It was Sunday afternoon, and Marcreta was expecting a caller. "How long
do you think he'll stay?" Clinton demanded as they rose from their two
o'clock dinner.
"As long as I'll let him, I suppose."
"Well, call a time-limit, Crete." And then recalled suddenly to the
realization that he must begin making the best of a situation that gave
every evidence of forcing itself upon him for life, he added hastily,
"What's the use of trying that new cure if you're going to pull against
it all the time?"
"Do you call this 'pulling against it'?"
"I do, decidedly. Every time that man comes here you're strung about an
octave higher than normal."
She looked at him, astonished. "Why, Clinton, I don't feel it myself.
I'm not conscious that he affects me that way."
"He does, though. We all know people who affect us that way. And it is
not a question of attraction or aversion. Liking or disliking them
doesn't alter the fact that they have the power to screw us up.
Sometimes, of course, it's a beneficial stimulant, but you shouldn't be
taking anything like that just now. Give Dr. Reynolds a chance."
"I will give him a chance. But to-day----Well, I promised Mr. Glover
that I'd listen to something that he has written."
"Help! Then he'll probably be here to supper. I didn't know he'd broken
into the writing game."
"I didn't either until the other day. But I think it is some advertising
for the new springs. He is very versatile. He does a number of things
and does them well."
Her brother glanced at her sharply without replying. That note of
championship in her voice put an edge on his nerves.
But she was mistaken in her guess concerning advertising matter for the
American Carlsbad. For when she and Richard Glover were alone in the
living-room he produced a copy of one of the popular magazines. "You
remember you said I might read you something to-day?" he began, drawing
his chair into a better light.
"Yes. I have been looking forward to it with pleasure. But I thought it
would be in manuscript. It is something you have had published?"
"My first attempt at anything in this line. It's a serial story and this
is the initial instalment. You see, I had a good deal of leisure time on
my hands when I was down at Mont-Mer and I've always wanted to try my
luck with a pen. I call this 'A Brother of Bluebeard.'"
"That's a gruesome title, but excellently chosen if it's a
mystery-story. I'm shivering already."
He settled himself with his back to the light and his profile toward
her. "I may as well tell you at first that I am not bringing this out
under my own name."
"Why not?"
"Because I wouldn't have felt quite free about writing it if I were
standing out in the open."
"Oh, it's a true story?"
"No, I can hardly claim that for it. It's rather a fantastic plot as you
will see. But every writer knows this, that when you first break into
print whatever you write is supposed to be transcribed almost verbatim
from actual experience, preferably your own experience. No matter how at
variance with your own life-plot the story may be, the people who know
you will leap to the conclusion that it is rooted in autobiography.
Imagination is the very last thing that our friends are willing to allow
us."
"What nom-de-plume do you use?"
"Ralph Regan. It's short and snappy and sounds as if it might be
genuine, don't you think?"
He found the place and began to read in a resonant, well-modulated
voice. The opening paragraph was a little stilted, a bit amateurish, but
after that the story swung into bold and breathless action. It gripped
its hearer with a compelling force that held her tense and motionless in
her chair. Only the sound of the reader's voice and the crisp crackle of
paper when he turned a page broke the quiet of the room. Outside, a gray
January mist engulfed the city, and electric bulbs from the houses
across the street cut bleary patches in the mantle of fog. For almost an
hour Richard Glover read in his clear, unhurried voice, and Marcreta
listened, her wide eyes fastened upon his face.
When he had finished, with the irritating promise, "To Be Continued," he
laid the periodical face-down upon the library-table and turned toward
her. In his amber eyes was a new light. A railroad switchman who faces
the company's president after saving a train from destruction might wear
just that expression.
Marcreta seemed bereft of speech. She was staring at one of the lights
in the house across the street as though it had hypnotized her. One of
the delicate white hands was clasped tight upon the arm of her chair.
Richard Glover told himself that he had never seen her look so
beautiful. And for the first time since he had known her, there was not
a suggestion of invalidism in her tall, regal figure. She was wearing a
filmy gray dress with a touch of pink that seemed to give a heightened
flush to her cheeks. He allowed several seconds to pass. Was it
possible, he was wondering, that this "first story" had won that tribute
most coveted by all authors--the tribute of breathless silence?
"Well?" he ventured at last. "What do you think of it?"
She brought her eyes back to the room, to the magazine lying face-down
upon the table, but not to him. "I think," she said with a long sigh,
"that you are a wonderfully clever man."
The light flickered out of his eyes. He leaned toward her with a
pleading gesture. "Is that all you are going to say to me?"
"Isn't that enough? Wouldn't you rather have me say that than anything
else?"
"You know I wouldn't. You know that there are many other things that I
would far rather have you say." He came over and stood beside her chair.
"Marcreta," he begged, "say just one of them. Say this--that you are
glad to have me come here. I wrote that story for you; because I know
that you value creative power more than anything else in the world. Are
you glad that I did it? Are you glad that I brought it to you?"
She was looking at him now, all her ardent soul in her eyes. "I _am_
glad," she breathed. "I can't tell you how glad."
