VI
OF THE MAKING OF LAWS
The session, the shortest in the history of the State, and thus far the least eventful, was nearing its close; and the alarmists who had prophesied evil and evil only of the "Populist" victory were fast losing credit with the men of their own camp and with the country at large.
After the orthodox strife over the speakership of the House, and the equally orthodox wrangle over contested seats, the State Assembly had settled down to routine business, despatching it with such unheard-of celerity as to win columns of approval from the State press as a whole; though there were not wanting a few radical editors to raise the ante-election cry of reform, and to ask pointedly when it was to begin.
Notwithstanding the lack of alarms, however, the six weeks had been a period of unceasing vigilance on the part of the interests which were supposed to be in jeopardy. Every alien corporation owning property and doing business in the State had its quota of watchful defenders on the ground; men who came and went, in the lobbies of the capitol, in the visitors' galleries, at the receptions; men who said little, but who saw and heard all things down to the small talk of the corridors and the clubs, and the gossip of the hotel rotundas.
David Kent was of this silent army of observation, doing watch-dog duty for the Western Pacific; thankful enough, if the truth be told, to have a thing to do which kept him from dwelling overmuch upon the wreck of his hopes. But in the closing days of the session, when a despatchful Assembly, anxious to be quit of its task, had gone into night sittings, the anodyne drug of work began to lose its effect.
The Brentwoods had taken furnished apartments in Tejon Avenue, two squares from the capitol, and Kent had called no oftener than good breeding prescribed. Yet their accessibility, and his unconquerable desire to sear his wound in the flame that had caused it, were constant temptations, and he was battling with them for the hundredth time on the Friday night when he sat in the House gallery listening to a perfunctory debate which concerned itself with a bill touching State water-ways.
"Heavens! This thing is getting to be little short of deadly!" fumed Crenshawe, his right-hand neighbor, who was also a member of the corps of observation. "I'm going to the club for a game of pool. Won't you come along?"
Kent nodded and left his seat with the bored one. But in the great rotunda he changed his mind.
"You'll find plenty of better players than I am at the club," he said in extenuation. "I think I'll smoke a whiff or two here and go back. They can't hold on much longer for to-night."
Five minutes later, when he had lighted a cigar and was glancing over the evening paper, two other members of the corporation committee of safety came down from the Senate gallery and stopped opposite Kent's pillar to struggle into their overcoats.
"It's precisely as I wrote our people two weeks ago—timidity scare, pure and simple," one of them was saying. "I've a mind to start home to-morrow. There is nothing doing here, or going to be done."
"No," said the other. "If it wasn't for House Bill Twenty-nine, I'd go to-night. They will adjourn to-morrow or Monday."
"House Bill Twenty-nine is much too dead to bury," was the reassuring rejoinder. "The committee is ours, and the bill will not be heard of again at this session. If that is all you are holding on for——"
They passed out of earshot, and Kent folded his newspaper absently. House Bill Twenty-nine had been the one measure touching the sensitive "vested interests"; the one measure for the suppression of which the corporations' lobby had felt called on to take steps. It was an omnibus bill put forth as a substitute for the existing law defining the status of foreign corporations. It had originated in the governor's office,—a fact which Kent had ferreted out within twenty-four hours of its first reading,—and for that reason he had procured a printed copy, searching it diligently for the hidden menace he was sure it embodied.
When the search proved fruitless, he had seen the bill pass the House by a safe majority, had followed it to the Senate, and in a cunningly worded amendment tacked on in the upper house had found what he was seeking. Under the existing law foreign corporations were subject to State supervision, and were dealt with as presumably unfriendly aliens. But the Senate amendment to House Bill Twenty-nine fairly swept the interstate corporations, as such, out of existence, by making it obligatory upon them to acquire the standing of local corporations. Charters were to be refiled with the secretary of State; resident directories and operating headquarters were to be established within the boundaries and jurisdiction of the State; in short, the State proposed, by the terms of the new law, to deal only with creatures of its own creation.
Kent saw, or thought he saw, the fine hand of the junto in all this. It was a still hunt in which the longest way around was the shortest way home. Like all new-country codes, the organic law of the State favored local corporations, and it might be argued that a bill placing the foreign companies on a purely local footing was an unmixed blessing to the aliens. But on the other hand, an unprincipled executive might easily make the new law an engine of extortion. To go no further into the matter than the required refiling of charters: the State constitution gave the secretary of State quasi-judicial powers. It was within his province to pass upon the applications for chartered rights, and to deny them if the question pro bono publico were involved.
Kent put two and two together, saw the wide door of exactions which might be opened, and passed the word of warning among his associates; after which he had watched the course of the amended House Bill Twenty-nine with interest sharp-set, planning meanwhile with Hildreth, the editor of the Daily Argus, an exposé which should make plain the immense possibilities for corruption opened up by the proposed law; a journalistic salvo of publicity to be fired as a last resort.
