events, I'm going to walk with your K. O., and it's time I was getting
ready. Good-by."
"Good-by, Mrs. Wynyard."
"Day-day!" said Dorothy, from the divan.
"She's a crack-a-jack!" exclaimed young Nisbet, after she had gone.
"Mercy!" said Dorothy. "I never knew you to be so enthusiastic over any
one before. If you have any intention of falling in love with Aunt
Helen, I feel it to be my duty, as a friend and well-wisher, to warn you
in advance that there isn't the most remote show in the world for you."
"Oh, it's not that!" protested young Nisbet with that stupendous
earnestness which made people want to hug him. "Why, Mrs. Wynyard would
have me talked to a standstill in two or seven minutes! Imagine me
trying to make love to a dame like that! She'd lose me so quick you
couldn't see me for the dust. Besides"--
"Besides what?" asked Dorothy with an elaborate air of unconcern, as he
hesitated.
Young Nisbet was quite crimson now, and twitched at the creases in his
trousers where they passed over his knees, and turned in his toes
excessively.
"There's somebody else in the running!" he blurted out desperately.
There! It was out--a part of it, at least--not at all, to be sure, in
anything even remotely resembling one of the thousand manners he had
proposed to himself as effective, during long hours of wakefulness, when
there was nothing in the world but his crowding thoughts and the ticking
of his clock--but still, out! The ice was broken. It was impossible that
she should not understand. The rest would be easier.
Alas for young Nisbet! He was, as he himself acknowledged, not "up on
women!"
"Somebody else?" repeated Dorothy. "How ever did you find that out? She
only told _me_ about it twenty minutes ago."
Alas, alas, for young Nisbet! He had thought his feet upon the beach at
last, whereas they had but touched a sand-bar in passing over. The
under-tow of embarrassment was worse than ever now, and threatened to
drag him down.
"Oh, I don't mean Mrs. Wynyard. I wasn't talking of her--that is, I was,
at first--but afterwards--anyhow, I'm not talking of her now! When I say
there's somebody else, I mean--I mean"--
"I am going out for a moment, Dorothy--just over to the _doctor's_.
_How_ de do, Mr. Nisbet? _Wretched_ weather, _isn't_ it? Natalie's with
your father, my dear, and _I'll_ be back _almost_ immediately.
Er--_ahem_!"
Mrs. Rathbawne went through a kind of rudimentary calisthenic exercise,
which consisted of squaring her shoulders and drawing in her chin. It
was accompanied by a meaning glance at her daughter, and was designed as
an inconspicuous substitute for the frank injunction to "sit up
straight, my dear," upon which Dorothy had finally placed a ban.
"And _won't_ you feed the gold-fish, my dear?" she added. "I've been _so_
occupied, and the poor things haven't had a _crumb_ for three days. I've
just told Thomas to take a plate of bread in at _once_. I'm sure Mr.
_Nisbet_ won't mind: get him to _help_ you. Er--_ahem_! And I'll be back
in about fifteen minutes, or so."
For a time there was silence in the big, warm conservatory. Young Nisbet
had taken the dish from Dorothy's hands, and, after seating himself on
the low marble parapet surrounding the pool, devoted his energies to
feeding the gold-fish. He was thinking that it was all to be done over
again, and that it was harder than ever, if such a thing were possible,
to do. What was there about those few words which seemed to choke him?
For the moment, he took refuge in a commonplace question.
"Is it one of your duties to feed these persons?"
Dorothy laughed shortly, like a little chord of music.
"No--it's the Mater's peculiar privilege," she answered. "She adores the
stupid little beasts. Don't give them such large pieces, Mr. Nisbet. She
feeds them regularly herself,--or did, until Dad began to require so
much of her time. But lately, the house has been so upset, and she has
been doing such a lot of going out, and coming in"--
"Yes," put in young Nisbet dryly, "I've noticed the coming in part."
"So Natalie has been doing it for her," went on Dorothy, more rapidly.
"I suppose Natalie herself hasn't had the time, these last three days.
They _are_ hungry, aren't they? _Don't give them such large pieces, Mr.
Nisbet!_ Don't you see the poor things have only button-holes for
mouths?"
There was another long pause, before either spoke again.
"What defeats me about your mother," said young Nisbet slowly, "is the
way she manages to come in just at the wrong moment. At interruption,
she's the most star performer I've ever run up against. You don't mind
my saying that, do you? I'm not throwing any asparagus. I wouldn't be
disrespectful about her for the world. But really, for chopping into a
conversation, she's a dazzler!"
"She _is_ a little inopportune at times," admitted Dorothy.
