Sometimes during the winter, when she glanced around her parlor on the
evenings of her receptions Bertha felt as if she was in a waking
dream,--so many people of whom she seemed to know nothing were gathered
about her; she saw strange faces on every side; a new element had
appeared, which was gradually crowding out the old, and she herself felt
that she was almost a stranger in it. Day by day, and by almost
imperceptible degrees at first, various mysterious duties had devolved
upon her. She had found herself calling at one house because the head of
it was a member of a committee, at another because its mistress was a
person whose influence over her husband it would be well to consider;
she had issued an invitation here because the recipients must be
pleased, another there because somebody was to be biassed in the right
direction. The persons thus to be pleased and biassed were by no means
invariably interesting. There was a stalwart Westerner or so, who made
themselves almost too readily at home; an occasional rigid New
Englander, who suspected a lack of purpose in the atmosphere; and a
stray Southerner, who exhibited a tendency towards a large and rather
exhaustive gallantry. As a rule, too, Bertha was obliged to admit that
she found the men more easily entertained than the women, who were most
of them new to their surroundings, and privately determined to do
themselves credit and not be imposed upon by appearances; and when this
was not the case were either timorously overpowered by a sense of their
inadequacy to the situation, or calmly intrenched behind a shield of
impassive composure, more discouraging than all else. It was not always
easy to enliven such material: to be always ready with the right thing
to say and do; to understand, as by inspiration, the intricacies of
every occasion and the requirements of every mental condition, and while
Bertha spared no effort, and used her every gift to the best of her
ability, the result, even when comparatively successful, was rather
productive of exhaustion, mental and physical.
"They don't care about me," she said to Arbuthnot one night, with a
rueful laugh, as she looked around her. "And I am always afraid of their
privately suspecting that I don't care about them. Sometimes when I look
at them I cannot help being overpowered by a sense of there being a kind
of ludicrousness in it all. Do you know, nearly every one of them has a
reason for being here, and it is never by any chance connected with my
reason for inviting them. I could give you some of the reasons. Shall I?
Some of them are feminine reasons, and some of them are masculine. That
woman at the end of the sofa--the thin, eager-looking one--comes because
she wishes to accustom herself to society. Her husband is a 'rising
man,' and she is in love with him, and has a hungry desire to keep pace
with him. The woman she is talking to has a husband who wants something
Senator Planefield may be induced to give him--and Senator Planefield is
on his native heath here; that showy little Southern widow has a large
claim against the government, and comes because she sees people she
thinks it best to know. She is wanted because she has a favorite cousin
who is given patriotically to opposing all measures not designed to
benefit the South. It is rather fantastic when you reflect upon it,
isn't it?"
"You know what I think about it without asking," answered Arbuthnot.
"Yes, you have told me," was her response; "but it will be all over
before long, and then--Ah! there is Senator Blundel! Do you know, it is
always a relief to me when he comes;" and she went toward him with a
brighter look than Arbuthnot had seen her wear at any time during the
entire evening.
It had taken her some time herself to decide why it was that she liked
Blundel and felt at ease with him; in fact, up to the present period she
had scarcely done more than decide that she did like him. She had not
found his manner become more polished as their acquaintance progressed;
he was neither gallant nor accomplished; he was always rather full of
himself, in a genuine, masculine way. He was blunt, and by no means
tactful; but she had never objected to him from the first, and after a
while she had become conscious of feeling relief, as she had put it to
Arbuthnot, when his strong, rather aggressive, personality presented
itself upon the scene. He was not difficult to entertain, at least.
Finding in her the best of listeners he entertained himself by talking
to her, and by making sharp jokes, at which they both laughed with equal
appreciation. He knew what to talk about too, and what subjects to joke
on; and, however apparently communicative his mood might be, his
opinions were always kept thriftily in hand.
"He seems to talk a good deal," Richard said, testily; "but, after all,
you don't find out much of what he really thinks."
Bertha had discovered this early in their acquaintance. If the object in
making the house attractive to him was that he might be led to commit
himself in any way during his visits, that object was scarcely attained.
