Part 43 (1/2)

”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 const.i.tuted 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 gla.s.s, 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 att.i.tude 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 rehea.r.s.ed.

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.