The measure as amended had passed the Senate without debate, and had gone back to the House. Here, after the second reading, and in the very hour when the Argus editorial was getting itself cast in the linotypes, there was a hitch. The member from the Rio Blanco, favoring the measure in all its parts, and fearful only lest corporation gold might find a technical flaw in it, moved that it be referred to the committee on judiciary for a report on its constitutionality; and, accordingly, to the committee on judiciary it had gone.
Kent recalled the passing of the crisis, remembering how he had hastened to telephone the Argus editor to kill the exposé at the last moment. The incident was now a month in the past, and the committee had not yet reported; would never report, Kent imagined. He knew the personnel of the committee on judiciary; knew that at least three members of it were down on the list, made up at the beginning of the session by his colleagues in the army of observation, as "approachables". Also, he knew by inference at least, that these three men had been approached, not without success, and that House Bill Twenty-nine, with its fee-gathering amendment, was safely shelved.
"It's an ill-smelling muck-heap!" he frowned, recalling the incidents of the crisis at the suggestion let fall by the two outgoing lobbyists. "And so much of this dog-watch as isn't sickeningly demoralizing is deadly dull, as Crenshawe puts it. If I had anywhere to go, I'd cut the galleries for to-night."
He was returning the newspaper to his pocket when it occurred to him that his object in buying it had been to note the stock quotations; a daily duty which, for Elinor's sake, he had never omitted. Whereupon he reopened it and ran his eye down the lists. There was a decided upward tendency in westerns. Overland Short Line had gained two points; and Western Pacific——
He held the paper under the nearest electric globe to make sure: Western Pacific, preferred, was quoted at fifty-eight and a half, which was one point and a half above the Brentwood purchase price.
One minute later an excited life-saver was shut in the box of the public telephone, gritting his teeth at the inanity of the central operator who insisted on giving him "A-1224" instead of "A-1234," the Hotel Wellington.
"No, no! Can't you understand? I want twelve-thirty-four; one, two, three, four; the Hotel Wellington."
There was more skirling of bells, another nerve-trying wait, and at last the clerk of the hotel answered.
"What name did you say? Oh, it's you, is it, Mr. Kent? Ormsby? Mr. Brookes Ormsby? No, he isn't here; he went out about two minutes ago. What's that you say? Damn? Well, I'm sorry, too. No message that I can take? All right. Good-by."
This was the beginning. For the middle part Kent burst out of the telephone-box and took the nearest short-cut through the capitol grounds for the street-car corner. At a quarter of nine he was cross-questioning the clerk face to face in the lobby of the Wellington. There was little more to be learned about Ormsby. The club-man had left his key and gone out. He was in evening dress, and had taken a cab at the hotel entrance.
Kent dashed across to his rooms and, in a feverish race against time, made himself fit to chase a man in evening dress. There was no car in sight when he came down, and he, too, took a cab with an explosive order to the driver: "124 Tejon Avenue, and be quick about it!"
It was the housemaid that answered his ring at the door of the Brentwood apartment. She was a Swede, a recent importation; hence Kent learned nothing beyond the bare fact that the ladies had gone out. "With Mr. Ormsby?" he asked.
"Yaas; Aye tank it vill pee dat yentlemans."
The pursuer took the road again, rather unhopefully. There were a dozen places where Ormsby might have taken his charges. Among them there was the legislative reception at Portia Van Brock's. Kent flipped a figurative coin, and gave the order for Alameda Square. The reception was perhaps the least unlikely place of the dozen.
He was no more than fashionably late at the Van Brock house, and fortunately he was able to reckon himself among the chosen few for whom Miss Portia's door swung on hospitable hinges at all hours. Loring had known her in Washington, and he had stood sponsor for Kent in the first week of the exile's residence at the capital. Thereafter she had taken Kent up on his own account, and by now he was deep in her debt. For one thing, she had set the fashion in the matter of legislative receptions—her detractors, knowing nothing whatever about it, hinted that she had been an amateur social lobbyist in Washington, playing the game for the pure zest of it—and at these functions Kent had learned many things pertinent to his purpose as watch-dog for the railroad company and legal adviser to his chief—things not named openly on the floor of the House or of the Senate chamber.
There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded reception-parlors in the search for the Brentwood party. It was unsuccessful at first; but later, catching a glimpse of Elinor at the piano, and another of Penelope inducting an up-country legislator into the mysteries of social small-talk, he breathed freer. His haphazard guess had hit the mark, and the finding of Ormsby was now only a question of moments.
It was Miss Van Brock herself who told him where to look for the club-man—though not at his first asking.
"You did come, then," she said, giving him her hand with a frank little smile of welcome. "Some one said you were not going to be frivolous any more, and I wondered if you would take it out on me. Have you been at the night session?"
"Yes; at what you and your frivolities have left of it. A good third of the Solons seem to be sitting in permanence in Alameda Square."
