Onthe long day-ride from Alta Vista to Denver, Bartrow dwelt upon Myra's letter until the hopefulness of it took possession of him, urging him to reconsider his determination to give up the fight on the Little Myriad. That which seems to have fortified itself beyond peradventure of doubt in the night season is prone to open the door to dubiety in the morning; and the hope which McMurtrie's verdict had quenched came to life again, setting the mill of retrieval agrind, though, apart from the suggestion in Myra's letter, there was little enough for grist.
From admitting the hope to considering ways and means was but a step in the march of returning confidence; and, setting aside Myra's proposal as an alternative which would bring victory at the expense of the cause in which the battle was fought, he was moved to break his promise to himself and to ask help of Stephen Elliott. This decision was not reached without a day-long struggle, in which pride and generosity fought shoulder to shoulder against the apparent necessity. The pioneer had more than once offered to back the promise of the Little Myriad; but Bartrow, knowing Elliott's weakness in the matter of money keeping, had steadily refused to open another door of risk to theold man who had fathered him from boyhood, and whose major infirmity was an open-handed willingness to lend to any borrower.
But the necessity was most urgent. Bartrow rehearsed the condoning facts and set them over against his promise to himself. If he should give up the fight the Little Myriad would be lost, he would be left hopelessly in debt, and the beatific vision, with Miss Van Vetter for its central figure, vanished at once into the limbo of things unrealizable. Moreover, the investment would be less hazardous for the pioneer than at any previous time in the history of the mine. Notwithstanding the discouragements, it was a heartening fact that the ore-bearing vein was steadily widening; and the last mill-run assay, made a week before, had shown a cheering increase in value.
Bartrow weighed the pros and cons for the twentieth time while the train was speeding over the ultimate mile of the long run, and finally yielded to the importunate urgings of the necessity. The first step was to take Connie into his confidence; and when the train reached Denver he hurried to the hotel, full of the new hope and eager to begin the campaign of retrieval. While he was inscribing his name in the register the clerk asked a question.
"Just come down from the range, Mr. Bartrow?"
"Yes. Can you give me my old room?"
"Certainly." The clerk wrote the number opposite the name. "What do they say up in the carbonate camp about the Lodestar business?"
"The Lodestar? I don't know. I haven't been in Leadville. I came down from the Bonanza district on the other line. Anything broke loose?"
"Haven't you heard? The big producer is played out."
"What!"
"Fact; struck a 'lime horse' two weeks ago, and they've been keeping it dark and unloading the stock right and left. You are not in it, I hope?"
Bartrow was not, but he knew that Elliott was; knew, too, that in any unloadingsauve qui peutthe old pioneer would most likely be one of those found dead in the deserted trenches. Wherefore he slurred his supper and hastened out to the house in Colfax Avenue, not to ask help, as he had prefigured, but to ascertain if there were not some way in which a broken man might tender it.
There was a light in the library and none in the parlor; and Bartrow, being rather more a brevet member of Stephen Elliott's family than a visitor, nodded to the servant who admitted him, hung up his coat and hat, and walked unannounced into the lighted room. When he discovered that the library held but one occupant, that the shapely head bending over a book in the cone of light beneath the reading-lamp was not Connie's, he realized the magnitude of Connie's duplicity, and equanimity forsook him.
Miss Van Vetter shut her finger in her book and smiled as if his sudden appearance were quite a matter of course.
"I hoped you would come," she said. "Have you been to dinner?"
The prosaic question might have enabled a less ingenuous man to cover his discomposure with some poor verbal mantle of commonplace or what not; but Bartrow could only murmur "Good Lord!" sinking therewith into the hollow of the nearest chair because his emotion was too great to be borne standing.
Since she was not a party to Connie's small plot, Myra was left to infer that her visitor was ill, and she rose in sympathetic concern.
"Why, Mr. Bartrow! is anything the matter? Shall I get you something? a glass of wine, or"—
Bartrow shook his head and besought her with both hands to sit down again. "No, nothing, thank you; it's miles past that sort of mending. Do you—do you happen to know where your cousin is?"
"Why, yes; she has gone to Boulder with Uncle Stephen."
"I—I thought you were going," Bartrow stammered.
It did not occur to Miss Van Vetter to wonder why he should have thought anything about it.
"I thought so myself, up to the last moment," she rejoined.
Bartrow leaned forward with his hands on his knees.
"Miss Myra, would you—do you mind telling me why you didn't go?" He said it with reproachful gravity.
Miss Van Vetter's poise was an inheritance which had lost nothing in transmission, but the unconscious reproach in his appeal overset it. Under less trying conditions her laugh would have emancipated him; but being still in the bonds of unreadiness, he could only glower at her in a way which lacked nothing of hostility save intention, and say, "I should think you might tell me what you're laughing at!"
"Oh, nothing—nothing at all. Only one would think you were sorry I didn't go. Are you?"
"You know well enough I'm not." This time the reproach was not unconscious. "But you haven't answered my question. I have a horrible suspicion, and I want to know."
"It was Connie's mistake. I was to meet them at the station at half past four—I am sure she said half past four—and when I went down I found the train had been gone an hour. Did you ever hear of such a thing?"
Miss Van Vetter did not know that the small arch-plotter had exhausted her ingenuity trying to devise some less primitive means of accomplishing her purpose; but Bartrow gave Connie full credit for act and intention.
"She'd do worse things than that; she wouldn't stick at anything to carry her point," he said unguardedly.
Myra laughed again. "I hope you don't ask me to believe that she did it purposely," she said.
"Oh, no; of course not. I don't ask you tobelieve anything—except that I'm foolishly glad you missed the train," rejoined the downright one, beginning to find himself.
"Are you, really? I was almost ready to doubt it."
