Chapter 8

They were in the grounds of the Eyrie--the elder Dumont was just completing it when he died early in the previous spring. His widow went abroad to live with her daughter and her sister in Paris; so her son and his wife had taken it. It was a great rambling stone house that hung upon and in a lofty bluff. From its windows and verandas and balconies could be seen the panorama of Saint Christopher. To the left lay the town, its ugly part--its factories and railway yards--hidden by the jut of a hill. Beneath and beyond to the right, the shining river wound among fields brown where the harvests had been gathered, green and white where myriads of graceful tassels waved above acres on acres of Indian corn. And the broad leaves sent up through the murmur of the river a rhythmic rustling like a sigh of content. Once in a while a passing steamboat made the sonorous cry of its whistle and the melodious beat of its paddles echo from hill to hill. Between the house and the hilltop, highway lay several hundred acres of lawn and garden and wood.

The rooms of the Eyrie and its well-screened verandas were in a cool twilight, though the September sun was hot.

"They're all out, or asleep," said Pauline, as she and Olivia entered the wide reception hall. "Let's have tea on the east veranda. Its view isn't so good, but we'll be cooler. You'd like to go to your room first?"

Olivia said she was comfortable as she was and needed the tea. So they went on through the splendidly-furnished drawing-room and were going through the library when Olivia paused before a portrait--"Your husband, isn't it?"

"Yes," replied Pauline, standing behind her cousin. "We each had one done in Paris."

"What a masterful face!" said Olivia. "I've never seen a better forehead." And she thought,

"He's of the same type as Scarborough, except--what is it I dislike in his expression?"

"Do you notice a resemblance to any one you know?" asked Pauline.

"Ye-e-s," replied Olivia, coloring. "I think----"

"Scarborough, isn't it?"

"Yes," admitted Olivia.

After a pause Pauline said ambiguously: "The resemblance is stronger there than in life."

Olivia glanced at her and was made vaguely uneasy by the look she was directing at the face of the portrait. But though Pauline must have seen that she was observed, she did not change expression. They went out upon the east veranda and Olivia stood at the railing. She hardly noted the view in the press of thoughts roused by the hints of what was behind the richly embroidered curtain of her cousin's life.

All along the bluff, some exposed, some half hid by dense foliage, were the pretentious houses of the thirty or forty families who had grown rich through the industries developed within the past ten years. Two foreign-looking servants in foreign-looking house-liveries were bringing a table on which was an enormous silver tray with a tea-service of antique silver and artistic china. As Olivia turned to seat herself a young man and a woman of perhaps forty, obviously from the East, came through the doors at the far end of the long porch. Both were in white, carefully dressed and groomed; both suggested a mode of life whose leisure had never been interrupted.

"Who are coming?" asked Olivia. She wished she had gone to her room before tea. These people made her feel dowdy and mussy.

Pauline glanced round, smiled and nodded, turned back to her cousin.

"Mrs. Herron and Mr. Langdon. She's the wife of a New York lawyer, and she takes Mr. Langdon everywhere with her to amuse her, and he goes to amuse himself. He's a socialist, or something like that. He thinks up and says things to shock conservative, conventional people. He's rich and never has worked--couldn't if he would, probably. But he denounces leisure classes and large fortunes and advocates manual labor every day for everybody. He's clever in a queer, cynical way."

A Mrs. Fanshaw, also of New York, came from the library in a tea-gown of chiffon and real lace. All were made acquainted and Pauline poured the tea. As Olivia felt shy and was hungry, she ate the little sandwiches and looked and listened and thought--looked and thought rather than listened. These were certainly well-bred people, yet she did not like them.

"They're in earnest about trifles," she said to herself, "and trifle about earnest things." Yet it irritated her to feel that, though they would care not at all for her low opinion of them, she did care a great deal because they would fail to appreciate her.

"They ought to be jailed," Langdon was drawling with considerable emphasis.

"Who, Mr. Langdon?" inquired Mrs. Fanshaw--she had been as abstracted as Olivia. "You've been filling the jails rapidly to-day, and hanging not a few."