When at last it appeared feasible to discuss the Westoria lands project
in his presence, he showed no unwillingness to listen or to ask
questions; but, the discussion being at an end, if notes had been
compared no one could have said that he had taken either side of the
question.
"He's balancing things," Planefield said. "I told you he would do it.
You may trust him not to speak until he has made up his mind which side
of the scale the weight is on."
When these discussions were being carried on Bertha had a fancy that he
was more interested than he appeared outwardly. Several times she had
observed that he asked her questions afterward which proved that no word
had dropped on his ear unheeded, and that he had, for some reason best
known to himself, reflected upon all he had heard. But their
acquaintance had a side entirely untouched by worldly machinations, and
it was this aspect of it which Bertha liked. There was something homely
and genuine about it. He paid her no compliments; he even occasionally
found fault with her habits, and what he regarded as the unnecessary
conventionality of some of her surroundings; but his good-natured
egotism never offended her. A widower without family, and immersed in
political business, he knew little of the comforts of home life. He
lived in two or three rooms, full of papers, books, and pigeon-holes,
and took his meals at a hotel. He found this convenient, if not
luxurious, and more than convenience it had never yet occurred to him to
expect or demand. But he was not too dull to appreciate the good which
fell in his way; and after spending an hour with the Amorys on two or
three occasions, when he had left the scene of his political labors
fagged and out of humor, he began to find pleasure and relief in his
unceremonious visits, and looked forward to them. There came an evening
when Bertha, in looking over some music, came upon a primitive ballad,
which proved to be among the recollections of his youth, and she aroused
him to enthusiasm by singing it. His musical taste was not remarkable
for its cultivation; he was strongly in favor of pronounced melody, and
was disposed to regard a song as incomplete without a chorus; but he
enjoyed himself when his prejudices were pandered to, and Bertha rather
respected his courageous, if benighted, frankness, and his obstinate
faith in his obsolete favorites. So she sang "Ben Bolt" to him, and "The
Harp that once through Tara's Halls," and others far less classical and
more florid, and while she sang he sat ungracefully, but comfortably,
by the fire, his eyes twinkling less watchfully, the rugged lines of his
blunt-featured face almost settling into repose, and sometimes when she
ended he roused himself with something like a sigh.
"Do you like it?" she would say. "Does it make you forget 'the gentleman
from Indiana' and the 'senator from Connecticut'?"
"I don't want to forget them," he would reply with dogged good-humor.
"They are not the kind of fellows it is safe to forget, but it makes my
recollections of them more agreeable."
But after a while there were times when he was not in the best of
humors, and when Bertha had a fancy that he was not entirely at ease or
pleased with herself. At such times his visits were brief and
unsatisfactory, and she frequently discovered that he regarded her with
a restless and perturbed expression, as if he was not quite certain of
his own opinions of her.
"He looks at me," she said to Richard, "as if he had moments of
suspecting me of something."
"Nonsense!" said Richard. "What could he suspect you of?"
"Of nothing," she answered. "I think that was what we agreed to call
it."
But she never failed to shrink when the twinkling eyes rested upon her
with the disturbed questioning in their glance, and the consciousness of
this shrinking was very bitter to her in secret.
When her guest approached her on the evening before referred to, she
detected at once that he was not in a condition of mind altogether
unruffled. The glances he cast on those about him were not encouraging,
and the few nods of recognition he bestowed were far from cordial; his
hair stood on end a trifle more aggressively than usual, and his short,
stout body expressed a degree of general dissatisfaction which it was
next to impossible to ignore.
Bertha did not attempt to ignore it.
"I will tell you something before you speak to me," she said. "Something
has put you out of humor."
He gave her a sharp glance, and then looked away over the heads of the
crowd.
"There is always enough to put a man out of humor," he said. "What a lot
of people you have here to-night! What do they come for?"
"I have just been telling Mr. Arbuthnot some of the reasons," she
answered. "They are very few of them good ones. You came hoping to
recover your spirits."
"I came to look at you," he said.
He was frequently blunt, but there was a bluntness about this speech
which surprised her. She answered him with a laugh, however.
"I am always worth looking at," she said. "And now you have seen me"--
He was looking at her by this time, and even more sharply than before.
