Old John began to offer the various dishes in order; but when all had been served Aileen had not yet come.

"See where Aileen is, John," observed Mrs. Butler, interestedly. "The meal will be gettin" cold."

Old John returned with the news that Aileen was not in her room.

"Sure she must be somewhere," commented Mrs. Butler, only slightly perplexed. "She"ll be comin", though, never mind, if she wants to. She knows it"s meal-time."

The conversation drifted from a new water-works that was being planned to the new city hall, then nearing completion; Cowperwood"s financial and social troubles, and the state of the stock market generally; a new gold-mine in Arizona; the departure of Mrs. Mollenhauer the following Tuesday for Europe, with appropriate comments by Norah and Callum; and a Christmas ball that was going to be given for charity.

"Aileen"ll be wantin" to go to that," commented Mrs. Butler.

"I"m going, you bet," put in Norah.

"Who"s going to take you?" asked Callum.

"That"s my affair, mister," she replied, smartly.

The meal was over, and Mrs. Butler strolled up to Aileen"s room to see why she had not come down to dinner. Butler entered his den, wishing so much that he could take his wife into his confidence concerning all that was worrying him. On his desk, as he sat down and turned up the light, he saw the note. He recognized Aileen"s handwriting at once. What could she mean by writing him? A sense of the untoward came to him, and he tore it open slowly, and, putting on his gla.s.ses, contemplated it solemnly.

So Aileen was gone. The old man stared at each word as if it had been written in fire. She said she had not gone with Cowperwood. It was possible, just the same, that he had run away from Philadelphia and taken her with him. This was the last straw. This ended it. Aileen lured away from home--to where--to what? Butler could scarcely believe, though, that Cowperwood had tempted her to do this. He had too much at stake; it would involve his own and Butler"s families. The papers would be certain to get it quickly. He got up, crumpling the paper in his hand, and turned about at a noise. His wife was coming in. He pulled himself together and shoved the letter in his pocket.

"Aileen"s not in her room," she said, curiously. "She didn"t say anything to you about going out, did she?"

"No," he replied, truthfully, wondering how soon he should have to tell his wife.

"That"s odd," observed Mrs. Butler, doubtfully. "She must have gone out after somethin". It"s a wonder she wouldn"t tell somebody."

Butler gave no sign. He dared not. "She"ll be back," he said, more in order to gain time than anything else. He was sorry to have to pretend.

Mrs. Butler went out, and he closed the door. Then he took out the letter and read it again. The girl was crazy. She was doing an absolutely wild, inhuman, senseless thing. Where could she go, except to Cowperwood? She was on the verge of a public scandal, and this would produce it. There was just one thing to do as far as he could see.

Cowperwood, if he were still in Philadelphia, would know. He would go to him--threaten, cajole, actually destroy him, if necessary. Aileen must come back. She need not go to Europe, perhaps, but she must come back and behave herself at least until Cowperwood could legitimately marry her. That was all he could expect now. She would have to wait, and some day perhaps he could bring himself to accept her wretched proposition.

Horrible thought! It would kill her mother, disgrace her sister. He got up, took down his hat, put on his overcoat, and started out.

Arriving at the Cowperwood home he was shown into the reception-room.

Cowperwood at the time was in his den looking over some private papers.

When the name of Butler was announced he immediately went down-stairs.

It was characteristic of the man that the announcement of Butler"s presence created no stir in him whatsoever. So Butler had come. That meant, of course, that Aileen had gone. Now for a battle, not of words, but of weights of personalities. He felt himself to be intellectually, socially, and in every other way the more powerful man of the two. That spiritual content of him which we call life hardened to the texture of steel. He recalled that although he had told his wife and his father that the politicians, of whom Butler was one, were trying to make a scapegoat of him, Butler, nevertheless, was not considered to be wholly alienated as a friend, and civility must prevail. He would like very much to placate him if he could, to talk out the hard facts of life in a quiet and friendly way. But this matter of Aileen had to be adjusted now once and for all. And with that thought in his mind he walked quickly into Butler"s presence.

The old man, when he learned that Cowperwood was in and would see him, determined to make his contact with the financier as short and effective as possible. He moved the least bit when he heard Cowperwood"s step, as light and springy as ever.

"Good evening, Mr. Butler," said Cowperwood, cheerfully, when he saw him, extending his hand. "What can I do for you?"

"Ye can take that away from in front of me, for one thing," said Butler, grimly referring to his hand. "I have no need of it. It"s my daughter I"ve come to talk to ye about, and I want plain answers. Where is she?"

"You mean Aileen?" said Cowperwood, looking at him with steady, curious, unrevealing eyes, and merely interpolating this to obtain a moment for reflection. "What can I tell you about her?"

"Ye can tell me where she is, that I know. And ye can make her come back to her home, where she belongs. It was bad fortune that ever brought ye across my doorstep; but I"ll not bandy words with ye here. Ye"ll tell me where my daughter is, and ye"ll leave her alone from now, or I"ll--" The old man"s fists closed like a vise, and his chest heaved with suppressed rage. "Ye"ll not be drivin" me too far, man, if ye"re wise," he added, after a time, recovering his equanimity in part. "I want no truck with ye. I want my daughter."

