V
It is perfectly true that the club and the dogs were uncomfortably close together. A week later the crisis came when Munn, in a violent rage, accused Sprowl of spiriting away his ward, Eileen O’Hara. But when Sprowl at last comprehended that the girl and the papers had really disappeared, he turned like a maddened pig on Munn, tore the signed checks to shreds before his eyes, and cursed him steadily as long as he remained within hearing.
As for Munn, his game appeared to be up. He hurried to New York, and spent a month or two attempting to find some trace of his ward, then his money gave out. He returned to his community and wrote a cringing letter to Sprowl, begging him to buy the O’Hara land for next to nothing, and risk the legality of the transfer. To which Sprowl paid no attention. A week later Munn and the Shining Band left for Munnville, Maine.
It was vaguely understood at the club that Lansing had a patient in 5 and 6.
“Probably a rich woman whom he can’t afford to lose,” suggested Sprowl, with a sneer; “but I’m cursed if I can see why he should turn this club into a drug-shop to make money in!” And the Colonel and the Major agreed that it was indecent in the extreme.
To his face, of course, Sprowl, the Colonel, and the Major treated Lansing with perfect respect; but the faint odor of antiseptics from rooms 5 and 6 made them madder and madder every time they noticed it.
Meanwhile young Coursay had a free bridle; Lansing was never around to interfere, and he drove and rode and fished and strolled with Agatha Sprowl until neither he nor the shameless beauty knew whether they were standing on their heads or their heels. To be in love was a new sensation to Agatha Sprowl; to believe himself in love was nothing new to Coursay, but the flavor never palled.
What they might have done—what, perhaps, they had already decided to do—nobody but they knew. The chances are that they would have bolted if they had not run smack into that rigid sentinel who guards the pathway of life. The sentinel is called Fate. And it came about in the following manner:
Dr. Courtney Thayer arrived one cool day early in October; Lansing met him with a quiet smile, and, together, these eminent gentlemen entered rooms 5 and 6.
A few moments later Courtney Thayer came out, laughing, followed by Lansing, who also appeared to be a prey to mirth.
“She’s charming—she’s perfectly charming!” said Courtney Thayer. “Where the deuce do these Yankee convent people get that elusive Continental flavor? Her father must have been a gentleman.”
“He was an Irish lumberman,” said Lansing. After a moment he added: “So you won’t come back, doctor?”
“No, it’s not necessary; you know that. I’ve an operation to-morrow in Manhattan; I must get back to town. Wish I could stay and shoot grouse with you, but I can’t.”
“Come up for the fall flight of woodcock; I’ll wire you when it’s on,” urged Lansing.
“Perhaps; good-bye.”
Lansing took his outstretched hand in both of his. “There is no use in my trying to tell you what you have done for me, doctor,” he said.
Thayer regarded him keenly. “Thought I did it for her,” he remarked.
Instantly Lansing’s face turned red-hot. Thayer clasped the young man’s hands and shook them till they ached.
“You’re all right, my boy—you’re all right!” he said, heartily; and was gone down the stairs, two at a jump—a rather lively proceeding for the famous and dignified Courtney Thayer.
Lansing turned and entered rooms 5 and 6. His patient was standing by the curtained window. “Do you want to know your fate?” he asked, lightly.
She turned and looked at him out of her lovely eyes; the quaint, listening expression in her face still remained, but she saw him, this time.
“Am I well?” she asked, calmly.
“Yes; … perfectly.”
She sat down by the window, her slender hands folded, her eyes on him.
“And now,” she asked, “what am I to do?”
He understood, and bent his head. He had an answer ready, trembling on his lips; but a horror of presuming on her gratitude kept him silent.
“Am I to go back … to him?” she said, faintly.
“God forbid!” he blurted out. With all his keen eyesight, how could he fail to see the adoration in her eyes, on her mute lips’ quivering curve, in every line of her body? But the brutality of asking for that which her gratitude might not withhold froze him. It was no use; he could not speak.
“Then—what? Tell me; I will do it,” she said, in a desolate voice. “Of course I cannot stay here now.”
