"_Oof_! I feel as if I had been dipped in a warm bath of conspiracy and
hung up to dry in the cold storage of nihilism! If you take me to any more
meetings of your committee of safety, I shall be like the man without
music in his soul--'fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.'"
Thus Penelope, after the breaking up of the Van Brock dinner party. Elinor
had elected to walk the few blocks intervening between Alameda Square and
Tejon Avenue, and Ormsby had dismissed his chauffeur with the motor-car.
"I told you beforehand it was going to be a political confab," said the
club-man in self-defense. "And you mustn't treat it lightly, either. Ten
prattling words of what you have heard to-night set afloat on the gossip
pool of this town might make it pretty difficult for our David."
"We are not very likely to babble," retorted Penelope. "We are not so rich
in intimates in this aboriginal desert." But Elinor spoke to the penal
clause in his warning.
"Then Mr. Kent's danger is more real than he admitted?" she said.
"It's real enough, I fancy; more real for him than it might be for another
man in his place. He is a curious combination, is David: keen and
sharp-witted and as cold as an icicle in the planning part; but when it
comes to the in-fighting he hasn't sense enough to pound sand, as his New
Hampshire neighbors would say."
"I like that side of him best," Penelope averred. "Deliver me from a man
of the cold and calculating sort who sits on his impulses, sleeps on his
injuries, and takes money-revenge for an insult. Mr. Loring tells a story
of a transplanted Vermonter in South America. A hot-headed Peruvian called
him a liar, and he said: 'Oh, pshaw! you can't prove it.'"
"What a merciless generalizer you are!" said Ormsby, laughing. "The man
who marries you will have his work cut out for him if he proposes to fill
the requirements."
"Won't he?" said Penelope. "I can fancy him sitting up nights to figure it
all out."
They had reached the Tejon Avenue apartment house, and to Elinor's "Won't
you come in?" Ormsby said: "It's pretty late, but I'll smoke a cigar on
the porch, if you'll let me."
Penelope took the hammock, but she kept it only during the first inch of
Ormsby's cigar. After her sister had gone in, Elinor went back to the
lapsed topic.
"I am rather concerned about Mr. Kent. You described him exactly;
and--well, he is past the planning part and into the fighting part. Do you
think he will take ordinary precautions?"
"I hope so, I'm sure," rejoined the amateur chairman. "As his business
manager I am responsible for him, after a fashion. I was glad to see
Loring to-night--glad he has come back. Kent defers to him more than he
does to any one else; and Loring is a solid, sober-minded sort."
"Yes," she agreed; "I was glad, too."
After that the talk languished, and the silence was broken only by the
distant droning of an electric car, the fizz and click of the arc light
over the roadway, and the occasional _dap_ of one the great beetles
darting hither and thither in the glare.
Ormsby was wondering if the time was come for the successful exploiting of
an idea which had been growing on him steadily for weeks, not to say
months.
It was becoming more and more evident to him that he was not advancing in
the sentimental siege beyond the first parallel thrown up so skilfully on
the last night of the westward journey. It was not that Elinor was lacking
in loyalty or in acquiescence; she scrupulously gave him both as an
accepted suitor. But though he could not put his finger upon the precise
thing said or done which marked the loosening of his hold, he knew he was
receding rather than advancing.
Now to a man of expedients the interposition of an obstacle suggests only
ways and means for overcoming it. Ormsby had certain clear-cut convictions
touching the subjugation of women, and as his stout heart gave him
resolution he lived up to them. When he spoke again it was of the matter
which concerned him most deeply; and his plea was a gentle repetition of
many others in the same strain.
"Elinor, I have waited patiently for a long time, and I'll go on doing it,
if that is what will come the nearest to pleasing you. But it would be a
prodigious comfort if I might be counting the days or the weeks. Are you
still finding it impossible to set the limit?"
She nodded slowly, and he took the next step like a man feeling his way in
the dark.
"That is as large an answer as you have ever given me, I think. Is there
any speakable reason?"
"You know the reason," she said, looking away from him.
"I am not sure that I do. Is it because the moneygods have been
unpropitious--because these robber barons have looted your railroad?"
"No; that is only part of it--the smallest part."
"I hoped so: if you have too little, I have a good bit too much. But that
corners it in a way to make me sorry. I am not keeping my promise to win
what you weren't able to give me at first."
"Please don't put it that way. If there be any fault, it is mine. You have
left nothing undone."
The man of expedients ran over his cards reflectively and decided that the
moment for playing his long suit was fully come.
"Your goodness of heart excuses me where I am to blame," he qualified. "I
am coming to believe that I have defeated my own cause."
