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So Glory hid the fears that had been growing in her heart and, because of the tidal power of personal fascination and contact, she found it an easy task. While Spurrier was with her, those fears seemed to lose their substance and to stand out as absurdities. They were delirious miasmas dissipated by the sun and daylight of companionship.
Spurrier kept most of his valuable papers in a safety vault in Louisville, but for purposes of reference here, he maintained a complete system of carbon copies, and these must be stored in some place where he could feel sure they were immune from any prying eye. The entire record of his proceedings would be clear to any reader of those memoranda.
While Glory was away one day, he removed a section of the living-room wall and fashioned something in the nature of a secret cabinet, upon which he could rely for these purposes. Before he went away again he shared that secret with her, since in certain exigencies it might be needful that some one should be able to act on wired instructions. He showed her the bit of molding that was removable and which gave entrance to the hidden recess.
“In that strong box,” he told her, “are papers of vital importance. If I haven’t taken you entirely into my confidence about them all, dear, it’s because they concern other people more closely than myself. All my own affairs are yours—but in the service of others, I must obey instructions and those instructions are rigid.”
He took out one envelope, though, plainly marked.
“This,” he said, “is a paper to be used only in case of extreme emergency. It is an order on the safety-deposit236people in Louisville to open my vault to the bearer. In the event of my death, or if I should wire you from a distance, I would want you to use it.”
Even that admittance into the veiled sanctum of his business life pleased Glory, and she nodded her head gravely.
She did not tell him, and he did not guess, that tongues were wagging in his absence, and that people said she was good enough only for that part of his life in which he shed his white collar and his “fine manners” and donned the rougher habiliments of the backwoods.
Even when she learned that his coming back had been only to spend the holidays with her and that he must leave again to be gone for weeks, at least, she let none of the disquiet that smouldered in her find an utterance in words.
On a fine old Blue Grass estate, which exhaled the elegance and ease of the Old South, lived Colonel Merriwell, a life-long friend of Dyke Cappeze. In years long gone he had more than once sought to have Cappeze transfer his activities to a wider field. Now, timber interests called him to the mountains, and though the cold weather had set in, his daughter chose to come with him. She had heard much of the strange and retarded life of the mountains, and because it was so different from the refinements with which she had always been surrounded, she wanted to see it.
When they arrived after traveling conditions that warranted every conception of quaintness, but violated237every demand of comfort, the girl from the Bluegrass found Glory a discovery.
At once she recognized that into any drawing-room this wilderness-bred girl could be safely dropped, and that even though she stood in a corner, she would soon become its center.
Helen Merriwell was fascinated by the anomaly of an inherent aristocracy in an encompassing life which was almost squalid, and a bond of sympathy sprang into instant being. The Bluegrass woman knew by instinct, though through no utterance from the loyal lips, that the other was lonely, and when Colonel Merriwell announced his intention of returning home, the daughter decided to continue her visit and its companionship.
To Spurrier’s house, too, during the crisp, clear weather of late winter came, without announcement or expectation another visitor. They were two other visitors to be exact, but one so overshadowed his companion in importance that the second became negligible.
At the Carnettsville station the daily train drew up one morning and uncoupled, on a siding, the first private car that had ever run over that piece of roadbed. Its chef and valet gazed superciliously down upon the assembled loungers, but the two gentlemen who alighted and gave their names as Martin Harrison and his secretary, Mr. Spooner, were to all appearances “jest ordinary folks.”
Glory was housecleaning on the day of Harrison’s coming, and, in neatly patched gingham and dust-protected crown, she came nearer seeming the typical mountain woman than she had for many days before.238Her fresh beauty was hard to eclipse, but she was less presentable than she wished to be when her husband’s great patron saw her for the first time and contrasted her with such women as his own daughter.
When she heard the name, without previous warning, a sort of panic possessed her and for once she became tongue-tied and awkward, so that after the first, Helen Merriwell stepped into the breach and did the talking.
“My name is Martin Harrison,” said the great man with simple cordiality. “I thought John Spurrier lived here—but I seem to be mistaken.”
“He—he does live here,” stammered Glory, catching the swiftly stifled amazement of the magnate’s disapproving eyes.
“Here?” He put the question blankly as if only politeness prevented a greater vehemence of surprise. “But I expected to find a bachelor establishment. There are ladies here.”
Glory fell back a step as if in retreat under attack. If this statement were true, Spurrier had never acknowledged her to the employer with whom his relations were intimately close. In her own eyes, she stood as one who had lost caste and been repudiated—and all self-confidence abandoned her, giving way to trepidation.