Mrs. Herron laughed. "He says your husband and Mrs. Dumont's and mine should be locked up as conspirators."

"Precisely," said Langdon, tranquilly. "They'll sign a few papers, and when they're done, what'll have happened? Not one more sheep'll be raised. Not one more pound of wool will be shorn. Not one more laborer'll be employed. Not a single improvement in any process of manufacture. But, on the other hand, the farmer'll have to sell his wool cheaper, the consumer'll have to pay a bigger price for blankets and all kinds of clothes, for carpets--for everything wool goes into. And these few men will have trebled their fortunes and at least trebled their incomes. Does anybody deny that such a performance is a crime? Why, in comparison, a burglar is honorable and courageous. HE risks liberty and life."

"Dreadful! Dreadful!" exclaimed Mrs. Fanshaw, in mock horror. "You must go at once, Mowbray, and lead the police in a raid on Jack's office."

"Thanks--it's more comfortable here." Langdon took a piece of a curious-looking kind of hot bread. "Extraordinary good stuff this is," he interjected; then went on: "And I've done my duty when I've stated the facts. Also, I'm taking a little stock in the new trust. But I don't pose as a 'captain of industry' or 'promoter of civilization.' I admit I'm a robber. My point is the rotten hypocrisy of my fellow bandits--no, pickpockets, by gad!"

Olivia looked at him with disapproving interest. It was the first time she had been present at a game of battledore and shuttlecock with what she regarded as fundamental morals. Langdon noted her expression and said to Pauline in a tone of contrition that did not conceal his amusement: "I've shocked your cousin, Mrs. Dumont."

"I hope so," replied Pauline. "I'm sure we all ought to be shocked--and should be, if it weren't you who are trying to do the shocking. She'll soon get used to you."

"Then it was a jest?" said Olivia to Langdon.

"A jest?" He looked serious. "Not at all, my dear Mrs. Pierson. Every word I said was true, and worse. They----"

"Stop your nonsense, Mowbray," interrupted Mrs. Herron, who appreciated that Olivia was an "outsider." "Certainly he was jesting, Mrs. Pierson. Mr. Langdon pretends to have eccentric ideas--one of them is that everybody with brains should be put under the feet of the numskulls; another is that anybody who has anything should be locked up and his property given to those who have nothing."

"Splendid!" exclaimed Langdon. And he took out a gold cigarette case and lighted a large, expensive-looking cigarette with a match from a gold safe. "Go on, dear lady! Herron should get you to write our prospectus when we're ready to unload on the public. The dear public! How it does yearn for a share in any piratical enterprise that flies the snowy flag of respectability." He rose. "Who'll play English billiards?"

"All right," said Mrs. Herron, rising.

"And I, too," said Mrs. Fanshaw.

"Give me one of your cigarettes, Mowbray," said Mrs. Herron. "I left my case in my room."

Pauline, answering Olivia's expression, said as soon as the three had disappeared:

"Why not? Is it any worse for a woman than for a man?"

"I don't know why not," replied Olivia. "There must be another reason than because I don't do it, and didn't think ladies did. But that's the only reason I can give just now."

"What do you think of Langdon?" asked Pauline.

"I guess my sense of humor's defective. I don't like the sort of jest he seems to excel in."

"I fancy it wasn't altogether a jest," said Pauline. "I don't inquire into those matters any more. I used to, but--the more I saw, the worse it was. Tricks and traps and squeezes and--oh, business is all vulgar and low. It's necessary, I suppose, but it's repulsive to me." She paused, then added carelessly, yet with a certain deliberateness, "I never meddle with Mr. Dumont, nor he with me."

Olivia wished to protest against Pauline's view of business. But--how could she without seeming to attack, indeed, without attacking, her cousin's husband?

Dumont brought Fanshaw up in his automobile, Herron remaining at the offices for half an hour to give the newspapers a carefully considered account of the much-discussed "merger" of the manufacturers of low-grade woolens. Herron had objected to any statement. "It's our private business," he said. "Let them howl. The fewer facts they have, the sooner they'll stop howling." But Dumont held firm for publicity. "There's no such thing as a private business nowadays," he replied. "Besides, don't we want the public to take part of our stock? What's the use of acting shady--you've avoided the legal obstacles, haven't you? Let's tell the public frankly all we want it to know, and it'll think it knows all there is to know."

