The Game and the Candle

"Afterward there must be more. It is not possible, simply is not, for poverty to approach Theodora and Aunt Rose. Look around you, Robert."

Under the clear California moonlight the jade-green lawns and terraces dropped one below the other to the distant road. Through them writhed the long serpentine drive and paths; dotted over them stood dark masses of flowering bushes or trees, with here and there the snowy gleam of a statue; over all floated the rhythmic tinkle of the central fountain. Untroubled calm was the spirit of the place, hereditary comfort.

"I have looked so often, John. Yet, I find nothing."

"We must find not a little money, but a fortune, and we must find it in six months," John answered, his low voice just reaching his listener. "There is no way to earn it, we know. Inside the law there are ways to acquire it. Wall Street, for instance; a new popular song or two, an inexplicable conjuring trick, or a fresh breakfast food. But we have no such talents, you and I; we are just the ordinary gentlemen of leisure,--dilettanti. We are useless, within the limits set for us. Outside the limits, outside the law--"

The suggestion was left unfinished, the two men falling silent before it. They were young; so young that the morning mists of romance still blurred the sharp landscape of reality, and for the moment, daring appealed more than endurance.

"We could not do anything low," Robert demurred hesitatingly. "Not about the mortgages or business tangles, John."

"No, no," John agreed, flushing. "Of course not that. I suppose there is an honor even in crime, a class distinction. Sir Henry Morgan probably despised a common thief, and Paul Clifford would not pick his neighbor's pocket at dinner. No; we will pay our inherited debts, if we have to steal for it. What a comedie-heroique!"

Robert regarded him seriously.

"You are just playing?" he doubted.

"I am not playing at all; only looking at things. For the time left us is not long. If we do nothing, this place will go, and with it all that Theodora and Aunt Rose call life. We must then take these women, Aunt Rose an invalid, Theo a spoiled and petted patrician, to some cheap city lodging, and there strive to support them. How, I haven't any idea. Some one might employ us as clerks, possibly. I have traveled all over Europe and speak French and Italian; that is all my stock in trade, except an education."

"Mine is less."

"We have wasted our time thoroughly, if innocently. Now we pay. Do you wonder that I look at the outlaw's path that offers itself?"

His brother moved, startled.

"Offers itself, John?"

"Yes; I did not think of this without the prompting of circumstance. Are you dismayed, or shocked?"

"I can not see very clearly," Robert answered simply. "Or, rather, I keep seeing the wrong things. Nothing dismays me to-night except the idea of pain coming to Theo and her mother. I do not say it should be so; merely that it is. We are more ornamental than useful, we Allards, as you point out, but we have the art of loving. I think most people have a less capacity for it; I believe it is a certain intensity born with one--a gift, a talent. And we have it. Tell me more."

"I shall not tell you very much, because the work is only for one of us," John said. "One of us must go, the other stay here and live as always. One must still be master of Sun-Kist, still the head of this household of ours and an irreproachable citizen. He had better not know too accurately what the one who goes is doing."

"John!"