Harrison stood bewilderedly looking at this country girl who had turned tremulous and pale, and Helen Merriwell stepped forward.
“Then you didn’t know that Mr. Spurrier was married?” she smilingly inquired.
The money baron transferred his glance to her as his shadowed face lightened into relief. This young239woman had the poise and ease of his own world, which made communication facile. If Spurrier had not been candid with him, at all events he had, perhaps, not unclassed himself. The other was presumably a local servant of whom he need think no more.
“Mr. Spurrier,” he answered easily, “had not mentioned his marriage, probably because our recent correspondence has all related to business. However, I hold it unhandsome of him not to have done so.” He paused, then added deferentially: “Of course, I am better prepared now to felicitate him—since I have seen you.”
But Helen Merriwell laughed and laid a hand on Glory’s shoulder.
“You do me too much honor, Mr. Harrison,” she assured him. “Thisis Mrs. Spurrier.”
The financier’s ingrained politeness for once failed him. It was not for long, but in the breached instant he stiffened arrogantly as his eyes went back to Glory, and betrayed themselves in half-contemptuous hostility. The lieutenant whom he had chosen as his own successor in the world of lofty affairs had not only deceived him but had thrown himself wantonly away upon a stammering daughter of illiterates!
Martin Harrison bowed again, but this time with a precise formality.
“I didn’t notify Mr. Spurrier of my coming, since I felt sure I would find him here,” he explained briefly, directing himself pointedly to Helen Merriwell. “I am on my way south, so now I’ll defer seeing him until another time—unless you expect him back shortly?”
Helen turned inquiringly to Glory and Glory shook240her head. The episode, confirming her own anxieties, had unnerved her steadfast courage into collapse.
Had any warning come to her in advance of the event her bearing toward this stranger would have been a different one. The pride that bowed submissively to no one except in love, would have sustained her. The natural dignity which was the gift of her blood would have been the thing that any observer must have first and last recognized. With a chance to have shaped her attitude, Glory would have received Harrison as a Barbarian princess might have met an ambassador from Rome, but no such chance had been afforded her and she stood as distraught and as panicky as a stage-struck child whose speech fails.
She even slid back into the rough-hewn vernacular that had been so completely banished from her lips and custom.
“I ain’t got ther power ter say,” she faltered, “when he’ll git back. He’s goin’ ter Frankfort first.”
“I’ll write to him there,” said the capitalist.
Harrison departed with the stiff dignity of an affronted sachem, and Helen Merriwell, looking after him, smiled with amusement for the incident which she so well understood, until she turned and saw Glory.
The girl had wilted back against the wall and stood there as if she had been stricken. Her great, violet eyes were brimming with the spirit of tragedy and held the despair of one who has blithely returned home—to find his house in ruin and ashes.
Glory stole away to her own room, escaping the embrace of sympathetic arms, as soon as she could. “He’s done denied me ter his friends,” she told herself241wildly. “He dast’n’t acknowledge me ter fine folks!”
Then through the first, torpid misery of hurt pride, crept a more terrifying thought. Spurrier had been practically engaged to this man’s daughter. He had been diverted from his purpose by motives of pity, and now that Harrison knew, he might be ruined—probably would be ruined. If so disaster would come to him because of her—and at last she rose from the chair where she had dropped down, collapsed, with a light of new resolution in her eyes.
“If that’s all I’m good for,” she declared tempestuously, “he’s got to be rid of me.”
242CHAPTER XVIII
During the sitting of the legislature John Spurrier was a sporadic onlooker, and his agents were as vigilant as sentinels in a danger zone. The last day of the term drew to a wintry sunset, and when the clock registered midnight the body would stand automatically adjourned until gavel fall two years hence.
Spurrier, outwardly a picture of serenity, but inwardly tensed for the final issue, sat in the visitors’ gallery of the Senate chamber. The charter upon which all his hopes hung as upon a fulcrum was all but in his grasp. Seemingly the enemy slept on. Presumably in those last tired hours the authorizing bill would slip through to passage with the frictionless ease of well-oiled bearings.
The needed men had been won over. Carping critics might prate, here and there, of ugly means that savored of bribery, but that was academic. The promise of forth-coming victory remained. Methods may be questionable. Results are not, and Spurrier was interested in results.
A. O. and G. had corrupted and suborned certain public servants. He had discovered their practice and played their own cards to their undoing. His ostensible clients were perhaps little cleaner-handed than their adversaries, but certainly, those other clients who did243not even know themselves to be represented stood with no stain on their claims.