It seemed as if he was bent upon reading in her face the answer to the
question he had asked of it before, but he evidently did not find it.
"There's something wrong with you," he said. "I don't know what it is. I
don't know what to make of you."
"If you could make anything of me but Bertha Amory," she replied, "you
might do a service to society; but that is out of the question, and as
to there being something wrong with me, there is something wrong with
all of us. There is something wrong with Mr. Arbuthnot, he is not
enjoying himself; there is something wrong with Senator Planefield, who
has been gloomy all the evening."
"Planefield," he said. "Ah! yes, there he is! Here pretty often, isn't
he?"
"He is a great friend of Richard's," she replied, with discretion.
"So I have heard," he returned. And then he gave his attention to
Planefield for a few minutes, as if he found him also an object of deep
interest. After this inspection he turned to Bertha again.
"Well," he said, "I suppose you enjoy all this, or you wouldn't do it?"
"You are not enjoying it," she replied. "It does not exhilarate you as I
hoped it would."
"I am out of humor," was his answer. "I told you so. I have just heard
something I don't like. I dropped in here to stay five minutes, and take
a look at you and see if"--
He checked himself and rubbed his upright hair impatiently, almost
angrily.
"I am not sure that you mightn't be enjoying yourself better," he said,
"and I should like to know something more of you than I do."
"If any information I can give you"--she began.
"Come," he said, with a sudden effort at better humor, "that is the way
you talk to Planefield. We are too good friends for that."
His shrewd eyes fixed themselves on her as if asking the unanswered
question again.
"Come!" he said. "I'm a blunt, old-fashioned fogy, but we are good,
honest friends,--and always have been."
She glanced across the room at Richard, who was talking to a stubborn
opposer of the great measure, and making himself delightful beyond
description. She wished for the moment that he was not quite so
picturesque and animated; then she gathered herself together.
"I think we have been," she said. "I hope you will believe so."
"Well," he answered, "I shouldn't like to believe anything else."
She thought that perhaps he had said more than he originally intended;
he changed the subject abruptly, made a few comments upon people near
them, asked a few questions, and finally went away, having scarcely
spoken to any one but herself.
"Why did he not remain longer?" Richard asked afterward, when the
guests were gone and they were talking the evening over.
"He was not in the mood to meet people," Bertha replied. "He said he had
heard something he did not like, and it had put him out of humor. I
think it was something about me."
"About you!" Richard exclaimed. "Why, in Heaven's name, about you?"
"His manner made me think so," she answered, coldly. "And it would not
be at all unnatural. I think we may begin to expect such things."
"Upon my word," said Richard, starting up, "I think that is going rather
far. Don't you see"--with righteous indignation--"what an imputation you
are casting on me? Do you suppose I would allow you to do anything
that--that"--
She raised her eyes and met his with an unwavering glance.
"Certainly not," she said, quickly. And his sentence remained
unfinished, not because he felt that his point had been admitted, but
because, for some mysterious reason, it suddenly became impossible for
him to say more.
More than some of late, when he had launched into one of his spasmodic
defences of himself, he had found himself checked by this intangible
power in her uplifted eyes, and he certainly did not feel his grievances
the less for the experiences.
Until during the last few months he had always counted it as one of his
wife's chief charms that there was nothing complicated about her, that
her methods were as simple and direct as a child's. It had never seemed
necessary to explain her. But he had not found this so of late. He had
even begun to feel that, though there was no outward breach in the tenor
of their lives, an almost impalpable barrier had risen between them. He
expressed no wish she did not endeavor to gratify her manner toward
himself, with the exception of the fleeting moments when he had felt the
check, was entirely unchanged; the spirit of her gayety ruled the house,
as it had always done; and yet he was not always sure of the exact
significance of her jests and laughter. The jests were clever, the laugh
had a light ring; but there was a difference which puzzled him, and
which, because he recognized in it some vague connection with himself,
he tried in his moments of leisure to explain. He had even spoken of it
to Colonel Tredennis on occasions when his mood was confidential.
