Chapter 16

Farther along, he decided that the change was in himself, and was merely the outcropping of the morbid vein which persists, with more or less continuity, in all the temperamental workings of the human mind. When the dinner was over and there was an adjournment to the sitting-room, little Miss Gilman presently found her reading-glasses and a book; and the doctor, in the act of filling two long-stemmed pipes for his guest and himself, was called away professionally. Griswold saw himself confronting the really crucial stage of the ordeal, and prudence was warning him that it would be safer to make his adieux and to go with his host. It was partly Miss Farnham's protest, but more his own determination to prove the bridge of peril to the uttermost, that made him stay.

Miss Gilman, least obtrusive of chaperones, had been peacefully napping for a good half-hour in her low rocker under the reading-lamp, and the pictures in a thick quarto of Gulf Coast views had pleasantly filled the interval for the two who were awake, when Griswold finally assured himself that the danger of recognition was a danger past. As a mental analyst he knew that the opening of each fresh door in the house of present familiarity was automatically closing other doors opening upon the past; and it came to him with a little flush of the seer's exaltation that once again his prefigurings were finding their exact fulfilment. In a spirit of artistic daring he yielded to a sudden impulse, as one crossing the flimsiest of bridges may run and leap to prove that his theory of safety-stresses is a sufficient guarantee of his own immunity.

"You were speaking of first impressions of places," he said, while they were still turning the leaves of the picture-book. "Are you a believer in the absolute correctness of first impressions?"

"I don't know," was the thoughtful reply; but its after-word was more definite: "As to places, I'm not sure that the first impression always persists; in a few instances I am quite certain it hasn't. I didn't like the Gulf Coast at all, at first; it seemed so foreign and different and unhomelike. As to people, however----"

She paused, and Griswold entered the breach hardily.

"As to people, you are less easily converted from the original prejudice--or prepossession. So am I. I have learned to place the utmost confidence in the first impression. In my own case it is invariably correct, and if for any reason whatever I suffer any later characterization to take its place, I am always the loser."

She was regarding him curiously over the big book which still lay open between them.

"Is that a part of the writing gift?" she asked.

"No, not specially; most people have it in some more or less workable quantity, though for many it expresses itself only in a vague attraction or repulsion."

"I've had that feeling," she answered quickly.

"I know," he affirmed. "There have been times when, with every reasonable fibre in you urging you to believe the evil, a still stronger impulse has made you believe in the good."

"How can you know that?" she asked; and again he saw in the expressive eyes the flying signals of indeterminate perplexity and apprehension.

Resolutely he pressed the hazardous experiment to its logical conclusion. Once for all, he must know if this young woman with the sympathetic voice and the goddess-like pose could, even under suggestion, be led to link up the past with the present.

"It is my trade to know," he said quietly, closing the book of views and laying it aside. "There have been moments in your life when you would have given much to be able to decide a question of duty or expediency entirely irrespective of your impressions. Isn't that so?"

For one flitting instant he thought he had gone too far. In the hardy determination to win all or lose all, he had been holding her eyes steadily, as the sure mirror in which he should be able to read his sentence, of acquittal or of condemnation. This time there was no mistaking the sudden widening of the pupils to betray the equally sudden awakening of womanly terror.

"Don't be afraid," he began, and he had come thus far on the road to open confession when he saw that she was not looking at him; she was looking past him toward one of the windows giving upon the porch. "What is it?" he demanded, turning to look with her.

"It was a man--he was looking in at the window!" she returned in low tones. "I thought I saw him once before; but this time I am certain!"

Griswold sprang from his chair and a moment later was letting himself out noiselessly through the hall door. There was nothing stirring on the porch. The windless night was starlit and crystal clear, and the silence was profound. As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home hitching-post.

"Hello, Mr. Griswold; is that you?" called the cheery one, when he saw a bareheaded man beating the covers in his front yard.

Griswold met his host at the gate and walked up the path with him.

"Miss Charlotte thought she saw some one at one of the front windows," he explained; and a moment afterward the daughter was telling it for herself.

"I saw him twice," she insisted; "once while we were at dinner, and again just now. The first time I thought I might be mistaken, but this time----"

Griswold was laughing silently and inwardly deriding his gifts when, under cover of the doctor's return, he made decent acknowledgments for benefits bestowed and took his departure. On the pleasant summer-night walk to upper Shawnee Street he was congratulating himself upon the now quite complete fulfilment of the wishing prophecy. Miss Farnham was going to prove to be all that the most critical maker of studies from life could ask in a model; a supremely perfect original for the character of _Fidelia_ in the book. Moreover, she would be his touchstone for the truths and verities; even as Margery Grierson might, if she were forgiving enough to let by-gones be by-gones, hold the mirror up to Nature and the pure humanities. Moreover, again, whatever slight danger there might have been in a possibility of recognition was a danger outlived. If the first meeting had not stirred the sleeping memories in Miss Farnham, subsequent ones would serve only to widen the gulf between forgetfulness and recollection by just such distances as the Wahaskan Griswold should traverse in leaving behind him the deck-hand of the _Belle Julie_.

