The Custom of the Country Part 45

"Do you mean to say it's not going through?"

"Not this time, anyhow. We're high and dry."

Something seemed to snap in Ralph's head, and he sat down in the nearest chair. "Has the common stock dropped a lot?"

"Well, you've got to lean over to see it." Moffatt pressed his finger-tips together and added thoughtfully: "But it's THERE all right.

We're bound to get our charter in the end."

"What do you call the end?"

"Oh, before the Day of Judgment, sure: next year, I guess."

"Next year?" Ralph flushed. "What earthly good will that do me?"

"I don't say it's as pleasant as driving your best girl home by moonlight. But that's how it is. And the stuff's safe enough any way--I've told you that right along."

"But you've told me all along I could count on a rise before August. You knew I had to have the money now."

"I knew you WANTED to have the money now; and so did I, and several of my friends. I put you onto it because it was the only thing in sight likely to give you the return you wanted."

"You ought at least to have warned me of the risk!"

"Risk? I don't call it much of a risk to lie back in your chair and wait another few months for fifty thousand to drop into your lap. I tell you the thing's as safe as a bank."

"How do I know it is? You've misled me about it from the first."

Moffatt's face grew dark red to the forehead: for the first time in their acquaintance Ralph saw him on the verge of anger. "Well, if you get stuck so do I. I'm in it a good deal deeper than you. That's about the best guarantee I can give; unless you won't take my word for that either." To control himself Moffatt spoke with extreme deliberation, separating his syllables like a machine cutting something into even lengths.

Ralph listened through a cloud of confusion; but he saw the madness of offending Moffatt, and tried to take a more conciliatory tone. "Of course I take your word for it. But I can't--I simply can't afford to lose..."

"You ain't going to lose: I don't believe you'll even have to put up any margin. It's THERE safe enough, I tell you..."

"Yes, yes; I understand. I'm sure you wouldn't have advised me--"

Ralph's tongue seemed swollen, and he had difficulty in bringing out the words. "Only, you see--I can't wait; it's not possible; and I want to know if there isn't a way--"

Moffatt looked at him with a sort of resigned compa.s.sion, as a doctor looks at a despairing mother who will not understand what he has tried to imply without uttering the word she dreads. Ralph understood the look, but hurried on.

"You'll think I'm mad, or an a.s.s, to talk like this; but the fact is, I must have the money." He waited and drew a hard breath. "I must have it: that's all. Perhaps I'd better tell you--"

Moffatt, who had risen, as if a.s.suming that the interview was over, sat down again and turned an attentive look on him. "Go ahead," he said, more humanly than he had hitherto spoken.

"My boy...you spoke of him the other day... I'm awfully fond of him--"

Ralph broke off, deterred by the impossibility of confiding his feeling for Paul to this coa.r.s.e-grained man with whom he hadn't a sentiment in common.

Moffatt was still looking at him. "I should say you would be! He's as smart a little chap as I ever saw; and I guess he's the kind that gets better every day."

Ralph had collected himself, and went on with sudden resolution: "Well, you see--when my wife and I separated, I never dreamed she'd want the boy: the question never came up. If it had, of course--but she'd left him with me when she went away two years before, and at the time of the divorce I was a fool...I didn't take the proper steps..."

"You mean she's got sole custody?"

Ralph made a sign of a.s.sent, and Moffatt pondered. "That's bad--bad."

"And now I understand she's going to marry again--and of course I can't give up my son."

"She wants you to, eh?"

Ralph again a.s.sented.

Moffatt swung his chair about and leaned back in it, stretching out his plump legs and contemplating the tips of his varnished boots. He hummed a low tune behind inscrutable lips.

"That's what you want the money for?" he finally raised his head to ask.

The word came out of the depths of Ralph's anguish: "Yes."

"And why you want it in such a hurry. I see." Moffatt reverted to the study of his boots. "It's a lot of money."

"Yes. That's the difficulty. And I...she..."

