SUNSET AT THE SYCAMORES
When the door had closed behind the pleasant figure of Mr. Brown,
Blake pressed the button upon his desk. His stenographer appeared.
"I have some important matters to consider," he said. "Do not allow me
to be disturbed until Doctor and Mrs. Sherman come with the car."
His privacy thus secured, Blake sat at his desk, staring fixedly
before him. His brow was compressed into wrinkles, his dark face,
still showing a yellowish pallor, was hard and set. He reviewed the
entire situation, and as his consuming ambition contemplated the
glories of success, and the success after that, and the succession of
successes that led up and ever up, his every nerve was afire with an
excruciating, impatient pleasure.
For a space while Katherine had confronted him, and for a space after
she had gone, he had shrunk from this business he was carrying
through. But he had spoken truthfully to Mr. Brown when he had said
that his revulsion was but a temporary feeling, and that of his own
accord he would have come back to his original decision. He had had
such revulsions before, and each time he had swung as surely back to
his purpose as does the disturbed needle to the magnetic pole.
Westville considered Harrison Blake a happy blend of the best of his
father and mother; whereas, in point of fact, his father and his
mother lived in him with their personalities almost intact. There was
his mother, with her idealism and her high sense of honour; and his
father, with his boundless ambition and his lack of principles. In the
earlier years of Blake's manhood his mother's qualities had dominated.
He had sincerely tried to do great work for Westville, and had done
it; and the reputation he had then made, and the gratitude he had then
won, were the seed from which had grown the great esteem with which
Westville now regarded him.
But a few years back he had found that rise, through virtue, was slow
and beset with barriers. His ambition had become impatient. Now that
he was a figure of local power and importance, temptation began to
assail him with offers of rapid elevation if only he would be
complaisant. In this situation, the father in him rose into the
ascendency; he had compromised and yielded, though always managing to
keep his dubious transactions secret. And now at length ambition ruled
him--though as yet not undisturbed, for conscience sometimes rose in
unexpected revolt and gave him many a bitter battle.
When his stenographer told Blake that Doctor and Mrs. Sherman were
waiting at the curb, he descended with something more like his usual
cast of countenance. Elsie and her husband were in the tonneau, and as
Blake crossed the sidewalk to the car she stretched out a nervous hand
and gave him a worn, excited smile.
"It is so good of you to take us out to The Sycamores for over night!"
she exclaimed. "It's such a pleasure--and such a relief!"
She did not need to explain that it was a relief because the motion,
the company, the change of scene, would help crowd from her mind the
dread of to-morrow when her husband would have to take the stand
against Doctor West; she did not need to explain this, because Blake's
eyes read it all in her pale, feverish face.
Blake shook hands with Doctor Sherman, dismissed his chauffeur, and
took the wheel. They spun out of the city and down into the River
Road--the favourite drive with Westville folk--which followed the
stream in broad sweeping curves and ran through arcades of
thick-bodied, bowing willows and sycamores lofty and severe, their
foliage now a drought-crisped brown. After half an hour the car turned
through a stone gateway into a grove of beech and elm and sycamore. At
a comfortable distance apart were perhaps a dozen houses whose outer
walls were slabs of trees with the bark still on. This was The
Sycamores, a little summer resort established by a small group of the
select families of Westville.
Blake stopped the car before one of these houses--"cabins" their
owners called them, though their primitiveness was all in that outer
shell of bark. A rather tall, straight, white-haired old lady, with a
sweet nobility and strength of face, was on the little porch to greet
them. She welcomed Elsie and her husband warmly and graciously. Then
with no relaxation of her natural dignity into emotional effusion, she
embraced her son and kissed him--for to her, as to Westville, he was
the same man as five years before, and to him she had given not only
the love a mother gives her only son, but the love she had formerly
borne her husband who, during his last years, had been to her a bitter
grief. Blake returned the kiss with no less feeling. His love of his
mother was the talk of Westville; it was the one noble sentiment which
he still allowed to sway him with all its original sincerity and
might.