Bartrow was not yet fit to measure swords of repartee with any one, least of all with Miss Van Vetter, and the quicksand of speechlessness engulfed him. His helplessness was so palpable that it presently became infectious, and Myra was dismayed to find herself growing sympathetically self-conscious. Her letter lay between their last meeting and this, and she began to wonder if that were the barrier. When the silence became portentous, Bartrow gathered himself for another dash toward enlargement. It was that or asphyxia. The very air of the room was heavy with the narcosis of embarrassment.
"Your letter came yesterday," he began abruptly.
"Did it? And you have come to tell me to—to tell me to mind my own business? as I said you might?"
"No, indeed, I haven't. But I can't do it, all the same—drag your friend in on the Myriad."
"Was Mr. Lansdale mistaken? Don't you need more capital to go on with?"
"Need it?—well, yes; rather. But I can't take your Mr. Grimsby's money."
"Why not?"
"Because"—the low-pitched hollow of the big lounging-chair seemed to put him at a disadvantage, and he struggled up out of it to tramp back andforth before her—"well, in the first place, because heisyour friend; and if he wasn't, I have no security to offer him—collateral, I suppose he'd call it."
"He is not exactly my friend, within your meaning of the word; and he will not ask you to secure him."
He stopped and looked down upon her. She was shading her eyes from the sheen of the reading-lamp and turning the leaves of the book.
"What does he know about the Little Myriad? anything more than you have told him?"
"No."
"And yet you say he is willing to put up money on it?"
"He is ready to help you—yes."
Bartrow's brows went together in a frown of perplexity. "As long as I'm not going to let him, I suppose I haven't any right to ask questions, but"—
She put the book on the table and looked up at him with something of Connie's steadfastness in her eyes.
"Perhaps I was foolish to try to make even such a small mystery of it; but I thought—I was so anxious to—to put it in such a way as to"—
The words would not discover themselves; and Bartrow, to whom the mystery was now no mystery, helped her over the obstruction.
"As to make it easy for me. I think I catch on, after so long a time. Mr. Grimsby is your business manager, isn't he?"
"My solicitor; yes."
"That's what I meant. And it was going to be your own money?"
"Yes."
He met her gaze with a smile of mingled triumph and admiration.
"It was a close call, and you'll never know how near I came to falling down," he said. "It was a fearful temptation."
The pencilled brows went up with a little arch of interrogation between them.
"A temptation? Why do you call it that?"
Bartrow was slowly coming to his own in the matter of unconstraint. "If you had ever dabbled in mineral, you'd know. When a fellow gets in about so deep, he'd foreclose the mortgage on his grandfather's farm to get money to go on with. I didn't read between the lines in your letter. I thought the Philadelphia man was some friend of yours who was interested in a general way, and the temptation to fall on his neck and weep was almost too much for me."
"You still call it a temptation."
"It was just that, and nothing less. I had the toughest kind of a fight with myself before I could say no, and mean it."
"But why should you say no? You believe in the Little Myriad, don't you?"
"Sure. But that's for myself—and for a few people who knew the size of the risk when they staked me. So far as I've gone with it, it's only abig game of chance; and I wouldn't let you put your money into it unless I knew it was the surest kind of a sure thing."
"Not if I believe in it, too? Not if I am willing to take the chances that you and the others have taken?" Myra conceived that her mistake lay in putting it upon the ground of a purely business transaction, and changed front with truly feminine adroitness. "Won't you let me have just a tiny share of it? Enough so that when I go back to Philadelphia I can say that I am interested in a mine? I should think you might. I'll promise to be the most tractable and obedient stockholder you have."
She made the plea like a spoiled child begging for a toy, but there was no mistaking the earnestness of it. Bartrow felt his fine determination oozing, and was moved to tramp again, making a circuit of the entire room this time, and saying to himself with many emphatic repetitions that it could not be possible,—that her motive was only charitable,—that he was nothing more to her than Connie's friend. When he spoke again his circlings had brought him to the back of her chair.
"You're making it fearfully hard for me, and the worst of it is that you don't seem to know it. You think I am a mining crank, like all the rest of them, and so I am; but there was method in my madness. I never cared overmuch for money until I came to know what it is to love a woman who has too much of it."
There was manifestly no reply to be made to such a pointless speech as this, and when he resumed his circumambulatory march she began to turn the leaves of the book again. When it became evident that he was not going to elucidate, she said, "Meaning Connie?"
"No, not meaning Connie." He had drifted around to the back of her chair again. "I wish you'd put that book away for a few minutes. It owls me."
"I will, if you will stop circling about and talking down on me from the ceiling. It's dreadfully distressing."
He laughed and drew up a chair facing her; drew it up until the arm of it touched hers.
"It's a stand-off," he said, with cheerful effrontery; "only I didn't mean my part of it. Let's see, where were we? You said, 'Meaning Connie,' and I said, 'No, not meaning Connie.' I meant some one else. Until I met her, the Little Myriad was merely a hole in the ground, not so very different from other holes in the ground except that it was mine—and it wasn't the Little Myriad then, either. After that, it got its name changed, and its mission, too. From that day its business was to make it possible for me to go to her and say, 'I love you; you, yourself, and not your money. I've money enough of my own.'"
She heard him through with the face of a graven image. "And now?"
"And now I can't do it; I can never do it, I'mafraid. The Little Myriad has gone back on me, and I'm nearer flat broke to-day than I've ever been."
"But this unfortunate young person who has too much money—she is young, isn't she?—has she nothing to say about it?"
Bartrow answered his own thought rather than her question. "She couldn't be happy with everybody saying she'd staked her husband."
"Has she told you that?"
"No; but it's so,—you know it's so."
Bartrow was no juggler in figures of speech, and his fictitious third person threatened to become unmanageable.
Her smile was good to look upon. "I don't know anything of the kind. I think she would be very foolish to let such an absurd thing make her unhappy—supposing any one should be unkind enough to say it."
"They would say it, and I'd hear of it; and then there'd be trouble."
"But you say you love her; isn't your love strong enough to rise above such things? You think the sacrifice would be hers, but it wouldn't; it would be yours."
