The September showing was very encouraging. There were still a great many bankruptcies and losses, but some of them could not be guarded against. Darcy and Winston regularly eschewed speculation, though the latter confessed his fingers sometimes burned to be in the pie.
"But, after all," he said frankly, "if the energy, ingenuity, ambition, and strength that are expended to make certain people buy and sell, over and over, a thing that can be no more valuable than the money it makes year by year, which often is not much,—if this were turned into industrial and commercial channels,—gad! what a country we would be! Our flag would float on every sea, our goods be in every port. And yet they go on, rich to-day because they have beggared their neighbor, poor to-morrow because their neighbor has beggared them. What idiotic business!"
But I must go back a little with my hero. There were many things to occupy his mind, the summer of the "strikes;" yet through it all, like one strain of heavenly harmony in a clash of discord, he came to know the diviner needs of his being. Another man might have been dismayed at the revelation. Like a flash when the horizon is opened, he saw the light; and he knew, from the depths of the darkness the next moment, what manner of storm it would be.
He had never weakened or frittered away his sweetest emotions on the various flirtations that fill the early years of so many men. He had liked and admired Sylvie Barry above all young women he had ever met; but this emotion, though pure and lasting, never stirred the ardor of his soul. Had it really lain untouched so long, or had some vague dream slipped into it the night he and Sylvie had planned the costume for Irene Lawrence, the time he first encountered her beauty in all its vivid splendor? To him she was a glorious young goddess.
The long-ago summer day he had met the two in the phaeton, he was more keenly pained for her sake than his own. To be sure, his first emotion was that of angry indignation, sending the outraged blood through every pulse; then, as it cooled, the act appeared so utterly unwomanly. If she had passed him by carelessly—but to designedly attract his glance, and stab it thus, was as if a giant had taken a club to kill a butterfly because it breathed the fragrance of the rose. He shut out that vision. You can tell what impression she had made upon him, when he always thought of her as he saw her in the glow of Sylvie's pretty parlor, that summer night. His healthy, active temperament never brooded over disagreeable things a moment longer than necessity kept him there.
She faded from his mind by degrees. Even when he took Fred back into the old regard, he thought of her as the possible wife of some millionnaire. When she returned to Yerbury, and shut herself up in stately despair, refusing even Sylvie's proffered sympathy, she puzzled him. How could she, so fond of admiration and gayety, live this nun's life, without the nun's spiritual exaltation? He passed her once or twice in the hall, as he was calling on Fred, but neither made any sign.
Then came that terrible night, when he had found her astray, her brain consumed by the smouldering fire of isolation, when you have only the black, choking smoke that never blazes up in purifying flames. There are thousands of women who have done this, weakly, sentimentally, through the period of adversity that has tried the metal of all souls; but she, being stronger, more self-reliant, could not drop into puerile whining.
At Depford Beach they had come in contact again. There was both attraction and repulsion in these two people, as there often is in strongly-marked, positive natures. She tolerated him because he was Sylvie's lover; despised him, believing that he meant to make a stepping-stone of this girl's wealth and position; and, in spite of herself, felt the current of his strength and buoyant energy. By slow degrees the unwilling truth was forced upon her, that God never created any human soul for its own self-destruction; that there was no absolute virtue in warping and twisting circumstances into chains and bonds, that were ordained for higher, nobler purposes. Her mental disease had run its course. Sylvie's sorrow was the final electric shock that broke the heavy soil of apathy.
Her utter surprise when she found that through all these years Jack Darcy had refrained from influencing Sylvie in his behalf, was something quite indescribable. She thought she had fathomed men's souls with her keen insight, but this man was a Saul amid his peers. Had there been some subtile, far-reaching foundation for Fred's regard in the boyhood days,—something that their eyes, being holden with golden bonds, could not see?
After the marriage there was a certain degree of association, not intimacy. And yet she set herself to watch him. Somewhere she would discern the print of the feet of clay this idol of Fred and Sylvie's possessed.