Chapter 10

"You will find your regular mechanician waiting for you when you go out again," he observed. "You can learn much with him, if you choose, Corrie, although he is no Rupert. Take your machine where and how you please; it is all practice. I will see you again at dinner, unless you grow tired before then and would like to come up to the draughting-room to meet my chief engineer and designer."

Corrie looked down, crumpling a fold of the table cloth between nervous fingers.

"Gerard, do they know?" he asked, his voice low. "I mean, how you were hurt and what Rupert accuses me of?"

"Certainly not. You are no one to them but my new driver."

A still ruddier color tinged the young face, the fair head bent a little lower.

"That is all I want to be, ever. Thank you, Gerard; I'll make good."

XII

THE MAKING GOOD

Corrie did not slip control during the weeks that followed. There was no running wild to record. At first he used to come in from his driving reddened by more than the cold wind, and there were rumors current of certain vigorous word-duels between him and his sullen assistant, Devlin. But he never complained to Gerard or exhibited any smart of excoriated vanity. The testers accepted him as a little more than their equal, after watching him drive, and he gladly met their comradeship with his own. It was very easy to like Corrie; soon he was surrounded by friends.

Only Jack Rupert never spoke to him. The thing was not done obtrusively, but it was done. He never openly slighted Corrie Rose or showed him discourtesy, he simply failed to come in contact with him. And Corrie tacitly accepted the situation, avoiding the inflexible mechanician, on his part. So winter shut in, with blizzards that frequently drove everyone off the roads until snow-ploughs and shovels had accomplished their work. Then Gerard would summon Corrie to the inside of the huge, reverberant factory, where amid its lesser brothers the Titan racing machine was slowly growing to completion; the Titan of Gerard's past speed-visions, the dream-planned car that was now for another's control. He taught, and Corrie learned hungrily.

It was in February Corrie first noticed that Gerard and Rupert simultaneously disappeared for an hour and a half every morning. No one knew why, or had interested enough to speculate, it seemed. Gerard always sent Corrie off on some duty, at that time each day, and only accidental circumstances awoke the young driver's attention to a custom without an explanation.

Of course, Corrie asked no questions. He was not temperamentally curious and he was well-bred. But, returning unexpectedly to the house, one morning in early March, he passed Rupert going out and realized himself encroaching on the tacitly established period of retirement. Sobered, half-doubtful of his course, he ran up the stairs, and in the upper hall came suddenly upon Gerard leaning against the wall.

"Gerard!" Corrie exclaimed; goggles and gloves fell to the floor as he sprang to his friend. "Gerard, you're ill? Let me help you--lean on me! I'm strong enough to _carry_ you."

"It is nothing," Gerard panted. "I tried to come after Rupert in too much of a hurry, that's all. I remembered something I had forgotten to tell him. What are you doing here? I sent you out."

Once Corrie would have flashed hot retort to a reproof certainly undeserved, not now.

"I am sorry; I didn't understand," he apologized. "You never said I _must_ stay out. Let me help you, get you something."

"I know; I'm unreasonable!" Gerard straightened himself. "Never mind me, Corrie; I am all right now."

He was white with a singular pallor that Corrie was too inexperienced to recognize, but he smiled reassurance to his assistant and himself led the way to the room opposite.

"There is some dose in the glass on the table," he indicated, finding a chair. "I might drink it, if I had it here. And, don't you want to get me a cigarette?"

In silence Corrie complied with the requests. Beside the slight, colorless Gerard, he radiated vigorous health and that scintillant freshness drawn from days passed in sunlight and sweet air, but his eyes at this moment held a desperate anxiety and unrest that left the advantage of contrast to his companion's clear tranquillity of regard.

"You are getting worse," he declared abruptly. "There is no use of trying to spare my feelings, Gerard; instead of gaining, you are losing strength."

"I beg your pardon; I am getting better," Gerard corrected with perfect assurance. He put aside his glass and leaned back in his chair. "You do not in the least know what you are talking about. Since you are here, we might get a bit of business done that I had meant to leave until you came in to luncheon. You understand that the formalities must be preserved; are you willing to sign one of our regular driver's contracts, to drive for the Mercury Company this year, and for no one else?"

