"I have been alone all the afternoon: I can endure it a little while longer, I presume."
Ormsby permitted himself a single heart-throb of exultation. He had deliberately gone about to break down her poise, her only barrier of defense, and it began to look as if he had succeeded.
"I couldn"t help it, you know," he said, catching his cue swiftly. "There are times when I"m obliged to keep away from you--times when every fiber of me rebels against the restraints of the false position you have thrust me into. When I"m taken that way I don"t dare play with the fire."
"I wish I could know how much you mean by that," she said musingly. Deep down in her heart she knew she was as far as ever from loving this man; but his love, or the insistent urging of it, was like a strong current drifting her whither she would not go.
"I mean all that an honest man can mean," he rejoined. "I have fought like a soldier for standing-room in the place you have a.s.signed me; I have tried sincerely--and stupidly, you will say--to be merely your friend, just the best friend you ever had. But it"s no use. Coming or going, I shall always be your lover."
"Please don"t," she said, neither coldly nor warmly. "You are getting over into the domain of the very young people when you say things like that."
It was an unpleasant thing to say, and he was not beyond wincing a little.
None the less, he would not be turned aside.
"You"ll overlook it in me if I"ve pressed the thing too hard on the side of sentiment, won"t you? Apart from the fact that I feel that way, I"ve been going on the supposition that you"d like it, if you could only make up your mind to like me."
"I do like you," she admitted; "more than any one I have ever known, I think."
The drumming wheels and a long-drawn trumpet blast from the locomotive made a shield of sound to isolate them. The elderly banker in the opposite section was nodding over his newspaper; and the newly married ones were oblivious, each to all else but the other. Mrs. Brentwood was apparently sleeping peacefully three seats away; and Penelope was invisible.
"There was a time when I should have begged hard for something more, Elinor; but now I"m willing to take what I can get, and be thankful. Will you give me the right to make you as happy as I can on the unemotional basis?"
She felt herself slipping.
"If you could fully understand----"
"I understand that you don"t love me, in the novelist"s sense of the word, and I am not asking more than you can give. But if you can give me the little now, and more when I have won it--don"t curl your lip at me, please: I"m trying to put it as mildly as I can."
She was looking at him level-eyed, and he could have sworn that she was never calmer or more self-possessed.
"I don"t know why you should want my promise--or any woman"s--on such conditions," she said evenly.
"But I do," he insisted.
The lights of a town suburb were flitting past the windows, and the monotonous song of the tires was drowned in the shrill crescendo of the brakes. She turned from him suddenly and laid her cheek against the grateful cool of the window-pane. But when he took her hand she did not withdraw it.
"Is it mine, Elinor?" he whispered. "You see, I"m not asking much."
"Is it worth taking--by itself?"
"You make me very happy," he said quietly; and just then the train stopped with a jerk, and a shuffling bustle of station-platform noises floated in through the open deck transoms of the car.
As if the solution of continuity had been a call to arouse her, Elinor freed her hand with a swift little wrench and sat bolt upright in her corner.
"This station--do you know the name of it?" she asked, fighting hard for the self-control that usually came so easily.
Ormsby consulted his watch.
"I am not quite sure. It ought to be----"
He broke off when he saw that she was no longer listening to him. There was a stir in the forward vestibule, and the porter came in with a hand-bag. At his heels was a man in a rough-weather box-coat; a youngish man, clean-shaven and wind-tanned to a healthy bronze, with an eager face and alert eyes that made an instant inventory of the car and its complement of pa.s.sengers. So much Ormsby saw. Then Penelope stood up in her place to greet the new-comer.
"Why, Mr. Kent!" she exclaimed. "Are you really going on with us? How nice of you!"
Elinor turned coolly upon her seat-mate, self-possession once more firmly seated in the saddle.
"Did you know Mr. Kent was going to board the train here?" she asked abruptly.
"Do you mean the gentleman Penelope has waylaid? I haven"t the pleasure of his acquaintance. Will you introduce us?"
V
JOURNEYS END--
It had been a day of upsettings for David Kent, beginning with the late breakfast at which Neltje, the night watchman at the railway station, had brought him Penelope"s telegram.
