Chapter 18

Half an hour later Broffin had followed the huge hoof-prints of the great English trap-horse to the driveway portal of the De Soto grounds where they were lost on the pebbled carriage approach. Strolling on through the grounds into the lake-fronting lobby of the Inn, he was soon able to account for Raymer. The young iron-founder was evidently on business bent. He was sitting in the lobby with a man whom Broffin recognized as the master car builder of the Pineboro Railroad, and the two were discussing mechanical details over a thick file of blue-prints spread out on Raymer's knees. The smile under Broffin's drooping mustaches was a grin of instant comprehension. Miss Grierson, driving Raymer's way, had picked up the iron-founder and brought him along to the business appointment. It was a way she had--when the candidate for the spare seat in the trap happened to be young and good-looking.

Having placed Raymer, Broffin went in search of Miss Grierson. He found her on the broad veranda, alone, and for the moment unoccupied. How to make the attack so direct and so overwhelming that it could not be withstood was the only remaining question; and Broffin had answered it to his own satisfaction, and was advancing through an open French window directly behind Miss Grierson's chair to put the answer into effect, when the opportunity was snatched away. Raymer, with his roll of blue-prints under his arm and his business with the master car builder apparently concluded, came down the veranda and took the chair next to Miss Grierson's.

Broffin dropped back into the writing-room alcove for which the open French window was the outlet and sat down to bide his time, taking care that the chair which he noiselessly placed for himself should be out of sight from the veranda, but not out of earshot. It seemed very unlikely that the two young people who were enjoying the Minnedaskan view would say anything worth listening to; but the ex-harrier of moonshine-makers was of those who discount all chances.

For a time nothing happened. The two on the veranda talked of the view, of the coming regatta, of the latest lawn social given by the Guild of St. John's. Broffin surmised that they were waiting for the trap to be brought around from the hotel stables, though why there should be a delay was not so evident. But in any event his opportunity was lost unless he could contrive to isolate the young woman again. It was while he was groping for the compassing means that Raymer said:

"It's a shame to make you wait this way, Miss Madge. McMurtry said he had an appointment with Mr. Galbraith for three o'clock, and he had to go and keep it. But he ought to be down again by this time. Don't wait for me if you want to go back to town. I can get a lift from somebody."

"That would be nice, wouldn't it?" was the good-natured retort. "To make you tie up your own horse in town and then to leave you stranded away out here three miles from nowhere! I think I see myself doing such a thing! Besides, I haven't a thing to do but to wait."

Broffin shifted the extinct cigar he was chewing from one corner of his mouth to the other and pulled his soft hat lower over his eyes. He, too, could wait. There was a little stir on the veranda; a rustling of silk petticoats and the click of small heels on the hardwood floor. Broffin could not forbear the peering peep around the sheltering window draperies. Miss Grierson had left her seat and was pacing a slow march up and down before Raymer's chair, apparently for Raymer's benefit. The watcher behind the window draperies drew back quickly when she made the turn to face his way, arguing sapiently that whatever significance their further talk might hold would be carefully and thoughtfully neutralized if Miss Grierson should see him. That she had not seen him became a fact sufficiently well-assured when she sat down again and began to speak of Griswold.

"How is the new partnership going, by this time," she asked, after the manner of one who re-winnows the chaff of the commonplaces in the hope of finding grain enough for the immediate need.

"So far as Griswold is concerned, you wouldn't notice that there is a partnership," laughed the iron-founder. "I can't make him galvanize an atom of interest in his investment. All I can get out of him is, 'Don't bother me; I'm busy.'"

"Mr. Griswold is in a class by himself, don't you think?" was the questioning comment.

"He is all kinds of a good fellow; that's all I know, and all I ask to know," answered Raymer loyally.

"I believe that--now," said his companion, with the faintest possible emphasis upon the time-word.

Broffin marked the emphasis, and the pause that preceded it, and leaned forward to miss no word.

"Meaning that there was a time when you didn't believe it?" Raymer asked.