Those native men and women had not asked him to safeguard them, and had they been able to see what he was doing they would have guessed only that, after winning their faith, he was bent on swindling them. But Spurrier knew not only the seeming facts but those which lay beneath and he fought with a definite sense of stewardship.
First thecoupmust succeed, since that success was the foundation of all the rest, and the moment was at hand.
For this he had slaved, faced dangers and deprived himself of the contentment of home and the society of his wife. Now it was about to end in victory.
The enemy had been caught napping, and the victory would be his. Certainly he had been as fair as the foe. What now remained was a perfunctory confirmation by the Senate, and in these final wearied hours it would slip through easily in the general wind-up of uncontested affairs.
Spurrier had not slept for two days—or had slept little. When this ended he would go to his bed and lie there in sunken hours of restoration the clock around—and after that back to Glory. Already he carried in his pocket the brief message which he meant to put upon the wires to Harrison, at the moment of midnight and success. Characteristically it read: “Complete victory. Spurrier.”
Now as the clerk droned through the mass of unfinished matters that burdened the schedule, the clock stood at ten in the evening, and a spirit of disordered peevishness proclaimed itself in the chamber.244Seats were vacated. Voices rose in unparliamentary clamor.
From the desk where a mountain senator sat in touseled disarray, a flask was drawn and tipped with scant regard to senatorial dignity. Then the chairman of the committee which had the steering of Spurrier’s affairs arose and handed a paper to the clerk.
Spurrier himself maintained the same unemotional cast of countenance with which, years before, he had watched a horse in the stretch battling for more than he could afford to lose, but Wharton, who sat at his side, chewed nervously on an unlighted cigar. Sleepy reporters yawned at the press tables as the clerk droned out his sing-song, “An act entitled an act conferring charter rights upon the Hemlock Pipe Line Company of Kentucky.”
The reading of the measure seemed devoid of interest or attention. It went forward in confusion, yet when it was ended the mountain man who had taken the swig out of his flask, came slowly to his feet.
“Mr. President of the Senate,” he drawled, “I want to address a few incongruvial remarks to the senators in regards to this here proposed measure.”
With a sudden sense of premonition Spurrier found himself sitting electrically upright.
That man was Senator Chew who had sat in council with him and advised him; his right hand in action and his fox-brain in planning, yet now, with every moment invaluable he was burning up time!
He was a pygmy among small men, and as he drooled on he seemed to urge no pertinent objection.245Yet before he had been five minutes on his feet his intent was clear and his success assured.
Out of the hands of their recognized lieutenants A. O. and G. had taken the matter of serving them. Into the hands of this obscure and loutish Solon who was ostensibly pledged to their enemies, they had thrust their commission, and now with the clock creeping forward toward adjournment, he meant to talk the charter measure to death by holding the floor until the opportunity for a vote had elapsed.
Tediously and inanely he meandered along, and no one knew what he was talking about. In extravagant metaphor and florid simile he indulged himself—and the clock worked industriously, an ally not to be unduly hurried.
“Gentlemen of the Senate—” he drooled, “most of us have been raised in a land that knows little of the primitive features that make up life with us, and though it may not at first seem germane or pertinent, I want you to go with me as your guide, while I try to make you see the life of those steep counties that are affected by the measure before you; counties that lie behind the barriers and sleep the ancient sleep of the forgotten.”
Men yawned while his tediousness spun itself into a tawdry flow of slow words, but the Honorable Mr. Chew talked on.
“Many the day, as a lad, have I lain by a rushing brook,” he declaimed, “where the water gushes with the sparkle of sunlit crystal and watched the deer come down on gingerly lifted feet to drink his fill. Now I reckon mighty few of you gentlemen have seen a deer come down to drink——”
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The minute hand of the clock, in comparison with this windy deliberation seemed to be racing between the dial characters.
“In God’s name,” exclaimed Spurrier, “isn’t there any way to shut that fool up? He’s ruining us. Get some of our leaders up here, Wharton. We’ve got to stop him.”
“How?” demanded Wharton with a fallen jaw.
“I don’t give a damn how! Kill him—buy him. Anything!”
“It’s too late,” responded Wharton grimly. “He’s already bought. We’ve walked into their trap. We might as well go home.”
Spurrier sent for his whip, but he had come to the end of his resourcefulness and shook a dejected head.
“If you want to shoot him down as he stands there,” said the gentleman testily, “I dare say it would stop him short. I know no other way. He is having resort to the senatorial privilege of filibuster. We have let them slip up on us. A. O. and G. has outbid you, that’s all.”