They had tea out upon the porch, with its view of the river twinkling
down the easy hill between the trees. Mrs. Blake, seeing how agitated
Elsie was, and under what a strain was Doctor Sherman, and guessing
the cause, deftly guided the conversation away from to-morrow's trial.
She led the talk around to the lecture room which was being added to
Doctor Sherman's church--a topic of high interest to them all, for she
was a member of the church, Blake was chairman of the building
committee, and Doctor Sherman was treasurer of the committee and
active director of the work. This manoeuvre had but moderate
success. Blake carried his part of the conversation well enough, and
Elsie talked with a feverish interest which was too great a drain upon
her meagre strength. But the stress of Doctor Sherman, which he strove
to conceal, seemed to grow greater rather than decrease.
Presently Blake excused himself and Doctor Sherman, and the two men
strolled down a winding, root-obstructed path toward the river. As
they left the cabin behind them, Blake's manner became cold and hard,
as in his office, and Doctor Sherman's agitation, which he had with
such an effort kept in hand, began to escape his control. Once he
stumbled over the twisted root which a beech thrust across their path
and would have fallen had not Blake put out a swift hand and caught
him. Yet at this neither uttered a word, and in silence they
continued walking on till they reached a retired spot upon the river's
bank.
Here Doctor Sherman sank to a seat upon a mossy, rotting log. Blake,
erect, but leaning lightly against the scaling, mottled body of a
giant sycamore, at first gave no heed to his companion. He gazed
straight ahead down the river, emaciated by the drought till the
bowlders of its bottom protruded through the surface like so many
bones--with the ranks of austere sycamores keeping their stately watch
on either bank--with the sun, blood red in the September haze,
suspended above the river's west-most reach.
Thus the pair remained for several moments. Then Blake looked slowly
about at the minister.
"I brought you down here because there is something I want to tell
you," he said calmly.
"I supposed so; go ahead," responded Doctor Sherman in a choked voice,
his eyes upon the ground.
"You seem somewhat disturbed," remarked Blake in the same cold, even
tone.
"Disturbed!" cried Doctor Sherman. "Disturbed!"
His voice told how preposterously inadequate was the word. He did not
lift his eyes, but sat silent a moment, his white hands crushing one
another, his face bent upon the rotted wood beneath his feet.
"It's that business to-morrow!" he groaned; and at that he suddenly
sprang up and confronted Blake. His fine face was wildly haggard and
was working in convulsive agony. "My God," he burst out, "when I look
back at myself as I was four years ago, and then look at myself as I
am to-day--oh, I'm sick, sick!" A hand gripped the cloth over his
breast. "Why, when I came to Westville I was on fire to serve God with
all my heart and never a compromise! On fire to preach the new gospel
that the way to make people better is to make this an easier world for
people to be better in!"
That passion-shaken figure was not a pleasant thing to look upon.
Blake turned his eyes back to the glistening river and the sun, and
steeled himself.
"Yes, I remember you preached some great sermons in those days," he
commented in his cold voice. "And what happened to you?"
"You know what happened to me!" cried the young minister with his wild
passion. "You know well enough, even if you were not in that group of
prominent members who gave me to understand that I'd either have to
change my sermons or they'd have to change their minister!"
"At least they gave you a choice," returned Blake.
"And I made the wrong choice! I was at the beginning of my career--the
church here seemed a great chance for so young a man--and I did not
want to fail at the very beginning. And so--and so--I compromised!"
"Do you suppose you are the first man that has ever made a
compromise?"
"That compromise was the direct cause of to-morrow!" the young
clergyman went on in his passionate remorse. "That compromise was the
beginning of my fall. After the prominent members took me up, favoured
me, it became easy to blink my eyes at their business methods. And
then it became easy for me to convince myself that it would be all
right for me to gamble in stocks."
"That was your great mistake," said the dry voice of the motionless
figure against the tree. "A minister has no business to fool with the
stock market."
"But what was I to do?" Doctor Sherman cried desperately. "No money
behind me--the salary of a dry goods clerk--my wife up there, whom I
love better than my own life, needing delicacies, attention, a long
stay in Colorado--what other chance, I ask you, did I have of getting
the money?"