"Meaning that there was a time when he had me scared half to death," confessed the one who seemed always to say the confidential thing as if it were the most trivial. "Do you remember one day in the library, when you found me looking over the files of the newspapers for the story of the robbery of the Bayou State Security Bank in New Orleans?"

Raymer remembered it very well, and admitted it.

"That was the time when the dreadful idea was scaring me stiff," she went on. "You remember the story, don't you? how the president--our Mr. Galbraith here--was held up at the point of a pistol and marched to the paying teller's window, and how the robber escaped on a river steamboat and was recognized by somebody and was arrested at St. Louis?"

"Yes; I remember it all very clearly. Also I recollect how the second newspaper notice told how he escaped from the officers at St. Louis. Wasn't there something about a young woman being mixed up in it some way?"

"There was: _she_ was the one who recognized the robber disguised as a deck-hand on the boat."

Raymer seemed to have forgotten his impatience for a renewal of the interview with the Pineboro Railroad master car builder.

"I don't seem to recall any mention of that in the newspapers," he said half-doubtfully.

"The newspaper reporters didn't put two and two together, but I did," asserted the sharer of confidences. "There was a young woman getting a draft cashed at the teller's window when the robbery was committed. The bank people didn't know her, so she must have been travelling. You see it's simple enough when you put your mind to it."

"But you haven't told me how you were scared," Raymer suggested.

"I'm coming to that. This escape we read about happened on a certain day in April. It was the very day on which poppa met me on my way back from Florida, and we took the eleven-thirty train north that night. You haven't forgotten that Mr. Griswold was a passenger on that same train?"

"But, goodness gracious, Miss Margery! any number of people were passengers on that train. You surely wouldn't----"

"Hush!" she said, and through the lace window hangings Broffin saw her lift a warning finger. "What I am telling you, Mr. Raymer, is in the strictest confidence; we mustn't let a breath of it get out. But that wasn't all. Mr. Griswold was dreadfully sick, and, of course, he couldn't tell us anything about himself. But while he was delirious he was always muttering something about money, money; money that he had lost and couldn't find, or money that he had found and couldn't lose. Then when we thought he couldn't possibly get well, Doctor Bertie and I ransacked his suit-cases for cards or letters or something that would tell us who he was and where he came from. _There wasn't the littlest thing!_"

"And that was when you began to suspect?" queried Raymer.

"That was when the suspicion began to torture me. I fought it; oh, you don't know how hard I fought it! There he was, lying sick and helpless; utterly unable to do a thing or say a word in his own defence; and yet, if he were the robber, of course, we should have to give him up. It was terrible!"

"I should say so," was Raymer's sympathetic comment. "How did you get it straightened out, at last?"

"It hasn't been altogether straightened out until just lately--within the past few days," she went on gravely. "After he began to get well, I made him talk to me--about himself, you know. There didn't seem to be anything to conceal. At different times he told me all about his home, and his mother, whom he barely remembers, and the big-hearted, open-handed father who made money so easily in his profession--he was _the_ Griswold, the great architect, you know--that he gave it away to anybody who wanted it--but I suppose he has told you all this?"

"No; at least, not very much of it."

Miss Grierson went on smoothly, falling sympathetically into the reminiscent vein.

"Kenneth went to college without ever having known what it was to lack anything in reason that money could buy. A little while after he was graduated his father died."

"Leaving Kenneth poor, I suppose; he has intimated as much to me, once or twice," said Raymer.

"Leaving him awfully poor. He wanted to learn to write, and for a long time he stayed on in New York, living just any old way, and having a dreadfully hard time of it, I imagine, though he would never say much about that part of it. He says he was studying the under-dog, and he has told me some of the most harrowing things he has seen and been through: one of them had a little child in it--a baby that he found in a tenement where the father and mother had both died of starvation ... think of it! And he took the baby away and fed it and kept it...."