"I don't see how you make that out."
Myra's heart sank within her. It hurt her immeasurably to be driven to plead her own cause, but the money-fact was inexorable; and the look in Bartrow's eyes was her warrant when she dared to read it.
"Oh, can't you see?" The words wrought themselves into a plea, though she strove to say them dispassionately. "If it touch your self-respect ever so little, the sacrifice is all yours."
That point of view was quite new to Bartrow. He took time to think it out, but when the truth clinched itself he went straight to the mark.
"I never saw that side of it before—don't quite see it now. But if you do, that's different. It's you, little woman; and I do love you—you, yourself, and not your money. I wish I could go on and say the rest of it, but I can't. Will you take me for better or for worse—with an even chance that it's going to be all worse and no better?"
Her eyes filled with quick tears, and her voice was tremulous. "It would serve you right if I should say no; you've fairly made me beg you to ask me!"
Her hand was on the arm of the chair, and he possessed himself of it and raised it to his lips with gentle reverence.
"You'll have to begin making allowances for me right at the start," he said humbly. "When I make any bad breaks you must remember it's because I don't know any better, and that away down deep under it all I love you well enough to—to go to jail for you. Will you wait for me while I skirmish around and try to get on my feet again?"
"No"—with sweet petulance.
"There it is, you see; another bad break right on top of the first. Suppose you talk a while and let me listen. I'm good at listening."
"I'll wait, if you want me to,—and if you will let me help you to go on with the Little Myriad."
Bartrow's laugh had a ring of boyish joy in it.
"Back to the old cross-roads, aren't we? I'll let you in on it now; but if you take the mine you'll have to take the man along with the other incumbrances,—simultaneously, so to speak."
"I thought you were anxious to wait."
"If you were as poor as I am, I'd ask you to make it high noon to-morrow."
"Oh! the money again. Can't we put it aside, once for all? There isn't so much of it as you may imagine."
Bartrow overleaped the barrier at a bound.
"Then let's make it noon to-morrow. If we are going to push the Myriad I ought to go back to-morrow night."
She tried to scoff at him, but there was love in her eyes.
"Connie said once that you were Young-man-afraid-of-his-horses, but she doesn't know you. I believe you more than half mean it."
"I do mean it. If I sit here and look at you much longer I shall be begging you to make it nine o'clock instead of twelve. Don't ask me to wait very long. It'll be hard enough to go off and leave you afterward. It's a good bit more than a hundred miles in a straight line from Denver to Topeka Mountain."
"I'm going with you," she said calmly.
"You?—to live in a wicky-up on the side of abald mountain? But you know what it is; you've been there. You'd die of the blues in a week."
"Would I?" She rose and stood beside his chair. "You don't know much about me, yet, do you? If the 'wicky-up' is good enough for you, it is good enough for me. I am going with you, and I'm going to make that dear little log cabin a place that you will always be glad to remember,—if I can."
He drew her down on the arm of the chair.
"Don't talk to me that way, Myra,—you mustn't, you know. I'm not used to it, and it breaks me all up. If you say another word I shall want to make it seven o'clock in the morning instead of nine."
"Can you wait a month?"
"No."
"Three weeks?"
"No."
She gave up in despair. "You are dreadfully unreasonable."
"I know it; I was born that way and I can't help it. I sha'n't insist on to-morrow, because I'm not sure that Wun Ling has anything for us to eat; but one week from to-morrow, when I've had time to stock up and straighten up a bit, is going to be the limit. Can you make it?"
"What if I say no?"
"I shall come anyway."
She bent over until her lips touched his forehead.
"That is your answer, only you don't deserve it. And now will you answer my question? I askedyou when you came in if you had been to dinner, and you said 'Good Lord!'"
"Did I? I think I must have been a bit rattled. You see, I'd just heard some bad news, and I was expecting to find Connie, and wasn't expecting to find you."
"Did Connie write you she would meet you?"
He had one hand free to fish out the day-old telegram and give it to her. She read it with a swift blush crimsoning cheek and neck.
"The unscrupulous little tyke!" she said; and then, with self-defensive tact: "But you said you had bad news."
"Yes. A mine that our good old Uncle Steve is pretty deeply into has gone dry."
"Failed, you mean?"
"Yes, that's it. I wish you'd teach me how to talk English,—good clean English, like yours. Connie has tried it, but pshaw! she's worse than I am. But about the Lodestar: I don't know how deep the old man is in; he's such an innocent old infant about putting up money that I'm awfully afraid they have salted him. You must pump Connie and find out. I'll be in Leadville to-morrow night, and if there is anything to be done on the ground I'll do it. The old man has been a second father to me."
Myra promised, and went back once more to the unanswered dinner query.
"Now you remind me of it, I believe I haven't been to dinner," he admitted. "But that's nothing;a meal or two more or less isn't to be mentioned at such a time as this."
"I am going to get you something."
"No, don't; I'm too happy to eat."
But she insisted, and when she came back with a dainty luncheon on a tea-tray he did ample justice to it, if for no better reason than that she sat on the other side of the small reading-table and made tea for him.
Afterward, when the time drew near for the Elliotts' return, he took his leave, though it was yet early.
"They are the best friends I have on earth," he said, when Myra went to the door with him, "but somehow, I feel as if I didn't want to meet anybody I know,—not to-night. I want to have it all to myself for a few hours."
She laughed at that; a laugh with an upbubbling of content and pure happiness in it; and sent him off with his heart afire. When he was halfway down the walk she recalled him. He came back obediently.
"It will cost you something every time you do that," he protested, exacting the penalty. "Was that what you wanted?"
"Of course not! I merely wanted to ask you what it is to 'owl' a person. You said I 'owled' you."
"Did I? Well, you don't; you never can. That is the best definition I can think of: something you can never do to me. May I say good-night again? the way I did a minute ago?"
