The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 9

"A superb pram-trundler," suggested Arkwright.

"Precisely. Be off now; I must work. Be off, and exhibit that wonderful suit and those spotless white spats where they'll be appreciated." And he dismissed the elegantly-dressed idler as a king might rid himself of a favorite who threatened to presume upon his master's good humor and outstay his welcome. But Arkwright didn't greatly mind. He was used to Josh's airs. Also, though he would not have confessed it to his inmost self, Josh's preposterous a.s.sumptions, by sheer force of frequent and energetic reiteration, had made upon him an impression of possible validity--not probable, but possible; and the possible was quite enough to stir deep down in Arkwright's soul the all but universal deference before power. It never occurred to him to suspect there might be design in Craig's sweeping a.s.sertions and a.s.sumptions of superiority, that he might be shrewdly calculating that, underneath the ridicule those obstreperous vanities would create, there would gradually form and steadily grow a conviction of solid truth, a conviction that Joshua Craig was indeed the personage he professed to be--mighty, inevitably prevailing, Napoleonic.

This latent feeling of Arkwright's was, however, not strong enough to suppress his irritation when, a few days later, he went to the Severences for tea, and found Margaret and Josh alone in the garden, walking up and down, engaged in a conversation that was obviously intimate and absorbing. When he appeared on the veranda Joshua greeted him with an eloquent smile of loving friendship.

"Ah, there you are now!" he cried. "Well, little ones, I'll leave you together. I've wasted as much time as I can spare to-day to frivolity."

"Yes, hurry back to work," said Arkwright. "The ship of state's wobbling badly through your neglect."

Craig laughed, looking at Margaret. "Grant thinks that's a jest," said he. "Instead, it's the sober truth. I am engaged in keeping my Chief in order, and in preventing the President from skulking from the policies he has the shrewdness to advocate but lacks the nerve to put into action."

Margaret stood looking after him as he strode away.

"You mustn't mind his insane vanity," said Arkwright, vaguely uneasy at the expression of her hazel eyes, at once so dark, mysterious, melancholy, so light and frank and amused.

"I don't," said she in a tone that seemed to mean a great deal.

He, still more uneasy, went on: "A little more experience of the world and Josh'll come round all right--get a sense of proportion."

"But isn't it true?" asked Margaret somewhat absently.

"What?"

"Why, what he said as he was leaving. Before you came he'd been here quite a while, and most of the time he talked of himself--"

Arkwright laughed, but Margaret only smiled, and that rather reluctantly.

"And he was telling how hard a time he was having; what with Stillwater's corruption and the President's timidity about really acting against rich, people--something about criminal suits against what he calls the big thieves--I didn't understand it, or care much about it, but it gave me an impression of Mr. Craig's power."

"There IS some truth in what he says," Arkwright admitted, with a reluctance of which his pride, and his heart as well, were ashamed.

"He's become a burr, a thorn, in the Administration, and they're really afraid of him in a way--though, of course, they have to laugh at him as every one else does."

"Of course," said Margaret absently.

Arkwright watched her nervously. "You seem to be getting round to the state of mind," said he, "where you'll be in danger of marrying our friend Craig."

Margaret, her eyes carefully away from him, laughed softly--a disturbingly noncommittal laugh.

"Of course, I'm only joking," continued Arkwright. "I know YOU couldn't marry HIM."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't think he's sincere."

Her silence made him feel that she thought this as weak as he did.

"Because you don't love him."

"No, I certainly don't love him," said Margaret.

"Because you don't even like him."

"What a strange way of advocating your friend you have."

Arkwright flushed scarlet. "I thought you'd quite dismissed him as a possibility," he stammered.

"With a woman every man's a possibility so long as no man's a certainty."

"Margaret, you couldn't marry a man you didn't like?"

She seemed to reflect. "Not if I were in love with another at the time,"

she said finally. "That's as far as my womanly delicacy--what's left of it after my years in society--can influence me. And it's stronger, I believe, than the delicacy of most women of our sort."

They were sitting now on the bench round the circle where the fountain was tossing high its jets in play with the sunshine. She was looking very much the woman of the fashionable world, and the soft grays, shading into blues, that dominated her costume gave her an exceeding and entrancing seeming of fragility. Arkwright thought her eyes wonderful; the sweet, powerful yet delicate odor of the lilac sachet powder with which her every garment was saturated set upon his senses like a love-philter.