"'Solons'," she repeated. "That recalls Editor Brownlo's little joke—only he didn't mean it. He wrote of them as 'Solons,' but the printer got it 'solans'. The member from Caliente read the article and the word stuck in his mind. In an unhappy hour he asked Colonel Mack's boy—Harry, the irrepressible, you know—to look it up for him. Harry did it, and of course took the most public occasion he could find to hand in his answer. 'It's geese, Mr. Hackett!' he announced triumphantly; and after we were all through laughing at him the member from the warm place turned it just as neatly as a veteran. 'Well, I'm Hackett,' he said."
David Kent laughed, as he was in duty bound, but he still had Ormsby on his mind.
"I see you have Mrs. Brentwood and her daughters here: can you tell me where I can find Mr. Brookes Ormsby?"
"I suppose I could if I should try. But you mustn't hurry me. There is a vacant corner in that davenport beyond the piano: please put me there and fetch me an ice. I'll wait for you."
He did as he was bidden, and when she was served he stood over her, wondering, as other men had wondered, what was the precise secret of her charm. Loring had told him Miss Van Brock's story. She was southern born, the only child of a somewhat ill-considered match between a young California lawyer, wire-pulling in the national capital in the interest of the Central Pacific Railroad, and a Virginia belle tasting the delights of her first winter in Washington.
Later, the young lawyer's state, or his employers, had sent him to Congress; and Portia, left motherless in her middle childhood, had grown up in an atmosphere of statecraft, or what passes for such, in an era of frank commercialism. Inheriting her mother's rare beauty of face and form, and uniting with it a sympathetic gift in grasp of detail, political and other, she soon became her father's confidante and loyal partizan, taking the place, as a daughter might, of the ambitious young wife and mother, who had set her heart on seeing the Van Brock name on the roll of the United States Senate.
Rensselaer Van Brock had died before the senatorial dream could be realized, but not before he had made a sufficient number of lucky investments to leave his daughter the arbitress of her own future. What that future should be, not even Loring could guess. Since her father's death Miss Van Brock had been a citizen of the world. With a widowed aunt for the shadowiest of chaperons, she had drifted with the tide of inclination, coming finally to rest in the western capital for no better reason, perhaps, than that some portion of her interest-bearing securities were emblazoned with the great seal of this particular western State.
Kent was thinking of Loring's recountal as he stood looking down on her. Other women were younger—and with features more conventionally beautiful; Kent could find a round dozen within easy eye-reach, to say nothing of the calm-eyed, queenly improvisatrice at the piano—his constant standard of all womanly charm and grace. Unconsciously he fell to comparing the two, his hostess and his love, and was brought back to things present by a sharp reminder from Portia.
"Stop looking at Miss Brentwood that way, Mr. David. She is not for you; and you are keeping me waiting."
He smiled down on her.
"It is the law of compensation. I fancy you have kept many a man waiting—and will keep many another."
There was a little tang of bitterness in her laugh.
"You remind me of the time when I went home from school—oh, years and years ago. Old Chloe—she was my black mammy, you know—had a grown daughter of her own, and her effort to dispose of her 'M'randy' was a standing joke in the family. In answer to my stereotyped question she stood back and folded her arms. 'Naw, honey; dat M'randy ain't ma'ied yit. She gwine be des lak you; look pretty, an' say, Howdy! Misteh Jawnson, an' go 'long by awn turrer side de road.'"
"A very pretty little fable," said Kent. "And the moral?"
"Is that I amuse myself with you—all of you; and in your turn you make use of me—or you think you do. Of what use can I be to Mr. David Kent this evening?"
"See how you misjudge me!" he protested. "My errand here to-night is purely charitable. Which brings me back to Ormsby: did you say you could tell me where to look for him?"
"He is in the smoking-room with five or six other tobacco misanthropes. What do you want of him?"
"I want to say two words in his ear; after which I shall vanish and make room for my betters."
Miss Van Brock was gazing steadfastly at the impassioned face lighted by the piano candles.
"Is it about Miss Brentwood?" she asked abruptly.
"In a way—yes," he confessed.
She rose and stood beside him—a bewitching figure of a woman who knew her part in the human comedy and played it well.
"Is it wise, David?" she asked softly. "I am not denying the possibilities: you might come between them if you should try—I'm rather afraid you could. But you mustn't, you know; it's too late. You've marred her, between you; or rather that convention, which makes a woman deaf, blind and dumb until a man has fairly committed himself, has marred her. For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him: for his sake she could never be quite the same to you."
He drew apart from her, frowning.
"If I should say that I don't fully understand what you mean?" he rejoined.
"I should retort by saying something extremely uncomplimentary about your lack of perspicacity," she cut in maliciously.
"I beg pardon," he said, a little stiffly. "You are laboring under an entirely wrong impression. What I have to say to Mr. Brookes Ormsby does not remotely concern the matter you touch upon. It's an affair of the Stock Exchange."
