"Never mind, Bobby," said Agnes. "I have a suspicion that you have cut a wisdom-tooth. I rather imagined that you needed this one last folly as a sort of relapse before complete convalescence, to settle you down and bring you back to me for a more serious effort. I see that the most of your money is tied up in this embarra.s.sing suit, and when I read that you were on your way home I went to Mr. Chalmers and got him to arrange for the release of some bonds. Following the provisions of your father"s will your next two hundred and fifty thousand is waiting for you. Moreover, Bobby, this time I want you to listen to your trustee. I have found a new business for you, one about which you know nothing whatever, but one that you must learn; I want to put a weapon into your hands with which to fight for everything you have lost."
He looked at her in wonder.
"I always told you I needed you," he declared. "When _are_ you going to marry me?"
"When you have won your fight, Bobby, or when you have proved entirely hopeless," she replied with a smile in which there was a certain amount of wistfulness.
"You"re a good sort, Agnes," he said a little huskily, and he pondered for some little time in awe over the existence of women like this. "I guess the governor was mighty right in making you my trustee, after all. But what is this business?"
"The _Evening Bulletin_ is for sale, I have learned. Just now it is an independent paper, but it seems to me you could not have a better weapon, with your following, for fighting your political and business enemies."
"I"ll think that over very seriously," he said with much soberness. "I have refused everybody"s advice so far, and have taken only my own. I have begun to believe that I am not the wisest person in the world; also I have come to believe that there are more ways to lose money than there are to make money; also I"ve found out that men are not the only gold-brick salesmen. Agnes, I"m what Biff Bates calls a "Hick"!"
"Look what your father has to say about this last escapade of yours,"
she said, smiling, and from her desk brought him one of the familiar gray envelopes. This was the letter:
_To My Daughter Agnes, Upon Bobby"s Entanglement with a Blackmailing Woman_
"No man can guard against being roped in by a scheming woman the first time; but if it happens twice he deserves it, and he should be turned out to stay an idiot, for the signs are so plain. A man swindler takes a man"s money and makes a fool of him; but a woman swindler takes a man"s money and leaves a smirch on him. Only a man"s nearest and dearest can help him live down such a smirch; so, Agnes, if my son has been this particular variety of everlasting blank fool, don"t turn against him. He needs you. Moreover, you"ll find him improved by it. He"ll be so much more humble."
"I didn"t really need that letter," Agnes shyly confessed; "but maybe it helped some."
CHAPTER XXII
AGNES FINDS BOBBY A SLING AND BOBBY PUTS A STONE IN IT
The wonderful change in a girl who, through her love, has become all woman, that was the marvel to Bobby; the breadth of her knowledge, the depth of her sympathy, the boundlessness of her compa.s.sionate forgiveness, her quality of motherliness; and this last was perhaps the greatest marvel of all. Yet even his marveling did not encompa.s.s all the wonder. In his last exploit, more full of folly than anything into which he had yet blundered, and the one which, of all others, might most have turned her from him, Agnes had had the harder part; to sit at home and wait, to dread she knew not what. The certainty which finally evolved had less of distress in it than not to know while day by day pa.s.sed by. One thing had made it easier: never for one moment had she lost faith in Bobby, in any way. She was certain, however, that financially his trip would be a losing one, and from the time he left she kept her mind almost constantly upon the thought of his future. She had become almost desperately anxious for him to fulfill the hopes of his father, and day by day she studied the commercial field as she had never thought it possible that she could do. There was no line of industry upon which she did not ponder, and there was scarcely any morning that she did not at the breakfast table ask Dan Elliston the ins and outs of some business. If he was not able to tell her all she wanted to know, she usually commissioned him to find out.
He took these requests in good part, and if she accomplished nothing else by all her inquiries she acquired such a commercial education as falls to the lot of but few home-kept young women.
One morning her uncle came down a trifle late for breakfast and was in a hurry.
"The Elliston School of Commercial Instruction will have a recess for this session," he observed as he popped into his chair. "I have an important engagement at the factory this morning and have about seven minutes for breakfast. During that seven minutes I prefer to eat rather than to talk. However, I do not object to listening. This being my last word except to request you to gather things closely about my plate, you may now start."
"Very well," said she, dimpling as she usually did at any evidence of briskness on the part of her Uncle Dan, for from long experience she knew the harmlessness of his bark. "Nick Allstyne happened to remark to me last night that the _Bulletin_ is for sale. What do you think of the newspaper business for Bobby?"
"The time necessary to answer that question takes my orange from me,"
objected Uncle Dan as he hastily sipped another bite of the fruit and pushed it away. "The newspaper business for Bobby!" He drew the m.u.f.fins toward him and took one upon his plate, then he stopped and pondered a moment. "Do you know," said he, "that"s about the best suggestion you"ve made. I believe he could make a hummer out of a newspaper. I"ve noticed this about the boy"s failures; they have all of them been due to lack of experience; none of them has been due to any absence of backbone. n.o.body has ever bluffed him."
