“Um,” said Carfax, absently rolling a cigarette between his palms. “That was my guess, based upon a word that Hartridge let drop the day I drove him down here to eat with us. I suppose the corollary to that is——”
“That the accident that smashed things this morning was ‘assisted,’ as the others have been. So long as we went on drilling in dead ground it wasn’t worth while to interfere. But now that we are trying a new wrinkle——”
Carfax got up and returned the softened cigarette to its place in his pocket-case.
“I think we’d better sleep on that corollary of yours, Vance,” he suggested mildly. “If it looks as plausible in daylight as it does now, I don’t know but we had better call out the militia and give Rucker more help in the night-watching. Anyway, we’ll see how it stacks up in the morning.”
XI
Rosemary and Rue
THE better impulses had been all to the fore when Tregarvon had wished his friend a fair field and no favor at Highmount. But between a burst of generosity on the spur of a repentant moment and a day-by-day renouncing of a pearl of price there is apt to lie a via dolorosa plentifully bestrewn with stone bruises for misguided feet. On the day following the evening of plain speech Tregarvon toiled manfully with Rucker and the laborers in the repairing of the damaged machinery; but he did it without prejudice to a good many sharp-pointed reflections basing themselves upon Carfax’s blunt accusation, upon the golden youth’s calm interference, and upon the fact that, late in the forenoon, Carfax, apparently tired of looking on and doing nothing at the scene of the repairing activities, had strolled away through the forest in the direction of Highmount.
There was more than one disturbing string to the bow of reflection. At first, Miss Birrell had openly made a good-natured mock of Carfax, with his small affectations to point her gibings; but Tregarvon was now impecunious enough himself to appreciate the potency of money. Miss Richardia had told him a little about the Birrell fortunes—or the lack of them; of the vanishing of the family possessions in the aftermath of the Civil War; of the fact that her father, once the leading jurist of the Cumberland counties—Miss Richardia did not say this, but Tregarvon easily inferred it—had found himself out of touch with the later and more pushing spirit of the New South, and had withdrawn more and more until he had become almost a hermit. The Carfax millions were enough to tempt any young woman; and Carfax himself—Tregarvon admitted it without bitterness—was a man to whom most women were attracted and whom all women trusted.
But was Carfax really in love with Judge Birrell’s daughter? Tregarvon boasted that he had summered and wintered the golden youth; yet there were depths in him that the Philadelphian suspected no one had ever fully plumbed. In Tregarvon’s knowing of him he had always been, or appeared to be, immune to sentiment; his attitude had been that of a gentle-natured soul who was willing to be used, or even abused, without detriment to an impartial affection for the entire sex. Would such a man be able to make Richardia as happy as she deserved to be? In the intimacy which Tregarvon had pressed to its ultimate limits he had come to know that behind the cool, slate-blue eyes and the lips that lent themselves so readily to playful mockery there was a passionate soul which would give all and demand all; which would starve on a diet of mere affection, however kindly and indulgent. Would the Carfax millions outweigh this demand? It was an irritating question, refusing to be answered.
Tregarvon, driving bolts into the patched derrick frame, strove dejectedly to put his own huge misfortune aside as a matter definitely settled. He admitted, with pricklings of shame, the truth, or at least the half-truth, of Carfax’s accusation—the charge of fickleness. In a light-hearted way he had been devoted to many women, for the moment, and the nearest woman had always been the loadstone. He excused the weakness by saying that it was common to all men—thereby touching a truth larger than he knew; excused it further by laying down the broad principle that Richardia Birrell, though numerically the last, was really the first woman who had ever broken through to the inner depths of him.
Just here he had a saving glimpse of the workings of the normal masculine mind, and it jogged his sense of humor. Was not the latest charmer always the pearl of great price; the one altogether lovely? Perhaps; but in this case, he told himself, it was different. The Richardias are few and far between; and he had discovered one of the precious few only to realize that he was bound in honor to relinquish her without a murmur to a Carfax, or even to a Hartridge. It was a part of the irrefrangible vanity of the male to regard the relinquishment as a voluntary virtue on his part. In all the gnawings of the worm of reflection, girdings at his hard lot, questionings as to Richardia’s future happiness, gratulatory back-pattings at his own magnanimity in leaving the field to Carfax, it did not occur to him that Richardia, herself, might have had something to say to his own suit—if he had been able, as a man of honor, to press it. Like many other men, he comforted himself with the cheerful assumption that, in the absence of the abnormal obstacles, any man may win any woman, if he shall only put his mind to it; a doctrine, it may be said, which is still lacking proof in certain isolated instances.