"Well, at any rate, you should have kept your fingers off that church
building fund."
"God, don't I realize that! But with the market falling, and all the
little I had about to be swept away, what else was a half frantic man
to do but to try to save himself with any money he could put his hands
upon?"
Blake shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, if luck was against you when that church money was also swept
away, luck was certainly with you when it happened that I was the one
to discover what you had done."
"So I thought, when you offered to replace the money and cover the
whole thing up. But, God, I never dreamed you'd exact such a price in
return!"
He gripped Blake's arm and shook it. His voice was a half-muffled
shriek.
"If you wanted the water-works, if you wanted to do this to Doctor
West, why did you pick on me to bring the accusation? There are men
who would never have minded it--men without conscience and without
character!"
Blake steadfastly kept his steely gaze upon the river.
"I believe I have answered that a number of times," he replied
in his hard, even tone. "I picked you because I needed a man of
character to give the charges weight. A minister, the president of
our reform body--no one else would serve so well. And I picked you
because--pardon me, if in my directness I seem brutal--I picked you
because you were all ready to my hand; you were in a situation where
you dared not refuse me. Also I picked you, instead of a man with no
character to lose, because I knew that you, having a character to lose
and not wanting to lose it, would be less likely than any one else
ever to break down and confess. I hope my answer is sufficiently
explicit."
Doctor Sherman stared at the erect, immobile figure.
"And you still intend," he asked in a dry, husky voice, "you still
intend to force me to go upon the stand to-morrow and commit----"
"I would not use so unpleasant a word if I were you."
"But you are going to force me to do it?"
"I am not going to force you. You referred a few minutes ago to the
time when you had a choice. Well, here is another time when you have a
choice."
"Choice?" cried Doctor Sherman eagerly.
"Yes. You can testify, or not testify, as you please. Only in reaching
your decision," added the dry, emotionless voice, "I suggest that you
do not forget that I have in my possession your signed confession of
that embezzlement."
"And you call that a choice?" cried Doctor Sherman. "When, if I
refuse, you'll expose me, ruin me forever, kill Elsie's love for me!
Do you call that a choice?"
"A choice, certainly. Perhaps you are inclined not to testify. If so,
very well. But before you make your decision I desire to inform you of
one fact. You will remember that I said in the beginning that I
brought you down here to tell you something."
"Yes. What is it?"
"Merely this. That Miss West has discovered that I am behind this
affair."
"What!" Doctor Sherman fell back a step, and his face filled with
sudden terror. "Then--she knows everything?"
"She knows little, but she suspects much. For instance, since she
knows that this is a plot, she is likely to suspect that every person
in any way connected with the affair is guilty of conspiracy."
"Even--even me?"
"Even you."
"Then--you think?"
Blake turned his face sharply about upon Doctor Sherman--the first
time since the beginning of their colloquy. It was his father's
face--his father in one of his most relentless, overriding moods--the
face of a man whom nothing can stop.
"I think," said he slowly, driving each word home, "that the only
chance for people who want to come out of this affair with a clean
name is to stick the thing right through as we planned."
Doctor Sherman did not speak.
"I tell you about Miss West for two reasons. First, in order to let
you know the danger you're in. Second, in order, in case you decided
to testify, that you may be forewarned and be prepared to outface her.
I believe you understand everything now?"
"Yes," was the almost breathless response.
"Then may I be allowed to ask what you are going to do--testify, or
not testify?"
The minister's hands opened and closed. He swallowed with difficulty.
"Testify, or not testify?" Blake insisted.
"Testify," whispered Doctor Sherman.
"Just as you choose," said Blake coldly.
The minister sank back to his seat upon the mossy log, and bowed his
head into his hands. "Oh, my God!" he breathed.
There followed a silence, during which Blake gazed upon the huddled
figure. Then he turned his set face down the glittering, dwindled
stream, and, one shoulder lightly against the sycamore, he watched the
sun there at the river's end sink softly down into its golden slumber.