The Grafters Part 12

"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.

"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a political const.i.tuency."

She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.

Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful.

They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of pa.s.sionate rebellion.

Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field of the l.u.s.t of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash, it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had been over it all in those days, and to the pa.s.sion-warped the high call is transmitted in terms of self-seeking.

He turned upon her suddenly.

"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.

"How absurd!"

"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."

"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.

"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been trying to be a money-getter."

"You can be something vastly better."

"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."

Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone, of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There would be time enough to drain it farther on.

"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said, breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I----"

She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.

"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always do."

David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon summer for a background.

It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism in them, as thus:

"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we were both very young that summer--years younger than we can ever be again.

Don't you?"

"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pa.s.s in which he would have agreed with her if she had a.s.serted that black was white. It was not weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the word which would fit her changed mood.

"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"

"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her resentful.

She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just.

And you were not quite just, I think."

"To you?" he demanded.

"Oh, no; to yourself."

Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. _You have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to you_. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise him?

The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.

"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at once.

"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the house and had turned their faces townward.

"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank to sell her stock--won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now, when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted, mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the jaw--intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"

Kent's laugh was mirthless.

"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for the accusation.

If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to steer clear of that shoal.

"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with Elinor."

"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother would have the casting vote."

"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."

"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now--as between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean--but there will probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go.

We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."

The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said: "Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the G.o.d in the car.

Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."

David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.

"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one thing you must never do."

"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.

Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor made him fearless of consequences.

"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know: be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never forgive you."

"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough--to draw it mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David Kent's affair."

Kent turned about and caught step again.

"I've said my say--all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss Brentwood rather better than you do."

Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to the debatable ground in an outspoken word.