# The Red Book Magazine/Volume 17/Number 4/The Man That Lost His Chance

from The Red Book Magazine, August 1911, pp. 673–685. Accompanying illustrations may be omitted.
“This case is your opportunity, young man”
The Man That Lost His Chance
BY REGINALD WRIGHT KAUFFMAN
Author of “The House of Bondage,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY CHARLES G. WRENN
AS the bell ended its tinkling, Warner seized the swing-arm of his desk-telephone and drew it toward him. He was a tall, slim man of thirty-five, black-haired, clean-shaven and quietly dressed, to whose regular features and pale face a compressed mouth gave something of asceticism.
“Hello,” he said.
He spoke clearly into the black ear of the transmitter; but the voice that responded was a gentle purr.
“Mr. Warner?”
“Yes.”
“This is Mr. Lovett. Will you kindly step up to the president's office, Mr. Warner? Mr. Marbury would like to see you.”
Would he step up to the room of that cloud-hidden god who controlled the tangled destinies of the great G. P. & F. system? Would he comply with the request of the almost unseen Power that he had served for six years? Warner smiled; but his lips stiffened as he spoke again into the telephone.
“Very well,” he said. “I'll be right up.”
He passed down the narrow hall off which opened the alcoves that served as offices for his fellow-attorneys in the railroad's legal department. Two of those attorneys, Green and Prentice, both well in their forties, were standing by the gate in the reception-room's rail when Warner paused to leave word of his destination with the uniformed negro in attendance there.
“If anybody asks for me,” said Warner, and he could not deny his tone a note of triumph, “you may tell him that I am busy in Mr. Marbury's office.”
Green, stroking his bald head, looked after the speaker.
“Busy with Daniel J.!” he said. “You mark my words, Jim; that man Warner will climb right over our heads before we know it.”
But Warner did not hear this prophecy. He crossed the entire length of the terminal building by the passage above the train-shed and hurried into one of the rapid elevators to the seventh floor that his associates called “The Seventh Heaven.” There he turned down another hall and paused before the unmarked door to the president's suite.
Then, in the strong light from a plate-glass window, you would have had a second and better look at Joel Warner. You would have seen that his carefully pressed suit was not of the latest cut, that it even assumed a tell-tale sheen at the elbows. You would have seen that, here and there, a suspicion of grey lurked in the man's scanty hair, and that the intelligent, lean face, with its high cheek-bones and quiet blue eyes, had in it a trace of timidity sufficient to explain the need of its compressed lips. Still, you would have said that it was a pleasant face and an honest one, and you would have wished that its owner were in a better position than that of a mere private in the legal regiment of a great railroad.
Warner opened the door.
“Come in,” said Lovett, the eternally suave and eternally smiling secretary. He had a face like a sheep's and his hands, perhaps from his habit of rubbing the one upon the other, were a polished pink. “Mr. Marbury is disengaged and waiting. This door, please.”
Warner stepped through the door that Lovett unclosed for him. He heard it shut at his back and found himself alone in the Olympian presence.
It was a large room, with a Oriental rug on its parquetry floor. There were comprehensive windows letting in a blare of winter sunlight; wide portraits of broad worthies upon the high walls; capacious mahogany chairs; a long, mahogany table; and near the farthest window, a tall mahogany roll-top desk—at which, turning toward Warner and smiling a “Good morning,” sat the bulky, round figure of Daniel J. Marbury, constructed upon the ample scale of his business-surroundings.
Mr. Marbury, even in his hours of ease, was an impressive personage. No man ever more thoroughly resembled himself, and few so completely dressed for the part. His bulging, brilliant shoes were surmounted by white spats; the spats were topped by striped, pearl-grey trousers and above those trousers swelled, under a crackling white waistcoat, a well-filled paunch. Mr. Marbury always wore a brilliant necktie and a black frock coat with a white chrysanthemum in its lapel.
That was the way in which Warner looked at the railroad-president: from the ground upward. When, hesitant, the attorney reached Marbury's face, he saw it as he had theretofore seen it only in scudding glimpses: large and round, too, with a double chin, a bristling gray mustache, a bulbous nose, the gray side-whiskers of a British butler and penetrating black eyes beneath thick gray brows that nearly reached to the mass of gray hair upon the large, round head.
