Part 40

Another thing: he failed to take into account the influence of any cross current, until he was made to realize the necessity of stemming his strength against it. This influence was Aileen Armagh.

Whenever in walking up lower Broadway from the office he found himself passing Grace Church, he realized that, despite every effort of will, he was obliged to relive in thought the experience of that night seven years ago at the Vaudeville. Then for the first time he saw the little match girl crouching on the steps of the stage reproduction of this same marble church. The child's singing of her last song had induced in him then--wholly unawares, wholly unaccountably--a sudden mental nausea and a physical disgust at the course of his young life, the result being that the woman "who lay in wait for him at the corner" by appointment, watched that night in vain for his coming.

In reliving this experience, there was always present in his thought the Aileen Armagh as he knew her now--pure, loyal, high-spirited, helpful, womanly in all her household ways, entertaining in her originality, endowed with the gift of song. She was charming; this was patent to all who knew her. It was a pleasure to dwell on this thought of her, and, dwelling upon it too often at off-times in his business life, the desire grew irresistible to be with her again; to chat with her; to see the blue-gray eyes lifted to his; to find in them something he found in no others. At such times a telegram sped over the wires, to Aurora Googe, and her heart was rejoiced by a two days' visit from her son.

Champney Googe knew perfectly well that this cross current of influence was diametrically opposed to his own course of life as he had marked it out for himself; knew that this was a species of self-gratification in which he had no business to indulge; he knew, moreover, that from the moment he should make an earnest effort to win Alice Van Ostend and her accompanying millions, this self-gratification must cease. He told himself this over and over again; meanwhile he made excuse--a talk with the manager of the quarries, a new order of weekly payments to introduce and regulate with Romanzo Caukins, the satisfactory pay-master in the Flamsted office, a week-end with his mother, the consideration of contracts and the erection of a new shed on the lake shore--to visit Flamsted several times during the autumn, winter, and early spring.

At last, however, he called a halt.

Alice Van Ostend, young, immature, amusing in her girlish abandon to the delight of at last "coming out", was, nevertheless, rapidly growing up, a condition of affairs that Champney was forced rather unwillingly to admit just before her first large ball. As usual he made himself useful to Alice, who looked upon him as a part of her goods and chattels. It was in the selection of the favors for the german to be given in the stone house on the occasion of the coming-out reception for its heiress, that his eyes were suddenly opened to the value of time, so to say; for Alice was beginning to patronize him. By this sign he recognized that she was putting the ten years' difference in their ages at something like a generation. It was not pleasing to contemplate, because the winning of Alice Van Ostend was, to use his own expression, in a line coincident with his own life lines. Till now he believed he was the favored one; but certain signs of the times began to be provocative of distrust in this direction.

He asked boldly for the first dance, for the cotillon, and the privilege of giving her the flowers she was to wear that night. He assumed these favors to be within his rights; she was by no means of his way of thinking. It developed during their scrapping--Champney had often to scrap with Alice to keep on a level with her immaturity--that there was another rival for the cotillon, another, a younger man, who desired to give her the special flowers for this special affair. The final division of the young lady's favors was not wholly reassuring to Mr. Googe. As a result of this awakening, he decided to remain in New York without farther visits to Flamsted until the Van Ostends should have left the city for the summer.

But in the course of the spring and summer he found it one thing to call a halt and quite another to make one. The cross current of influence, which had its source in Flamsted, was proving, against his will and judgment, too strong for him. He knew this and deplored it, for it threatened to carry him away from the shore towards which he was pushing, unawares that this apparently firm ground of attainment might prove treacherous in the end.

"Every man has his weakness, and she's mine," he told himself more than once; yet in making this statement he was half aware that the word "weakness" was in no sense applicable to Aileen. It remained for the development of his growing passion for her to show him that he was wholly in the wrong--she was his strength, but he failed to realize this.

Champney Googe was not a man to mince matters with himself. He told himself that he was not infatuated; infatuation was a thing to which he had yielded but few times in his selfish life. He was ready to acknowledge that his interest in Aileen Armagh was something deeper, more lasting; something that, had he been willing to look the whole matter squarely in the face instead of glancing askance at its profile, he would have seen to be perilously like real love--that love which first binds through passionate attachment, then holds through congenial companionship to bless a man's life to its close.