"As if I didn't know!" she countered. "You merely reminded me of the other thing. But if it is only a business secret you may as well tell me all about it at first hands. Some one is sure to tell me sooner or later."
Now David Kent was growing impatient. Down in the inner depths of him he was persuaded that Ormsby might have difficulty in inducing Mrs. Brentwood to sell her Western Pacific stock even at an advance; might require time, at least. And time, with a Bucks majority tinkering with corporate rights in the Assembly, might well be precious.
"Forgive me if I tell Ormsby first," he pleaded. "Afterward, if you care to know, you shall."
Miss Van Brock let him go at that, but now the way to the smoking-den on the floor above was hedged up. He did battle with the polite requirements, as a man must; shaking hands or exchanging a word with one and another of the obstructors only as he had to. None the less, when he had finally wrought his way to the smoking-room Ormsby had eluded him again.
He went back to the parlors, wondering how he had missed the club-man. In the middle room of the suite he found Portia chatting with Marston, the lieutenant-governor; and a young woman in the smartest of reception gowns had succeeded to Elinor's place at the piano.
"You found him?" queried the hostess, excusing herself to the tall, saturnine man who had shared the honors at the head of the People's Party ticket with Jasper G. Bucks.
"No," said Kent. "Have you seen him?"
"Why, yes; they all came to take leave just a few moments after you left me. I thought of telling Mr. Ormsby you were looking for him, but you shut me off so snippily——"
"Miss Van Brock! What have you done? I must go at once."
"Really? I am complimented. But if you must, you must, I suppose. I had something to tell you—something of importance; but I can't remember what it was now. I never can remember things in the hurry of leave-takings."
As we have intimated, Kent had hitherto found Miss Portia's confidences exceedingly helpful in a business way, and he hesitated. "Tell me," he begged.
"No, I can't remember it: I doubt if I shall ever remember it unless you can remind me by telling me why you are so desperately anxious to find Mr. Ormsby."
"I wonder if you hold everybody up like this," he laughed. "But I don't mind telling you. Western Pacific preferred has gone to fifty-eight and a half."
"And Mr. Ormsby has some to sell? I wish I had. Do you know what I'd do?" She drew closer and laid a hand on his arm. "I'd sell—by wire—to-night; at least, I'd make sure that my telegram would be the first thing my broker would lay his hands on in the morning."
"On general principles, I suppose: so should I, and for the same reason. But have I succeeded in reminding you of that thing you were going to tell me?"
"Not wholly; only partly. You said this matter of Mr. Ormsby's concerned Miss Brentwood—in a way—didn't you?"
"You will have your pound of flesh entire, won't you? The stock is hers, and her mother's and sister's. I want Ormsby to persuade them to sell. They'll listen to him. That is all; all the all."
"Of course!" she said airily. "How simple of me not to have been able to add it up without your help. I saw the quotation in the evening paper; and I know, better, perhaps, than you do, the need for haste. Must you go now?" She had taken his arm and was edging him through the press in the parlors toward the entrance hall.
"You haven't paid me yet," he objected.
"No; I'm trying to remember. Oh, yes; I have it now. Wasn't some one telling me that you are interested in House Bill Twenty-nine?"
They had reached the dimly lighted front vestibule, and her hand was still on his arm.
"I was interested in it," he admitted, correcting the present to the past tense.
"But after it went to the House committee on judiciary you left it to more skilful, or perhaps we'd better say, to less scrupulous hands?"
"I believe you are a witch. Is there anything you don't know?"
"Plenty of things. For example, I don't know exactly how much it cost our good friends of the 'vested interests' to have that bill mislaid in the committee room. But I do know they made a very foolish bargain."
"Beyond all doubt a most demoralizing bargain, which, to say the best of it, was only a choice between two evils. But why foolish?"
"Because—well, because mislaid things have a way of turning up unexpectedly, you know, and—"
He stopped her in a sudden gust of feverish excitement.
"Tell me what you mean in one word, Miss Van Brock. Don't those fellows intend to stay bought?"
She smiled pityingly.
"You are very young, Mr. David—or very honest. Supposing those 'fellows', as you dub the honorable members of the committee on judiciary, had a little plan of their own; a plan suggested by the readiness of certain of their opponents to rush into print with statements which might derange things?"
"I am supposing it with all my might."
"That is right; we are only supposing, you must remember. We may suppose their idea was to let the excitement about the amended bill die down; to let people generally, and one fiercely honest young corporation attorney in particular, have time to forget that there was such a thing as House Bill Twenty-nine. And in such a suppositional case, how much they would be surprised, and how they would laugh in their sleeves, if some one came along and paid them handsomely for doing precisely what they meant to do."
David Kent's smile was almost ferocious.
"My argument is as good now as it was in the beginning: they have yet to reckon with the man who will dare to expose them."
She turned from him and spoke to the footman at the door.