“Sit down,” said Mr. Marbury, indicating a chair beside the desk and a silver-bound box upon it. “Sit down and have a cigar.”
Warner obeyed.
The president lit a cigar for himself and then, with his own hand, extended the burning match for his employee.
“Mr. Warner,” he began, “I have just received a telegram from the head of your department.”
Warner caught his breath.
“From Mr. Gordon?” he asked.
The president nodded his gray head.
“I hope that Palm Beach is benefiting him, sir.”
“No,” said the president. “I'm sorry to say that it isn't. We all thought that he could at least be in shape to run up for a week in the middle of next month, but he wires me that his physician forbids his leaving Florida before spring.”
Warner's heart gave a great bound. He knew that he had hoped for this, and yet, even now, he could not believe that it would be he, instead of his several seniors, who would be sought. He didn't wish old Gordon any ill; he didn't wish any ill to Green or Prentice; but he was employed in a system where fellow-workers were competitors. He wanted to be true, but the thing was too sudden, and he found himself murmuring, precisely as if he meant it:
“I am very sorry to hear that—very.”
But the president did not seem to heed him.
“Not before spring,” he repeated, fixing his black eyes upon Warner. “And we had hoped that he could at least give us a week on the fifteenth.”
Warner nodded. He did not know what else was expected of him.
“The fifteenth,” proceeded the president, “is the date for the legislative hearing on the State Railway Commission Bill.”
Warner, blushing in embarrassment that he should ever have forgotten, remembered. He remembered that, at the last election, a silly tide of political revolt swamped the voting-booths; that a raw-boned legislator, new to the capital, had proposed the creation of a commission with arbitrary powers over the railways operating within the state; that the G. P. & F. lobby had been unable to prevent reference of this bill to a committee only partly in sympathy with the road; and that the road had been depending upon its chief counsel to win its cause by argument before the committee. He tried to cover his chagrin by a resort to the practical.
“I had assumed,” he said, “that, if Mr. Gordon were absent, Mr. Cooper would undertake the task.”
“That,” said the president, “is what we all assumed; but we didn't calculate on the fact that our First Assistant General Counsel is the sort of automobilist that drives his own car. This morning Mr. Cooper had a smash-up and broke his leg. I needn't tell you that it would be against the policy of this road to call upon outside talent—not medical, for Mr. Cooper, but legal, for ourselves. The case must therefore be taken before the committee by one of the men remaining in our own offices.”
The president paused, but Warner dared not trust his voice to reply.
“Consequently,” pursued the president, “I have been telegraphing to Mr. Gordon for his advice. Mr. Warner, Mr. Gordon suggests that you take the case.”
It had come! After six years of waiting, after patience that had seemed exhausted and work that had seemed unnoticed, the chance had come at last! The stars in their courses had fought for him. Warner was more than ever afraid to speak; but speak, he felt he must.
“I'm gratified by Mr. Gordon's confidence,” he said, “and, if you agree in his decision, I'l1 do my best.”
The president smiled, not unkindly, a large, fat smile.
“I'm glad to hear you say that,” he answered. “It reminds me of the day when I got the appointment to my first real office in the Maintenance of Way Department. You have the proper American sentiment, Mr. Warner. Faithful service has no limit to the rewards it earns in this country and this company. I do agree with Mr. Gordon's decision.”
“Thank you,” stammered Warner.
“I believe,” the president resumed, “that you assisted Mr. Gordon in getting up the argument that he had prepared.”
“No; that was Mr. Prentice.”
“Hum. Then Prentice—However, Gordon names you, and I suppose he knows what he is talking about.”
Warner bowed.
“Mr. Gordon says you will find the whole case, properly blocked out, in the top drawer of his safe. He depends, largely, upon the Act of 1870, which he says—” The president drew his glasses by their long tape and set them athwart his bulbous nose, the better to read a broad railroad-telegraph form that lay on the desk before him—“which he says, according to his construction, makes the present bill wholly unconstitutional.”
“In that case, Mr. Marbury, even if we lose the legislature, we are sure to win in the Supreme Court.”
The president's gray brows rushed together.