Thus the complacent, musing upper thought in the mind and on the lips of the proletary as he wended his way through the quiet and well-nigh deserted streets to the older part of the town. How much it might have been modified if he had known that the man whose face Miss Farnham had seen at the window was silently tracking him through the tree-shadowed streets is a matter for conjecture. Also, it is to be presumed that much, if not all, of the complacency would have vanished if he could have been an unseen listener in the Farnham sitting-room, dating from the time when little Miss Gilman pattered off to bed, leaving the father and daughter sitting together under the reading-lamp.

At first their talk was entirely of the window apparition; the daughter insisting upon its reality, and the father trying to push it over into the limbo of things imagined. Driven finally to give all the reasons for her belief in the realities, Charlotte related the incident of the afternoon.

"You may remember that I told you over the 'phone that I had a caller this afternoon," she began.

The doctor did remember it, and said so.

"You can imagine how frightened I was when I tell you that it was a man--a detective from New Orleans who has, or at least who says he has, been travelling thousands of miles to find me."

Doctor Bertie was tickling his bearded chin thoughtfully. "He should have come to me first," he said, frowning a little at the invasion of his home. "It was about that bank robbery, I suppose?"

"Yes; he thought I could tell him the man's real name. It seems that they have no identity clew to work upon. I knew at the time that 'Gavitt' was an assumed name; the man as good as told me so, you remember. This Mr. Broffin wouldn't believe that I couldn't tell him the real name, and along toward the last he grew quite angry and threatening. He insisted upon it that I knew the robber--that I had known him before the crime was committed; and he intimated pretty broadly that I am still in communication with him. Of course, it is all very absurd; but it is also very annoying to think that somebody is spying upon you all the time. I didn't want to speak of it before Mr. Griswold; but it was this detective who came twice to look in at our windows this evening."

By this time the good Doctor Bertie had become the indignant Doctor Bertie.

"We can't have that at all!" he said incisively. "You did your whole duty in that bank matter; and it was a good deal more than most young women would have done. I'm not going to have you persecuted and harassed--not one minute! Where is this fellow stopping?"

The daughter shook her head. "I don't know. He gave me his card, but it has the New Orleans address only."

"Give it to me and I'll look him up to-morrow."

The card changed hands, and for a few minutes neither of them spoke. Then the daughter began again.

"I've had another shock this evening, too," she said, speaking this time in low tones and with eyes downcast. "This Mr. Griswold: tell me all you know about him, father."

"I don't know much of anything more than--thanks to Miss Grierson--all the town knows. They brought him here sick--she and her father--as I told you. That was some little time before you came home; perhaps while you were still on the way up the river. They didn't know who he was; and oddly enough, there wasn't anything in his clothes or luggage to tell them. I know that to be a fact because, at Miss Margery's request, I helped her overhaul his belongings. Afterward, in a talk with him, I learned that he had been robbed on the train; or at least, that was the supposition. He said there was money in one of the suit-cases, and we didn't find any."

"He is an author, they say; I don't seem to recall his name in any of my reading."

The doctor laughed good-naturedly. "Perhaps he is only one of the would-be's; I don't think it has got much farther than the hankering, as yet. There was a book manuscript in one of his valises, and I read a little of it. It was pretty poor stuff, I thought. But what was your other shock?"

"It was at the dinner-table; when you were joking him about the come-down from Mereside to us. Something he said--I couldn't remember, a minute afterward, just what it was--was spoken exactly in the voice, and with the same little trick of conciseness, as something that was said to me that never-to-be-forgotten evening on the saloon-deck promenade of the _Belle Julie_ ... said by the man whose name was _not_ John Wesley Gavitt."

"Oh, my dear girl!" was the father's instant protest; "that couldn't be, you know!"

"I know it couldn't," was the fair-minded rejoinder. "And I kept on telling myself so all the evening. I had to, father; for that once at the table wasn't the only time. Every few minutes he would say something to bring back that haunting half-recollection. It is only a coincidence, of course; it couldn't be anything else. But when he went away I couldn't help hoping that he would do one of two things; stay away altogether, or come often enough so that--oh, it's all nonsense, all of it: what difference can it make, to him or to me!"

"No difference at all." Doctor Bertie's membership was in that large confraternity of fathers whose blindness on the side of sentiment where their own daughters are concerned has become proverbial.