"I will do," said Corrie, "whatever you want. Is this the paper?"

He took up a pen and, still standing, wrote his name across the foot of the document, the other man's attentive gaze following his movements.

"Is that the way you sign legal papers, Corrie, without reading them?"

The blue eyes gave the questioner one expressive glance.

"You gave it to me," was the answer.

Gerard contemplated him, then drew another printed sheet from a pile on the desk and pushed it across.

"All right. I want you to sign this, too," he signified.

As carelessly as before, Corrie set down his signature and turned away from the half-folded page.

"I came back early because I had a letter from Flavia," he explained. "I wanted to answer it right away. She says that father doesn't intend to come home until autumn. I don't believe she likes it much, but of course she wouldn't tell him so. He has enough to stand."

Gerard drew the two papers towards him and put them into a drawer. It is hard to be consistent; the temptation of seeing Corrie read Flavia's weekly letters had long since vanquished the resolution of the man whose love for her seemed to himself to illustrate that the economies of Nature do not include human passion. Corrie found a willing, if mute, listener to all confidences in regard to his sister.

"She has never told Mr. Rose that you are with me?" Gerard asked, to-day.

"No," he responded, surprised. "Oh no! She promised me that, the night before I left home."

"Yet, living so close in thought with your father as she does, I should have fancied----"

"That she couldn't help telling him? I don't know who started that story that women can't keep secrets." Corrie laughed mirthlessly. "From what I have seen, they can keep quiet a secret that would tear itself out of any man I ever met, if the wrench killed him."

He unclasped the heavy fur coat he still wore and pushed it aside from his throat with an impatient air of oppression.

"But Flavia could not hurt anyone, and she knows that would hurt me," he added, more gently.

Flavia could not hurt anyone. Allan Gerard considered that statement, not so much in bitterness as in a wonder that made all life uncertain. He recalled the fountain arcade of rose-colored columns and delicate lights, the sweetly demure girl who waited there for her brother, and her last brief glance of virginal candor and innocently unconscious confession. Flavia could not hurt anyone. Yet she had dismissed the man who loved her, without even granting him the poor alms of courteous sympathy, had left him to learn her decision from her silence. Long since, he had decided that he had been condemned as the cause of her beloved brother's downfall, and now he again excused her hardness to himself as a result of her over-tenderness for Corrie. Either that, or he himself had somehow failed, in some way had been found lacking.

He never did Flavia Rose so much wrong as to suppose her affected by the physical injury he had suffered. If she had loved him, no such change could have come between them. He knew that no marring of her beauty would have had effect upon his steadfast love for her, and he rated her far above himself in all good things.

It was quite a quarter-hour before Gerard looked up and saw that Corrie had remained standing by the table in an abstraction complete as his own, lips pressed shut and straight brows contracted. Startled out of self-contemplation, the older man leaned forward to give his aid to a moment whose bitterness he divined.

"Corrie, take off your furs and come to luncheon," he directed, crisply energetic. "You have got to take out the Titan for its first run, this afternoon."

Effectively aroused, Corrie swung around.

"The Titan?" he echoed. "To-day?"

"Yes. Come on."

In the thin, clear March sunshine, two hours later, the Mercury Titan rolled out onto the mile track, shaking earth and air with its roar and vibrant clamor. The force of testers and factory operatives crowded about, busy men found time to cluster at the buildings' doors and windows in keen interest.

Opposite Gerard and his little staff, the men who had designed and evoked the winged monster, Corrie Rose was in his seat, flushed with excitement, but collected and at home in the powerful machine which he was to be the first to test and master. "Until you give it to its racing driver, let no one except me take it?" he had begged of Gerard. And Gerard had given the promise, smiling oddly.

But if Corrie was eager for the start, his mechanician palpably was not. The place beside the driver remained vacant until the last moment, when the reluctant Devlin slowly climbed into it.

