Dangerous Business/Chapter 24
In the cold recounting of a great attempt made and won, the news from Lake Superior reached Jay in the morning. He was in Westchester at his sister's and was at breakfast with Ralph, who first had the newspaper.
"They got 'em!" exclaimed Ralph, in a tone of personal pleasure. "They got those men off the mast last night."
Jay went over beside him and started at sight of "Blenmora." He did not, for a minute, speak. Ralph kept talking.
"Powell," he said. "The captain of the ore-ship is Powell. Isn't"
"He's her father," said Jay. "Ellen Powell's father."
Ralph looked up at Jay suddenly and stared; he looked away and up at Jay again. Then he handed Jay the paper and Jay carried it into the drawing-room.
He imagined Ellen receiving it as he had but on a street corner, likely, when she went out to breakfast. Jay wanted no breakfast. By hurrying, he could catch an earlier train to the city.
He found Ellen at work, but white and very subdued, and she was so silent, when he spoke to her of her father, that he asked: "Nothing happened to the Blenmora later, did there? You've not had any personal news?"
"No," said Ellen, "I've not heard at all from home. I don't fear there's anything wrong."
"How did you hear it?" asked Jay.
"On the radio last night," said Ellen, looking at him steadily. Would he ask where and with whom?
He didn't. "I saw it was relayed," he replied. "It happened about eleven o'clock out there. People all over the country heard it—and you did."
"It was like being there—without any body yourself," said Ellen.
"No wonder you're done up. You ought to rest to-day. You ought to go home. I mean to Michigan."
"Why? Father won't be home. He'll have left the men at Ashland and be loading ore in Duluth to-day. They'll be eastbound to-morrow. He'll pass home, south, and just see it. They'll just see the ship. The straits won't close for a month yet."
Jay's business, that day, was with Lyman Howarth and it had progressed to a point of meetings with the seniors in the president's offices; but Lyman did not take Jay at once into the meeting.
"I was in on something last night," Lyman told him. "Slengel was giving a party. I ran around and ran into it. We had a radio, Jay, which we were using between dances and we got that rescue on it. God, how we got it, Jay! And do you know what? The daughter of the master of the Blenmora was there. We saw her get it at the party."
"What?" demanded Jay. "What did you say?"
"I said at the party which Slengel gave, a fellow brought in the daughter of Powell, who took off those men; and she was there and got it! I'd been noticing the girl; she was a nice-looking girl. I'd been wondering about her and . . ." he told Jay all about it.
After he had heard it, Jay was obliged to go into the conference, but Ralph arrived to bear the burden of negotiation.
Ralph was elated when Jay and he left. He clapped Jay on the back: "Got 'em. We got 'em! Got 'em from Slengel, b'God. I'd as soon have L. K. Howarth Sr., look at me and say, 'I'm satisfied. We will arrange it' as see his name on a signed order. It's done, with him. He's sold."
Jay did not jubilate. He did not doubt that Ralph and he had Howarth; he knew it. Lyman, privately, had just told him so. Knowing it, he did not know what to do with the knowledge.
He could not yet telegraph it to his father. When the order was signed, he would; that would be some satisfaction; some . . . but the rest was run from him. He could not take his trophy to Ellen Powell. He could not return to her at all. Gone again, and this time forever, his end of day with her. Gone—gone, end of day with her in Chicago; gone his incomparable day—that day begun with cock-crow and wood smoke, gray eyes and brown hands on a blue bowl of berries; brown arms and legs in the sun of the lake and the swim to the little boat; gone the delight of talk together on the hill; gone the joy and reluctance of parting at the roadside under the dance of the dead. She had accompanied Lew Alban to the party last night. Upon the evening of Lew's return, she had gone out with him. She must—miserably, Jay thought—have resumed a friendship with Lew developed before.
So Jay could not return to the office; but he could find no satisfaction anywhere else. He wanted to go nowhere else.
He went to the office.
Ellen knew, at sight of him, that he had been told. She knew he had been with the Howarths and she realized that the quiet young man, whom she'd liked and who was so important to Art Slengel, must have been Lyman; and she was certain that Lyman would have related to Jay the event which had surprised the party last night.
She did not speak to Jay and he sat down in Ralph's chair. He put up no pretense of having anything to do; and she sat with her hands before her, looking at him.
Finally Jay said: "I came from Howarths'."
"I saw one of the Mr. Howarths last night," replied Ellen.
"Lyman."
"Yes. . . . I was with Lew Alban."
Jay pushed himself upon his feet. "Lyman didn't know who you were—that you were anybody to me. I mean that you and I . . ." Jay began again. "He told me there was a girl at the party named Powell; she was the daughter of the Powell on the ship and that he saw you . . . he saw her hear it. He'd no idea it meant anything to me."
Jay had not meant to repeat that. He controlled himself and said, coldly: "We got Howarth to-day."
"What?"
"We got Howarth—the business of the Howarth-Lyman company," he explained, politely. "We'd been rather needing it, you know. Your friend has been so likely to leave us. He can leave us now whenever he wants; the sooner, the better. We have Howarth and they're the sort to stay."
"You have them?"
"Yes. What does it mean to you?"
Ellen's head inclined slowly; she seemed unable to keep it up. Her shoulders wilted; suddenly all her strength was gone and she collapsed over her desk and cried and cried.
Jay stood over her; he put a hand upon her and at touch of her, his anger broke. "Ellen," he whispered to her. "Ellen?"
