Chapter 21

"A seven-hundred-thousand-dollar difference?" suggested Ormsby, who had had speech with Loring.

Kent flushed a dull red.

"I sha'n't strike you, Ormsby, no matter what you say," he said doggedly.

"Humph! There is one difference between you and Rabbi Balaam's burro, David: it could talk sense, and you can't," was the offensive rejoinder.

Kent changed the subject abruptly.

"Say, Ormsby; I'm going into a political office-hunt. There is a death vacancy in the House, and I mean to have the nomination and election. I don't need money now, but I do need a friend. Are you with me?"

"Oh, sure. Miss Van Brock will answer for that."

"But I don't want you to do it on her account; I want you to do it for me."

"It's all one," said the club-man.

Kent looked up quickly.

"You are right; that is the truest word you've said to-night," and he went away, leaving the dessert untouched.

The evening was still young when Kent reached the house in Alameda Square. Within the week the weather had changed, and the first chill of the approaching autumn was in the air. The great square house was lighted and warmed, and the homelikeness of the place appealed to him as it never had before. To her other gifts, which were many and diverse, Miss Van Brock added that of home-making; and the aftermath of battle is apt to be an acute longing for peace and quiet, for domesticity and creature comforts.

He had not seen Portia since the night when she had armed him for the final struggle with the enemy; he told himself that he should not see her again until the battle was fought and won. But in no part of the struggle had he been suffered to lose sight of his obligation to her. He had seen the chain lengthen link by link, and now the time was come for the welding of it into a shackle to bind. He did not try to deceive himself, nor did he allow the glamour of false sentiment to blind him. With an undying love for Elinor Brentwood in his heart, he knew well what was before him. None the less, Portia should have her just due.

She was waiting for him when he entered the comfortable library.

"I knew you would come to-night," she said cheerfully. "I gave you a day to drive the nail--and, O David! you have driven it well!--another day to clinch it, and a third to recover from the effects. Have you fully recovered?"

"I hope so. I took the day for it, at all events," he laughed. "I am just out of bed, as you might say."

"I can imagine how it took it out of you," she assented. "Not so much the work, but the anxiety. Night before last, after Mr. Loring went away, I sat it out with the telephone, nagging poor Mr. Hildreth for news until I know he wanted to murder me."

"How much did you get of it?" he asked.

"He told me all he dared--or perhaps it was all he knew--and it made me feel miserably helpless. The little I could get from the _Argus_ office was enough to prove that all your plans had been changed at the last moment."

"They were," he admitted; and he began at the beginning and filled in the details for her.

She heard him through without comment other than a kindling of the brown eyes at the climaxes of daring; but at the end she gave him praise unstinted.

"You have played the man, David, as I knew you would if you could be once fully aroused. I've had faith in you from the very first."

"It has been more than faith, Portia," he asserted soberly. "You have taken me up and carried me when I could neither run nor walk. Do you suppose I am so besotted as not to realize that you have been the head, while I have been only the hand?"

"Nonsense!" she said lightly. "You are in the dumps of the reaction now. You mustn't say things that you will be sorry for, later on."

"I am going to say one thing, nevertheless; and will remain for you to make it a thing hard to be remembered, or the other kind. Will you take what there is of me and make what you can of it?"

She laughed in his face.

"No, my dear David; no, no, no." And after a little pause: "How deliciously transparent you are, to be sure!"

He would have been less than a man if his self-love had not been touched in its most sensitive part.

"I am glad if it amuses you," he frowned. "Only I meant it in all seriousness."

"No, you didn't; you only thought you did," she contradicted, and the brown eyes were still laughing at him. "Let me tell you what you did mean. You are pleased to think that I have helped you--that an obligation has been incurred; and you meant to pay your debt like a man and a gentleman in the only coin a woman is supposed to recognize."

"But if I should say that you are misinterpreting the motive?" he suggested.

"It would make your nice little speech a perjury instead of a simple untruth, and I should say no, again, on other, and perhaps better, grounds."