“But how in God’s name did they get wise?”
The other laughed grimly. “Wise?” he snorted. “My guess is that they’ve been wise all the time and that hayseed Iscariot has been playing us along for suckers.”
Held by a deadly fascination, Spurrier sank back into his seat. The clock over the speaker’s desk traveled once, almost twice around the dial, and yet that nasal voice wandered on in an endless stream of grotesque bombast—talking the charter to a slow death by strangulation.
Now, reflected Spurrier bitterly, his connection247with the enterprise must seem to any eye that viewed it that only of Harrison’s jackal and lobbyist, who had signally failed in his attempt to raid A. O. and G.
To the mountain folk themselves, if the facts ever percolated into the hills, his seeming would be far from heroic and with nothing tangible accomplished, it would do no good to tell them that he had made his fight with their interests at heart. Such a claim would only stamp him in the face of contrary evidence as taking a coward’s refuge in lies.
Then when it seemed to him that he could no longer restrain himself, Spurrier heard the gavel fall. It was a light sound, but it crashed on his brain with thunders of destruction.
“Gentlemen,” declared the presiding officer, “The Senate stands adjourned,sine die.”
Had John Spurrier gone to see the “witch woman” when Mosebury advised it, his course from that point on would have brought him to a different ending.
In looking back on that night, he could never quite remember it with consecutive distinctness. Gaps of forgetfulness were fitfully shot through with disconnected scraps of recollection. When events began to marshal themselves into orderly sequence, the windowpanes of his hotel room were turning a dirty gray with the coming of dawn, and he was sitting in a straight-backed chair. His bed had not been touched. Back of that lay a chaotic sense of irremediable disaster and despair.
At last he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and that picture of disheveled wildness startled him and brought him back to realization.
Then self-contempt swept in on him. He had been248called a man of iron nerve; a plunger who never turned a hair under reversals of fortune—and now he stood looking through the glass at a broken gambler with frenzied eyes. It was such a face as one might see in the circle before the Casino at Monte Carlo—the place of suicides.
The man who had seemed to come from nowhere and who had talked last night with such destructive volubility, had been a pure shyster. To be outwitted by such a clown carried the sting of chagrin, quite apart from the material disaster. Yet into his disordered thoughts came the realization that the senator had been only a puppet. His actuating wires had been pulled by the fingers of A. O. and G. and the men who sat as overlords of A. O. and G. were only shysters of a greater caliber. The men whom he, himself, served were no better. Compared to this backwoods statesman he, John Spurrier, was as a smooth and sophisticated confidence man paralleled with a pickpocket. Ethically, they were cut from the same cloth, though to differing patterns—one rustic and the other urban.
He had been engaged in a tawdry game, for all its gilding of rich prospects, but in the face of defeat a man cannot change his colors.
Had he been able to undertake this fight as his own man and choose his own methods—changing them as he grew in stature—there might have been a man’s zest in the game.
Now, less than ever, could he speak open truth to these simple friends who had trusted him. Now he must fight out a damaged campaign to the end along249the lines to which he stood committed, and until the end there was nothing to say.
Perhaps if he could avert total ruin, he might yet have opportunity to reclaim the confidence of these Esaus who had traded for a mess of pottage. Certainly they had nothing to hope for from the myrmidons of Trabue.
John Spurrier forced his shoulders back into military erectness. He compelled his lips into the stiff and counterfeited curvature of a smile.
Not only had every resource he could muster gone into the scrapped enterprise, leaving him worse than bankrupt, but through him Martin Harrison had been led into the sinking of a fortune.
Harrison would, in all likelihood, be less bitter about the money loss, than the thought of the triumphant smile on Trabue’s thin lips, but it was quite in the cards that, with his contempt for failure, he would wash his hands of Spurrier.
That, of course, spelled ruin. The exhibition skater had gone through the thin ice.
Harrison could, if he chose, do more than dismiss John Spurrier. He had seen to it that his lieutenant was bound to his standards by debts he could not pay, save out of some future enrichment contingent on success. If he chose to call those loans he would leave his employee shattered beyond hope of recovery.
But when Spurrier went down to the hotel dining room at breakfast time, a cold bath and a superhuman exertion of will power had transformed him. His bearing was a nice blending of the debonair and the dignified.
To no eye of observation was there any trace of250collapse or reversal. He seemed the man who demanded the best from life and who got it.
At a table not far from his own sat Senator Chew with a companion whom Spurrier did not know. The traitor glanced up and his eye met that of the man he had betrayed, then fell flinching.