"Devlin is nervous," Gerard gravely commented, to his own one-time mechanician. "He is a very good factory man, but this is too big work for him. If they were going on a longer trip, I should not like to send Corrie out with him."

"I ain't denying anything," snapped Rupert, scowling after the departing car as it leaped for the open track like an animal unleashed.

That first afternoon's trial of the Mercury Titan proved it much faster than either the track or road would stand. Also, Corrie Rose was proved fully capable of handling his wheeled projectile. When he came in, at dusk, the testers regarded him with unconcealed respect; there was genuine admiration mingled with the congratulations offered him by the car's designers. He had become, after Gerard, the most conspicuous man in the great automobile plant.

Devlin crawled out of his seat and complained of nausea.

On the third day of practice, when Corrie brought the car back to the factory at noon, Rupert suddenly walked up to him and broke the silence of months.

"What's the matter with your fifth cylinder?" he demanded.

Amazed, Corrie slipped off his mask and turned his fatigued face to the questioner.

"I couldn't help it," he deprecated, quite humbly. "Devlin was too busy holding on to do much, and I was driving."

Rupert darted a glance of blighting contempt at the sullen Devlin, and walked away.

Gerard had not seen the episode, nor did it reach his ears. But he was chatting with Corrie, late on the same afternoon, when Rupert emerged from the factory and thrust an overcoat at the young driver who stood beside his car.

"I ain't hanging out a diploma," he stated acridly, "but this ain't summer by some months and you're qualifying for a hospital--which I don't guess is what you were brought here for."

"Thank you," faltered Corrie, and wonderingly put on the garment.

Gerard continued to survey the machine before him, not a flicker crossing his expression or betraying consciousness of any unusual event. Rupert's swift look of blended defiance and embarrassment directed towards his chief glided off an impenetrable surface.

Corrie followed with wistful eyes the mechanician's return to the building.

"I knew a West Point fellow, once, who had been given the 'silence' treatment--I used to wonder why he minded so much," he laughed, apropos of nothing, but his voice caught.

It was the first time Corrie had ever admitted knowledge of Rupert's ostracism of him, or revealed how deeply the hurt had been felt. Gerard laid a caressing hand on his shoulder, wisely saying nothing. After a moment Corrie grasped the Titan's steering-wheel and swung himself into his seat behind it, but paused before summoning Devlin to start the motor, and rewarded Gerard's tact by another impulsive confidence, spoken just audibly:

"I miss my father all the time. I think I always will. And I would miss him most if he came home and I had to live along side of him. He--well, he stays in Europe. I'll put up the car for the night, if you're ready to have me; it's getting pretty dark to run any more."

"The car is in your hands; put it where you please, when you please," responded Gerard; that mark of trust seemed the only comfort he could offer, then; he was too fine not to ignore the other issues.

XIII

THE TITAN'S DRIVER

There was a letter for Corrie in the evening mail, next day. At least, there was an envelope containing a gaudy picture-postal. It was at this last that Corrie was gazing, when Gerard came to remind him that dinner waited, and of it he first spoke.

"It's from Isabel. I--she need not have sent it!" He abruptly pushed the card across the table toward Gerard and turned away to complete his preparations.

"A postal?"

"Oh, yes. She used to be fond of writing long letters, but she has quit the habit. Flavia tells me she has not received but three postal-cards from Isabel since they parted, although they used to be such chums."

"I am to read?"

"If you like."

The red and green landscape represented, libellously, the Natural Bridge of Virginia. Across the glazed surface ran a few blurred lines of script:

"Dear Corrie: May I marry someone else, if I want to, or do you say not? I.R."

Gerard laid down the card and regarded, troubled, his companion's straight shoulders and the back of his erect head, the only view afforded as Corrie stood before his mirror employing a pair of military brushes upon his unruly blond hair.

"I did not know that the affair--that matters were so far arranged between you and your cousin," he said.