“It must never get so far,” he snapped. “Understand that right now, Mr. Warner: it must never get so far. These socialistic green-horns and know-nothings at the capital are howling at what they call our cheap grade of rails—as if they could tell a rail from an air-brake! If that commission came into existence, the first thing it would do would be to stop our entire construction of the Conestoga Valley Branch, and the next would be a move to make us lay new rails along the entire main passenger-line. The cheaper rails have never yet been proved unsafe, and we've only just got over the bills for laying them.”
“I see,” said Warner, though he saw nothing.
“Exactly. So you will please to remember, Mr. Warner, that this road has a duty to the public to perform; that there are millions of dollars belonging to widows and orphans invested in it, and that we must, at whatever cost, prevent this sort of unskilled meddling and unconscionable blackmail—which, if we don't stop it, will reduce the January earnings by sixty per cent.”
“As I say, Mr. Marbury, I'll do my best.”
The great man rose, and Warner, at the signal, rose also. The big hand of the elder was laid heavily upon the shoulder of his employee.
“Mr. Warner,” he concluded, “I suppose I should add to you that, in my private opinion, Mr. Gordon will never return from Florida alive. This case is your opportunity, young man.”
Warner trod the clouds. He did not think of Gordon's death; he thought only of his own prospective elevation. Gordon would not come back; Cooper would be made General Counsel, and he, Joel Warner, would get Cooper's place. First Assistant General Counsel—that meant a salary that was, in his eyes, affluence. He scarcely knew the once familiar hall, as he re-traversed it; when he passed the open door to Cooper's big, empty office, he could already see himself in the chair at its portentous desk; his entry into the little cell in which he had worked for a half-dozen years was the entry of a stranger into a repellent place.
Chere was a letter awaiting him. He opened it and found that it came from his old instructor, from former Judge Kittridge, for whom he had first worked as an office-boy and under whom he had later studied law. The good man was offering him a minor partnership. Warner smiled as he read it. He remembered how any sort of partnership with this man, whom he still revered and loved, had once been the star of his ambition. But now—now its “certainty of at least two thousand a year, with the chance of eight thousand by the time you are fifty”—how paltry the sums sounded!
Warner put that letter aside for answer with the rest of his correspondence next morning and turned to the matter of the Railway Commission Bill. He got the papers, notes, outlines and statutes referred to, from Gordon's safe, and attacked them as a starving man attacks unexpected food.
The lunch-hour passed without his noticing it; but by four o'clock he had secured a winning grip upon his subject. Gordon, he found, had worked well: the Act of 1870 might have been drawn with especial attention to the needs of a time that was gone; it might never have been enforced, even at that time; it might have ever since lain forgotten in the crowded limbo of our absurd legislation; but it had never been declared unconstitutional and had never been repealed. Warner found his victory prepared for him.
He had no time for more than a hasty toilet. He even indulged in the luxury of a taxi-cab through the falling snow to the dingy boarding-house on a side-street where he had an appointment. Soon he would own a car like Cooper's. Soon, he reflected; he would—
Joel saw that the burden was Jean
A tall, graceful woman came running into the meanly furnished parlor into which he had been shown—a woman of thirty, with a broad, low forehead, coils of rich brown hair, and clear-seeing eyes of gray. A critical gaze would have noted in her a certain weariness, would have observed that her beauty had paused at its full flower before the fading that another year of hard work must bring it; but to Warner's gaze she was only the woman that had waited for him, and he took her into his arms.
“It's all over, Jean!” he cried, between laughter and tears. “It's all over! Rip up your notebook. Throw away your pencils. No typewriter-ribbon is going to stain your fingers any more!”
“You don't mean—” she began.
“I mean that this is all done with.” He made a wide gesture encompassing the horsehair furniture, the crayon-portraits about them and the boarding-house variety of gas-light above their heads. “You're going to live in a house of your own,” he said. “You're going to put away that jacket you've worn for three winters and have a sealskin, or whatever sort of fur's the right thing, from your little pink ears to your little black shoetops. You're going to throw it in the street if you don't like it, and get another; and you're going to have a new one next year, and a new one every year forever after. Jean Campbell, just as soon as you want, you're going to be Mrs. Joel Warner!”
She succeeded, now, in escaping from his gesturing arms, and, with one hand against her breast, looked at him, her body trembling, but her eyes once more calm.
“Is it Judge Kittridge?” she asked.