"I was at that party with Lew, Lew Alban." Now it all came from her. "I swore to myself I'd hold him till you got Howarth. That day—our day under the trees—I swore to hold him for you. He liked me, you see—Lew Alban. So I came here. He called me last night . . . yesterday . . . I went to him to hold him. to Art Slengel's party. . . ."
Jay caught her and bundled her in his arms. How little and light, she was. Dizzy; dizzy, he was, for a second, his heart racing. The door! He carried her to it and, with one of his hands he turned the bolt. But no one was about. It was end of day—their end of day again together.
He looked into her eyes. "Here we are," he whispered, "here we are, you and I."
She lay in his arms, not moving; not clinging to him and not resisting. Not inert! Her heart was throbbing; throbbing. His fingers under her arm felt it—and her breathing. But she touched him not at all with her hands; she had them clasped before her breast; and she said nothing—but looked at him.
"Here we are," he told her again, more loudly, as if to rouse her. "Here we are . . . you know I love you."
That stirred her a little. It stopped for a second that racing throb under his fingers; it stopped her breathing; it unclasped her hands so that, for a second, she clung to him. Then she lay back but said nothing. Nothing?
Lida, her eyes said, looking into him. Lida; Lida. What of her? Where was she?
"Lida," said Jay aloud. "Lida's not in this. She's—out. She wants to be out. She's—divorcing me."
The throb, throb which had been hurrying under his fingers, hurried now against his heart; his lips were on hers, burning on hers; her hands, the gentle, holding, pressing hands of love clasped him and drew him again to her lips. "Love . . . love . . . my love . . . love," Ellen whispered.
The world learned, in the next days, that Lida was divorcing him. Lida had reappeared to her circle of society, in Paris, where Mrs. Jay Rountree had taken up a residence, most properly, with an infant daughter, baptized Amelia for Mrs. Lytle. The papers, which printed this news, added the announcement that Mrs. Rountree was proceeding for a divorce; Jay and she had proven incompatible.
Mrs. Lytle, now a grandmother, was with Lida to aid her daughter in the negotiations with the French courts. Later, Jay Rountree would go to Paris; the case required his perfunctory appearance but the legal separation was assured.
Jay sailed for France at the end of the week.
Sun and snow and the sharp, conical shadows of cedar. Green, deep green the pines; blue the sky; white the land and the lake—white, all white. The lake lay level under its snow. Crack, crack resounded the ice in the strait. Wood-smoke above the chimneys; rabbit tracks beyond the ghosts of the garden.
Ellen was at home and her father was with her. They had not much to say, these two, but they liked to be together, especially to-day before Jay should come—Jay—Jay Rountree who to arrive in another hour, and to-morrow, marry her.
Marry? He had never been, in fact, the husband of Lida; Ellen knew that now. Mr. Rountree had told her that Lida had been but "nominally" Jay's wife.
Marry; Jay and she were to marry. The family was all in a flurry—except her father. He sat beside the fire with his pipe and gazed into the flames and packed his pipe and sometimes patted Ellen's hand and sometimes said a word to her.
"It's to be a different life for ye, Ellen. Strange for ye."
"Yes," said Ellen. Strange for her but not so strange for her as strange to her father.
She looked at him and remembered how, throughout the half hour when he was bringing his ship beside the Gant, the world had waited and watched him; and here he sat beside her, the same as she had known him always. Never, likely, would Jay, whom she would marry to-morrow, do a thing to equal her father. His was to be a different life, strange to her father's. Why, so easily and without a doubt of herself, was she to leave the life of her own people and take up his? Because she loved him?
Oh, that she did; yet before ever she had loved Jay Rountree, before ever she had heard of him, she had left her father's life for that lived by the Rountrees. If she were not now to marry Jay, still she would return to the city and to business. No doubt of that. Why, if what her father did was so much the better?
"Time," said her father. "Time, Ellen, to be away."
To the station, he meant; the little, snowy station in Hoster where Jay's train soon would be whistling. Oh, she had it in mind! Her father and she were to drive down alone.
At the door, Ellen reached up and kissed her father. They went out to the sleigh and jingled toward the town. Ahead to the left, under a charitable mantle of snow, stood the Dewitt's dilapidated cottage—the home which Di had left and to which she would never return, after having proved of service to Slengels in winning Metten. Di, too, had abandoned the life of her people for the city of business.
Queer that, at this recollection, Ellen felt again the draw of the city—and business. Though it had "destroyed" Di, ten times more powerfully Ellen felt it.
She was the draw of adventure, enterprise, danger! Danger, to be sure, her father well knew and endured; but his danger was of an old, patterned sort. His manner of meeting it was set out for him; he held within him patterns of courage and skill as old as shipping; as old, indeed, as physical peril and man's first impulse to save his fellow from storm and sea.
The danger from business was different—strange. No old patterns there, no cut channels of courage to guide one. You had to find your own way and make it; you had to try, enterprise, experiment and explore, balance risks and rights. That was the draw of business, to-day, which filled the cities. It demanded a different quality in a man from any that her father possessed; though once, for half an hour, all the world had waited upon him. This was what she had felt and once even had tried to say to Jay and had not been able then to explain it.
She reached for her father's hand. The finest man in the world. Oh, she loved him! But here, a train was whistling. Jay was upon it—Jay who would take her away, his wife!
She stood up and leaped down. There was the train; it was stopping, and upon the first step, stood Jay.
The end