Chapter 11

"And this is one of the times?" persisted the analyst.

"We shall say that this is one of the times: say it and stick to it, Mr.----"

The pause after the courtesy title was significant, and Griswold filled it promptly. "Griswold--Kenneth Griswold. Do you mean to say that you haven't known my name, doctor?"

"We have not. We took the Good Samaritan's privilege and ransacked your belongings--Miss Margery and I--thinking that there might be relatives or friends who should be notified."

"And you found nothing?" queried the sick man, a cold fear gripping at his heart.

"Absolutely nothing to tell us who you were; no cards, letters, or memoranda of any kind. The conclusion was obvious: some one had taken advantage of your illness on the train and had picked your pockets."

Griswold moistened his lips and swallowed hard. "There were two suit-cases: were they lost?"

"No; they are here."

"And you found nothing in them?"

"Nothing but clothing and your toilet tools, a pistol, and a typewritten book manuscript bearing no signature."

Griswold turned his face away and shut his eyes. Once more his stake in the game of life was gone.

"There was another package of--of papers in one of the grips," he said, faintly; "quite a large package wrapped in brown paper."

"Valuables?" queried the doctor, sympathetically curious.

"Y-yes; rather valuable."

"We found nothing but the manuscript. Could any one else make use of the papers you speak of?"

Griswold was too feeble to prevaricate successfully.

"There was money in the package," he said, leaving the physician to infer what he pleased.

"Ah; then you were robbed. It's a pity we didn't know it at the time. It is pretty late to begin looking for the thief now, I'm afraid."

"Quite too late," said Griswold monotonously.

The doctor rose to go.

"Don't let the material loss depress you, Mr. Griswold," he said, with encouraging kindliness. "The one loss that couldn't have been retrieved is a danger past for you now, I'm glad to say. Be cheerful and patient, and we'll soon have you a sound man again. You have a magnificent constitution and fine recuperative powers; otherwise we should have buried you within a week of your arrival."

It was not until after the doctor had gone that Griswold was able to face the new misfortune with anything like a sober measure of equanimity. Imaginative to the degree which facilely transforms the suppositional into the real, he was still singularly free from superstition. Nevertheless, all the legends clustering about the proverbial slipperiness of ill-gotten gains paraded themselves insistently. It was only by the supremest effort of will that he could push them aside and address himself to the practical matter of getting well. That was the first thing to be considered; with or without money, he must relieve the Griersons of their self-assumed burden at the earliest possible moment.

This was the thought with which he sank into the first natural sleep of convalescence. But during the days which followed, Margery was able to modify it without dulling the keen edge of his obligation. What perfect hospitality could do was done, without ostentation, with the exact degree of spontaneity which made it appear as a service rendered to a kinsman. It was one of the gifts of the daughter of men to be able to ignore all the middle distances between an introduction and a friendship; and by the time Griswold was strong enough to let the big, gentle Swede plant him in a Morris chair in the sun-warmed bay-window, the friendship was a fact accomplished.

"Do you know, you're the most wonderful person I have ever known?" he said to Margery, on the first of the sunning days when she had come to perch in the window-seat opposite his chair.

"It's propinquity," she laughed. "You haven't seen any other woman for days and weeks. Wait until you are strong enough to come down to one of my 'evenings.'"

"No, it isn't propinquity," he denied.

"Then it's the unaccustomed. You are from the well-behaved East. There are some people even here in Wahaska who will tell you that I have never properly learned how to behave."

"Your looking-glass will tell you why they say that," he said gravely.

Her smile showed the perfect rows of white teeth. "You are recovering rapidly, Mr. Kenneth; don't you think so? Or was that only a little return of the fever?"

He brushed the bit of mockery aside. "I want to be serious to-day--if you'll let me. There are a lot of things I'd like to know."

"About Wahaska?"

"About you, first. Where did we meet?--before I came out of the fever woods and saw you standing by the bed?"

