Markham knew little of business and hated it cordially, but he had heard enough of this affair to be sure that, whatever the courts had decided, Oliver Herrick had been unfairly dealt with and that a part, at least, of Peter Challoner's fortune belonged morally, at least, to the inconsiderable mite of femininity who read proof in a publisher's office in New York. He knew something of the law of the survival of the fittest, for he himself had survived the long struggle for honors which had put him at last in a position where he felt secure at least from the pinch of poverty, and whatever Oliver Herrick's failings among the larger forces with which he had been brought into contact, Markham knew him to have been an honest man, a good father and a faithful gentleman. Something was wrong with a world which pinched the righteous between the grindstones of progress and let the evil prosper.
It was an unfairness which descended to the second generation and would descend through the years until the equalizing forces of character and will—or the lack of them—brought later generations to the same level of condition. Markham could not help comparing Hermia Challoner with her less fortunate sister—Hermia Challoner, the courted, the fêted, who had but to wish for a thing to have it granted, with Dorothy Herrick, the neglected and forgotten, who was bartering her youth for twelve dollars a week and was glad to get the money; one, who boasted that the only value life had for her was what she could get out of it, with the other, who almost felt it a privilege to be permitted to live at all. The more he thought of these two girls, the more convincing was his belief that Miss Herrick did not suffer by the comparison. She was doing just what thousands of other girls were doing in New York, with no more patience and no more self-sacrifice than they, but the childish vagaries of his visitor, still fresh in his memory, seemed to endow Dorothy Herrick with a firmer contour, a stronger claim on his interest and sympathies.
And yet—this little madcap aviatrix disclosed a winning directness and simplicity which charmed and surprised him. She was a joyous soul. He could not remember a morning when he had been so completely abstracted from the usual current of thought and occupation as today, and whatever the faults bequeathed by her intrepid father, she was, as Markham had said to Olga, quite human. There were possibilities in the child-and it seemed a pity that no strong guiding hand led the way on a road like hers, which had so many turnings. She was only an overgrown child as yet, flat chested, slender, almost a boy, and yet redeemed to femininity by an unconscious coquetry which she could no more control than she could the warm flush of her blood; a child indeed, full of quick impulses for good or for evil.
Markham rose, knocked the ash out of his pipe, walked over to his canvas, set it up against the porch pillar and examined it leisurely. But in a moment he took it indoors and added it to the pile in the living-room, fetching a fresh canvas and carrying his easel and paint-box over the hill to another spot, a shady one among the rocks where he had already painted many times.
He worked a while and then sat and smoked again, his thoughts afar. What sort of an influence was Olga Tcherny for the mind of this impressionable child? The Countess was clever, generous and wonderfully attractive to men and to women but, as Markham knew, her views of life were liberal and she was not wise—at least, not with a wisdom which would help Hermia Challoner. One doesn't live for ten years in Paris in the set in which Markham had met her without absorbing something of its careless creed, its loose ethical and moral standards. New York society, he knew, reflected much that was bad, and much that was good of the gay worlds of Paris and London; for Americans are unexcelled in the talent of imitation, but from phrases that had passed Olga's lips he knew that she had outgrown her own country.
Markham tried to paint but things went wrong and so he gave it up, swearing silently at the interruption which had spoiled his day. After lunch he tried it again with no better success, and finally gave it up and, taking a book, went out on a point of rocks where the tide swirled and cast in a fishing line, not because he hoped to catch anything but because fishing, of all the resources available, had most surely the ways of peace. The book was a French treatise on the Marxian philosophies—dull reading for a summer's day when the water lapped merrily at one's feet, the breeze sighed softly, laden with the odors of the mysterious deeps, and sea and sky beckoned him invitingly into the realms of adventure and delight, so dull that, the fish biting not, Markham dozed, and at last rolled over in the sunlight and slept.
How long he lay there he did not know. He was awakened by the exhaust of a launch close at hand and sat up so quickly that "Karl Marx," rudely jostled by his elbow, went sliding over the edge of the rock and into the sea. But there was no time at present to bewail this calamity for the man in the launch had brought her inshore and hailed him politely.
"Mr. Markham?" he questioned.
Markham nodded. "That's my name," he said.
"A note for you." The launch moved slowly in toward the landing and
Markham met his visitor, already aware that there was to be a further
intrusion on his solitude. He broke the seal of the note and read.
It was from Hermia Challoner.