The glare of the arc-light swinging between its poles across the avenue was quite ruthless, and there were passers-by in straggling procession on the sidewalk. But at the critical instant the kindly incandescence burned blue, clicked, fizzed, and died down to a red spot in the darkness. For which cause Bartrow presently went his way, with the heart-fire upblazing afresh; and when Myra won back to the library and the cosy depths of the great chair, the color scheme of fair neck and cheek and brow was not altogether the reflection from the crimson shade of the reading-lamp.
CONSTANCE TO MYRA
My dear Lady Bountiful: Your letter—the ridiculous one—came yesterday. The idea of your proposing in the very morning of your honey-month to take the Colfax Avenue house and turn it into a home for indigent relatives! As Tommie would put it, "Wot are you givin' us!"
But seriously, cuzzy dear, it's quite out of the question. Papa wouldn't hear to it, and besides, we are getting along very cosily now, re-learning a good many lessons that prosperity makes one forget. One of them is that gratitude isn't quite like the dodo,—gone into fossilistic extinction, you know.
Margaret Gannon is one of the instances. She has taken a room in our block, and there is no limit to her great Irish tender-heartedness. If I'd let her, she would make me sit down and hold my hands while she does the housework of our three rooms. In spite of all I can say or do, she does do a great deal of it; and I can hear her sewing-machine buzzing deep into the night to pay for it.
Tommie is another. The day we moved down here from the old home in Colfax Avenue that "irreclaimable little savage," as you once called him,brought me his surplus of a dollar and something and asked me to "blow it in" for him. Think of it and weep, you luxury-spoiled darling! I could have hugged him, dirt and all. And since that day he has been my Ariel, in more ways than you would think possible. He is so sharp and keen-witted; and his philanthropy has developed into a passion.
Mr. Lansdale has been most kind. That is the proper phrase, I believe, but now that I have written it down it seems trite and meaningless. If I say that he has fairly earned the right to sign himself "Robert Lansdale, Gentleman," you will understand. The change in our circumstances has been a test that he alone of all our friends has been able to endure unmoved. I don't say that others are not kind and sympathetic, but they are—well, they are different. Now that I can say it without hurting you, I'll admit that I've always had a good bit of contempt for culture of the imported variety (I think I have been spelling it "culchah"), but Mr. Lansdale has converted me. It is worth something to be able to rise superior to circumstances,—the circumstances of others, I mean,—and, between us two, it's a virtue to which we new people haven't quite attained.
I presume you read the Denver papers, and if you do you know all I could tell you about the person whom you once said was better worth saving than other people. Mr. Lansdale, who was one of the original trio, you remember, talks very sparingly of Mr. Jeffard; from which I infer that there isn'tmuch to be said,—in mixed company. The newly arrived one lives in an apartment building, and papa says they are beginning to call him a miser on the street. They'd say that of any capitalist who wouldn't invest in at least one "ground-floor" a day; but I think you will agree with me that they can't say anything worse than the truth about him. I haven't had the ill-chance to meet him yet (I hope I'll be spared that), but I am afraid Tommie has been spying upon him,—for reasons of his own which he won't explain. I happened to overhear the final volley of a small battle royal between my Ariel and Margaret the other day, which had in it a hint of an unnamable thing,—a thing which involves Margaret and the unworthy one. You may remember that he once posed as herdeus ex machina. And she has grown dangerously beautiful in her year of uprightness.
When you write, tell me all about your plans for the summer; and believe me always
Your cousin-content,Connie.
MYRA TO CONSTANCE
Dear Connie: Really, the S. P. C. C. ought to take you in hand! To think of the cold-blooded way in which you hoodwinked us up to the very last moment, making us believe that the Lodestar involvement was next to nothing, and keeping the home intact solely for the purpose of providing a proper stage-setting for the final act of our little comedy-drama!It's fairly heart-breaking; the more since you won't let us share with you, as we'd be glad to. Before you saw fit to confide in us, Dick had used every argument short of a pick-handle to convince me that I should presently go back to Denver and creature comforts, leaving him here to go on delving in the Myriad. I only laughed at him, but I'll recant if you will listen to reason, and let me make a home for you and Uncle Stephen. But as between living a three-quarter widow in Denver on mere visiting terms with you and your father, and hibernating here with Dick, you may be sure I shall choose the latter.
We are both as enthusiastic as can be over the prospects of the mine. The new machinery is on the way, and we are down twenty feet on the incline. Another month will surely carry it into pay-rock. (You see I am learning to talk "mineral-English" with the best of them.) Under the circumstances, I don't blame Dick for wanting to stay right here every day; and it won't be so lonesome for me as you may imagine. You see I have Dick, and he can be a whole cityful upon occasion.
You wouldn't know "The Eyrie" (Dick says the altitude is so great that we had to have a high-sounding name) since we have begun to remodel it. We are to have another room, a larger kitchen for Wun Ling (oh, he is a celestial treasure!—quite the archangel of the culinary host), a huge chimney, with immense fireplaces, against a possible winter here, and a wider porch,—board-floored, if youplease. And inside I have rugged and portièred, and pictured and bric-a-bracked, until the pristine barkiness of the place is all but effaced.
So far, with the exception of an occasional call from Mr. McMurtrie, we have been "each other's own best company;" but if I stay up all summer it will be conditional upon your and Uncle Stephen's spending at least a month with us when the hot weather makes your block uncomfortable. Don't say no beforehand, unless you want to make me quite disgusted.
Mr. Lansdale is a lineal descendant in the direct line of the Chevalier,—thesans peur et sans reprocheone; you know I've always said that of him. It chokes me when I think of what is lying in wait for him. Isn't there the least little glimmer of hope? He looked so bright and eager on our wedding day that I could almost make myself believe he was going to get well. You must be very, very careful, Connie dear; not to encourage him too much, I mean; not unless you—but I sha'n't say it without your warrant.