"Name them," he said shortly.

"I will, David, though I am neither a stick nor a stone to do it without wincing. You love another woman with all your heart and soul, and you know it."

"Well? You see I am neither admitting nor denying."

"As if you needed to!" she scoffed. "But don't interrupt me, please. You said I might take what there is of you and make what I can of it: I might make you anything and everything in the world, David, except that which a woman craves most in a husband--a lover."

His eyes grew dark.

"I wish I knew how much that word means to you, Portia."

"It means just as much to me as it does to every woman who has ever drawn the breath of life in a passionate world, David. But that isn't all. Leaving Miss Brentwood entirely out of the question, you'd be miserably unhappy."

"Why should I?"

"Because I shouldn't be able to realize a single one of your ideals. I know what they are--what you will expect in a wife. I could make you a rich man, a successful man, as the world measures success, and perhaps I could even give you love: after the first flush of youth is past, the heavenly-affinity sentiment loses its hold and a woman comes to know that if she cares to try hard enough she can love any man who will be thoughtful and gentle, and whose habits of life are not hopelessly at war with her own. But that kind of love doesn't breed love. Your vanity would pique itself for a little while, and then you would know the curse of unsought love and murder me in your heart a thousand times a day. No, David, I have read you to little purpose if these are the things you will ask of the woman who takes your name and becomes the mother of your children." She had risen and was standing beside his chair, with her hand lightly touching his shoulder. "Will you go now? There are others coming, and--"

He made his adieux gravely and went away half dazed and a prey to many emotions, but strangely light-hearted withal: and as once before, he walked when he might have ridden. But the mixed-emotion mood was not immortal. At the Clarendon he found a committee of Civic Leaguers waiting to ask him if he would stand as a "Good Government" candidate in the special election to fill the House vacancy in the capital district; and in the discussion of ways and means, and the setting of political pins which followed there was little food for sentiment.

It was three weeks and more after Governor Marston's call summoning the Assembly for an investigative session. Kent had fought his way triumphantly through the special election to a seat in the House, aided and abetted manfully by Ormsby, Hildreth, and the entire Trans-Western influence and vote. And now men were beginning to say that without the tireless blows of the keen-witted, sharp-tongued young corporation lawyer, the junto might still have reasserted itself.

But the House committee, of which Kent was the youngest member and the chairman, had proved incorruptible, and the day of the Gaston wolf-pack was over. Hendricks resigned, to escape a worse thing; Meigs came over to the majority with a show of heartiness that made Kent doubly watchful of him; heads fell to the right and left, until at the last there was left only one member of the original cabal to reckon with; the judicial tool of the capitol ring.

Kent had hesitated when MacFarlane's name came up; and the judge never knew that he owed his escape from the inquisitorial House committee, and his permission to resign on the plea of broken health, to a young woman whom he had never seen.

It was Elinor Brentwood who was his intercessor; and the occasion was the last day of the third week of the extra session--a Saturday afternoon and a legislative recess when Kent had borrowed Ormsby's auto-car, and had driven Elinor and Penelope out to Pentland Place to look at a house he was thinking of buying. For with means to indulge it, Kent's Gaston-bred mania for plunging in real estate had returned upon him with all the acuteness of a half-satisfied passion.

They had gone all over the house and grounds with the caretaker, and when there was nothing more to see, Penelope had prevailed on the woman to open the Venetians in the music-room. There was a grand piano in the place of honor, presided over by a mechanical piano-player; and Penelope went into ecstasies of mockery.

"Wait till I can find the music scrolls, and I'll hypnotize you," she said gleefully; and Kent and Elinor beat a hasty retreat to the wide entrance hall.

"I don't quite understand it," was Elinor's comment, when they had put distance between themselves and Penelope's joyous grinding-out of a Wagner scroll. "It looks as if the owners had just walked out at a moment's notice."