"We didn't 'meet,' in the accepted meaning of the word. My father and I happened to sit at your table one evening in the Hotel Chouteau, in St. Louis."

"Ah; I knew there was a day back of the other days. Do you believe in destiny?"

She nodded brightly. "Sometimes I do; when it brings things out the way I want them to come out."

"I've often wondered," he went on musingly. "Think of it: somewhere back in the past you took the first step in a path which was to lead you to that late supper in the Chouteau. Somewhere in my past I took the first step in the crooked trail that was to lead me there."

"Well?" she encouraged.

"The paths crossed--and I am your poor debtor," he finished. "I can never hope to repay you and your father for what you have done."

"Oh, yes you can," she asserted lightly. "You can pass it along to the man farther down. Forget it, and tell me what you want to know about Wahaska."

"First, I'd like to know my doctor's name."

"The idea!" she exclaimed. "Hasn't there been anybody to introduce you? He is Wahaska's best-beloved 'Doctor Bertie'; otherwise Doctor Herbert C. Farnham."

"_Doctor Farnham?_--not Miss Char----" He bit the name in two in the middle, but the mischief was done.

"Yes; Charlotte's father," was the calm reply. Then: "Where did you meet Miss Farnham?"

"I haven't met her," he protested instantly; "she--she doesn't know me from Adam. But I have seen her, and I happened to learn her name and her home address."

Miss Margery's pretty face took on an expression of polite disinterest, but behind the mask the active brain was busily fitting the pegs of deduction into their proper holes. Her involuntary guest did not know the father; therefore he must have seen the daughter while she was away from home. Charlotte Farnham had been South, at Pass Christian, and doubtless in New Orleans. The convalescent had also been in New Orleans, as his money packet with its Bayou State Security labels sufficiently testified.

Miss Grierson got up to draw one of the window shades. It had become imperative that she should have time to think and an excuse for hiding her face from the eyes which seemed to be trying masterfully to read her inmost thoughts.

"You think it is strange that I should know Miss Farnham's name and address without having met her?" Griswold asked, when the pause had become a keen agony.

Miss Grierson's rejoinder was flippant. "Oh, no; she is pretty enough to account for a stranger thing than that."

"She is more than pretty," said Griswold, impulsively; "she has the beauty of those who have high ideals, and live up to them."

"I thought you said you didn't know her," was the swift retort.

"I said I hadn't met her, and that she doesn't know me."

"Oh," said the small fitter of deduction pegs; and afterward she talked, and made the convalescent talk, pointedly of other things.

This occurred in the forenoon of a pleasant day in May. In the afternoon of the same day, Miss Grierson's trap was halted before the door of the temporary quarters of the Wahaska Public Library. Raymer saw the trap and crossed the street, remembering--what he would otherwise have forgotten--that his sister had asked him to get a book on orchids.

Miss Margery was in the reference room, wading absently through the newspaper files. She nodded brightly when Raymer entered--and was not in the least dust-blinded by the library card in his hand.

"You are just in time to help me," she told him. "Do you remember the story of that daring bank robbery in New Orleans a few weeks ago?--the one in which a man made the president draw a check and get it cashed for him?"

Raymer did remember it, chiefly because he had talked about it at the time with Jasper Grierson, and had wondered curiously how the president of the Farmers' and Merchants' would deport himself under like conditions.

"Do you remember the date?" she asked.

Since it was tied to his first business interview with Grierson _père_, Raymer was able to recall the date, approximately, and together they turned the file of the _Pioneer Press_ until they came to the number containing the Associated Press story of the crime. It was fairly circumstantial; the young woman at the teller's window figured in it, and there was a sketchy description of the robber.

"If you should meet the man face to face, would you recognise him from the description?" she flashed up at Raymer.

"Not in a thousand years," he confessed. "Would you?"

"No; not from the description," she admitted. Then she passed to a matter apparently quite irrelevant.

"Didn't I see Miss Farnham's return noticed in the _Wahaskan_ the other day?"