"She suits me--suits me to a T;" such was his admission in what he called his weak moments. Then he called himself a fool; he cursed himself for yielding to the influence of her charming personality in so far as to encourage what he perceived to be on her part a deep and absorbing love for him. In yielding to his weakness, he knew he was deviating from the life lines he had laid with such forethought for his following. A rich marriage was the natural corollary of his determination to advance his own interests in his chosen career. This marriage he still intended to make, if possible with Alice Van Ostend; and the fact that young Ben Falkenburg, an old playmate of Alice's, just graduated from college, the "other man" of the cotillon favors, was the first invited guest for the prospective cruise on Mr. Van Ostend's yacht, did not dovetail with his intentions. It angered him to think of being thwarted at this point.

"Why must such a girl cross my path just as I was getting on my feet with Alice?" he asked himself, manlike illogically impatient with Aileen when he should have lost patience with himself. But in the next moment he found himself dwelling in thought on the lovely light in the eyes raised so frankly to his, on the promises of loyalty those same eyes would hold for him if only he were to speak the one word which she was waiting to hear--which she had a right to hear after his last visit in July to Flamsted.

If he had not kissed her that once! With a girl like Aileen there could be no trifling--what then?

He cursed himself for his heedless folly, yet--he knew well enough that he would not have denied himself that moment of bliss when the girl in response to his whispered words of love gave him her first kiss, and with it the unspoken pledge of her loving heart.

"I'm making another ass of myself!" he spoke aloud and continued to chew the end of a cold cigar.

The New York office was deserted in these last days of August except for two clerks who had just left to take an early train to the beach for a breath of air. The treasurer of the Flamsted Quarries Company was sitting idle at his desk. It was an off-time in business and he had leisure to assure himself that he was without doubt the quadruped alluded to above--"An ass that this time is in danger of choosing thistles for fodder when he can get something better."

Only the day before he had concluded on his own account a deal, that cost him much thought and required an extra amount of a certain kind of courage, with a Wall Street firm. Now that this was off his hands and there was nothing to do between Friday and Monday, when he was to start for Bar Harbor to join the Van Ostends and a large party of invited guests for a three weeks' cruise on the Labrador coast, he had plenty of time to convince himself that he possessed certain asinine qualities which did not redound to his credit as a man of sense. In his idle moments the thought of Aileen had a curious way of coming to the surface of consciousness. It came now. He whirled suddenly to face his desk squarely; tossed aside the cold cigar in disgust; touched the electric button to summon the office boy.

"I'll put an end to it--it's got to be done sometime or other--just as well now." He wrote a note to the head clerk to say that he was leaving two days earlier for his vacation than he intended; left his address for the next four days in case anything should turn up that might demand his presence before starting on the cruise; sent the office boy off with a telegram to his mother that she might expect him Saturday morning for two days in Flamsted; went to his apartment, packed grip and steamer trunk for the yacht, and left on the night express for the Maine coast.

VII

"I just saw Mr. Googe driving down from The Gore, Aileen, so he's in town again."

Octavius was passing the open library window where Aileen was sitting at her work, and stopped to tell her the news.

"Is he?"

The tone was indifferent, but had she not risen quickly to shake some threads of embroidery linen into the scrap-basket beneath the library table, Octavius might have seen the quick blood mount into her cheeks, the red lips quiver. It was welcome news for which she had been waiting already six weeks.

Octavius spoke again but in a low voice:

"You might mention it to Mrs. Champney when she comes down; it don't set well, you know, if she ain't told everything that's going on." He passed on without waiting for an answer.

The girl took her seat again by the window. Her work lay in her lap; her hands were folded above it; her face was turned to the Flamsted Hills. "Would he come soon? When and where could she see him again, and alone?" Her thoughts were busy with conjecture.

Octavius recrossing the terrace called out to her:

"You going up to Mrs. Caukins' later on this afternoon?"