Part 6

"Yes, yes, I'll be happy to," interrupted John, not knowing just what tone or form one should take in expressing the necessary amenities to the secretary of a great man.

"Very well. His car will call for you at six-thirty," responded the voice.

But before John could pick up the thread of his unfinished sentence to Mr. Mitchell, a knock sounded at the door, at first soft and cushioned, as if from a gloved hand, then louder and more determined, and repeated with quick impatience.

"Come in," called Mitchell.

The knob turned, and the door swung wide, leaving the panel of white to frame the picture of a woman. She was young, of medium height and appealing roundness, clad from head to foot in a traveling dress of dark green, with a small hat of a shade to match, the chief adornment of which was a red hawk's feather slanting backward at a jaunty angle. A veil enveloped both hat brim and face but was not thick enough to dim the sparkle of bright eyes or the pink flush of dimpled cheeks, much less to conceal two rows of gleaming teeth from between which, after a moment's pause for sensation, burst a ringing cadence of laughter.

"Miss Bessie!" exclaimed John excitedly.

"The very first guess!" declared that young lady, advancing and yielding the doorframe to another figure which filled it so much more completely as to sufficiently explain a more deliberate arrival.

"Mollie!" ejaculated Mitchell, who by this time had turned toward the door. "What in thunder?"

But the General Freight Agent's lines of communication were just then temporarily disconnected by an assault upon his features conducted by Miss Bessie in person. During this interval, Mrs. Mitchell stood placidly surveying the room, and as she took in its air of preparation for immediate departure, a tantalizing smile spread itself on her expansive features.

"Is this an accident or a calamity?" demanded Mitchell, playfully thrusting Bessie aside and advancing to greet his wife.

"Both!" declared that lady, submitting her lips with more of formality than enthusiasm, after which, feeling that sufficient time had elapsed to make an explanation of her sudden appearance not undignified, she proceeded:

"Just one of my whims, Bob! Next week was the spring vacation; no school, and the poor child was pale from overstudy and so anxious about her examinations (Bessie shot a look at Hampstead), that I just made up my mind I'd bring her up here and let her get a good bite of fog and a breath from the Golden Gate."

"Fine idea!" declared Mitchell. "Fine! Now that you've had it," he chuckled, "we'll start home. I'm leaving at eight."

"You are not!" proclaimed Mrs. Mitchell flatly. "You will stay right here for at least three days and do nothing but devote yourself to your child. And to her mother!" she subjoined, as if that were an afterthought; all with a toss of her chin, which, by way of emphasis, held its advanced position for a moment after the speech was done.

"And the business of the company?" Mitchell suggested, with a solicitous air.

"It can wait on me," averred Mrs. Mitchell decisively, taking a turn up and down the room and surveying once more the signs of confusion and of hasty packing. "Many's the time I've waited on it. You can stay, too, John," she said, turning to Hampstead. "I want you to take Bessie to a lot of places Robert and I have been and won't care to visit this time."

"Robert!" and while her eyes turned toward the windows, two of which opened on a view of Market Street, the new commander began a redisposition of forces, "I rather like this suite. Bessie and I will take the corner room. You can take this room and Mr. Hampstead can move across the hall, or anywhere else they can put him."

As an act of possession, Mrs. Mitchell walked to the dresser, took off her hat, stabbed the two pins into it emphatically, and tossed it upon the bed, where it bloomed like a flower-garden in the midst of a desert of papers while she, still standing before the mirror, bestowed a few comfortable pats upon her hair.

"John," Mitchell said jovially, "I know orders from headquarters when I get 'em. You were going to stay over, anyway; but use your own judgment about obeying the instructions you have just received."

"Never had such agreeable instructions in my life," declared Hampstead, turning to Mrs. Mitchell with an elaborately stagy bow, and the natural quotation from Hamlet which leaped to his lips:

"'_I shall in all my best obey you, madam._'"

"See that you do," said that lady, not half liking the bow and shooting a glance at Hampstead less cordial than austere. "And by the way," she added, "see that you don't let that stage nonsense carry you much further, young man," with which remark Mrs. Mitchell turned abruptly and gave Hampstead a most complete view of a broad and uncompromising back.

In Mrs. Mitchell's mind a man had much better be a section hand on the Great Southwestern than a fixed star on the drama's milky way.

"By the way, mother," remarked Mr. Mitchell, with the air of one who makes an important revelation, "John is just going out to dine with William N. Scofield."

Mrs. Mitchell turned quickly, and her dark eyes shot a meaningful glance at her husband, while the line of her lower lip first grew full and then protruded. A squeeze of that lip at the moment, Hampstead reflected, would extract something at least as sour as very sour lemon juice.

