Ford went to Lamont ostensibly to offer his condolences. His intention was to borrow enough money from him to pay back Miss Ann. That he should have succeeded in borrowing a dollar even from that wayward gentleman seems incredible, and yet one of those strange changes had come over “Handsome Jack.” Having played the fool, things took with him a more serious turn of mind. He thought of Sue, and as is often the case with men of his kind, he fell suddenly head over heels in love with her. Not finding him at his house, Ebner Ford found him some days later at his club.
It proved to be a winning day for Ebner Ford. Luck was with him from the first. He explained to Lamont, “man to man,” all that had happened. He found Lamont exceedingly nervous after his spree, but generous, his latter condition of mind, no doubt, due to his heavy winnings and his desire to stand well in favor with Mrs. Ford.
The two men had a heavy luncheon at a near-by chop-house, and at the end of it Lamont would not hear of Sue leaving the apartment. That was out of the question. Over a long cigar he drew breath, and therewith on the spot a check ample enough to make up what Ford owed Miss Ann, and for which he took (not without some polite protest) enough of the United Laundry Association’s gilt-edged preferred as security. He could not believe but that Sue would be overwhelmingly grateful. He intended, also, to hold the loan over Ford, if he ever got ugly over his attentions to his stepdaughter. After all, he reasoned, Sue was not Ford’s daughter. By his generosity he also wished to defeat Enoch of his desire to get the Fords out of the house. Ebner Ford left him at a little after three, every nerve in him tingling over his good luck.
“There ain’t no one can beat me,” he said to himself, as he sauntered out of the greasy door of the chop-house and down Broadway, “when it comes to a crisis. I went to him man to man.” He smiled with satisfaction. “Well, I pulled off the trick, didn’t I? I got what I wanted.” Now and then his lean, long hand felt in his inside pocket to see if Lamont’s magnanimous check was still safe, and having found that it was, he crossed over to a drug-store and bought a fifty-cent box of stale candy for his wife.
“Business acumen,” he muttered, still musing as the clerk wrapped it up and handed him his package of chocolate creams and his change. The stimulus of sudden and easy money buoyed him up into grand good-humor. “Talked to him like a Dutch uncle, didn’t I? Not one man in a thousand could have done what I done to-day.” And in this he was right.
Farther down the thoroughfare he thought of girlie, of the part she had unconsciously but valuably played in the transaction. For all of half an hour he wandered around a department store looking for a bargain to please Sue, but finding they were all expensive, wandered out again and decided some day to surprise her with a new umbrella. “The best money can buy,” he declared, as he boarded a green horse-car, and lighted a fresh cigar Lamont had given him. He stood on the front platform back of the driver, whose big gloved hand had polished continually the knob of the steel brake handle, and whose whip hung limp over the dashboard. They talked of horses in general, and the weather in particular, the toughness of winter especially, and mentioned a few aldermen besides, and the chances on the next election for “ivery dacent hard-workin’ man,” as the veteran driver expressed it. Meanwhile the car rattled on, all its windows shivered and shook as with the ague, and the smell of its kerosene-lamps was noticeable even on the front platform. Now and then the steaming horses stopped for a second’s hard-earned panting rest, while a passenger got on. Now and then Ford nodded back to the conductor to go ahead, but at Madison Square he swung off with an easy “So long” to the driver, and turned into the Hoffman House with an air of a man who had suddenly been lifted out of his troubles forever.
Success is a dangerous stimulant. Ford feared nothing now. What he saw ahead was a wider market for his stock. It is possible he saw in his optimistic, visionary way, in his abject ignorance of men at large, other Lamonts whom he could cajole to a luncheon they paid for and extract from the victim other checks to help him out of “the little ups and downs,” as he called them, of the business world. To Ford to-day the horizon of his affairs had cleared to its zenith, and from that great distance things seemed to be coming his way in droves in so vast a proportion that on his return to Waverly Place he garrulously confessed to his wife all that had happened—even to his interview with Enoch; of Lamont’s devotion to them, and of the stanch and generous proof of his friendship. He explained it all to her as merely natural; that in the business world such little incidents were of daily occurrence, and that no really legitimate business was free from them—and, poor soul, she believed him. The news that Lamont was their friend overshadowed anything that had happened.
Could she have kept the joyful news to herself? Impossible! Scarcely had Sue entered the door, when her mother told her everything. Let us pass over this painful scene—of Sue’s humiliation and rage, of how the poor child went straight to Enoch, of how she sobbed out her heart to him, and how he comforted her like a father, glad in his heart that her eyes were open at last to the worthlessness of a man like Lamont, whom he had openly denounced, whose acquaintance with her he had feared from the very first.
Only when Sue had left him did the torrent of Enoch’s rage burst forth. All that had previously happened was nothing compared to this—that Ebner Ford should have used Sue, his own stepdaughter, as a means to an end; that he had dared obtain money from Lamont, giving him his worthless stock, giving him as collateral carte blanche, as it were, to continue his attentions to Sue as he pleased.
“Good God!” he cried aloud. Then he felt weak and sank into his chair.