It was after he had taken up the latest copy of the _Lancet_ and was beginning to bury himself in the editorials, that Charlotte reopened the threshed-out subject with a belated query.

"Did I understand you to say that he had lost all of his money?"

"Yes; practically all of it," said the father, without losing his hold upon what a certain great London physician was saying through the columns of the English medical journal.

But afterward, long after Charlotte had gone up to her room, he remembered, with a curious little start of half-awakened puzzlement, that some one, no longer ago than the yesterday, had told him that young Griswold was rich--or if not rich, at least "well-fixed."

XXVI

PITFALLS

What arguments Edward Raymer used to convince his mother and sister that Griswold as a participating partner was better than Jasper Grierson figuring as the man in possession, the Wahaskan gossips were unable to guess. But the fact remained. Within a week from the day when Raymer, angrily jubilant, had rescued his imperilled stock, it was pretty generally known that Kenneth Griswold, the writing-man, had become the fourth member in the close corporation of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Wahaska was eagerly earning Broffin's contemptuous characterization of it by discussing the business affair in all its possible and probable bearings upon the Raymers, the Griersons, and the newly elected directory of the Pineboro Railroad.

Of all this buzzing of the gossip bees the person most acutely concerned heard little or nothing. Griswold's intimation to Raymer that he wished only to be a silent partner had been made in good faith; and beyond a few purely perfunctory visits to the plant across the railroad tracks, made because Raymer had insisted that he go over the books and learn for himself the exact condition of the business into which he had put his money, Griswold took no more than an advisory part in the industrial activities. To Raymer's urgings there was always the same answer: the writing fit was on him and he had no time.

Taken for what it was worth, the writing excuse was sufficiently valid. In the fallow period of the slow convalescence the imaginative field had grown fertile for the plough, and a new book, borrowing nothing from the old save the sociological background, was already under way. Digging deeply in the inspirational field, Griswold speedily became oblivious to most of his encompassments; to all of them, indeed, save those which bore directly upon the beloved task. Among these, he counted the frequent afternoon visits to Mereside, and the scarcely less frequent evenings spent in the Farnham home. Again in harmony with the later prefigurings, he was using each of the young women as a foil for the other in the outworking of his plot; and he welcomed it as a sign of growth that the story in its new form was acquiring verisimilitude and becoming gratefully, and at times, he persuaded himself, quite vividly, human.

When he got well into the swing of it and was turning out a chapter every three or four days, he fell easily into the habit of slipping the last instalment into his pocket when he went to Mereside. Margery Grierson was adding generously to his immense obligation to her; hoping only to find a friendly listener, he found a helpful collaborator. More than once, when his own imagination was at fault, she was able to open new vistas in the humanities for him, apparently drawing upon a reserve of intuitive conclusions compared with which his own hard-bought store of experimental knowledge was almost puerile.

"I wish you would tell me the secret of your marvellous cleverness!" he exclaimed, on one of the June afternoons when he had been reading to her in the cool half-shadows of the Mereside library. "You are only a child in years: how can you know with such miraculous certainty what other people would think and do under conditions about which you can't possibly know anything experimentally? It's beyond me!"

"There are many things beyond you yet, dear boy; many, many things," was her laughing rejoinder; from which it will be inferred that the episode in the Farmers' and Merchants' burglar-proof had become an episode forgotten--or at least forgiven. "You know men--a little; but when it comes to the women ... well, if I didn't keep continually nagging at you, your two heroines--with neither of whom you are really in love--would degenerate into rag dolls. They would, actually."

"That's true; I can see it clearly enough when you point it out," he admitted, putting his craftsman pride underfoot, as he was always obliged to do in these talks with her. "I should be discouraged if you didn't keep on telling me that the story, as a story, is good."

"It _is_ good; it is a big story," she asserted, with kindling enthusiasm. "The plot, so far as you have gone with it, is fine; and that is where you leave me away behind. I don't see how you could ever think it out. And the character-drawing is fine, too, some of it. Your _Fleming_ is as far beyond me as your _Fidelia_ seems to be beyond you."

"_Fleming_ is human in every drop of his blood," he boasted.

"I don't doubt it for a moment; all the little ear-marks of humanity are there, and I know in reason that he must be a type. But I have never met the man himself; and I am sure I shall be scared silly if I ever do meet him. Think of being shut up in any little corner of the world with a man who has convinced himself that he can commit any crime in the calendar so long as he believes the particular one he chooses isn't a crime!"

"Crime, so-called, is like everything else in this world; a thing to be defined strictly by the motive and the point of view," said Griswold, mounting his hobby with joyous alacrity.