"She used to be as frank as a child," he said, "and have the lightest
way in the world; and I liked it. I am a rather feather-headed fellow
myself, perhaps, and it suited me. But it is all gone now. When she
laughs I don't feel sure of her, and when she is silent I begin to
wonder what she is thinking of."
The thing she thought, the words she said to herself oftenest were: "It
will not last very long." She said them over to herself at moments she
could not have sustained herself under but for the consolation she found
in them. Beyond this time, when what she faced from day to day would be
over, she had not yet looked.
"It is a curious thing," she said to Arbuthnot, "but I seem to have
ceased even to think of the future. I wonder sometimes if very old
people do not feel so--as if there was nothing more to happen."
There was another person who found the events of the present sufficient
to exclude for the time being almost all thought of the future. This
person was Colonel Tredennis, who had found his responsibilities
increase upon him also,--not the least of these responsibilities being,
it must be confessed, that intimacy with Mr. Richard Amory of which
Bertha had spoken.
"He is very intimate with Richard," she had said, and she had every
reason for making the comment.
At first it had been the colonel who had made the advances, for reasons
of his own, but later it had not been necessary for him to make
advances. Having found relief in making his first reluctant
half-confidences, Richard had gradually fallen into making others. When
he had been overpowered by secret anxiety and nervous distrust of
everything, finding himself alone with the colonel, and admiring and
respecting above all things the self-control he saw in him,--a
self-control which meant safety and silence under all temptations to
betray the faintest shadow of a trust reposed in him,--it had been
impossible for him to resist the impulse to speak of the trials which
beset him; and, having once spoken of them, it was again impossible not
to go a little farther, and say more than he had at first intended. So
he had gone on from one step to another until there had come a day when
the colonel himself had checked him for an instant, feeling it only the
part of honor in the man who was the cooler of the two, and who had
nothing to risk or repent.
"Wait a moment," he said. "Remember that, though I have not asked
questions so far, I am ready to hear anything you choose to say, but
don't tell me what you might wish you had kept back to-morrow."
"The devil take it all," cried Richard, dashing his fist on the table.
"I must tell some one, or I shall go mad." But the misery which impelled
him notwithstanding, he always told his story in his own way, and gave
it a complexion more delicate than a less graceful historian might have
been generous enough to bestow. He had been too sanguine and
enthusiastic; he had made mistakes; he had been led by the duplicity of
a wily world into follies; he had been unfortunate; those more
experienced than himself had betrayed the confidence it had been only
natural he should repose in them. And throughout the labyrinth of the
relation he wound his way,--a graceful, agile, supple figure, lightly
avoiding an obstacle here, dexterously overstepping a barrier there, and
untouched by any shadow but that of misfortune.
At first he spoke chiefly of the complications which bore heavily upon
him; and these complications, arising entirely from the actions of
others, committed him to so little that the colonel listened with
apprehension more grave than the open confession of greater blunders
would have awakened in him. "He would tell more," he thought, "if there
were less to tell."
The grim fancy came to him sometimes as he listened, that it was as if
he watched a man circling about the edge of a volcano, drawing nearer
and nearer, until at last, in spite of himself, and impelled by some
dread necessity, he must plunge headlong in. And so Richard circled
about his crater: sometimes drawn nearer by the emotion and excitement
of the moment, sometimes withdrawing a trifle through a caution as
momentary, but in each of his circlings revealing a little more of the
truth. The revelations were principally connected with the Westoria
lands scheme, and were such in many instances as the colonel was not
wholly unprepared to hear. He had not looked on during the last year for
nothing, and often, when Richard had been in gay good spirits, and had
imagined himself telling nothing, his silent companion had heard his
pleasantries with forebodings which he could not control. He was not
deceived by any appearance of entire frankness, and knew that he had not
been told all until one dark and stormy night, as he sat in his room,
Richard was announced, and came in pallid, haggard, beaten by the rain,
and at the lowest ebb of depression. He had had a hard and bitter day of
it, and it had followed several others quite as hard and bitter; he had
been fagging about the Capitol, going the old rounds, using the old
arguments, trying new ones, overcoming one obstacle only to find himself
confronted with another, feeling that he was losing ground where it was
a matter of life and death that he should gain it; spirits and courage
deserting him just when he needed them most; and all this being over, he
dropped into his office to find awaiting him there letters containing
news which gave the final blow.
