Griswold

“ The spring evening was raw and chilly, and the open doors of the saloon volleyed light and warmth and a beckoning invitation. Griswold's gift, prostituted to the service of the changed point of view, bade him read in the red face, the loose lip, and the bibulous eyes the temptation that was gripping the plain-clothes man. "Wait," whispered the colorless inner voice; "wait, and be ready when he goes in to get the drink he has promised himself he will never again be weak enough to take while he is on duty. ”

“ Griswold, waiting on the porch while Doctor Farnham fitted his key, had a nerve-tingling shiver of apprehension when the latch yielded with a click and he found himself under the hall lantern formally shaking hands with the statuesque young woman of the many imaginings. It gave him a curious thrill of mingled terror and joy to find her absolutely unchanged. ”

“ Post told him.
"I never heard of him!" said Griswold as though he were delivering young Cochran's death sentence. "Who is he?"
"He's an architect in our office," said Post. "We think a lot of him. He'll leave us soon, of course. The best ones always do. His work is very popular. So is he."
"I never heard of him," repeated Griswold. Then, with sudden heat, he added savagely: "But I mean to to-night."
When Griswold had first persuaded Aline Proctor to engage herself to him he had suggested that, to avoid embarrassment, she should tell him the names of the other men to whom she had been engaged. ”

“ Ardmore's scarlet fever telegram no longer rankled in the breast of the associate professor of admiralty of the University of Virginia, for Griswold knew that no matter what might be the outcome of his effort to uphold the dignity of the sovereign state of South Carolina, his participation in any such adventure would so cover his friend with envy that he would have him forever at his mercy. Thomas Ardsley deserved punishment—there was no doubt of that, and as Professor Griswold was not more or less than a human being, he took comfort of the reflection. ”

“ They went into the woods back [Pg 292] of the church, where Griswold began to exercise his reasoning powers.
"Some one must have come in from this direction and freed the man and taken him away," he declared.
He knelt and marked the hoof-prints where Appleweight had been left tied; but the grass here was much trampled, and Griswold was misled by the fact, not knowing that news of Appleweight's strange disappearance had passed among the outlaw's friends by the swift telegraphy of the border, and that the whole neighborhood had been threshed over hours before. ”

“ Curses, not loud—since a generation of travellers has arisen to whom profanity, however picturesque, is objectionable—but deep and corrosive; contumely and abuse; tongue-lashings that stung like the flick of a whip; and now and then, at a night landing when there were no upper-deck people looking on to be shocked, blows. All these slave-drivings, or at least his share of them, Griswold endured as became a man who had voluntarily put himself in the way of them. But they were hardening. Griswold fought manfully against the brutalizing effect of them, but with only partial success. ”

“ It was suddenly brought home to the enthusiast with sharp emphasis that to all civilized mankind, save and excepting those few chosen ones who shared his peculiar convictions, he was a common thief, a bandit, an outlaw. Public opinion, potential or expressed, is at best but an intangible thing. But for a few tumultuous seconds Griswold writhed under the ban of it as if it had been a whip of scorpions. Then he smiled to think how strong the bonds of custom had grown; and at the smile conscience flung away its empty quiver. ”

“ Griswold and Ardmore had often idealized themselves as hopeless pursuers of the elusive, the unattainable, the impossible; or at least Ardmore had, and Griswold had entered into the spirit of this sort of thing for the joy it gave Ardmore. They had discussed frequently the call of soul to soul—the quick glance passing between perfect strangers in crowded thoroughfares—and had fruitlessly speculated as to their proper course in the event the call seemed imperative. A glance of the eye is one thing, but it is quite another to address a stranger and offer eternal friendship. ”

“ Griswold: I have held out against you, knowing all the time that you were right; that life is full of these bitter compromises which we are forced to accept. Please forget what I have said about your Fidelia and—and your Joan. You are trying to make them human, and that is as it should be."
Griswold could scarcely believe the evidence of his senses. He told himself fiercely that he would never believe, without the convincement of fact, that the ideal could step down from its pedestal. ”

“ Griswold had been hardening himself deliberately to look unmoved upon what the shaded electric night-light in the farther room should reveal: it was nothing more terrible than the sight of a drawn face, half-hidden in the pillows; a face in which life and death still fought for the mastery as they had fought on that other day when life, unhelped, would have been the loser. ”

“ It was clear that Bosworth took no stock whatever in Griswold’s story; but Griswold’s pretended employment by the governor and his apparent knowledge of the governor’s affairs piqued his curiosity. If this was really the Griswold who had written a widely accepted work on admiralty and who was known to him by reputation as a brilliant lawyer of Virginia, the mystery was all the deeper. ”

“ Granting that his theories were incendiary and crudely subversive of all the civilized conventions, Griswold the man was nothing worse than an impressionable enthusiast; a victim of the auto-suggestion which seizes upon those who dwell too persistently upon the wrongs of the wronged.
So ran Bainbridge's epitomizing of the proletary's case; and he knew that his opinion was shared with complete unanimity by all who had known Griswold in Printing House Square. To a man they agreed in calling him Utopian, altruistic, visionary. ”

“ It had become imperative that she should have time to think and an excuse for hiding her face from the eyes which seemed to be trying masterfully to read her inmost thoughts.
"You think it is strange that I should know Miss Farnham's name and address without having met her?" Griswold asked, when the pause had become a keen agony.
Miss Grierson's rejoinder was flippant. "Oh, no; she is pretty enough to account for a stranger thing than that."
"She is more than pretty," said Griswold, impulsively; "she has the beauty of those who have high ideals, and live up to them." ”