Ralph's tongue was again too thick for his mouth. "I'm afraid she won't wait...or take less..."

Moffatt, abandoning the boots, was scrutinizing him through half-shut lids. "No," he said slowly, "I don't believe Undine Spragg'll take a single cent less."

Ralph felt himself whiten. Was it insolence or ignorance that had prompted Moffatt's speech? Nothing in his voice or face showed the sense of any shades of expression or of feeling: he seemed to apply to everything the measure of the same crude flippancy. But such considerations could not curb Ralph now. He said to himself "Keep your temper--keep your temper--" and his anger suddenly boiled over.

"Look here, Moffatt," he said, getting to his feet, "the fact that I've been divorced from Mrs. Marvell doesn't authorize any one to take that tone to me in speaking of her."

Moffatt met the challenge with a calm stare under which there were dawning signs of surprise and interest. "That so? Well, if that's the case I presume I ought to feel the same way: I've been divorced from her myself."

For an instant the words conveyed no meaning to Ralph; then they surged up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "THIS man...THIS man..." was the one fiery point in his darkened consciousness.... "What on earth are you talking about?" he brought out.

"Why, facts," said Moffatt, in a cool half-humorous voice. "You didn't know? I understood from Mrs. Marvell your folks had a prejudice against divorce, so I suppose she kept quiet about that early episode. The truth is," he continued amicably, "I wouldn't have alluded to it now if you hadn't taken rather a high tone with me about our little venture; but now it's out I guess you may as well hear the whole story. It's mighty wholesome for a man to have a round now and then with a few facts. Shall I go on?"

Ralph had stood listening without a sign, but as Moffatt ended he made a slight motion of acquiescence. He did not otherwise change his att.i.tude, except to grasp with one hand the back of the chair that Moffatt pushed toward him.

"Rather stand?..." Moffatt himself dropped back into his seat and took the pose of easy narrative. "Well, it was this way. Undine Spragg and I were made one at Opake, Nebraska, just nine years ago last month. My!

She was a beauty then. Nothing much had happened to her before but being engaged for a year or two to a soft called Millard Binch; the same she pa.s.sed on to Indiana Rolliver; and--well, I guess she liked the change.

We didn't have what you'd called a society wedding: no best man or bridesmaids or Voice that Breathed o'er Eden. Fact is, Pa and Ma didn't know about it till it was over. But it was a marriage fast enough, as they found out when they tried to undo it. Trouble was, they caught on too soon; we only had a fortnight. Then they hauled Undine back to Apex, and--well, I hadn't the cash or the pull to fight 'em. Uncle Abner was a pretty big man out there then; and he had James J. Rolliver behind him. I always know when I'm licked; and I was licked that time. So we unlooped the loop, and they fixed it up for me to make a trip to Alaska.

Let me see--that was the year before they moved over to New York. Next time I saw Undine I sat alongside of her at the theatre the day your engagement was announced."

He still kept to his half-humorous minor key, as though he were in the first stages of an after-dinner speech; but as he went on his bodily presence, which hitherto had seemed to Ralph the mere average garment of vulgarity, began to loom, huge and portentous as some monster released from a magician's bottle. His redness, his glossiness, his baldness, and the carefully brushed ring of hair encircling it; the square line of his shoulders, the too careful fit of his clothes, the prominent l.u.s.tre of his scarf-pin, the growth of short black hair on his manicured hands, even the tiny cracks and crows'-feet beginning to show in the hard close surface of his complexion: all these solid witnesses to his reality and his proximity pressed on Ralph with the mounting pang of physical nausea.

"THIS man...THIS man..." he couldn't get beyond the thought: whichever way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the perspective...Ralph's eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on the desk beside Moffatt's hand. Faugh! That such a hand should have touched it!

Suddenly he heard himself speaking. "Before my marriage--did you know they hadn't told me?"

"Why, I understood as much..."

Ralph pushed on: "You knew it the day I met you in Mr. Spragg's office?"