presumably the Nemesis which waits on those who take big chances in an
uncertain market. It was in the air that he was "going up against" the
Pinkey-Dowd group and the Norman-Graham combination, and everybody knew
that the cemeteries of Wall Street were full of the unhonoured graves
of others who in years past had attempted to do the same.
Pinkey, that sinister buccaneer, could have eaten a dozen Baileys.
Devouring aspiring young men of the Bailey type was Norman's chief
diversion.
Ruth knew nothing of these things. She told herself that it was her
abruptness that had driven Bailey away.
Weariness and depression had settled on Ruth since that afternoon of
the storm. It was as if the storm had wrought an awakening in her. It
had marked a definite point of change in her outlook. She felt as if
she had been roused from a trance by a sharp blow.
If Steve had but known, she had had the "jolt" by which he set such
store. She knew now that she had thrown away the substance for the
shadow.
Kirk's anger, so unlike him, so foreign to the weak, easy-going person
she had always thought him, had brought her to herself. But it was too
late. There could be no going back and picking up the threads. She had
lost him, and must bear the consequences.
The withdrawal of Bailey was a small thing by comparison, a submotive
in the greater tragedy. But she had always been fond of Bailey, and it
hurt her to think that she should have driven him out of her life.
It seemed to her that she was very much alone now. She was marooned on
a desert island of froth and laughter. Everything that mattered she had
lost.
Even Bill had gone from her. The bitter justice of Kirk's words came
home to her now in her time of clear thinking. It was all true. In the
first excitement of the new life he had bored her. She had looked upon
Mrs. Porter as a saviour who brought her freedom together with an easy
conscience. It had been so simple to deceive herself, to cheat herself
into the comfortable belief that all that could be done for him was
being done, when, as concerned the essential thing, as Kirk had said,
there was no child of the streets who was not better off.
She tramped her round of social duties mechanically. Everything bored
her now. The joy of life had gone out of her. She ate the bread of
sorrow in captivity.
And then, this morning, had come a voice from the world she had
lost, little Mrs. Bailey's voice, small and tearful.
Could she possibly come out by the next train? Bailey was very ill.
Bailey was dying. Bailey had come home last night looking ghastly. He
had not slept. In the early morning he had begun to babble, Mrs.
Bailey's voice had risen and broken on the word, and Ruth at the other
end of the wire had heard her frightened sobs. The doctor had come. The
doctor had looked awfully grave. The doctor had telephoned to New York
for another doctor. They were both upstairs now. It was awful, and Ruth
must come at once.
This was the bad news which had brought about the pallor which had
impressed Mr. Keggs as he helped Ruth into her cab.
Little Mrs. Bailey was waiting for her on the platform when she got out
of the train. Her face was drawn and miserable. She looked like a
beaten kitten. She hugged Ruth hysterically.
"Oh, my dear, I'm so glad you've come. He's better, but it has been
awful. The doctors have had to fight him to keep him in bed. He
was crazy to get to town. He kept saying over and over again that he
must be at the office. They gave him something, and he was asleep when
I left the house."
She began to cry helplessly. The fates had not bestowed upon Sybil
Bannister the same care in the matter of education for times of crisis
which they had accorded to Steve's Mamie. Her life till now had been
sheltered and unruffled, and disaster, swooping upon her, had found her
an easy victim.
She was trying to be brave, but her powers of resistance were small
like her body. She clung to Ruth as a child clings to its mother. Ruth,
as she tried to comfort her, felt curiously old. It occurred to her
with a suggestion almost of grotesqueness that she and Sybil had been
debutantes in the same season.
They walked up to the house. The summer cottage which Bailey had taken
was not far from the station. On the way, in the intervals of her sobs,
Sybil told Ruth the disjointed story of what had happened.
Bailey had not been looking well for some days. She had thought it must
be the heat or business worries or something. He had not eaten very
much, and he had seemed too tired to talk when he got home each
evening. She had begged him to take a few days' rest. That had been the
only occasion in the whole of the last week when she had heard him
laugh; and it had been such a horrid, ugly sort of laugh that she
wished she hadn't.
He had said that if he stayed away from the office for some time to
come it would mean love in a cottage for them for the rest of their
lives, and not a summer cottage at Tuxedo at that. "'My dear child,'"
he had gone on, "and you know when Bailey calls me that," said Sybil,
"it means that there is something the matter; for, as a rule, he never
calls me anything but my name, or baby, or something like that."
Which gave Ruth a little shock of surprise. Somehow the idea of the
dignified Bailey addressing his wife as baby startled her. She was
certainly learning these days that she did not know people as
completely as she had supposed. There seemed to be endless sides to
people's characters which had never come under her notice. A sudden
memory of Kirk on that fateful afternoon came to her and made her
wince.
Mrs. Bailey continued: "'My dear child,' he went on, 'this week is
about the most important week you and I are ever likely to live
through. It's the show-down. We either come out on top or we blow up.
It's one thing or the other. And if I take a few days' holiday just now
you had better start looking about for the best place to sell your
jewellery.'
"Those were his very words," she said tearfully. "I remember them all.
It was so unlike his usual way of talking."
Ruth acknowledged that it was. More than ever she felt that she did not
know the complete Bailey.
"He was probably exaggerating," she said for the sake of saying
something.
Sybil was silent for a moment.
"It isn't that that's worrying me," she went on then. "Somehow I don't
seem to care at all whether we come out right or not, so long as he
gets well. Last night, when I thought he was going to die, I made up my
mind that I couldn't go on living without him. I wouldn't have,
either."
This time the shock of surprise which came to Ruth was greater by a
hundred-fold than the first had been. She gave a quick glance at Sybil.
Her small face was hard, and the little white teeth gleamed between her
drawn lips. It was the face, for one brief instant, of a fanatic. The
sight of it affected Ruth extraordinarily. It was as if she had seen a
naked soul where she had never imagined a soul to be.
She had weighed Sybil in the same calm, complacent almost patronizing
fashion in which she had weighed Bailey, Kirk, everybody. She had set
her down as a delightful child, an undeveloped, feather-brained little
thing, pleasant to spend an afternoon with, but not to be taken
seriously by any one as magnificent and superior as Ruth Winfield. And
what manner of a man must Bailey be, Bailey whom she had always looked
on as a dear, but as quite a joke, something to be chaffed and made to