He sat down by the table and began his outpourings, graceful,
attractive, injured. The colonel thought him so, as he watched him and
listened, recognizing meanwhile the incompleteness of his recital, and
making up his mind that the time had come when it was safer that the
whole truth should be told. In the hours in which he had pondered upon
the subject he gradually decided that such an occasion would arrive; and
here it was.
So at a certain fitting juncture, just as Richard was lightly skirting a
delicate point, Tredennis leaned forward and laid his open hand on the
table with a curious simplicity of gesture.
"I think," he said, "you had better tell me the whole story. You have
never done it yet. What do you say?"
The boarder on the floor below, who had heard him walking to and fro on
the first New Year's night he had spent in Washington, and on many a
night since, heard his firm, regular tread again during the half hour in
which Richard told, in fitful outbursts, what he had not found himself
equal to telling before. It was not easy to tell it in a very clear and
connected manner; it was necessary to interlard it with many
explanations and extenuations, and even when these were supplied there
was a baldness about the facts, as they gradually grouped themselves
together, which it was not agreeable to contemplate; and Richard felt
this himself gallingly.
"I know how it appears to you," he said; "I know how it sounds! That is
the maddening side of it,--it looks so much worse than it really is!
There is not a man living who would accuse me of intentional wrong.
Confound it! I seem to have been forced into doing the very things it
was least natural to me to do! Bertha herself would say it,--she would
understand it. She is always just and generous!"
"Yes," said the colonel; "I should say she had been generous."
"You mean that I have betrayed her generosity!" cried Richard. "That,
of course! I expected it."
"You will find," said the colonel, "that others will say the same
thing."
He had heard even more than his worst misgivings had suggested to him,
and the shock of it had destroyed something of his self-control. For the
time being he was in no lenient mood.
"I know what people will say!" Richard exclaimed. "Do you suppose I have
not thought of it a thousand times? I know what I should say if I did
not know the circumstances. It is the circumstances that make the
difference."
"The fact that they are your circumstances, and not another man's,"
began Tredennis; but there he checked himself. "I beg your pardon," he
said, coldly. "I have no right to meet your confidence with blame. It
will do no good. If I can give you no help, I might better be silent.
There were circumstances which appeared extenuating to you, I suppose."
He was angered by his own anger, as he had often been before. He told
himself that he was making the matter a personal cause, as usual; but
how could he hear that her very generosity and simplicity had been used
against her by the man who should have guarded her interests as his
first duty, without burning with sharp and fierce indignation.
"If I understand you," he said, "your only hope of recovering what you
have lost lies in the success of the Westoria scheme?"
"Yes," answered Amory, with his forehead on his hands, "that is the
diabolical truth!"
"And you have lost?"
"Once I was driven into saying to you that if the thing should fail it
would mean ruin to me. That was the truth, too."
The colonel stood still.
"Ruin to you!" he said. "Ruin to your wife--ruin to your
children--serious loss to the old man who"--
"Who trusted me!" Richard finished, gnawing his white lips. "I see it in
exactly the same light myself, and it does not make it easier to bear.
That is the way a thing looks when it fails. Suppose it had succeeded.
It may succeed yet. They trusted me, and, I tell you, I trusted myself."
It was easy to see just what despair would seize him if the worst came
to the worst, and how powerless he would be in its clutches. He was like
a reed beaten by the wind, even now. A sudden paroxysm of fear fell upon
him.
"Great God!" he cried. "It can't fail! What could I say to them--how
could I explain it?"
A thousand wild thoughts surged through Tredennis' brain as he heard
him. The old sense of helplessness was strong upon him. To his upright
strength there seemed no way of judging fairly of, or dealing
practically with, such dishonor and weakness. What standard could be
applied to a man who lied agreeably in his very thoughts of himself and
his actions? He had scarcely made a statement during the last hour which
had not contained some airy falsehood. Of whom was it he thought in his
momentary anguish? Not of Bertha--not of her children--not of the gentle
old scholar, who had always been lenient with his faults. It was of
himself he was thinking--of Richard Amory, robbed of his refined
picturesqueness by mere circumstance and placed by bad luck at a baleful
disadvantage!
