Chapter 24

It was in the afternoon of this third day, when she had been reading to him, at his own request, the sayings of the Man on the Mount, that he referred for the first time to the details of the accident which had so nearly blotted him out. Upon his asking, she related the few and simple facts of the rescue, modestly minimizing her own part in it, and giving her companion in the catboat full credit.

"The writer-man," he said thoughtfully, when she had finished telling him how Griswold had worked over him in the boat, and how he would not give up. "I remember; you fetched him out to the hotel with you one day: no, you needna fear I'll be forgetting him." Then, with a shrewd look out of the steel-gray eyes: "How long have you been knowing him, Maggie, child?"

"Oh, for quite a long time," she hastened to say. "He came here, sick and helpless, one day last spring, and--well, there isn't any hospital here in Wahaska, you know, so we took him in and helped him get over the fever, or whatever it was. This was his room while he stayed with us."

Andrew Galbraith wagged his head on the pillow.

"I know," he said. "And ye're doing it again for a poor auld man whose siller has never bought him anything like the love you're spending on him. You're everybody's good angel, I'm thinking, Maggie, lassie." Though he did not realize it, his sickness was bringing him day by day nearer to his far-away boyhood in the Inverness-shire hills, and it was easy to slip into the speech of the mother-tongue. Then, after a long pause, he went on: "He wasna wearing a beard, a red beard trimmed down to a spike--this writer-man, when ye found him, was he?"

She shook her head. "No; I have never seen him with a beard."

The sick man turned his face to the wall, and after a time she heard him repeating softly the words which she had just read to him. "But if ye forgive not men ... neither will your Father forgive...." And again, "Judge not that ye be not judged." When he turned back to her there were new lines of suffering in the gray old face.

"I'm sore beset, child; sore beset," he sighed. "You were telling me that MacFarland and Johnson will be here to-night?"

"Yes; they should both reach Wahaska this evening."

Another pause, and at the end of it: "That man Broffin: you'll remember you asked me one day who he was, and I tell 't ye he was a special officer for the bank. Is he still here?"

"He is; I saw him on the street this morning."

Again Andrew Galbraith turned his face away, and he was quiet for so long a time that she thought he had fallen asleep. But he had not.

"You're thinking something of the writer-man, lassie? Don't mind the clavers of an auld man who never had a chick or child of his ain."

Her answer was such as a child might have made. She lifted the big-jointed hand on the coverlet and pressed it softly to her flushed cheek, and he understood.

"I thought so; I was afraid so," he said, slowly. "You say you have known him a long time: it canna have been long enough, bairnie."

"But it is," she insisted, loyally. "I know him better than he knows himself; oh, very much better."

"Ye know the good in him, maybe; there's good in all men, I'm thinking now, though there was a time when I didna believe it."

"I know the good and the bad--and the bad is only the good turned upside down."

Again the sick man wagged his head on the pillow and closed his eyes.

"Ye're a loving lassie, Maggie, and that's a' there is to it," he commented; and after another interval: "What must be, must be. We spoke of this man Broffin: I must see him before Johnson comes. Can ye get him for me, Maggie, child?"

She nodded and went down-stairs to the telephone, returning almost immediately.

"I was fortunate enough to catch him at the hotel. He will be here in a few minutes," was the word she brought; and Galbraith thanked her with his eyes.

"When he comes, ye'll let me see him alone--just for a few minutes," he begged; and beyond that he said no more.

It was after the click of the gate latch had announced Broffin's arrival that Margery drew the shades to shut out the glare of the afternoon sun, lowering the one at the bed's head so that the light no longer fell upon the instruments of the small house-telephone-set mounted upon the wall beside the door.

"Mr. Broffin is here, and I'll send him up," she said. "But you mustn't let him stay long, and you mustn't try to talk too much."

The sick man promised, and as she was going away she turned to repeat the caution. Andrew Galbraith's eyes were closed in weariness, and he did not see that she was standing with her back to the wall while she admonished him, or that, when she had gone to send the visitor up, the ear-piece of the house-telephone-set had been detached from its hook and left dangling by its wire cord.

Miss Grierson went on into the library after she had met the detective at the door and had told him how to find the up stairs room. When the sound of a cautiously closed door told her that Broffin had entered the sick-room, she snatched the receiver of the library house 'phone from its hook and held it to her ear. For a little time keen anxiety wrote its sign manual in the knitted brows and the tightly pressed lips. Then she smiled and the dark eyes grew softly radiant. "The dear old saint!" she whispered; "the dear, _dear_ old saint!" And when Broffin came down a few minutes later, she went to open the hall door for him, serenely demure and with honey on her tongue, as befitted the rôle of "everybody's good angel."

"Did you find him worse than you feared, or better than you hoped?" she asked.

