The Helpers

Bartrow's brows went together in a frown of perplexity. "As long as I'm not going to let him, I suppose I haven't any right to ask questions, but" —

She put the book on the table and looked up at him with something of Connie's steadfastness in her eyes.

"Perhaps I was foolish to try to make even such a small mystery of it; but I thought – I was so anxious to – to put it in such a way as to" —

The words would not discover themselves; and Bartrow, to whom the mystery was now no mystery, helped her over the obstruction.

"As to make it easy for me. I think I catch on, after so long a time. Mr. Grimsby is your business manager, isn't he?"

"My solicitor; yes."

"That's what I meant. And it was going to be your own money?"

"Yes."

He met her gaze with a smile of mingled triumph and admiration.

"It was a close call, and you'll never know how near I came to falling down," he said. "It was a fearful temptation."

The pencilled brows went up with a little arch of interrogation between them.

"A temptation? Why do you call it that?"

Bartrow was slowly coming to his own in the matter of unconstraint. "If you had ever dabbled in mineral, you'd know. When a fellow gets in about so deep, he'd foreclose the mortgage on his grandfather's farm to get money to go on with. I didn't read between the lines in your letter. I thought the Philadelphia man was some friend of yours who was interested in a general way, and the temptation to fall on his neck and weep was almost too much for me."

"You still call it a temptation."

"It was just that, and nothing less. I had the toughest kind of a fight with myself before I could say no, and mean it."

"But why should you say no? You believe in the Little Myriad, don't you?"

"Sure. But that's for myself – and for a few people who knew the size of the risk when they staked me. So far as I've gone with it, it's only a big game of chance; and I wouldn't let you put your money into it unless I knew it was the surest kind of a sure thing."

"Not if I believe in it, too? Not if I am willing to take the chances that you and the others have taken?" Myra conceived that her mistake lay in putting it upon the ground of a purely business transaction, and changed front with truly feminine adroitness. "Won't you let me have just a tiny share of it? Enough so that when I go back to Philadelphia I can say that I am interested in a mine? I should think you might. I'll promise to be the most tractable and obedient stockholder you have."

She made the plea like a spoiled child begging for a toy, but there was no mistaking the earnestness of it. Bartrow felt his fine determination oozing, and was moved to tramp again, making a circuit of the entire room this time, and saying to himself with many emphatic repetitions that it could not be possible, – that her motive was only charitable, – that he was nothing more to her than Connie's friend. When he spoke again his circlings had brought him to the back of her chair.

"You're making it fearfully hard for me, and the worst of it is that you don't seem to know it. You think I am a mining crank, like all the rest of them, and so I am; but there was method in my madness. I never cared overmuch for money until I came to know what it is to love a woman who has too much of it."

There was manifestly no reply to be made to such a pointless speech as this, and when he resumed his circumambulatory march she began to turn the leaves of the book again. When it became evident that he was not going to elucidate, she said, "Meaning Connie?"

"No, not meaning Connie." He had drifted around to the back of her chair again. "I wish you'd put that book away for a few minutes. It owls me."

"I will, if you will stop circling about and talking down on me from the ceiling. It's dreadfully distressing."

He laughed and drew up a chair facing her; drew it up until the arm of it touched hers.

"It's a stand-off," he said, with cheerful effrontery; "only I didn't mean my part of it. Let's see, where were we? You said, 'Meaning Connie,' and I said, 'No, not meaning Connie.' I meant some one else. Until I met her, the Little Myriad was merely a hole in the ground, not so very different from other holes in the ground except that it was mine – and it wasn't the Little Myriad then, either. After that, it got its name changed, and its mission, too. From that day its business was to make it possible for me to go to her and say, 'I love you; you, yourself, and not your money. I've money enough of my own.'"

She heard him through with the face of a graven image. "And now?"

"And now I can't do it; I can never do it, I'm afraid. The Little Myriad has gone back on me, and I'm nearer flat broke to-day than I've ever been."

"But this unfortunate young person who has too much money – she is young, isn't she? – has she nothing to say about it?"

Bartrow answered his own thought rather than her question. "She couldn't be happy with everybody saying she'd staked her husband."

"Has she told you that?"

"No; but it's so, – you know it's so."

Bartrow was no juggler in figures of speech, and his fictitious third person threatened to become unmanageable.

Her smile was good to look upon. "I don't know anything of the kind. I think she would be very foolish to let such an absurd thing make her unhappy – supposing any one should be unkind enough to say it."

"They would say it, and I'd hear of it; and then there'd be trouble."

"But you say you love her; isn't your love strong enough to rise above such things? You think the sacrifice would be hers, but it wouldn't; it would be yours."

"I don't see how you make that out."

Myra's heart sank within her. It hurt her immeasurably to be driven to plead her own cause, but the money-fact was inexorable; and the look in Bartrow's eyes was her warrant when she dared to read it.

"Oh, can't you see?" The words wrought themselves into a plea, though she strove to say them dispassionately. "If it touch your self-respect ever so little, the sacrifice is all yours."

That point of view was quite new to Bartrow. He took time to think it out, but when the truth clinched itself he went straight to the mark.

"I never saw that side of it before – don't quite see it now. But if you do, that's different. It's you, little woman; and I do love you – you, yourself, and not your money. I wish I could go on and say the rest of it, but I can't. Will you take me for better or for worse – with an even chance that it's going to be all worse and no better?"

Her eyes filled with quick tears, and her voice was tremulous. "It would serve you right if I should say no; you've fairly made me beg you to ask me!"

Her hand was on the arm of the chair, and he possessed himself of it and raised it to his lips with gentle reverence.

"You'll have to begin making allowances for me right at the start," he said humbly. "When I make any bad breaks you must remember it's because I don't know any better, and that away down deep under it all I love you well enough to – to go to jail for you. Will you wait for me while I skirmish around and try to get on my feet again?"

"No" – with sweet petulance.

"There it is, you see; another bad break right on top of the first. Suppose you talk a while and let me listen. I'm good at listening."

"I'll wait, if you want me to, – and if you will let me help you to go on with the Little Myriad."

Bartrow's laugh had a ring of boyish joy in it.

"Back to the old cross-roads, aren't we? I'll let you in on it now; but if you take the mine you'll have to take the man along with the other incumbrances, – simultaneously, so to speak."

"I thought you were anxious to wait."

"If you were as poor as I am, I'd ask you to make it high noon to-morrow."