PAGE 6
The Best Man
by
“Not much, perhaps; I know it’s difficult. But, after all, it was your kicking him out that ruined him.”
“It was his dishonesty that ruined him. He was getting a good salary as my stenographer, and if he hadn’t sold those letters to the ‘Spy’ he would have been getting it still.”
She wavered. “After all, nothing was proved–he always denied it.”
“Good heavens, Ella! Have you ever doubted his guilt?”
“No–no; I don’t mean that. But, of course, his wife and children believe in him, and think you were cruel, and he has been out of work so long that they are starving.”
“Send them some money, then; I wonder you thought it necessary to ask.”
“I shouldn’t have thought it so, but money is not what I want. Mrs. Gregg is proud, and it is hard to help her in that way. Couldn’t you give him work of some kind–just a little post in a corner?”
“My dear child, the little posts in the corner are just the ones where honesty is essential. A footpad doesn’t wait under a street-lamp! Besides, how can I recommend a man whom I have dismissed for theft? I won’t say a word to hinder his getting a place, but on my conscience I can’t give him one.”
She paused and turned toward the door silently, though without any show of resentment; but on the threshold she lingered long enough to say: “Yet you gave Fleetwood his chance!”
“Fleetwood? You class Fleetwood with Gregg? The best man in the State with a little beggarly thieving nonentity? It’s evident enough you’re new at wire-pulling, or you would show more skill at it!”
She met this with a laugh. “I’m not likely to have much practice if my first attempt is such a failure. Well, I will see if Mrs. Gregg will let me help her a little–I suppose there is nothing else to be done.”
“Nothing that we can do. If Gregg wants a place he had better get one on the staff of the ‘Spy.’ He served them better than he did me.”
III
THE Governor stared at the card with a frown. Half an hour had elapsed since his wife had gone upstairs to dress for the big dinner from which official duties excused him, and he was still lingering over the fire before preparing for his own solitary meal. He expected no one that evening but his old friend Hadley Shackwell, with whom it was his long-established habit to talk over his defeats and victories in the first lull after the conflict; and Shackwell was not likely to turn up till nine o’clock. The unwonted stillness of the room, and the knowledge that he had a quiet evening before him, filled the Governor with a luxurious sense of repose. The world seemed to him a good place to be in, and his complacency was shadowed only by the fear that he had perhaps been a trifle over-harsh in refusing his wife’s plea for the stenographer. There seemed, therefore, a certain fitness in the appearance of the man’s card, and the Governor with a sigh gave orders that Gregg should be shown in.
Gregg was still the soft-stepping scoundrel who invited the toe of honesty, and Mornway, as he entered, was conscious of a sharp revulsion of feeling. But it was impossible to evade the interview, and he sat silent while the man stated his case.
Mrs. Mornway had represented the stenographer as being in desperate straits, and ready to accept any job that could be found, but though his appearance might have seemed to corroborate her account, he evidently took a less hopeless view of his case, and the Governor found with surprise that he had fixed his eye on a clerkship in one of the Government offices, a post which had been half promised him before the incident of the letters. His plea was that the Governor’s charge, though unproved, had so injured his reputation that he could only hope to clear himself by getting some sort of small job under the Administration. After that, it would be easy for him to obtain any employment he wanted.