"I knew you'd make difficulties when it came to the paying part of it, and since I didn't know, myself, I wired Mr. Ormsby again. Here is what he says," and she untwisted a second telegram and read it to him.

"'Fee should not be less than five per cent. of bonded indebtedness; four-fifths in stock at par; one-fifth cash; no cure, no pay.'"

"Three million five hundred thousand dollars!" gasped Kent.

"It's only nominally that much," she laughed. "The stock part of it is merely your guaranty of good faith: it is worth next to nothing now, and it will be many a long day before it goes to par, even if you are successful in saving its life. So your magnificent fee shrinks to seven hundred thousand dollars, less your expenses."

"But heavens and earth! that's awful!" said Kent.

"Not when you consider it as a surgeon's risk. You happen to be the one man who has the idea, and if it isn't carried out, the patient is going to die to-morrow night, permanently. You are the specialist in this case, and specialists come high. Now you may go and attend to the preliminary details, if you like."

He found his hat and stood up. She stood with him; but when he took her hand she made him sit down again.

"You have at least three degrees of fever!" she exclaimed; "or is it only the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar shock? What have you been doing to yourself?"

"Nothing, I a.s.sure you. I haven't been sleeping very well for a few nights. But that is only natural."

"And I said you must have a cool head! Will you do exactly as I tell you to?"

"If you don't make it too hard."

"Take the car down-town--don't walk--and after you have made Mr. Loring send his message to Boston, you go straight to Doctor Biddle. Tell him what is the matter with you, and that you need to sleep the clock around."

"But the time!" he protested. "I shall need every hour between now and to-morrow night!"

"One clear-headed hour is worth a dozen muddled ones. You do as I say."

"I hate drugs," he said, rising again.

"So do I; but there is a time for everything under the sun. It is a crying necessity that you go into this fight perfectly fit and with all your wits about you. If you don't, somebody--several somebodies--will land in the penitentiary. Will you mind me?"

"Yes," he promised; and this time he got away.

XXVI

ON THE HIGH PLAINS

Much to Elinor's relief, and quite as much, perhaps, to Penelope's, Mrs.

Brentwood tired of Breezeland Inn in less than a fortnight and began to talk of returning to the apartment house in the capital.

Pressed to give a reason for her dissatisfaction, the younger sister might have been at a loss to account for it in words; but Elinor's desire to cut the outing short was based upon pride and militant shame. After many trap-settings she had succeeded in making her mother confess that the stay at Breezeland was at Ormsby's expense; and not all of Mrs. Brentwood's petulant justifyings could remove the sting of the nettle of obligation.

"There is no reason in the world why you should make so much of it: I am your mother, and I ought to know," was Mrs. Brentwood's dictum. "You wouldn't have any scruples if we were his guests on the _Amphitrite_ or in his country house on Long Island."

"That would be different," Elinor contended. "We are not his guests here; we are his pensioners."

"Nonsense!" frowned the mother. "Isn't it beginning to occur to you that beggars shouldn't be choosers? And, besides, so far as you are concerned, you are only antic.i.p.ating a little."

It was an exceedingly injudicious, not to say brutal way of putting it; and the blue-gray eyes flashed fire.

"Can't you see that you are daily making a marriage between us more and more impossible?" was the bitter rejoinder. Elinor's _metier_ was cool composure under fire, but she was not always able to compa.s.s it.

Mrs. Brentwood fanned herself vigorously. She had been aching to have it out with this self-willed young woman who was playing fast and loose with attainable millions, and the hour had struck.

"What made you break it off with Brookes Ormsby?" she snapped; adding: "I don't wonder you were ashamed to tell me about it."

"I did not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated.

"That is what Brookes told me, but I didn't believe him," said the mother.

"It's all wrong, anyway, and I more than half believe David Kent is at the bottom of it."

Elinor left her chair and went to the window, which looked down on the sanatorium, the ornate parterre, and the crescent driveway. These family bickerings were very trying to her, and the longing to escape them was sometimes strong enough to override cool reason and her innate sense of the fitness of things.

In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals.

This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it, hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to cry.

But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compa.s.sionate, came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy, and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. It was for her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.

The tears in Elinor's eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put her back to the window. Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of emotion.

"Have you set your heart upon this thing, mother?--but I know you have.

And I--I have tried as I could to be just and reasonable; to you and Penelope, and to Brookes Ormsby. He is n.o.bleness itself: it is a shame to give him the shadow when he so richly deserves the substance."

She spoke rapidly, almost incoherently; and the mother-love in the woman who was careful and troubled about the things that perish put the match-maker to the wall. It was almost terrifying to see Elinor, the strong-hearted, the self-contained, breaking down like other mothers'

daughters. So it was the mother who held out her arms, and the daughter ran to go down on her knees at the chair-side, burying her face in the lap of comforting.

"There, there, Ellie, child; don't cry. It's terrible to hear you sob like that," she protested, her own voice shaking in sympathy. "I have been thinking only of you and your future, and fearing weakly that you couldn't bear the hard things. But we'll bear them together--we three; and I'll never say another word about Brookes Ormsby and what might have been."

"O mother! you are making it harder than ever, now," was the tearful rejoinder. "I--there is no reason why I should be so obstinate. I haven't even the one poor excuse you are making for me down deep in your heart."

"David Kent?" said the mother.

The bowed head nodded a wordless a.s.sent.

"I sha'n't say that I haven't suspected him all along, dear. I am afraid I have. I have nothing against him. But he is a poor man, Elinor; and we are poor, too. You'd be miserably unhappy."

"If he stays poor, it is I who am to blame,"--this most contritely. "He had a future before him: the open door was his winning in the railroad fight, and I closed it against him."

"You?" said the mother, astonished.

"Yes. I told him he couldn't go on in the way he meant to. I made it a matter of conscience; and he--he has turned back when he might have fought it out and made a name for himself, and saved us all. And it was such a hair-splitting thing! All the world would have applauded him if he had gone on; and there was only one woman in all the world to pry into the secret places of his soul and stir up the sleeping doubt!"

Now, if all the thrifty, gear-getting "faculty" of the dead and gone Grimkies had become thin and diluted and inefficient in this Mrs.

Hepzibah, last of the name, the strong wine and iron of the blood of uprightness had come down to her unstrained.