With Charlotte's father a daily visitor at Mereside, it seemed incredible that Miss Grierson had not heard of the daughter's home-coming. But Raymer answered in good faith.

"You may have seen it some time ago. She and Miss Gilman have been home for three or four weeks."

"Somebody said they were coming up the river by boat; did they?"

"Yes, all the way from New Orleans."

"That must have been delightful, if they were fortunate enough to get a good boat. I've been told that the table is simply impossible on some of them."

"So it is. But they came up as far as St. Louis on one of the Anchor Lines--the _Belle Julie_--and even Miss Gilman admits that the accommodations were excellent."

She nodded absently and began to turn the leaves of the newspaper file. Raymer took it as his dismissal and went to the desk to get the orchid book. When he looked in again on his way to the street, Miss Grierson had gone, leaving the file of the _Pioneer Press_ open on the reading desk. Almost involuntarily he glanced at the first-page headings, thrilling to a little shock of surprise when one of them proved to be the caption of another Associated Press despatch giving a twenty-line story of the capture and second escape of the Bayou State Security robber on the levee at St. Louis.

The reading of the bit of stale news impressed him curiously. Why had Miss Margery interested herself in the details of the New Orleans bank robbery? Why--with no apparent special reason--should she have remembered it at all? or remembering it, have known where to look for the two newspaper references?

Raymer left the library speculating vaguely on the unaccountable tangents at which the feminine mind could now and then fly off from the well-defined circle of the conventionally usual. On rare occasions his mother or Gertrude did it, and he had long since learned the folly of trying to reduce the small problem to terms of known quantities masculine.

"Just the same, I'd like to know why, this time," he said to himself, as he crossed the street to the Manufacturers' Club. "Miss Grierson isn't at all the person to do things without an object."

XX

THE CONVALESCENT

After a few more days in the Morris chair; days during which he was idly contented when Margery was with him, and vaguely dissatisfied when she was not; Griswold was permitted to go below stairs, where he met, for the first time since the Grierson roof had given him shelter, the master of Mereside.

The little visit to Jasper Grierson's library was not prolonged beyond the invalid's strength; but notwithstanding its brevity there were inert currents of antagonism evolved which Margery, present and endeavoring to serve as a lightning-arrester, could neither ground nor turn aside.

For Griswold there was an immediate recrudescence of the unfavorable first impression gained at the Hotel Chouteau supper-table. He recalled his own descriptive formula struck out as a tag for the hard-faced, heavy-browed man at the end of the café table--"crudely strong, elementally shrewd, with a touch, or more than a touch, of the savage: the gray-wolf type"--and he found no present reason for changing the record.

Thus the convalescent debtor to the Grierson hospitality. And as for the Wahaskan money lord, it is to be presumed that he saw nothing more than a hollow-eyed, impractical story-writer (he had been told of the manuscript found in Griswold's hand-baggage), who chanced to be Margery's latest and least accountable fad.

Griswold took away from the rather constrained ice-breaking in the banker's library a renewed resolve to cut his obligation to Jasper Grierson as short as possible. How he should begin again the mordant struggle for existence was still an unsolved problem. Of the one-thousand-dollar spending fund there remained something less than half: for a few weeks or months he could live and pay his way; but after that.... Curiously enough, the alternative of another attack upon the plutocratic dragon did not suggest itself. That, he told himself, was an experiment tried and found wanting. But in any event, he must not outstay his welcome at Mereside; and with this thought in mind he crept down-stairs daily after the library episode, and would give Margery no peace because she would not let him go abroad in the town.

"Not to-day, but to-morrow," she said, finally, when there was no longer any good reason for denying him. "Wait until to-morrow, and if it's a fine day, I'll drive you in the trap."

"But why not to-day?" he complained.

"'How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless'--what shall I say; patient, or guest, or--friend?" she laughed, garbling the quotation to fit the occasion.

"Shakespeare said 'child,'" he suggested mildly.

