The Helpers

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?"