"Can you give it a name?" asked Kent, nerving himself.
"I can. But first tell me one thing: as matters stand, could Guilford dispose of the road--sell it or lease it?"
"No; he would first have to be made permanent receiver and be given authority by the court."
"Ah! that explains Judge MacFarlane"s return. Now what I am going to tell you is the deadest of secrets. It came to me from one of the Overland officials, and I"m not supposed to gossip. Did you know the Overland Short Line had pa.s.sed under Plantagould domination?"
"I know they elected a Plantagould directory at the annual meeting."
"Exactly. Well, Guilford is going to lease the Trans-Western to its compet.i.tor for a term of ninety-nine years. That"s your death sentence."
Kent sprang to his feet, and what he said is unrecordable. He was not a profane man, but the sanguine temperament would a.s.sert itself explosively in moments of sudden stress.
"When is this thing to be done?" he demanded, when the temperamental G.o.ds were appeased a little.
Hildreth shrugged.
"I have told you all I could, and rather more than I had any right to.
Open the door behind you, won"t you? The air is positively sulphurous."
Kent opened the door, entirely missing the point of the sarcasm in his heat.
"But you must have some idea," he insisted.
"I haven"t; any more than the general one that they won"t let the gra.s.s grow under their feet."
"No. G.o.d blast the whole--I wish I could swear in Sanscrit. The mother-tongue doesn"t begin to do justice to it. Now I know what Bucks meant when he told me to take my railroad, _if I could get it_. He had the whole thing coopered up in a barrel at that minute."
"I take it you have no alternative to this," said the editor, tapping the pile of affidavits.
"Not a cursed shred of an idea! And, Hildreth--" he broke off short because once again the subject suddenly grew too large for coherent speech.
Hildreth disentangled himself from the legs of his chair and stood up to put his hands on Kent"s shoulders.
"You are up against it hard, David," he said; and he repeated: "I"d give all my old shoes to be able to help you out."
"I know it," said Kent; and then he turned abruptly and went away.
Between nine and ten o"clock the same evening Kent was walking the floor of his room, trying vainly to persuade himself that virtue was its own reward, and wondering if a small dose of chloral hydrate would be defensible under the cruel necessity for sleep. He had about decided in favor of the drug when a tap at the door announced the coming of a bell-boy with a note. It was a message from Portia.
"If you have thrown away your chance definitely, and are willing to take a still more desperate one, come to see me," she wrote; and he went mechanically, as a drowning man catches at a straw, knowing it will not save him.
The house in Alameda Square was dark when he went up the walk; and while he was feeling for the bell-push his summoner called to him out of the electric stencilings of leaf shadows under the broad veranda.
"It is too fine a night to stay indoors," she said. "Come and sit in the hammock while I scold you as you deserve." And when he had taken the hammock: "Now give an account of yourself. Where have you been for the past age or two?"
"Wallowing around in the lower depths of the place that Dante visited," he admitted.
"Don"t you think you deserve a manhandling?"
"I suppose so; and if you have it in mind, I shall probably get it. But I may say I"m not especially anxious for a tongue-lashing to-night."
"Poor boy!" she murmured, in mock sympathy. "Does it hurt to be truly good?"
"Try it some time when you have a little leisure, and see for yourself,"
he retorted.
She laughed.
"No; I"ll leave that for the Miss Brentwoods. By the way, did you go to tell the household good-by? Penelope was wondering audibly what had become of you."
"I didn"t know they were gone. I have been nowhere since the night you drove me out with contumely and opprobrium."
She laughed again.
"You must have dived deep. They went a week ago Tuesday, and you lost your ghostly adviser and your political stage manager at one fell swoop. But it isn"t wonderful that you haven"t missed Mr. Ormsby. Having elected Miss Brentwood your conscience-keeper-in-chief, you have no further use for the P.S.M."
"And you have no further use for me, apparently," he complained. "Did you send for me so that you might abuse me in the second edition?"
"No; I wanted to give you a bit of news, and to repeat an old question of mine. Do you know what they are going to do next with your railroad?"
"Yes; Hildreth told me this afternoon."
"Well, what are _you_ going to do?"
"Nothing. There is nothing to be done. They have held to the form of legal procedure thus far, but they won"t do it any more. They will take MacFarlane off in a corner somewhere, have him make Guilford permanent receiver, and the lease to the Overland will be consummated on the spot. I sha"n"t be in it."
"Probably not; certainly not if you don"t try to get in it. And that brings me back to the old question. Are you big enough, David?"
"If you think I haven"t been big enough to live up to my opportunities thus far, I"m afraid I may disappoint you again," he said doubtfully.
"You have disappointed me," she admitted. "That is why I am asking: I"d like to be reasonably sure your Jonathan Edwardsy notions are not going to trip us again."
"Portia, if I thought you really meant that ... A conscienceless man is bad enough, G.o.d knows; but a conscienceless woman----"
Her laugh was a decorous little shriek.
"David, you are _not_ big; you are narrow, narrow, _narrow_! Is there then no other code of morals in the round world save that which the accident of birth has interleaved with your New England Bible? What is conscience? Is it an absolute standard of right and wrong? Or is it merely your ideal or mine, or Shafiz Ullah Khan"s?"
"You may call it all the hard names you can lay tongue to," he allowed.
"I"m not getting much comfort out of it, and I rather enjoy hearing it abused. But you are thrusting at a shadow in the present instance. Do you know what I did this afternoon?"
"How should I know?"
"I don"t know why you shouldn"t: you know everything that happens. But I"ll tell you. I had been fighting the thing over from start to finish and back again ever since you blessed me out a week ago last Monday, and at the wind-up this afternoon I took the papers out of the bank vault, having it in mind to go and give his Excellency a bad quarter of an hour."
"But you didn"t do it?"
"No, he saved me the trouble. While I was getting ready to go and hunt him, his card came up. We had it out in my rooms."