
bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this
new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she
was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism
in them, as thus:
"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over
the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I
recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things
which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we
were both very young that summer--years younger than we can ever be again.
Don't you?"
"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have
agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not
weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the
word which would fit her changed mood.
"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more
charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on
our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"
"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the
mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no
good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her
resentful.
She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just.
And you were not quite just, I think."
"To you?" he demanded.
"Oh, no; to yourself."
Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. _You
have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all
she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to
you_. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most
unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise
him?
The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a
door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.
"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he
announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at
once.
"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the
house and had turned their faces townward.
"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank
to sell her stock--won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now,
when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted,
mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I
tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the
jaw--intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people
needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"
Kent's laugh was mirthless.
"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for
the accusation.
If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to
steer clear of that shoal.
"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with
Elinor."
"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother
would have the casting vote."
"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."
"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now--as
between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean--but there will
probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go.
We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."
The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said:
"Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't
altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes
to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car.
Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss
what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."
David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.
"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one
thing you must never do."
"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.
Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor
made him fearless of consequences.
"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has
spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss
Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very
food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know:
be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never
forgive you."
"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough--to draw it
mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David
Kent's affair."
Kent turned about and caught step again.
"I've said my say--all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently
modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in
the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss
Brentwood rather better than you do."
Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside
to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But
at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to
the debatable ground in an outspoken word.
"I know pretty well now what there is between us, Kent, and we mustn't
quarrel if we can help it," he said. "If you complain that I didn't give
you a fair show, I'll retort that I didn't dare to. Are you satisfied?"
"No," said David Kent; and with that they separated.