Perhaps the mountaineer expected the dining room to stage such a scene of recrimination and violence as it had in the past on more than one occasion, for his crafty face went brick red, then darkened into truculence as he half pushed back his chair and his hand swept tentatively toward his hip.
But the plunger had still his pride left, or its remnant, and it was no part of his plan to stand the self-confessed and vanquished victim, by any patent demonstration of wrath. He met the eyes of the politician who had played on both sides of the same game, and smiled, and if there was contempt in the expression, it was recognized only by the man who knew its cause.
Later he wrote a telegram to Harrison. It was not the thing he had expected to say, yet in it went no whine of despair:
Have suffered a temporary reversal.
Have suffered a temporary reversal.
Those were the words that the capitalist read when the message, after being decoded from its cipher, was laid on his desk.
Harrison, recently returned from his Southern trip, thought truculently of that nearby office in which251Trabue was also receiving telegraphic information, and he writhed in the wormwood of chagrin.
The curtness of his response scorched the wires:
Explain in person if you can. Otherwise we separate.
Explain in person if you can. Otherwise we separate.
So John Spurrier packed his bag and caught the first train for the mountains. He must say good-by to Glory, before facing this final ordeal, and he believed that in that clarifying air he could brace himself for the encounter that awaited him in New York.
As he turned into the yard of his own house he paused, and something about his heart tightened until it unsteadied him. Here alone, in all the world, he had known what home meant, and in his heart and veins rose an intoxicating tumult like that of wine.
Back of that emotional wave though lurked a misery of self-reproach. Glory had made the magic of his brief happiness, but there was a background, too, of kindly souls and a ruggedly genuine welcome. He had learned to know these people and to revise his first, false views of them. In them dwelt the stout honesty and real strength of oak and hickory.
First he had striven to plunder them, then sought to lift the yoke of poverty from their long-bowed shoulders. In both efforts he had failed.
But had he failed, after all? Certainly he stood under the black shadow of a major disaster, but had not others retrieved disasters and made final victory only the brighter for its contrast with lurid misfortune?
He had been the plunger who seemed strongest252when he was weakest, and these enduring hills spoke their message of steadfastness to him as he stood surrounded by their lofty crests of spruce and pine.
Then he had reached the door and flung it open and Glory was in his arms, but unaccountably she had burst into a tempest of tears.
Before he had had time to speak of the necessity that called him East she was telling of the visit of Martin Harrison and his indignant departure.
Despite his all-consuming absorption of a moment before, Spurrier drew away, chilled by that announcement, and Glory read in his eyes a momentary agony of apprehension.
“In God’s name,” he demanded in a numbed voice, “why didn’t you write me about that?”
“He said,” responded the wife simply, “thathewould write to you at Frankfort. I thought you knew.”
“But I should have thought you’d have spoken of his coming and going—like that.”
Her head came up with a brief little flash of hurt pride.
“You hadn’t ever told him—about me,” she said, though without accusation. “I didn’t want to talk to you about it until you were ready to suggest it. It might have seemed—disloyal.”
Spurrier again braced his shoulders. After a moment he took her in his arms.
“Glory, my sweetheart, I’ve been playing a game for big stakes. I’ve had to do some things I didn’t relish. I’ve got to do another now. I’m summoned to Harrison’s office in New York, at once—and I have no choice.”
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Glory drew away and looked with challenging directness into his eyes.
“I suppose—you’ll go alone?”
“I must. Business affairs are at a crisis, and I need a free hand. But, God granting me a safe return, it’s to be our last separation. I swear that. I am always wretched without you.”
Always before when disappointment or disquiet had riffled the deeps of her eyes, it had taken only a word and a smile from this man to dispel them and bring back the serenity of content. Her moments of panic when she had seemed to drop down, down into pits of foreboding until she had plumbed the depth of despair, had been moments to which she had surrendered in his absence and of which he had been given no hint.
Now with a gravity that was bafflingly unreadable she stood silent and looked about the room, and the man’s eyes followed hers.
Why was it, he almost fiercely demanded of himself, that this cottage set in remote hills shed about him a feeling of soul-satisfaction that he had never encountered in more luxurious places?
Now as he looked at it the thought of leaving it cramped his heart with a sort of breathless agony.
Yet, of course, there was no question after all. It was because in everything it was reflection of Glory’s own spirit and to him Glory stood for the only love that had ever been bigger to him than himself.
The simplicity and good taste of the small house, standing in a land of squalid cabins like a disciple of quiet elegance among beggars, had been the result254of their collaboration. Glory had had the instinct of artistic perception and true values and he had been able to guide her from his sybarite experience.
