"You have been successful?" she asked quickly.
"Reasonably so in the preaching, since that depended solely upon me. As to the other, I don"t know. Sometimes I"m credulous enough to believe that the house-cleaners are honestly at work, as they say they are, and at other times I"m afraid they are only putting up a bluff to mislead me. Some day, perhaps, I may tell you how far I have had to go into the "practical-politics" armory to get my weapons."
There was still a half-square of the sidewalk privacy available, and she made what seemed to be the most necessary use of it.
"And your father, Evan; are you coming to understand him any better?"
He shook his head despondently. "No; or rather yes. I might say that I am coming to understand him--or his methods--only too well. The only way we can keep from quarrelling now is to banish politics when we are together."
"I am sorry," she said, and the sorrow was emphatic in her tone. "As I have said before, you don"t understand him. You are judging him by standards which, however just and true they may be, are peculiarly your own standards. I know you can be broad for others when you try. Can"t you be broad for him?"
It was good to hear her defend his father. It was what he would have wished his wife to do. Suddenly there arose within him a huge reluctance to lessen or to weaken in any way her trust in David Blount.
"Let us say that the fault is mine," he interposed hastily. "G.o.d forbid that I should be the means of making you think less of him in any respect."
"You couldn"t do that, Evan. He is simply a grand old man--the first I have ever known for whom the hackneyed phrase seemed to have been made,"
she a.s.serted warmly. "If he has faults, I am sure they are nothing more than gigantic virtues--the faults of a man who is too strong and too magnanimous to be little in any respect."
The final half-square lay behind them, and Mrs. Honoria and the senator, Gantry, Gordon and his wife, and the two Weatherfords, with one of the marriageable daughters, were at the _cafe_ door waiting for the laggards. Being in no proper frame of mind to enjoy a theatre supper with another Weatherford attack as the possible penalty, Blount reluctantly surrendered Patricia to Gantry, made his excuses, and went to smoke a bedtime pipe in the homelike and democratic lobby.
With Patricia in town the "silver-tongued spellbinder of Quaretaro Mesa," as _The Daily Capital_ called the railroad company"s campaign field-officer, would have been glad to evade some of the speaking appointments; but since his engagements had been made some days in advance, he was obliged to go.
On his return to the capital he was delighted to find the party of three still occupying the private dining-room suite at the Inter-Mountain.
Arriving on a morning train, he was permitted to make the party of three a party of four at the breakfast-table; and with Patricia sitting opposite he was able to forget the strenuosities for a restful half-hour.
Later, when he went to his offices in the Temple Court Building, the strenuosities rea.s.serted themselves with emphasis. Though he found his desk closed, and was reasonably certain that he had in his pocket the only key that would unlock it, he found his papers scattered in confusion under the roll-top. A touch upon the electric b.u.t.ton brought the stenographer from the anteroom.
"Who"s been into my desk, Collins?" he demanded, pointing to the confusion and scrutinizing the face of the young man sharply for signs of guilt.
"Goodness gracious! How could anybody get into it when you"ve got the only key, Mr. Blount?" stammered the clerk. Then he went on, parrot-like: "I"ve been putting the letters and telegrams through the letter-slit, as you told me to, and I"ve kept the private office locked."
"Nevertheless it is very evident that somebody has been here," said Blount. Then he had a sudden shock and wheeled shortly upon the stenographer. "Collins, what did you do with that packet of papers I gave you last Monday--the one I told you to put away in the safe?"
"I did just what you told me to; put it in the inner cash-box, and put the key of the cash-box on your desk. Didn"t you get it?"
Blount felt in his pockets and found the key, which he handed to Collins. "Go and get that packet and bring it to me," he directed. The shock was beginning to subside a little by now, and he sat down to bring something like order out of the confusion on the desk. At first, he had thought that the sheaf of evidence letters which gave him the strangle-hold upon Gantry and the lawbreakers had been left in a pigeonhole of the desk. Then he remembered having given it to Collins to put away.
A minute or two later it occurred to him that the stenographer was taking a long time for a short errand. Rising silently, he crossed the room and reached for the k.n.o.b of the door of communication. In the act he saw that the door was ajar, and through the crack he saw Collins standing before the opened safe. The clerk was running his tongue along the flap of a large envelope, preparatory to sealing it. Blount"s first impulse was to break in with a sharp command. Then he reconsidered and went back to his desk; was still busy at it when Collins came in and laid the freshly sealed envelope before him.
"That isn"t the packet I gave you," said Blount curtly.
