“And you’ve never seen him since?”
She waited, as if trying to piece her recollections together. “I suppose I must have; but all that seems so long ago,” she said sighing. She had been given, of late, to such plaintive glances toward her happy girlhood but Ralph seemed not to notice the allusion.
“Do you know,” he exclaimed after a moment, “I don’t believe the fellow’s beaten yet.”
She looked up quickly. “Don’t you?”
“No; and I could see that Bowen didn’t either. He strikes me as the kind of man who develops slowly, needs a big field, and perhaps makes some big mistakes, but gets where he wants to in the end. Jove, I wish I could put him in a book! There’s something epic about him—a kind of epic effrontery.”
Undine’s pulses beat faster as she listened. Was it not what Moffatt had always said of himself—that all he needed was time and elbow-room? How odd that Ralph, who seemed so dreamy and unobservant, should instantly have reached the same conclusion! But what she wanted to know was the practical result of their meeting.
“What did you and he talk about when you were smoking?”
“Oh, he got on the Driscoll fight again—gave us some extraordinary details. The man’s a thundering brute, but he’s full of observation and humour. Then, after Bowen joined you, he told me about a new deal he’s gone into—rather a promising scheme, but on the same Titanic scale. It’s just possible, by the way, that we may be able to do something for him: part of the property he’s after is held in our office.” He paused, knowing Undine’s indifference to business matters; but the face she turned to him was alive with interest.
“You mean you might sell the property to him?”
“Well, if the thing comes off. There would be a big commission if we did.” He glanced down on her half ironically. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
She answered with a shade of reproach: “Why do you say that? I haven’t complained.”
“Oh, no; but I know I’ve been a disappointment as a money-maker.”
She leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes as if in utter weariness and indifference, and in a moment she felt him bending over her. “What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well?”
“I’m a little tired. It’s nothing.” She pulled her hand away and burst into tears.
Ralph knelt down by her chair and put his arm about her. It was the first time he had touched her since the night of the boy’s birthday, and the sense of her softness woke a momentary warmth in his veins.
“What is it, dear? What is it?”
Without turning her head she sobbed out: “You seem to think I’m too selfish and odious—that I’m just pretending to be ill.”
“No, no,” he assured her, smoothing back her hair. But she continued to sob on in a gradual crescendo of despair, till the vehemence of her weeping began to frighten him, and he drew her to her feet and tried to persuade her to let herself be led upstairs. She yielded to his arm, sobbing in short exhausted gasps, and leaning her whole weight on him as he guided her along the passage to her bedroom. On the lounge to which he lowered her she lay white and still, tears trickling through her lashes and her handkerchief pressed against her lips. He recognized the symptoms with a sinking heart: she was on the verge of a nervous attack such as she had had in the winter, and he foresaw with dismay the disastrous train of consequences, the doctors’ and nurses’ bills, and all the attendant confusion and expense. If only Moffatt’s project might be realized—if for once he could feel a round sum in his pocket, and be freed from the perpetual daily strain!
The next morning Undine, though calmer, was too weak to leave her bed, and her doctor prescribed rest and absence of worry—later, perhaps, a change of scene. He explained to Ralph that nothing was so wearing to a high-strung nature as monotony, and that if Mrs. Marvell were contemplating a Newport season it was necessary that she should be fortified to meet it. In such cases he often recommended a dash to Paris or London, just to tone up the nervous system.
Undine regained her strength slowly, and as the days dragged on the suggestion of the European trip recurred with increasing frequency. But it came always from her medical adviser: she herself had grown strangely passive and indifferent. She continued to remain upstairs on her lounge, seeing no one but Mrs. Heeny, whose daily ministrations had once more been prescribed, and asking only that the noise of Paul’s play should be kept from her. His scamperings overhead disturbed her sleep, and his bed was moved into the day nursery, above his father’s room. The child’s early romping did not trouble Ralph, since he himself was always awake before daylight. The days were not long enough to hold his cares, and they came and stood by him through the silent hours, when there was no other sound to drown their voices.
Ralph had not made a success of his business. The real-estate brokers who had taken him into partnership had done so only with the hope of profiting by his social connections; and in this respect the alliance had been a failure. It was in such directions that he most lacked facility, and so far he had been of use to his partners only as an office-drudge. He was resigned to the continuance of such drudgery, though all his powers cried out against it; but even for the routine of business his aptitude was small, and he began to feel that he was not considered an addition to the firm. The difficulty of finding another opening made him fear a break; and his thoughts turned hopefully to Elmer Moffatt’s hint of a “deal.” The success of the negotiation might bring advantages beyond the immediate pecuniary profit; and that, at the present juncture, was important enough in itself.
Moffatt reappeared two days after the dinner, presenting himself in West End Avenue in the late afternoon with the explanation that the business in hand necessitated discretion, and that he preferred not to be seen in Ralph’s office. It was a question of negotiating with the utmost privacy for the purchase of a small strip of land between two large plots already acquired by purchasers cautiously designated by Moffatt as his “parties.” How far he “stood in” with the parties he left it to Ralph to conjecture; but it was plain that he had a large stake in the transaction, and that it offered him his first chance of recovering himself since Driscoll had “thrown” him. The owners of the coveted plot did not seem anxious to sell, and there were personal reasons for Moffatt’s not approaching them through Ralph’s partners, who were the regular agents of the estate: so that Ralph’s acquaintance with the conditions, combined with his detachments from the case, marked him out as a useful intermediary.
Their first talk left Ralph with a dazzled sense of Moffatt’s strength and keenness, but with a vague doubt as to the “straightness” of the proposed transaction. Ralph had never seen his way clearly in that dim underworld of affairs where men of the Moffatt and Driscoll type moved like shadowy destructive monsters beneath the darting small fry of the surface. He knew that “business” has created its own special morality; and his musings on man’s relation to his self imposed laws had shown him how little human conduct is generally troubled about its own sanctions. He had a vivid sense of the things a man of his kind didn’t do; but his inability to get a mental grasp on large financial problems made it hard to apply to them so simple a measure as this inherited standard. He only knew, as Moffatt’s plan developed, that it seemed all right while he talked of it with its originator, but vaguely wrong when he thought it over afterward. It occurred to him to consult his grandfather; and if he renounced the idea for the obvious reason that Mr. Dagonet’s ignorance of business was as fathomless as his own, this was not his sole motive. Finally it occurred to him to put the case hypothetically to Mr. Spragg. As far as Ralph knew, his father-in-law’s business record was unblemished; yet one felt in him an elasticity of adjustment not allowed for in the Dagonet code.