"And so shall I," she gibed--but the gibe itself was almost a caress. "Sometimes you remind me of an impatient boy who has been promised a peach and can't wait until it ripens. But if you must have a reason why I won't drive you this afternoon, you may. We are going to have a tiny little social function at Mereside this evening, and I want you to be fresh and rested for it."

"Oh, my dear Miss Margery!" protested the convalescent, reluctant to his finger-tips; "not to meet your friends! I am only your poor charity patient, and----"

"That will do," she declared, tyrannizing over him with a fine affectation of austere hostess-ship. "_I_ say you are to come down-stairs this evening to meet a few of our friends. And you will come."

"Certainly, I shall come, if you wish it," he assented, remembering afresh his immense obligation; and when the time was ripe he made himself presentable and felt his way down the dimly lighted library stair, being minded to slip into the social pool by the route which promised the smallest splash and the fewest ripples.

It was a stirring of the Philistine in him that led him to prefigure weariness and banality in the prospect. Without in the least suspecting it, Griswold was a Brahmin of the severest sect on his social side; easily disposed to hold aloof and to criticise, and, as a man Eastern-bred, serenely assured that nothing truly acceptable in the social sense could come out of the Nazareth of the West.

For this cause he was properly humiliated when he entered the spacious double drawing-rooms and found them so comfortably crowded by a throng of conventionally clothed and conventionally behaved guests that he was immediately able to lose himself--and any lingering trace of self-consciousness--in a company which, if appearances were to be trusted, was Western only by reason of Wahaska's location on the map. Indeed, the sudden and necessary rearrangement of the pieces on the prefigured chess-board was almost embarrassing; and Margery's greeting and welcome brought a grateful sense of relief and a certain recovery of self-possession for which, a few minutes earlier, he had thought there could be no possible Wahaskan demand.

"Thank you so much for coming down, and for resolving heroically not to be bored," she began brightly. "And now that you've made your little concession, I'll make mine. I sha'n't ask anything at all of you"--piling the cushions in the corner of a wide window-seat and making him sit down; "you are just to be an invalid this evening, you know, and you needn't meet any more people than you want to."

When she had patted the pillows into place and was gone to welcome still later comers, Griswold had a chance to look around him. The readjusting mechanism was still at work. Beyond question it was all very different, strikingly different, from his forecastings. A young woman was at the piano, with a young man whose clothes fitted him and who was in nowise conscious of them, turning the music for her. There was a pleasant hum of conversation; the lights were not glaring; the furnishings were not in bad taste--on the contrary, they were in exceedingly good taste. Griswold smiled when he remembered that he had been looking forward to something suggesting a cross between a neighborhood tea-drinking and a church social. He was agreeably disappointed to find that the keynote was distinctly well-mannered, passably urban, undeniably conventional.

And the charming young hostess.... From his corner of the window-seat Griswold had a comprehensive view of the two great rooms, and beyond them through a pillared opening to the candle-lighted dining-room where the refreshments were served. Though the rooms were well filled, there was but a single personality pervading them for the eager student of types. Admitting that there were other women more beautiful, Griswold, groping always for the fitting figure and the apt phrase, told himself that Miss Grierson's crowning gift was an acute sense of the eternal harmonies; she was always "in character."

Hitherto he had known her only as his benefactress and the thoughtful caretaker for his comfort. But now, at this first sight of her in the broader social field, she shone upon and dazzled him. Admitting that the later charm might be subtly sensuous--he refused to analyze it too closely--it was undeniable that it warmed him to a newer and a stronger life; that he could bask in its generous glow like some hibernating thing of the wild answering to the first thrilling of the spring-tide. True, Miss Grierson bore little resemblance to any ideal of his past imaginings. She might even be the _Aspasia_ to Charlotte Farnham's _Saint Cecilia_. But even so, was not the daughter of Axiochus well beloved of men and of heroes?

