The Conflict Part 9

"If I can find time," said Selma. "But I'd rather come and take you for a walk. I have to walk two hours every day. It's the only thing that'll keep my head clear."

"When will you come?--to-morrow?"

"Is nine o'clock too early?"

Jane reflected that her father left for business at half-past eight.

"Nine to-morrow," she said. "Good-by again."

As she was mounting her horse, she saw "the Cossack girl," as she was calling her, writing away at the window hardly three feet above the level of Jane's head when she was mounted, so low was the first story of the battered old frame house. But Selma did not see her; she was all intent upon the writing. "She's forgotten me already," thought Jane with a pang of jealous vanity. She added: "But SHE has SOMETHING to think about--she and Victor Dorn."

She was so preoccupied that she rode away with only an absent thank you for the small boy, in an older and much larger and wider brother's cast-off shirt, suspenders and trousers. At the corner of the avenue she remembered and turned her horse. There stood the boy gazing after her with a hypnotic intensity that made her smile. She rode back fumbling in her pockets. "I beg your pardon," said she to the boy.

Then she called up to Selma Gordon:

"Miss Gordon--please--will you lend me a quarter until to-morrow?"

Selma looked up, stared dazedly at her, smiled absently at Miss Hastings--and Miss Hastings had the strongest confirmation of her suspicion that Selma had forgotten her and her visit the instant she vanished from the threshold of the office. Said Selma: "A quarter?--oh, yes--certainly." She seemed to be searching a drawer or a purse out of sight. "I haven't anything but a five dollar bill. I'm so sorry"--this in an absent manner, with most of her thoughts evidently still upon her work. She rose, leaned from the window, glanced up the street, then down. She went on:

"There comes Victor Dorn. He'll lend it to you."

Along the ragged brick walk at a quick pace the man who had in such abrupt fashion stormed Jane Hasting's fancy and taken possession of her curiosity was advancing with a basket on his arm. He was indeed a man of small stature--about the medium height for a woman--about the height of Jane Hastings. But his figure was so well put together and his walk so easy and free from self-consciousness that the question of stature no sooner arose than it was dismissed. His head commanded all the attention--its poise and the remarkable face that fronted it. The features were bold, the skin was clear and healthy and rather fair.

His eyes--gray or green blue and set neither prominently nor retreatedly--seemed to be seeing and understanding all that was going on about him. He had a strong, rather relentless mouth--the mouth of men who make and compel sacrifices for their ambitions.

"Victor," cried Selma as soon as he was within easy range of her voice, "please lend Miss Hastings a quarter." And she immediately sat down and went to work again, with the incident dismissed from mind.

The young man--for he was plainly not far beyond thirty--halted and regarded the young woman on the horse.

"I wish to give this young gentleman here a quarter," said Jane. "He was very good about holding my horse."

The words were not spoken before the young gentleman darted across the narrow street and into a yard hidden by ma.s.ses of clematis, morning glory and sweet peas. And Jane realized that she had wholly mistaken the meaning of that hypnotic stare.

Victor laughed--the small figure, the vast clothes, the bare feet with voluminous trousers about them made a ludicrous sight. "He doesn't want it," said Victor. "Thank you just the same."

"But I want him to have it," said Jane.

With a significant unconscious glance at her costume Dorn said: "Those costumes haven't reached our town yet."

"He did some work for me. I owe it to him."

"He's my sister's little boy," said Dorn, with his amiable, friendly smile. "We mustn't start him in the bad way of expecting pay for politeness."

Jane colored as if she had been rebuked, when in fact his tone forbade the suggestion of rebuke. There was an unpleasant sparkle in her eyes as she regarded the young man in the baggy suit, with the basket on his arm. "I beg your pardon," said she coldly. "I naturally didn't know your peculiar point of view."

"That's all right," said Dorn carelessly. "Thank you, and good day."

And with a polite raising of the hat and a manner of good humored friendliness that showed how utterly unconscious he was of her being offended at him, he hastened across the street and went in at the gate where the boy had vanished. And Jane had the sense that he had forgotten her. She glanced nervously up at the window to see whether Selma Gordon was witnessing her humiliation--for so she regarded it.

But Selma was evidently lost in a world of her own. "She doesn't love him," Jane decided. "For, even though she is a strange kind of person, she's a woman--and if she had loved him she couldn't have helped watching while he talked with another woman--especially with one of my appearance and cla.s.s."

Jane rode slowly away. At the corner--it was a long block--she glanced toward the scene she had just quitted. Involuntarily she drew rein.