"Scofield is after him," bragged Mitchell.

"Well, see that he doesn't get him," his wife commanded sternly, and then shifting her somber glance until it rested on John with a look that was near to menace, inquired acridly:

"Young man, you wouldn't be disloyal? You wouldn't sell yourself?" In the second interrogatory her voice had passed from acridity to bitterness, while the eyes bored implacably, till Hampstead at first wriggled, then grew resentful and replied crisply, standing very straight:

"No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself!"

"That's right," exclaimed Bessie, stepping impulsively toward John's side. "Do not let her browbeat you. I am sorry to say, Mr. Hampstead, that mother is inclined to be somewhat dictatorial. You see what she does to poor papa!"

"And you see what you do to poor me," exclaimed that worthy lady, turning on her daughter with surprise and injury in her glance and tone,--"dragging me almost out of bed last night to make this foolish trip up here with you. Next week, of all weeks, too, when I wanted to do so many other things."

"Ho! ho!" broke in Mitchell, "so that's the way of it. This trip up here is a scheme of yours," and he turned accusingly upon his daughter, but Bessie smiled and curtseyed, entirely unabashed. "Well, then, I don't guess we'll stay," teased Mitchell. "And I don't suppose you knew a thing about Hampstead's being here. That was all an accident."

"It was not," flashed Bessie. "I did. I haven't seen dear old John for a year. I could go in and have delightful tete-a-tetes with him when he was a stenographer, but out in the Rate Department there are forty prying eyes and men with ears as long as jack-rabbits. He hasn't taken me to a circus or anything for nobody knows how long. You shall give him money for theater tickets, for dinners, for auto rides, for everything nice for three whole days."

Bessie was standing directly in front of her father, her eyes looking up into his, and her two hands patting his generous jowls, as her speech was concluded.

John listened rapturously. This was the old Bessie talking. She had entered the room looking a year older, a year prettier since that day when he wrote the Phroso invitations for her, and had taken on so easily the lacquer and dignity of dresses and of years that he was beginning to feel in awe of her. This speech was a great relief.

Besides, in the whirl of the hour before she came, he had found himself strangely wanting to take counsel with Bessie. The Mitchells had made of him for all these years a convenient caretaker of their daughter. Bessie had made of him a playfellow with whom she took the same liberties as with any other of her father's possessions. This attitude on her part had created the only atmosphere in which Hampstead could have been at ease with her. It had permitted his soul to bask when she was by, but it had done no more. But now, he somehow wanted to confide in Bessie,--not to take her advice for he wasn't going to take anybody's advice; all advice was against him,--but to tell her what he was going to do, because he believed she would listen appreciatingly, if not sympathetically. He felt he needed at least the added support of a neutral mind. He had rejected Mr. Mitchell's proposal, but the glitter of it flashed occasionally. And now he was going to face the resourceful, the ingratiating, the dominating William N. Scofield, and he felt like a man who goes alone to meet his temptation on the mountain top.

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE HIGH BID*

For an hour and a half at dinner, and for another hour sunk in the depths of a great leather chair in the lounging room of the Pacific Union Club, William N. Scofield had searched the soul of Hampstead, who had not only been led to talk rapturously of his stage ambition but to reveal the metes and bounds of his interest in and knowledge upon many subjects.

"Gad, but you know a lot," ejaculated Scofield, with unfeigned amazement. "Where'd you get it all?"

"I have read a good deal," confessed John, trying to appear much more modest than in his heart he felt; for it was a part of Scofield's whim or of his campaign to flatter him enormously, and he had succeeded.

But for a time now, the Traffic Manager was silent, puffing meditatively at his cigar and staring at the ceiling through loafing rings of smoke in which, as if they were floating letters, he seemed to read the transcript of his thought,--the thought that if, beside employing this enormously able young man, he could also enlist in behalf of the railroad as an institution his capacity for fanatical devotion to an ideal, the prize was one worth bidding high for, high enough to win!

"People like you, Hampstead," Scofield broke out presently, and in his most ingratiating vein. "We all felt that down at the office. You did a difficult thing without making an enemy of one of us. Therefore what your personality can do interests me even more than what you know."

The railroad man interrupted his speech to shoot an exploratory glance from under veiling lids and went on calculatingly:

"The railroad business is going to change. Now we tell the Railroad Commission what to do. The time is coming when it will tell us what to do, and we will do it. But the public attitude toward the railroad has also got to change." Scofield's tone had taken on new emphasis.

