CHAPTER XX

THE ENEMY TRIUMPHS

Sometimes the history of any household progresses rapidly in closely related scenes of action; but, for the most part, months pa.s.s by during which life has apparently ceased to act. Everything that had seemed tending toward catastrophe stopped, as it were, with the departure of Grace Noir. Possibly the climax was still ahead; if so, the waters were at present heaped high on this side of ultimate disaster, and on the other side, leaving, between past and future, a dry no-thoroughfare.

Old Mrs. Jefferson would long ago have struck a blow against Grace Noir had she not recognized the fact that when one like Grace wears the helmet of beauty and breastplate of youth, the darts of the very angles of justice, who are neither beautiful nor young, are turned aside. Helplessly Mrs. Jefferson had watched and waited and now, behold! there was no more Dragon. Fran had said she would do it-- nothing could have exceeded the confidence of the old lady in the new secretary.

Mrs. Gregory's sense of relief was not so profound as her mother's, because she could not think of Grace's absence except as a reprieve.

Surely she would return--but the present was to be placidly enjoyed.

To observers, Mrs. Gregory appeared ever placid, not because of indifference, but, as it was supposed, from blindness. Under the calm exterior of the wronged wife, there seemed no smoldering fire awaiting a favorable wind. In truth, she was always fearing that people would discover her husband's sentimental bearing toward his secretary--and always hoping that if they did, they would conclude the wife understood best and felt no alarm.

In the meantime, Grace was gone. Mrs. Gregory's smile once more reminded Fran of the other's half-forgotten youth. When a board has laid too long on the ground, one finds, on its removal, that the gra.s.s is withered; all the same, the gra.s.s feels the sunshine.

Fran thanked herself that Grace was no longer silhouetted against the horizon, and Gregory, remarking this att.i.tude of self-congratulation, was thrown more than ever out of sympathy with his daughter. Fran was indefatigable in her duties as secretary, but her father felt that it was not the same. She could turn out an immense amount of work because she was strong and playing for high stakes--but she did not have Grace's methodical ways--one never knew how Fran would do anything, only that she would do it. Grace was all method, but more than that she was, as Gregory phrased it to himself--she was all Grace.

Gregory missed her every minute of the day, and the harder Fran tried to fill her place, the more he resented it. He divined that Fran hated the routine, the monotonous forms of charity, the duplicated copies of kind acts, the rows of figures representing so many unfortunates.

Instead of acknowledging to himself that his daughter did the work from a yearning for his love, from a resolution to save him from the Grace-infatuation by absent treatment, he perversely rebelled at her secretly rejoicing over a conquered foe. Fran was separated from his sympathies by the chasm in his own soul.

The time came when Gregory felt that he must see Grace again and be alone with her. At first, he had thought they must not meet apart from the world; but by the end of the week, he was wondering what excuse he could offer to induce her to meet him--not at Miss Sapphira's, where she now boarded, not at the grocery where Bob was always hovering about--but somewhere remote, somewhere safe, where they might talk about--but he had no idea of the conversation that might ensue; there was nothing definite in anything save his fixed thought of being with her. As to any harm, there could be none. He had so long regarded Grace as the best woman in the world, that even after the day of kisses, his mind continued in its inertia of faith,--even the gravitation of material facts were unable to check its sublime course.

It was at the close of a July day that Hamilton Gregory left his house resolved, at any cost--save that of exposure--to experience once more the only pleasure life held in reserve for him: nearness to Grace Noir. She might be at the store, since all shops were to remain open late, in hopes of reaping sordid advantages from the gaiety of mankind. In a word, Littleburg was in the grip of its first street fair.

Before going down-town, Gregory strolled casually within sight of the Clinton boarding-house.

Only Miss Sapphira was on the green veranda. She had watched the ceaseless streams of humanity pouring along either sidewalk, destined for the heart of the small town,--countless hordes, reenforced from rural districts by excursion trains. From the very ground they seemed to spring, these autochthones of confetti and side-shows. On they flowed, stormy with horn and whistle and hideous balloons whose horrid pipes squealed the music of modern Pan; they overwhelmed the native population with elusive tickler and rubber-stringed ball; here were to be seen weary mothers reaching forth for greater weariness; joy- scourged fathers driven to the money-changers; frenzied children at last in Fairyland.

Miss Sapphira, recognizing Gregory, waved a solemn greeting, and he felt rea.s.sured--for he was always afraid Robert--would "tell". He pushed his way nearer. Miss Sapphira sat in the huge chair not as if unable to rise, but as a tangible rebuke to carnal amus.e.m.e.nts. She spoke to Gregory on the subject of which she was full to the brim-- and Miss Sapphira was of generous capacity--

"No wonder so few go to church!"