Victor and the boy had come out into the street and were playing catches. The game did not last long. Dorn let the boy corner him and seize him, then gave him a great toss into the air, catching him as he came down and giving him a hug and a kiss. The boy ran shouting merrily into the yard; Victor disappeared in the entrance to the offices of the New Day.

That evening, as she pretended to listen to Hull on national politics, and while dressing the following morning Jane reflected upon her adventure. She decided that Dorn and the "wild girl" were a low, ill-mannered pair with whom she had nothing in common, that her fantastic, impulsive interest in them had been killed, that for the future she would avoid "all that sort of cattle." She would receive Selma Gordon politely, of course--would plead headache as an excuse for not walking, would get rid of her as soon as possible. "No doubt,"

thought Jane, with the familiar, though indignantly denied, complacence of her cla.s.s, "as soon as she gets in here she'll want to hang on. She played it very well, but she must have been crazy with delight at my noticing her and offering to take her up."

The postman came as Jane was finishing breakfast. He brought a note from Selma--a hasty pencil scrawl on a sheet of printer's copy paper:

"Dear Miss Hastings: For the present I'm too busy to take my walks.

So, I'll not be there to-morrow. With best regards, S.G."

Such a fury rose up in Jane that the undigested breakfast went wrong and put her in condition to give such exhibition as chance might tempt of that ugliness of disposition which appears from time to time in all of us not of the meek and worm-like cla.s.s, and which we usually attribute to any cause under the sun but the vulgar right one. "The impertinence!" muttered Jane, with a second glance at the note which conveyed; among other humiliating things, an impression of her own absolute lack of importance to Selma Gordon. "Serves me right for lowering myself to such people. If I wanted to try to do anything for the working cla.s.s I'd have to keep away from them. They're so unattractive to look at and to a.s.sociate with--not like those shrewd, respectful, interesting peasants one finds on the other side. They're better in the East. They know their place in a way. But out here they're insufferable."

And she spent the morning quarrelling with her maid and the other servants, issuing orders right and left, working herself into a horrible mood dominated by a headache that was anything but a pretense.

As she wandered about the house and gardens, she trailed a beautiful negligee with that carelessness which in a woman of clean and orderly habits invariably indicates the possession of many clothes and of a maid who can be counted on to freshen things up before they shall be used again. Her father came home to lunch in high good humor.

"I'll not go down town again for a few days," said he. "I reckon I'd best keep out of the way. That scoundrelly Victor Dorn has done so much lying and inciting these last four or five years that it ain't safe for a man like me to go about when there's trouble with the hands."

"Isn't it outrageous!" exclaimed Jane. "He ought to be stopped."

Hastings chuckled and nodded. "And he will be," said he. "Wait till this strike's over."

"When will that be?" asked Jane.

"Mighty soon," replied her father. "I was ready for 'em this time--good and ready. I've sent word to the governor that I want the militia down here tomorrow----"

"Has there been a riot?" cried Jane anxiously.

"Not yet," said Hastings. He was laughing to himself. "But there will be to-night. Then the governor'll send the troops in to-morrow afternoon."

"But maybe the men'll be quiet, and then----" began Jane, sick inside and trembling.

"When I say a thing'll happen, it'll happen," interrupted her father.

"We've made up our minds it's time to give these fellows a lesson.

It's got to be done. A milder lesson'll serve now, where later on it'd have to be hard. I tell you these things because I want you to remember 'em. They'll come in handy--when you'll have to look after your own property."

She knew how her father hated the thought of his own death; this was the nearest he had ever come to speaking of it. "Of course, there's your brother William," he went on. "William's a good boy--and a mighty good business man--though he does take risks I'd never 'a took--not even when I was young and had nothing to lose. Yes--and Billy's honest. BUT"--the big head shook impressively--"William's human, Jenny--don't ever forget that. The love of money's an awful thing." A l.u.s.tful glitter like the shine of an inextinguishable fire made his eyes fascinating and terrible. "It takes hold of a man and never lets go. To see the money pile up--and up--and up."

The girl turned away her gaze. She did not wish to see so far into her father's soul. It seemed a hideous indecency.

"So, Jenny--don't trust William, but look after your own property."

"Oh, I don't care anything about it, popsy," she cried, fighting to think of him and to speak to him as simply the living father she had always insisted on seeing.

"Yes--you do care," said Hastings sharply. "You've got to have your money, because that's your foundation--what you're built on. And I'm going to train you. This here strike's a good time to begin."

After a long silence she said: "Yes, money's what I'm built on. I might as well recognize the truth and act accordingly. I want you to teach me, father."

"I've got to educate you so as, when you get control, you won't go and do fool sentimental things like some women--and some men that warn't trained practically--men like that Davy Hull you think so well of.

Things that'd do no good and 'd make you smaller and weaker."