The stone fireplace with its ingle-nook, built by their own hands from rocks they had selected and gathered together, seemed to him a beautiful thing. The natural wood of the paneling, picked out at the saw-mill with a critical eye for graining and figuration, satisfied the eye, and the few pictures that he had brought from the East were all landscapes that meant something to each of them—lyric bits of canvas with singing skies. To every object a memory had attached itself; a memory that had also a tendril in their hearts.
But now Glory, too, was looking at all these things as though she as well as himself were leaving them. There was something of farewell in the glance that lingered on them and caressed them, as if of leave-taking and into Spurrier’s heart crept the intuition that despite his declaration just made that this should be their last separation, she was seeing in it a threat of permanence.
And that was the thought that was chilling Glory’s heart and muting the song of happiness which his coming had awakened. This place which had been founded with all the promise of home and companionship was beginning to hold for her the foreboding of loneliness and something like abandonment. He knew it only when they were together here, but she had been in it alone and frightened more than in times of shared happiness.
And why was this true? Why could it be either true or necessary unless, as she had told herself in255panic moments and denied so persistently, she was a misfit in his broader life and a woman whom he could enjoy in solitude but dared not trust to comparison with others?
256CHAPTER XIX
At last she turned abruptly away, in order that the misery which would no longer submit to concealment might not show itself in her eyes, and stood looking out of the window.
Spurrier crossed with anxious swiftness and took her again into his arms.
“When I have finished this business trip,” he declared fervently, “our separations shall end. They have been too many and too long—but I’ve paid for them in loneliness, dear. This call, that I’m answering now, is unexpected but it’s imperative and I can’t disobey it.”
She turned then, slowly and gravely, but with no lightening of the burdened anxiety in her eyes.
“It’s not just that you have to go away, Jack,” she told him. “It’s a great deal more than that.”
“What else is there, dearest?” His question was intoned with surprise. “When we are together, I have nothing else to ask of life. Have you?”
“The place has been changed—mightily changed,” she went on musingly as though talking to herself rather than to him. “And yet the walls are the same as they were that day—when we both thought we had to die here together.”
“They are the dearer for that,” he exclaimed fervently. “That was what made us see things truly.”
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“I wonder,” she questioned, then meeting his eyes steadily she went on as though determined to say what must be said.
“When you called Brother Hawkins in to marry us, I was afraid. I was afraid because I thought you were only doing it out of kindness, and that afterward you’d be ashamed of me.”
“Ashamed of you,” he echoed with indignant incredulity. “In God’s name how could I be?”
“Or if not ashamed of me that you couldn’t help knowing that I was—what I am—all right here in the hills but that outside—I wouldn’t do.”
“If you were ever afraid of that, it was only because you were undervaluing yourself. You surely haven’t any ghost of such a fear left now.”
For a little she stood silent again torn between the loyalty that hesitated to question him and the pride that was hurt.
Finally she said simply: “It’s a bigger fear now. Unless I’m unpresentable, why do you—never take me anywhere with you?”
John Spurrier laughed, vastly relieved that the mountain of her anxiety had resolved itself, as he thought, into a mole-hill. He could laugh because he had no suspicion of the chronic soreness of her heart and his answer was lightly made.
“These trips have all been in connection with the sort of business, Glory, that would have meant keeping me away from you whether you had gone to town or not. When we travel together—and I want that we shall travel a great deal—I must be free to devote myself to you. I want to show the world to you and I want to show you to the world.”
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That declaration he fancied ought to resolve her fears of his being ashamed of her.
“If you were afraid I’d seem out of place,” she assured him, “I might be right sorry—and yet I think I’d understand. I’m not a fool and I know I’d make mistakes, but I was raised a lawyer’s daughter and I’ve got a pretty good business head—yet you’ve never told me anything of what this business is that calls you away. You always treat me as if there were no use in even trying to make me understand it.”
The man no longer laughed. He could not explain that it was rather because she might understand too well than not well enough. Even to her, until he was ready to prove his intent by his actual deeds, it seemed impossible to give that story without the seeming of the plunderer of her people.
“When the time comes that releases me from my pledge of absolute secrecy, dear,” he told her earnestly, “I mean to tell you all about my business—and I think you’ll approve, then. Now I don’t talk because I have no right to.”
Again there was silence, after which Glory said in a voice of still resolution which he had never heard from her before:
“I’m ignorant and uncultivated, Jack, but to me marriage is a full partnership—or it isn’t anything. When Mr. Harrison came, I saw for the first time just how I looked to men like him. I was just ‘pore white trash.’”
