The Ball of Fire

by George Randolph Chester; Lillian Chester

But let her first take up the case of her Uncle Jim. She had not dared go with her news to hot-tempered Jim Sargent. His first impulse would have been one of violence, and she could not see that a murder on her soul, and her Uncle Jim in jail as a murderer, and her name figuring large, with her photograph in the pages of the free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press, would help any one in the present dilemma. Yet even a warning, to her Uncle Jim, of impending financial danger might bring about this very same result, for he had a trick of turning suddenly from the kind and indulgent and tremendously admiring uncle, into a stern parent, and firing one imperative question after another at her, in the very image and likeness of her own father; and that was an authoritative process which she knew she could not resist. Yet Uncle Jim must be protected! How? It was easy enough to say that he must be, and yet could he be? Could he even protect himself? She shook her head as she gazed, with unseeing eyes, out of the daintily curtained port hole upon the river, with its swarm of bustling small craft.

Where to turn for advice, or even to have a sharer in the burden which she felt must surely crush her. There was no one. It was a burden she must bear alone, unless she could devise some plan of effective action, and the sense of how far she had been responsible for this condition of affairs was one which oppressed her, and humbled her, and deepened the circles about her woe-smitten eyes.

She had been guilty. In a rush of remorse and repentance, she over-blamed herself. She did not allow, in her severe self-injustice, for the natural instincts which had led her into a full and free commingling with all this new circle; for, as Arly later put it for her by way of comfort, how was she to know if she did not find out. Now, however, she allowed herself no grain of comfort, or sympathy, or relief, from the stern self-arraignment through which she put herself. She had been wicked, she told herself. Had she delved deeply enough into her own heart, and acknowledged what she saw there, and had she abided by that knowledge, she could have spared her many suitors a part of the pain and humiliation she had caused them by her refusal. She had not been surprised by any of them. With the infliction of but very slight pain, she could have stopped them long before they came to the point of proposal, she saw that now. Why had she not done so? Pride! That was the answer. The pleasure of being so eagerly sought, the actually spoken evidence of her popularity, and the flattery of having aroused in all these big men emotions so strong that they took the sincere form of the offering of a lifetime of devotion. And she, who had prated to herself so seriously of marriage, had held it as so sacred a thing, she had so toyed with it, and had toyed, too, with that instinct in these good men!

In the light of her experience with Allison, she began to distrust her own sincerity, and for some minutes she floundered in that Slough of Despond.

But no, out of that misery she was able to emerge clear of soul. Her worst fault had been folly. An instinctive groping for that other part of her, which nature had set somewhere, unlabelled, to make of the twain a complete and perfect human entity, had led her into all her entanglements, even with Allison. And again the darkness deepened around her troubled eyes.

After all, had she but known it, she had a greater fault than folly. Inexperience. Her charm was another, her youth, her beauty, her virility—and her sympathy! These were her true faults, and the ones for which every attractive girl must suffer. There is no escape. It is the great law of compensation. Nature bestows no gift of value for which she does not exact a corresponding price.

Gail took her little fists from their pressure into the brown coverlet, and held her temples between the fingertips of either hand; and the brown hair, springing into wayward ringlets from the salt-breeze which blew in at the half opened window, rippled down over her slender hands, as if to soothe and comfort them. She had been wasting her time in introspection and self-analysis when there was need for decisive action! Fortunately she had a respite until Monday morning. In the past few days of huge commercial movements which so vitally interested her, she had become acquainted with business methods, to a certain extent, and she knew that nothing could be done on Saturday afternoon or Sunday; therefore her Uncle Jim was safe for two nights and a day. Then Allison would deny the connection of her Uncle Jim’s road with the A.-P., and the beginning of the destruction of the Sargent family would be thoroughly accomplished! She had been given a thorough grasp of how easily that could be done. What could she do in two nights and a day? It was past her ingenuity to conceive. She must have help!

But from whom could she receive it? Tod Boyd? The same reason which made her think of him first made her swiftly place him last. Her Uncle Jim? Too hotheaded. Her Aunt Grace? Too inexperienced. Her Aunt Helen? Too conventional. Lucile, Ted, Dick? She laughed. Arly?

There was a knock on her door, and Arly herself appeared.

“Selfish,” chided Arly. “We’re all wanting you.”