“Why don’t you sneak the kid away somewhere?” he suggested. “Why don’t you go right in at them and say: ‘It’s my kid, and I’m going to take him away into the country out of all this white-tile stuff and let him roll in the mud same as he used to.’ Why, say, there’s that shack of yours in Connecticut, just made for it. That kid would have the time of his life there.”
“You think that’s the solution, do you, Steve?”
“I’m dead sure it is.” Steve’s voice became more and more enthusiastic as the idea unfolded itself. “Why, it ain’t only the kid I’m thinking of. There’s Miss Ruth. Say, you don’t mind me pulling this line of talk?”
“Go ahead. I began it. What about Miss Ruth?”
“Well, you know just what’s the matter with her. She’s let this society game run away with her. I guess she started it because she felt lonesome when you were away; and now it’s got her and she can’t drop it. All she wants is a jolt. It would slow her up and show her just where she was. She’s asking for it. One good, snappy jolt would put the whole thing right. And this thing of jerking the kid away to Connecticut would be the right dope, believe me.”
Kirk shook his head.
“It wouldn’t do, Steve. It isn’t that I don’t want to do it; but one must play to the rules. I can’t explain what I mean. I can only say it’s impossible. Let’s think of a parallel case. When you were in the ring, there must have been times when you had a chance of hitting your man low. Why didn’t you do it? It would have jolted him, all right.”
“Why, I’d have lost on a foul.”
“Well, so should I lose on a foul if I started the sort of roughhouse you suggest.”
“I don’t get you.”
“Well, if you want it in plain English, Ruth would never forgive me. Is that clear enough?”
“You’re dead wrong, boss,” said Steve excitedly. “I know her.”
“I thought I did. Well, anyway, Steve, thanks for the suggestion; but, believe me, nothing doing. And now, if you feel like it, I wish you would resume your celebrated imitation of a man exulting over the fact that he is wearing Middleton’s Undeniable. There isn’t much more to do, and I should like to get through with it today, if possible. There, hold that pose. It’s exactly right. The honest man gloating over his suspenders. You ought to go on the stage, Steve.”
VII
Cutting the Tangled Knot
There are some men whose mission in life it appears to be to go about the world creating crises in the lives of other people. When there is thunder in the air they precipitate the thunderbolt.
Bailey Bannister was one of these. He meant extraordinarily well, but he was a dangerous man for that very reason, and in a properly constituted world would have been segregated or kept under supervision. He would not leave the tangled lives of those around him to adjust themselves. He blundered in and tried to help. He nearly always produced a definite result, but seldom the one at which he aimed.
That he should have interfered in the affairs of Ruth and Kirk at this time was, it must be admitted, unselfish of him, for just now he was having troubles of his own on a somewhat extensive scale. His wife’s extravagance was putting a strain on his finances, and he was faced with the choice of checking her or increasing his income. Being very much in love, he shrank from the former task and adopted the other way out of the difficulty.
It was this that had led to the change in his manner noticed by Steve. In order to make more money he had had to take risks, and only recently had he begun to perceive how extremely risky these risks were. For the first time in its history the firm of Bannister was making firsthand acquaintance with frenzied finance.
It is, perhaps, a little unfair to lay the blame for this entirely at the door of Bailey’s Sybil. Her extravagance was largely responsible; but Bailey’s newly found freedom was also a factor in the developments of the firm’s operations. If you keep a dog, a dog with a high sense of his abilities and importance, tied up and muzzled for a length of time and then abruptly set it free the chances are that it will celebrate its freedom. This had happened in the case of Bailey.
Just as her father’s money had caused Ruth to plunge into a whirl of pleasures which she did not really enjoy, merely for the novelty of it, so the death of John Bannister and his own consequent accession to the throne had upset Bailey’s balance and embarked him on an orgy of speculation quite foreign to his true nature. All their lives Ruth and Bailey had been repressed by their father, and his removal had unsteadied them.
Bailey, on whom the shadow of the dead man had pressed particularly severely, had been quite intoxicated by sudden freedom. He had been a cipher in the firm of Bannister & Son. In the firm of Bannister & Co. he was an untrammelled despot. He did that which was right in his own eyes, and there was no one to say him nay.
It was true that veteran members of the firm, looking in the glass, found white hairs where no white hairs had been and wrinkles on foreheads which, under the solid rule of old John Bannister, had been smooth; but it would have taken more than these straws to convince Bailey that the wind which was blowing was an ill-wind. He had developed in a day the sublime self-confidence of a young Napoleon. He was all dash and enterprise—the hurricane fighter of Wall Street.
With these private interests to occupy him, it is