He spoke with hesitation, uncertain of how to venture upon a subject never before broached between them, yet feeling speech tacitly invited. In the stress of his own suffering at the time following the accident, preoccupied by the witnessing of Corrie's hard punishment of dishonor and grief and his struggle to fall no lower under it, he had forgotten that the boy-man also had to bear the loss of the girl upon whom he had spent his first love. For it required no deep insight to recognize that Isabel Rose was not the type of woman who is a refuge in time of disaster.

But the embarrassment was his alone; Corrie answered without confusion:

"We were engaged, yes. But that is ended. She had no need to write. She might have known, or have taken it for granted."

Gerard studied the view presented of his companion, striving to draw some conclusion from pose or tone. He had no mind to have his work of months marred and his driver distracted by an interlude of useless sentimentality; the temptation to congratulate Corrie upon his freedom from an unsuitable marriage was almost too strong. But what he actually said was quite different, and escaped from his lips without consideration of its effect.

"I should not have supposed your cousin had so fine and strict a sense of honor."

The oval brush slipped through Corrie's fingers and fell to the floor, rolling jerkily away with the light glinting on its silver mounting in a series of heliographic flashes. The owner stooped to recover it, groping for the conspicuous object as if the room were dark instead of flooded with the brightness of late afternoon.

"What do you mean?" he demanded. "What did you say? Her sense of honor----?"

"I beg your pardon," Gerard promptly apologized, aware of worse than indiscretion. "I, really, Corrie, I hardly realized what I was saying. Certainly I did not mean that the way it sounded. I only intended to say----"

What had he intended to say? What could he substitute for the spoken truth that would not wound the hearer either for himself or for the girl he loved?

"I only meant," he recommenced, "that her asking your formal release showed a careful punctiliousness not common."

Corrie had recovered his brush, now. He laid it on the chiffonier before answering.

"How do we know what is common? What is honor, anyway; what other people see or what you are? I fancy she wouldn't have written if she hadn't been sure of what I'd say," he retorted, with the first cynicism Gerard ever had seen in him. "She likes me to take the responsibility, that's about all. Well, I've done it. Did you say I was keeping dinner waiting?"

This of the once-adored Isabel! However much relief the older man felt, there came with it a sensation of shock and regret. Had Corrie lost so much of his youth, unsuspected by his daily companion? Where were the old illusions which should have blurred this sharp judgment? He made some brief reply, and presently they went downstairs.

The dinner was rather a silent affair.

"Do you want to drive me into town?" Gerard inquired, at its conclusion. "I find that I must see Carruthers before he leaves for the East, and he is stopping at the Hotel Marion. If you are tired, I will get my chauffeur."

"I should like it," Corrie exclaimed, rising eagerly. "I'll get the car. Your car?"

"I should think so. I am not exactly anxious to drive into town with your racing machine, although we have got to make fair time in order to catch him before his train leaves."

Corrie laughed, turning away.

"I'll make the time, all right," he promised. "Your roadster isn't so pretty slow, considering. I'll be at the door in three minutes."

He was, driving hatless and without a motor-mask in the fresh spring air.

"No overcoat?" Gerard disapproved. "What would Rupert say?"

Corrie flushed like a complimented girl; that the mechanician should have admitted him to any intercourse, however cold and slight, moved him so deeply that even Gerard's allusion was too much.

"I have it with me; I don't need it," he evaded hurriedly. "Ready?"

"Ready."

The car sprang forward.

The yellow country road merged into macadam, the macadam into asphalt. They were in the city, presently, slowly rolling through streets filled with playing children who garnered the last daylight moments. On one corner a hand-organ was performing, and the group disporting itself to the flat, tinkling music broke apart to shout after the car, waving grimy hands.

"Hello, Mr. Corrie!" one shrill voice came to the motorists.

The driver lifted his hand in salute, glancing at his companion with a blended mischief and diffidence so delightful, so much like the old merry Corrie Rose, that Gerard laughed in sheer sympathy of pleasure.

"They seem to know you, Corrie?"