"He's mighty near the edge, I should say--what? But you never can tell. Some of these old fellows can claw back to the top o' the hill after all the doctors in creation have thrown up their hands. I've seen it. What does Doc Farnham say?"

"What he always says; 'while there's life, there's hope.'"

Broffin nodded and went his way down the walk, stopping at the gate to take up the cigar he had hidden on his arrival.

"So Galbraith's out of it, lock, stock and barrel," he muttered, as he strode thoughtfully townward. "I reckoned it'd be that-a-way, as soon as I heard the story o' that shipwreck. And now I ain't so blamed sure that it's Raymer a-holdin' the fort in them pretty black eyes. The old man talked like a man that had just been honeyfugled and talked over and primed plum' up to the muzzle. Why the blue blazes can't she take her iron-moulder fellow and be satisfied? She can't swing to _both_ of 'em. Ump!--the old man wanted me to skip out on a wild-goose chase to 'Frisco in that bond business, and take the first train! Sure, I'll go--but not to-day; oh, no, by grapples; not this day!"

It was possibly an hour beyond Broffin's visit when Margery, having successfully read the sick man to sleep, tiptoed out of the room and went below stairs to shut herself into the hall telephone closet. The number she asked for was that of the Raymer Foundry and Machine Works, and Raymer, himself, answered the call.

"Are you awfully busy?" she asked.

"Up to my chin--yes. But that doesn't count if I can do anything for you."

"Have you heard anything yet from Mr.--from our friend?"

"Not a word. But I'm not worrying any more now."

"Why aren't you?"

"Because I've been remembering that he is the happy--or unhappy--possessor of the 'artistic temperament' and that accounts for anything and everything. I'd forgotten that for a few minutes, you know."

"Well?" she said, with the faintest possible accent of impatience.

"He has gone off somewhere to plug away on that book of his; I'm sure of it. And he hasn't gone very far. I'm inclined to believe that Mrs. Holcomb knows where he is--only she won't tell. And somebody else knows, too."

"Who is the somebody else?"

Though the wire was in a measure public, Raymer risked a single word.

"Charlotte."

None of the sudden passion that leaped into Margery Grierson's eyes was suffered to find its way into her voice when she said: "What makes you think that?"

"Oh, a lot of little things. I was over at the house last night, and there is some sort of a tea-pot tempest going on; I couldn't make out just what. But from the way things shaped up, I gathered that our friend was wanted in Lake Boulevard, and wanted bad--for some reason or other. I had to promise that I'd try to dig him up, before I got away."

"Well?" went the questioning word over the wires, and this time the impatient accent was unconcealed.

"I promised; but this morning Doctor Bertie called me up to say that it was all right; that I needn't trouble myself."

"And I needn't have troubled you," said the voice at the Mereside transmitter. "Excuse _me_, as Hank Billingsly used to say when he happened to shoot the wrong man. Come over when you feel like it--and have time. You mustn't forget that you owe me two calls. Good-by."

After Margery Grierson had let herself out of the stifling little closet under the hall stair, she went into the darkened library and sat for a long time staring at the cold hearth. It was a crooked world, and just now it was a sharply cruel one. There was much to be read between the lines of the short telephone talk with Edward Raymer. The trap was sprung and its jaws were closing; and in his extremity Kenneth Griswold was turning, not to the woman who had condoned and shielded and paid the costly price, but to the other.

"Dear God!" she said softly, when the prolonged stare had brought the quick-springing tears to her eyes; "and I--_I_ could have kept him safe!"

XXXVIII

THE PENDULUM-SWING

To a man seeking only to escape from himself, all roads are equal and all destinations likely to prove uniformly disappointing. Turning his back upon the Iron Works in the day of defeat, with no very clear idea of what he should do or where he should go, Griswold pushed through the strikers' picket lines, and, avoiding the militant suburb, drifted by way of sundry outlying residence streets and a country road to the high ground back of the city.

In deserting Raymer he was actuated by no motive of disloyalty. On the contrary, so much of the motive as had any bearing upon his relations with the young iron-founder sprang from a generous impulse to free Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil spell, and Raymer could well spare him.

On the long tramp to the hills the events of the past few months marshalled themselves in accusing review. No human being, save one, of all those with whom he had come in contact since the day of dragon-bearding in the New Orleans bank had escaped the contaminating touch, and each in turn had suffered loss. The man Gavitt had given his name and identity; the mate of the _Belle Julie_ had sacrificed what little respect he may have had for law and order by becoming, potentially, at least, a criminal accessory. The little Irish cab-driver had sold himself for a price; and the negro deck-hand had earned his mess of fried fish. The single exception was Charlotte Farnham, and he told himself that she had escaped only because she had done her duty as she saw it.