"Thomas, fetch Mr. Kent's coat and hat from the dressing-room." And then to Kent, in the tone she might have used in telling him of the latest breeziness of the member from the Rio Blanco: "I remember now what it was that I wanted to tell you. While you have been trying to find Mr. Ormsby, the committee on judiciary has been reporting the long-lost House Bill Twenty-nine. If you hurry you may be in time to see it passed—it will doubtless go through without any tiresome debate. But you will hardly have time to obstruct it by arousing public sentiment through the newspapers."
David Kent shook the light touch of her hand from his arm and set his teeth hard upon a word hot from the furnace of righteous indignation. For a moment he fully believed she was in league with the junto; that she had been purposely holding him in talk while the very seconds were priceless.
She saw the scornful wrath in his eyes and turned it aside with a swift denial.
"No, David; I didn't do that," she said, speaking to his inmost thought. "If there had been anything you could do—the smallest shadow of a chance for you—I should have sent you flying at the first word. But there wasn't; it was all too well arranged—"
But he had snatched coat and hat from the waiting Thomas and was running like a madman for the nearest cab-stand.
VII
THE SENTIMENTALISTS
Kent's time from Alameda Square to the capitol was the quickest a flogged cab-horse could make, but he might have spared the horse and saved the double fee. On the broad steps of the south portico he, uprushing three at a bound, met the advance guard of the gallery contingent, down-coming. The House had adjourned.
"One minute, Harnwicke!" he gasped, falling upon the first member of the corporations' lobby he could identify in the throng. "What's been done?"
"They've taken a fall out of us," was the brusk reply. "House Bill Twenty-nine was reported by the committee on judiciary and rushed through after you left. Somebody engineered it to the paring of a fingernail: bare quorum to act; members who might have filibustered weeded out, on one pretext or another, to a man; pages all excused, and nobody here with the privilege of the floor. It was as neat a piece of gag-work as I ever hope to see if I live to be a hundred."
Kent faced about and joined the townward dispersal with his informant.
"Well, I suppose that settles it definitely; at least, until we can test its constitutionality in the courts," he said.
Harnwicke thought not, being of the opinion that the vested interests would never say die until they were quite dead. As assistant counsel for the Overland Short Line, he was in some sense the dean of the corps of observation, and could speak with authority.
"There is one chance left for us this side of the courts," he went on; "and now I think of it, you are the man to say how much of a chance it is. The bill still lacks the governor's signature."
Kent shook his head.
"It is his own measure. I have proof positive that he and Meigs and Hendricks drafted it. And all this fine-haired engineering to-night was his, or Meigs'."
"Of course; we all know that. But we don't know the particular object yet. Do they need the new law in their business as a source of revenue? Or do they want to be hired to kill it? In other words, does Bucks want a lump sum for a veto? You know the man better than any of us."
"By Jove!" said Kent. "Do you mean to say you would buy the governor of a state?"
Harnwicke turned a cold eye on his companion as they strode along. He was of the square-set, plain-spoken, aggressive type—a finished product of the modern school of business lawyers.
"I don't understand that you are raising the question of ethics at this stage of the game, do I?" he remarked.
Kent fired up a little.
"And if I am?" he retorted.
"I should say you had missed your calling. It is baldly a question of business—or rather of self-preservation. We needn't mince matters among ourselves. If Bucks is for sale, we buy him."
Kent shrugged.
"There isn't any doubt about his purchasability. But I confess I don't quite see how you will go about it."
"Never mind that part of it; just leave the ways and means with those of us who have riper experience—and fewer hamperings, perhaps—than you have. Your share in it is to tell us how big a bid we must make. As I say, you know the man."
David Kent was silent for the striding of half a square. The New England conscience dies hard, and while it lives it is given to drawing sharp lines on all the boundaries of culpability. Kent ended by taking the matter in debate violently out of the domain of ethics and standing it upon the ground of expediency.
"It will cost too much. You would have to bid high—not to overcome his scruples, for he has none; but to satisfy his greed—which is abnormal. And, besides, he has his pose to defend. If he can see his way clear to a harvest of extortions under the law, he will probably turn you down—and will make it hot for you later on in the name of outraged virtue."
Harnwicke's laugh was cynical.
"He and his little clique don't own the earth in fee simple. Perhaps we shall be able to make them grasp that idea before we are through with them. We have had this fight on in other states. Would ten thousand be likely to satisfy him?"
"No," said Kent. "If you add another cipher, it might."
"A hundred thousand is a pot of money. I take it for granted the Western Pacific will stand its pro-rate?"
The New England conscience bucked again, and Kent made his first open protest against the methods of the demoralizers.
"I am not in a position to say: I should advise against it. Unofficially, I think I can speak for Loring and the Boston people. We are not more saintly than other folk, perhaps; and we are not in the railroad business for health or pleasure. But I fancy the Advisory Board would draw the line at bribing a governor—at any rate, I hope it would."
"Rot!" said Harnwicke. And then: "You'll reap the benefits with other interstate interests; you'll have to come in."
