The Just and the Unjust Part 13

"I don't think anything about it."

"Well, maybe I am, I have been under a strain. But I'm not too drunk to attend to business; I am never too drunk for that. I wish to say I have the money--"

His lips twitched, and Gilmore, watching him furtively, saw that he was again shivering.

"You got what, Marsh?" demanded Gilmore in a whisper.

"The money, the money I owe you!"

"Oh, I see!" He fell back a step and stared at Langham; there was apprehension dawning in his eyes. "Where did you get it?" he asked.

But Langham shook his head.

"That's my business; it's enough for you to get your money."

"Well, you were quick about it," said Gilmore, and he rested his hand on the lawyer's arm.

Langham moved a step aside.

"You threatened me," he said resentfully, but with drunken dignity. "You were going to smash me; I wish to say that now you can smash and be d.a.m.ned! I have the money--"

"Oh, come, Marsh! Don't you feel cut up about that; I didn't mean to make you mad; you mustn't hold that against me!"

"You come to my office to-morrow and get your money," said Langham, still with dignity. "I've been under a great strain getting that money, and now I'm done with you--"

Gilmore laughed.

"What are you laughing at?"

"You, you fool! But you aren't done with me; we'll be closer friends than ever after this. Just now you are too funny for me to take seriously. You go home and sleep off this drunk; that's my advice to you! I'd give a good deal to know where you have been and what sort of a fool you have been making of yourself since I saw you last!" added Gilmore.

"Don't you worry about me; I'm all right. What I want to say is, lend me your keys; I can't go home this way--lend me your keys and I'll go to your rooms and sleep it off."

"All right, Marsh; think you can get there?"

"Of course; I'm all right."

"And you'll go there if I give you my keys--you'll go nowhere else?"

"Of course I won't, Andy!"

"You won't stop to talk with any one?"

"Who'll I find to talk with at this time of the night?" laughed the drunken man derisively. "It's three o'clock! Say, Andy, who'll I find to talk to?"

"By G.o.d, I hope no one, you fool!" muttered Gilmore.

"Well, give me the keys, Andy. I'll go along and get to bed, and I want you to forget this conversation--"

"Oh, I'll forget it all right, Marsh--but you won't after you come to your senses!" he added under his breath.

"Give me the keys--thanks. Good night, Andy! I'll see you in the morning."

He reeled uncertainly down the path, cursing his treacherous footing as he went. At the gate he paused and waved an unsteady farewell to the gambler, who stood on the porch staring after him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE BEAUTY OF ELIZABETH

His interview with Evelyn Langham left North with a sense of moral nausea, yet he felt he had somehow failed in his comprehension of her, that she had not meant him to understand her as he had; that, after all, perhaps the significance he had given to her words was of his own imagining.

He waited in his room until she should have time to be well on her way home, then hurried down-stairs. He was to dine at the Herberts' at seven o'clock, and as their place was but scant two miles from town, he determined to walk. He crossed the Square, only stopping to speak with the little lamplighter, and twenty minutes later Mount Hope, in the cold breath of the storm, had dwindled to a huddle of faint ghostly lights on the hillside and in the valley.

The Herbert home, a showy country-place in a region of farms, merited a name; but no one except Mrs. Herbert, who in the first flush of possession determined so to dignify it, had ever made use of the name she had chosen after much deliberation. General Herbert himself called it simply the farm, while to the neighbors and the dwellers in Mount Hope it was known as the general's place, which perhaps sufficiently distinguished it; for its owner was still always spoken of as the general, though since the war he had been governor of his state.

Rather less than half a century before, Daniel Herbert, then a country urchin tending cattle on the hillside where now stood his turreted stone mansion, had decided that some day when he should be rich he would return and buy that hillside and the great reach of flat river-bottom that lay adjacent to it, and there build his home. His worldly goods at the time of this decision consisted of a pair of jeans trousers, a hickory shirt, and a battered straw hat. For years he had forgotten his boyish ambition. He had made his way in the world; he had won success in his profession, the law; he had won even greater distinction as a soldier in the Civil War; he had been a national figure in politics, and he had been governor of his state. And then had come the country-bred man's hunger for the soil. He had remembered that hillside where as a boy he had tended his father's herds.

