Dangerous Business/Chapter 4
Jay closed the door and confronted his father. "You've heard," he said. It was plain; plain, too, that his father believed what had been reported to him. For a few seconds, Jay felt sick. He would not have minded, so much, his father believing him when he accused himself; but already his father had condemned him on the word of another.
Jay turned against the lie in himself; he wanted to cry out against it to his father; he wanted to clear himself of it as of nothing else in all his life. But what had he wired to Lida just now? "Be glad. I am." It meant he was going through with it; going through! So he stared at his father and took it.
"I have heard," said his father, "quite fully."
"Yes," said Jay, "I suppose so"; and his mind set to working. What had his father heard? He knew, in general, with what he had been charged; but with what special circumstances had it been related?
He realized that Lida and he yesterday should have agreed upon details implicating him, instead of Nucast. They had not, because she had denied, yesterday, that she would permit him to take this upon himself.
So Jay asked, because he had to ask: "What have you heard, father?" And he saw this strike his father as an effort of concealment. His father refused to reply and turned to Ellen Powell. "Where are those telegrams about him?"
"You have them," Ellen whispered, and cleared her voice and repeated more loudly, "You have them."
"Where?"
They were before him. She moved to the desk and touched them. He drew them from under her throbbing finger-tips. He turned them upside down, insultingly, as his son's eyes rested on them.
"You want to know how much I know, do you?"
"No, father."
"That's what you asked."
"It's not what I meant."
"What did you mean?"
Jay couldn't tell him.
Ellen Powell was standing near his father. Why did she? Why didn't she leave the room? Jay glanced at her and saw her whiter, even, than before; and her eyes so big and gray. She had read the telegrams, of course; they had come first to her. She had learned all about him.
He had begun to feel as though those telegrams told what he had done. He looked away from her, biting his lips. He was sick, sick again. He might almost as well be guilty. He had not realized it would be like this. Why didn't she leave the room?
"Do you deny," demanded his father, "any of this?"
"No," said Jay. It was his chance to see the telegrams but, unthinking, he had passed it.
"How old is the girl?"
"Lida?"
"Have you others?"
"Others," cried Jay; he could cast off that. "No: no, father."
"What use is your word? Didn't you deny this a month ago?"
What did his father mean, Jay wondered.
In a moment, he returned to the question. "How old is she?"
"Old? She's just nineteen."
Why didn't Ellen Powell go?
His father turned to her. "He wrote me a letter on his twenty-third birthday, last month," he said to her. "Find me that letter."
Ellen went to the personal files against the wall and bent over; she dropped to her knees and knelt, as she searched, she was shaking so.
Looking about, she saw Mr. Rountree watching her as he waited for the letter.
Jay, watching her, remembered that on his birthday he had made one of his periodical attempts to clear up quarrels with his father; he had made a special effort of reconciliation, writing to his father honestly of what he had and had not done. In reply, his father had been conciliatory, expressing a certain amount of faith in him and a willingness to take him on trust for the future. But now his father believed, and must believe, that he had written that letter after—Lida.
He burned with flaming shame at this realization; and his father swung about and caught him.
"You now recollect your letter?"
Jay nodded.
Ellen drew it from the files and brought it slowly to the desk.
"You wrote me this after you—you must have written this after"
Jay had to say it. "Yes, father."
So he was stripped of any defense of himself.
"Very well, Miss Powell," his father said to her, dismissing her to her little office beyond the coat closet.
Ellen closed the first door and the second. Shut away from their voices—Mr. Rountree's only it was, soon—she sat at her little desk, stifled. He had done what the telegram implied! He had said so. Yet he was the same.
When she had faced him, and heard him say so, he had been the same as before to her. He was in trouble, in far, far, deeper trouble than ever but he had not changed, to her. She had not shrunk from him or wanted to shrink from him. She had not reproached him or wanted to. She had wanted to help him, to defend him as never before. He was hers, hers to help and defend, whatever he had done. She did not, she could not care; she loved him never, never so much as at this moment.
Suppose he had done wrong, terribly wrong, unforgivably wrong with Lida-Haige! She forgave him! Whatever it was she ought to feel against him, she felt for him. She yearned to be with him. He did not love Lida Haige. This was not as he would have come if he loved her. He had done wrong with Lida Haige; that was all.
All? It was a great deal; oh, it was a very great deal! But it was not all. To love was all.
That letter which he had written upon his birthday and which she had just found in the files; his fine, fair, frank letter. She knew the substance of it for his father had dictated to her the reply and quoted many of Jay's words. How fine and fair and frank the boy had been! But if he had written it, with Lida Haige on his soul, how false and low and utterly base!
Ellen sat up straighter, with her heart pounding harder and more slowly, with stifling hardness and slowness, as she recollected phrases of Jay's letter. If he had written it, with Lida Haige on his soul, she could not forgive him. But never, never could he have written it then. She could imagine him doing wrong with Lida Haige but she could not imagine him, having done it, composing that letter.