"You would make the type of executive that could change it! The successful transportation man of the future has got to be a sort of ambassador of the railroad to the people, and the man who best serves the people tributary to his road will best serve his stockholders."

"Do you know who gave me that point?" the Traffic Manager asked, turning from the vision he was contemplating in the clouds of smoke over his head and looking sharply at Hampstead.

"Naturally not," admitted the younger man.

"Bob Mitchell," said Scofield, and paused while his thin lips coaxed persistently at the cigar which appeared to have gone out. "Bob Mitchell! And I reviled him for his sagacity, told him he was an altruistic fool. But after a while I saw he was right. Then I tried to get him for us, but I didn't succeed. He wasn't as sensible as I hope you will be. Besides, I am going to offer you more than I offered him."

More than he offered Mitchell! There was a sudden jolt somewhere in John's breast, and he wet a dry, parched lip, but did not speak.

"Yes," breathed Scofield softly, almost as if he had been interrupted. "I am going to offer you more. Hampstead!" and the voice was raised quickly, "I want you to be our General Freight Agent!"

If Scofield had leaned over and kissed him, John would not have been more surprised, nor have known less what to say.

"General Freight Agent!" he croaked hoarsely.

"Yes," affirmed the other coolly, almost icily, while he flicked the ashes from his cigar and enjoyed the sensation his proposal had produced.

"At my age?" stumbled John, still groping, but trying to see himself in the position.

"Why, yes," reassured Scofield suavely. "You tell me you're past twenty-five. Paul Morton was Assistant General Freight Agent of the Burlington at twenty-one. Look where he is to-day--in the cabinet of the President of the United States. The salary," Scofield added casually, by way of finally clinching the argument, "will be twelve thousand a year."

Hampstead's lips silently formed the words--twelve thousand! But he did not utter them. They dazed him. They rushed him headlong. They made rejection impossible. No man had a right to throw away such a fortune as that. One thousand dollars a month! He felt himself yielding, helplessly, irresistibly.

And then, suddenly as the photographer's bomb lights up every lineament of every face in the darkened room, for one single moment Hampstead saw things clearly and in their true proportions. This Schofield was not a man. He was a grinning devil, with horns and a barb on his tail. He was tempting, trapping, buying him. He would not be bought. "_No, Mrs. Mitchell, I would not sell myself,_" he had said, not, however, meaning at all what that lady meant.

Leaning back stubbornly, his fist smiting heavy blows upon the cushioned arm of the chair, John muttered through clenched teeth:

"No! No! No--I'll never do it. No, Mr. Scofield, I cannot accept your offer. I thank you for it; but I cannot accept it. The stage is to be the place of my achievement. Why, why, Mr. Scofield, the wonderfully flattering offer you have made to me to-night has come because of the training incident to the cultivation of a stage ambition. If it can bring me so much with so little devotion, is it not reasonable to suppose that it will bring me more--very much more? I will not be so disloyal to that which has been so generous with me."

Scofield's countenance had suddenly and impressively changed. It became a mask of stone, a sphinx-like thing, the brow a knot, the nose a beak, the mouth a stitched scar. The beady gleam of the eyes from beneath drawn lids was sinister. This fanatical young fool was escaping him, and Scofield did not like any one to escape him.

But the young man refused to be swerved by frowns.

"Not to manage railroads," he declared enthusiastically, "but to mould human character is to be my life-work; to depict the virtues and the vices, the weaknesses and the strengths of life, to make men laugh and love and--forget."

Scofield's eyes twinkled, and his mouth became less a scar, but John thought this was a very fine phrase really, and he rushed along:

"Life looks like a tangle, like a mess--drudgeries, disappointments, injustices--the wrong man prospering--the wrong girl suffering! The drama composes life. It grabs out a few people and follows them, compressing into the action of two hours the eventualities of a lifetime and shortening perspectives till men can see the consequences of their acts, whether for good or for ill. The stage teaches the doctrine of the conservation of moral energy--and of immoral energy--that sustained effort, conserved effort is never cheated; it gets its goal at last."

"Say!" broke in Scofield; but John would not be denied what he felt was a final smashing generalization.

"To figure the tariff on human conduct, to grade and classify the acts of life, to quote the rates on happiness and misery in trainload lots. That's what I'm going to do," he concluded, with a glow upon his face.

But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the railroad man.

"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor. You're a preacher!"

John gasped.

"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't want you around at all."

With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.

John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's attitude--a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a preacher? The idea was ridiculous.

Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn. Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.

But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.

"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"

The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.

John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to make over again.

However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.

* * * * *

"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.

They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.