"They did," said Kent. "They went to Europe, I believe. And by the way; I think I have a souvenir here somewhere. Will you go up to the first landing of the stair and point your finger at that window?"

She did it, wondering; and when he had the line of direction he knelt in the cushioned window-seat and began to probe with the blade of his pen-knife in a small round hole in the woodwork.

"What is it?" she asked, coming down to stand beside him.

"This." He had cut out a flattened bullet and was holding it up for her to see. "It was meant for me, and I've always had an idea that I heard it strike the woodwork."

"For you? Were you ever here when the house was occupied?"

"Yes, once; it is the Senator Duvall place. This is the window where I broke in."

She nodded intelligence.

"I know now why you are going to buy it. The senator is another of those whom you haven't forgiven."

His laugh was a ready denial.

"I have nothing against Duvall. He was one of Bucks' dupes, and he is paying the price. The property is to be sold at a forced sale, and it is a good investment."

"Is that all it means to you? It is too fine to be hawked about as a thing to make money with. It's a splendidly ideal home--leaving out that thing that Penelope is quarreling with." And she made a feint of stopping her ears.

He laughed again.

"Ormsby says I ought to buy it, and marry and settle down."

She took him seriously.

"You don't need it. Miss Van Brock has a very lovely home of her own," she said soberly.

It was at his tongue's end to tell the woman he loved how the woman he did not love had refused him, but he saved himself on the brink and said:

"Why Miss Van Brock?"

"Because she is vindictive, too, and----"

"But I am not vindictive."

"Yes, you are. Do you know anything about Judge MacFarlane's family affairs?"

"A little. He has three daughters; one of them rather unhappily married, I believe."

"Have you considered the cost to these three women if you make their father's name a byword in the city where they were born?"

"He should have considered it," was the unmoved reply.

"David!" she said; and he looked up quickly.

"You want me to let him resign? It would be compounding a felony. He is a Judge, and he was bribed."

She sat down beside him in the cushioned window seat and began to plead with him.

"You must let him go," she insisted. "It is entirely in your hands as chairman of the House committee; the governor, himself, told me so. I know all you say about him is true; but he is old and wretched, with only a little while to live, at best."

There was a curious little smile curling his lip when he answered her.

"He has chosen a good advocate. It is quite like a man of his stamp to try to reach me through you."

"David!" she said again. Then: "I really shouldn't know him if I were to see him."

"Then why----" he began; but there was a love-light in the blue-gray eyes to set his heart afire. "You are doing this for me?" he said, trembling on the verge of things unutterable.

"Yes. You don't know how it hurts me to see you growing hard and merciless as you climb higher and higher in the path you have marked out for yourself."

"The path you have marked out for me," he corrected. "Do you remember our little talk over the embers of the fire in your sitting-room at home? I knew then that I had lost the love I might have won; but the desire to be the kind of leader you were describing was born in me at that moment. I haven't always been true to the ideal. I couldn't be, lacking the right to wear your colors on my heart----"

"Don't!" she said. "I haven't been true to my ideals. I--I sold them, David!"

She was in his arms when she said it, and the bachelor maid was quite lost in the woman.

"I'll never believe that," he said loyally. "But if you did, we'll buy them back--together."

* * * * *

Penelope was good to them. It was a full half-hour before she professed herself satisfied with the mechanical piano-toy; and when she was through, she helped the woman caretaker to shut the Venetians with clangings that would have warned the most oblivious pair of lovers.

And afterward, when they were free of the house, she ran ahead to the waiting auto-car, leaving Kent and Elinor to follow at a snail's pace down the leaf-covered walk to the gate. There was a cedar hedge to mark the sidewalk boundary, and while it still screened them Kent bent quickly to the upturned face of happiness.

"One more," he pleaded; and when he had it: "Do you know now, dearest, why I brought you here to-day?"

She nodded joyously.

"It is the sweetest old place. And, David, dear; we'll bring our ideals--all of them; and it shall be your haven when the storms beat."