And as the bedeviling thing had begun, so it had continued, losing none of its potency for evil. In the little world of Wahaska, which was to have been the theatre of Utopian demonstration, the curse had persisted. The money, used with the loftiest intentions, had served only as a means to an end, and the end had proved to be the rearing of an apparently impassable wall of bitter antagonism between master and men. And the secret of the money's origin and acquisition, which was to have been so easily cast aside and ignored, had become a soul-sickness incurable and even contagious. Griswold was beginning to suspect that it had attacked Margery Grierson; that it had subconsciously, if not otherwise, thrust itself into Charlotte Farnham's life; and the night of horror so lately past had shown him into what depths it could plunge its wretched guardian and slave.

Now that the plunge had been taken and he had been made to understand that he must henceforth reckon with a base and cowardly under-self which would not stop short of the most heinous crime, he told himself that he must have time to think--to plan.

Caring nothing for its roughness, and scarcely noting the direction in which it was leading him, he followed the country road in its winding descent into a valley forest of oaks. After an hour of aimless tramping he began to have occasional near-hand glimpses of the lake; and a little farther along he came out upon the main-travelled road leading to the summer-resort hotel at the head of De Soto Bay.

Still without any definite purpose in mind he pushed on, and upon reaching the hotel he went in and registered for a room. The luncheon hour was past, but not even the long tramp had given him an appetite. Choosing the quietest corner of the lake-facing veranda he tried to smoke; but the tobacco had lost its flavor, and a longing for completer solitude drove him to his room. Here he drew the window shades and lay down, deliberately wishing that he might fall asleep and wake in some less poignant world; and since the week of strife had been cutting deeply into the nights, the first half of the wish presently came true. While the poignancies were still asserting themselves acutely, sleep stole upon him, and when he awoke it was evening and a cheerful clamor in the dining-room beneath told him that it was dinner-time.

It is a trite saying that many a gulf, seemingly impassable, has been safely bridged in sleep. Bathed, refreshed and with the tramping stains removed, Griswold went down to dinner with the lost appetite regained. A leisurely hour spent in the restorative atmosphere of the well-filled dining-room added its uplift, and at the end of it the troublesome perplexities and paradoxes had withdrawn--at least far enough so that they could be held in the artistic perspective. Afterward, during the cigar-smoking on the cool veranda, he struck out his plan. In the morning he would send in town to Mrs. Holcomb for a few necessaries, and telephone to Raymer. After which, he would try what a fallow day or two would do for him; an interval in which he could weigh and measure and think, and possibly recover the lost sense of proportion.

As the plan was conceived, so it was carried out. Early on the following day he sent a note to Mrs. Holcomb by one of the Inn employees; but the copy of the _Daily Wahaskan_ laid beside his breakfast plate made it unnecessary to telephone Raymer. The paper had a full account of the sudden ending of the lock-out and the resumption of work in the Raymer plant, and he read it with a curious stirring of self-compassion. As he had reasoned it out, there was only one way in which the result could have been attained so quickly. Had Raymer taken that way, in spite of his wrathful rejection of the suggestion? Doubtless he had; and on the heels of that conclusion came a sense of deprivation that was fairly appalling, and the healthy breakfast appetite vanished. Griswold knew what it meant, or he thought he did. Margery Grierson was gone out of his life--gone beyond recall.

After that, there was all the better reason why he should grapple with himself in the fallow interval; and for two complete days he was lost, even to the small world of the summer resort, tramping for hours in the lake shore forests or drifting about in one of the hotel skiffs, and returning to the Inn only to eat and sleep when hunger or weariness constrained him. On the whole, the discipline was good. He flattered himself that the sense of proportion was returning slowly, and with it some saner impulses. Truly, it had been his misfortune to be obliged to compromise with evil to some extent, and to involve others, but was not that rather due to the ineradicable faults of an imperfect social system than to any basic defect in his own theories? And was not the same imperfect social system partly responsible for the _quasi_-criminal attitude which had been forced upon him? He was willing to believe it; willing, also, to believe that he could rise above the constraining forces and be the man he wished to be. That he could so rise was proved, he decided, on the morning of the third day, when he chanced to overhear the hotel clerk telling the man whose room was across the corridor from his own that Andrew Galbraith still had a fighting chance for life. In the pleasant glow of the high resolve the news awakened none of the murderous promptings, but rather the generous hope that it might be true.

It was late in the afternoon of this third day, upon his return from a long pull in the borrowed skiff around the group of islands in the upper and unfrequented part of the lake, that he found a note awaiting him. It was from Miss Farnham, and its brevity, no less than its urgency, stirred him apprehensively, bringing a suggestive return of the furtive fierceness which he promptly fought down. "I must see you before eight o'clock this evening. It is of the last importance," was the wording of the note; and the heavy underscoring of the "last," and a certain tremulous characteristic in the handwriting, stressed the urgency.