"I know; that is what you say"--this with an adorable uptilt of the pretty chin and a flash of the dark eyes which an instant before had been slumbrous wells of studious abstraction. "But your _Fleming_ is going to prove the contrary; it may not be what you want him to do, but it will be what he will insist upon doing before you get through with him. You have already indicated it in the story, unconsciously, perhaps. When _Fidelia_ surprises him, _Fleming_ is almost ready to kill her; not in defense of the principle he has set up, but to save his own miserable life."

"That is a part of his humanity," insisted the craftsman stubbornly. "You don't know _Fleming_ yet. Have you ever met _Fidelia_?"

"Not as you have drawn her--no. She is too unutterably fine. If she had a single shred of humanity about her, I should suspect you of meaning to fall in love with her, farther along--to the humiliation and despair of poor _Joan_, who, as you say, is a mere daughter of men."

"But how about _Joan_?" he fretted. "Is she out of drawing, too?"

"Yes; you are distorting her the other way--making her too inhumanly worldly and insincere." Then, with an abruptness that was like a slap in the face: "If you didn't spend so many evenings at Doctor Bertie's, you would get both _Fidelia_ and _Joan_ in better drawing."

He flushed and drew himself up, with the stabbed _amour propre_ prompting him to make some stinging retort contrasting the wells of truth with the brackish waters of sheer worldliness. Then he saw how inadequate it would be; how utterly impossible it was to meet this charmingly vindictive young person upon any grounds save those of her own choosing.

"That is the first really unkind thing I have ever heard you say," was the mild reproach which was all that the reactionary second thought would sanction.

"Unkind to whom?--to you, or to Miss Farnham?"

"Ask yourself," he countered weakly; and she laughed at him.

"There is another of your failings, Kenneth. You haven't always the courage of your convictions. What you are thinking is that I am a spiteful little cat. Why don't you say it out loud, like a man?"

"Because I'm not thinking it," he denied, adding: "But I do think you are a little inclined to be unfair to Miss Charlotte."

"Am I? Let us see if I am. I accuse her of nothing but a slavish devotion to custom and the conventions. What did she say when you read her the chapter before this one: where _Fidelia_ goes down to the dining-room at midnight and finds _Fleming_ breaking into the silver-safe where the money is hidden?"

"I'm not reading the story to her," he admitted, and again she laughed.

"But you do talk it over with her; you couldn't help doing that," she persisted.

"Sometimes," he allowed.

"Well, what did she say when you came to that part where _Fidelia_ makes _Fleming_ sit down while she tries to convince him that house-breaking is a crime. You don't dare tell me what she said."

Griswold did it, with a firm convincement that he was thereby breaking a sacred confidence. But the alluring lips and eyes were irresistible when he was fairly within their influence.

"I merely suggested the scene as something that might be done," he explained. "She did not approve of it. Her objection was that the _Fidelias_ in real life don't do such things."

"They don't," was Miss Margery's flippant agreement. "And your letting your _Fidelia_ do it is the one redeeming thing you have done in your drawing of her. Just the same, with all your ingenuity you leave one with the firm conviction that she will never, under any circumstances, do such an unconventional thing again; never, never, never! And that is a false note."

"Why is it?"

"Because it leaves out the common sex-factor; the one that is shared alike by the _Fidelias_ and the _Joans_ and all the rest of us."

"And that is----"

"Just plain, every-day inconsistency--our dearest heritage from good old Mother Eve. Being a mere man, you can't understand that, so you neglect to put it into your women."

"But I can't let that stand," he objected. "You must allow the ideal some little latitude. _Fidelia_ was not inconsistent, either in striving with _Fleming_, or in betraying him."

Miss Grierson's perfect shoulders twitched in a little shrug of impatience.

"Not that time, maybe; with _Fleming_ standing by to tell her that she must be true to herself at whatever cost to him. But the next time--if she should happen to fall in love with the gentleman who was breaking into her father's house-safe...." She laughed in sheer mockery and misquoted a couplet from Riley for him:

"'There, little boy, don't cry; I have broken your doll, I know!'"

"Break some more of them if you can," he urged. "A few more casualties won't make any difference."

"There is only the boy-doll left; and I don't like to break boy-dolls."

"_Fleming_, you mean? I give you leave. Hammer him until he bleeds sawdust, if the spirit moves you."

Miss Grierson had been curled up like a comfortable kitten in the depths of a great lounging chair--her favorite attitude while he was reading to her. But now she sat up and locked her fingers over one knee.

"I said a little while ago that I'd never met _Fleming_, and I haven't. But I like him, and I'm sorry to see him putting himself in for such a savage hereafter. He is a good man, like other good men, with the single difference that he thinks he isn't bound by the traditions. He believes he can commit what the traditionary people call a crime without paying the penalties. He can't: nobody can."

Griswold's smile was the superior smile of the writing craftsman. "That is merely a matter of invention," he asserted. "He can escape the penalties if he is smart enough."