Chapter XXV: The Ancient Art of Fascination

And much of the last wild hurricane of work took place under the observation of a woman!

From the top of the big mesa there was a clear view of the new reservoir, from the dam on one side far back into the hills on the other. In spite of the tremendous downpour and the fierce gale Helen Illingworth stood exposed to both attacks, and, indeed, indifferent to them,--albeit protected by slicker and boots and sou'wester--fascinated by the titanic struggle between nature and man of which she was a witness. How she came to be there herself is another chapter and how the two men who stood by her came to be with her is now to be related.

The general investigation by Rodney and Miss Illingworth had produced no results. A careful study by each of the members of the new alliance of Rodney's accurately reported, graphically set forth notes upon the subject had only served the more thoroughly to convince each of them of the correctness of their conclusions. Analyzed and expanded, iterated and reiterated, scrutinized and emphasized by each of them separately and then together in many long discussions, they only made them more and more confident that Meade was blameless. But the most assiduous effort with the heartiest will in the world and the promptings of devotion and affection could not make a case out of these suggestions and their inferences that would hold water. They could not establish their contention beyond peradventure in the face of Meade's direct admission and Shurtliff's corroboration. They could not establish it in the public mind by any evidence at all if Meade and Shurtliff remained silent.

If either one or the other of the two conspirators could be brought to tell the truth, Meade could be restored, at least sufficiently so for the purpose of argument; the argument that Helen Illingworth sooner or later must make to her father. It was that to which she gave the most thought, it was for that she planned and longed.

Two people cannot resolve even by mutual consent to dismiss from their daily thought and conversation any subject whatsoever without introducing in place of it a certain constraint. It is as futile to attempt to dismiss anything absolutely from the human mind as is the oft suggested cure for rheumatism--doing certain things without thinking of the disease sought to be cured!

Colonel Illingworth had dismissed Meade from his mind because he hated him. Helen Illingworth refrained from talking about him to her father because she loved him. So they were never in each other's presence without thinking of the man. This was a source of great irritation to the father. On occasion he almost found himself at the point of shouting at his daughter to talk about him. And that she so carefully avoided the subject and as the avoidance was so obviously in accordance with his own wish, the restraint irritated him the more. The fact that they both sought so carefully to maintain the old relationship made it the more impossible. For relationships which are primarily founded on love cannot be maintained by constraint without the weakening of the great force upon which their tenure had previously depended. There is nothing like concealment to impair and weaken a tie unless it be a ban! Prohibitions rarely prohibit. Still there remained a deep and abiding affection between father and daughter and they managed somehow to get along outwardly much as before. Indeed Colonel Illingworth was more kind and considerate than ever to his daughter, and she repaid him with more than usual care and devotion. The very fact that she seemed to have accepted the situation and obeyed the law he had laid down gave him some compunctions of conscience. On that account perhaps he had been the more willing to accede to her request to take Shurtliff into his employ. In no way was Shurtliff responsible for the failure of the bridge or for any mistake in the calculations of the Meades, and Shurtliff was an invaluable man, not only for an engineer but for the president of the Martlet Bridge Company.

He was familiar with the subjects that Colonel Illingworth discussed and wrote about. He was intelligent and reliable to the last degree, his reputation for steadiness and discretion unquestioned, and he was marvelously efficient in his subordinate position. The Colonel, having first tried him out, had advanced him rapidly after learning his worth. He was now his private secretary. Shurtliff being an old bachelor without kith or kin and not originally fond of women, found himself suddenly in touch with one of the sweetest and kindest, as well as the youngest and most beautiful of a sex about which he knew nothing.

His new position naturally brought him into close touch with the Colonel. The old man transacted a good deal of his business in his own house. Shurtliff was frequently there. Under other circumstances Helen Illingworth would have treated him with that fine and gracious courtesy which she extended to everyone with whom she came in contact, but she would not have especially interested herself in him. She would not have made him the object of the delicate attention and given him the careful consideration which would have completely turned the head of a younger and more susceptible man.