"By being too good to me?" she suggested.
"No; by running where I should have been content to walk; by shackling you
with a promise, and so in a certain sense becoming your jailer. That is
putting it rather clumsily, but isn't it true?"
"I had never thought of it in that light," she said unresponsively.
"You wouldn't, naturally. But the fact remains. It has wrenched your point
of view hopelessly aside, don't you think? I have seen it and felt it all
along, but I haven't had the courage of my convictions."
"In what way?" she asked.
"In the only way the thing can be stood squarely upon its feet. It's
hard--desperately hard; and hardest of all for a man of my peculiar build.
I am no longer what you would call a young man, Elinor, and I have never
learned to turn back and begin all over again with any show of heartiness.
They used to say of me in the Yacht Club that if I gained a half-length in
a race, I'd hold it if it took the sticks out of my boat."
"I know," she assented absently.
"Well, it's the same way now. But for your sake--or rather for the sake of
my love--I am going to turn back for once. You are free again, Elinor. All
I ask is that you will let me begin where I left off somewhere on the road
between here and Boston last fall."
She sat with clasped hands looking steadily at the darkened windows of the
opposite house, and he let her take her own time. When she spoke there was
a thrill in her voice that he had never heard before.
"I don't deserve it--so much consideration, I mean," she said; and he made
haste to spare her.
"Yes, you do; you deserve anything the best man in the world could do for
you, and I'm a good bit short of that."
"But if I don't want you to go back?"
He had gained something--much more than he knew; and for a tremulous
instant he was near to losing it again by a passionate retraction of all
he had been saying. But the cool purpose came to his rescue in time.
"I should still insist on doing it. You gave me what you could, but I want
more, and I am willing to do what is necessary to win it."
Again she said: "You are too good to me," and again he contradicted her.
"No; it is hardly a question of goodness; indeed, I am not sure that it
escapes being selfish. But I am very much in earnest, and I am going to
prove it. Three years ago you met a man whom you thought you could
love--don't interrupt me, please. He was like some other men we know: he
didn't have the courage of his convictions, lacking the few dollars which
might have made things more nearly equal. May I go on?"
"I suppose you have earned the right to say what you please," was the
impassive reply.
It was the old struggle in which they were so evenly matched--of the woman
to preserve her poise; of the man to break it down. Another lover might
have given up in despair, but Ormsby's strength lay in holding on in the
face of all discouragements.
"I believe, as much as I believe anything in this world, that you were
mistaken in regard to your feeling for the other man," he went on calmly.
"But I want you to be sure of that for yourself, and you can't be sure
unless you are free to choose between us."
"Oh, don't!--you shouldn't say such things to me," she broke out; and then
he knew he was gaining ground.
"Yes, I must. We have been stumbling around in the dark all these months,
and I mean to be the lantern-bearer for once in a way. You know, and I
know, and Kent is coming to know. That man is going to be a success,
Elinor: he has it in him, and he sha'n't lack the money-backing he may
need. When he arrives----"
She turned on him quickly, and the blue-gray eyes were suspiciously
bright.
"Please don't bury me alive," she begged.
He saw what he had done; that the nicely calculated purpose had carried
straight and true to its mark; and for a moment the mixed motives, which
are at the bottom of most human sayings and doings, surged in him like the
sea at the vexed tide-line of an iron-bound coast. But it was the better
Brookes Ormsby that struggled up out of the elemental conflict.
"Don't mistake me," he said. "I am neither better nor worse than other
men, I fancy. My motives, such as they are, would probably turn out to be
purely selfish in the last analysis. I am proceeding on the theory that
constraint breeds the desire for the thing it forbids; therefore I remove
it. Also, it is a part of that theory that the successful David Kent will
not appeal to you as the unspoiled country lawyer did. No, I'm not going
to spoil him; if I were, I shouldn't be telling you about it. But--may I
be brutally frank?--the David Kent who will come successfully out of this
political prize-fight will not be the man you have idealized."
There was a muttering of thunder in the air, and the cool precursory
breeze of a shower was sweeping through the tree-tops.
"Shall we go into the house?" she asked; and he took it as his dismissal.
"You may; I have kept you up long enough." And then, taking her hand: "Are
we safely ashore on the new continent, Elinor? May I come and go as
heretofore?"
"You were always welcome, Brookes; you will be twice welcome, now."
It was the first time she had ever called him by his Christian name and it
went near to toppling down the carefully reared structure of
self-restraint. But he made shift to shore the tottering walls with a
playful retort.
"If that is the case, I'll have to think up some more self-abnegations.
Good night."