What you say about Margaret Gannon's Irish true-heartedness reminds me of our own wild Irishman. He is the mine blacksmith, a perfect Sheridan for wit and repartee when he is sober, and a maniac of maniacs when he is drunk,—which happens whenever Dick relaxes his vigilance for a single hour.
The other day Pat (if he has any other name I've never heard it) did a thing heroic. They are using dynamite in the tunnel, and after the noonblasts one of the miners went in before the deadly gas had been properly "ventilated" out. One of the others saw him stumble and go headlong down the incline, and the cry went back to the entrance. Pat heard it (he was sober that day), flung his tools to the four winds, dashed into the pit of death, and came out black in the face, but with the man on his shoulder, just as Dick got down to the entrance. Wasn't that fine?
As you surmise, we have read all that the newspapers are saying about Mr. Jeffard. Isn't it queer that he should develop into a millionaire miser! Dick has told me a great deal about him,—at least about the Mr. Jeffard he used to know,—and whatever sins he may have had to answer for in those days, avarice was not one of them. I suppose it is another case of money-spoiling, but I can't help wanting to doubt your latest suspicion of him. I read your letter to Dick, and he shook his head when I came to that part; said he couldn't believe it, even on your testimony,—that the man might be capable of all sorts of villainy, but not that. So I am going over to Dick's point of view far enough to ask you not to be too hard upon the "unworthy one" just because he is no longer one of your poverty-stricken sinners,—hewasthat once, wasn't he? The rich sinners need charity quite as really as the poor; of a different kind, to be sure, and not always as easy to exercise as the other, but none the less necessary.
This is all you are going to get to-night. Dickhas just come up from the mine, and he says I sha'n't write any more whatever.
Your loving cousin,Myra.
LANSDALE TO BARTROW
My Dear Richard:—What with a mine for a taskmaster and a wife for your leisure I can fancy you tossing this letter aside unopened. But the promise which you exacted is herein kept, and it must plead my excuse for breaking into your honeymoon with a few pages of barren gossip.
First, as to Miss Elliott and her good father. Your foreboding went nearer the mark than the ostensible fact. They were merely postponing the evil day until after your wedding, and when the crash came it turned out to be no less than a catastrophe. Stephen Elliott met it like a man, giving up everything to his creditors, and coming down to a life of the barest necessities with the serenity of a philosopher, happy, apparently, that the well of assets was deep enough to brim the tank of liability, though at the expense of the final drop.
I am told that he was left quite without resources other than a small sum of money which one of the creditors absolutely refused to accept; and he assures me that he will once more shoulder pick and shovel and go afield again as soon as the season is a little farther advanced. I confess frankly that the heroism of it bedazes me. If there be any finer example of dauntlessness in the heart of man, the novellers havenot yet portrayed it for us. He was sixty-three last January, and he promises to begin the search for another competence with all the enthusiasm and ardor of youth!
Constance you know, and I need not assure you that the sudden down-dropping touches her not at all; or if at all, only on the side of her beneficences to others. So far as one may perceive, the change for her is only of encompassments. She is as much above it as she was superior to the cheapening effect of an elastic bank account. To me she seems the sweeter for the chastening, though really, I presume, she is neither better nor worse for it,—nor any different. You may be sure that my first call upon them after the submergence was made with a heartful of sympathy,—which I took away with me, and with it a lesson in sincerity and simple-heartedness rare enough in my experience. There is gentle blood and enviable in these two. My pen is too clumsy to ink in the details of this picture for you.
As to Jeffard: When he made his appearance I struck hands with your point of view sufficiently to meet him as if nothing save good fortune had overtaken him,—an attitude which it is sometimes as difficult for me to maintain as it appears altogether impossible for some others who used to know him. By which you will understand that he is ostracized in a way, or would be in any casting of the potsherd votes by the unthinking majority.
I am bound to say, however, that the whiplash of public opinion does not seem to be quite long enoughto reach him. A fortnight ago, for reasons charitable or experimental, as you please, I got him a bidding to one of Mrs. Calmaine's "ridottos." You know Mrs. Calmaine and her tolerance, and you will appreciate the situation when I tell you that I had to manœuvre a bit for the formal invitation, though Jeffard used to be in her good book. Jeffard accepted, and I went with him to see what would befall. There were a good many there who had known the prehistoric Jeffard, and while they did not pointedly ignore him, they seemed to be divided between a desire to cold-shoulder the man and to conciliate the prospective millionaire;—wherefore they compromised by giving him what you would call "the high hand-shake."
Whatever may have been my motive in dragging him into it, Jeffard's own reasons for going were confessedly experimental. So much he confided to me on our early retreat from the house of mirth. "I wanted to find out where I stand," he said, "and these good people have been quite explicit. Don't get me any more invitations." And after a time he added, "I can buy them when I want them." From which you will infer that he will henceforth sit in the seat of the scornful, and this, I fear, is the lamentable fact.
Touching his present mode of life, it borders on the puzzling. With a bank deposit which is currently reported to reach seven figures, and which is doubtless well up in the sixes, he lives in two rooms in a block, and takes his meals at the club. A veryrich spendthrift might do this, you will say, saving at the spigot and wasting at the bung; but so far as my observation goes, Jeffard seems not to know that his barrel has a bung. And if any of the staves have started on the side of dissipation, the leak is not yet apparent to me. The other evening, when I let drive a little arrow pointed with a gibe at his penuriousness, he laughed and reminded me of something he had said one night in the famine time when we were dining by the help of a small windfall of mine. "I told you I should be a miser if the tide ever turned," said he, "and you scoffed at me. I assure you I can account for every dollar I have spent since the Midas began to pour them in."
This is his attitude as he defines it, but I can qualify the accusation a little on the friendly side. I should rather say that he had set his mark at thrifty frugality. He is not niggardly; in benevolences which may be paid for in the coin of effort he is still generous; and if he were living on a clerk's income people would commend him.
But I fancy I hear you cry "Enough!" and this ends with the heartiest good wishes for you both.
Faithfully yours,Robert Lansdale.
