"Oh, no, I haven't; I grant you that. But logically" —
"Logic has nothing whatever to do with it. It's ego, pure and unstrained, in most of us; a sluggish river of self, with a quicksand of evil for its bottom."
Lansdale borrowed a gun of his antagonist, and sighted it accurately.
"What do you know about humanity as a whole? What do you know about any part of it save your own infinitesimal fraction? – which seems to be a rather unfair sample."
Jeffard confessed judgment and paid the costs. "I don't know very much about the sample, Lansdale. One time – it was in the sophomore year, I believe – I thought I knew my own potentialities. But I didn't. If any one had prophesied then that I had it in me to do what I have done, I should have demanded a miracle to confirm it."
"But you must justify yourself to yourself," Lansdale persisted.
"Why must I? That is another of your cut-and-dried formulas. So far from recognizing any such obligation, I may say that I gave up trying to account for myself a long time ago. And if I have found it impossible, it isn't worth while for you to try."
Lansdale was not the man to bruise his hands with much beating upon the barred doors of any one's confidence. So he said, "I'm done. It's between you and your conscience, – if you haven't eliminated that with the other things. But I had hoped you'd see fit to defend yourself. The eternal query is sharp enough without the pointing of particular instances."
Jeffard squared himself, with his elbows on the table.
"Do you want an hypothesis, too? – as another man did? Take this, and make the most of it. You knew me and my lacks and havings. You knew that I had reached a point at which I would have pawned my soul for the wherewithal to purchase a short hour or two of forgetfulness. Hold that picture in your mind, and conceive that a summer of unsuccessful prospecting had not changed me for better or worse. Is the point of view unobstructed?"
"The point of view is your own, not mine," Lansdale objected. "And, moreover, the summer did change you, because advancement in some direction is an irrefrangible law. But go on."
"I will. This man whom you have in mind was suddenly brought face to face with a great temptation, – great and subtle. Garvin drove the tunnel on the Midas three years ago and abandoned it as worthless. It was my curiosity which led to the discovery of the gold. It was I who took the sample to the assayer and carried the news of the bonanza to Garvin. I might have kept the knowledge to myself, but I didn't. Why? do you ask? I don't know – perhaps because it didn't occur to me. What followed Bartrow has told you, but not all. Let us assume that the race to Aspen was made in good faith; that this man who had put honor and good report behind him really meant to stand between a drunken fool and the fate he was rushing upon. Can you go so far with me?"
Lansdale nodded. He was spellbound, but it was the artist in him and not the man who hung breathless upon the edge of expectancy.
"Very well; now for the crux. This man knelt behind a locked door and heard himself execrated by the man he was trying to save; heard the first kindly impulse he had yielded to in months distorted into a desperate plan to rob the cursing maniac. Is it past belief that he crept away from the locked door and sat down to ask himself in hot resentment why he should go on? Is it not conceivable that he should have begun to give ear to the plea of self-preservation? – to say to himself that if the maniac were no better than a lost man it was no reason that the treasure should be lost also?"
It was altogether conceivable, and Lansdale nodded again. Jeffard found a cigar and went on while he was clipping the end of it.
"But that was not all. Picture this man at the crumbling point of resolution tiptoeing to the door to listen again. He has heard enough to convince him that the miracle of fortune will be worse than wasted upon the drunken witling. Now he is to hear that the besotted fool has already transferred whatever right he had in the Midas to the two despoilers; signed a quitclaim, sold his miracle for a drink or two of whiskey, more or less. Are you listening?"
Lansdale moistened his lips with the lees of the tea in the empty cup, and said, "Yes; go on."
Jeffard sat back and lighted the cigar. "That's all," he said curtly. "It's enough, isn't it? You knew the man a year ago; you think you know him now. What would he do?"
If the hypothesis were intended to be a test of blind loyalty it missed the mark by just so much as the student of his kind must hold himself aloof from sympathetic entanglements. Lansdale weighed the evidence, not as a partisan, but rather as an onlooker whose point of view was wholly extrinsic.
"I understand," said he; "the man would do as you have done. It's your own affair. As I said a few minutes ago, it is between you and your private conscience. And I dare say if the facts were known the public conscience wouldn't condemn you. Don't you want to use the columns of the 'Coloradoan'?"