Broffin, sitting behind the window draperies, had his elbows on his knees and his head tightly clamped between his hands. He was striving, as the dying strive for breath, to remember. Where had he heard this self-same story of the man who had fought some sort of a studying fight in the back-water of the New York slums? In every detail it came back to him like the recurring scenes of a vivid dream; but the key-notes of time, place, and the man's identity were gone; lost beyond any power of the groping mentality to recall them.

"That is why he thinks he is a Socialist," Miss Grierson was going on evenly. "I've been wondering if you knew these things, and I've wanted to tell you. I've thought it might help you to understand him better if you knew something of what he has been through. But we were talking about my dreadful suspicion. It persisted, you know, right along through everything. At last, I felt that I just _must_ know, at whatever cost. One day when we were driving, I brought him here and--and introduced him to Mr. Galbraith. I was so scared that I could taste it--but I did it!"

Raymer laughed. "Of course, nothing came of it?"

"Nothing at all; and the reaction pretty nearly made me faint. They just made talk, like any two freshly introduced people would, and that was all there was of it. You'd say that was proof enough, wouldn't you? Surely Mr. Galbraith would recognize the man who robbed him?"

"Certainly; there couldn't be any doubt of that."

"That's what I said. And then, right out of a clear sky, came another proof that was even more convincing. Do you happen to know who the young woman was who discovered the bank robber on the steamboat?"

"I? How should I know?"

"I didn't know but she had told you," was the demure rejoinder. "It was Charlotte Farnham."

"What!" ejaculated Raymer. But he was not more deeply moved than was the man behind the window curtains. If Broffin's dead cigar had not been already reduced to shapeless inutility, Miss Grierson's cool announcement, carrying with it the assurance that his secret was no secret, would have settled it.

"It's so," she was adding calmly. "I found out. She and her aunt were passengers on the _Belle Julie_; that was the boat the robber escaped on, you remember. Doctor Bertie told me that. And she was the young woman who was having the draft cashed in the Bayou State Security. How do I know? Because her father bought the draft at poppa's bank, and in the course of time it came back with the Bayou State Security's dated paying stamp on it. See how easy it was!"

Raymer's laugh was not altogether mirthful.

"You are a witch," he said. "Is there anything that you don't know?"

"Not so very many things that I really need to know," was the mildly boastful retort. "But you see, now, how foolish my suspicions were. Mr. Galbraith meets Mr. Griswold just as he would any other nice young man; and Charlotte Farnham, who recognized the robber even when he was disguised as a deck-hand, sees Mr. Griswold pretty nearly every day."

Raymer nodded. Though he would not have admitted it under torture, the entire matter figured somewhat as a mountain constructed out of a rather small mole-hill to a man for whom the subtleties lay in a region unexplored. He wondered that the clear-minded little "social climber," as his sister called her, had ever bothered her nimble brain about such an abstruse and far-fetched question of identities.

"You said, a few minutes ago, that Griswold calls himself a Socialist. That isn't quite the word. He is a sociologist."

Miss Grierson ignored the nice distinction in names.

"Socialism goes with being poor, doesn't it?" she remarked. "Since Mr. Griswold's ship has come in, I suppose he finds it easier, and pleasanter, to be a theoretical leveller than a practical one."

"That is another thing I have never been quite able to understand," said the iron-founder. "You say his father left him poor: where did he get his money?"

"Why, don't you know?" was the innocent query. And then, with a pretty affectation of embarrassment, real or perfectly simulated: "If he hasn't told you, I mustn't."

"Of course, I don't want to pry," said Raymer, loyal again.

"I can give you a hint, and that is all. Don't you remember 'My Lady Jezebel,' the unsigned novel that made such a hit last summer?"

"Why, bless goodness, yes! Did he write that?"

"He has never admitted it in so many words. But I'll divide a little secret with you. He has been reading bits of his new book to me, and pshaw! a blind person could tell! I asked him once if he could guess how much the author of 'My Lady Jezebel' had been paid, and he said, with the most perfectly transparent carelessness: 'Oh, about a hundred thousand, I suppose.'"

