The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 31

"Why petty? Is it petty to meet the requirements of a situation? The situation was petty--the trick had to be. Besides, I tell you, it wasn't a trick. If I hadn't given my nerves an outlet I might have balked or bolted myself. I didn't want to have to think any more than she."

"You mustn't say those things to me," objected his friend.

"Why not? What do I care what you or any one else thinks of ME? And what could you do except simply think? Old pal, you ought to learn not to judge me by the rules of your little puddle. It's a ridiculous habit."

He leaped at the door where Margaret had disappeared and rapped on it fiercely.

"Yes--yes--I'm coming," responded a nervous, pleading, agitated voice; and the door opened and Margaret appeared.

"What shall we do now?" she said to Craig. Grant saw, with an amazement he could scarcely conceal, that for the time, at least, she was quite subdued, would meekly submit to anything.

"Go to your grandmother," said Craig promptly. "You attend to the preacher, Grant. Twenty-five's enough to give him."

Margaret's cheeks flamed, her head bowed. Grant flushed in sympathy with her agony before this vulgarity. And a moment later he saw Margaret standing, drooping and resigned, at the curb, while Craig excitedly hailed a cab. "Poor girl!" he muttered, "living with that nightmare-in-breeches will surely kill her--so delicate, so refined, so sensitive!"

CHAPTER XIX

MADAM BOWKER'S BLESSING

"If you like I'll go up and tell your grandmother," said Craig, breaking the silence as they neared the hotel. But Margaret's brain had resumed its normal function, was making up for the time it had lost. With the shaking off of the daze had come amazement at finding herself married.

In the same circ.u.mstances a man would have been incapacitated for action; Craig, who had been so reckless, so headlong a few minutes before, was now timid, irresolute, prey to alarms. But women, beneath the pose which man's resolute apotheosis of woman as the embodiment of unreasoning imagination has enforced upon them, are rarely so imaginative that the practical is wholly obscured. Margaret was accepting the situation, was planning soberly to turn it to the best advantage. Obviously, much hung upon this unconventional, this vulgarly-sensational marriage being diplomatically announced to the person from whom she expected to get an income of her own. "No," said she to Joshua, in response to his nervously-made offer. "You must wait down in the office while I tell her. At the proper time I'll send for you."

She spoke friendlily enough, with an inviting suggestion of their common interests. But Craig found it uncomfortable even to look at her. Now that the crisis was over his weaknesses were returning; he could not believe he had dared bear off this "delicate, refined creature," this woman whom "any one can see at a glance is a patrician of patricians."

That kind of nervousness as quickly spreads through every part, moral, mental and physical, of a man not sure of himself as a fire through a haystack. He could not conceal his awe of her. She saw that something was wrong with him; being herself in no "patrician" mood, but, on the contrary, in a mood that was most humanly plebeian, she quite missed the cause of his clumsy embarra.s.sment and constraint; she suspected a sudden physical ailment. "It'll be some time, I expect," said she. "Don't bother to hang around. I'll send a note to the desk, and you can inquire--say, in half an hour or so."

"Half an hour!" he cried in dismay. Whatever should he do with himself, alone with these returned terrors, and with no Margaret there to make him ashamed not to give braver battle to them.

"An hour, then."

She nodded, shook hands with a blush and a smile, not without its gleam of appreciation of the queerness of the situation. He lifted his hat, made a nervous, formal bow and turned away, though no car was there. As the elevator was starting up with her he came hurrying back.

"One moment," he said. "I quite forgot."

She joined him and they stood aside, in the shelter of a great wrap-rack. "You can tell your grandmother--it may help to smooth things over--that my appointment as Attorney-General will be announced day after to-morrow."

"Oh!" exclaimed she, her eyes lighting up.

He went on to explain. "As you know, the President didn't want to give it to me. But I succeeded in drawing him into a position where he either had to give it to me or seem to be retiring me because I had so vigorously attacked the big rascals he's suspected of being privately more than half in sympathy with."

"She'll be delighted!" exclaimed Margaret.

"And you?" he asked with awkward wistfulness.

"I?" said she blus.h.i.+ng and dropping her glance. "Is it necessary for you to ask?"