Jeffard's negative was explosive. "Do you write me down a fool as well as a knave? Damn the public conscience!"
"Don't swear; I was only offering to turn the stone for you if you've anything to grind."
"I haven't. If I wanted the consent of the majority I could buy it, – buy it if I had shot the maniac instead of letting him shoot me."
"Possibly; and yet you couldn't buy any fraction of it that is worth having," Lansdale asserted, with conviction. "There are a few people left who have not bowed the head in the house of Rimmon."
The cynical hardness went out of Jeffard's eye and lip, and for the first time since the proletary's reincarnation, Lansdale fancied he got a brief glimpse of the man he had known in the day of sincerity.
"A few, yes; the Elliotts, father and daughter, for two, you would say. I wonder if you could help me there."
"To their good opinion? – my dear Jeffard, I'm no professional conscience-keeper!"
"No, I didn't mean that. What I had in mind is a much simpler thing. A year ago Miss Elliott gave me of her abundance. She meant it as a gift, though I made it a loan and repaid the principal – when I was able to. But I am still in her debt. Measured by consequences, which are the only true interest-table, the earnings of her small investment are hardly to be computed in dollars and cents. Naturally, she won't take that view of it, but that does not cancel my obligation. Will you help me to discharge it? They need money."
Lansdale let the appeal simmer in the pot of reflection. His inclination was to refuse to be drawn into any such entanglement; but the opportunity to lessen by ever so little the burdens of the woman he loved was not to be lightly set aside. None the less, the thing seemed impossible.
"I'm afraid it's too big for me, Jeffard; I shouldn't know how to go about it. Don't misunderstand me. I shouldn't stick at the necessary equivocations; but if you know Miss Elliott you must know that Machiavelli himself couldn't be insincere with her. She would have to be told the truth, and" —
He left the sentence incomplete, and Jeffard took it up at the break.
"And if she should acknowledge my obligation – which she would not – she would refuse to be reimbursed out of Garvin's money. That is why I haven't sent her a note with a check in it. Will you have another cup of tea?"
Lansdale took the query as a dismissal of the subject and pushed back his chair. On the way out they passed a late incomer; a florid man, with a nervous step and the eye of preoccupation. He nodded to Lansdale in passing, and Jeffard said, "Do you know him?"
"Yes; it's Finchly, – John Murray's man of business."
Jeffard had apparently relapsed into the deeper depths of cynicism again.
"Yes, I know. That's the charitable euphemism. Murray is a day laborer, transmogrified by a lucky strike into a millionaire. He doesn't know enough to write his own name, much less how to keep a great fortune from dissolving, so he hires a manager. It was a happy thought. What does Finchly get?"
Lansdale laughed. "A good living, doubtless."
"Of course; and much more, with the pickings. But there is a salary which is supposed to be the consideration, isn't there?"
"Oh, yes; and the figure of it varies with the imagination of the gossips from ten to fifty thousand a year."
Jeffard stopped to relight his cigar, and Lansdale fancied that the Finchly query went out with the spent match. But Jeffard revived it a square farther on.
"Suppose we assume, for the sake of argument, that the man has a conscience. How much could he justly take for the service rendered?"
They were at the entrance of the "Coloradoan" building, and Lansdale took out his notebook and made a memorandum.
"That is good for a column," he said; "'The Moral Responsibility of Millionaire-Managers.' I'll answer your question later, when I've had time to think it over."
"But, seriously," Jeffard insisted. "Is it worth ten thousand a year? – or the half of it? The man is only a cashier, – a high-class accountant at best."
"Finchly is much more than that; he is Murray's brain as well as his pen-hand. But if he were only a money-counter, a money-counter's salary would be enough; say two or three thousand a year, to be liberal."
Jeffard nodded and was turning away; had in fact taken three steps streetward, when he came back to return to the subject dropped at the supper table as though there had been no hiatus.
"You were going to say she would refuse to take Garvin's money, and I said it for you. Would it make it any easier if I can assure you that the money I shall put in your hands is honestly mine? – that James Garvin has no claim, ethical or otherwise, upon it? Take time to consider it, – with an eye to Miss Elliott's present needs rather than to my havings or wishes in the matter."