Lansdalehad defined himself as a reporter on the "Coloradoan," but in reality he was rather more,—or less,—being that anomalous member of a newspaper staff known as the literary editor. Kershaw had taken him in doubtfully, and had afterward wondered why a man with such an evident gift for journalistic work should prefer to spend his days and nights writing stories which no one would buy. For, contrary to all precedent, when he could sink his literary ambitions the fictionist proved to be a general utility journalist of no uncertain ability, running the office gamut from proof-reading in an emergency to filling the editorial columns on the rare occasions when Kershaw was absent.
It was during one of the Kershawan absences that the letter to Bartrow was written; and the hands of the paper-weight clock on the desk were pointing to the supper hour when Lansdale dropped the pen and drew down the desk-curtain. Unlike his chief, he rarely ignored the supper recess, though a walk in the open air often took the place of the meal; and having his night's work well in hand, he let himself into the corridor, said "Down!" and was presently set afoot at the street level.
As usual, the swift rush down the elevator-shaftdizzied him, and he had to steady himself before he could go on. When he allowed himself to think about it he realized that these dizzyings were growing commoner, and were set awhirl by slighter exciting causes. Another man, or a man with another ailment, might have given the unnerving weakness its true name and place and succumbed to it; but Lansdale'smétierhad been love-transformed into unflinching hopefulness, and the trivialities of the daily walk had come to be so many blind and desperate sorties against the indrawing lines of the relentless besieger. For of the two lions standing in the way to the House Beautiful that named Inequality had been slain by the collapse of the Lodestar; wherefore this other of Ill-health must either slay or be slain, since love would not be denied.
This was what was in his resolute step when he went forth into the night; into the whirl of life on the peopled streets and sidewalks. Some vague supper promptings were present, but a stronger impulse sent him riverward, away from the thickly peopled walks and down into the wholesale district toward a shabby apartment building which had been left stranded on the bar of traffic when the uptown tide had set in.
The little excursion was purposeless, as had been many another in the same direction; but when he found himself opposite the stairway of the shabby building he wondered if he might not go up and ask Constance for a cup of tea. He was wise in hisgeneration, and he had long since discovered that the way to Constance Elliott's heart lay through helpings accepted. With love abounding for any human soul at need, there were precious reserves of tenderness for those to whom she might minister.
Lansdale glanced up at the two lighted windows on the third floor and crossed the street. In the stair archway, which was dimly lighted by a single inefficient gas-jet, he stumbled upon a bit of by-play, in which the actors were a man and a woman leaning together across the stair-rail, and a barelegged boy spying upon the twain from the dimnesses beyond. The little tableau fell apart at the sound of the intruder's footsteps. The boy vanished mysteriously, the woman ran upstairs, and the man turned half angrily, as one faulted. It was Jeffard; and when he recognized Lansdale he spoke quickly, as if to forestall possible comment.
"Hello!—think of the devil and you'll hear the clatter of his hoofs. I was just about to go up to the print-shop to see if I could find you. Been to supper?"
"No; I was"—
Jeffard cut in again swiftly, with edgings streetward. "That's lucky; neither have I. Let's go up to the club."
Lansdale acceded rather reluctantly, since a cup of tea with Constance easily outweighed the grill-room prospect.
"I'll go with you, though I can't promise to play much of a knife and fork," he said. "I was justgoing up to ask Miss Elliott to give me a cup of tea."
They were turning the corner above the stranded apartment house before Jeffard returned the shuttle of speech.
"So the Elliotts live down there now, do they?"
Lansdale said "Yes," and began to rummage in recollection. Had Jeffard been on Constance Elliott's visiting list in the prehistoric time? It was probable that he had been,—with Dick Bartrow for his sponsor. But at this point recollection turned up the mental notes of a certain talk with Bartrow, in which the downright one had confessed his sins of omission Jeffardward. So Lansdale added a query to the affirmative.
"Yes; they live in the Thorson Block. Do you know them?"
Jeffard's reply was no reply. "I'll have to take time to think about it," he said; and they had traversed the necessary streets and found a tableà deuxin the grill-room at the club before he pieced out the unfinished rejoinder.
"You asked me if I knew the Elliotts. I did know Miss Elliott,—as I knew some of those people at Mrs. Calmaine's the other evening. It's quite likely she does not remember me."
Lansdale's brain went apart again, and the reflective half of it continued the rummaging. On the two or three occasions when he had mentioned the newest star in the bonanzine firmament Constance had been visibly disturbed. The nature ofher resentment had not been quite obvious, but Jeffard's tardy rejoinder made it clear. She had known Jeffard and was sorry to be reminded of him.
Lansdale had not done full justice to himself in slurring his own point of view in the letter to Bartrow. So far as he had analyzed it he had been content to call it negative, but it was not quite that. On the contrary, it was complaisant, concerning itself chiefly with the things of past sight, and not unduly with those of present rumor. Jeffard might be an indubitable scoundrel in his later reincarnation, as certain of the mining-camp newspapers had intimated in their accounts of the fight for possession; but in the older time he had been a good fellow and a generous friend at a pinch. Lansdale remembered some of the generosities, and his heart went soft at the recollection of them. Kershaw had kept the secret of the prearranged purchase of certain unusable manuscripts, but the pigeon-holes of a newspaper office are open archives, and one day Lansdale had found a clue which he had followed out to his comforting; a string of hitherto unexplainable incidents, with two stanch friends at the end of it.
One of these loyal friends was the man at whom public opinion was now pointing a dubious finger; and while Lansdale was munching his toast and drinking his cup of weak tea in troubled silence, it began to be discomfortingly evident that he must presently take sides for or against the man whose hospitality he was at that moment sharing. Left toitself, the insularity in him would have evaded the issue. Loyalty of the crucible-test degree of fineness—the loyalty of the single eye—must needs sit below the salt at the table of any analyst of his kind; and Lansdale was a student first and a partisan only when benefits unforgot constrained him. Moreover, frankness in the last resort is rarely at its best in any vivisector of his fellow-men, and it was with no little difficulty that Lansdale made shift to overleap the barrier of reserve.