There had been a prejudice in Shurtliff's mind against women in general, and Helen Illingworth in particular. He had quickly realized that she above all persons had the greatest interest in disproving Meade's statement and his own and in laying the blame for the failure of the bridge where it belonged, on the shoulders of the patron, to love whom had been the habit of his life. Therefore, the old secretary was constantly on his guard lest he be entrapped into admissions or actions which might be used to discredit the older Meade and convict the two conspirators.

But Helen Illingworth was far too clever to allow any inkling of such a design to appear. Not the remotest hint of such a purpose did she betray. She deliberately set about to win the old man's regard and respect and perhaps eventually his affection. She had the ordering of her father's household, of course. That was a matter in which the Colonel concerned himself not at all so long as things went smoothly, as they always did. He was a little astonished at her treatment of Shurtliff, but the old secretary was at heart a gentleman and there was no reason why, if Helen chose to include him among her friends and invite him to dinner and otherwise make him welcome in the house, she should not do so. And in his dry, precise way Shurtliff was rather likable. He was touched and flattered by her kindness and in spite of his suspicions, which gradually grew less, by the way, he exerted himself to show his appreciation and to bear himself seemingly in his new life.

Colonel Illingworth had no suspicions whatsoever that there had been any conspiracy to suppress the truth and shift the blame. True his daughter had protested on that fatal day that she did not believe Meade and Shurtliff, but that was in the excitement of the moment and understandable in view of her plighted troth. Helen had never discussed that with him; even the very name of the engineer being banned, she was silent. She was wise enough not to try to worry or bother her father with arguments on that point, to which, of course, he would not have listened in any event.

Accordingly the conferences with Rodney had never been brought to his notice. There was no use stirring up trouble and strife. There was no necessity even to discuss it with her father until she had found more proof. So he at least had no suspicions as to her treatment of Shurtliff. He could not see any end to be gained and therefore he jumped to the conclusion that there was none.

In course of time, as Miss Illingworth never referred to Meade in the secretary's presence, all his mistrust disappeared. Finally he even brought up the subject of Meade's whereabouts of his own motion. Although the girl was fairly wild to talk and ask questions she had wit and resolution enough to change the subject when it had been first broached and for many times thereafter.

Helen Illingworth was fighting for the reputation of the man she loved and for her own happiness, and she was resolved to neglect no point in the game. She partook in a large measure of her father's capacity, but she added to his somewhat blunt and military way of doing things the infinite tact of woman, stimulated by a growing, overwhelming devotion to her absent lover. She cherished that feeling for him in any event and would have done so but the whole situation was so charged with mystery and surcharged with romance that it made the most powerful and stimulating appeal to her.

She lived to vindicate Meade and she bent every effort toward that end. She did not overdo it, either. Finally, as he himself continued to press the subject upon her, she made no secret to Shurtliff of her devotion to the younger Meade, her sorrow that he had made such a declaration, and her determination to wait for him. She was always careful to end every conversation by saying that she knew her outlook was perfectly hopeless and that she could expect nothing except sorrow until the younger Meade was rehabilitated. She so contrived matters, while constantly affirming her feeling for Meade, as to let Shurtliff infer that she was convinced that he had been telling the truth in what he had said.

After a time she deftly appealed to him to know if he could not help her discover the truth which she tactfully maintained even in face of the evidence that Shurtliff had given. And she did this in such an adroit way that Shurtliff became convinced that she did not connect him with any willful deception, and that she believed that he was deluded himself and occupied the position of an innocent abettor. And Shurtliff, in his strange, old, self-contained way, finally grew to like Helen Illingworth exceedingly. Indeed he started in his work with natural antagonism to Colonel Illingworth, and when he sensed, as he very soon did, the difference that had arisen between father and daughter, he espoused the cause of the latter. He was the kind of a man who had to devote himself to somebody. He began to wonder if there was any way to secure the girl's happiness without betraying the elder Meade.

She compassed the secretary, who was, of course, old enough to be her father, with sweet observances and he found it increasingly hard to keep true to his falsehood. Now she was capable of fascinating bigger personalities than Shurtliff, although she cared little for that power and rarely exercised it. The old man actually got to thinking of her as a daughter. Sometimes when they had an hour together he found himself seconding her arguments for the innocence of the younger Meade, for she had progressed that far by now, with little details which his knowledge and experience of the two men could supply. Trifling in themselves as were these contributions, as Rodney pointed out when she repeated them to him, they nevertheless added something to the cumulative force of the argument so laboriously built up by the friend and woman. And they were decidedly indicative of a growing mental condition on the part of Shurtliff from which much might be hoped and expected.