The whole party met in the drawing-room at a quarter-past eight, Langdon the last to come down--Olivia was uncertain whether or not she was unjust to him when she suspected design in his late entrance, the handsomest and the best-dressed man of the company.

He looked cynically at Dumont. "Well, fellow pirate: how go our plans for a merry winter for the poor?"

"Ass!" muttered Herron to Olivia, who happened to, be nearest him. "He fancies impudence is wit. He's devoid of moral sense or even of decency. He's a traitor to his class and shouldn't be tolerated in it."

Dumont was laughingly answering Langdon in his own vein.

"Splendidly," he replied, "thanks to our worthy chaplain, Herron, who secures us the blessing and protection of the law."

"That gives me an appetite!" exclaimed Langdon. "I feared something might miscarry in these last hours of our months of plotting. Heaven be praised, the people won't have so much to waste hereafter. I'm proud to be in one of the many noble bands that are struggling to save them from themselves."

But Dumont had turned away from him; so he dropped into Mrs. Herron's discussion with Mrs. Fanshaw on their proposed trip to the Mediterranean. Dinner was announced and he was put between Mrs. Herron and Olivia, with Dumont on her right. It was a round table and Olivia's eyes lingered upon its details--the embroidered cloth with real lace in the center, the graceful antique silver candlesticks, the tall vases filled with enormous roses--everything exquisitely simple and tasteful.

Langdon talked with her until Mrs. Herron, impatient at his neglect, caught his eye and compelled his attention. Dumont, seeing that Olivia was free, drew her into his conversation with Mrs. Fanshaw; and then Mrs. Fanshaw began to talk with Mr. Herron, who was eating furiously because he had just overheard Langdon say: "That was a great day for pirates when they thought of taking aboard the lawyers as chaplains."

All the men were in high spirits; Dumont was boyish in his exuberance. When he left home that morning he was four times a millionaire; now he was at least twelve times a millionaire, through the magic of the "merger." True, eight of the twelve millions were on paper; but it was paper that would certainly pay dividends, paper that would presently sell at or near its face value. And this success had come when he was only thirty-four. His mind was already projecting greater triumphs in this modern necromancy by which millionaires evoke and materialize millions from the empty air--apparently. He was bubbling over with happiness--in the victory won, in victories to be won.

Olivia tried him on several subjects, but the conversation dragged. Of Pauline he would not talk; of Europe, he was interested only in the comfort of hotels and railway trains, in the comparative merits of the cooking and the wines in London and Paris. But his face--alert, shrewd, aggressive--and his mode of expression made her feel that he was uninteresting because he was thinking of something which he did not care to expose to her and could not take his mind from. And this was the truth. It was not until she adventured upon his business that he became talkative. And soon she had him telling her about his "combine"--frankly, boastfully, his face more and more flushed, for as he talked he drank.

"But," he said presently, "this little matter to-day is only a fair beginning. It seemed big until it was about accomplished. Then I saw it was only a suggestion for a scheme that'd be really worth, while." And he went on to unfold one of those projects of to-day's commerce and finance that were regarded as fantastic, delirious a few years ago. He would reach out and out for hundreds of millions of capital; with his woolens "combine" as a basis he would build an enormous corporation to control the sheep industry of the world--to buy millions of acres of sheep-ranges; to raise scores of millions of sheep; to acquire and to construct hundreds of plants for utilizing every part of the raw product of the ranges; to sell wherever the human race had or could have a market.

Olivia was ambitious herself, usually was delighted by ambition in others. But his exhibit of imagination and energy repelled her, even while it fascinated. Partly through youth, more through that contempt for concealment which characterizes the courageous type of large man, he showed himself to her just as he was. And she saw him not as an ambition but as an appetite, or rather a bundle of appetites.