At ten he had a case in court: Shotwell _vs_. Western Pacific Co., damages for stock-killing; for the plaintiff--Hawk; for the defendant--Kent. With the thought that he was presently going to see Elinor again, Kent went gaily to the battle legal, meaning to wring victory out of a jury drawn for the most part from the plaintiff"s stock-raising neighbors. By dint of great perseverance he managed to prolong the fight until the middle of the afternoon, was worsted, as usual, and so far lost his temper as to get himself called down by the judge, MacFarlane.
Whereupon he went back to the Farquhar Building and to his office and sat down at the type-writer to pound out a letter to the general counsel, resigning his sinecure. The Shotwell case was the third he had lost for the company in a single court term. Justice for the railroad company, under present agrarian conditions, was not to be had in the lower courts, and he was weary of fighting the losing battle. Therefore----
In the midst of the type-rattling the boy that served the few occupied offices in the Farquhar Building had brought the afternoon mail. It included a letter from Loring, and there was another reversive upheaval for the exile. Loring"s business at the capital was no longer a secret. He had been tendered the resident management of the Western Pacific, with headquarters on the ground, and had accepted. His letter was a brief note, asking Kent to report at once for legal duty in the larger field.
"I am not fairly in the saddle yet, and shall not be for a week or so,"
wrote the newly appointed manager. "But I find I am going to need a level-headed lawyer at my elbow from the jump--one who knows the State political ropes and isn"t afraid of a sc.r.a.p. Come in on Number Three to-day, if you can; if not, send a wire and say when I may look for you.
Or, better still, wire anyway."
David Kent struggled with his emotions until he had got his feet down to the solid earth again. Then he tore up the half-written resignation and began to smite things in order for the flight. Could he make Number Three?
Since that was the train named in Penelope"s message, nothing short of a catastrophe should prevent his making it.
He did make it, with an hour to spare; an hour which he proceeded to turn into a time of sharp trial for the patient telegraph operator at the station, with his badgerings of the man for news of Number Three. The train reported--he took it as a special miracle wrought in his behalf that the Flyer was for this once abreast of her schedule--he fell to tramping up and down the long platform, deep in antic.i.p.ative prefigurings. The mills of the years grind many grists besides the trickling stream of the hours: would he find Miss Brentwood as he had left her? Could he be sure of meeting her on the frank, friendly footing of the Croydon summer? He feared not; feared all things--lover-like.
He hoped there would be no absence-reared barrier to be painfully leveled.
A man among men, a leader in some sort, and in battle a soldier who could hew his way painstakingly, if not dramatically, to his end, David Kent was no carpet knight, and he knew his lack. Would Elinor make things easy for him, as she used to daily in the somewhat difficult social atmosphere of the exclusive summer hotel?
Measuring it out in all its despairing length and breadth after the fact, he was deeply grateful to Penelope. Missing her ready help at the moment of cataclysms when he entered the sleeping-car, he might have betrayed himself. His first glance lighted on Elinor and Ormsby, and he needed no gloss on the love-text. He had delayed too long; had asked too much of the Fates, and Atropos, the scissors-bearing sister, had snipped his thread of hope.
It is one of the consequences of civilization that we are denied the privilege of unmasking at the behest of the elemental emotions; that we are constrained to bleed decorously. Making shift to lean heavily on Penelope, Kent came through without doing or saying anything unseemly.
Mrs. Brentwood, who had been sleeping with one eye open, and that eye upon Elinor and Ormsby, made sure that she had now no special reason to be ungracious to David Kent. For the others, Ormsby was good-naturedly suave; Elinor was by turns unwontedly kind and curiously silent; and Penelope--but, as we say, it was to Penelope that Kent owed most.
So it came about that the outcome of the cataclysm was a thing which happens often enough in a conventionalized world. David Kent, with his tragedy fresh upon him, dropped informally into place as one of the party of five; and of all the others, Penelope alone suspected how hard he was. .h.i.t. And when all was said; when the new _modus vivendi_ had been fairly established and the hour grew late, Kent went voluntarily with Ormsby to the smoking-compartment, "to play the string out decently," as he afterward confessed to Loring.
"I see you know how to get the most comfort out of your tobacco," said the club-man, when they were companionably settled in the men"s room and Kent produced his pipe and tobacco pouch. "I prefer the pipe myself, for a steady thing; but at this time of night a light Castilla fits me pretty well. Try one?" tendering his cigar-case.
Fighting shrewdly against a natural prompting to regard Ormsby as an hereditary enemy, Kent forced himself to be neighborly.