Porter he had known simply in a business way. From the first he had felt that Ringwood would pass out of its owner's possession, and he had begun to covet it. The Lauzanne race had been Langdon's planning altogether. Crane, cold-blooded as he was, would not have robbed a man he had business dealings with deliberately. He had told his trainer to win, if possible, a race with Lauzanne, and get rid of him. That Langdon's villainous scheme had borne evil fruit for John Porter was purely a matter of chance selection. There was a Mephistophelean restitution in not striving to wrest the Eclipse from Lucretia with The Dutchman.
And now, in this year, had come the entirely new experience of an affection—his admiration for Allis Porter. It conflicted with every other emotion that governed his being. All his life he had been selfish—considering only Philip Crane, his mind unharrassed by anything but business obstacles in his ambitious career. Love for this quiet, self-contained girl, unadorned by anything but the truth, and honesty, and fearlessness that were in her big steadfast eyes, had come upon him suddenly and with an assertive force that completely mastered him. By a mere chance he had heard Allis give her recitation, “The Run of Crusader,” in the little church at Brookfield. Crane was not an agnostic, but he had interested himself little in church matters; and the Reverend Dolman's concert, that was meant to top down many weeds of debt that were choking the church, had claimed him simply because an evening in Brookfield had come to hang heavily on his hands. Now when the Reverend Dolman received Philip Crane's check for fifty dollars the next day, to be applied to the church encumbrance, he sought to allay his surprise by attributing the gift to his own special pleading that evening, of course backed up by Providence. If anybody had stated that the mainspring of the gift had been the wicked horse-racing poem of their denunciation he would have been scandalized and full of righteous disbelief. It is quite likely that even Crane would have denied that Allis's poem had inspired him to the check; but nevertheless it had.
The world of feeling and sympathy and goodness that had hung in her voice had set a new window in his soul slightly ajar—so slightly ajar that even now, months afterward, the lovelight was only beginning to stream through. When love comes to a man at forty he is apt to play the game very badly indeed; he turns it into a very anxious business, and moves through the light-tripping measure with the pedantic dignity of a minuet dancer. But Philip Crane was not given to making mistakes; he knew that, like Crusader, “His best racing days (in the love stakes) were over”—especially where the woman was but a girl. So he sat down and planned it all out as he planned to win the Brooklyn Derby months later. And all the time he was as sincerely in love as if he had blundered into many foolishness; but his love making was to be diplomatic. Even now all the gods of Fate stood ranged on his side; Allis's brother was in his bank, more or less dependent upon him; Ringwood itself was all but in the bank; he stood fairly well with John Porter, and much better with Allis's mother, for already he had begun to ingratitate himself with Mrs. Porter. He would cast from the shoulders of the Reverend Dolman a trifle more of the load he was carrying. He would send the reverend gentleman another check.
Why he should think it necessary to prepare his suit with so much subtlety he hardly knew; in all reason he should be considered a fair match for Allis Porter. He was not a bad man as the world understood him; he did not profess Christianity, but, on the other hand, his life was extremely respectable; he did not drink; he was not given to profane language; even in racing his presence seemed to lend an air of respectability to the sport, and it was generally supposed that he raced purely for relaxation. In truth, it seemed to him that his marriage with Allis would be a deuced good thing for the Porters.
In actuality there were just two things that stood in the way—two things which his position and wealth could not obviate—his age, and the Porter pride. If Porter had not been dubbed “Honest John” early in life, he might have been saddled with “Proud Porter” later on. The pride had come up out of old Kentucky with all the other useless things—the horse-racing, and the inability to make money, and the fancy for keeping a promise. Something whispered to Crane that Allis would never come to him simply out of love; it might be regard, esteem, a desire to please her parents, a bowing to the evident decree of fate. Perhaps even the very difficulty of conquest made Crane the more determined to win, and made him hasten slowly.
IX
As a rule few visitors went to Ringwood.
John Porter had been too interested in his horses and his home life to care much for social matters. Mrs. Porter was a home-body, too, caring nothing at all for society—at best there was but little of it in Brookfield—except where it was connected with church work. Perhaps that was one reason why Allis had grown so close into her father's life. It was a very small, self-contained household.
Mike Gaynor had become attached to the staff at Ringwood this winter as a sort of assistant trainer to Porter. Dixon only trained the Ringwood horses during the racing season, Porter always supervising them in winter quarters. Perhaps it was Porter's great cloud of evil fortune which had cast its sinister influence over Mike because of his sympathy for the master of Ringwood; certain it is that the autumn found him quite “on his uppers,” as he graphically described his financial standing. An arrangement was made by which Mike's disconsolate horses were fed at Ringwood, and he took care of both strings. This delighted Allis, for she had full confidence in Gaynor's integrity and good sense.