The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 3

She smiled. "It isn't proper for a well-brought-up girl to love until she is loved, is it?" Her expression gave Grant a faint suggestion of a chill of apprehension lest she should be about to take advantage of their friendship by making a dead set for him. But she speedily tranquilized him by saying: "No, my reason was that I didn't want to spoil my one friendship. Even a business person craves the luxury of a friend--and marrying has been my business," this with a slight curl of her pretty, somewhat cruel mouth. "To be quite frank, I gave you up as a possibility years ago. I saw I wasn't your style. Your tastes in women are rather--coa.r.s.e."

Arkwright flushed. "I do like 'em a bit noisy and silly," he admitted.

"That sort is so--so GEMUTHLICH, as the Germans say."

"Who's the man you delivered over to old Patsy Raymond? I see he's still fast to her."

"Handsome, isn't he?"

"Of a sort."

"It's Craig--the Honorable Joshua Craig--a.s.sistant TO the Attorney-General. He's from Minnesota. He's the real thing. But you'd not like him."

"He looks quite--tame, compared to what he was two years or so ago,"

said Rita, her voice as indolent as her slowly-moving eagle feathers.

"Oh, you've met him?"

"No--only saw him. When I went West with the Burkes, Gus and the husband took me to a political meeting--one of those silly, stuffy gatherings where some blatant politician bellows out a lot of lies, and a crowd of badly-dressed people listen and swallow and yelp. Your friend was one of the speakers. What he said sounded--" Rita paused for a word.

"Sounded true," suggested Grant.

"Not at all. n.o.body really cares anything about the people, not even themselves. No, it sounded as if he had at least half-convinced himself, while the others showed they were lying outright. We rather liked him--at the safe distance of half the hall. He's the kind of man that suggests--menageries--lions--danger if the bars break."

"How women do like that in a man!"

"Do you know him?"

"Through and through. He's a fraud, of course, like all politicians. But beneath the fraud there's a man--I think--a great, big man, strong and sure of himself--which is what can't be said of many of us who wear trousers and pose as lords of creation."

The girl seemed to have ceased to listen, was apparently watching the dancers, Arkwright continued to gaze at his friend, to admire the impressive, if obviously posed, effect of his handsome head and shoulders. He smiled with a tender expression, as one smiles at the weakness of those one loves. Suddenly he said: "By Jove, Rita--just the thing!"

"What?" asked the girl, resuming the languid waving of her eagle fan.

"Marry him--marry Josh Craig. He'll not make much money out of politics.

I doubt if even a woman could corrupt him that far. But you could take him out of politics and put him in the law. He could roll it up there.

The good lawyers sell themselves dear nowadays, and he'd make a killing."

"This sounds interesting."

"It's a wonder I hadn't thought of it before."

The girl gave a curious, quiet smile. "I had," said she.

"YOU had!" exclaimed Arkwright.

"A woman always keeps a careful list of eligibles," explained she. "As Lucy Burke told me he was headed for Washington, I put him on my list that very night--well down toward the bottom, but, still, on it. I had quite forgotten him until to-night."

Arkwright was staring at her. Her perfect frankness, absolute naturalness with him, unreserved trust of him, gave him a guilty feeling for the bitter judgment on her character which he had secretly formed as the result of her confidences. "Yet, really," thought he, "she's quite the nicest girl I know, and the cleverest. If she had hid herself from me, as the rest do, I'd never for one instant have suspected her of having so much--so much--calm, good sense--for that's all it amounts to." He decided it was a mistake for any human being in any circ.u.mstances to be absolutely natural and unconcealingly candid. "We're such shallow fakers," reflected he, "that if any one confesses to us things not a tenth part as bad as what we privately think and do, why, we set him--or her--especially her--down as a living, breathing atrocity in pants or petticoats."

Margaret was of the women who seem never to think of what they are really absorbed in, and never to look at what they are really scrutinizing. She disconcerted him by interrupting his reflections with: "Your private opinion of me is of small consequence to me, Grant, beside the relief and the joy of being able to say my secret self aloud.

Also"--here she grew dizzy at her own audacity in the frankness that fools--"Also, if I wished to get you, Grant, or any man, I'd not be silly enough to fancy my character or lack of it would affect him. That isn't what wins men--is it?"

"You and Josh Craig have a most uncomfortable way of answering people's thoughts," said Arkwright. "Now, how did you guess I was thinking mean things about you?"