"Jeffard," he began, when the weak tea was low in the cup, "we used to be pretty near to each other in a time that I like to remember; will you bear with me if I say what is in my mind?"
"Surely," said Jeffard; but the tone was not of assurance.
"You know what the newspapers intimated last fall, and what people are saying of you now?"
"Yes."
"And that your silence makes it rather hard for your friends?"
"I have no friends, Lansdale."
"Oh, yes, you have; or you would have if you would take the trouble to set yourself aright."
"What if I cannot set myself aright?"
"I should be sorry to believe that,—more than sorry to be driven to admit the alternative."
"What is the alternative?"
Lansdale hesitated, as one who has his point at his adversary's breast and is loath to drive it in. "I don't quite like to put it in words, Jeffard; theEnglish is a bit harsh. But you will understand that it is the smiting of a friend. So long as you refuse to say you didn't, the supposition is that you have robbed a man to whom you were under rather heavy obligations."
"Is that Bartrow's supposition?"
"He says it isn't, but I'm afraid the wish is the father to the thought: in his case as in—as in that of others." Lansdale added the inclusive in the hope that the wound would be the better for probing.
Jeffard's laugh was altogether bitter. "'Give a dog a bad name,'" he quoted. "Do you know, I fancied Dick would be obstinate enough to stand out against the apparent fact?"
"That is precisely what he has done, and with less reason than the most devoted partisan might demand. You know you told him that the claim was Garvin's. He wouldn't believe the newspaper story; he insisted that you would be able to 'square' yourself, as he phrased it, when you came out."
Jeffard was looking past his interlocutor, out and beyond to where the farther tables were emptying themselves of the late diners.
"Yet it is his supposition; and your own, you were going to say. Is it Miss Elliott's also?"
Lansdale resisted the impulse to rummage again, and said: "I don't know that—how should I know? But rumor has made the charge, and you have not denied it."
"I don't mean to deny it—not even to her. But neither have I admitted it."
"My dear Jeffard! aren't the facts an admission?—at least, so long as they stand uncontradicted."
"Everybody seems to think so,—and I can afford to be indifferent."
"Having the money, you mean?—possibly. Am I to take that as an admission of the facts?"
"Facts are fixtures, aren't they? things not to be set up or set aside by admissions or denials. But you may take it as you please."
Lansdale shook his head as one whose deprecation is too large for speech. "I can't begin to understand it, Jeffard,—the motive which could impel a man of your convictions, I mean."
Jeffard broke forth in revilings. "What do you know about my convictions? What do you know about anything in the heart of man? You have a set of formulas which you call types, and into which you try to fit all human beings arbitrarily, each after his kind. It's the merest child's-play; a fallacy based on an assumption. No two men can be squared by the same rule; no two will do the same things under exactly similar conditions. Character-study is your specialty, I believe; but you have yet to learn that the human atom is an irresponsible individuality."
"Oh, no, I haven't; I grant you that. But logically"—
"Logic has nothing whatever to do with it. It's ego, pure and unstrained, in most of us; a sluggish river of self, with a quicksand of evil for its bottom."
Lansdale borrowed a gun of his antagonist, and sighted it accurately.
"What do you know about humanity as a whole? What do you know about any part of it save your own infinitesimal fraction?—which seems to be a rather unfair sample."
Jeffard confessed judgment and paid the costs. "I don't know very much about the sample, Lansdale. One time—it was in the sophomore year, I believe—I thought I knew my own potentialities. But I didn't. If any one had prophesied then that I had it in me to do what I have done, I should have demanded a miracle to confirm it."
"But you must justify yourself to yourself," Lansdale persisted.
"Why must I? That is another of your cut-and-dried formulas. So far from recognizing any such obligation, I may say that I gave up trying to account for myself a long time ago. And if I have found it impossible, it isn't worth while for you to try."
Lansdale was not the man to bruise his hands with much beating upon the barred doors of any one's confidence. So he said, "I'm done. It's between you and your conscience,—if you haven't eliminated that with the other things. But I had hoped you'd see fit to defend yourself. The eternal query is sharp enough without the pointing of particular instances."
Jeffard squared himself, with his elbows on the table.
"Do you want an hypothesis, too?—as another man did? Take this, and make the most of it. You knew me and my lacks and havings. You knew that I had reached a point at which I would have pawned my soul for the wherewithal to purchase a short hour or two of forgetfulness. Hold that picture in your mind, and conceive that a summer of unsuccessful prospecting had not changed me for better or worse. Is the point of view unobstructed?"
"The point of view is your own, not mine," Lansdale objected. "And, moreover, the summer did change you, because advancement in some direction is an irrefrangible law. But go on."
"I will. This man whom you have in mind was suddenly brought face to face with a great temptation,—great and subtle. Garvin drove the tunnel on the Midas three years ago and abandoned it as worthless. It was my curiosity which led to the discovery of the gold. It was I who took the sample to the assayer and carried the news of the bonanza to Garvin. I might have kept the knowledge to myself, but I didn't. Why? do you ask? I don't know—perhaps because it didn't occur to me. What followed Bartrow has told you, but not all. Let us assume that the race to Aspen was made in good faith; that this man who had put honor and good report behind him really meant to stand between a drunken fool and the fate he was rushing upon. Can you go so far with me?"
Lansdale nodded. He was spellbound, but it wasthe artist in him and not the man who hung breathless upon the edge of expectancy.
"Very well; now for the crux. This man knelt behind a locked door and heard himself execrated by the man he was trying to save; heard the first kindly impulse he had yielded to in months distorted into a desperate plan to rob the cursing maniac. Is it past belief that he crept away from the locked door and sat down to ask himself in hot resentment why he should go on? Is it not conceivable that he should have begun to give ear to the plea of self-preservation?—to say to himself that if the maniac were no better than a lost man it was no reason that the treasure should be lost also?"