For a few minutes there was a silence. Richard sat with his brow upon
his hands, his elbows on the table before him. Tredennis paced to and
fro, looking downward. At length Richard raised his head. He did so
because Tredennis had stopped his walk.
"What is it?" he asked.
Tredennis walked over to him and sat down. He was pale, and wore a set
and rigid look, the chief characteristic of which was that it expressed
absolutely nothing. His voice was just as hard and expressed as little
when he spoke.
"I have a proposition to make to you," he said, "and I will preface it
by the statement that, as a business man, I am perfectly well aware that
it is almost madness to make it. I say 'almost.' Let it rest there. I
will assume the risks you have run in the Westoria scheme. Invest the
money you have charge of in something safer. You say there are chances
of success. I will take those chances."
"_What!_" cried Richard. "_What!_"
He sat upright, staring. He did not believe the evidence of his senses;
but Tredennis went on, without the quiver of a muscle, speaking
steadily, almost monotonously.
"I have money," he said. "More than you know, perhaps. I have had
recently a legacy which would of itself make me a comparatively rich
man. That I was not dependent upon my pay you knew before. I have no
family. I shall not marry. I am fond of your children, of Janey
particularly. I should have provided for her future in any case. You
have made a bad investment in these lands; transfer them to me and
invest in something safer."
"And if the bill fails to pass!" exclaimed Richard.
"If it fails to pass I shall have the land on my hands; if it passes I
shall have made something by a venture, and Janey will be the richer;
but, as it stands, the venture had better be mine than yours. You have
lost enough."
Richard gave his hair an excited toss backward, and stared at him as he
had done before; a slight, cold moisture broke out on his forehead.
"You mean"--he began, breathlessly.
"Do you remember," said Tredennis, "what I told you of the comments
people were beginning to make? They have assumed the form I told you
they would. It is best for--for your children that they should be put
an end to. If I assume these risks there will be no farther need for you
to use--to exert yourself." He began to look white about the mouth, and
through his iron stolidity there was something revealed before which
Richard felt himself quail. "The night that Blundel came in to your
wife's reception, and remained so short a time, he had heard a remark
upon the influence she was exerting over him, and it had had a bad
effect. The remark was made publicly at one of the hotels." He turned a
little whiter, and the something all the strength in him had held down
at the outset leaped to the surface. "I have no wife to--to use," he
said; "if I had, by Heavens, I would have spared her!"
He had held himself in hand and been silent a long time, but he could
not do it now.
"She is the mother of your children," he cried, clenching his great
hand. "And women are beginning to avoid her, and men to bandy her name
to and fro. You have deceived her; you have thrown away her fortune; you
have used her as an instrument in your schemes. _I_, who am only an
outsider, with no right to defend her--_I_ defend her for her father's
sake, for her child's, for her own! You are on the verge of ruin and
disgrace. I offer you the chance to retrieve yourself--to retrieve her!
Take it, if you are a man!"
Richard had fallen back in his chair breathless and ashen. In all his
imaginings of what the future might hold he had never thought of such a
possibility as this,--that it should be this man who would turn upon him
and place an interpretation so fiercely unsparing upon what he had done!
Under all his admiration and respect for the colonel there had been
hidden, it must be admitted, an almost unconscious touch of contempt for
him, as a rather heavy and unsophisticated personage, scarcely versatile
or agile enough, and formed in a mould somewhat obsolete and
quixotic,--a safe person to confide in, and one to invite confidence
passively by his belief in what was presented to him; a man to make a
good listener and to encourage one to believe in one's own statements,
certainly not a man to embarrass and discourage a historian by asking
difficult questions or translating too literally what was said. He had
not asked questions until to-night, and his face had said very little
for him on any occasion. Among other things Richard had secretly--though
leniently--felt him to be a trifle stolid, and had amiably forgiven him
for it. It was this very thing which made the sudden change appear so
keen an injustice and injury; it amounted to a breach of confidence,
that _he_ should have formed a deliberate and obstinate opinion of his
own, entirely unbiassed by the presentation of the case offered to him.