Something in his haggard face set her heart beating heavily; then for a moment her heart seemed to stop. She covered her eyes with a swift gesture.
“Is it pain?” he asked, quickly. “Let me see your eyes!” Her hands covered them. He came to her; she stood up, and he drew her fingers from her eyes and looked into them steadily. But what he saw there he alone knows; for he bent closer, shaking in every limb; and both her arms crept to his shoulders and her clasped hands tightened around his neck.
Which was doubtless an involuntary muscular affection incident on successful operations for lamellar or zonular cataract.
That day they opened the steel box. She understood little of what he read to her; presently he stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence and remained staring, reading on and on in absorbed silence.
Content, serene, numbed with her happiness, she watched him sleepily.
He muttered under his breath: “Sprowl! What a fool! What a cheap fool! And yet not one among us even suspected him of that!”
After a long time he looked up at the girl, blankly at first, and with a grimace of disgust. “You see,” he said, and gave a curious laugh—“you see that—that you own all this land of ours—as far as I can make out.”
After a long explanation she partly understood, and laughed outright, a clear child’s laugh without a trace of that sad undertone he knew so well.
“But we are not going to take it away from your club—are we?” she asked.
“No,” he said; “let the club have the land—your land! What do we care? We will never come here again!” He sat a moment, thinking, then sprang up. “We will go to New York to-morrow,” he said; “and I’ll just step out and say good-bye to Sprowl—I think he and his wife are also going to-morrow; I think they’re going to Europe, to live! I’m sure they are; and that they will never come back.”
And, curiously enough, that is exactly what they did; and they are there yet. And their establishment in the American colony is the headquarters for all nobility in exile, including the chivalrous Orleans.
Which is one sort of justice—the Lansing sort; and, anyway, Coursay survived and married an actress a year later. And the club still remains in undisturbed possession of Eileen Lansing’s land; and Major Brent is now its president.
As for Munn, he has permanently retired to Munnville, Maine, where, it is reported, he has cured several worthy and wealthy people by the simple process of prayer.
ONE MAN IN A MILLION
I
Do you desire me to marry him?” asked Miss Castle, quietly.
“Let me finish,” said her uncle. “Jane,” he added, turning on his sister, “if you could avoid sneezing for a few moments, I should be indebted to you.”
Miss Jane Garcide, a sallow lady of forty, who suffered with colds all winter and hay-fever all summer, meekly left the room.
Miss Castle herself leaned on the piano, tearing the pink petals from a half-withered rose, while her guardian, the Hon. John Garcide, finished what he had to say and pulled out his cigar-case with decision.
“I have only to add,” he said, “that James J. Crawford is one man in a million.”
Her youthful adoration of Garcide had changed within a few years to a sweet-tempered indifference. He was aware of this; he was anxious to learn whether the change had also affected her inherited passion for truthfulness.
“Do you remember a promise you once made?” he inquired, lighting his cigar with care.
“When was it?”
“On my tenth birthday.”
He looked out of the heavily curtained window.
“Of course you could not be held to such a promise,” he remarked.
“There is no need to hold me to it,” she answered, flushing up.
Her delicate sense of honor amused him; he lay back in his arm-chair, enjoying his cigar.
“It is curious,” he said, “that you cannot recall meeting Mr. Crawford last winter.”
“A girl has an opportunity to forget hundreds of faces after her first season,” she said.
There was another pause; then Garcide went on: “I am going to ask you to marry him.”
Her face paled a trifle; she bent her head in acquiescence. Garcide smiled. It had always been that way with the Castles. Their word, once given, ended all matters. And now Garcide was gratified to learn the value of a promise made by a child of ten.
“I wonder,” said Garcide, plaintively, “why you never open your heart to me, Hilda?”
“I wonder, too,” she said; “my father did.”
Garcide turned his flushed face to the window.
Years before, when the firm of Garcide & Castle went to pieces, Peter Castle stood by the wreck to the end, patching it with his last dollar. But the wreck broke up, and he drifted piteously with the débris until a kindly current carried him into the last harbor of all—the port of human derelicts.