"Tally!" said Raymer, laughing. "Griswold has put an even ninety thousand into my little egg-basket out at the plant. But, of course you knew that, everybody in Wahaska knows it by this time."

"Yes; I knew it."

"I'm glad it's book money," Raymer went on. "If we should happen to go smash, he won't feel the loss quite so fiercely. I have a friend over in Wisconsin; he is a laboratory professor in mechanics, and he writes books on the side. He says a book is a pure gamble. If you win, you have that much more money to throw to the dicky-birds. If you lose, you've merely drawn the usual blank."

Miss Grierson did not reply, and for a little while they were both silent. Then Raymer said:

"I wonder if McMurtry doesn't think I've dropped out on him. I guess I'd better go and see. Don't wait any longer on my motions, unless you want to, Miss Margery."

When Raymer had gone, the opportunity which Broffin had so lately craved was his. Miss Grierson was left alone on the big veranda, and he had only to step out and confront her. Instead, he got up quietly and went back through the lobby with his head down and his hands in his pockets, and the surviving bit of the dead cigar disappeared between his strong teeth and became a cud of chagrin. There had been a goal in sight, but Miss Grierson had beat him to it.

And the winner of the small handicap? For the time it took Raymer to disappear she sat perfectly still, in the attitude of one who stifles all the other senses that the listening ear may hear and strike the note of warning or of relief. A group of young people, returning from a steam-launch circuit of the upper lake, came up the steps to disperse itself with pleasant human clatterings on the veranda; but in spite of the distractions the listening ear caught the sound for which it was straining. With a deep breath-drawing that was almost a sob, Miss Grierson sprang up, stole a swift confirming glance at the empty chair behind the window hangings, and crossed the veranda to stand with one arm around a supporting pillar. And since the battle was fought and won, and the friendly pillar gave its stay and shelter, the velvety eyes filled suddenly and the ripe red lips were trembling like the lips of a frightened child.

XXIX

ALL THAT A MAN HATH

For four entire days after Margery Grierson had driven home the nail of the elemental verities in her frank criticism of the new book, and Charlotte Farnham had clinched it, Wahaska's public places saw nothing of Griswold; and Mrs. Holcomb, motherly soul, was driven to expostulate scoldingly with her second-floor front who was pushing the pen feverishly from dawn to the small hours, and evidently--in the kindly widow's phrase--burning the candle at both ends and in the middle.

Out of this candle-burning frenzy the toiler emerged in the afternoon of the fifth day, a little pallid and tremulous from the overstrain, but with a thick packet of fresh manuscript to bulge in his pocket when he made his way, blinking at the unwonted sunlight of out-of-doors, to the great house at the lake's edge.

Margery was waiting for him when he rang the bell: he guessed it gratefully, and she confirmed it.

"Of course," she said, with the bewitching little grimace which could be made to mean so much or so little. "Isn't this your afternoon? Why shouldn't I be waiting for you?" Then, with a swiftly sympathetic glance for the pale face and the tired eyes: "You've been overworking again. Let's sit out here on the porch where we can have what little air there is. There must be a storm brewing; it's positively breathless in the house."

Griswold was glad enough to acquiesce; glad and restfully happy and mildly intoxicated with her beauty and the loving rudeness with which she pushed him into the easiest of the great lounging chairs and took the sheaf of manuscript away from him, declaring that she meant to read it herself.

"It will wear you out," he objected, fishing for the denial which would give the precious fillip to the craftsman vanity.

The denial came promptly.

"Foolish!" she said; "as if anything you have written could make anybody tired!" And then, with the mocking after-touch he had come to know so well, and to look for: "Is that what you wanted me to say?"

"You are the spice of life and your name should have been Variety," he countered feebly. "But I warn you beforehand: there is a frightful lot of it. I have rewritten it from the beginning."

"So much the better," she affirmed. "You've been doling it out to me in little morsels, and I've been aching to get it all at one bite." And she began to read.