She went back to the elevator still more out of humor with herself. She had begun their married life with what was very nearly a--well, it certainly was an evasion; for she cared nothing about his political career, so soon to end. However, she was glad of the appointment, because the news of it would be useful in calming and reconciling her grandmother. Just as her spirits began to rise it flashed into her mind: "Why, that's how it happens I'm married! If he hadn't been successful in getting the office he wouldn't have come.... He maneuvered the President into a position where he had to give him what he wanted. Then he came here and maneuvered me into a position where _I_ had to give him what he wanted. Always his 'game!' No sincerity or directness anywhere in him, and very little real courage." Here she stopped short in the full swing of pharisaism, smiled at herself in dismal self-mockery. "And what am _I_ doing? Playing MY 'game.' I'm on my way now to maneuver my grandmother. We are well suited--he and I. In another walk of life we might have been a pair of swindlers, playing into each other's hands....

And yet I don't believe we're worse than most people. Why, most people do these things without a thought of their being--unprincipled. And, after all, I'm not harming anybody, am I? That is, anybody but myself."

She had her campaign carefully laid out; she had mapped it in the cab between the parsonage and the hotel. "Grandmother," she began as the old lady looked up with a frown because of her long, unexpected absence, "I must tell you that just before we left Was.h.i.+ngton Craig broke the engagement."

Madam Bowker half-started from her chair. "Broke the engagement!" she cried in dismay.

"Abruptly and, apparently, finally. I--I didn't dare tell you before."

She so longed for sympathy that she half-hoped the old lady would show signs of being touched by the plight which that situation meant. But no sign came. Instead, Madam Bowker pierced her with wrathful eyes and said in a furious voice: "This is frightful! And you have done nothing?" She struck the floor violently with her staff. "He must be brought to a sense of honor--of decency! He must! Do you hear? It was your fault, I am sure. If he does not marry you are ruined!"

"He came over this morning," pursued Margaret. "He wanted to marry me at once."

"You should have given him no chance to change his mind again," cried Madam Bowker. "What a trifler you are! No seriousness! Your intelligence all in the abstract; only folly and fritter for your own affairs. You should have given him no chance to change!"

Margaret closed in and struck home. "I didn't," said she tersely. "I married him."

The old lady stared. Then, as she realized how cleverly Margaret had trapped her, she smiled a grim smile of appreciation and forgiveness.

"Come and kiss me," said she. "You will do something, now that you have a chance. No woman has a chance--no LADY--until she is a Mrs. It's the struggle to round that point that wrecks so many of them."

Margaret kissed her. "And," she went on, "he has been made Attorney-General."

Never, never had Margaret seen such unconcealed satisfaction in her grandmother's face. The stern, piercing eyes softened and beamed affection upon the girl; all the affection she had deemed it wise to show theretofore always was tempered with sternness. "What a pity he hasn't money," said she. "Still, it can be managed, after a fas.h.i.+on."

"We MUST have money," pursued the girl. "Life with him, without it, would be intolerable. Poor people are thrown so closely together. He is too much for my nerves--often."

"He's your property now," Madam Bowker reminded her. "You must not disparage your own property. Always remember that your husband is your property. Then your silly nerves will soon quiet down."

"We must have money," repeated Margaret. "A great deal of money."

"You know I can't give you a great deal," said the old lady apologetically. "I'll do my best.... Would you like to live with me?"

There was something so fantastic in the idea of Joshua Craig and Madam Bowker living under the same roof, and herself trying to live with them, that Margaret burst out laughing. The old lady frowned; then, appreciating the joke, she joined in. "You'll have to make up your mind to live very quietly. Politics doesn't pay well--not Craig's branch of it, except in honor. He will be very famous."

"Where?" retorted Margaret disdainfully. "Why, with a lot of people who aren't worth considering. No, I am going to take Joshua out of politics."

The old lady looked interest and inquiry.

"He has had several flattering offers to be counsel to big corporations.

The things he has done against them have made them respect and want him.

I'm going to get him to leave politics and practice law in New York.

Lawyers there--the shrewd ones, like him--make fortunes. He can still speak occasionally and get all the applause he wants. Joshua loves applause."

The old lady was watching her narrowly.

"Don't you think I'm right, Grandma? I'm telling you because I want your opinion."

"Will he do it?"

Margaret laughed easily. "He's afraid of me. If I manage him well he'll do whatever I wish. I can make him realize he has no right to deprive myself and him of the advantages of my station."