Garcide, however, contrived to cling to some valuable flotsam and paddle into calm water, and anchor.
After a few years he built a handsome house above Fiftieth Street; after a few more years he built a new wing for Saint Berold’s Hospital; and after a few more years he did other things equally edifying, but which, if mentioned, might identify him.
Church work had always interested him. As a speculation in moral obligation, he adopted Peter Castle’s orphan, who turned to him in a passion of gratitude and blind devotion. And as she bade fair to rival her dead mother in beauty, and as rich men marry beauty when it is in the market, the Hon. John Garcide decided to control the child’s future. A promise at ten years is quickly made, but he had never forgotten it, and she could not forget.
And now Garcide needed her as he needed mercy from Ophir Steel, which was slowly crushing his own steel syndicate to powder.
The struggle between Steel Plank and James J. Crawford’s Ophir Steel is historical. The pure love of fighting was in Crawford; he fought Garcide to a standstill and then kicked him, filling Garcide with a mixture of terror and painful admiration.
But sheer luck caught at Garcide’s coat-tails and hung there. Crawford, prowling in the purlieus of society, had seen Miss Castle.
The next day Crawford came into Garcide’s office and accepted a chair with such a humble and uneasy smile that Garcide mistook his conciliatory demeanor and attempted to bully him. But when he found out what Crawford wanted, he nearly fainted in an attempt to conceal his astonishment and delight.
“Do you think I’d buy you off with an innocent child?” he said, lashing himself into a good imitation of an insulted gentleman.
Crawford looked out of the window, then rose and walked towards the door.
“Do you think you can bribe me?” shouted Garcide after him. Crawford hesitated.
“Come back here,” said Garcide, firmly; “I want you to explain yourself.”
“I can’t,” muttered Crawford.
“Well—try, anyway,” said Garcide, more amiably.
And now this was the result of that explanation, at least one of the results; and Miss Castle had promised to wed a gentleman in Ophir Steel named Crawford, at the convenience of the Hon. John Garcide.
The early morning sunshine fell across the rugs in the music-room, filling the gloom with golden lights. It touched a strand of hair on Miss Castle’s bent head.
“You’ll like him,” said Garcide, guiltily.
Her hand hung heavily on the piano keys.
“You have no other man in mind?” he asked.
“No, … no man.”
Garcide chewed the end of his cigar.
“Crawford’s a bashful man. Don’t make it hard for him,” he said.
She swung around on the gilded music-stool, one white hand lying among the ivory keys.
“I shall spare us both,” she said; “I shall tell him that it is settled.”
Garcide rose; she received his caress with composure. He made another grateful peck at her chin.
“Why don’t you take a quiet week or two in the country?” he suggested, cheerfully, “Go up to the Sagamore Club; Jane will go with you. You can have the whole place to yourselves. You always liked nature and—er—all that, eh?”
“Oh yes,” she said, indifferently.
That afternoon the Hon. John Garcide sent a messenger to James J. Crawford with the following letter:
“My dear Crawford,—Your manly and straightforward request for permission to address my ward, Miss Castle, has profoundly touched me.
“I have considered the matter, I may say earnestly considered it.
“Honor and the sacred duties of guardianship forbid that I should interfere in any way with my dear child’s happiness if she desires to place it in your keeping. On the other hand, honor and decency prevent me from attempting to influence her to any decision which might prove acceptable to myself.
“I can therefore only grant you the permission you desire to address my ward. The rest lies with a propitious Providence.
“Cordially yours, John Garcide.
“P.S.—My sister, Miss Garcide, and Miss Castle are going to the Sagamore Club to-night. I’ll take you up there whenever you can get away.”
To which came answer by messenger:
“Hon. John Garcide:
“My dear Garcide,—Can’t go for two weeks. My fool nephew Jim is on his vacation, and I don’t know where he is prowling.
Hastily yours,
“James J. Crawford.
“P. S.—There’s a director’s meeting at three. Come down and we’ll settle all quarrels.”
To this the Hon. John Garcide telegraphed: “All right,” and hurriedly prepared to escort his sister and Miss Castle to the mid-day express for Sagamore Hills.