MR. BURTON HIGMAN mounted the stairs of The Guardian office, dressed
in his best suit of clothes. A powerfully inferential mind might have
derived from his proud and important bearing that he had matters of
moment on his mind; might further have deduced that he had been on a
railway journey, from the presence of a cinder in his ear. He wore the
air and expression, sanctified, as it were, all but martyr-like, as
of one who, if he had not already died for his country, was at least
prepared to. For young Mr. Higman had been performing that miracle,
forever dear to dreaming boyhood; he had been saving the world. Such, at
all events, was his own glorious interpretation of his enterprise.
The clock, pointing an accusing digit at V, was the only sign of life in
the inner den. Buddy went to Mr. Galpin’s office. Empty also. So there
was none to apprise him of the Boss’s final determination. A group of
printers, scrubbed and clean, clumped down the stairs, still discussing
the exciting rumor that somebody had bought out Robson; for every
press-room is a clearing-house of gossip, technical and other.
“Hey, Buddy,” one of them hailed. “Got a new job yet?”
“Good-bye the easy snap,” added another. “The old Guardian’s sold
again.”
“Much you know about it,” retorted Buddy, stoutly and scornfully.
But the statement struck a chill to his ardent soul. Could it be that he
was too late? Surely the deal could n’t have been fixed up overnight!
On Mr. Higman’s official desk was a heap of mail which, in size, would
have done credit to a correspondence school. It was Mr. Higman’s present
professional duty, interrupted by his brief leave of absence, to sift
out the anonymous communications, with special reference to those of
a spicy and murderous character, and deliver them to his chief. To
Jeremy’s journalistic instinct, it had occurred as a sprightly idea to
make up a special page for publication of these epistolary efforts.
It would be interesting to his readers, and would serve further to
enlighten them as to the extent and virulence of local German sentiment.
Perhaps, too, it would check the flood. So Mr. Higman sorted and divided
and contributed marginal marks, and finally delivered a large packet
upon the editorial desk for the Boss’s professional consideration, when
he should return that evening, which, his young aide felt sure he would
do, even though it was Saturday. Few, indeed, were the evenings that did
not see a light in the den, close up to midnight.
Doctors’ protests to the contrary, notwithstanding, Jeremy came back to
the office that evening, after a hasty dinner. Overwork might be bad for
that second-rate and shop-worn heart of his. Loafing on the job would be
a thousand times worse. That was one thing which his temper positively
refused to endure. As he ran through the pile of letters, terminating
in such suggestive and enticing signatures as “Vengeance,” “Outraged
justice,” “Member of the Firing Squad,” “Old Scores,” or (with
appropriate and blood-curdling commitments) those old familiars, “X,”
“Y,” and “Z,” he realized that the threats were getting on his nerves.
He was becoming bored, with an unendurable, deadly boredom, at their
repetition. Nor could he deny to himself that they were affecting his
actions, though in minor respects. For a week he had gone a block out
of his way at night, not to avoid but to pass a certain unlighted
alley-mouth wherein, so “Well-Wisher” and “Warned-in-Time,” two (or
perhaps one) depressing correspondents had informed him, in feminine
handwriting, lurked his intended murderers. Silly though it was to pay
any heed, he had to do it. He had to prove to himself the futility of
any such intimidation. In vain had Andrew Galpin tried to prevail upon
him to carry a revolver. It was the common-sense, reasonable, unromantic
thing to do. Jeremy would n’t do it. He would n’t even have one in his
desk. But there were times in the long solitary evenings at the office
when the unexplained creaking of floor-boards, or that elfin gunnery
carried on by invisible sharpshooters in the woodwork of old buildings
during nights of changing temperatures, produced sudden effects upon
his handwriting which the two-fingered typist, Mr. Burton Higman,
subsequently found disconcerting.
On this Saturday evening, he had set aside nearly enough epistolary
blood-curdlers for his make-up, and was deleting certain anatomical
references unsuited to fireside consumption from a rather illiterate but
highly expressive letter, when he became aware that a draft from below
was driving some papers along the hallway outside. A high wind off
the lakes was making clamor through the street, but it had no business
inside The Guardian building, and could n’t have got there unless some
one had opened the front door. He listened for footsteps on the stairs.
Nothing. He returned to his editing.
“Getting your throte cut some dark nigt is too Good for you,” his
correspondent had written, and suggested, in unpolished terms,
disagreeable and lethal substitutes of almost surgical technicality.
Jeremy was Bowdlerizing these, when he stopped and put down his pen.
The floor-boards in the hallway were creaking intermittently but
progressively. Through the noise of the wind he thought that he could
catch fragments of a whispered colloquy. Then, quite plainly, there was
a retreating tread, which, however, left something. What? An infernal
machine? Infernal machines do not linger, striving and forcing
themselves to the determining action; theirs is a simple and direct
method. And Jeremy could feel, through the noisy darkness, the struggle
of a will, agonizingly fighting for expression, through dread. Himself,
he was not conscious of fear. But every nerve was tense. He sat looking
at the door.