"Listen, Mr. Butler," said Cowperwood, quite calmly, relishing the situation for the sheer sense of superiority it gave him. "I want to be perfectly frank with you, if you will let me. I may know where your daughter is, and I may not. I may wish to tell you, and I may not. She may not wish me to. But unless you wish to talk with me in a civil way there is no need of our going on any further. You are privileged to do what you like. Won"t you come up-stairs to my room? We can talk more comfortably there."

Butler looked at his former protege in utter astonishment. He had never before in all his experience come up against a more ruthless type--suave, bland, forceful, unterrified. This man had certainly come to him as a sheep, and had turned out to be a ravening wolf. His incarceration had not put him in the least awe.

"I"ll not come up to your room," Butler said, "and ye"ll not get out of Philadelphy with her if that"s what ye"re plannin". I can see to that.

Ye think ye have the upper hand of me, I see, and ye"re anxious to make something of it. Well, ye"re not. It wasn"t enough that ye come to me as a beggar, cravin" the help of me, and that I took ye in and helped ye all I could--ye had to steal my daughter from me in the bargain. If it wasn"t for the girl"s mother and her sister and her brothers--dacenter men than ever ye"ll know how to be--I"d brain ye where ye stand. Takin"

a young, innocent girl and makin" an evil woman out of her, and ye a married man! It"s a G.o.d"s blessin" for ye that it"s me, and not one of me sons, that"s here talkin" to ye, or ye wouldn"t be alive to say what ye"d do."

The old man was grim but impotent in his rage.

"I"m sorry, Mr. Butler," replied Cowperwood, quietly. "I"m willing to explain, but you won"t let me. I"m not planning to run away with your daughter, nor to leave Philadelphia. You ought to know me well enough to know that I"m not contemplating anything of that kind; my interests are too large. You and I are practical men. We ought to be able to talk this matter over together and reach an understanding. I thought once of coming to you and explaining this; but I was quite sure you wouldn"t listen to me. Now that you are here I would like to talk to you. If you will come up to my room I will be glad to--otherwise not. Won"t you come up?"

Butler saw that Cowperwood had the advantage. He might as well go up.

Otherwise it was plain he would get no information.

"Very well," he said.

Cowperwood led the way quite amicably, and, having entered his private office, closed the door behind him.

"We ought to be able to talk this matter over and reach an understanding," he said again, when they were in the room and he had closed the door. "I am not as bad as you think, though I know I appear very bad." Butler stared at him in contempt. "I love your daughter, and she loves me. I know you are asking yourself how I can do this while I am still married; but I a.s.sure you I can, and that I do. I am not happily married. I had expected, if this panic hadn"t come along, to arrange with my wife for a divorce and marry Aileen. My intentions are perfectly good. The situation which you can complain of, of course, is the one you encountered a few weeks ago. It was indiscreet, but it was entirely human. Your daughter does not complain--she understands." At the mention of his daughter in this connection Butler flushed with rage and shame, but he controlled himself.

"And ye think because she doesn"t complain that it"s all right, do ye?"

he asked, sarcastically.

"From my point of view, yes; from yours no. You have one view of life, Mr. Butler, and I have another."

"Ye"re right there," put in Butler, "for once, anyhow."

"That doesn"t prove that either of us is right or wrong. In my judgment the present end justifies the means. The end I have in view is to marry Aileen. If I can possibly pull myself out of this financial sc.r.a.pe that I am in I will do so. Of course, I would like to have your consent for that--so would Aileen; but if we can"t, we can"t." (Cowperwood was thinking that while this might not have a very soothing effect on the old contractor"s point of view, nevertheless it must make some appeal to his sense of the possible or necessary. Aileen"s present situation was quite unsatisfactory without marriage in view. And even if he, Cowperwood, was a convicted embezzler in the eyes of the public, that did not make him so. He might get free and restore himself--would certainly--and Aileen ought to be glad to marry him if she could under the circ.u.mstances. He did not quite grasp the depth of Butler"s religious and moral prejudices.) "Lately," he went on, "you have been doing all you can, as I understand it, to pull me down, on account of Aileen, I suppose; but that is simply delaying what I want to do."

"Ye"d like me to help ye do that, I suppose?" suggested Butler, with infinite disgust and patience.

"I want to marry Aileen," Cowperwood repeated, for emphasis" sake. "She wants to marry me. Under the circ.u.mstances, however you may feel, you can have no real objection to my doing that, I am sure; yet you go on fighting me--making it hard for me to do what you really know ought to be done."

"Ye"re a scoundrel," said Butler, seeing through his motives quite clearly. "Ye"re a sharper, to my way of thinkin", and it"s no child of mine I want connected with ye. I"m not sayin", seein" that things are as they are, that if ye were a free man it wouldn"t be better that she should marry ye. It"s the one dacent thing ye could do--if ye would, which I doubt. But that"s nayther here nor there now. What can ye want with her hid away somewhere? Ye can"t marry her. Ye can"t get a divorce.