The clerk looked away. "You meant those letters, didn"t you?" he queried. "The rubber band broke and I put them in an envelope."
"When?" snapped Blount.
The young man faced around again and the innocence in his look disarmed the questioner.
"When? Just now. That"s what made me so long--I couldn"t find an envelope big enough."
Blount took up the letter opener and slipped the blade under the flap of the envelope. If he had looked up at the stenographer then he would have seen the mask of innocence slip aside to discover a face ashen with terror. But whatever the shorthand man had to fear from the opening of the lately sealed envelope was postponed by the incoming of Ackerton, the working head of the legal department, with a damage suit to discuss with his chief. Blount thrust the big envelope into his pocket unopened, and later in the day, when he went around to his bank to put the evidence letters into his safe-deposit box, the incident of the morning had lost its significance so completely, or had been so deeply buried under other and more important matters, that he deposited the packet without examining it.
The evening of this same day there was a dance given by the Gordons in the ranchman candidate"s big house opposite the Weatherfords" in Mesa Circle, and Blount went, hoping that Patricia would be there. She was there; and in the heart of the evening, when Blount had persuaded her to sit out a dance with him in a corner of the homelike reception-hall, he began to pry at a little stone of stumbling which was threatening to grow too large to be easily rolled aside.
"I"m hunting a conscience to-night," he said, without preface. "Have you got one that you could lend me?"
She laughed lightly.
"You told me once that I had the New England conscience--which was the same as saying that I had enough for my own needs and a surplus to pa.s.s around among my friends. What bad thing have you been doing now?"
He made a wry face. "It"s the "practical politics" again. Suppose I say that I have obtained positive evidence of a crime against the laws of the State and the nation. How far am I justified in suppressing, for a perfectly right and proper end, this evidence which would send a lot of people to jail?"
"Mercy!" she exclaimed; "how you can bring a thunderbolt crashing down out of a perfectly clear sky! Is it ever justifiable to shield criminals and criminality?"
"That is just what I"m trying to find out," he persisted. "At the present moment I am shielding a good handful of open lawbreakers. Some of them know what I"m doing, and some of them don"t. Those who know have been told that they must be good or I"ll publish the evidence, and they"ve promised to be good if I won"t publish it. At the time I didn"t question my right to make such a bargain, but--"
"But now you are questioning it? What would happen if you should tell what you know?"
"Chaos," he replied briefly.
"May I ask who is implicated?"
"A good half of the corporation officials in the State, and some few outside of it."
"Mercy!" she said again. And then: "It"s too big for me, Evan. I can only go back to first principles and ask if it is ever justifiable to do evil that good may come."
"If you put it that way, I"ve made myself _particeps criminis_," he said gravely. "I have given my word to keep still if the lawbreaking deals are broken off at once and in good faith. Beyond that, I can"t help knowing that the exposure which I have threatened to make, and could make, would practically turn the people of this State into a mob."
She was shaking her head determinedly. "I can"t help you this time, Evan; truly I can"t." Then, in sudden appeal: "Why won"t you go to your father? He could tell you what to do and how to do it, and his judgment would be too big and just to stumble over the tangling little moralities."
Blount smiled.
"What if I should tell you that my father is more or less involved, Patricia? I don"t know precisely how much or how little, but I am a.s.sured, by those who claim to know, that he, too, would go down in the general wreck."
"I can"t believe it!" she protested, in generous loyalty. "These people, whoever they are, are deceiving you to shelter themselves. Have you ever spoken to your father about this?"
"Yes, once; one evening when we were dining together I told him what I had, and what use I should make of it if all other means should fail.
Also, I advised him to dodge."
"What did he say?"
"That is the discouraging part of it. I was hoping against hope that he would tell me to go ahead; that he would say that he wasn"t involved.
But, as a matter of fact, he didn"t say much of anything. I"m horribly afraid that his silence meant all that I"ve been trying to believe it didn"t mean."
She was slowly opening and closing her fan, as if she were trying to gain time.
"I can only tell you again what I told you at first," she said at length. "You must be bigger than all these hampering circ.u.mstances; bigger than the little moralities, if need be. You can be, Evan; you"ve given splendid proof of it thus far, and I"m proud--just as proud as I can be--"
Blount felt as if he could, joyously and entirely without scruple, have brained young Gordon, to whom the next dance belonged, and who came just at this climaxing moment to claim Patricia. But there was no help for it, short of a cold-blooded and rather embarra.s.sing deed of violence, and the hard-won confidence ended pretty much where it had begun.