"Inopportune? Yes,--she's all of that. When she marches in, I feel
exactly as if the boat had gybed, and the boom come over and knocked me
into thirty fathoms of water. Lord!"
"Why, how ridiculous!" said Dorothy. "There's nothing about the Mater to
be afraid of. She's the dearest, most innocent old thing in the world!
She just blunders along like that, and nobody is less aware of her
mistakes than she is. And, after all, why shouldn't she interrupt us, so
long as we're not saying anything in particular? And if we _were_
saying--anything in particular, we could always pick up the
conversation where we dropped it."
"That's just what I find it so hard to do!" confessed young Nisbet. "I'm
a stupid sort of lout, you know, Miss Rathbawne. I've never had half a
chance to practice talking to dames, and where other lads fuss like
experts, I just can't make good. I foozle every stroke. I'm an
ass--that's all!"
"You're nothing of the sort!" said Dorothy indignantly. "You're an
extremely attractive young man!"
"As good as the average in some ways, perhaps. But--how can I explain
what I mean?--there always comes a day when a chap wants to be more,
wants to be the best ever, in every way! That's the proposition I'm up
against now. I seem to be just a bundle of misfits, and--and--oh,
shucks! my line of talk is all crooked, and I can't tell you what the
trouble is, but"--
"Your liver's out of kilter," interpolated Dorothy.
"No, sir!" protested young Nisbet. "Nothing is ever out of kilter
inside me! If I'm nothing else, I'm blue-ribbon boy on the health
question. No, it's something I want, and that I'm pretty sure I can't
get."
"I know perfectly well what it is," said Dorothy, "and you haven't even
asked for it!"
Young Nisbet looked up suddenly.
"Do you mean?"--he stammered, "do you mean?"--
Outside, the front door slammed, and Mrs. Rathbawne's voice became
audible, inquiring Dorothy's whereabouts of the butler. The girl
laughed.
"There's the Mater back again," she said. "Oh, Mr. _Nisbet_!"
For young Nisbet had dropped dish and bread-crumbs into the pool with a
great splash, electrifying the gold-fish into unheard-of activity, and
had risen, at the same moment, to his feet. He stood before her, his
honest face blazing, his hands outstretched.
"I love you!" he said. "Will you marry me?"
And whether or not he received an audible reply to this question he
never knew,--only she was in his arms, and gold-fish might feast or
starve, for all he cared about them. The wide doors of perfect bliss
swung open before him, and young Nisbet passed within.
He was gazing ruefully into the water, as Mrs. Rathbawne entered. For
the first time in his experience, her presence did not embarrass him.
"I've dropped a dish into your pool, Mrs. Rathbawne," he said, "and
scared the gold-fish into blue conniption fits. Look how they are
scurrying around. I hope I haven't done them any harm."
"Oh, no," answered Mrs. Rathbawne placidly. "They are getting _so_ fat
that I should _think_ a little exercise, _now_ and again, would be
_good_ for them. We _might_ drop a dish into the pool every week or so,
Dorothy, just to stir them up."
"It might go for a while," said young Nisbet, "but any old football
player like myself, Mrs. Rathbawne, will tell you that you can't work
the same trick more than just a certain number of times."
"Interruption, for example!" added Dorothy, and laughed across at him,
deliciously, with her eyes.
XII
DIOGENES
It was during the tenth week of the strike at the Rathbawne Mills that
the "Kenton City Record" made its long-remembered attack upon
Lieutenant-Governor Barclay. The arraignment was one unparalleled for
venom, even in the columns of that most notoriously scurrilous journal
in the state, and, withal, there was about it a devilish ingenuity, a
distortion of facts so slight as to defy refutation, and so plausible as
to carry conviction. It was the last blow in the long series of
discouragements which Barclay had suffered since his inauguration, and
for the moment he was completely unmanned. He was at no loss, however,
to trace the source from which the ingeniously perverted facts had been
obtained. Not even McGrath, with his intimate knowledge of all that went
forward at the capitol, could have supplied information so detailed.
The hand of Elijah Abbott was traceable in every line of the attack.
Their conversation, on the afternoon when he had first spoken to Barclay
of the impending strike, was reproduced almost word for word, as well as
that on the occasion when McGrath had been present, and therefrom the
"Record" went on to deduce that not even Peter Rathbawne, with all his
obstinacy, all his blindness to the welfare of his employees, was
responsible for their present destitution in the same sense as was the
Lieutenant-Governor, who might have avoided the strike by a conciliatory
word, and who, instead, had advised Mr. Rathbawne to fight the
working-people until the last cent of their money should be exhausted
and the last drop of their blood should be shed.