“Did he——” Spurrier broke off and his face went abruptly white with passion. Had Harrison been there at that moment he would have stood in259danger at the hands of his employee, but Glory shook her head and hastened to quiet him.
“He wasn’t impolite, Jack. It wasn’t that—only I read in his eyes what he tried to hide. I only told you that because I wanted you to understand me. People here say that you give me everything but yourself; that I’m not good enough for you except right here where there’s nothing better.”
“That is a damned lie,” he expostulated. “Who says it?”
“Only women-folks and gossipy grannies that you can’t fight with, Jack,” she answered steadily. “But I’ve thought about it lots. I’ve come to think, dear, that maybe you ought to be free—and if you ought,” she paused, then the final assertion broke from her with an agonized voice, “then, I love you enough to set you free.”
Spurrier seized her in his arms and his words came choked with vehement feeling.
“I want you, Glory. I want you always and I couldn’t live without you. When I have to go away I endure it only by thinking of coming back to you. If you ever set me free as you call it, it will be only becauseyoudon’t wantme. I suppose in that case I’d try to take my medicine—but I think it would about kill me.”
“There’s no danger of that, dear,” she declared.
The man drew away for a moment and fumbled for words. His aptness of speech had deserted him and at last he spoke clumsily:
“It’s hard to explain just now, when you’ve accused me of not taking you into my confidence, but I stand at a point, Glory, where I’ve got the hardest fight260ahead of me I ever made. I stand to be ruined or to make good. I’ve got to use every minute and every thought in competition with quick brains and enormous power. Until its over I must be a machine with one idea ... and I’ll fail, dear, unless I can take with me the knowledge that you trust me.”
She looked up into his face and the misery in her eyes gave place to confidence.
“Go ahead, Jack,” she said. “I believe in you and I’m not even afraid of your failing.” After a moment she clasped her arms tightly about him and added vehemently: “But whether you succeed or fail, come back to me, dear, because, except for your sake, it won’t make any difference to me.”
That same afternoon Spurrier found time to visit the “witch woman.” It had dawned upon him since that night in the Senate chamber that, after all, Sim Colby might have been the least dangerous of his enemies, and the thought made him inquisitive.
The old crone made her magic with abundant grotesquerie, but at its end she peered shrewdly into his eyes, and said:
“I reads hyar in the omends thet mebby ye comes too late.”
Spurrier smiled grimly. He thought that himself.
“I dis’arns,” went on the hag portentously, “thet a blind man impereled ye mightily—a blind man thet plays a fiddle—but thars others beside him thet dwells fur away an’ holds a mighty power of wealth.”
A blind man! Spurrier’s remembrance flashed back to the visit of blind Joe Givins and the papers incautiously left on his table. Yet if he was genuinely blind they could have meant nothing to him—and if261he was not genuinely blind it was hard to conceive of human nerves enduring without wincing that test of the gun thrust against the temple.
Spurrier rose and paid his fee. Had he seen her in time, this warning would have averted disaster. Now it was something of a post-mortem.
At the door of Martin Harrison’s office several days later Spurrier drew back his shoulders and braced himself. It was impossible to ignore the fact that he stood on the brink of total ruin; that his sole hope lay in persuading his principal that with more time and more money he would yet be able to succeed—and Harrison was as plastic to persuasion as a brass Buddha.
But he had steeled himself for the interview—and now he turned the knob and swung back the mahogany door.
Spurrier was familiar enough with the atmosphere of that office to read the signs correctly. The hushed air of nervousness that hung over it now betokened a chief in a mood which no one sought to stir to further irritation.
Always in the past Spurrier had been deferentially ushered into a private office and treated as the future chief. Now, as though he were already a disinherited heir, he was left in the general waiting room, and he was left there for an hour. That cooling of the heel, he recognized as a warning of the cold reception to come—and an augury of ruin.
At last he was called in, but he went with an unruffled demeanor which hid from the principal’s eye how near to breaking his inward confidence was strained.
262
“I wired you to come at once,” began Harrison curtly, and Spurrier smiled as he nodded.
“I came at once, sir, except that I hadn’t been home for some time, and it was necessary to make a stop there.”
“Home,” Martin’s brows lifted a trifle. “You mean the mountains.”
“Certainly—for the time being, I’m located there.”
“We may as well be honest with each other,” asserted the magnate. “I consider that under the circumstances you behaved with serious discourtesy and without candor.” For a casual moment his glance dwelt on the portrait of Vivien which stood on his table.
