‘Miss Marcia,’ he said slowly, ‘I wish you wouldn’t take this matter so badly. Your uncle was out of his senses when he talked to you, and he didn’t realize what he was saying. He feels awfully cut up about it. He told me to-night that he was afraid he had spoiled your summer, and that he wouldn’t have hurt you for the world.’
Marcia’s eyes suddenly filled with tears and she bit her lip. Sybert leaned forward and poked the fire.
‘I should like to talk to you about your uncle,’ he said, with his eyes fixed on the embers. ‘He is one of the finest men I have ever known. And it is not often that a man in his position amounts to much—that is, as a human being; the temptations are all the other way. Most men, you know, with leisure and his tastes would—well, go in for collecting carved ivory and hammered silver and all that rubbish. Nobody understands what he is trying to do, least of all the people he is doing it for. He does it very quietly and in his own way, and he doesn’t ask for thanks. Still, just a little appreciation would be grateful; and, instead of that, he is abused at every turn. This wheat business increased the feeling against him, and naturally he feels sore. The other evening he’d just been reading some articles about the trouble in a Roman paper, and I had been telling him about your encounter with the village people when you came in. It was an unfortunate moment you chose, and he forgot himself. I wish you would be as kind to him as you can, for he has a good many critics outside, and—’ Sybert hesitated an instant—‘he needs a little sympathy at home.’
Marcia drew a deep breath.
‘I understand about Uncle Howard,’ she said. ‘I used to think sometimes—’ she hesitated too—‘that he wasn’t very happy, but I didn’t know the reason. Of course I don’t blame him for what he said; I know he was worried, and I know he didn’t mean it. In any case, I should rather know the truth. But about the wheat,’ she continued, ‘my father is not to blame the way you think he is. He and Uncle Howard don’t understand each other, but I understand them both, and if I had known sooner I could have stopped it. He didn’t have the remotest idea of harming Italy or any other country. He just thought about getting ahead of a lot of others, and—you know what men are like—making people look up to him. He’s very quick; he sees things faster than other men; he knows what’s going to happen ahead of time, and you can’t expect him not to take advantage of it. Of course’—she flushed—‘he wants to make money, too; but it isn’t all that, for he doesn’t use it after he gets it made. It’s the beating others that he likes—the power it gives him. I’m afraid,’ she added, with a slightly pathetic smile, ‘that I shall have to go home and look after him.’
‘Oh, certainly, Miss Marcia, we all know that your father had no thought of deliberately harming Italy or any other country. And, as a matter of fact, the American wheat corner has not had so much to do with the trouble as the Italian government would have us believe. The simple truth is that your father has been used as a scapegoat. While the Roman papers have been suggestively silent on many points, they have had much to say of the American Wheat King.’
‘Have the things they said been very bad?’
Sybert smiled a trifle.
‘There’s not been much, to tell the truth, that he will care to cut out and paste in his scrap-book.’
‘Our party, next week, seems heartless, doesn’t it—sort of like giving a ball while the people next door are having a funeral? I wanted to give it up, but Uncle Howard looked so hurt when I proposed it that I didn’t say anything more about it.’