“No, it isn't. I had an offer from the good old soul to-day, but I mean to decline it to-morrow. He talks of two thousand a year. Two thousand! Why, we couldn't get along on that; we'd have to wait perhaps three years. No, my dear, you had better be respectful, for you are talking to the man that next spring is going to be First Assistant General Counsel to the G. P. & F.”
He did not tell her all about it; but he told her as much as he thought he might tell without a betrayal of that “Office confidence” which he had been trained to respect so highly. They were to dine with some friends in the suburbs, and, as they sat in the G. P. & F. train, bound thither, he finished his narrative with a look about the heavily crowded car, which seemed to anticipate part ownership.
Jean looked at him, smiling somewhat in amusement at his return to a forgotten boyish enthusiasm and somewhat in her joy that the return could be made, and in the cause of it all.
“Joel,” she said, “do you know why I love you most?”
Warner laughed lightly.
“Because,” he asked, “I am the luckiest man in the world?”
“No; because you are the bravest.”
“Nonsense!” He liked it—he couldn't help liking it—but he felt that a deprecating dissent was the demand of a proper modesty. “I've never done a brave thing in my life.”
She would not hear of that.
“Yes, you have,” she insisted. “You are the bravest man in the world. Any other man would have been discouraged; any other man would have given up; any other man would have looked for a rich wife, Joel, during all these years that you just worked on and hoped on—or else any other man would have squandered his love, recklessly, casually.”
“But you!” he returned. “Every word you say of me applies with more force to yourself. You had the chance of a better marriage—”
“Not a better.”
“Well, what looked at the time like a richer, at any rate. And you didn't take it. You believed in me, and it was that made me whatever I was that was worth while.”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “It was all there to begin with, born in you; and because it was I don't deserve any praise for loving it and waiting. You are brave—brave. That's the fine thing, Joel. That's the thing that makes me so sure I can depend on you, can put myself in your care forever and forever.”
He did not at once answer, and Jean, her hand fast in her lover's beneath the skirt of his storm-coat, looked through a cleared spot on the frosted window, upon what little the train's lights made visible of the rushing fields and fences beside the track. The snowfall had been light, but steady, and it now lay hard frozen upon the ground. Particles of ice blown from the car-roofs clattered musically against the pane. The telegraph-poles seemed to whip by with unwonted speed, and the coach rocked and swayed like a swift ship laboring in a running sea.
The car was filled to suffocation with commuters and shoppers homeward bound from their full day in town. On the seat in front of the lovers sat a grimy laborer, his tin bucket between his clay-stained knees. Beside him was a care-worn woman with a baby whose cries began to silence all attempts at further talk. Men sat upon seat-arms and leaned against seat-backs, filling the aisles and trying to read the evening-papers by the twilight of the smoking lamps.
“I think,” smiled Jean, returning her gaze to Joel, “that when you become president of this road you should put on more late-afternoon trains for suburban service.”
“Certainly,” said Warner. “Anything else? You've only to name it now, you know.”
“Yes,” she answered, “there is something else. They shouldn't run at such a terrific rate around these curves. There! They quite throw me into your arms.”
“Oh, as to that,” said Joel, “I can't see—Hello, here's another. And look here: that man's been tossed over!”
She looked. One of the commuters standing in the aisle had been flung to the floor.
“Why—” she began.
But she did not finish.
There was a sound as if the curtain of Heaven had been ripped from horizon to horizon; a roar as if the stars were falling to the earth. The car, seemingly wrenched from its fellows, shot away at a tangent, lurched, fell upon its side. There was sudden darkness, and, out of the darkness, shrieks and crushing struggle and stabbing pain.
All that Warner knew was panic. At one moment he had been riding in a lighted train curveting through space like an uncontrolled aëroplane. At the next, in a black night, he was lying on a snow-drift with a weight of timbers across his chest and the reverberation as of many waters in his ears. His sole impulse was the primal impulse of self-preservation.
He braced both hands against the weight across his breast, and shoved—shoved madly, till he thought his back would snap. The weight gave, and he leaped up, trembling.
“Joel!” He heard the voice from somewhere near his feet, but he could not heed it. “Joel!—Joel!”
He cast a single, wild look at the indistinct wreckage before him, and then, blinded by the sight, he turned, regardless of everything but the terror within him and ran—through the snow—ran panting and stumbling through the snow—anywhere to get away.
