The City of Numbered Days

The sweat stood out in great drops on his forehead when he finally drew a pad of telegraph blanks under his hand and began to write a message. Painstakingly he composed it, referring often to the notes in his field-book, and printing the words neatly in his accurate, clearly defined handwriting.

When it was finished he translated it laboriously into the department code. But after the copy was made and signed he did not ring at once for a messenger. Instead, he put the two, the original and the cipher, under a paper-weight and sat glooming at them, as if they had been his own death-warrant – was still so sitting when a light tap at the door was followed by a soft swishing of silken skirts, a faint odor of crushed violets, and Genevieve Cortwright stood beside him.

XVII

The Circean Cup

While one might count ten the silence of the upper room remained unbroken, and neither the man nor the woman spoke. It was not the first time by many that Genevieve Cortwright had come to stand beside the engineer's desk, holding him with smiling eyes and a charming audacity while she laid her commands upon him for the afternoon's motoring or the evening's bridge party or what other social diversion she might have in view.

But now there was a difference. Brouillard felt it instinctively – and in the momentary silence saw it in a certain hard brilliance of the beautiful eyes, in the curving of the ripe lips, half scornful, half pathetic, though the pathos may have been only a touch of self-pity born of the knowledge that the world of the luxury-lapped has so little to offer once the cold finger of satiety has been laid upon the throbbing pulse of fruition.

"You have been quarrelling with father again," she said, with an abruptness that was altogether foreign to her habitual attitude toward him. "I have come to try to make peace. Won't you ask me to sit down?"

He recalled himself with a start from his abstracted study of the faultless contour of cheek and chin and rounded throat and placed a chair for her, apologizing for the momentary aberration and slipping easily from apology into explanation.

"It was good of you to try to bring the wine and oil," he said. "But it was scarcely a quarrel; the king doesn't quarrel with his subjects."

"Now you are making impossible all the things I came to say," she protested, with a note of earnestness in her voice that he had rarely heard. "Tell me what it was about."

"I am afraid it wouldn't interest you in the least," he returned evasively.

"I suppose you are punishing me now for the 'giddy butterfly' pose which you once said was mine. Isn't there a possibility, just the least little shadow of a possibility, that I don't deserve to be punished?"

He had sat down facing her and his thought was quite alien to the words when he tried again.

"You wouldn't understand. It was merely a disagreement in a matter of – a matter of business."

"Perhaps I can understand more than you give me credit for," she countered, with an upflash of the captivating eyes. "Perhaps I can be hurt where you have been thinking that the armor of frivolity, or ignorance, or indifference is the thickest."

"No, you wouldn't be hurt," he denied, in sober finality.

"How can you tell? Can you read minds and hearts as you do your maps and drawings? Must I be set down as hopelessly and irreclaimably frivolous just because I have chosen to laugh when possibly another woman might have cried?"

"Oh, no," he denied again. Then he tried to meet her fairly on the new ground. "You mustn't accuse yourself. You are of your own world and you can't very well help being of it. Besides, it is a pleasant world."

"But an exceedingly shallow one, you would say. But why not, Mr. Brouillard? What do we get out of life more than the day's dole of – well, of whatever we care most for? I suppose one ought to be properly shocked at the big electric sign Monsieur Bongras has put up over the entrance to his café; 'Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die.' He meant it as a cynical gibe at the expense of Mirapolis, of course; but do you know it appeals to me – it makes me think."

"I'm listening," said Brouillard. "Convert me if you can."

"Oh, I don't know how to say it, or perhaps even how to think it. But when I see Monsieur Bongras's cynical little fling I wonder if it isn't the real philosophy, after all. Why should we be always looking forward and striving and trying foolishly to climb to some high plane where the air is sure to be so rare that we couldn't possibly breathe it?"

Brouillard's smile was a mere eye-lifting of grave reminiscence when he said: "Some of us have quit looking forward – quit trying to climb – and that without even the poor hope of reaping the reward that Poodles's quotation offers."

Miss Cortwright left her chair and began to make an aimless circuit of the room, passing the blue-prints on the walls in slow review, and coming finally to the window looking out over the city and across to the gray, timber-crowned wall of the mighty structure spanning the gap between the Niquoia's two sentinel mountains.