For what seemed an interminable time nothing happened. But the Something
outside drew slowly, painfully nearer. The knob of his door moved, a
thing suddenly inspired to life. Jeremy gathered himself. It turned. The
door was drawn open swiftly. A blur came upon Jeremy’s vision. His heart
bumped once in a thick, dull way, then swelled intolerably. He half
rose, sat down again heavily. His eyes cleared and the clogged blood in
his temples flowed again.
She stood framed against the stirring, whispering darkness beyond. Her
breath came quick and light. She was white to the lips, and more lovely
even than the dreams of her, cherished through all those aching years.
“Jem,” she said.
“Marcia!”
She made one eager step forward. A vagrant gust, ranging the darkness,
caught the door and drove it savagely to, behind her. She threw a
startled glance back. It was as if the impalpable fates had cut off the
last chance of withdrawal.
“I have come back to you.” The sweet precision of her speech was the
unforgotten same, blessedly unchanged in any intonation. But wonder held
Jeremy speechless. He stood, his hands knuckling the desk, and devoured
her with his eyes.
“Will you not speak to me?” she said, with a quick sorrowful little
intake of the breath. “You frighten me. You look so strange. Have you
been ill?”
At that he came forward and took her hand, and drew out a chair for her.
“Not ill,” he heard himself say in a surprisingly commonplace voice.
“Sit down.”
She shook her head gently. “I can look at you better, standing.”
Her candid eyes swept over him. She saw a face thinner and more drawn
than she had remembered it; bitten into by stern lines about the mouth;
the eyes tired but more thoughtful, and just over the temple nearest
her a fleck of gray in the dark sweep of his hair. Involuntarily she put
forth a swift hand and touched it.
“Oh, Jem!” she whispered with quivering lips.
He seemed to brace himself against her light touch. “That?” he said.
“Oh, that is n’t anything.”
“How came it there?”
“Honest toil, I hope,” he returned cheerfully.
Her inventory was completed with a smile. “You are quite as carefully
turned out as ever,” she commented.
“Habit.”
“Oh, no! Not habit alone. Character. And you stand as straight and
square as you used.”
A curious expression came into the weary eyes. “Straighter,” he said.
“That’s your doing, Marcia.”
“How mine?”
“It’s rather complicated and long. I don’t know that you’d understand.”
“Make me understand.”
“Give me time. This has been--well, startling. I think I’m a little
dazzled and--and dizzy.”
And, indeed, Marcia Ames, as she stood there beneath the hard, revealing
light of the overhead arc, was a vision to dazzle any man, and, taken
on an empty heart, to make him dizzy. The years had fulfilled her; had
added splendor to her compelling beauty without withdrawing that almost
fantastically delicate and elusive challenge of youth. She seated
herself, and Jem took his accustomed position behind the editorial
table.
“That is well,” she said lightly. “Is that how you receive callers on
business?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. I have come on business.”
“Where did you come from? I can’t quite believe it’s really you--here!”
“From Chicago. Buddy brought me.”
“Buddy Higman?”
“He came after me. He told me that you were in great trouble.”
“He told you that I was going to desert the ship.”
“Oh, no! Buddy is your loyal subject. The Boss can do no wrong.”
“The Boss has reached the point where he is n’t sure what’s wrong and
what’s right.”
“I am not afraid of that.” There was an implication of pride and of
proprietorship in the words which shook Jem’s hard hold upon himself.
“Were you coming here, anyway?”
“Later.”
“Then I should have seen you.” He seemed to be puzzling out some inner
problem.
“I had thought you would have been in the army.”
“So I should, if I had n’t been told that I’m a useless bit of
wreckage.”
“Please! I know all about it. I have seen Mr. Galpin. Your war is here.
If you had decided otherwise than you did I should--I should--”
“You’re trying to make it easy for me,” he accused. “I should have come
back to find another Jem from the one I have learned to believe in.”
“To believe in, Marcia? How’s that?”
“‘Seein’ ’s believin’,”’ she laughed. “I once heard Buddy’s aunt give
out that word of wisdom. I have been seeing The Guardian and reading it,
and reading you in it, ever since the war.”
“More than me. Galpin and Cassius Kimball; yes, and old Eli Wade,
and others that have helped keep me straight. We haven’t always gone
straight, Marcia. There have been issues of The Guardian that I’d hate
to have you see.”
“But I have seen them. All.”
“And you did n’t lose faith?”
“I never lost hope that--that you would be what I wanted you to be. Jem,
Mr. Galpin says that the paper is losing.”
“It is.”
“Can you go on?”
“For a while?”