Kent hesitated, but not now on the ground of the principle to be defended.
"That brings in a question which I am not competent to decide. Loring is your man. You will call a conference of the 'powers,' I take it?"
"It is already called. I sent Atherton out to notify everybody as soon as the trap was sprung in the House. We meet in the ordinary at the Camelot. You'll be there?"
"A little later—if Loring wants me. I have some telephoning to do before this thing gets on the wires."
They parted at the entrance to the Camelot Club, and Kent went two squares farther on to the Wellington. Ormsby had not yet returned, and Kent went to the telephone and called up the Brentwood apartments. It was Penelope that answered.
"Well, I think you owe it," she began, as soon as he had given his name. "What did I do at Miss Van Brock's to make you cut me dead?"
"Why, nothing at all, I'm sure. I—I was looking for Mr. Ormsby, and——"
"Not when I saw you," she broke in flippantly. "You were handing Miss Portia an ice. Are you still looking for Mr. Ormsby?"
"I am—just that. Is he with you?"
"No; he left here about twenty minutes ago. Is it anything serious?"
"Serious enough to make me want to find him as soon as I can. Did he say he was coming down to the Wellington?"
"Of course, he didn't," laughed Penelope. And then: "Whatever is the matter with you this evening, Mr. Kent?"
"I guess I'm a little excited," said Kent. "Something has happened—something I can't talk about over the wires. It concerns you and your mother and sister. You'll know all about it as soon as I can find Ormsby and send him out to you."
Penelope's "Oh!" was long-drawn and gasping.
"Is any one dead?" she faltered.
"No, no; it's nothing of that kind. I'll send Ormsby out, and he will tell you all about it."
"Can't you come yourself?"
"I may have to if I can't find Ormsby. Please don't let your mother go to bed until you have heard from one or the other of us. Did you get that?"
"Ye-es; but I should like to know more—a great deal more."
"I know; and I'd like to tell you. But I am using the public telephone here at the Wellington, and—Oh, damn!" Central had cut him out, and it was some minutes before the connection was switched in again. "Is that you, Miss Penelope? All right; I wasn't quite through. When Ormsby comes, you must do as he tells you to, and you and Miss Elinor must help him convince your mother. Do you understand?"
"No, I don't understand anything. For goodness' sake, find Mr. Ormsby and make him run! This is perfectly dreadful!"
"Isn't it? And I'm awfully sorry. Good-by."
Kent hung up the receiver, and when he was asking a second time at the clerk's desk for the missing man, Ormsby came in to answer for himself. Whereupon the crisis was outlined to him in brief phrase, and he rose to the occasion, though not without a grimace.
"I'm not sure just how well you know Mrs. Hepzibah Brentwood," he demurred; "but it will be quite like her to balk. Don't you think you'd better go along? You are the company's attorney, and your opinion ought to carry some weight."
David Kent thought not; but a cautious diplomatist, having got the idea well into the back part of his head, was not to be denied.
"Of course, you'll come. You are just the man I'll need to back me up. I shan't shirk; I'll take the mother into the library and break the ice, while you are squaring things with the young women. Penelope won't care the snap of her finger either way; but Elinor has some notion's that you are fitter to cope with than I am. After, if you can give me a lift with Mrs. Hepzibah, I'll call you in. Come on; it's getting pretty late to go visiting."
Kent yielded reluctantly, and they took a car for the sake of speed. It was Penelope who opened the door for them at 124 Tejon Avenue; and Ormsby made it easy for his coadjutor, as he had promised.
"I want to see your mother in the library for a few minutes," he began. "Will you arrange it, and take care of Mr. Kent until I come for him?"
Penelope "arranged" it, not without another added pang of curiosity, whereupon David Kent found himself the rather embarrassed third of a silent trio gathered about the embers of the sitting-room fire.
"Is it to be a Quaker meeting?" asked Penelope, sweetly, when the silence had grown awe-inspiring.
Kent laughed for pure joy at the breaking of the spell.
"One would think we had come to drag you all off to jail, Ormsby and I," he said; and then he went on to explain. "It's about your Western Pacific stock, you know. To-day's quotations put it a point and a half above your purchase price, and we've come to persuade you to unload, pronto, as the member from the Rio Blanco would say."
"Is that all?" said Penelope, stifling a yawn. "Then I'm not in it: I'm an infant." And she rose and went to the piano.
"You haven't told us all of it: what has happened?" queried Elinor, speaking for the first time since her greeting of Kent.
He briefed the story of House Bill Twenty-nine for her, pointing out the probabilities.
"Of course, no one can tell what the precise effect will be," he qualified. "But in my opinion it is very likely to be destructive of dividends. Skipping the dry details, the new law, which is equitable enough on its face, can be made an engine of extortion in the hands of those who administer it. In fact, I happen to know that it was designed and carried through for that very purpose."
She smiled.
"I have understood you were in the opposition. Are you speaking politically?"