"You haven't told me yet what your disagreement with father was about," she reminded him at length; and before he could speak: "You needn't, because I know. You have been getting in his way – financially, and he has been getting in your way – ethically. You are both in the wrong."

"Yes?" said Brouillard, neither agreeing nor denying.

"Yes. Father thinks too much of making money – a great deal too much; and you – "

"Well?" he prompted, when the pause threatened to become a break. "I am waiting to hear my indictment."

"You puzzle me," she acknowledged frankly. "At first I thought you were going to be a thirsty money hunter like all the others. And – and I couldn't quite understand why you should be. Now I know, or partly know. You had an object that was different from that of the others. You wanted to buy some one thing – not everything, as most people do. But there is something missing, and that is what puzzles me. I don't know what it is that you want to buy."

"There have been two things," he broke in. "One of them you know, because I spoke of it to you long ago. The other – "

"The other is connected in some way with the Massingales; so much I have been able to gather from what father said."

"Since you know part, you may know all," he went on. "David Massingale owes your father – technically, at least – one hundred thousand dollars, which he can't pay; which your father isn't going to let him pay, if he can help it. And if Massingale doesn't pay he will lose his mine."

"You interested yourself? Would you mind telling me just why?" she asked.

"That is one of the things you couldn't understand."

She turned a calmly smiling face toward him.

"Oh, you are mistaken, greatly mistaken. I can understand it very well, indeed. You are in love with David Massingale's daughter."

Once more he neither denied nor affirmed, and she had turned to face the window again when she went on in the same unmoved tone:

"It was fine. I can appreciate such devotion even if I can't fully sympathize with it. Everybody should be in love like that – once. Every woman demands that kind of love – once. But afterward, you know – if one should be content to take the good the gods provide…" When she began again at the end of the eloquent little pause there was a new note in her voice, a note soothingly suggestive of swaying poppies in sunlit fields, of ease and peace and the ideal heights receding, of rose-strewn paths pleasant to the feet of the weary wayfarer. "Why shouldn't we take to-day, the only day we can be sure of having, and use and enjoy it while it is ours? Money? – there is money enough in the world, God knows; enough and to spare for anything that is worth the buying. I have money, if that is all – money of my own. And, if I should ask him, father would give me the 'Little Susan' outright, to do with it as I pleased."

Brouillard was leaning back in his chair studying her faultless profile as she talked, and the full meaning of what she was saying did not come to him at once. But when it did he sprang up and went to stand beside her. And all the honesty and manhood the evil days had spared went into what he said to her.

"I was a coward a moment ago, Miss Genevieve, when you spoke of the motive which had prompted me to help David Massingale. But you knew and you said the words for me. When you love as I do you will understand that there is an ecstasy in the very madness of it that is more precious than all the joys of a gold-mounted paradise without it. I must go on as I have begun."

"You will marry her?" she asked softly.

"There has never been any hope of that, I think; not from the very beginning. While I remained an honest man there was the insurmountable obstacle I once told you of – the honor debt my father left me. And when I became a thief and a grafter for love's sake I put myself out of the running, definitely and hopelessly."

"Has she told you so?"

"Not in so many words; there was no need. There can be no fellowship between light and darkness."

Miss Cortwright's beautiful eyes mirrored well-bred incredulity, and there was the faintest possible suggestion of lenient scorn in her smile.

"What a pedestal you have built for her!" she said. "Has it never occurred to you that she may be just a woman – like other women? Tell me, Mr. Brouillard, have you asked her to marry you?"

"You know very well that I haven't."

"Then, if you value your peace of mind, don't. She would probably say 'yes' and you would be miserable forever after. Ideals are exceedingly fragile things, you know. They are made to be looked up to, not handled."

"Possibly they are," he said, as one who would rather concede than dispute. The reaction was setting in, bringing a discomforting conviction that he had opened the door of an inner sanctuary to unsympathetic eyes.

Followed a little pause, which was threatening to become awkward when Miss Cortwright broke it and went back to the beginning of things.

"I came to tender my good offices in the – the disagreement, as you call it, between you and father. Can't you be complaisant for once, in a way, Mr. Brouillard?"