iv
Natalie, who had come in on tip-toe, noiselessly, was standing just inside the door. Galt seemed suddenly to feel her presence. When he looked at her tears started in his eyes and he turned his face away. She rushed to his side, knelt, and put her arms around him. No word was spoken.
I left them, telephoned for the family physician to come and stay in the house, and then acted on an impulse which had been rising in me for an hour. I wished to see Vera.
She was alone in the studio. I had not seen her informally since the cataclysmic evening that wrecked the African image.
“Oh,” she said, looking up. “I thought you might come. Excuse me while I finish this.”
She was writing a note. When she had signed it with a firm hand, and blotted it, she handed it to me to read. It was a very brief note to Lord Porteous, breaking their engagement.
“He won’t accept it,” I said.
“You can be generous,” she replied. “However, it doesn’t matter. I accept it.”
“These things are all untrue that people are saying about your father. It’s a kind of hysteria. The indictment, if that’s what you are thinking of, is preposterous. Nothing will come of it. There will be a sudden reaction in public feeling.”
“I know,” she said. “That isn’t all.... I suppose you have come to take me home?”
“But what else?” I asked.
She shook her head. As we were leaving the studio she paused on the threshold to look back. I was watching her face. It expressed a premonition of farewell. Once before I had seen that look. When? Ah, yes. That night long ago when she told me the old house had been mortgaged. Then I understood.
To her, and indeed to all the family, this crisis in Galt’s affairs meant another smash. The only difference between this time and others was that they would fall from a greater height, and probably for the last time.
We drove home in a taxi.
“How I loathe it!” she whispered as we were going in, saying it to herself.
Natalie appeared.
“You’re in for it,” she said to me. “Father wants to know who brought the doctor in.”
“I was worried about him,” I said.
“So is the doctor. But it’s no use. He can’t do a thing. Father sent him away in a hurry.”
Gram’ma Galt came in for dinner. So we were five. Galt did not come down. Conversation was oblique and thin. One wondered what the servants were thinking, and wished the service were not so noiseless. If only they would rattle the plates, or break something, or sneeze, instead of moving about with that oiled and faultless precision. The tinkling of water in the fountain room was a silly, exasperating sound, and for minutes together the only sound there was. Mrs. Galt was off her form. She tried and failed. Nobody else tried at all.
Natalie, as I believed, was the only one whose thoughts were outside of herself. Several times our eyes met in a lucid, sympathetic manner. This had not happened between us before. What we understood was that both of us were thinking of the same object,—of a frail, ill kept little figure with ragged hair and a mist in its eyes, wounded by the destiny that controlled it,—of Galt lying in his clothes on a bed upstairs, and nothing to be done for his ease or comfort. She was grateful to me that my thoughts were with him, and when I was not looking at her I was thinking how different these four women were. Yet one indefinable thing they had all in common. It brought and held them together in any crisis affecting Galt. It was not devotion, not loyalty, not faith. Perhaps it was an inborn fatalistic clan spirit. But whatever it was, I knew that each of them would surrender to him again, if need were, the whole of all she possessed. They were expecting to do it.
“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock to-day?” asked Gram’ma Galt in a firm, clear voice. Everybody started a little, even one of the servants who happened to stand in the line of my vision.
“One hundred and seventy,” I said.
To those of us who had just seen it fall in a few weeks from two-hundred-and-twenty this price of one-hundred-and-seventy seemed calamitous. That shows how soon we lose the true perspective and how myopically we regard the nearest contrast.
“When my son took charge of it eight years ago it was one-and-a-half ... one-and-a-half,” said Gram’ma Galt in the same clear voice.
For this I rose and saluted her with a kiss on the forehead. She didn’t mind. Natalie gave me a splendid look. Then I excused myself and went to see Galt.
The door of his apartment was ajar. I could see him. He was in his pajamas now, apparently asleep. So I closed the door and sat at his desk in the work room outside to call up Mordecai, who had asked me to communicate with him, and attend to some other matters. Presently the hall door opened and closed gently. I looked around. It was Gram’ma Galt. In her hand she carried a large envelope tied around with a blue ribbon. She walked straight to the door of Galt’s apartment and went in without knocking. I could see her from where I sat. She left the door open behind her.
“What’s this?” Galt asked, as she put the envelope on the bed beside him. She did not answer his question, but leaned over, laid one hand on his forehead and spoke in this delphic manner:
“Fast ye for strife and smite with the fist of wickedness.”
Then she turned, came straight out, closed the door carefully, passed me without a glance, and was gone. Never again did I wonder whence Galt derived his thirst for combat. When he emerged some ten minutes later the mist had fallen from his eyes. The right doctor had been there. He handed me the envelope tied around with blue ribbon.
“That’s Gram’ma Galt’s little fortune ... everything she has received out of Great Midwestern. Keep it in the safe for a few days so she will think we needed it.... Did you give out that statement?”
“Not yet. There is plenty of time,” I said.
“Tear it up. That isn’t the way we fight, ... is it?”
Gram’ma Galt never got her envelope back. Two weeks later she died.