"Yes, you are finer and n.o.bler than most women," he said giddily. "And that's why it distresses me to hear you talk even in jest, as if you could marry Josh."

"And a few weeks ago you were suggesting him as just the husband for me."

Arkwright was silent. How could he go on? How tell her why he had changed without committing himself to her by a proposal? She was fascinating--would be an ideal wife. With what style and taste she'd entertain--how she'd shine at the head of his table! What a satisfaction it would be to feel that his money was being so competently spent.

But--well, he did not wish to marry, not just yet; perhaps, somewhere in the world, he would find, in the next few years, a woman even better suited to him than Margaret. Marrying was a serious business. True, now that divorce had pushed its way up and had become recognized by fashionable society, had become an established social favorite, marriage had been robbed of one of its terrors. But the other remained--divorce still meant alimony. The woman who trapped an eligible never endangered her hard-earned position; a man must be extremely careful or he would find himself forced to hard choice between keeping on with a woman he wished to be rid of and paying out a large part of his income in alimony. It seemed far-fetched to think of these things in connection with such a woman as Margaret. He certainly never could grow tired of her, and her looks were of the sort that had staying power. Nor was she in the least likely to be so ungrateful as to wish to be rid of him and hold him up for alimony. Still--wouldn't it have been seemingly just as absurd to consider in advance such sordid matters in connection with any one of a dozen couples among his friends whose matrimonial enterprises had gone smash? It was said that nowadays girls went to the altar thinking that if the husbands they were taking proved unsatisfactory they would soon be free again, the better off by the t.i.tle of Mrs. and a good stiff alimony and some invaluable experience. "I must keep my head," thought he. "I must consider how I'd feel after the fatal cards were out."

"Yes, you were quite eager for me to marry him," persisted she. She was watching his face out of the corner of her eye.

"I admit it," said he huskily. "But we've both changed since then."

"Changed?" said she, perhaps a shade too encouragingly.

He felt the hook tickling his gills and darted off warily. "Changed toward him, I mean. Changed in our estimate of his availability as a husband for you." He rose; the situation was becoming highly perilous.

"I must speak to your mother and fly. I'm late for an appointment now."

As he drove away ten minutes later he drew a long breath. "Gad!" said he half aloud, "Rita'll never realize how close I was to proposing to-day.

She ALMOST had me.... Though why I should think of it that way I don't know. It's d.a.m.ned low and indelicate of me. She ought to be my wife. I love her as much as a man of experience can love a woman in advance of trying her out thoroughly. If she had money I'd not be hesitating, I'm afraid. Then, too, I don't think the moral tone of that set she and I travel with is what it ought to be. It's all very well for me, but--Well, a man ought to be ready for almost anything that might happen if his wife went with that crowd--or had gone with it before he married her. Not that I suspect Margaret, though I must say--What a pup this sort of life does make of a man in some ways!... Yes, I almost leaped.

She'll never know how near I came to it.... Perhaps Josh's more than half-right and I'm oversophisticated. My doubts and delays may cost me a kind of happiness I'd rather have than anything on earth--IF it really exists." There he laughed comfortably. "Poor Rita! If she only knew, how cut up she'd be!"

He might not have been so absolutely certain of her ignorance could he have looked into the Severances' drawing-room just then. For Margaret, after a burst of hysterical gayety, had gone to the far end of the room on the pretext of arranging some flowers. And there, with her face securely hid from the half-dozen round the distant tea-table, she was choking back the sobs, was muttering: "I'll have to do it! I'm a desperate woman--desperate!"

CHAPTER VI

MR. CRAIG IN SWEET DANGER

It is a rash enterprise to open wide to the world the private doors of the family, to expose intimate interiors all unconscious of outside observation, and all unprepared for it. Such frankness tends to destroy "sympathetic interest," to make delusion and illusion impossible; it gives cynicism and his brother, pharisaism, their opportunity to simper and to sneer. Still rasher is it to fling wide the doors of a human heart, and, without any clever arrangement of lights and shades, reveal in the full face of the sun exactly what goes on there. We lie to others unconsciously; we lie to ourselves both consciously and unconsciously.

We admit and entertain dark thoughts, and at the first alarm of exposure deny that we ever saw them before; we cover up our motives, forget where we have hidden them, and wax justly indignant when they are dug out and confronted with us. We are scandalized, quite honestly, when others are caught doing what we ourselves have done. We are horrified and cry "Monster!" when others do what we ourselves refrain from doing only through lack of the bad courage.