“ When Griswold had reached across the corner of his writing-table in the unlighted study to strike hands with Edward Raymer upon the promise to stay and help, it is conceivable that he gave the impelling motive its just due. To step aside was to become a fugitive, leaving a fugitive's plain trail and half-confession of guilt behind him to direct the pursuit. To stay and face the crisis coldly was equally out of the question for a man of temperament. ”

“ When inaction was no longer bearable, Griswold sprang up and went to stand at the open window. The summer night was hot and breathless. In the north-west a storm cloud was creeping up into the sky, and he watched its black [Pg 381] shadow climbing like a terrifying threat of doom out of the illimitable and blotting out the stars one by one.... "For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain...." Out of a childhood which seemed very far away and unreal the words of the Psalmist came to ring in his ears like the muffled tolling of a passing-bell. ”

“ The girl's black eyes were shining with excitement and fearless daring, and Griswold would have given much for time and leisure in which to catch and fix the fleeting inspiration of the instant. But there was little space for the artistic appreciation.
"Hurry!" she cried; "we'll have to take it again in a minute or two!" and there was still a bucketing of the shipped sea to thrash about in the cockpit when the island withdrew its friendly shelter and the Clytie, going free and sailed as Griswold had never seen a catboat sailed before, wallowed out into the smother. ”

“ The two had dismissed him, and before Bosworth’s step died away in the hall, Griswold was running his eye over the papers.
“That man will do something nasty if he is clever enough to think of anything.”
“He’s a disgusting person,” said Barbara, touching her forehead with her handkerchief.
“He’s all of that,” remarked Griswold, as he retied the red tape round the packet of papers. “And now, before we leave we may as well face a serious proposition. Your father’s absence and this fiction we are maintaining that he is really here cannot be maintained for ever. ”

“ Griswold looked up with a smile that was almost ill-natured, and quoted cynically: "'Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath.'"
Bainbridge's laugh was tolerant enough to take the edge from his retort.
"That's a pretty thing to fling at a man who never knifed you or pistoled you or tried to poison you! An innocent by-stander might say you envied me."
"I do," rejoined Griswold gravely. "I envy any man who can earn enough money to pay for three meals a day and a place to sleep in." ”

“ The appearance of Griswold aroused the Mississippian to a renewal of the discussion of the New Orleans [Pg 27] incident. He was in excellent humor, and had carried to the car a quart bottle, which he pushed toward Griswold:
"As the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina—"
"No, thank you," and as he spoke Griswold's eyes fell upon the girl, and he saw annoyance written fleetingly on her face.
"You needn't be afraid of that whisky. It's all right," the Mississippian protested. ”

“ It was amusing to figure Griswold, who, as long as his modest patrimony had lasted had been most emphatically a man not of the people, posing as an anarchist and up in arms against the well-to-do world. None the less, he was to be pitied.
"Poor beggar! he is in the doldrums just now, and it isn't quite fair to hold him responsible for what he says or thinks—or for what he thinks he thinks," said the reporter, letting the thought slip into speech. "Just the same, I wish I had made him take that ten-dollar bill. It might have— Why, hello, Broffin! How are you, old man? ”

“ Griswold allowed him to go no farther.
"I know this much," he roared: "she was in love with the man who took those photographs, and that man was in love with her! And you're that man!"
"What if I am!" roared back Charles. "Men always have loved her; men always will—because she's a fine, big, wonderful woman! ”

“ Griswold went through the motions with the key-bearing young woman half-absently. By this time he was fathoms deep in the reactionary undertow. Must the recovered treasure always transform itself into a millstone to drag him down into some new and untried depth of degradation? Thrice he had given it up for lost, and in each instance its reappearance had been the signal for a relapse into primitive barbarism, for a plunge into the moral under-depths out of which he had each time emerged distinctively and definitely the loser. ”

“ Griswold took the reporter’s notebook and read over this pronunciamiento; then he handed it to Barbara, who studied it carefully.
“I think that sounds just right, only why not substitute for ‘honest’ the word ‘vigorous’?”
[103] “Excellent,” assented Griswold, and thus amended the statement was returned to the reporter.
“Now,” said Griswold to the young man, “you are getting a pretty good item that no other paper will have. Please wire your story to Raleigh; Governor Osborne is very anxious that the people up there shall understand fully his attitude in the Appleweight matter.” ”

“ Barbara and Griswold stopped at the telegraph office on their way back to the executive mansion, and were met with news that the sheriff of Mingo had refused to receive Griswold's message.
"His private lines of communication with the capital are doubtless well established," said Griswold, "and Bosworth probably warned him, but it isn't of great importance. It's just as well for Appleweight and his friends, high and low, to show their hands." ”

“ It was Johnson who broke the spell. While Bainbridge was insisting that Griswold should come in and make a social third at the hotel dinner-table, the teller picked up his hand-bag and mounted the steps. Griswold's brain fell into halves. With one of them he was making excuses to the newspaper man; with the other he saw Broffin stop Johnson and draw him aside.
What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being subjected. ”

“ You know the place, don’t you?”
“Yes; I’ve visited there,” admitted Griswold. “But we’d better give it a wide berth. The whole estate is simply infested with scarlet fever. They’re quarantined.”
“I guess that’s a joke,” said Habersham. “There’s a big party on there now, and I have seen some of the guests in Turner’s within a day or two.”
[178] “Within how many days?” demanded Griswold, his heart sinking at the thought that Ardmore had lied to him to keep him away from Ardsley—from Ardmore’s house! The thought of it really hurt him now. ”

“ As soon as the glare of the house lights was out of his eyes, Griswold made a quick circuit of the porch. Not satisfied with this, he widened the circle to take in the front yard, realizing as he did it that a dozen men might easily play hide-and-seek with a single searcher in the shrubbery. He was still groping among the bushes, and Miss Farnham had come to the front door, when the doctor's buggy appeared under the street lights and was halted at the home hitching-post. ”