A Poor Wise Man Part 25

"Then I can only say I'm sorry," Lily said slowly.

She felt strangely helpless and rather maternal. With all his strength this sort of man needed to be protected from himself. She felt no answering thrill whatever to his pa.s.sion, but as though, having told her he loved her, he had placed a considerable responsibility in her hands.

"I'll be good now," he said. "Mind, I'm not sorry. But I don't want to worry you."

He made no further overtures to her during the ride, but he was neither sulky nor sheepish. He feigned an anxiety as to the threatened strike, and related at great length and with extreme cleverness of invention his own efforts to prevent it.

"I've a good bit of influence with the A.F.L.," he said. "Doyle's in bad with them, but I'm still solid. But it's coming, sure as shooting. And they'll win, too."

He knew women well, and he saw that she was forgiving him. But she would not forget. He had a cynical doctrine, to the effect that a woman's first kiss of pa.s.sion left an ineradicable mark on her, and he was quite certain that Lily had never been so kissed before.

Driving through the park he turned to her:

"Please forgive me," he said, his mellow voice contrite and supplicating. "You've been so fine about it that you make me ashamed."

"I would like to feel that it wouldn't happen again: That's all."

"That means you intend to see me again. But never is a long word. I'm afraid to promise. You go to my head, Lily Cardew." They were halted by the traffic, and it gave him a chance to say something he had been ingeniously formulating in his mind. "I've known lots of girls. I'm no saint. But you are different. You're a good woman. You could do anything you wanted with me, if you cared to."

And because she was young and lovely, and because he was always the slave of youth and beauty, he meant what he said. It was a lie, but he was lying to himself also, and his voice held unmistakable sincerity.

But even then he was watching her, weighing the effect of his words on her. He saw that she was touched.

He was very well pleased with himself on his way home. He left the car at the public garage, and walked, whistling blithely, to his small bachelor apartment. He was a self-indulgent man, and his rooms were comfortable to the point of luxury. In the sitting room was a desk, as clean and orderly as Doyle's was untidy. Having put on his dressing gown he went to it, and with a sheet of paper before him sat for some time thinking.

He found his work irksome at times. True, it had its interest. He was the liaison between organized labor, which was conservative in the main, and the radical element, both in and out of the organization. He played a double game, and his work was always the same, to fan the discontent latently smoldering in every man's soul into a flame. And to do this he had not Doyle's fanaticism. Personally, Louis Akers found the world a pretty good place. He hated the rich because they had more than he had, but he scorned the poor because they had less. And he liked the feeling of power he had when, on the platform, men swayed to his words like wheat to a wind.

Personal ambition was his fetish, as power was Anthony Cardew's.

Sometimes he walked past the exclusive city clubs, and he dreamed of a time when he, too, would have the entree to them. But time was pa.s.sing.

He was thirty-three years old when Jim Doyle crossed his path, and the clubs were as far away as ever. It was Doyle who found the weak place in his armor, and who taught him that when one could not rise it was possible to pull others down.

But it was Woslosky, the Americanized Pole; who had put the thing in a more appealing form.

"Our friend Doyle to the contrary," he said cynically, "we cannot hope to contend against the inevitable. The few will always govern the many, in the end. It will be the old cycle, autocracy, anarchy, and then democracy; but out of this last comes always the one man who crowns himself or is crowned. One of the people. You, or myself, it may be."

The Pole had smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

Akers did not go to work immediately. He sat for some time, a cigarette in his hand, his eyes slightly narrowed. He believed that he could marry Lily Cardew. It would take time and all his skill, but he believed he could do it. His mind wandered to Lily herself, her youth and charm, her soft red mouth, the feel of her warm young body in his arms. He brought himself up sharply. Where would such a marriage take him?

He pondered the question pro and con. On the one hand the Cardews, on the other, Doyle and a revolutionary movement. A revolution would be interesting and exciting, and there was strong in him the desire to pull down. But revolution was troublesome. It was violent and b.l.o.o.d.y. Even if it succeeded it would be years before the country would be stabilized.

This other, now--

He sat low in his chair, his long legs stretched out in his favorite position, and dreamed. He would not play the fool like Doyle. He would conciliate the family. In the end he would be put up at the clubs; he might even play polo. His thoughts wandered to Pink Denslow at the polo grounds, and he grinned.