"I am stating the plain fact," said Kent, nettled a little by her coolness. "Decadent Rome never lifted a baser set of demagogues into office than we have here in this State at the present moment."
He spoke warmly, and she liked him best when he put her on the footing of an equal antagonist.
"I can't agree with your inference," she objected. "As a people we are neither obsequious nor stupid."
"Perhaps not. But it is one of the failures of a popular government that an honest majority may be controlled and directed by a small minority of shrewd rascals. That is exactly what has happened in the passage of this bill. I venture to say that not one man in ten who voted for it had the faintest suspicion that it was a 'graft'."
"If that be true, what chances there are for men with the gift of true leadership and a love of pure justice in their hearts!" she said half-absently; and he started forward and said: "I beg pardon?"
She let the blue-gray eyes meet his and there was a passing shadow of disappointment in them.
"I ought to beg yours. I'm afraid I was thinking aloud. But it is one of my dreams. If I were a man I should go into politics."
"To purify them?"
"To do my part in trying. The great heart of the people is honest and well-meaning: I think we all admit that. And there is intelligence, too. But human nature is the same as it used to be when they set up a man who could and called him a king. Gentle or simple, it must be led."
"There is no lack of leadership, such as it is," he hazarded.
"No; but there seems to be a pitiful lack of the right kind: men who will put self-seeking and unworthy ambition aside and lift the standard of justice and right-doing for its own sake. Are there any such men nowadays?"
"I don't know," he rejoined gravely. "Sometimes I'm tempted to doubt it. It is a frantic scramble for place and power for the most part. The kind of man you have in mind isn't in it; shuns it as he would a plague spot."
She contradicted him firmly.
"No, the kind of man I have in mind wouldn't shun it; he would take hold with his hands and try to make things better; he would put the selfish temptations under foot and give the people a leader worth following—be the real mind and hand of the well-meaning majority."
Kent shook his head slowly.
"Not unless we admit a motive stronger than the abstraction which we call patriotism."
"I don't understand," she said; meaning, rather, that she refused to understand.
"I mean that such a man, however exalted his views might be, would have to have an object more personal to him than the mere dutiful promptings of patriotism to make him do his best."
"But that would be self-seeking again."
"Not necessarily in the narrow sense. The old knightly chivalry was a beautiful thing in its way, and it gave an uplift to an age which would have been frankly brutal without it: yet it had its well-spring in what appeals to us now as being a rather fantastic sentiment."
"And we are not sentimentalists?" she suggested.
"No; and it's the worse for us in some respects. You will not find your ideal politician until you find a man with somewhat of the old knightly spirit in him. And I'll go further and say that when you do find him he will be at heart the champion of the woman he loves rather than that of a political constituency."
She became silent at that, and for a time the low sweet harmonies of the nocturne Penelope was playing filled the gap.
Kent left his chair and began to wish honestly for Ormsby's return. He was searing the wound again, and the process was more than commonly painful. They had been speaking in figures, as a man and a woman will; yet he made sure the mask of metaphor was transparent, no less to her than to him. As many times before, his heart was crying out to her; but now behind the cry there was an upsurging tidal wave of emotion new and strange; a toppling down of barriers and a sweeping inrush of passionate rebellion.
Why had she put it out of her power to make him her champion in the Field of the Lust of Mastery? Instantly, and like a revealing lightning flash, it dawned upon him that this was his awakening. Something of himself she had shown him in the former time: how he was rusting inactive in the small field when he should be doing a man's work, the work for which his training had fitted him, in the larger. But the glamour of sentiment had been over it all in those days, and to the passion-warped the high call is transmitted in terms of self-seeking.
He turned upon her suddenly.
"Did you mean to reproach me?" he asked abruptly.
"How absurd!"
"No, it isn't. You are responsible for me, in a certain sense. You sent me out into the world, and somehow I feel as if I had disappointed you."
"'But what went ye out for to see?'" she quoted softly.
"I know," he nodded, sitting down again. "You thought you were arousing a worthy ambition, but it was only avarice that was quickened. I've been trying to be a money-getter."
"You can be something vastly better."
"No, I am afraid not; it is too late."
Again the piano-mellowed silence supervened, and Kent put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands, being very miserable. He believed now what he had been slow to credit before: that he had it in him to hew his way to the end of the line if only the motive were strong enough to call out all the reserves of battle-might and courage. That motive she alone, of all the women in the world, might have supplied, he told himself in keen self-pity. With her love to arm him, her clear-eyed faith to inspire him.... He sat up straight and pushed the cup of bitter herbs aside. There would be time enough to drain it farther on.
"Coming back to the stock market and the present crisis," he said, breaking the silence in sheer self-defense; "Ormsby and I——"
She put the resurrected topic back into its grave with a little gesture of apathetic impatience she used now and then with Ormsby.
"I suppose I ought to be interested, but I am not," she confessed. "Mother will do as she thinks best, and we shall calmly acquiesce, as we always do."