"For the same reason that Mr. Craig is able to guess what's going on in your head."

"And that reason is--"

She laughed mockingly. "Because I know you, Grant Arkwright--you, the meanest-generous man, and the most generous-mean man the Lord ever permitted. The way to make you generous is to give you a mean impulse; the way to make you mean is to set you to fearing you're in danger of being generous."

"There's a bouquet with an asp coiled in it," said Arkwright, pleased; for with truly human vanity he had accepted the compliment and had thrown away the criticism. "I'll go bring Josh Craig."

"No, not to-night," said Miss Severence, with a sudden compression of the lips and a stern, almost stormy contraction of the brows.

"Please don't do that, Rita," cried Arkwright. "It reminds me of your grandmother."

The girl's face cleared instantly, and all overt signs of strength of character vanished in her usual expression of sweet, reserved femininity. "Bring him to-morrow," said she. "A little late, please. I want others to be there, so that I can study him un.o.bserved." She laughed. "This is a serious matter for me. My time is short, and my list of possible eligibles less extended than I could wish." And with a satiric smile and a long, languorous, coquettish glance, she waved him away and waved the waiting Jackie into his place.

Arkwright found Craig clear of "Patsy" Raymond and against the wall near the door. He was obviously unconscious of himself, of the possibility that he might be observed. His eyes were pouncing from blaze of jewels to white neck, to laughing, sensuous face, to jewels again or to lithe, young form, scantily clad and swaying in masculine arm in rhythm with the waltz. It gave Arkwright a qualm of something very like terror to note the contrast between his pa.s.sive figure and his roving eyes with their wolfish gleam--like Blucher, when he looked out over London and said: "G.o.d! What a city to sack!"

Arkwright thought Josh was too absorbed to be aware of his approach; but as soon as he was beside him Josh said: "You were right about that apartment of mine. It's a squalid hole. Six months ago, when I got my seventy-five hundred a year, I thought I was rich. Rich? Why, that woman there has ten years' salary on her hair. All the money I and my whole family ever saw wouldn't pay for the rings on any one of a hundred hands here. It makes me mad and it makes me greedy."

"'I warned you," said Arkwright.

Craig wheeled on him. "You don't--can't--understand. You're like all these people. Money is your G.o.d. But I don't want money, I want power--to make all these sn.o.bs with their wealth, these millionaires, these women with fine skins and beautiful bodies, bow down before me--that's what I want!"

Arkwright laughed. "Well, it's up to you, Joshua."

Craig tossed his Viking head. "Yes, it's up to me, and I'll get what I want--the people and I.... Who's THAT frightful person?"

Into the room, only a few feet from them, advanced an old woman--very old, but straight as a projectile. She carried her head high, and her ma.s.ses of gray-white hair, coiled like a crown, gave her the seeming of royalty in full panoply. There was white lace over her black velvet at the shoulders; her train swept yards behind her. She was bearing a cane, or rather a staff, of ebony; but it suggested, not decrepitude, but power--perhaps even a weapon that might be used to enforce authority should occasion demand. In her face, in her eyes, however, there was that which forbade the supposition of any revolt being never so remotely possible.

As she advanced across the ballroom, dancing ceased before her and around her, and but for the noise of the orchestra there would have been an awed and painful silence. Mrs. Burke's haughty daughter-in-law, with an expression of eager desire to conciliate and to please, hastened forward and conducted the old lady to a gilt armchair in the center of the dais, across the end of the ballroom. It was several minutes before the gayety was resumed, and then it seemed to have lost the abandon which the freely-flowing champagne had put into it.

"WHO is that frightful person?" repeated Craig. He was scowling like a king angered and insulted by the advent of an eclipsing rival.

"Grandma,"' replied Arkwright, his flippancy carefully keyed low.

"I've never seen a more dreadful person!" exclaimed Craig angrily. "And a woman, too! She's the exact reverse of everything a woman should be--no sweetness, no gentleness. I can't believe she ever brought a child into the world."

"She probably doubts it herself," said Arkwright.

"Why does everybody cringe before her?"

"That's what everybody asks. She hasn't any huge wealth--or birth, either, for that matter. It's just the custom. We defer to her here precisely as we wear claw-hammer coats and low-neck dresses. n.o.body thinks of changing the custom."

Josh's lip curled. "Introduce me to her," he said commandingly.