It was some little time afterward, and Jasper Grierson, stalking like a grim and rather unwilling master of ceremonies among his guests, had gruffly introduced three or four of the men, when Griswold gladly made room in the window-seat for his transformed and glorified mistress of the fitnesses. As had happened more than once before, her nearness intoxicated him; and while he made sure now that the charm was at least partly physical, its appeal was none the less irresistible.

"Are you dreadfully tired?" she asked; adding quickly: "You mustn't let us make a martyr of you. It's your privilege to disappear whenever you feel like it."

"Indeed, I'm not at all tired," he protested. "It is all very comforting and homelike; so vastly--" he hesitated, seeking thoughtfully for the word which should convey his meaning without laying him open to the charge of patronizing superciliousness, and she supplied it promptly.

"So different from what you were expecting; I know. You have been thinking of us as barbarians--outer barbarians, perhaps--and you find that we are only harmless provincials. But really, you know, we are improving. I wish you could have known Wahaska as it used to be."

"Before you took it in hand?" he suggested. "I can imagine it."

"Can you? I don't have to imagine it--I can remember: how we used to sit around the edges of the room behaving ourselves just as hard as ever we could, and boring one another to extinction. I'm afraid some of them do it yet, sometimes; but I won't let them do it here."

Once more Griswold let his gaze go at large through the stately rooms. He understood now. His prefigurings had not been so wide of the mark, after all. He had merely reckoned without his hostess.

"It is a miracle," he said, giving her full credit. "I'd like to ask how you wrought it, only I mustn't keep you from your duties."

She laughed joyously, with a little toss of the shapely head which was far more expressive than many words.

"I haven't any duties; I have taught them to amuse themselves. And they are doing it very creditably, don't you think?"

"They are getting along," he admitted. "But tell me: how did you go about it?"

"It was simple enough. When we came here we found a lot of good people who had fallen into the bad habit of boring one another, and a few who hadn't; but the few held themselves aloof. We opened our house to the many, and tried to show them that a church sewing-circle isn't precisely the acme of social enjoyment. That is all."

Griswold saw in his mind's eye a sharply etched picture of the rise and progress of a village magnate cleanly struck out in the two terse sentences, and his respect for his companion in the wide window-seat increased in just proportion. Verily, Miss Margery had imagination.

"It is all very grateful and delightful to me," he confessed, at length. "I have been out of the social running for a long time, but I may as well admit that I am shamelessly Epicurean by nature, and an ascetic only when the necessities drive."

"I know," she assented, with quick appreciation. "An author has to be both, hasn't he?--keen to enjoy, and well hardened to endure."

He turned upon her squarely.

"Where did you ever learn how to say such things as that?" he demanded.

It was an opening for mockery and good-natured raillery, but she did not make use of it. Instead, she let him look as deeply as he pleased into the velvety eyes when she said: "It is given to some of us to see and to understand where others have to learn slowly, letter by letter. Surely, your own gift has told you that, Mr. Griswold?"

"It has," he acknowledged. "But I have found few who really do understand."

"Which is to say that you haven't yet found your other self, isn't it? Perhaps that will come, too, if you'll only be patient--and not expect too many other gifts of the gods along with the one priceless gift of perfect sympathy."

"When I find the one priceless gift, I shall confidently expect to find everything else," he asserted, still held a willing prisoner by the bewitching eyes.

She laughed softly. "You'll be disappointed. The gift you demand will preclude some of the others; as the others would certainly preclude it. How can you be an author and not understand that?"

"I am not an author, I am sorry to say," he objected. "I have written but the one book, and I have never been able to find a publisher for it."

"But you are not going to give up?"

"No; I am going to rewrite the book and try again--and yet again, if needful. It is my message to mankind, and I mean to deliver it."

"Bravo!" she applauded, clapping her hands in a little burst of enthusiasm which, if it were not real, was at least an excellent simulation. "It is only the weak ones who say, 'I hope.' For the truly strong hearts there is only the one battle-cry, 'I will!' When you get blue and discouraged you must come to me and let me cheer you. Cheering people is _my_ mission, if I have any."