The Maker of Opportunities Part 6

"Burglars," roared the copper. "If I wasn't busy I'd run ye in." And he was off at full speed on his vagrant mission.

"Lucky you're busy, old chap," muttered Crabb to the departing figure.

"Do sober up a little, Ross, or we'll never get away. And don't jostle me so, for I clank like a bellwether."

Slowly the pair made their way to Thomas Circle and Vermont Avenue, where the sounds of commotion were lost in the noises of the night.

At L Street Burnett straightened up. "Lord!" he gasped. "But that was close."

"Not as close as it looked," said Crabb, coolly. "A white shirt-front does wonders with a copper. It was better than a knock on the head and a run for it. In the meanwhile, Ross, for the love of Heaven, help me with some of the bric-a-brac." And with that he handed Burnett a gold pin tray, a silver box and a watch fob.

Burnett soberly examined the spoils. "I only wish we could have done without that."

"And had Arnim know what we were driving for? Never, Ross. I'll p.a.w.n them in New York for as little as I can and send von Schlichter the tickets. Won't that do?"

"I suppose it must," said Burnett, dubiously.

By three o'clock they were on the _Blue Wing_ again, Burnett with mingled feelings of doubt and satisfaction, Crabb afire with the achievement.

"Ra.s.selas was a fool, Ross, a malcontent--a _faineant_. Life is amazing, bewitching, consummate." And then, gayly: "Here's a health, boy--a long life to the new amba.s.sador to the Court of St. James!"

But Ross did not go to the Court of St. James. In the following winter, to the surprise of many, the President gave him a special mission to prepare a trade treaty with Peru. Baron Arnim, in due course, recovered his bric-a-brac. Meanwhile Emperor William, mystified at the amazing sagacity of the Secretary of State in the Eastern question, continues the building of a mighty navy in the fear that one day the upstart nation across the ocean will bring the questions complicating them to an issue.

But life was no longer amusing, bewitching or consummate to Crabb. The flavor of an adventure gone from his mouth, the commonplace became more flat and tasteless than before. Life was all pale drabs and grays again.

To make matters worse he had been obliged to make a business visit in Philadelphia, and this filled the cup of insipidity to the brim. He was almost ready to wish that his benighted forbears had never owned the coal mines in Pennsylvania to which he had fallen heir, for it seemed there were many matters to be settled, contracts to be signed and leases to be drawn by his attorney in the sleepy city, and it would be several days, he discovered, before he could get off to Newport. Not even the _Blue Wing_ was at his disposal, for an accident in the engine room had laid her out of commission for two weeks at least.

So he resigned himself to the inevitable, and took a room at a hotel, grimly determined to see the matter through, conscious meanwhile of a fervid hope that the unusual might happen--the lightning might strike.

Hate he had known and fear, but love had so far eluded him. Why, he did not know, save that he had never been willing to perceive that emotion when offered in conventional forms--and since no other forms were possible, he had simply ceased to consider the matter. Yet marry some day, he must, of course. But whom? Little he dreamed how soon he would know. Little did Miss Patricia Wharton think that she had anything to do with it. In fact, Patricia's thoughts at that time were far from matrimony. Patricia was bored. For a month while Wharton pere boiled out his gout at the sulphur springs, Patricia had dutifully sat and rocked, tapping a small foot impatiently, looking hourly less a monument of Patience and smiling not at all.

At last they were in Philadelphia. Wilson had opened two rooms at the house and a speedy termination of David Wharton's business would have seen them soon at Bar Harbor. But something went wrong at the office in Chestnut Street, and Patricia, once a lamb and now a sheep of sacrifice, found herself at this particular moment doomed to another weary week of waiting.

To make matters worse not a girl Patricia knew was in town, or if there were any the telephone refused to discover them. Her aunt's place was at Haverford, but she knew that an invitation to dinner there meant aged Quaker cousins and that kind of creaky informality which shows a need of oil at the joints. That lubricant Patricia had no intention of supplying. She had rather be bored alone than bored in company. She found herself sighing for Bar Harbor as she had never sighed before. She pictured the cottage, cool and gray among the rocks, the blue bowl of the sea with its rim just at her window-ledge, the clamoring surf, and the briny smell with its faint suggestion of things cool and curious which came up newly breathed from the heart of the deep. She could hear "Country Girl" whinnying impatience from the stable when Jack Masters on "Kentucky" rode down from "The Pinnacle" to inquire.

Indeed, as she walked out into the Square in the afternoon she found herself relapsing into a minute and somewhat sordid introspection. It was the weather, perhaps. Surely the dog-days had settled upon the sleepy city in earnest. No breath stirred the famishing trees, the smell of hot asphalt was in the air, locusts buzzed vigorously everywhere, trolley bells clanged out of tune, and the sun was leaving a blood-hot trail across the sky in angry augury for the morrow.

Patricia sank upon a bench, and poked viciously at the walk with her parasol. She experienced a certain grim satisfaction in being more than usually alone. Poor Patricia! who at the crooking of a finger, could have summoned to her side any one of five estimable scions of stupid, distinguished families. Only something new, something difficult and extraordinary would lift her from the hopeless slough of despond into which she had found herself precipitated.

Andromeda awaiting Perseus on a bench in Rittenhouse Square! She smiled widely and unrestrainedly up and precisely into the face of Mr. Mortimer Crabb.