"Young fool!" he reflected. "If I can't beat his time--" He ordered dinner to be sent up, and mixed himself a c.o.c.ktail, using the utmost care in its preparation. Drinking it, he eyed himself complacently in the small mirror over the mantel. Yes, life was not bad. It was d.a.m.ned interesting. It was a game. No, it was a race where a man could so hedge his bets that he stood to gain, whoever won.

When there was a knock at the door he did not turn. "Come in," he said.

But it was not the waiter. It was Edith Boyd. He saw her through the mirror, and so addressed her.

"h.e.l.lo, sweetie," he said. Then he turned. "You oughtn't to come here, Edith. I've told you about that."

"I had to see you, Lou."

"Well, take a good look, then," he said. Her coming fitted in well with the complacence of his mood. Yes, life was good, so long as it held power, and drink, and women.

He stooped to kiss her, but although she accepted the caress, she did not return it.

"Not mad at me, Miss Boyd, are you?"

"No. Lou, I'm frightened!"

CHAPTER XIV

On clear Sundays Anthony Cardew played golf all day. He kept his religious observances for bad weather, but at such times as he attended service he did it with the decorum and dignity of a Cardew, who bowed to his G.o.d but to nothing else. He made the responses properly and with a certain unction, and sat during the sermon with a vigilant eye on the choir boys, who wriggled. Now and then, however, the eye wandered to the great stained gla.s.s window which was a memorial to his wife. It said beneath: "In memoriam, Lilian Lethbridge Cardew."

He thought there was too much yellow in John the Baptist. On the Sunday afternoon following her ride into the city with Louis Akers, Lily found herself alone. Anthony was golfing and Grace and Howard had motored out of town for luncheon. In a small office near the rear of the hall the second man dozed, waiting for the doorbell. There would be people in for tea later, as always on Sunday afternoons; girls and men, walking through the park or motoring up in smart cars, the men a trifle bored because they were not golfing or riding, the girls chattering about the small inessentials which somehow they made so important.

Lily was wretchedly unhappy. For one thing, she had begun to feel that Mademoiselle was exercising over her a sort of gentle espionage, and she thought her grandfather was behind it. Out of sheer rebellion she had gone again to the house on Cardew Way, to find Elinor out and Jim Doyle writing at his desk. He had received her cordially, and had talked to her as an equal. His deferential att.i.tude had soothed her wounded pride, and she had told him something--very little--of the situation at home.

"Then you are still forbidden to come here?"

"Yes. As if what happened years ago matters now, Mr. Doyle."

He eyed her.

"Don't let them break your spirit, Lily," he had said. "Success can make people very hard. I don't know myself what success would do to me. Plenty, probably." He smiled. "It isn't the past your people won't forgive me, Lily. It's my failure to succeed in what they call success."

"It isn't that," she had said hastily. "It is--they say you are inflammatory. Of course they don't understand. I have tried to tell them, but--"

"There are fires that purify," he had said, smilingly.

She had gone home, discontented with her family's lack of vision, and with herself.

She was in a curious frame of mind. The thought of Louis Akers repelled her, but she thought of him constantly. She a.n.a.lyzed him clearly enough; he was not fine and not sensitive. He was not even kind. Indeed, she felt that he could be both cruel and ruthless. And if she was the first good woman he had ever known, then he must have had a hateful past.

The thought that he had kissed her turned her hot with anger and shame at such times, but the thought recurred.

Had she had occupation perhaps she might have been saved, but she had nothing to do. The house went on with its disciplined service; Lent had made its small demands as to church services, and was over. The weather was bad, and the golf links still soggy with the spring rains. Her wardrobe was long ago replenished, and that small interest gone.

And somehow there had opened a breach between herself and the little intimate group that had been hers before the war. She wondered sometimes what they would think of Louis Akers. They would admire him, at first, for his opulent good looks, but very soon they would recognize what she knew so well--the gulf between him and the men of their own world, so hard a distinction to divine, yet so real for all that. They would know instinctively that under his veneer of good manners was something coa.r.s.e and crude, as she did, and they would politely snub him. She had no name and no knowledge for the urge in the man that she vaguely recognized and resented. But she had a full knowledge of the obsession he was becoming in her mind.

"If I could see him here," she reflected, more than once, "I'd get over thinking about him. It's because they forbid me to see him. It's sheer contrariness."

But it was not, and she knew it. She had never heard of his theory about the mark on a woman.