But Shurtliff could not bring himself to come out boldly and confess, and his failure to do that made him more and more miserable. At first his conscience had been entirely clear. He had viewed his conduct in the light of a noble sacrifice for the great man. Now he began to question: Was it right to blast the future of the living for the sake of the fame of the dead? Probably he would have questioned that eventually without regard to Helen Illingworth, but when he began to grow fond of the woman and when he realized, as she unmistakably disclosed it to him, that her own happiness was engaged and that he was not only ruining the career of a man but wrecking the life and crushing the heart of an entirely innocent woman, he had a constant battle royal with himself to pursue his course and to keep silent.

Yet such is the character of a temperament like that of Shurtliff, narrowed and contracted by a single passion in a life and lacking the breadth which comes from intercourse with men and women, that his compunctions of conscience only made him the more resolved. The lonely, heartbroken old man swore that he would never tell. The young man could go his own gait and work out his own salvation, or be damned, if he must. The woman's heart might break, pitiful as that would be, but he would never tell. He was as unhappy in that determination as any other man fighting against his conscience must inevitably be.

Sometimes looking at the misery in the old man's face (for on his countenance his heart wrote his secret), Helen Illingworth experienced compunctions of conscience of her own, which she told to Rodney in default of other confessor. That fine young man appreciated fully the woman's feelings and understood her keen sensibilities, and his comprehension was a great comfort to her. He encouraged her to persevere. Since it was only through Shurtliff that the truth could be established, she must not falter nor reject any fair and reasonable means to gain his whole confidence and make him speak. It was, after all, simply a question of whether the game was worth the candle. How best could they expose or fight a deceit? And that the deception was for a noble purpose and to serve a laudable end in the minds of the deceivers did not alter that fact.

"You are doing nothing in the least degree dishonorable, Miss Illingworth," said Rodney, reassuringly. "Woman's wiles have been her weapons since the Stone Age."

"But I do feel compunctions of conscience occasionally."

"Personally I think you are abundantly justified," urged Rodney.

"Yes, to establish the truth, to give the man I love his good name would justify more than this," she replied, "and yet"--she smiled faintly--"my conscience does hurt me a little. The old man is beginning to love me."

"That's the reason it hurts you," said Rodney. "When he loves you enough he will do anything you want, as I would----"

The young man stopped, looked long at her, and then turned away with a little gesture of--was it appeal or renunciation? He was too loyal to his friend to speak, but he could not control everything. The tone of his voice, the look in his eyes, his quick avoidance of her, told the woman a little story. They had been very closely associated, these two. Rodney also had not had much advantage of woman's society, certainly not of a woman like Helen Illingworth. She had given him her full confidence in the intimacy. He was a man. He loved like others. She was too fond of him, too great, too true a woman to pretend.

"Mr. Rodney," said the girl, laying her hand on his arm, "that way madness lies."

"Miss Illingworth," said Rodney, turning and facing her, his lips firmly compressed, his eyes shining, "I'm devoted to Bert Meade and to you"--he lifted her hand from his arm and kissed it--"and I'm going to do everything for your happiness."

Brave words and he said them bravely.

"I understand," said the woman, "and I honor you for your loyalty to your friend and your devotion to me. Loyalty is not always the easiest thing on earth, I know."

"You make it easy for me because you understand."

So the fall and winter were filled with interest to Helen Illingworth and there was in her days no lack of hope. Every Saturday the flowers that Meade had arranged for spoke words of love to her and bade her not forget, although that was admonition she did not need.

That was the only message that she received from her lover. He had dropped out of sight completely. They caused search to be made for him, sought tidings of him in every possible way, but in vain. Her heart almost broke sometimes at the separation. She had confidence enough in her power over him, and in her woman's wit, to feel that if she had only another opportunity she might learn the truth, force it from him, constrain him to tell it, because she loved him!