"They do. At least, what they call knowing me. You see, I blew out a tire here, on the way home after you sent me in to the postoffice, last week, and about three dozen kiddies gathered around to watch me change it. Bully little frogs; they nearly lost all the kit of tools trying to help me. And talk! So I--well, I gave them all a spin about the square, in blocks of as many as could hang on at a time, and I set up the ice creams all around. It seemed my treat. You don't mind? I suppose they _are_ full of germs and want washing, but I just remembered they were kids."

"I certainly do not mind," Gerard assured. He wanted to say something more, but found his thoughts singularly inarticulate. There was a certain verse commencing with "Inasmuch----" that he would have quoted to Corrie, had they been of any blood but the reticent Saxon. "They remembered part of your name," he added instead.

"That was all I told them. The Hotel Marion?"

"Yes. Speed up all you dare, our time is short."

The time was indeed short. As they came down the avenue, Gerard uttered an exclamation, catching sight of a man who descended the hotel steps toward a carriage.

"Cross the street! There he goes. Quick, or we'll lose him! Cross over."

He was promptly obeyed. The car shot across the street regardless of traffic rules, and was brought shuddering to a halt beside the left-hand curb. Gerard sprang out and went to join the man who had stopped beside the carriage to wait for his pursuer.

Left in the car, Corrie took a leisurely survey of the street, preparatory to withdrawing from his illegal situation. But it was already too late. Even while he looked, a blue-garbed figure appeared around a corner, perceived the south-bound automobile beside the east curb and marched upon the offender.

To some temperaments there is an undeniable exhilaration in conflict. Corrie puckered his lips to a soundless whistle, settled back in his seat, and waited.

"What are you doing over here?" the officer challenged, arriving. "Don't you know how to drive? You're under arrest."

"What for?" Corrie asked unmoved.

"What for? How did you get a chauffeur's license? For driving on the wrong side of the street, of course."

"I'm not driving."

"Don't be funny, young fellow! For stopping on the wrong side, if you like it better, then."

"I'm not stopping."

"You----?"

"I am stopped. You did not see me do it. I might have come out of one of those buildings, or have come up on one of those sidewalk elevators, for all you know. You can't arrest me for something you didn't see me do, man. You wouldn't if you could; I can see you have a sweet disposition."

The officer stared, and took a more careful survey of his antagonist.

"You're no chauffeur, I guess," he pronounced dryly.

"Well, I've got a license."

"That may be. Anyway, chauffeur or college student, you can't stay here with that machine."

"You want me to leave? Certainly, officer, I always obey the law. Here comes my friend; I'll go now."

The policeman's face relaxed into a sour smile, the nonsense snaring him into unwilling participation.

"Do," he recommended. "The minute your wheels move, you will be driving on the wrong side of the street and I will pull you in."

"When I drive on the wrong side of the street, go ahead and do it. Are you ready to start, Gerard?"

Gerard, who had come up in time to hear enough, had interpretation been necessary, put an additional argument into the man's hand before entering the car.

"My fault, Johnston," he stated, with the quiet serenity of one certain of his ground. "You know I am not a law-breaker, I fancy; this was a case of necessity."

"It was your friend, Mr. Gerard----"

Corrie reached for a lever, smiling ingenuously across as he interrupted to reply.

"The rule says to keep to the right, officer?"

"Sure."

"Well, I am left-handed, that's all. Now look at this."

This was the execution of a movement that sent the automobile rolling backwards.

"You see, I go north on the east side," the driver called, while the machine slid away. "All right, yes? Nothing in the rules about which end first you drive your car? No? I thought not. Good-by."

The car was at the corner, rounded it, and darted away in the customary method of straightforward progression.

"But if this had been New York, I would be in jail," Corrie added placid commentary, when security was attained. "I know all about it; I was arrested in Manhattan, once, for driving without a license number displayed. The cords must have broken and have let the number-plate fall off. Much that policeman listened to me. He ordered Dean into the tonneau with Flavia, stepped up into the seat beside me and ordered me to drive to the nearest police station."

"What did you do?"

"I drove. It cost me twenty-five dollars, a week later, and I had to 'phone for the family lawyer with bail to keep me from spending that night in a cell. Father----"