Lansdale was off his guard, and the human side of him came uppermost in the swift rejoinder, – "Then you didn't tell me the whole truth? The Midas is honestly yours, after all?"
Jeffard turned away and snapped the ash from his cigar. "Don't jump at conclusions," he said. "It's always safer to go on voting with the majority. What I said has nothing to do with the story of the man and his temptation; but the meanest laborer is worthy of his hire. I worked all winter with pick and shovel in the Midas. Good-night."
CHAPTER XXIX
It was early in June when the pneumatic drill in the Little Myriad was smashed by a premature blast, and the master of the mine was constrained to make a flying trip to Denver to replace it. As a matter of course, if not, indeed, of necessity, Myra went with him. They traveled by the night train, breakfasted on canned viands out of the Pullman buffet, and so took Constance by surprise.
Myra had projects in view, some Utopian and others more Utopian, with her relatives for nuclei; and when Richard the untactful had been sent about his machinery business, she settled down for a persuasive day with Constance. Now Constance had been taken unawares, but she was of those who fight best at a disadvantage, and the end of the day found the Utopian projects still in air, being held in suspension by an obstinate young person who steadily refused to make of herself a vessel meet for condolence and cousinly beneficence.
"It's no use, cuzzy dear; you shall have an option on the help stock when there is any for sale, but at present there are no quotations."
Thus Connie, at the very end of the persuasive day. Upon which the young wife, with patience outwearing or outworn, retorts smartly: —
"I suppose you think it's heroic – your living like this; but it isn't. It is just plain poverty pride, which is all well enough to keep the crowd out, but which is simply wicked when it makes you shut the door in our faces. Think of it – you living here in three rooms at the top of a block when the Myriad has begun to pay dividends! I didn't mean to tell you just yet, but Dick is going to buy back the Colfax Avenue house, and it shall stand empty till doomsday if you won't go and live in it."
In times not long past Connie would have returned railing for railing – with interest added; but the reproachful day had been no less trying to her than to Myra, and the poverty fight – and some others – were sore upon her. Hence her disclaimer was of courageous meekness, with a smile of loving appreciation to pave the way.
"I hope Dick will do no such preposterous thing – unless you want it for yourselves. You know it would be quite out of the question for us to take it. Or to do anything but make the best of what has happened," she added.
Myra was standing at a window, looking down into the street where the early dusk was beginning to prick out the point-like coruscations of the arc-lights. There was that in Connie's eyes which beckoned tears to eyes sympathetic; and she found it easier to go on with her back turned upon the room and its other occupant.
"To make the best of it, yes; but you are not making the best of it. Or, if you are, the best is miserably bad. You are looking thin and wretched, as if – as if you didn't get enough to eat."
There was a touch of the old-time resilience in Connie's laugh. "How can you tell when you're not looking at me? Indeed, it hasn't come to that yet. We have enough, and a little to spare for those who have less."
Myra had been searching earnestly all day for some little rift into which the wedge of helpfulness might be driven, and here was an opening – of the vicarious sort.
"Won't you let me be your purseholder for those who have less, Connie? That is the very least you can do."
Constance willed it thankfully. After the trying day of refusals it was grateful to find something that could be conceded.
"I believe I told you once that I wouldn't be your proxy in that way, didn't I? But I will, now. You are so much better than your theories, Myra."
Myra left the window at that, wrote a generous check before the concession should have time to shrink in the cooling, and then went over to sit on the denim-covered lounge with her arm around her cousin's waist.
"Now that you have begun to be reasonable, won't you go a step farther, Connie, dear? I know there are troubles, – lots of them besides the pinching. Can't you lean on me just a little bit? I do so want to help you."
Connie did it literally, with her face on Myra's shoulder and a sob at the catching of her breath. Myra let her take her own time, as a judicious comforter will, and when the words came they wrought themselves into a confession.
"Oh, Myra, I thought I was so strong, and I'm not!" she wept. "The bullet in a gun hasn't less to say about where it shall be sent. I said it wasn't the pinch, but it is – or part of it is. Poppa has set his heart upon trying the mountains again, old as he is, and he can't go because – because there isn't money enough to outfit him with what he could carry on his back!"
