“Mr. Brownley, I have just come from Sands Landing. I am very anxious to talk with you on a business matter. I have brought a letter to you from my father. If you have other engagements I can wait until Monday, although,” and the black veiling lashes lifted, showing the half-laughing, half-pathetic eyes, “I wanted much to lay my business before you at the earliest minute possible.”
There was a faint touch of appeal in the charming voice as she spoke that was irresistible, and we were both willing to forget we had lunch waiting us on the Tribesman.
“Step into my office, Miss Sands, and all my time is yours,” said Bob, as he opened the door between his office and mine. After I had sent a note to my wife, saying we might be delayed for an hour or two, I settled down to wait for Bob in the general office, and it was a long wait. Thirty minutes went into an hour and an hour into two before Bob and Miss Sands came out. After he had put her in a cab for her hotel, he said in a tone curiously intent: “Jim, I have got to talk with you, got to get some of your good advice. Suppose we hustle along to the yacht and after lunch you tell Kate we have some business to go over. I don’t want to keep that girl waiting any longer than possible for an answer I cannot give until I get your ideas.” After lunch, on the bow end of the upper deck Bob relieved himself. Relieved is the word, for from the minute he had put Miss Sands into the carriage until then, it was evident even to my wife that his thoughts were anywhere but upon our outing.
“Jim,” he began in a voice that shook in spite of his efforts to make it sound calm, “there is no disguising the fact that I am mightily worked up about this matter, and I want to do everything possible for this girl. No need of my telling you how sacred we have got to keep what she has just let me into. You’ll see as I go along that it is sacred, and I know you will look at it as I do. Miss Sands must be helped out of her trouble.
“Judge Lee Sands, her father, is the head of the old Sands family of Virginia. The Virginia Sands don’t take off their bonnets to another family in this country, or elsewhere, for that matter, for anything that really counts. They have had brains, learning, money, and fixed position since Virginia was first settled. They are the best people of our State. It is a cross-road saying in Virginia that a Sands of Sands Landing can go to the bench, the United States Senate, the House, or the governor’s chair for the starting, and nearly all of the men folks have held one or all of these honours for generations. The present judge has held them all. I don’t know him personally, although my people and his have been thick from away back. Sands Landing on the James is some fifty miles above our home. The judge, Beulah Sands’s father, is close on to seventy, and I have heard mother and father say is a stalwart, a Virginia stalwart. Being rich—that is, what we Virginians call rich, a million or so—he has been very active in affairs, and I knew before his daughter told me, that he was the trustee for about all the best estates in our part of the country. It seems from what she tells, that of late he has been very active in developing our coal-mines and railroads, and that particularly he took a prominent hand in the Seaboard Air Line. You know the road, for your father was a director, and I think the house has been prominent in its banking affairs. Now, Jim, this poor girl, who, it seems, has recently been acting as the judge’s secretary, has just learned that that coup of Reinhart and his crowd has completely ruined her father. The decline has swamped his own fortune, and, what is worse, a million to a million and a half of his trust funds as well, and the old judge—well, you and I can understand his position. Yet I do not know that you just can, either, for you do not quite understand our Virginia life and the kind of revered position a man like Judge Sands occupies. You would have to know that to understand fully his present purgatory and the terrible position of this daughter, for it seems that since he began to get into deep water he has been relying upon her for courage and ideas. From our talk I gather she has a wonderful store of up-to-date business notions, and I am convinced from what she lays out that the judge’s affairs are hopeless, and, Jim, when that old man goes down it will be a smash that will shake our State in more ways than one.
“Up to now the girl has stood up to the blow like a man and has been able to steady the judge until he presents an exterior that holds down suspicion as to his real financial condition, although she says Reinhart and his Baltimore lawyer, from the ruthless way they put on the screws to shake out his holdings in the Air Line, must have a line on it that the judge is overboard. The old gentleman can keep things going for six months longer without jeopardising any of the remaining trust funds, of which he has some two millions, and while his wife, who is an invalid, knows the judge is in some trouble, she does not suspect his real position. His daughter says that when the blow came, that day of the panic, when Reinhart jammed the stock out of sight and scuttled her father’s bankers and partners in the road, the Wilsons of Baltimore, she had a frightful struggle to keep her father from going insane. She told me that for three days and nights she kept him locked in their rooms at their hotel in Baltimore, to prevent him from hunting Reinhart and his lawyer Rettybone and killing them both, but that at last she got him calmed down and together they have been planning.
“Jim, it was tough to sit there and listen to the schemes to recoup that this old gentleman and this girl, for she is only twenty-one, have tried to hatch up. The tears actually rolled down my cheeks as I listened; I couldn’t help it; you couldn’t either, Jim. But at last out of all the plans considered, they found only one that had a tint of hope in it, and the serious mention of even that one, Jim, in any but present circumstances, would make you think we were dealing with lunatics. But the girl has succeeded in making me think it worth trying. Yes, Jim, she has, and I have told her so, and I hope to God that that hard-headed horse-sense of yours will not make you sit down on it.”
Bob Brownley had got to his feet; he was slipping the shackles of that fiery, romantic, Southern passion that years in college and Wall Street had taught him to keep prisoner. His eyes were flashing sparks. His nostrils vibrated like a deer buck’s in the autumn woods. He faced me with his hands clinched.
“Jim Randolph,” he went on, “as I listened to that girl’s story of the terrible cruelty and devilish treachery practised by the human hyenas you and I associate with, human hyenas who, when in search of dirty dollars—the only thing they know anything about—put to shame the real beasts of the wilds—when I listened, I tell you that I felt it would not give me a twinge of conscience to put a ball through that slick scoundrel Reinhart. Yes, and that hired cur of his, too, who prostitutes a good family name and position, and an inherited ability the Almighty intended for more honest uses than the trapping of victims on whose purses his gutter-born master has set lecherous eyes. And, Jim, as I listened, a troop of old friends invaded my memory—friends whom I have not seen since before I went to Harvard, friends with whom I spent many a happy hour in my old Virginia home, friends born of my imagination, stalwart, rugged crusaders, who carried the sword and the cross and the banner inscribed ‘For Honour and for God.’ Old friends who would troop into my boyhood and trumpet, ‘Bob, don’t forget, when you’re a man, that the goal is honour, and the code: Do unto your neighbour as you would have your neighbour do unto you. Don’t forget that millions is the crest of the groundlings.’ And, Jim, I thought my friends looked at me with reproachful eyes, as they said, ‘You are well on the road, Bob Brownley, and in time your heart and soul will bear the hall-mark of the snaky S on the two upright bars, and you will be but a frenzied fellow in the Dirty Dollar army.’ Jim, Jim Randolph, as I listened to that agonising tale of the changing of that girl’s heaven to hell, I did not see that halo you and I have thought surrounded the sign of Randolph & Randolph. I did not see it, Jim, but I did see myself, and I didn’t feel proud of the picture. My God, Jim, is it possible you and I have joined the nobility of Dirty Dollars? Is it possible we are leaving trails along our life’s path like that Reinhart left through the home of these Virginians, such trails as this girl has shown me?”
Bob had worked himself into a state of frenzy. I had never seen him so excited as when he stood in front of me and almost shouted this fierce self-denunciation.