The Empty Sack Part 9

"Bradley, I shall expect you to remain with me," were the only words she used.

And he had remained. Less than two years later, it was she who fixed the sum the other woman was to be paid in order to get rid of her. She was sufficiently in sympathy with her s.e.x to insist on the terms being liberal. "I think she should have fifty thousand dollars," she declared, and fifty thousand dollars the woman received.

So that, if Bradley had lost the first pa.s.sion of his love for her, he had gained vastly in respect. Hot-tempered, high-handed, impetuous, imperious, as he knew her to be, he saw her curb and compress these qualities till they became a prodigious motor force. If she had not mastered herself, she had mastered the expression of herself till she was an instrument at her own command.

It was as an instrument at her own command that, on the Wednesday morning, before he went to town, she gave her husband as much information as she thought he ought to possess about his son.

"Would you mind sitting down for a minute, Bradley? I've something important to say."

He had come up to her room, as she took her breakfast in bed, after he had had his own downstairs. Wearing a lace dressing jacket and a boudoir cap, she was propped up with pillows, a wicker tray with legs on the coverlet before her. In the canopied Louis Quinze bed of old rich-grained walnut, raised six inches above the floor, she suggested an eighteenth-century French princess, Madame Sophie or Madame Victoire, receiving a courtier at her _levee_.

Luxurious with a note of chast.i.ty was the rest of the chintzy room. The pictures on the walls were sacred ones, copies of old Italian masters. A _prie-dieu_ in a corner supported a bible and a prayer-book in tooled bindings with a coat of arms. The white-paneled wardrobe room seen through a door ajar was as austere as a well-kept sacristy. Perfumed air came in through the open windows, and thrushes were fluting in the trees.

Reminding her that Tims, the chauffeur, would soon be at the door to take him to the bank, Collingham sank into the armchair nearest to the bed. His thoughts were on the amount in the proposed issue of Paraguayan bonds the house would be able to carry.

"It's about Bob," she began, in a tone little more than casual. "Did you know he was in a sc.r.a.pe?"

He started, firing off his brief questions rapidly:

"Who? Bob? What kind of sc.r.a.pe? With a girl?"

"Exactly. With a girl who may give us a good deal of trouble unless the thing is stopped."

If Collingham's heart sank it was not wholly because of the sc.r.a.pe with the girl, but because he was afraid of chickens coming home to roost.

Though he had never broached the subject with the boy, he had often wondered as to how he met s.e.xual temptation; and now he was to learn.

"Is it anything very wrong?"

"Only in intention." She sipped her coffee before letting him have the full force of it. "He wants to marry her."

He felt some slight relief.

"Oh, then it's not-"

"No; not as far as he's concerned. As to her-well I presume that she's the usual type."

"Did he tell you himself?"

"He told me himself."

"His job at the bank pays him only two thousand dollars a year. Did he say what else he expected to marry on?"

"We didn't discuss that; but I suppose it would be what he expects you to give him."

"And if I don't give him anything?"

"That's what I wanted to know. If you didn't-"

"He'd call it off?"

"No; perhaps not. But she would."

"Have you any special reason for thinking so?"

"None but my knowledge of-of that kind of woman in general." She went on as quietly as if the incident of fifteen years previously had never occurred. "Men are so guileless about women who have-who have love to sell. They're such simpletons. They so easily think these women like them for themselves when all the while they're only gauging the measure of the pocketbook."

Collingham endeavored not to hang his head, but it seemed to go down in spite of him as the placid voice sketched his program for the day.

Junia had heard her husband say that Mr. Huntley, his second in command, was to go to South America in connection with the issue of Paraguayan bonds. Why shouldn't Bob be sent with him? It would add to his experience and make him feel important. After he had left Asuncion, reasons could be found for keeping him at Lima, Rio, or Buenos Aires till the whole thing blew over. Having accepted the suggestion gratefully, Collingham came to the question he had up to now repressed.

"Who's the girl? I suppose you know."

"She's been posing for Hubert Wray. Bob met her at the studio. Her name is-"

Grasping the arms of the chair, he strained forward.

"Not-not Follett's girl?"

"Yes; that _is_ the name. You dismissed her father from the bank last year." Her eyes followed him as he stumbled to his feet. "But what difference does it make whether it's she or some one else?"

He couldn't tell her. The fear of the vague nemesis he called "chickens coming home to roost" was too obscure. Listening in a daze to the rest of his instructions, he seized them chiefly because they would ease the line he was to take with Bob.

He was to give him no hint that he, the father, had heard anything of the Follett girl. The South American mission could stand on its own merits as extremely flattering. Whatever reluctance Bob might feel, he would see the opportunity as too important to forego. All Junia begged of her husband was to know nothing of Bob's love affairs. If Bob himself brought the subject up, it would be enough to remain firm on the question of money. Of the rest, Junia was willing to take charge, as she would explain to him when he came home in the afternoon.

These instructions Collingham did his best to carry out. At lunch, in the house's private room at the Bowling Green Club, he approached Mr.

Huntley on the subject of being responsible for Bob on the errand to Asuncion, and Mr. Huntley expressed himself as delighted. On returning to the bank, Collingham asked Miss Rudd.i.c.k to bring the young man to the private office.

"h.e.l.lo, Bob! How are things going?"

"So, so, dad," Bob admitted, guardedly.

"Sit down. I want to talk to you."

Bob sat down gingerly, warily, scenting something in the wind, much like Max or Dauphin from a person's atmosphere. Whatever his mother had been told on Sat.u.r.day, his father might have learned by Wednesday. Bob would have been sure of this were it not that his mother often had curious reserves.

For Collingham there was nothing to do but to plunge on the subject of South America, and he plunged. But, in his dread of the roosting chicken, he plunged nervously, with a tendency to redden, to stammer, and otherwise to betray himself. Before he had finished Bob was saying inwardly: "Mother's put him wise to Jennie and I'm to be packed off.

Well, we'll see."

"It's thumping good of you and Mr. Huntley, dad," he said, aloud; "and I suppose it would do if I gave you my answer in a day or two."

"That's the girl," the father thought; but he obeyed Junia's injunction as to not being explicit when it came to words.

"You see, it's this way, Bob: It's not exactly an invitation that I'm giving you; it's-it's a decision of the bank of which you're an employee. We take it for granted that you'll go if we want to send you."

"And I take it for granted that you won't send me if I don't want to go."

Not to force the issue, Collingham left the matter there, preferring to consult Junia as to what he should do next. To this end, he drove home earlier than usual.

It added to Dauphin's irritation that Max should hear the motor first.