His privacy thus secured, Blake sat at his desk, staring fixedly before him. His brow was compressed into wrinkles, his dark face, still showing a yellowish pallor, was hard and set. He reviewed the entire situation, and as his consuming ambition contemplated the glories of success, and the success after that, and the succession of successes that led up and ever up, his every nerve was afire with an excruciating, impatient pleasure.
For a space while Katherine had confronted him, and for a space after she had gone, he had shrunk from this business he was carrying through. But he had spoken truthfully to Mr. Brown when he had said that his revulsion was but a temporary feeling, and that of his own accord he would have come back to his original decision. He had had such revulsions before, and each time he had swung as surely back to his purpose as does the disturbed needle to the magnetic pole.
Westville considered Harrison Blake a happy blend of the best of his father and mother; whereas, in point of fact, his father and his mother lived in him with their personalities almost intact. There was his mother, with her idealism and her high sense of honour; and his father, with his boundless ambition and his lack of principles. In the earlier years of Blake's manhood his mother's qualities had dominated.
He had sincerely tried to do great work for Westville, and had done it; and the reputation he had then made, and the gratitude he had then won, were the seed from which had grown the great esteem with which Westville now regarded him.
But a few years back he had found that rise, through virtue, was slow and beset with barriers. His ambition had become impatient. Now that he was a figure of local power and importance, temptation began to assail him with offers of rapid elevation if only he would be complaisant. In this situation, the father in him rose into the ascendency; he had compromised and yielded, though always managing to keep his dubious transactions secret. And now at length ambition ruled him--though as yet not undisturbed, for conscience sometimes rose in unexpected revolt and gave him many a bitter battle.
When his stenographer told Blake that Doctor and Mrs. Sherman were waiting at the curb, he descended with something more like his usual cast of countenance. Elsie and her husband were in the tonneau, and as Blake crossed the sidewalk to the car she stretched out a nervous hand and gave him a worn, excited smile.
"It is so good of you to take us out to The Sycamores for over night!"
she exclaimed. "It's such a pleasure--and such a relief!"
She did not need to explain that it was a relief because the motion, the company, the change of scene, would help crowd from her mind the dread of to-morrow when her husband would have to take the stand against Doctor West; she did not need to explain this, because Blake's eyes read it all in her pale, feverish face.
Blake shook hands with Doctor Sherman, dismissed his chauffeur, and took the wheel. They spun out of the city and down into the River Road--the favourite drive with Westville folk--which followed the stream in broad sweeping curves and ran through arcades of thick-bodied, bowing willows and sycamores lofty and severe, their foliage now a drought-crisped brown. After half an hour the car turned through a stone gateway into a grove of beech and elm and sycamore. At a comfortable distance apart were perhaps a dozen houses whose outer walls were slabs of trees with the bark still on. This was The Sycamores, a little summer resort established by a small group of the select families of Westville.
Blake stopped the car before one of these houses--"cabins" their owners called them, though their primitiveness was all in that outer shell of bark. A rather tall, straight, white-haired old lady, with a sweet nobility and strength of face, was on the little porch to greet them. She welcomed Elsie and her husband warmly and graciously. Then with no relaxation of her natural dignity into emotional effusion, she embraced her son and kissed him--for to her, as to Westville, he was the same man as five years before, and to him she had given not only the love a mother gives her only son, but the love she had formerly borne her husband who, during his last years, had been to her a bitter grief. Blake returned the kiss with no less feeling. His love of his mother was the talk of Westville; it was the one noble sentiment which he still allowed to sway him with all its original sincerity and might.
They had tea out upon the porch, with its view of the river twinkling down the easy hill between the trees. Mrs. Blake, seeing how agitated Elsie was, and under what a strain was Doctor Sherman, and guessing the cause, deftly guided the conversation away from to-morrow's trial.
She led the talk around to the lecture room which was being added to Doctor Sherman's church--a topic of high interest to them all, for she was a member of the church, Blake was chairman of the building committee, and Doctor Sherman was treasurer of the committee and active director of the work. This manoeuvre had but moderate success. Blake carried his part of the conversation well enough, and Elsie talked with a feverish interest which was too great a drain upon her meagre strength. But the stress of Doctor Sherman, which he strove to conceal, seemed to grow greater rather than decrease.
Presently Blake excused himself and Doctor Sherman, and the two men strolled down a winding, root-obstructed path toward the river. As they left the cabin behind them, Blake's manner became cold and hard, as in his office, and Doctor Sherman's agitation, which he had with such an effort kept in hand, began to escape his control. Once he stumbled over the twisted root which a beech thrust across their path and would have fallen had not Blake put out a swift hand and caught him. Yet at this neither uttered a word, and in silence they continued walking on till they reached a retired spot upon the river's bank.