He was not a rich man, but he had married a rich woman, and it was her money that bought the many acres and built the many-turreted mansion.

Wishing, perhaps, to mark the impermanency of the life there and to give it a purely holiday aspect, Mrs. Herbert had christened the place Idle Hour; but the governor, beyond occasional partic.i.p.ation in local politics, never again resumed those activities by which he had so distinguished himself. He wore top-boots and rode about the farm on an old gray horse, while his intimates were the neighboring farmers, with whom he talked crops and politics by the hour.

In pained surprise Mrs. Herbert, a woman of great ambition, had endured five years of this kind of life; with unspeakable bitterness of spirit she had seen the once potent name of Daniel Herbert disappear from the newspapers, and then she had died.

On her death the general became a rich and, in a way, a free man, for now he could, without the silent protest of his wife, recover the neglected lore of wood and field, and practise forgotten arts that had in his boyhood come under the elastic head of ch.o.r.es. Elizabeth, his daughter, had never shared her mother's ambitions. Perhaps because she had always had it she cared nothing for society. She was well content to ride about the farm with her father, whom she greatly admired, and at whose eccentricities she only smiled.

In this agreeable comradeship with his daughter, General Herbert had lived through the period of his bereavement with very tolerable comfort.

He had rendered the dead the dead's due of regretful tenderness; but Elizabeth never asked him when he was going to make his reentry into politics; and she never reproached him with having wasted the very best years of his life in trying to make four hundred acres of scientifically farmed land show a profit, a feat he had not yet accomplished.

Quitting the highway, North turned in at two stone pillars that marked the entrance to Idle Hour and walked rapidly up the maple-lined driveway to the great arched vestibule that gave to the house the appearance of a Norman-French chateau.

Answering the summons of the bell, a maid ushered him into the long drawing-room, and into the presence of the general and his daughter. The former received North with a perceptible shade of reserve. He knew more about the young man than he would have cared to tell his daughter, since he believed it would be better for her to make her own discoveries where North was concerned. He had not opposed his frequent visits to Idle Hour, for he felt that if Elizabeth was interested in the young fellow opposition would only strengthen it. Glancing at North as he greeted Elizabeth, the general admitted that whatever he might be, he was presentable, indeed good-looking, handsome. Why hadn't he done something other than make a mess of his life! He wondered, too, wishing to be quite fair, if North had not been the subject of a good deal of unmerited censure, if, after all, his idleness had not been the worst thing about him. He hoped this might be true. Still he regretted that Elizabeth should have allowed their boy and girl friendship--they had known each other always--to grow into a closer intimacy.

In the minds of these two men there was absolute accord on one point.

Either would have said that Elizabeth Herbert's beauty was a supreme endowment, and more nearly perfect than the beauty of any other woman.

She was slender, not tall, but poised and graceful with a distinction of bearing that added to her inches. Her hair was burnished copper and her coloring the tint of warm ivory with the sunlight showing through. North gazed at her as though he would store in his memory the vision of her loveliness. Then they walked out to the dining-room.

The dinner was rather a somber feast. North felt the restraint of the general's presence; he sensed his disfavor; and with added bitterness he realized that this was his last night in Mount Hope, that the morrow would find him speeding on his way West. He had given up everything for nothing, and now that a purpose, a hope, a great love had come to him, he must go from this place, the town of his birth, where he had become a bankrupt in both purse and reputation.

It was a relief when they returned to the drawing-room. There the general excused himself, and North and Elizabeth were left alone. She seated herself before the open fire of blazing hickory logs, whose light, and that of the shaded lamps, filled the long room with a soft radiance. She had never seemed so desirable to North as now when he was about to leave her. He stood silent, leaning against the corner of the chimneypiece, looking down on all her springlike radiance. Usually he was neither preoccupied nor silent, but to-night he was both. The thought that he was seeing her for the last time--Ah, this was the price of all his folly! At length he spoke.

"I came to-night to say good-by, Elizabeth!"

She glanced up, startled.

"To say good-by?" she repeated.