He had spoken more than once, it was true, in a manner which had
suggested prejudice; but it had been the prejudice of the primeval mind,
unable to adjust itself to modern conditions and easily disregarded by
more experienced. But now!--he was stolid no longer. His first words had
startled Richard beyond expression. His face said more for him than his
words; it burned white with the fire it had hidden so long; his great
frame quivered with the passion of the moment; when he had clenched his
hand it had been in the vain effort to hold it still; and yet the man
who saw it recognized in it only the wrath and scorn which had reference
to himself. Perhaps it was best that it should have been so,--best that
his triviality was so complete that he could see nothing which was not
in some way connected with his own personality.
"Tredennis," he gasped out, "you are terribly harsh! I did not think
you"--
"Even if I could lie and palter to you," said Tredennis, his clenched
hand still on the table, "this is not the time for it. I have tried
before to make you face the truth, but you have refused to do it.
Perhaps you had made yourself believe what you told me,--that no harm
was meant or done. _I_ know what harm has been done. I have heard the
talk of the hotel corridors and clubs!" His hand clenched itself harder
and he drew in a sharp breath.
"It is time that you should give this thing up," he continued, with
deadly determination. "And I am willing to shoulder it. Who else would
do the same thing?"
"No one else," said Richard, bitterly. "And it is not for my sake you do
it either; it is for the sake of some of your ideal fancies that are too
fine for us worldlings to understand, I swear!" And he felt it specially
hard that it was so.
"Yes," replied the colonel, "I suppose you might call it that. It is not
for your sake, as you say. It has been one of my fancies that a man
might even deny himself for the sake of an--an idea, and I am not
denying myself. I am only giving to your child, in one way, what I meant
to give to her in another. She would be willing to share it with her
mother, I think."
And then, somehow, Richard began to feel that this offer was a demand,
and that, even if his sanguine mood should come upon him again, he would
not find it exactly easy to avoid it. It seemed actually as if there was
something in this man--some principle of strength, of feeling, of
conviction--which almost constituted a right by which he might contend
for what he asked; and before it, in his temporary abasement and anguish
of mind, Richard Amory faltered. He said a great deal, it is true, and
argued his case as he had argued it before, being betrayed in the course
of the argument by the exigencies of the case to add facts as well as
fancies. He endeavored to adorn his position as much as possible, and,
naturally, his failure was not entire. There were hopes of the passage
of the bill, sometimes strong hopes, it seemed; if the money he had
invested had been his own; if it had not been for the failure of his
speculations in other quarters; if so much had not depended upon failure
and success,--he would have run all risks willingly. There were,
indeed, moments when it almost appeared that his companion was on the
point of making a capital investment, and being much favored thereby.
"It is really not half so bad as it seems," he said, gaining
cheerfulness as he talked. "But, after such a day as I have had, a man
loses courage and cannot look at things collectedly. I have been up and
down in the scale a score of times in the last eight hours. That is
where the wear and tear comes in. A great deal depends on Blundel; and I
had a talk with him which carried us farther than we have ever been
before."
"Farther," said Tredennis. "In what direction?"
Richard flushed slightly.
"I think I sounded him pretty well," he said. "There is no use mincing
matters; it has to be done. We have never been able to get at his views
of things exactly, and I won't say he went very far this afternoon; but
I was in a desperate mood, and--well, I think I reached bottom. He half
promised to call at the house this evening. I dare say he is with Bertha
now."
Something in his flush, which had a slightly excited and triumphant air,
something in his look and tone, caused Tredennis to start in his chair.
"What is he there for?" he said. "What do you mean?"
Richard thrust his hands in his pockets. For a moment he seemed to have
lost all his grace and refinement of charm,--for the moment he was a
distinctly coarse and undraped human being.
"He has gone to make an evening call," he said. "And if she manages him
as well as she has managed him before,--as well as she can manage any
man she chooses to take in hand, and yet not give him more than a smile
or so,--your investment, if you make it, may not turn out such a bad
one."