“Have you investigated it? Will you investigate it?”
“No. It’s a desirable tract, but it’s not necessary. We can get along without it, and just now we’re too busy to go fooling round with a doubtful title.”
“What’s the use? We know your option is disputed. We know we’d take on a lawsuit with it, and we don’t need any lawsuits.”
At last Jim understood. Moran had taken his steps, as he said he would. He had promised that Jim would be unable to dispose of his option, and had made good his promise. The task had been simple. He had notified all possible buyers that he would contest Jim’s option; that he claimed some lien on title. Jim knew when he came face to face with the impassable. He put his option in his pocket and returned to Diversity.
Neither magazine nor newspaper could hold his attention on the train. His mind could not be made to forget the weight that lay upon it; his heart could not be numbed to pain by anaesthetic. Jim was young. Suffering was new to him, and experience had not showed him how best to endure it.
It was not the ruin that hung over his business that clouded with anguish the eyes he fixed on the scudding landscape. It was not the knowledge that he was in a corner, fighting for his financial life with his back to the wall. It was Marie—only Marie. Youth can look forward to the building of another fortune; the losses of to-day will be wiped out in the gains of to-morrow. But when love crashes down in sordid ruin there is no to-morrow. Youth cannot see that the unguent of time will close the wound; it can see only that hope, the sweet anticipations which make of the future a magical realm almost within the grasp of the extending hand, has been swept away beyond recall.
Marie was not true, steadfast, as he had believed; her soul did not shine clearly, purely, with the guiding light he thought he had seen. Marie, the wonderful, the womanly, was erased from the picture; replaced by one sordid, despicable, treacherous even. Perhaps the bitterest pain is rending asunder of the trust of youth.
What remained? Work, feverish exertion, the comfort of facing an antagonist, of straining breast to breast with him.
At the junction Jim changed to the Diversity railroad. In the smoker when he entered was a sprinkling of Diversity folk, who, as the train got in motion, edged together to talk politics. Politics in Diversity was a topic of conversation as it had not been for twenty years. Zaanan Frame had taken the zest from it. He had been the county’s politics so long. In the eyes of the inhabitants the present condition assumed almost the importance of a revolution.