"Incompetency," said the article in part, "is what we long since learned
to expect from John Hamilton Barclay. Gross neglect of public duty,
flagrant callousness to responsibility, contemptuous indifference to the
interests of the citizens whose votes placed him where he is,--all
these have been part and parcel of his attitude since the unfortunate
moment of his election. But even in him we had not looked for the
incredible spectacle of a public official deliberately precipitating the
incalculable distress which has followed in the wake of the strike at
the Rathbawne Mills. Overburdened with the cares of office, in a single
instance the Governor of Alleghenia turned over a question of vital
significance to the lieutenant from whom he had every reason to expect
compliance and support. Even so, he was careful to point out a line of
action by which the impending calamity might readily have been avoided.
And what was the result? Not only in total disregard of plain duty, but
in direct disobedience of the orders of his superior, the
Lieutenant-Governor of Alleghenia threw his influence into the scale to
outweigh law and order, and brought about the deplorable destitution now
facing the families of four thousand martyrs to principle. When men are
driven to desperation, when women turn to shame in order to maintain
life, when children are heard crying in our streets for bread, to whom
shall we point as the author of it all? To Peter Rathbawne, a poor,
doddering old man, barely responsible now, if rumor is to be believed,
for what he does? No! To John Hamilton Barclay, Lieutenant-Governor of
Alleghenia!"
This, and much more in the same strain, while passed over as sensational
bombast by the better element, did not fail of its effect upon the
strikers. A mass-meeting, held that morning, denounced Barclay in a set
of resolutions, as a traitor to his office and as the avowed enemy of
labor, and demanded his impeachment on the ground of neglect of duty.
During the day, half a score of threatening letters came to his office.
But what hurt him most, though he almost smiled at his own
sensitiveness, was that the doormen and porters at the Capitol greeted
his morning nod with a stare, and even the little office-boy, bending
low over his table in the ante-room, did not look up for the customary
wink. For his mother was a trimmer at the Rathbawne Mills.
Once in his office, the Lieutenant-Governor found it impossible to
concentrate his mind upon the work before him. Sentence after sentence,
the words of his arraignment marched through his mind, as he sat with
his elbows on the desk and his chin in his doubled fists. A single
reading seemed to have stamped them indelibly and forever upon his
memory. Baffled by conflicting reflections he began, for the first time,
to doubt whether his had been the course of conscience, or merely that
of pride and perversity. Was not the "Record" right, perhaps, after all?
If it was true that the strike was driving men to crime and women to the
streets--and if it was not, as yet, true, it soon must be--who, indeed,
was to blame if not he himself, who had said "Fight them!" when he might
have kept peace by a word?
Suddenly, the Lieutenant-Governor rose, and, crossing the room to where
the arms of Alleghenia hung upon the wall, took down the frame, laid
it, face up, upon the table, and, bending down, studied it intently. The
beautifully executed nude figures of Art and Labor stared steadfastly
back at him, their muscular hands grasping the circular shield, strength
and endurance in every line of their necks, shoulders, and thighs,
purity and purpose in their blue eyes and square-cut jaws. He was as
motionless as they for full five minutes. Presently his finger moved
slowly across the frame, and he said, quite softly:
"_Justitia--Lex--Integritas._"
Then he looked up, straight before him, out of the open window, where an
encircling wistaria was dotted with minute sprouts of green, and up at
the clear, wide sky.
"I'm right!" he said aloud. "I'm right!"
* * * * *
At five that afternoon, Spencer Cavendish set out upon the most
unpleasant assignment which had ever fallen to his lot. When Payson had
told him that he was to procure an interview with Peter Rathbawne for
the "Sentinel," with a special eye to the mill-owner's failing health,
as reported in the morning's "Record," he had shrunk back instinctively
from a task so distasteful, and was on the point of refusing. But two
considerations checked this impulse. If the thing were to be done at
all, he thought, surely it had better be the work of one friendly to the
Rathbawnes and with their interests at heart than that of a bungling
outsider, with it in his power to hurt them beyond expression. The
argument was plausible, but behind its logic, at the back of Cavendish's
brain, there lay another reason, without which the first had been
insufficient to persuade him. He wanted to see Natalie again--to meet
her under the shield of some compatible excuse, so that he should not
seem to have sought her of his own will. He was thirsty for a word from
her, thirsty with the pitiable thirst of the shipwrecked sailor who
knows a swallow of salt water will but increase his torture, and who
craves it, none the less. Long since, he had forfeited his right to her
friendship--no sophistry could blind him to that. Moreover the ocean of
degradation not only lay behind him; it lay in front as well. It was as
he had told Barclay. He stood upon an island, not the mainland, of
redemption, and another plunge was inevitable.