Agnes softly clapped her hands.
"Exactly!" she cried. "Well, Uncle Dan, this is the last word _I"m_ going to say. For the balance of your seven minutes I"m going to help stuff you with enough food to keep you until luncheon time; but sometime to-day, if you find time, I want you to go over and see the proprietor of the _Bulletin_ and find out how much he wants for his property, and investigate it as a business proposition just the same as if you were going into it yourself."
Uncle Dan, dipping voraciously into his soft boiled eggs, grinned and said: "Huh!" Then he looked at his watch. When he came home to dinner, however, he hunted up Agnes at once.
"Your _Bulletin_ proposition looks pretty good," he told her. "I saw Greenleaf. He"s a physical wreck and has been for two years. He has to get away or die. Moreover, his physical condition has reacted upon his paper. His circulation has run down, but he has a magnificent plant and a good office organization. He wants two hundred thousand dollars for his plant, good will and franchises. I"m going to investigate this a little further. Do you suppose Bobby will have two hundred thousand left when he gets through with grand opera?"
"I hope so," replied Agnes; "but if he hasn"t I"ll have him waste the balance of this two hundred and fifty thousand so that he can draw the next one."
Uncle Dan laughed in huge enjoyment of this solution.
"You surely were cut out for high finance," he told her.
She smiled, and was silent a while, hesitating.
"You seem to think pretty well of the business as a business proposition," she ventured anxiously, by and by; "but you haven"t told me what you think of it as applicable to Bobby."
"If he"ll take you in the office with him, he"ll do all right," he answered her banteringly; but when he went up-stairs and found his wife he said: "Constance, if that girl don"t pull Bobby Burnit through his puppyhood in good shape there is something wrong with the scheme of creation. There is something about you women of the Elliston family that every once in a while makes me pause and reverence the Almighty,"
whereupon Aunt Constance flushed prettily, as became her.
With the same earnestness of purpose Agnes handled the question of Bobby"s breach-of-promise suit in so far as it affected his social reception. The Ellistons went to the theater and sat in a box to exhibit him on the second night after his return, and Agnes took careful count of all the people she knew who attended the theater that night. The next day she went to see all of them, among others Mrs.
Horace Wickersham, whose social word was social law.
"My dear," said the redoubtable Mrs. Wickersham, "it does Bobby Burnit great credit that he did not marry the creature. Of course I shall invite him to our affair next Friday night."
After that there could be no further question of Bobby"s standing, though without the firm support of Agnes he might possibly have been ostracised, for a time at least.
It was with much less certainty that she spread before Bobby the facts and figures which Uncle Dan had secured about the condition and prospects of the _Bulletin_. She did not urge the project upon him.
Instead, though in considerable anxiety, she left the proposition open to his own judgment. He pondered the question more soberly and seriously than he had yet considered anything. There were but two chances left to redeem himself now, and he felt much like a gambler who has been reduced to his last desperate stake. He grew almost haggard over the proposition, and he spent two solid weeks in investigation. He went to Washington to see Jack Starlett, who knew three or four newspaper proprietors in Philadelphia and elsewhere. He obtained introductions to these people and consulted with them, inspected their plants and listened to all they would say; as they liked him, they said much. Ripened considerably by what he had found out he came back home and bought the _Bulletin_. Moreover, he had very definitely made up his mind precisely what to do with it.
On the first morning that he walked into the office of that paper as its sole owner and proprietor, he called the managing editor to him and asked:
"What, heretofore, has been the politics of this paper?"
"Pale yellow jelly," snapped Ben Jolter wrathfully.
"Supposed to be anti-Stone, hasn"t it been?" Bobby smilingly inquired.
"But always perfectly ladylike in what it said about him."
"And what are the politics of the employees?"
At this Mr. Jolter snorted.
"They are good newspaper men, Mr. Burnit," he stated in quick defense; "and a good newspaper man has no politics."
Bobby eyed Mr. Jolter with contemplative favor. He was a stout, stockily-built man, with a square head and spa.r.s.e gray hair that would persist in tangling and curling at the ends; and he perpetually kept his sleeves rolled up over his big arms.
"I don"t know anything about this business," confessed Bobby, "but I hope to. First of all, I"d like to find out why the _Bulletin_ has no circulation."
"The lack of a spinal column," a.s.serted Jolter. "It has had no policy, stood pat on no proposition, and made no aggressive fight on anything."
"If I understand what you mean by the word," said Bobby slowly, "the _Bulletin_ is going to have a policy."
It was now Mr. Jolter"s turn to gaze contemplatively at Bobby.