He ran until he dropped exhausted, against a fence, and leaned there, each breath a stab.
Gradually he discovered that he had described a half-circle and was again facing, though at a greater distance, the wreck. Gradually he made out that, from this distance, there came, across the snow, a tumult of agony punctured by brief, quick, authoritative cries. Gradually he was aware of dancing spots of light that must be the yellow lanterns of the surviving train-crew. And then, not gradually, but in a horrid mental flash that seemed actually to illuminate the material darkness about him, he thought of Jean.
“Jean!” he gasped, and, with empty arms outstretched, ran headlong back to the wreck.
He came upon a mass of splintered timber, and iron that was bent like so much lead. In the jumping lights borne by the trainmen he caught ugly glimpses of silent human figures, lying very still; of fragments of clothing and fragments of flesh; of forms so twisted and broken and torn as to appear never to have been human. Here and there among the moving lanterns he saw red stains upon the snow.
A brakeman hurried shouting by, an ax in one hand.
Joel hurried after the man, fell over a heap of car-seats, rose, jumped forward and clutched the brakeman's arm. Warner thrust his face close to that of his captive.
“Where is she?” he yelled above the engulfing clamor.
But the brakeman shook him off as if he were a petulant child. He reeled and struck against a panting man, who bore in his arms a burden. Somebody dashed by with a torch, and as its flare fell upon that which the panting man carried, Joel saw that the burden was Jean. Her face was white and set and upon her fore head there was a slight cut that, to Warner's eyes, gaped as wide and as red as a fatal wound.
“Jean!” he shrieked
She opened her eyes. Even at that crisis they were calm.
“Put me down, please,” she said to him that carried her. “There were boards across my ankle. They held me. But it's only a slight sprain. Go and look after the others.”
Joel flung his arms about her, but she drew away and sank to a piece of wreckage, still addressing the man that had saved her.
“Thank you,” she said. “I'm all right—truly.”
Joel turned toward the man. He recognized in the rescuer the grimy laborer that had sat directly ahead of them. The man's face was now completely blackened, but he was at once to be identified by the remnants of his overalls and the tin lunch-bucket that, with its handle tossed high over its owner's forearm, had grotesquely hung there throughout the horror.
The man had plainly been stunned and had made this rescue through a series of actions almost automatic. He stood now looking straight before him with vacant eyes.
“It was them cheap rails!” he said. “It was them damn' cheap rails. They was a loose joint, an' the engine climbed it. I knowed this'd happen sometime.”
“Are you hurt?” asked Jean.
“It was them rails,” persisted the laborer. “Don't I ought to know? I helped lay 'em. We all knowed. We all looked fer it. An' the company, it knowed it was takin' chances, too.”
“Are you hurt?” persisted Jean, trying to rise, and twisting her lips in pain. “Joel, see if he's hurt.”
The enveloping racket, the shock of losing and now of finding her, and, at last, the dim comprehension of what the laborer was saying—these things had brought his brain to a standstill. Only her words animated him.
“But you—” he began bending solicitously toward her. “Jean, are you sure—?”
“I'm quite sure that I'm all right. You take care of this man.” Her voice bore authority.
Warner obeyed. He led the laborer to a knot of people near by—some train-men, a sweating surgeon and many wounded and a few dead passengers. Jean's rescuer was unhurt but kept babbling of the cheap rails; and a man on a blanket—the engineer, with a bloody bandage about his head—confirmed the babbling.
“He's right,” said the engineer. “I've been expectin' this ever since them rails was re-laid.”
Warner, returning to Jean, found several of the crew helping her into a farm-wagon that had been impressed as an ambulance. She leaned over the side when he called her, and he saw her face still unaccountably calm.
“They are driving us to town,” she said.
“Has the surgeon seen you?”
“Yes. It is only a sprained ankle.”
“But I—”
“This is for the wounded only. I can help here. Perhaps'—she nodded to the spot whence he had come—“perhaps you can help there.”
Joel bit his lip. She was right, and he knew it.
“Of course,” he said. “I'll do what I can. And may I see you to-morrow?”
She regarded him wonderingly.
“If you think it worth while,” she answered.
