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 rough-house
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 to-day, 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."
Chapter 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 first-hand
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 surprising that he
should have found time to take the affairs of Ruth and Kirk in hand.
But he did.
For some time he had watched the widening gulf between them with pained
solicitude. He disliked Kirk personally; but that did not influence
him. He conceived it to be his duty to suppress private prejudices.
Duty seemed to call him to go to Kirk's aid and smooth out his domestic
difficulties.
What urged him to this course more than anything else was Ruth's
growing intimacy with Basil Milbank; for, in the period which had
elapsed since the conversation recorded earlier in the story, when Kirk
had first made the other's acquaintance, the gifted Basil had become a
very important and menacing figure in Ruth's life.
To Ruth, as to most women, his gifts were his attraction. He danced
well; he talked well; he did everything well. He appealed to a side of
Ruth's nature which Kirk scarcely touched, a side which had only come
into prominence in the last year.
His manner was admirable. He suggested sympathy without expressing it.
He could convey to Ruth that he thought her a misunderstood and
neglected wife while talking to her about the weather. He could make
his own knight-errant attitude toward her perfectly plain without
saying a word, merely by playing soft music to her on the piano; for he
had the gift of saying more with his finger-tips than most men could
have said in a long speech carefully rehearsed.
Kirk's inability to accompany Ruth into her present life had given
Basil his chance. Into the gap which now lay between them he had
slipped with a smooth neatness born of experience.
Bailey hated Basil. Men, as a rule, did, without knowing why. Basil's
reputation was shady, without being actually bad. He was a suspect who
had never been convicted. New York contained several husbands who eyed
him askance, but could not verify their suspicions, and the apparent
hopelessness of ever doing so made them look on Basil as a man who had
carried smoothness into the realms of fine art. He was considered too
gifted to be wholesome. The men of his set, being for the most part
amiably stupid, resented his cleverness.
Bailey, just at present, was feeling strongly on the subject of Basil.
He was at that stage of his married life when he would have preferred
his Sybil to speak civilly to no other man than himself. And only
yesterday Sybil had come to him to inform him with obvious delight that
Basil Milbank had invited her to join his yacht party for a lengthy
voyage.
This had stung Bailey. He was not included in the invitation. The whole
affair struck him as sinister. It was true that Sybil had never shown
any sign of being fascinated by Basil; but, he told himself, there was
no knowing. He forbade Sybil to accept the invitation. To soothe her
disappointment, he sent her off then and there to Tiffany's with a
roving commission to get what she liked; for Bailey, the stern, strong
man, the man who knew when to put his foot down, was no tyrant. But he
would have been indignant at the suggestion that he had bribed Sybil to
refuse Basil's invitation.
One of the arguments which Sybil had advanced in the brief discussion
which had followed the putting down of Bailey's foot had been that Ruth