"And you would have let me go without telling me!" said Myra reproachfully. "He shall have a whole pack train of 'grub stake,' – is that what I should say? – and you shall come and stay with us while he is away. Consider that a trouble past, and tell me some more. You don't know how delicious it is to be permitted to pose as a small god in a car."
"Yes, I do," Connie responded, out of a heartful of similar ecstasies. "But it isn't a trouble past: he won't let you do it. Everybody has been offering to lend him money, and he won't take it."
"He will have to take it from me," said Myra, with prompt decision. "I'll make him. And when he goes, you will come to us, won't you?"
Constance looked up with a smile shining through the tears. "You're good, Myra, just like Dick! But I can't, you know. I must stay here."
"Why must you?" To the querist there seemed to be sufficiently good reasons, from the point of view of the proprieties, for setting Connie's decision aside mandatorily, but Myra had grown warier if not wiser in her year of cousin-kenning.
"There are reasons, – duties which I must not shirk."
"Are they namable?"
"Yes; Margaret is the name of one of them."
Myra's disapproval found vent in gentle foot-tappings. To the moderately compassionate on-looker it would seem that Constance had long since filled that measure of responsibility, – filled and heaped it to overflowing. But again the experienced one was discreet.
"As Dick would put it, you have 'angeled' Margaret for a year and more. Isn't she yet able to stand alone?"
Connie's answer was prompt and decisive. "Quite as well able as the best of us would be under similar conditions."
"I wouldn't make it conditional; but we've never been able to keep step in that journey. Why is Margaret's case exceptional?"
"Did I say it was? It isn't. She is just one of any number of poor girls who are trying to live honestly, with the barriers of innocence all down and an overwhelming temptation always beckoning."
Myra shook her head. "That is making temptation a constraint, when it can never be more than a lure. I must confess I can't get far enough away from the conventional point of view to understand how a young woman like Margaret, who has been lifted and carried and set fairly upon her feet, could be tempted to go back to the utter misery and degradation of the other life."
Constance spoke first to the sophism, and then to the particular instance.
"It is not true that temptation is always a lure. It is oftener a constraint. And you say you can't understand. It is terribly simple. They sin first for a thing which they mistake for love; but after that it is for bread and meat, and surcease from toil which has become a mere frenzied struggle to keep body and soul together. You don't know what it is to be poor, Myra, – with the barriers down. Have you any idea how much Margaret earned last week, working steadily the six days and deep into the nights?"
"Oh, not very much, I suppose. But her necessities are not large."
"Are they not? They are as large as yours or mine. She must eat and drink and have a bed to sleep on and clothes to cover her. And to provide these she was paid three dollars and eighty-five cents for her week's work; and two dollars of that had to go for rent. Is the temptation a lure or a constraint in her case?"
Myra was silenced, if not convinced, and she went back to the fact existent with sympathy no more than seemingly aloof.
"You hinted at Margaret's peculiar besetment in one of your letters. Is that what you have to stay and fight?"
Constance nodded assent.
"I have been hoping you were mistaken. Dick is still loyally incredulous. Isn't there a chance that you or Tommie, or both of you, have taken too much for granted?"
Connie's "No" was almost inaudible, and there was chastened sorrow in her voice when she went on to tell how Tommie had seen Jeffard and Margaret together, not once, but many times; how the man was always persuading, and the woman, reluctant at first, was visibly yielding; how within a week Tommie had seen Jeffard give her money.
"And she took it?" Myra queried.
"She didn't want to take it. Tommie says she almost fought with him to make him take it back. But he wouldn't."
Myra's sympathy circled down, but it alighted upon Connie. "You poor dear! after all your loving-kindnesses and helpings! It's miserable; but you can't do anything if you stay."
"Yes, I can. I couldn't stay alone, of course, and she will give up her room and come here to live with me. That will give me a better hold on her than I have now."
"But if you had a hundred eyes you couldn't safeguard her against her will!"
"No; but it isn't her will, – it's his. And he will not come here."
Myra's brows went together in a little frown of righteous indignation. "I should hope not, – the wretch! You were right, after all, Connie, and I'll retract all the charitable things Dick wanted me to say. He is too despicable" —
It was Connie's hand on the accusing lips that cut short the indignant arraignment.