Warner bowed his head. Even then the horror of the wreck was too strong upon him to permit of a realization of any change in her relation to him. He had run away from her when she called for his help; but he had forgotten that. In the terror of what he had afterwards seen, the recollection of his panic was indecipherable: the blot of the disaster of others—still more, the sense of what caused that disaster, of where the responsibility rested, of what this must mean to his whole career—covered all previous action from intelligent sight.
It was that cheap rail which ripped into his own brain as the night progressed. He labored among the broken cars until the last mutilated body was removed. He worked until the wreck-crew arrived. He carried the dead and bandaged the wounded until a pale dawn shivered in the east. But, under the groans that hurt his ears and the sharp orders that he obeyed mechanically, there ran ever, in accusing obbligato, the words of the laborer:
“It was them cheap rails!”
He breakfasted in the terminal restaurant and went at once to his office. There he brought out the papers that he had, the day before, worked so hard over, and there again he scrutinized their every line.
Doubt was impossible. The company's case was so clear that any novice could have handled it. The establishment of a State Railway Commission would be indirect violation of the forgotten, unenforced, but never repealed Act of 1870.
But something else was certain, too. The proposed Commission was the idea of the political newcomers. These were opposed to the method of construction and management of the G. P. & F. Marbury had many pairs of ears in the lobby of the capital, and Marbury had said that the newcomers intended the Commission as a lever to raise the rails of the G. P. & F.—the new rails that had caused the wreck.
The issue was clear. Joel Warner had only to plead a ready-made, surely winning cause; he had only to plead a cause that was legally certain to be won by some one else even in the event of his refusing it—he had only to do this to be made the First Assistant General Counsel of the G. P. & F. Or he had only to give up the case, to give up, with it, this chance of unhoped-for advancement, to give up even his present position, to give up, at least for years, the woman he had loved and waited for so long.
Warner made the papers into a careful pile and took up the telephone.
“Mr. Lovett?” he inquired.
“Mr. Lovett,” purred the president's private secretary.
“This is Mr. Warner. I want to see Mr. Marbury. Has he come in?”
There was a minute's pause. Then Lovett made answer:
“You are to come right up, Mr. Warner.”
Joel traversed the hall, stepped into the elevator and finally entered again the big, well-lighted, much be-furnitured room where just as yesterday, the big, round, chop-whiskered Daniel J. Marbury sat at his mahogany desk.
The president was gracious.
“Good morning,” he said, his black eyes gleaming amiability. “I have just had a wire from Gordon.”
“I hope he is better,” said Joel.
“I am sorry to say that he is worse. Mr. Warner”—Marbury stroked his bulging white waistcoat—“the fact is, Gordon never would take proper care of himself; he overate. Wont you sit down?”
Warner sat down.
“Worse,” continued the rotund Mr. Marbury. He crossed one thick knee over the other, grunting from the effort. “Worse,” he said. “And, what's more, there is disconcerting news from Cooper. The doctors are talking about possible internal injuries.”
Joel's compressed mouth tightened. He was familiar with accidental injuries now.
“Have a cigar,” said Marbury, pushing the silver-bound box toward Joel.
“No, thank you,” said Warner. He saw the surprise in the president's face; but he only laid his packet of papers on the arm of the desk and tapped them with a lean forefinger. “I've been over these,” he said.
Marbury's bushy eyebrows raised to the low mass of his grey hair.
“The Railway Commission case, Mr. Warner?”
“Yes.”
“How'd you find it?”
Joel looked straight into the other's eyes.
“I found it all right,” he said. “It is so clear a case at law that anybody could present it and that even an antagonistic committee wouldn't dare to go against it. I shouldn't deserve credit for success.”
Marbury smiled indulgently.
“You are too modest, Mr. Warner,” he replied—“too modest by half.”
“Nevertheless,” pursued Joel, “there are one or two points that I'd like you to make clear to me before I discard my modesty. You said—” He hesitated, his lean face paler than usual; but he hesitated for a moment only. “You said,” he concluded, “that these fellows were really after the G. P. & F.”
“There's no manner of question about that.”
“I see. And you said that the first thing they'd do would be to make us rip up our new cheap rails and lay better ones?”
Mr. Marbury's thicket of brows became a maze. What, in Heaven's name, was this threadbare young fellow driving at?
“Not better rails,” he corrected, “but more expensive ones. Yes; they've said so in so many words; but what they don't know about railroads would fill a free library.”