What he expected to gain by a word with Natalie Rathbawne, Cavendish
himself could hardly have told. At most, he was conscious of a faint
hope that in some turn or twist of the conversation he might have a
chance of thanking her, of telling her that he rejoiced in her
happiness, and of bidding her good-by. For paramount in his mind lay the
thought of his approaching downfall, inevitable, utter, and final. He
did not attempt to deceive himself. He knew what was coming. It had come
before.
When Cavendish had sent in his card, a servant showed him through the
library into the conservatory, where Peter Rathbawne was seated in a
deep rattan chair watching his daughter, who stood at his side tossing
bread-crumbs to the gold-fish in the circular central pool. They both
turned at the sound of his footsteps, and Natalie held out her hand.
"So you've come at last!" she said. "I should think it was quite time.
Dad, you remember Mr. Cavendish, don't you?"
"Yes," answered her father. "Oh, yes!"
Rathbawne's voice was without life, his face almost wholly void of
expression. Though he glanced at Cavendish, it was with the blank stare
of a delirious person whose attention is unconsciously caught by an
unusual noise rather than with any evidence of direct interest, and he
took no further part in the conversation, nor even seemed to realize
that his companions were speaking. When he had answered his daughter's
question and looked at Cavendish, he leaned back in his chair, and
wearily closed his eyes.
"He is very much changed since you saw him," said the girl in a lower
tone, turning again to the pool, "and it's all come about in the past
six weeks. The strike has had a most curious, a most pathetic effect
upon him. Even the doctor is at a loss to account for it. I think that
I am, perhaps, the only one who really understands. He has always been
so proud of his mills and of his people, so loyal to them, so like a
father to them, one and all, that to have them turn against him like
this, and, what is worse, get to drinking and rioting, has almost broken
his heart. The doctor says only one thing can save him, and that is to
see the mills going again and the people happy and prosperous, as they
were before. And who knows when that will be? For, feeble and broken as
he is, he will never give in to the Union. Of that I'm sure."
"I'm very sorry," said Cavendish softly. One look at Rathbawne had been
enough to show him that the interview for which he had been sent was an
impossibility. One look at Natalie sufficed to banish from his mind
every thought save that of her pitiful pallor and the pathetic quiver of
her lips.
"I had no idea it was as bad as this," he continued. "Can't anything be
done? You are far from being in good shape yourself, Miss Rathbawne."
"Tired and dispirited, that's all," she answered, trying to smile. "And
I fear nothing can be done as long as our fate lies in Governor Abbott's
hands. There's no use in harping on that, though. You know as well as I
what we have to expect from him. Did you see the attack on Mr. Barclay
this morning?"
"An infamous libel!" exclaimed Cavendish hotly.
Miss Rathbawne crumbled the bread between her fingers, and resumed her
feeding of the gold-fish.
"You must know that I am the last person in the world to need that
assurance," she said slowly. "It is only another thread in all the
hideous tissue of injustice and iniquity which has been wrapped about us
like a pall. What a shame, is it not, that such a man as he should be
powerless to do the work I think God intended for him? And what a shame
that Alleghenia, needing his clear head and his strong arm and his
loyal heart as she does in this hour of emergency, should only be
sneering at him as a coward and a cad!"
"I cannot believe," answered Cavendish, "that the venom of the 'Record'
is to be taken as the sentiment of the state. There must be many--there
must be a majority of Alleghenians who know, as we know, that no better
man breathes than John Barclay."
"Thank you," said the girl.
In the open spaces of water between the lily-pads the fat indolent
gold-fish mouthed at the crumbs, stirring the silence with little
sucking sounds, and sending tiny ripples widening on all sides. One
alone, dingy yellow in color, moped apart from his fellows, and took no
interest in the banquet.
"That one's a cynic," said Miss Rathbawne presently. "My subtlest
cajoleries never win him from that attitude of sneering contempt. The
others get all the tid-bits, and he doesn't seem to care. He isn't even
ornamental--he's in a class by himself. I call him Diogenes, and I'm
thinking of buying him a tub all for himself, where he can sulk in
solitary grandeur to his heart's content."
"Perhaps not altogether in a class by himself," said Cavendish. "There
are others, you know, who make no use of their opportunities, and who
can never hope to be anything but ugly and useless, while their fellows
are getting all the good things of life, and enjoying them, and giving
pleasure of one kind or another into the bargain."
Something in his tone caused Natalie to look at him suddenly.