“Anyhow, he seems to be sure it’s a safe thing. I understand he’s in with Rolliver now, and Rolliver practically controls Apex. This is some kind of a scheme to buy up all the works of public utility at Apex. They’re practically sure of their charter, and Moffatt tells me I can count on doubling my investment within a few weeks. Of course I’ll go into the details if you like—”
“Oh, no; you’ve made it all so clear to me!” She really made him feel he had. “And besides, what on earth does it matter? The great thing is that it’s done.” She lifted her sparkling eyes. “And now—my share—you haven’t told me…”
He explained that Mr. Dagonet, to whom he had already named the amount demanded, had at once promised him twenty-five thousand dollars, to be eventually deducted from his share of the estate. His mother had something put by that she insisted on contributing; and Henley Fairford, of his own accord, had come forward with ten thousand: it was awfully decent of Henley…
“Even Henley!” Clare sighed. “Then I’m the only one left out?”
Ralph felt the colour in his face. “Well, you see, I shall need as much as fifty—”
Her hands flew together joyfully. “But then you’ve got to let me help! Oh, I’m so glad—so glad! I’ve twenty thousand waiting.”
He looked about the room, checked anew by all its oppressive implications. “You’re a darling…but I couldn’t take it.”
“I’ve told you it’s mine, every penny of it!”
“Yes; but supposing things went wrong?”
“Nothing CAN—if you’ll only take it…”
“I may lose it—”
“
The rapture of the cry caught him up with it. Ah, yes, he could imagine it all! He stooped his head above her hands. “I accept,” he said; and they stood and looked at each other like radiant children.
She followed him to the door, and as he turned to leave he broke into a laugh. “It’s queer, though, its happening in this room!”
She was close beside him, her hand on the heavy tapestry curtaining the door; and her glance shot past him to her husband’s portrait. Ralph caught the look, and a flood of old tendernesses and hates welled up in him. He drew her under the portrait and kissed her vehemently.
XXXV
Within forty-eight hours Ralph’s money was in Moffatt’s hands, and the interval of suspense had begun.
The transaction over, he felt the deceptive buoyancy that follows on periods of painful indecision. It seemed to him that now at last life had freed him from all trammelling delusions, leaving him only the best thing in its gift—his boy.
The things he meant Paul to do and to be filled his fancy with happy pictures. The child was growing more and more interesting—throwing out countless tendrils of feeling and perception that delighted Ralph but preoccupied the watchful Laura.
“He’s going to be exactly like you, Ralph—” she paused and then risked it: “For his own sake, I wish there were just a drop or two of Spragg in him.”
Ralph laughed, understanding her. “Oh, the plodding citizen I’ve become will keep him from taking after the lyric idiot who begot him. Paul and I, between us, are going to turn out something first-rate.”
His book too was spreading and throwing out tendrils, and he worked at it in the white heat of energy which his factitious exhilaration produced. For a few weeks everything he did and said seemed as easy and unconditioned as the actions in a dream.
Clare Van Degen, in the light of this mood, became again the comrade of his boyhood. He did not see her often, for she had gone down to the country with her children, but they communicated daily by letter or telephone, and now and then she came over to the Fairfords’ for a night. There they renewed the long rambles of their youth, and once more the summer fields and woods seemed full of magic presences. Clare was no more intelligent, she followed him no farther in his flights; but some of the qualities that had become most precious to him were as native to her as its perfume to a flower. So, through the long June afternoons, they ranged together over many themes; and if her answers sometimes missed the mark it did not matter, because her silences never did.
Meanwhile Ralph, from various sources, continued to pick up a good deal of more or less contradictory information about Elmer Moffatt. It seemed to be generally understood that Moffatt had come back from Europe with the intention of testifying in the Ararat investigation, and that his former patron, the great Harmon B. Driscoll, had managed to silence him; and it was implied that the price of this silence, which was set at a considerable figure, had been turned to account in a series of speculations likely to lift Moffatt to permanent eminence among the rulers of Wall Street. The stories as to his latest achievement, and the theories as to the man himself, varied with the visual angle of each reporter: and whenever any attempt was made to focus his hard sharp personality some guardian divinity seemed to throw a veil of mystery over him. His detractors, however, were the first to own that there was “something about him”; it was felt that he had passed beyond the meteoric stage, and the business world was unanimous in recognizing that he had “come to stay.” A dawning sense of his stability was even beginning to make itself felt in Fifth Avenue. It was said that he had bought a house in Seventy-second Street, then that he meant to build near the Park; one or two people (always “taken by a friend”) had been to his flat in the Pactolus, to see his Chinese porcelains and Persian rugs; now and then he had a few important men to dine at a Fifth Avenue restaurant; his name began to appear in philanthropic reports and on municipal committees (there were even rumours of its having been put up at a well-known club); and the rector of a wealthy parish, who was raising funds for a chantry, was known to have met him at dinner and to have stated afterward that “the man was not wholly a materialist.”
All these converging proofs of Moffatt’s solidity strengthened Ralph’s faith in his venture. He remembered with what astuteness and authority Moffatt had conducted their real estate transaction—how far off and unreal it all seemed!—and awaited events with the passive faith of a sufferer in the hands of a skilful surgeon.
The days moved on toward the end of June, and each morning Ralph opened his newspaper with a keener thrill