Her heart pounded and pounded but it was ceasing to stifle her. Slowly, pulling herself up on her hands upon the desk, she arose. She had to return to the other room. She went to the first door, opened it, heard their voices—Mr. Rountree's voice. She opened the second door.
"Do not come in!" Mr. Rountree faced her. Jay faced her, very white. He, too, wanted her out.
She clung to the door and gazed at him, holding his eyes on hers. He looked away but his eyes returned to her and with the flood of her faith in him, color crept into his cheek; and her faith filled her, filled her again.
"Do not come in!" Mr. Rountree forbade her.
She almost cried out in reply. Cried out what? That Jay had not done that which he had admitted—but there he stood before his father, having confessed it.
"You don't want me?" was all she could say.
"No."
She retreated; and through the door beat and beat the voice of his father, who believed the boy had done that thing and, so believing, was making disposition in these minutes of Jay's years ahead; of all his years ahead.
"Marry . . . marry," Ellen heard. It was plain that Mr. Rountree commanded him to marry Lida Haige. It was plain that this was what Jay proposed to do; so it was the very thing which his father, instead of enforcing, should prevent! For there was an element in this affair of which he was completely ignorant, and which Jay would not tell.
At last the buzzer under her desk sounded and Ellen reëntered the big room.
"Put in a telephone call for Mrs. Imbrie Lytle on Park Avenue, New York City," Mr. Rountree directed. Then he shot at Jay, "Possibly you can supply the telephone number."
"I can," said Jay, and gave it.
"I will return before you complete the call," Mr. Rountree said, and was upon his feet, tall and towering over her. His black hair was damp with sweat, as though he had been through violent physical struggle. Tiny beads of sweat stood on his forehead and wet his deep wrinkles.
He passed Jay without glancing at him and went into the general offices.
Jay had remained near the door but he came toward the desk after his father had gone.
"That's over," he said to Ellen; and she replied, "I've got to put in that call."
She tried to tell him, by the way she said it, that she was acting against him only under orders; she was not against him.
"Go ahead," he said. So she sat in his father's chair and started the call, while he watched her. He was paler and his eyes were wider and he was astrain. He was astrain somewhat as he was in that picture which she kept in her room, showing him at his oar at the end of a race.
Jay turned from her and went to a window where the storm offered violence enough to draw away his thoughts to the lake. Her father was on the lake, probably, guiding his great ship through the gale.
"Where's your father?" he inquired, turning to her. "Still with his ship?"
Ellen swung about in Mr. Rountree's swivel chair. "Yes; he ought to be beyond the Straits. Navigation's lasting late this year."
"This'll soon close it," said Jay. "Then he'll be home; you'll all be home for Christmas, won't you?" he asked, attempting to speak in his old, eager way.
"I suppose so," said Ellen dully. Christmas! What would Christmas be to her this year, though she was at home, with Jay Rountree married to Lida Haige?
"Your mother well?" asked Jay.
"Yes."
"And the rest of your family?"
Ellen nodded; and to save herself she could not keep tears from her eyes.
"Some one's not," said Jay, with his swift concern and came closer to her. "Who is it? What's the matter?"
"Nobody!" She tossed the tears away. "They're all right. It's nobody at home. It's here."
"Oh," said Jay, "I've bothered you."
"Yes; it's you."
"Don't bother!" said Jay. "Don't! You—you've always been mighty decent to me."
"I mean to be! I mean always to be!"
How little she was in his father's big chair with her toes not quite touching the floor! She had pretty, slender feet. Her big, steady eyes were on his; very unlike Lida's eyes. Lida's were small and brilliant and restless, and Lida's lips were restless, even in a kiss. This girl's would be gentle and steady. What a fancy to fly through his head!
He returned to the refuge of impersonal talk: "How's Miss Dewitt?"
"All right," replied Ellen, not thinking at all. "I mean she's left us."
"Oh, has she? Trouble here?"
"No trouble. She's gone to the Slengels. They offered her a party job; or that's what it's turned into."
"Oh."
"The Slengels are going after our big accounts, you know," Ellen reported. "They're out for the Metten business here; and they've been after the Nucast business in New York. But that's safe, we heard this morning."
"What?" asked Jay. "What?"
"Your brother-in-law wired last night." She picked up a telegram from the desk and handed it to him.
"The Nucast business is safe," Jay read and rocked on his heels. So yesterday Nucast had given Ralph his order; yesterday Nucast had paid Jay Rountree.
For this must be payment—or what Nucast would consider payment—to him for his offer to Lida.
It dizzied him. Almost he lost control of himself before he dropped the telegram and went out.
Ellen picked it up. She thought in some way she must have handed him, instead of the business message, a telegram about himself; but she read again: "The Nucast business is safe." Only the business message; yet it had affected him more than all else this morning. Why? Why?
Holding it, she put away Mrs. Lytle's telegram. What it told was not so! The five words of this business message referred, she knew, to what had happened to Jay Rountree.