It was the first time he had had any of his own work read to him, and the experience was a pure luxury; at once the keenest and the most sensuous enjoyment he had ever known. Marvelling, as he was always moved to marvel, at her bright mind and clever wit and clear insight, he was driven to the superlatives again to find words to describe her reading. Artistically, and as with the gifted sympathy of a born actress, she seemed able to breathe the very atmosphere of the story. None of his subtle nuances were lost; there was never an emphasis misplaced. Better still, the impersonation was perfect. By turns she became himself, _Joan_, _Fidelia_, _Fleming_, or one of the subsidiary characters, speaking the parts, rather than reading them, with such a sure apprehension of his meaning that he could almost fancy that she was reading from his mind instead of following the manuscript.

When it was over; and he could not tell whether the interval should be measured by minutes or hours; the return to the realities--the hot afternoon, the tree-shaded veranda, the lake dimpling like a sheet of molten metal under the sun-glare--was almost painful.

"It is wonderful--simply wonderful!" he said, drawing a deep breath; and then, with a flush of honest confusion to drive away the work pallor: "Of course, you know I don't mean the story; I meant your reading of it. Hasn't any one ever told you that you have the making of a great actress in you, Margery, girl?"

"No," she said shortly; and, dismissing that phase of the subject in the single word: "Let's talk about the story. You have bettered it immensely. What made you do it?"

"I don't know; some convincement that it was all wrong and out of drawing as it stood, I suppose."

"Who gave you the convincement? Miss Farnham?"

His answer was meant to be truthful, but beauty of the intoxicating sort is the most mordant of solvents for truth in the abstract.

"No; you did."

"But she told you something," she persisted. "Otherwise, you could never have made _Fidelia_ all over again, as you have in this rewriting."

"Maybe she did," he admitted. "But that doesn't matter. You think I have bettered the story, and I know I have. And I know where I got the inspiration to do it."

She was smiling across at him, level-eyed.

"Let me pass it back to you, dear boy," she said. "You have the making of a great novelist in you. It may take years and years, and--and I'm afraid you'll always have to be helped; but if you can only get the right kind of help...." She looked away, out across the lake where a fitful breeze was turning the molten-metal dimples into laughing wavelets. Then, with one of her sudden topic-wrenchings: "Speaking of help, reminds me. Why didn't you tell me you had gone into the foundry business with Edward Raymer?"

"Because it didn't occur to me that you would care to know, I guess," he answered unsuspectingly. "As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten it myself."

"Was it a good investment?" she asked guilelessly.

"Yes; that is, I presume it was. I didn't think much about that part of it."

"What did you think about?"

It was just here that he awoke to the realization that he could hardly afford to give Jasper Grierson's daughter the real reason for the investment. So he prevaricated, knowing well enough that he had less than no chance in an evasive duel with her.

"Raymer had been adding to his plant, and he lacked capital," he said guardedly. "I had the money, and it was lying idle."

"Mr. Raymer didn't ask you for help?"

"No; it was my own offer."

"But he did tell you that he was in trouble?"

"Y-yes," hesitantly.

"What kind of trouble was it, Kenneth? I have the best right in the world to know."

Griswold straightened himself in his chair and the work-weariness became a thing of the past. With the fairly evident fact staring him in the face from day to day, it had never occurred to him that his friend and business partner might also be his fellow-prisoner in the house of the witcheries. The sudden convincement stung a little, the all-monopolizing selfishness of the craftsman carrying easily over into the field of sentiment. Yet it was clean friendship for Raymer, no less than for the daughter of desire, that prompted him to say:

"You can't have a right to know anything that will distress you."

"Foolish!" she chided--and this time the epithet had lost its alluring softness. "You may as well tell me. Mr. Raymer had borrowed money at poppa's bank. What was the matter? Did he have to pay it back--all at once?"

There seemed to be no further opening for evasion. "Yes; I think that was the way of it," he answered.

Arguing wholly from the newly made discovery, or postulated discovery, of Raymer's state and standing as an object of Miss Grierson's solicitude, Griswold expected something in the nature of an outburst. What he got was a transfixing glance of the passionate sort, quick with open-eyed admiration.