“Could you go on if you had more money?”
“For a while longer. There’d be a chance of our pulling through. But
only a chance.”
“Will you take mine?”
“Great God! _No!_”
“Why not?”
“I tell you, it’s almost sure loss. There’s a new paper coming into the
field--”
“You said just now that it was my doing that you--you stood straighter
than you used. Did you mean The Guardian?”
“The Guardian. Myself. It’s the same thing.”
“Then does not that give me a right in the paper? A moral right?” she
argued with bewitching earnestness. “Granted. Put in anything you like
but your money.”
“Jem! Please!” she pleaded. “Will you not take it if--”
“Not with any if.”
She rose and came to him around the corner of the table, and set her
hand on his shoulder. Her eyes were steady, clear, courageous upon his,
but her whole face flushed into a glorious shame and her voice shook and
fluttered as she spoke again. “Not if--not even if--I go with it?”
“No,” said Jem. But his face was like that of one in a mortal struggle.
For a moment there was a flash of fear in her regard. “Jem! There is
not--some one else?”
“How could there be?” he said simply.
“How could there be!” she repeated with a caressing contentment. “I knew
there could not be.”
“There never could. How did you know?”
She stepped back from him. “By what I felt, myself.” She laughed a
little tremulously. “I should have read it in The Guardian. Between the
lines.”
“But--” he began. “There was----Miss Pritchard told me--”
“Yes,” she assented gravely. “There was. It was a formal betrothal.
But when I saw him again I knew that I could not. It was no fault of
his--nor mine. I remembered,” she said very low, “that night. That last
night. On the bridge. Four years ago. My dear! _Was_ it four years ago?”
Her eyes, her voice yearned to him, wooed him. Jem’s knuckles were white
with the force of the grip wherewith he held to the table.
“Marcia!” he began.
“It made no difference,” she went on dreamily, “whether I was ever to
see you again or not. I did not believe then that I ever should. But
whether or not, there could be no one else. Some women are like that,
Jem. ‘Once is forever, and once alone!’ I think a woman wrote that....
And you have not even said I was welcome.”
“I dare n’t!” he burst out. “I dare n’t tell you what I feel--what I’m
struggling against. Marcia, I’m down and out.”
“Does that matter?” she broke in proudly.
“It matters everything. I can’t take your money. I can’t ask you to
marry me. There’s nothing ahead of me.”
“Mr. Galpin says that The Guardian is the one big, fighting energy--”
“Andy Galpin is a loyal fool. He’s the best and finest and stanchest
friend ever a blunderer like me had. Poor devil! He’s put every cent
he’s got into the fight--”
“And you will not let me put in my share?”
“Share? Don’t talk nonsense, Marcia. No.”
“Not even a little part?”
“Not a cent!”
“And you will not even marry me?”
“No,” groaned the sorely beset Jem.
“Very well. I think it very hard.” There was a palpable, even an
exaggerated, droop to the tender and mobile lips; but in the depths
of Marcia’s eyes twin devils of defiance and determination danced.
“Good-night, Jem. No! You shall _not_ take me downstairs.”
In the motor outside the scandalized Miss Letitia Pritchard, after a
wait of an hour and five minutes, commented significantly and with a
down-thrust inflection: “Well!”
“Well, Cousin Letty,” said Marcia demurely.
“Are you going to marry that young man, Marcia?”
“How can I? He has refused me.”
“Refused you!” gasped Miss Pritchard.
“Precisely. I am a blighted maiden.”
“Snumph!” sniffed Miss Pritchard. “Don’t you tell me!”
“Must you hear it from him to believe it?”
“Marcia Ames! I’ve watched that boy since you set your seal on him four
years ago. I’ve seen him grow into a man, and fight his way wrong and
right, and take his loss of you like a man and make a religion of it,
and run his life by it, and if ever a chit of a girl ought to be proud
of something too big and too good for her that she’s thrown away--Don’t
you tell me, Marcia Ames! I--I don’t positively know what to say of such
doings.”
The little electric, equally scandalized, suddenly lost its head, rushed
upon an unoffending hydrant, sheered off, made as if to climb the front
steps of the bank, performed an impossible curve, chased two horrified
and incredulous citizens (who had never seen Miss Pritchard under the
influence of liquor before, and so reported to their wives when they
got home) up against a railing, and finally resumed the road with a
sickening lurch, all of which may have been due to the fact that the
usually self-contained Miss Marcia Ames had abruptly buried her face in
Miss Pritchard’s shoulder, and clutched at her blindly.
“Say it again,” quavered Miss Ames, when the errant electric had squared
away for home. “Say it again, Cousin Letty! I could not make him say it.
And oh! how hard I tried.”
“Land sakes! Then you are going to marry him!” exclaimed Miss Pritchard.
“But he does not know it,” replied Marcia, suddenly demure.