Warner looked at Marbury from the head down. He saw the complacent, strong face between its brief whiskers; he saw the double chin, the white chrysanthemum in the frock-coat, the spats and the bulging shoes. He was painfully conscious of his own inadequate figure, and a touch of red came into his face, just above its high cheek-bones.
“Mr. Marbury,” he said, “this Commission is illegal; it can't under the present law, be created. But—I was in that wreck last night.”
Marbury's face lost its usual serenity. It became cumbersomely solicitous.
“Indeed?” he asked. “I hadn't heard. I hope you weren't hurt?”
“No,” said Joel. “I wasn't hurt—but some people were killed.”
“Certainly. We're all terribly cut up about that.”
“Not quite so much as they were, Mr. Marbury. And I am told that the cause of the accident was one of our cheap rails.”
Daniel J. Marbury's face glowed dully.
“Nonsense!” he declared. “Sensational newspaper talk! What do the papers know about practical railroading? Were you afraid this would hurt us in committee?”
“Nothing can hurt us in committee, Mr. Marbury, because the law is plainly with us. But the sources from which I got my information were expert.”
Marbury's mind was adrift.
“What the devil are you trying to tell me?” he demanded.
It was the end. Ambition, wealth, even Jean must go. Joel fixed the president with his cold, blue glance.
“Simply this:” he said, “—that I can't take the case.”
“What?” Marbury thundered the syllable, because he could not believe his ears. “Do you mean to say,” he nearly shouted, “that you wont do as you're bidden?”
“That,” said Warner quietly, “is precisely it.”
Marbury gasped. His face was purple, and a pearl button, snapping from his waistcoat, fell with a clatter to the parquetry-floor. In any other circumstances he would have hesitated not an instant to ring for Lovett to dismiss this madman; but the papers had indeed been talking; and it would not do for an attorney of the road to go away to be interviewed.
“Haven't you just said that our case was legal?” he cried.
“Not that it was right,” said Joel.
“But then don't you know that somebody will win it for us if you don't?”
“Somebody will; but at least it sha'n't be I.”
“What are you thinking of, Mr. Warner? Aren't you aware that we'll make adequate settlement for these lives that have unfortunately been lost? Aren't—”
“Adequate settlement, Mr. Marbury?”
“Don't interrupt, sir! Aren't you cognizant of the fact that we are a public concern with great public duties, with money invested by widows and orphans, which we mustn't jeopardize; and finally, don't you see what this course will cost you?”
“I loved you all those long, long years, because I thought you were so brave”
“I see that,” said Joel, “better than you suppose—better than you can. As for the widows and orphans, they would be, I fancy, the least sufferers; but they had better suffer than thrive on blood-money: there would be fewer new widows and orphans in the future.” He rose and went to the door. “Good morning,” he concluded. “I shall send up my resignation immediately.”
Marbury tried to speak again; but the door, for the first time in his life, was shut upon his speech. He sent Lovett to overtake the fugitive; but before the secretary could accomplish that purpose, Warner, by a brief line of writing, had forever left the employ of the G. P. & F.
He walked out of the terminal and trudged through the snow to the shabby boarding-house whither, only the evening before, he had been borne by a taxi-cab and bounding hope. He rang the loose-wired bell and was told by the slatternly maid that Jean, though not at her office, was well enough to be about the house. He saw her poor jacket hanging from the hat-rack in the dark hall; and in the parlor—where the daylight bitterly exhibited the horsehair furniture, the worn carpet, the crayon-portraits and the faded curtains—he waited.
She came in, reaching from the door-post to a chair, with a limp that robbed her of her grace, but moved him to a new tenderness.
“Jean,” he said; “you are all right, aren't you?”
Under the coils of brown hair, her forehead, broad and low, was calm; her gray-clear eyes were steady; her mouth full and firm. And yet she looked very tired. Never before had he seen the years of working and waiting so registered upon her—and his own deliberate act had condemned her to a fresh sentence for his own conscience's sake.
He sprang toward her; but she waved him back. Warner came to a sudden pause before her, his face even whiter than common, his glance full of wonder.
“What is it?” he demanded. “What's wrong? What have I done?”
She sat facing him almost as a judge might sit. The condemned had become the magistrate.
“You can ask that?” she questioned.