"He has no ideals," she thought. "He's like a man who wants food merely for itself, not for the strength and the intellect it will build up. And he likes or dislikes human beings only as one likes or dislikes different things to eat."

"It'll take you years and years," she said to him, because she must say something.

"Not at all." He waved his hand--Olivia thought it looked as much like a claw as like a hand. "It's a sky-scraper, but we build sky-scrapers overnight. Time and space used to be the big elements. WE practically disregard them." He followed this with a self-satisfied laugh and an emptying of his champagne glass at a gulp.

The women were rising to withdraw. After half an hour Langdon and Herron joined them. Dumont and Fanshaw did not come until eleven o'clock. Then Dumont was so abrupt and surly that every one was grateful to Mrs. Fanshaw for taking him away to the west veranda. At midnight all went to their rooms, Pauline going with Olivia, "to make sure you haven't been neglected."

She lingered until after one, and when they kissed each the other good night, she said: "It's done me a world of good to see you, 'Livia--more even than I hoped. I knew you'd be sympathetic with me where you understood. Now, I feel that you're sympathetic where you don't understand, too. And it's there that one really needs sympathy."

"That's what friendship means--and--love," said Olivia.

XIII.

"MY SISTER-IN-LAW, GLADYS."

The following afternoon Dumont took the Herrons, the Fanshaws and Langdon back to New York in his private car, and for three days Olivia and Pauline had the Eyrie to themselves. Olivia was about to write to Scarborough, asking him to call, when she saw in the News-Bulletin that he had gone to Denver to speak. A week after she left, Dumont returned, bringing his sister Gladys, just arrived from Europe, and Langdon. He stayed four days, took Langdon away with him and left Gladys.

Thus it came about that Scarborough, riding into Colonel Gardiner's grounds one hot afternoon in mid September, saw a phaeton-victoria with two women in it coming toward him on its way out. He drew his horse aside to make room. He was conscious that there were two women; he saw only one--she who was all in white except the scarlet poppies against the brim of her big white hat.

As he bowed the carriage stopped and Pauline said cordially: "Why, how d'ye do?"

He drew his horse close to the carriage and they shook hands. She introduced the other woman--"My sister-in-law, Gladys Dumont"--then went on: "We've been lunching and spending the afternoon with father and mother. They told us you returned this morning."

"I supposed you were in the East," said Scarborough--the first words he had spoken.

"Oh--I'm living here now--Gladys and I. Father says you never go anywhere, but I hope you'll make an exception for us."

"Thank you--I'll be glad to call."

"Why not dine with us--day after to-morrow night?"

"I'd like that--certainly, I'll come."

"We dine at half-past eight--at least we're supposed to."

Scarborough lifted his hat.

The carriage drove on.

"Why, he's not a bit as I expected," Gladys began at once. "He's much younger. ISN'T he handsome! That's the way a MAN ought to look. He's not married?"

"No," replied Pauline.

"Why did you look so queer when you first caught sight of him?"

"Did I?" Pauline replied tranquilly. "Probably it was because he very suddenly and vividly brought Battle Field back to me--that was the happiest time of my life. But I was too young or too foolish, or both, to know it till long afterward. At seventeen one takes happiness for granted."

"Did he look then as he does now?"

"No--and yes," said Pauline. "He was just from the farm and dressed badly and was awkward at times. But--really he was the same person. I guess it was the little change in him that startled me." And she became absorbed in her thoughts.

"I hope you'll send him in to dinner with me," said Gladys, presently.

"What did you say?" asked Pauline, absently.

"I was talking of Mr. Scarborough. I asked if you wouldn't send him in to dinner with me--unless you want to discuss old times with him."

"Yes--certainly--if you wish."

And Pauline gave Scarborough to Gladys and did her duty as hostess by taking in the dullest man in the party--Newnham. While Newnham droned and prosed, she watched Gladys lay herself out to please the distinguished Mr. Scarborough, successful as a lawyer, famous as an orator, deferred to because of his influence with the rank and file of his party in the middle West.