"Is Miss Noir here?" Gregory asked in a strained voice; the confusion hid the odd catch his voice had suffered in getting over the name.

"No. She's down-town--but not at any show, you may be sure. She's left late at the store because--I guess you've heard Abbott Ashton has been away a long time."

"I have heard nothing of the young man," Gregory replied stiffly.

"Well, he's been off two or three weeks somewhere, n.o.body knows unless it's Bob, and Bob won't tell anything any more. Abbott wrote he'd be home to-night, and Bob drove over to Simmtown to meet him in the surrey, so Miss Grace is alone down there--" She nodded ponderously.

"Alone!" he exclaimed involuntarily.

"Yes--I look for Bob and Abbott now just any minute." She added, eying the crowd--"I saw Fran on the street, long and merry ago!" Her accent was that of condemnation. Like a rock she sat, letting the fickle populace drift by to minstrel show and snake den. The severity of her double chin said they might all go thither--_she_ would not; let them be swallowed up by that gigantic serpent whose tail, too long for bill-board ill.u.s.tration, must needs be left to coil in the imagination --but the world should see that Miss Sapphira was safe from deglut.i.tion, either of frivolity or anaconda.

That was also Gregory's point of view; and even in his joy at finding the coast clear, he paused to say, "I am sorry that Fran seems to have lost all reason over this carnival company. If she would show half as much interest in her soul's welfare--"

He left the sentence unfinished. The thought of Grace had grown supreme--it seemed to illuminate some wide and splendid road into a glorious future.

The bookkeeper's desk was in a gallery near the ceiling of the Clinton grocery store; one looked thence, through a picket-fence, down upon the only floor. Doubtless Grace, thus looking, saw him coming. When he reached her side, he was breathless, partly from his struggle through the ma.s.ses, princ.i.p.ally from excitement of fancied security.

She was posting up the ledger, and made no sign of recognition until he called her name.

"Mr. Clinton is not here," she said remotely. "Can I do anything for you?"

He admired her calm courtesy. If at the same time she could have been reserved and yielding he would have found the impossible combination perfect. Because it was impossible, he was determined to preserve her angelic purity in imagination, and to restore her womanly charm to actual being.

"How can you receive me so coldly," he said impulsively, "when I've not seen you for weeks?"

"You see me at church," she answered impersonally.

"But I have been dying to be near you, to talk to you--"

"Stop!" she held up her hand. "You should know that Mr. Clinton and I are--"

"Grace!" he groaned.

She whispered, her face suddenly growing pale, "Are engaged." The tete-a-tete was beyond her supposed strength. His melodious voice, a.s.sociated in her mind with divine worship; the burning of those beautiful eyes in which she seemed to see her own love; the att.i.tude of his arms as if, not knowing it, he were reaching out for her--all this was hard for her to resist.

"Engaged!" he echoed, as if she had p.r.o.nounced one of the world's great tragedies. "Then you will give yourself to that man--yourself, Grace, that beautiful self--and without love? It's a crime! Don't commit the horrible blunder that's ruined my life. See what wretchedness has come to me--"

"Then you think," very slowly, "that I ought to let Fran ruin my whole life because your wife has ruined yours? Then you think that after I have been driven out of the house to make room for Fran, that I ought to stay single because you married unwisely?"

"Grace, don't say you are driven out."

"What do you call it? A resignation?"

"Grace!--we have only a few moments to be alone. For pity's sake, look at me kindly and use another tone--a tone like the dear days when you were by my side....We may never be together again."

She looked at him with the same repellent expression, and spoke in the same bitter tone: "Well, suppose we're not? You and that Fran will be together."

In his realization that it was Fran, and Fran alone, who separated them, Gregory pa.s.sed into a state of anger, to which his love added recklessness. "Grace, hate me if you must, but you shall not misunderstand me!"

She laughed. "Please don't ask me to understand you, Mr. Gregory, while you hide the only secret to your understanding. Don't come to me with pretended liking when what you call 'mysterious business interests at Springfield' drive me from your door, and keep Fran at my desk."

He interposed in a low pa.s.sionate voice. "I am resolved that you should know everything. Fran--is my own daughter."

She gave no sign save a sudden compression of the mouth; nevertheless, her surprise was extreme. Her mind flashed along the wires of the past and returned illuminated to the present entanglement.

He thought her merely stunned, and burst forth: "I tell you, Fran is my child. Now you know why I'm compelled to do what she wants. That's the secret Bob brought from Springfield. That's the secret Abbott Ashton hung over my head--the traitor! after I'd befriended him! All of my ungrateful friends have conspired to ruin me, to force you from me by this secret. But you know it now, and I've escaped its danger.

You know it!"

"And does your wife know?"