Warner ran his long fingers through his scant hair.
“Who told you?” he demanded. “How could you know?”
“I was conscious all the time,” she answered. “I saw you get to your feet beside me. I called you and I saw that you heard me call.” Her voice lowered. “And then,” she added, “I saw you run away.”
Warner's hands took a quick grip upon his hair.
“You—you—Oh, it's that!”
His white face went red with shame. He dropped into the stiff chair opposite and put his hands before his eyes.
She looked at him, for a moment, in silence; and when she spoke, it was with an unrelenting pity.
“How could you do it?” she asked. “How could you? It wasn't that I cared for myself. I would have been so glad to give my life for you. But I did care for my ideal of you. I cared more for that than for anything else in the world.”
He did not look up, but his shoulders began to shake with dry, wrenching sobs.
“I know it,” he whispered between his fingers, “I know that so well.”
“I loved you,” she went on monotonously. “I loved you all those long, long years, because I thought you were so brave, and then, when the test came, you failed me. When the test came you were only—” Her voice faltered but she pushed resolutely forward—“only a common coward, Joel.”
She ended. For a slow minute he did not reply. Then, drawing his handkerchief across his eyes, he met her steady gaze, his own wide with appeal.
“And so,” he said, “you can't care for me again?”
“Oh,” she smiled wanly, “I shall care. That's my punishment for ever caring for you—that I can't leave off now that I've seen the truth about you. It's become part of my life. It's grown into me. Yes, I shall keep right on caring.”
Her tone convinced him of her words and convinced him of her justice.
He was crushing his handkerchief into a little ball between his damp palms.
“But not in the old way,” he said.
She shook her brown head.
“No,” he agreed from his heart; “of course you couldn't. I see that now. And to think—it shows how unworthy I am at the very core of me—to think that I should have been so full of other things as to have forgotten my own cowardice to you!”
“You forgot?” Her face hardened.
“Yes,” he miserably confessed. “I forgot it. And so, of course, I couldn't ask you even to try to care for me again—sometime—to care in the old way.”
She rose, painfully, holding fast to the chair, and he rose also, to take his dismissal.
“You forgot,” she dully repeated. “Then it is over—all of it. I wish I could forgive you. I—” Her eyes filled. “I want to forgive you, Joel. I do forgive you what you did to me; but what you did to my ideal of you—I can't. I can't.”
“No,” he concurred. “I wouldn't ask that. There couldn't even be any chance to re-establish myself, any chance to prove—”
“That I was mistaken, that you had changed,” she took him up. “No chance, Joel.”
They faced each other in a third silence.
“You had better go now,” she said. “Haven't you been to the terminal this morning?”
“Yes,” he answered, moving by her. “I am through there, you know.”
The wing of a new amazement brushed the curtain of her personal concern.
“Through there?” She remembered the promotion he had told her of, and she could not understand.
“Yes,” he said. “It's Kittridge's partnership and two thousand a year for me now. And I had been so cruel and blind as to come here to ask you to begin waiting for me again!”
She drew back.
“But, Joel,” she said, “I thought you were to be promoted.”
“So I was.”
“And to take the road's case before the legislature.”
“Yes, But, you see, the legislature is after the G. P. & F. for its cheap rails—and last night's adventure showed me what those rails were.”
Her gray eyes searched his uncomprehending soul.
“Joel,” she cried—“and you gave it up?”
“Why, of course I did that,” he said, simply.
“And you knew what it would mean to us?”
He dropped his head, guiltily.
“Yes,” he said. “I even sacrificed, as I thought, you.”
But Jean limped toward him. She flung her arms about his neck. Suddenly she had seen him whole again. That which had been lost was found. A stranger had instinctively rescued her body; her own lover had, by taking thought, discarded the world and raised her to his own level above it. Through the long night that she had been forging his cowardice, he had been welding his heroism.
“Brave!” she sobbed hysterically. “Brave for us both! Don't you see, you dear old goose? Don't you see that this is the courage that is bigger than any physical courage? You've been brave enough to put the right above even me. You ran away instinctively; but this last you did with your own hard thought.”
She was kissing his bewildered eyes; kissing his tight, ascetic lips.
“Wait for you?” she cried. “I'll wait for you and slave for you a thousand years. You're the bravest man in all the world!”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1959, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 64 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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