Gladys had blue-black hair which she wore pulled out into a sort of halo about her small, delicate face. There were points of light in her dark irises, giving them the look of black quartz in the sunshine. She was not tall, but her figure was perfect, and she had her dresses fitted immediately to it. Her appeal was frankly to the senses, the edge taken from its audacity by its artistic effectiveness and by her ingenuous, almost innocent, expression.

Seeing Pauline looking at her, she tilted her head to a graceful angle and sent a radiant glance between two blossom-laden branches of the green and white bush that towered and spread in the center of the table. "Mr. Scarborough says," she called out, "character isn't a development, it's a disclosure. He thinks one is born a certain kind of person and that one's life simply either gives it a chance to show or fails to give it a chance. He says the boy isn't father to the man, but the miniature of the man. What do you think, Pauline?"

"I haven't thought of it," replied Pauline. "But I'm certain it's true. I used to dispute Mr. Scarborough's ideas sometimes, but I learned better."

As she realized the implications of her careless remark, their eyes met squarely for the first time since Battle Field. Both hastily glanced away, and neither looked at the other again. When the men came up to the drawing-room to join the women, Gladys adroitly intercepted him. When he went to Pauline to take leave, their manner each toward the other was formal, strained and even distant.

Dumont came again just after the November election. It had been an unexpected victory for the party which Scarborough advocated, and everywhere the talk was that he had been the chief factor--his skill in defining issues, his eloquence in presenting them, the public confidence in his party through the dominance of a man so obviously free from self-seeking or political trickery of any kind. Dumont, to whom control in both party machines and in the state government was a business necessity, told his political agent, Merriweather, that they had "let Scarborough go about far enough," unless he could be brought into their camp.

"I can't make out what he's looking for," said Merriweather. "One thing's certain--he'll do US no good. There's no way we can get our hooks in him. He don't give a damn for money. And as for power--he can get more of that by fighting us than by falling in line. We ain't exactly popular."

This seemed to Dumont rank ingratitude. Had he not just divided a million dollars among charities and educational institutions in the districts where opposition to his "merger" was strongest?

"Well, we'll see," he said. "If he isn't careful we'll have to kill him off in convention and make the committees stop his mouth."

"The trouble is he's been building up a following of his own--the sort of following that can't be honeyfugled," replied Merriweather. "The committees are afraid of him." Merriweather always took the gloomy view of everything, because he thus discounted his failures in advance and doubled the effect of his successes.

"I'll see--I'll see," said Dumont, impatiently. And he thought he was beginning to "see" when Gladys expanded to him upon the subject of Scarborough--his good looks, his wit, his "distinction."

Scarborough came to dinner a few evenings later and Dumont was particularly cordial to him; and Gladys made the most of the opportunity which Pauline again gave her. That night, when the others had left or had gone to bed, Gladys followed her brother into the smoke-room adjoining the library. They sat in silence drinking a "night-cap." In the dreaminess of her eyes, in the absent smile drifting round the corners of her full red lips, Gladys showed that her thoughts were pleasant and sentimental.

"What do you think of Scarborough?" her brother asked suddenly.

She started but did not flush--in her long European experience she had gained control of that signal of surprise. "How do you mean?" she asked. She rarely answered a question immediately, no matter how simple it was, but usually put another question in reply. Thus she insured herself time to think if time should be necessary.

"I mean, do you like him?"

"Why, certainly. But I've seen him only a few times."

"He's an uncommon man," continued her brother. "He'd make a mighty satisfactory husband for an ambitious woman, especially one with the money to push him fast."

Gladys slowly lifted and slowly lowered her smooth, slender shoulders.

"That sort of thing doesn't interest a woman in a man, unless she's married to him and has got over thinking more about him than about herself."

"It ought to," replied her brother. "A clever woman can always slosh round in sentimental slop with her head above it and cool. If I were a girl I'd make a dead set for that chap."

"If you were a girl," said Gladys, "you'd do nothing of the sort. You'd compel him to make a dead set for you." And as she put down her glass she gave his hair an affectionate pull--which was her way of thanking him for saying what she most wished to hear on the subject she most wished to hear about.

XIV.

STRAINING AT THE ANCHORS.