"Please don't!" she pleaded. "He is all that you can say or think, but my ears are weary with my own repetitions of it."
Myra took the hand from her lips and held it fast while she tried to search her cousin's face. But the gathering dusk had mounted from the level of the street to that of the upper room, and it baffled the eye-questioning.
"Connie Elliott! I more than half believe" – She stopped abruptly, as if there had been some dumb protest of the imprisoned hand, and then went on with a swift change from accusation to gentle reproach. "I believe you have only just begun to tell me your troubles, – and I've been with you all day! What are some more of them?"
"I have told you the worst of them, – or at least that part of them which makes it impossible for me to go away. But there is another reason why I ought to stay."
"Is that one namable, too?"
"Yes; but perhaps you won't understand. And you will be sure to tell me it isn't proper. I think one of Mr. Lansdale's few pleasures is his coming here."
"Few remaining pleasures, you would say, if you were not too tender-hearted. Is it wise, Connie?"
"Why not? – if it is a comfort to him?"
Myra hesitated, not because she had nothing to say, but because she knew not how to say the thing demanded.
"You haven't given me leave to be quite frank with you, Connie. But it seems to me that your kindness in this case is – is mistaken kindness."
Constance's rejoinder was merely an underthought slipping the leash. "It is not to be expected that any one would understand," she said.
"But I do understand," Myra asserted, this time with better confidence. "I'm not supposed to have the slightest inkling of your feelings, – you've never lisped a word to me, – but Mr. Lansdale's motives are plain enough to be read in the dark. If he were a well man he would have asked you to marry him long ago."
"Do you think so?" said Constance half absently. "I'm not so sure about that. He is far away from home and wretchedly ill; and he has many acquaintances and few real friends."
"But he loves you," Myra persisted.
"He has never said anything like that to me."
"It is quite possible that he never will, in view of the insurmountable obstacle."
"His ill-health, you mean? Myra, dear, you surely know love better than that – now. Love is the one thing which will both sow and reap even in the day when the heavens are of brass and the earth is a barren desert."
The under-roar of traffic in the street made the silence in the upper room more effective by contrast; like the sense of isolation which is often sharpest in a jostling throng. Myra rose and went to the window again, coming back presently to stand over Constance and say, "I suppose it is ordained that you should be a martyr to somebody or something, Connie, dear; and when the time comes I'm not going to say you nay, because I think you will be happier that way. If Mr. Lansdale should be tempted to say that which I am sure he has determined not to say, is your answer ready?"
Connie's hands were clasped over one knee, and the poise was of introspective beatitude. But the answer to Myra's query was not irrelevant.
"He is the truest of gentlemen; what would your answer be, Myra?"
It was the young wife in Myra Bartrow, that precious bit of clay as yet plastic under the hand of the master-potter, that prompted the steadfast reply.
"If I loved him as I ought, I should pray God to make me unselfish enough to say yes, Connie."
"So should I," said Constance simply; and Myra made the lighting of the lamp an excuse for the diversion which the three soft-spoken words demanded. And when she went back to the matter of fact, she touched lightly upon what she conceived to be a wound yet far from healing.
"You have silenced me, Connie, but I can at least provide for the contingency. If the event shapes itself so that you are free to come to us, don't let Margaret stand in the way. Bring her with you, and we'll find room and work for her."
Connie's eyes were shining, but there was a loving smile struggling with the tears. "I said you were good, like Dick, Myra, dear, and I can't put it any stronger. If I don't take you at your word, it will not be for anything you have left unsaid. Isn't that Dick coming?"
It was. There was a double step in the corridor, and Bartrow came in with Stephen Elliott. Since the battle persuasive with the daughter had kept her single-eyed, Myra had had but brief glimpses of the father during the day; but now she remarked that his step was a little less firmly planted than it had been in that holiday time when he had played the unwonted part of escort in ordinary to two young women who had dragged him whither they would, – and whither he would not. Moreover, there was the look of the burden-bearer in his eyes, though their fire was undimmed; and an air of belated sprightliness in his manner which went near to Myra's heart, because she knew it came of conscious effort. These jottings and others, the added stoop of the shoulders, and the lagging half-step to the rear in entering, as of one who may no longer keep pace with younger men, Myra made while Dick was timing the dash for their train.