Griswold thrust the note into his pocket and made his preparations to go to town, still fighting down the furtive malevolence which was unnerving him; fighting also an unshakable premonition that his hour had come. Once, before the Inn brake was ready to make its evening trip to Wahaska and the railway station, the premonition gripped him so benumbingly that he was sorely tempted. There was another railroad fourteen miles to the westward; a line running a fast day-train to the north with connections for Winnipeg. One of the Inn guests was driving over to catch this fast train at a country crossing, and there was a spare seat in the hired carry-all. Griswold considered the alternative for the length of time it took the hotel porter to put the departing guest's luggage into the waiting vehicle. Then he turned his back and let the chance escape. The issue was fairly defined. To become a fugitive now was to plead guilty as charged--to open the door to chaos.

It was still quite early in the evening when the Inn conveyance set him down at the door of his lodgings in upper Shawnee Street. To the care-taking widow, who would have prepared a late dinner for him, he explained that he was going out again almost at once; and taking time only for a bath and a change, he set forth on the cross-town walk. It lacked something less than a half-hour of the time limit set in Miss Farnham's note, but he attached no special importance to that. He knew that the doctor's dinner-hour was early, and that in any event he could choose his own time for an evening call.

It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly, and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the hotel porch an omnibus backed to the curb to deliver its complement of passengers from the lately met northbound train.

Griswold walked on until he was stopped by the sidewalk-blocking group of freshly arrived travellers pausing to identify their luggage as it was handed down from the top of the omnibus. Alertly watchful, he quickly recognized Broffin among the porch loungers, and saw him leave his tilted chair to saunter toward the steps. Then the fateful thing happened. One of the luggage-sorters, a clean-limbed, handsome young fellow with boyish eyes and a good-natured grin, wheeled suddenly and gripped him.

"Why, Griswold, old man!--well, I'll be dogged! Who on the face of the earth would ever have thought of finding you here? So this is where you came up, after the long, deep, McGinty dive, is it?" Then to one of his fellow travellers: "Hold on a minute, Johnson; I want you to shake hands with an old newspaper pal of mine from New York, Mr. Kenneth Griswold. Kenneth, this is Mr. Beverly Johnson, of the Bayou State Security Bank, in New Orleans."

Thus Bainbridge, sometime star reporter for the _Louisianian_, turning up at the climaxing instant to prove the crowded condition of an over-narrow world, much as Matthew Broffin had once turned up on the after-deck of the coastwise steamer _Adelantado_ to prove it to him.

While Griswold, with every nerve on edge, was acknowledging the introduction which he could by no means avoid, Broffin drew nearer. From the porch steps he could both see and hear. Bainbridge, cheerfully loquacious, continued to do most of the talking. He was telling Griswold of the streak of good luck which had snatched him out of a reporter's berth in the South to make him night editor of one of the St. Paul dailies. Johnson was merely an onlooker. Broffin's eyes searched the teller's face. Thus far it was a blank--a rather bored blank.

"And you are on your way to St. Paul now?" Griswold said to the newspaper man. Broffin, whose ears were skilfully attuned to all the tone variations in the voice of evasion, thought he detected a quaver of anxious impatience in the half-absent query.

"Yes; I was going on through to-night, but Johnson, here, stumped me to stop over. He said I might be able to get a news story out of his sick president," Bainbridge rattled on. "Ever meet Mr. Galbraith? He is the bank president who was held up last spring, you remember; fine old Scotch gentleman of the Walter-Scott brand."

"When did you leave New Orleans?" Griswold asked; and now Broffin made sure he distinguished the note of anxiety.

"Two days back: missed a connection on account of high water in the Ohio. Might have stayed another twelve hours in the good old levee town if we'd only known, eh, Johnson?" And then again to Griswold: "Remember that supper we had at Chaudière's, the night I was leaving for the banana coast? By George! come to think of it, I believe that was the last time we forgathered in the--Say, Kenneth, what have you done with your beard?"

Something clicked in Broffin's brain; then the wheels of the present slipped into gear with those of the past and the entire train moved on smoothly. The final doubt was cleared away. Griswold was the man whose story Bainbridge had told under the after-deck awning of the outward-bound fruit steamer; and the story in all its essentials was the same that Miss Grierson had told on the veranda of the De Soto. Broffin knew now why there had always been a haunting suggestion of familiarity in Griswold's face for him. He had seen and marked the "bloody-minded nihilist" of Bainbridge's story when the two were saying good-by on the banquette in front of Chaudière's.

Broffin's right hand went swiftly to an inside pocket of his coat and when it was withdrawn a pair of handcuffs, oiled to noiselessness, came with it. Deftly the man-catcher worked them open, using only the fingers of one hand, and never taking his eyes from the trio on the sidewalk. One last step remained: if he could only manage to get speech with Johnson first----