CHAPTER VI

A pleasant face it was, upon which, to her surprise, a smile very suddenly grew into being as though in response to her own. Patricia's eyes dropped quickly--sedately, as became those of a decorous woman, and yet in that brief second in which the eyes of the tall young man met hers, she had noticed that they were gray, as though sun-bleached, but very clear and sparkling. And when she raised her own to look quite through and beyond the opposite bench, her conscience refused to deny that she had enjoyed the looking. Were the eyes smiling _at_, or _with_ her? In that distinction lay a question in morals. Was their sparkle quizzical or intrusive? She would have vowed that good humor, benevolence (if benevolence may be found in the eyes of two and thirty), and a certain polite interest were its actual ingredients. It was all very interesting. She surprised herself in a not unlively curiosity as to his life and calling, and in a lack of any sort of misgiving at the _contretemps_.

The shadows beneath the wilted trees grew deeper. The sun swept down into the west and suddenly vanished with all his train of gold and purple. Patricia stole a furtive look at her neighbor. Triumphantly she confirmed her diagnosis. The man was lost in the glow of the sunset.

Importunity and he were miles asunder.

It may have been that Patricia's eyes were more potent than the sunset, or that her triumphant deduction was based upon a false premise, or that the young man had been watching her all the while from the tail of his benevolent eye; for without the slightest warning, his head turned suddenly to find the eyes of the unfortunate Patricia again fixed upon his. However quickly she might turn aside, the glance exchanged was long enough to disclose the fact that the sparkle was still there and to excite a suspicion that it had never been dispelled. Nor did the character of the smile rea.s.sure her. She was not at all certain now that he was not smiling both _with_ and _at_ her.

The quickly averted head, the toss of the chin, seemed all too inadequate to the situation; yet she availed herself of those bulwarks of maiden modesty in virtuous effort to refute the unconscious testimony of her unlucky eyes. Instinct suggested immediate flight. But Patricia moved not. Here indeed was a case where flight meant confession. She felt rather than saw his gaze search her from head to foot, and struggle as she might against it, the warm color raced to her cheek and brow. If she had enjoyed the situation a moment before, the impertinence, so suddenly born, filled her with dismay. By some subtle feminine process of reasoning, she succeeded in eliminating her share in the trifling adventure and now saw only the sin of the offending male. At last she arose, the very presentment of injured and scornful dignity and walked, looking neither to the left hand nor to the right.

There was a sound of firm, rapid footsteps and then a deep voice at her elbow.

"I beg pardon," it was saying.

The lifted straw hat, the inclined head, the mellow tones, the gray eyes (again benevolent), however unalarming in themselves, filled her with very real inquietude. Whatever he had done before, this, surely, was insupportable. She was about to turn away when her eye fell upon his extended arm and upon her luckless parasol.

"I beg pardon," he repeated, "but isn't this yours?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'I beg pardon,' he repeated, 'but isn't this yours?'"]

The blood flew to her face again and it was with an embarra.s.sment, a _gaucherie_, the like of which she could not remember, that she extended her hand toward the errant sunshade. No sound came from her lips; with bent head she took it from him. But as she walked on, she found that he was walking, too--with her, directly at her side. For a moment she was cold with terror.

"I hope you'll let me go along," he was saying coolly, "I'm really quite harmless. If you knew--if you only knew how dreadfully bored I've been, you really wouldn't mind me at all."

Patricia stole a hurried glance at him, her fears curiously diminished.

"I'm what the fallen call a victim of circ.u.mstances," he went on. "I ask no worse fate for my dearest enemy than to be consigned without a friend to this wilderness of whitened stoops and boarded doors--to wait upon your city's demiG.o.d, Procrastination. This I've done for forty-eight hours with a dear memory of a past but without a hope for the future.

If the Fountain of Youth were to gush hopefully from the office water-cooler of my aged lawyer, he would eye it askance and sigh for the lees of the turbid Schuylkill."

However she strove to lift her brows, Patricia was smiling now in spite of herself.

"I've followed the meandering tide down the narrow canon you call Chestnut Street, watched the leisurely coal wagon and its attendant tail of trolleys, or sat in my hotel striving to dust aside the acc.u.mulating cobwebs, one small unquiet molecule of disconsolation.

I'm stranded--marooned. By comparison, Crusoe was gregarious."

During this while they were walking north. All the way to Chestnut Street, Patricia was wondering whether to be most alarmed or amused. Of one thing she was a.s.sured, she was bored no longer. A sense of the violence done to her traditions hung like a millstone around her neck; and yet Patricia found herself peeping avidly through the hole to listen to the seductive voice of unconvention.

When Patricia succeeded in summoning her voice, she was not quite sure that it was her own.

"You're an impertinent person," she found herself saying.

"Can't you forgive?"

"No."

"Circ.u.mstances are against me," he said, "but I give you my word, I've a place in my own city, a friend or two, and a certain proclivity for virtue."

"Even if you do--speak to strange----"

"But I don't. It was the blessed parasol. Otherwise I shouldn't have dared."

"And the proclivity for virtue----"

"Why, that's exactly the reason. Can't you see? It was you! You fairly exuded gentility. Come now, I'm humility itself. I've sinned. How can I expiate?"