Here Doctor Sherman sank to a seat upon a mossy, rotting log. Blake, erect, but leaning lightly against the scaling, mottled body of a giant sycamore, at first gave no heed to his companion. He gazed straight ahead down the river, emaciated by the drought till the bowlders of its bottom protruded through the surface like so many bones--with the ranks of austere sycamores keeping their stately watch on either bank--with the sun, blood red in the September haze, suspended above the river's west-most reach.
Thus the pair remained for several moments. Then Blake looked slowly about at the minister.
"I brought you down here because there is something I want to tell you," he said calmly.
"I supposed so; go ahead," responded Doctor Sherman in a choked voice, his eyes upon the ground.
"You seem somewhat disturbed," remarked Blake in the same cold, even tone.
"Disturbed!" cried Doctor Sherman. "Disturbed!"
His voice told how preposterously inadequate was the word. He did not lift his eyes, but sat silent a moment, his white hands crushing one another, his face bent upon the rotted wood beneath his feet.
"It's that business to-morrow!" he groaned; and at that he suddenly sprang up and confronted Blake. His fine face was wildly haggard and was working in convulsive agony. "My God," he burst out, "when I look back at myself as I was four years ago, and then look at myself as I am to-day--oh, I'm sick, sick!" A hand gripped the cloth over his breast. "Why, when I came to Westville I was on fire to serve God with all my heart and never a compromise! On fire to preach the new gospel that the way to make people better is to make this an easier world for people to be better in!"
That passion-shaken figure was not a pleasant thing to look upon.
Blake turned his eyes back to the glistening river and the sun, and steeled himself.
"Yes, I remember you preached some great sermons in those days," he commented in his cold voice. "And what happened to you?"
"You know what happened to me!" cried the young minister with his wild passion. "You know well enough, even if you were not in that group of prominent members who gave me to understand that I'd either have to change my sermons or they'd have to change their minister!"
"At least they gave you a choice," returned Blake.
"And I made the wrong choice! I was at the beginning of my career--the church here seemed a great chance for so young a man--and I did not want to fail at the very beginning. And so--and so--I compromised!"
"Do you suppose you are the first man that has ever made a compromise?"
"That compromise was the direct cause of to-morrow!" the young clergyman went on in his passionate remorse. "That compromise was the beginning of my fall. After the prominent members took me up, favoured me, it became easy to blink my eyes at their business methods. And then it became easy for me to convince myself that it would be all right for me to gamble in stocks."
"That was your great mistake," said the dry voice of the motionless figure against the tree. "A minister has no business to fool with the stock market."
"But what was I to do?" Doctor Sherman cried desperately. "No money behind me--the salary of a dry goods clerk--my wife up there, whom I love better than my own life, needing delicacies, attention, a long stay in Colorado--what other chance, I ask you, did I have of getting the money?"
"Well, at any rate, you should have kept your fingers off that church building fund."
"God, don't I realize that! But with the market falling, and all the little I had about to be swept away, what else was a half frantic man to do but to try to save himself with any money he could put his hands upon?"
Blake shrugged his shoulders.
"Well, if luck was against you when that church money was also swept away, luck was certainly with you when it happened that I was the one to discover what you had done."
"So I thought, when you offered to replace the money and cover the whole thing up. But, God, I never dreamed you'd exact such a price in return!"
He gripped Blake's arm and shook it. His voice was a half-muffled shriek.
"If you wanted the water-works, if you wanted to do this to Doctor West, why did you pick on me to bring the accusation? There are men who would never have minded it--men without conscience and without character!"
Blake steadfastly kept his steely gaze upon the river.
"I believe I have answered that a number of times," he replied in his hard, even tone. "I picked you because I needed a man of character to give the charges weight. A minister, the president of our reform body--no one else would serve so well. And I picked you because--pardon me, if in my directness I seem brutal--I picked you because you were all ready to my hand; you were in a situation where you dared not refuse me. Also I picked you, instead of a man with no character to lose, because I knew that you, having a character to lose and not wanting to lose it, would be less likely than any one else ever to break down and confess. I hope my answer is sufficiently explicit."
Doctor Sherman stared at the erect, immobile figure.
"And you still intend," he asked in a dry, husky voice, "you still intend to force me to go upon the stand to-morrow and commit----"
"I would not use so unpleasant a word if I were you."
"But you are going to force me to do it?"
"I am not going to force you. You referred a few minutes ago to the time when you had a choice. Well, here is another time when you have a choice."
"Choice?" cried Doctor Sherman eagerly.
"Yes. You can testify, or not testify, as you please. Only in reaching your decision," added the dry, emotionless voice, "I suggest that you do not forget that I have in my possession your signed confession of that embezzlement."
"And you call that a choice?" cried Doctor Sherman. "When, if I refuse, you'll expose me, ruin me forever, kill Elsie's love for me!
Do you call that a choice?"
"A choice, certainly. Perhaps you are inclined not to testify. If so, very well. But before you make your decision I desire to inform you of one fact. You will remember that I said in the beginning that I brought you down here to tell you something."
"Yes. What is it?"