It was altogether conceivable, and Lansdale nodded again. Jeffard found a cigar and went on while he was clipping the end of it.
"But that was not all. Picture this man at the crumbling point of resolution tiptoeing to the door to listen again. He has heard enough to convince him that the miracle of fortune will be worse than wasted upon the drunken witling. Now he is to hear that the besotted fool has already transferred whatever right he had in the Midas to the two despoilers; signed a quitclaim, sold his miracle for a drink or two of whiskey, more or less. Are you listening?"
Lansdale moistened his lips with the lees of the tea in the empty cup, and said, "Yes; go on."
Jeffard sat back and lighted the cigar. "That's all," he said curtly. "It's enough, isn't it? Youknew the man a year ago; you think you know him now. What would he do?"
If the hypothesis were intended to be a test of blind loyalty it missed the mark by just so much as the student of his kind must hold himself aloof from sympathetic entanglements. Lansdale weighed the evidence, not as a partisan, but rather as an onlooker whose point of view was wholly extrinsic.
"I understand," said he; "the man would do as you have done. It's your own affair. As I said a few minutes ago, it is between you and your private conscience. And I dare say if the facts were known the public conscience wouldn't condemn you. Don't you want to use the columns of the 'Coloradoan'?"
Jeffard's negative was explosive. "Do you write me down a fool as well as a knave? Damn the public conscience!"
"Don't swear; I was only offering to turn the stone for you if you've anything to grind."
"I haven't. If I wanted the consent of the majority I could buy it,—buy it if I had shot the maniac instead of letting him shoot me."
"Possibly; and yet you couldn't buy any fraction of it that is worth having," Lansdale asserted, with conviction. "There are a few people left who have not bowed the head in the house of Rimmon."
The cynical hardness went out of Jeffard's eye and lip, and for the first time since the proletary's reincarnation, Lansdale fancied he got a brief glimpse of the man he had known in the day of sincerity.
"A few, yes; the Elliotts, father and daughter,for two, you would say. I wonder if you could help me there."
"To their good opinion?—my dear Jeffard, I'm no professional conscience-keeper!"
"No, I didn't mean that. What I had in mind is a much simpler thing. A year ago Miss Elliott gave me of her abundance. She meant it as a gift, though I made it a loan and repaid the principal—when I was able to. But I am still in her debt. Measured by consequences, which are the only true interest-table, the earnings of her small investment are hardly to be computed in dollars and cents. Naturally, she won't take that view of it, but that does not cancel my obligation. Will you help me to discharge it? They need money."
Lansdale let the appeal simmer in the pot of reflection. His inclination was to refuse to be drawn into any such entanglement; but the opportunity to lessen by ever so little the burdens of the woman he loved was not to be lightly set aside. None the less, the thing seemed impossible.
"I'm afraid it's too big for me, Jeffard; I shouldn't know how to go about it. Don't misunderstand me. I shouldn't stick at the necessary equivocations; but if you know Miss Elliott you must know that Machiavelli himself couldn't be insincere with her. She would have to be told the truth, and"—
He left the sentence incomplete, and Jeffard took it up at the break.
"And if she should acknowledge my obligation—whichshe would not—she would refuse to be reimbursed out of Garvin's money. That is why I haven't sent her a note with a check in it. Will you have another cup of tea?"
Lansdale took the query as a dismissal of the subject and pushed back his chair. On the way out they passed a late incomer; a florid man, with a nervous step and the eye of preoccupation. He nodded to Lansdale in passing, and Jeffard said, "Do you know him?"
"Yes; it's Finchly,—John Murray's man of business."
Jeffard had apparently relapsed into the deeper depths of cynicism again.
"Yes, I know. That's the charitable euphemism. Murray is a day laborer, transmogrified by a lucky strike into a millionaire. He doesn't know enough to write his own name, much less how to keep a great fortune from dissolving, so he hires a manager. It was a happy thought. What does Finchly get?"
Lansdale laughed. "A good living, doubtless."
"Of course; and much more, with the pickings. But there is a salary which is supposed to be the consideration, isn't there?"
"Oh, yes; and the figure of it varies with the imagination of the gossips from ten to fifty thousand a year."
Jeffard stopped to relight his cigar, and Lansdale fancied that the Finchly query went out with the spent match. But Jeffard revived it a square farther on.
"Suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that the man has a conscience. How much could he justly take for the service rendered?"
They were at the entrance of the "Coloradoan" building, and Lansdale took out his notebook and made a memorandum.
"That is good for a column," he said; "'The Moral Responsibility of Millionaire-Managers.' I'll answer your question later, when I've had time to think it over."
"But, seriously," Jeffard insisted. "Is it worth ten thousand a year?—or the half of it? The man is only a cashier,—a high-class accountant at best."
"Finchly is much more than that; he is Murray's brain as well as his pen-hand. But if he were only a money-counter, a money-counter's salary would be enough; say two or three thousand a year, to be liberal."
Jeffard nodded and was turning away; had in fact taken three steps streetward, when he came back to return to the subject dropped at the supper table as though there had been no hiatus.
"You were going to say she would refuse to take Garvin's money, and I said it for you. Would it make it any easier if I can assure you that the money I shall put in your hands is honestly mine?—that James Garvin has no claim, ethical or otherwise, upon it? Take time to consider it,—with an eye to Miss Elliott's present needs rather than to my havings or wishes in the matter."
Lansdale was off his guard, and the human side of him came uppermost in the swift rejoinder,—"Then you didn't tell me the whole truth? The Midas is honestly yours, after all?"
Jeffard turned away and snapped the ash from his cigar. "Don't jump at conclusions," he said. "It's always safer to go on voting with the majority. What I said has nothing to do with the story of the man and his temptation; but the meanest laborer is worthy of his hire. I worked all winter with pick and shovel in the Midas. Good-night."