“I disagree with you, sir. I preferred relating the full circumstances, which were unusual, when there was an opportunity to do so in person. I was kept there by your interests as well as my own.”
“That recital,” said the older man dryly, “is your concern. Now that I know the facts I find myself uninterested in the details. You have chosen your way. The question is whether we can travel it together.”
“And I presume that the first point of that question demands a full report upon the business operations.”
“So far as I can see, they have collapsed.”
“They have by no means collapsed.”
Suddenly the wrath that had been smoldering in Harrison’s eyes burst into tempest. He brought his clenched fist down upon his desk until inkwells and accessories rattled.
This man’s moments of equinox were terrifying to263those who must bow to his will—and his will held sway over broad horizons. If John Spurrier had not been intrepid he must have collapsed under the withering violence of the passion that rained on him.
“Before God,” cried Harrison,pacinghis floor like a lion that lashes itself to frenzy, “you undertook to avenge me on Trabue. You have drawn on me with carte-blanche liberties and spent fortunes like a prodigal! You have assured me that you had, at all times, the situation well in hand. Then, through some damned blunder, you failed. Let the money loss slide. Damn the money! I’m the laughingstock of the business world. I’m delivered over to Trabue’s enjoyment as a boob who failed. I’m an absurdity, and you’re responsible!”
“When you’ve finished, sir,” said Spurrier quietly, “I shall endeavor to show you that none of those things have happened—that our failure is temporary and that when you undertook this enterprise you were in no impetuous haste as to the time of its accomplishment.”
“The legislature doesn’t meet for two years,” Harrison barked back at him. “That will be two years of preparation for Trabue. Now he’s fully warned, where do we get off?”
“At our original point of destination, sir.”
The opportunity hound began his argument. His demeanor of unruffled calm and entire confidence began to exercise its persuasive force. Harrison cooled somewhat, but Spurrier was fighting, beneath his pose, as a man who has cramps in deep water fights for his life. These few minutes would determine264his fate, and he was totally at the mercy of this single arbiter.
“I have now all the options we need on the far side of Hemlock Mountain,” Spurrier summarized at last. “All except one tract which belongs to Bud Hawkins, who is a preacher and a friend of mine. He must have more generous terms, but I will be able to do business with him.”
“You talk of the options on the far side of the ridge,” Harrison broke in belligerently. “That is the minor field.”
“I’ll be able to repeat that performance on the near side.”
“You will not! A repetition of your performance is the last thing we crave. Any movement now would be only a piling up of warnings. For the present you will give every indication of having abandoned the project.”
“That is my idea, sir. I was not speaking of immediate but future activities. Also——” In spite of his desperation of plight the younger man’s bearing flashed into a challenging undernote of its old audacity, “when I used the word ‘repeat’ I referred to the successful portion of my effort. There was no failure on the land end. It was the charter that went wrong—through the deceit of a man we had to trust.”
“A man whom you selected,” Harrison caught him up. “You understood, in advance, the chances of your game. It was agreed upon your own insistence that your hand should be absolutely free—and freedom of method carries exclusiveness of responsibility. Traitors exist. They don’t furnish excuses.”
“Nor am I making them. I am merely stating facts265which you seem inclined to confuse. I grant the failure but I also claim the partial success.”
Harrison seated himself, and as the interview stretched Spurrier’s nerves stretched with it under the placid surface of his plunger’s camouflage. He had, as yet, no way of guessing how the verdict would go, and now the capitalist’s face was hardened in discouragement. It was a face of merciless inflexibility. The sentence had been prepared in the judge’s mind. There remained only its enunciation.
“Nothing is to be gained by mincing my words, Spurrier,” declared Spurrier’s chief. “We know precisely where you stand.”
Harrison extended his hand with its fingers spread and closed it slowly into a clenched fist. “I hold you—there! I can crush you to a pulp of absolute ruin. You know that. The only question is whether I want, or not, to do it.”
“And whether, or not, you can afford to do it,” amended the other with an audacity that he by no means felt. “You must decide whether you can afford to accept tamely and as a final defeat, a mere reversal, which I—and no one else—can turn into eventual victory.”
“I have duly considered that. I had implicit confidence in your abilities. You have struck at my personal feeling for you by a silence that was not frank. You have allied yourself with the mountain people by marriage, and we stand on opposite sides of the line of interest. You have all the while been watched by our enemies, and I regard you as a defeated man. If I choose to cast you aside, you go to the scrap heap. You will never recover.”