David Kent was not sorry to be relieved in so many words of the persuasive responsibility, and the talk drifted into reminiscence, with the Croydon summer for a background.
It was a dangerous pastime for Kent; perilous, and subversive of many things. One of his meliorating comforts had been the thought that however bitter his own disappointment was, Elinor at least was happy. But in this new-old field of talk a change came over her and he was no longer sure she was entirely happy. She was saying things with a flavor akin to cynicism in them, as thus:
"Do you remember how we used to go into raptures of pious indignation over the make-believe sentiment of the summer man and the summer girl? I recollect your saying once that it was wicked; a desecration of things which ought to be held sacred. It isn't so very long ago, but I think we were both very young that summer—years younger than we can ever be again. Don't you?"
"Doubtless," said David Kent. He was at a pass in which he would have agreed with her if she had asserted that black was white. It was not weakness; it was merely that he was absorbed in a groping search for the word which would fit her changed mood.
"We have learned to be more charitable since," she went on; "more charitable and less sentimental, perhaps. And yet we prided ourselves on our sincerity in that young time, don't you think?"
"I, at least, was sincere," he rejoined bluntly. He had found the mood-word at last: it was resentment; though, being a man, he could see no good reason why the memories of the Croydon summer should make her resentful.
She was not looking at him when she said: "No; sincerity is always just. And you were not quite just, I think."
"To you?" he demanded.
"Oh, no; to yourself."
Portia Van Brock's accusation was hammering itself into his brain. You have marred her between you.... For your sake she can never be quite all she ought to be to him; for his sake she could never be quite the same to you. A cold wave of apprehension submerged him. In seeking to do the most unselfish thing that offered, had he succeeded only in making her despise him?
The question was still hanging answerless when there came the sound of a door opening and closing, and Ormsby stood looking in upon them.
"We needn't keep these sleepy young persons out of bed any longer," he announced briefly; and the coadjutor said good-night and joined him at once.
"What luck?" was David Kent's anxious query when they were free of the house and had turned their faces townward.
"Just as much as we might have expected. Mrs. Hepzibah refuses point-blank to sell her stock—won't talk about it. 'The idea of parting with it now, when it is actually worth more than it was when we bought it!'" he quoted, mimicking the thin-lipped, acidulous protest. "Later, in an evil minute, I tried to drag you in, and she let you have it square on the point of the jaw—intimated that it was a deal in which some of you inside people needed her block of stock to make you whole. She did, by Jove!"
Kent's laugh was mirthless.
"I was never down in her good books," he said, by way of accounting for the accusation.
If Ormsby thought he knew the reason why, he was magnanimous enough to steer clear of that shoal.
"It's a mess," he growled. "I don't fancy you had any better luck with Elinor."
"She seemed not to care much about it either way. She said her mother would have the casting vote."
"I know. What I don't know is, what remains to be done."
"More waiting," said Kent, definitively. "The fight is fairly on now—as between the Bucks crowd and the corporations, I mean—but there will probably be ups and downs enough to scare Mrs. Brentwood into letting go. We must be ready to strike when the iron is hot; that's all."
The New Yorker tramped a full square in thoughtful silence before he said: "Candidly, Kent, Mrs. Hepzibah's little stake in Western Pacific isn't altogether a matter of life and death to me, don't you know? If it comes to the worst, I can have my broker play the part of the god in the car. Happily, or unhappily, whichever way you like to put it, I sha'n't miss what he may have to put up to make good on her three thousand shares."
David Kent stopped short and wheeled suddenly upon his companion.
"Ormsby, that's a thing I've been afraid of, all along; and it's the one thing you must never do."
"Why not?" demanded the straightforward Ormsby.
Kent knew he was skating on the thinnest of ice, but his love for Elinor made him fearless of consequences.
"If you don't know without being told, it proves that your money has spoiled you to that extent. It is because you have no right to entrap Miss Brentwood into an obligation that would make her your debtor for the very food she eats and the clothes she wears. You will say she need never know: be very sure she would find out, one way or another; and she would never forgive you."
"Um," said Ormsby, turning visibly grim. "You are frank enough—to draw it mildly. Another man in my place might suggest that it isn't Mr. David Kent's affair."
Kent turned about and caught step again.
"I've said my say—all of it," he rejoined stolidly. "We've been decently modern up to now, and we won't go back to the elemental things so late in the day. All the same, you'll not take it amiss if I say that I know Miss Brentwood rather better than you do."
Ormsby did not say whether he would or would not, and the talk went aside to less summary ways and means preservative of the Brentwood fortunes. But at the archway of the Camelot Club, where Kent paused, Ormsby went back to the debatable ground in an outspoken word.
"I know pretty well now what there is between us, Kent, and we mustn't quarrel if we can help it," he said. "If you complain that I didn't give you a fair show, I'll retort that I didn't dare to. Are you satisfied?"
"No," said David Kent; and with that they separated.