Ye"ve got your hands full fightin" your lawsuits and kapin" yourself out of jail. She"ll only be an added expense to ye, and ye"ll be wantin" all the money ye have for other things, I"m thinkin". Why should ye want to be takin" her away from a dacent home and makin" something out of her that ye"d be ashamed to marry if you could? The laist ye could do, if ye were any kind of a man at all, and had any of that thing that ye"re plased to call love, would be to lave her at home and keep her as respectable as possible. Mind ye, I"m not thinkin" she isn"t ten thousand times too good for ye, whatever ye"ve made of her. But if ye had any sinse of dacency left, ye wouldn"t let her shame her family and break her old mother"s heart, and that for no purpose except to make her worse than she is already. What good can ye get out of it, now? What good can ye expect to come of it? Be hivins, if ye had any sinse at all I should think ye could see that for yerself. Ye"re only addin" to your troubles, not takin" away from them--and she"ll not thank ye for that later on."

He stopped, rather astonished that he should have been drawn into an argument. His contempt for this man was so great that he could scarcely look at him, but his duty and his need was to get Aileen back.

Cowperwood looked at him as one who gives serious attention to another.

He seemed to be thinking deeply over what Butler had said.

"To tell you the truth, Mr. Butler," he said, "I did not want Aileen to leave your home at all; and she will tell you so, if you ever talk to her about it. I did my best to persuade her not to, and when she insisted on going the only thing I could do was to be sure she would be comfortable wherever she went. She was greatly outraged to think you should have put detectives on her trail. That, and the fact that you wanted to send her away somewhere against her will, was the princ.i.p.al reasons for her leaving. I a.s.sure you I did not want her to go. I think you forget sometimes, Mr. Butler, that Aileen is a grown woman, and that she has a will of her own. You think I control her to her great disadvantage. As a matter of fact, I am very much in love with her, and have been for three or four years; and if you know anything about love you know that it doesn"t always mean control. I"m not doing Aileen any injustice when I say that she has had as much influence on me as I have had on her. I love her, and that"s the cause of all the trouble. You come and insist that I shall return your daughter to you. As a matter of fact, I don"t know whether I can or not. I don"t know that she would go if I wanted her to. She might turn on me and say that I didn"t care for her any more. That is not true, and I would not want her to feel that way. She is greatly hurt, as I told you, by what you did to her, and the fact that you want her to leave Philadelphia. You can do as much to remedy that as I can. I could tell you where she is, but I do not know that I want to. Certainly not until I know what your att.i.tude toward her and this whole proposition is to be."

He paused and looked calmly at the old contractor, who eyed him grimly in return.

"What proposition are ye talkin" about?" asked Butler, interested by the peculiar developments of this argument. In spite of himself he was getting a slightly different angle on the whole situation. The scene was shifting to a certain extent. Cowperwood appeared to be reasonably sincere in the matter. His promises might all be wrong, but perhaps he did love Aileen; and it was possible that he did intend to get a divorce from his wife some time and marry her. Divorce, as Butler knew, was against the rules of the Catholic Church, which he so much revered. The laws of G.o.d and any sense of decency commanded that Cowperwood should not desert his wife and children and take up with another woman--not even Aileen, in order to save her. It was a criminal thing to plan, sociologically speaking, and showed what a villain Cowperwood inherently was; but, nevertheless, Cowperwood was not a Catholic, his views of life were not the same as his own, Butler"s, and besides and worst of all (no doubt due in part to Aileen"s own temperament), he had compromised her situation very materially. She might not easily be restored to a sense of of the normal and decent, and so the matter was worth taking into thought. Butler knew that ultimately he could not countenance any such thing--certainly not, and keep his faith with the Church--but he was human enough none the less to consider it. Besides, he wanted Aileen to come back; and Aileen from now on, he knew, would have some say as to what her future should be.

"Well, it"s simple enough," replied Cowperwood. "I should like to have you withdraw your opposition to Aileen"s remaining in Philadelphia, for one thing; and for another, I should like you to stop your attacks on me." Cowperwood smiled in an ingratiating way. He hoped really to placate Butler in part by his generous att.i.tude throughout this procedure. "I can"t make you do that, of course, unless you want to. I merely bring it up, Mr. Butler, because I am sure that if it hadn"t been for Aileen you would not have taken the course you have taken toward me.

I understood you received an anonymous letter, and that afternoon you called your loan with me. Since then I have heard from one source and another that you were strongly against me, and I merely wish to say that I wish you wouldn"t be. I am not guilty of embezzling any sixty thousand dollars, and you know it. My intentions were of the best. I did not think I was going to fail at the time I used those certificates, and if it hadn"t been for several other loans that were called I would have gone on to the end of the month and put them back in time, as I always had. I have always valued your friendship very highly, and I am very sorry to lose it. Now I have said all I am going to say."

Butler looked at Cowperwood with shrewd, calculating eyes. The man had some merit, but much unconscionable evil in him. Butler knew very well how he had taken the check, and a good many other things in connection with it. The manner in which he had played his cards to-night was on a par with the way he had run to him on the night of the fire. He was just shrewd and calculating and heartless.