Before their faces, the ocean, in swells and scoops of ever grayer gray, ran out to catch the horizon as it fell, illumined in its lower reaches by the sun, which was sinking into the haze above the waters like a lustrous orange ball.

Southward, beyond the green head of Golden Gate Park, the yellow gray of the sand dunes and the blue gray of the sea met in a lingering, playful kiss that swept back and forth in a long shimmering line which ran on sinuously, growing fainter and fainter, till lost in the shadow of the distant cliffs.

The hour was five o'clock. At eight that night John was to leave for Los Angeles. His vacation--the only vacation of his hard-driven life--was to end, and an epoch in his existence was also nearing its end. The past was clear as the land behind him; the future was an area of tossing uncertainty. Nothing appeared,--no track, no wake, no sail, no sun even. Only far over, beyond the curve of the horizon, was a kind of strange, unearthly glow, and on this his eye was set.

For three days his soul had ebbed and flowed like that lip of foam upon the beach, now stealing far up on the land,--for him the backward track; now turning and running far out to sea,--for him the way of adventure and advance.

But now the ultimate decision was to be made. Bessie saw it rising like a tide upon that face which once had seemed not to fit, a rapt look which snuggled in the hills and hollows and then began to harden like setting concrete. No one would call that face homely now. Interesting, most likely, would have been the word.

The gray eyes burned brighter, the lips grew tighter. The chin advanced, moved out to sea a little, as it were.

"Follow your star, John," Bessie declared stoutly, though a look of pain momentarily touched her whitening lips. "I shall despise you if you do not."

"The decision is made," John replied solemnly, "and you, Bessie, have helped to make it."

Bessie did not reply; she only looked.

Silence fell between them. Silence, too, was in the heavens; the sun, the waves, the restless wind for the moment appeared to stand still. All nature had paused respectfully. A man, young, inexperienced, but potential, had cast the horoscope of life beyond the power of gods or men to intervene,--and with it had cast some other horoscopes as well.

Hampstead felt the spell his act of will had wrapped about them, but he felt also the substance of his resolution framing like granite in his soul and making him strong with a new kind of strength.

But soon the sun was descending again, the clouds were drifting once more, and a gust of wind nipped sharply, causing the skirts of John's overcoat to flap lustily. Bessie twitched her fur collar closer about the neck, and thrust both hands deep into the pockets of her gray ulster. Hampstead passed his own hand through the curve of the girl's elbow, gripped her forearm possessively, selfishly, absently, and drew her toward him.

Indeed Bessie was closer to him than she had ever been before; and yet she had never felt so far away.

"Oh, but it's great to have a woman by you in a crisis," John chuckled happily.

Bessie looked up startled. John had called her woman. But she recovered from the start,--he had also called her _a_ woman.

"Come to understand each other pretty well, haven't we?" John observed, still looking oceanward, but giving the arm of Bessie what was intended for a meaningful squeeze.

"Not at all," sighed Bessie, also still looking oceanward.

Hampstead, his thoughts bowling rapidly forward, continued motionless until a white-winged, curious-eyed gull sailed between his line of vision and the water. Then, as if abruptly conscious that Bessie's answer was not what it should have been, he turned, and at the same time boldly swung her body round till they stood facing each other. Bessie met this gaze unblinkingly for a moment, with her face set and sober; then something in John's mystified glance touched her keen sense of humor, and she laughed,--her old, roguish laugh,--and flirted the stupid in the face with the end of her boa.

"You great big egoist!" she smiled. "There, that's the first chance I've had to use that word. I only learned the difference between it and another last week."

"Indeed!" retorted Hampstead. "And when did you learn the difference between me and the other word?"

"Well, I'm not sure that there is a difference," she sparred. "Being polite, I just concede it."

"Oh," he chuckled. "But," and he was serious again, "you say we don't understand each other?"

"Nonsense; I was only joking. I do understand you; you great, big, egoistical egotist! You are just now absolutely self-centered--and all, all ambition! And I am secretly--secretly, you understand--proud of you!"

"And you," said Hampstead, drawing her close again, "are just the truest, most understanding friend a man ever, ever had. You know, Bessie, a fellow can talk to you just like a sister,--a pretty little sister!" he subjoined, when Bessie looked less pleased than he thought she should.

"You've changed a lot, too, in a year," he conceded, studying her face critically. "When you came into the hotel that night, you struck fear into my heart, and then kind of made it flutter. I said to myself, 'She's gone--the old Bessie, that could be played with. But here's a young woman, a handsome young woman, taking her place.'"

"Did you say that?" asked Bessie happily.