De Graff smiled.
"No," said he, "it is my own. I have faith in you, Burnit, and faith in the _Bulletin_. Suppose you step over to the First National with me right away."
CHAPTER XXVII
AUNT CONSTANCE ELLISTON LOSES ALL HER PATIENCE WITH A CERTAIN PROSAIC COURTSHIP
That night, with a grave new responsibility upon him and a grave new elation, st.u.r.dier and stronger than he had ever been in his life, and more his own master, Bobby went out to see Agnes.
"Agnes, when my father made you my trustee," he said, "he laid upon you the obligation that you were not to marry me until I had proved myself either a success or a failure, didn"t he?"
"He did," a.s.sented Agnes demurely.
"But you are no longer my trustee. The last money over which you had nominal control has reverted to the main fund, which is in the hands of Mr. Barrister; so that releases you."
Agnes laughed softly and shook her head.
"The obligation wasn"t part of the trusteeship," she reminded him.
"But if I choose to construe it that way," he persisted, "and declare the obligation null and void, how soon could you get ready to be married to the political boss of this town and one of its leading business men? Agnes," he went on, suddenly quite serious, "I can not do without you any longer. I have waited long enough. I need you and you must come to me."
"I"ll come if you insist," she said simply, and laid both her hands in his. "But, Bobby, let"s think about this a minute. Let"s think what it means. I have been thinking of it many, many days, and really and truly I don"t like to give up, because of its bearing upon our future strength. Yesterday I drove down Grand Street and looked up at that Trimmer and Company sign, and so long as that is there, Bobby, I could not feel right about our deserting the colors, as it were; that is, unless you have definitely given up the fight."
"Given up!" repeated Bobby quickly. "Why, I have just begun. I"ve been to school all this time, Agnes, and to a hard school, but now I"m sure I have learned my lesson. I have won a fight or two; I have had the taste of blood; I"m going after more; I"m going to win."
"I"m sure that you will," she repeated. "Think how much better satisfied we will be after you have done so."
"Yes, but think, too, of the time it will take," he protested. "First of all I must earn money; that is, I must make the _Bulletin_ pay. I can do that. It is on the edge of earning its way right now, but I owe twenty-five thousand dollars. It is going to take a long, long time for me to win this battle, and in it I need you."
"I am always right here, Bobby," she reminded him. "I have never failed you when you needed me, have I? But maybe it won"t take so long. You say you are going to make the _Bulletin_ pay. If you do that counts for a business success, enough to release you on that side. But really, Bobby, how difficult a task would it be to get back control of your father"s store?"
"Hopeless, just now," said he.
"How much money would it take?"
"Well, not so very much in comparison with the business itself," he told her. "I own two hundred and sixty thousand dollars" worth of stock, Trimmer owns two hundred and forty thousand, while sixty thousand more are scattered among his relatives and dependents. That stock is not for sale, that is the trouble; but if I could buy twenty-one thousand dollars of it I could do what I liked with the entire concern."
"Then Bobby, let"s not think of anything else but how to get that stock. Let"s insist on having that for our wedding present."
Bobby regarded her gravely for a long time.
"Agnes, you"re a brick!" he finally concluded. "You"re right, as you have always been. We"ll wait. But you don"t know, oh, you don"t know how hard that is for me!"
"It is not the easiest thing in the world for me," she gently reminded him.
From the time that she had laid her hands in his he had held them, and now he had gathered them to him, pressing them upon his breast.
Suddenly, overcome by his great longing for her, he clasped her in his arms and held her, and pressed his lips to hers. For a moment she yielded to that embrace and closed her eyes, and then she gently drew away from him.
"We mustn"t indulge in that sort of thing very much," she reminded him, "or we"re likely to lose all our good resolutions."
"Good resolutions," declared Bobby, "are a nuisance."
She smiled and shook her head.
"Look at the people who haven"t any," she reminded him.
It was perhaps half an hour later when an idea which brought with it a smile came to her.
"We"ve definitely resolved now to wait until you have either accomplished what you set out to do, or completely failed, haven"t we?"
"Yes," he a.s.sented soberly.
"Then I"m going to open one of the letters your father left for us. I have been dying with curiosity to know what is in it," and hurrying up to her secretary she brought down one of the inevitable gray envelopes, addressed:
_To My Children Upon the Occasion of Their Deciding to Marry Before the Limit of My Prohibition_
"What I can not for the life of me understand is why the devil you didn"t do it long ago!"
Bobby was so thoroughly awake to the underlying principle of Agnes"
contention that even this letter did nothing to change his viewpoint.
"For it isn"t him, it is us, or rather it is me, who is to be considered," he declared. "But it does seem to me, Agnes, as if for once we had got the better of the governor."
They were still laughing over the unexpectedness of the letter when Aunt Constance came in, and they showed it to her.
"Good!" she exclaimed, dwelling longer upon the inscription than upon the letter itself. "I think you"re quite sensible, and I"ll arrange the finest wedding for Agnes that has ever occurred in the Elliston family. You must give me at least a couple of months, though. When is it to come off? Soon, I suppose?"
Carefully and patiently they explained the stand they had taken. At first she thought they were joking, and it took considerable reiteration on their part for her to understand that they were not.
"I declare I have no patience with you!" she avowed. "Of all the humdrum, prosaic people I ever saw, you are the very worst! There is no romance in you. You"re as cool about it as if marriage were a commercial partnership. Oh, Dan!" and she called her husband from the library. "Now what do you think of this?" she demanded, and explained the ridiculous att.i.tude of the young people.
"Great!" decided Uncle Dan. "Allow me to congratulate you," and he shook hands heartily with both Agnes and Bobby, whereat Aunt Constance denounced him as being a sordid soul of their own stripe and went to bed in a huff. She got up again, however, when she heard Agnes retire to her own room for the night, and came in to wrestle with that young lady in spirit. She found Agnes, however, obdurate in her content, and ended by becoming an enthusiastic supporter of the idea. "Although I did have my heart so set on a fine wedding," she plaintively concluded. "I have been planning it for ages."
"Just keep on planning, auntie," replied Agnes. "No doubt you will acquire some brilliant new ideas before the time comes."
So this utterly placid courtship went on in its old tranquil way, with Bobby a constant two and three nights a week visitor to the Elliston home, and with the two young people discussing business more frequently than anything else; for Bobby had learned to come to Agnes for counsel in everything. Just now his chief burden of conversation was the letting of the new waterworks contract, which, with public sentiment back of him, he had fought off until after the Stone administration had ended. Hamilton Ferris, an old polo antagonist of his, represented one of the competing firms as its president, and Bobby had been most anxious that he should be the successful bidder, as was Agnes; for Bobby had brought Ferris to dinner at the Ellistons and to call a couple of times during his stay in the city, and all of the Ellistons liked him tremendously. Bobby was quite crestfallen when the opening of the bids proved Ferris to be the second lowest man.
"I"ve tried hard enough for it," declared Ferris during a final dinner at the Ellistons that night. "There isn"t much doing this year, and I figured closer than anybody in my employ would dared to have done. In view of my estimate I can not for the life of me see how your local company overbid us all by over a million dollars."
"It is curious," admitted Bobby, still much puzzled.
"It"s rather unsportsmanlike in me to whine," resumed Ferris, "but I am bound to believe that there is a colored gentleman in the woodpile somewhere."
"That would be no novelty," returned Bobby. "Ever since I bought the _Bulletin_ I have been gunning for Ethiopians amid the fuel and always found them. The Middle West Construction Company, however, is a new load of kindling to me. I never heard of it until it was announced this morning as the lowest bidder."