"Then I think you ought to give me some reward. I ought to have at
least----"
She put out her hand with the imperious little gesture that he had come
to know well. "Not just now. Please, not just now. You see, you have
rather--swept me off my feet. Isn't that enough for one day?"
"It is enough," he assured her exultantly. And when, a few moments
later, he climbed into the roadster that was waiting at the curb, he was
repeating the three words over and over to himself like a hilarious
refrain.
Just at dusk Clinton came home and found his sister still sitting in
front of the gas logs where Richard Glover had left her. His step
startled her out of a reverie. "Oh, it's you, Clint! I'm so glad you've
come. The house has been full of ghosts."
"I suppose so. Glover come?"
"Yes. He has come and gone."
He reached down swiftly and felt one of her hands. It was icy.
"Something has happened, Crete." The words were not a question, but they
demanded a reply. And she gave it without hesitation.
"Yes, something has happened. I've got to take some action about it too,
but I haven't decided yet what it shall be."
He stood on the hearth-rug looking down at her with a curious mixture of
annoyance and admiration in his eyes. It had always been so, he
reflected. About the trivial things of life she was willing to abide by
his judgment, but in every vital issue she took the initiative and
pushed her own convictions through. In the moment of large emergency she
had always stood superbly alone. As he looked at her a half-audible sigh
escaped him. After all, this semblance of vitality was but the ephemeral
stimulation of excitement. And he dreaded the bleak reaction from it;
that sudden ebbing away of hope, known to all of those who have kept
long vigils beside sick beds.
"Let me manage it, whatever it is," he commanded. "I've told you before
that you're not strong enough for these emotional scenes. It isn't as if
you were a well woman."
She lapsed into silence, and he felt a sharp twinge of self-reproach. It
was that double-edged remorse that chivalrous strength always feels when
it reminds frailty of its weakness.
"Whatever it is, Crete," he hurried on, "can't you defer the action
until a more propitious time? Can't it wait until you are stronger?"
A little choking sound came from her. He stopped short in swift alarm.
Never before in all the long years of her semi-invalidism had she let
him see her give way to tears. He went to her, moving uncertainly as
though through unfamiliar territory. She had covered her face with her
hands as though she could shut out with them the sounds of passionate
sobbing.
"I'll never be any stronger, Clint. _You_ know it; _I_ know it. Why do
we drag on with this miserable pretense? Oh, it is killing me, but it
takes so long. Why can't I die?"
He recoiled before that cry, before the havoc that it revealed to him.
Inwardly he cursed himself and then he remembered Glover, as he might
have remembered a gun which he had accidentally discharged, believing it
to be unloaded. He couldn't endure the thought that _he_ had hurt her
and, manlike, seized upon the first scapegoat that offered itself. But
he carefully refrained from a mention of the late caller. And when he
spoke his voice was harsh with feeling. "Crete, how selfish of you. If
you should die, what would become of me?"
The promptness of her reply struck him like a blow. "You'd marry. You're
over thirty, Clint, and if it hadn't been for me you would have been
married years ago and would be living a normal life in a home of your
own. You think----" She was sitting upright now, facing him with a
terrible courage. "You think I don't realize what you have sacrificed.
Oh, if you only knew how I've lain awake at night, staring into the
dark, praying to die so that I could set you free. You promised mother.
I've always known that you did. But even if you hadn't, you would have
promised yourself. And _that's_ what has 'keyed me up,' as you express
it. That's what is making me live an octave higher than I can stand. It
isn't--any other man who is doing it. It's you."
He sat down on the broad arm of her chair as though overcome by sudden
weakness. "Well, thank God you have told me this, Crete, before it eats
any deeper into your soul. Sacrifice you call it. But sacrifice involves
renunciation, and I have never renounced any woman for your sake. I have
never been engaged--nor wanted to be."
"But you ought to," she told him violently. "You ought to, and you would
if you hadn't unconsciously put the idea away from you so many times.
You ought to have a home and wife and children. Oh, I know that you
should, and the knowledge has made me desperate."
A dawning suspicion showed in his eyes and then they grew hard. "It must
have," he said coldly. "It must have made you very desperate indeed--if
you have been considering Glover as a way out."
She met the charge without resentment. "What other way is there for me?
You see, there wouldn't be any danger of my--caring more for somebody
else afterward. That is quite beyond the range of possibility now, so it
would be safer for me than for some women. And physical disability, the
thing that made me--that would have made me refuse a man of a different
type, wouldn't count at all with him. His ambitions are purely material,
and I could capitalize them. That's all he wants. It would really be
quite a fair bargain."
Clinton Morgan rose slowly and stood looking down at his sister as
though she were a stranger to whom he had just been introduced. "Well,
by Gad!" he breathed, and for a moment was bereft of further speech. And
then his words came slowly, and more as the detached fragments of a
soliloquy than a response to her own.
"Crete, of all women in the world! You, with your temperament! With an
idealism that I and most other men couldn't touch with a ten-foot
pole--and yet you'd work out a proposition like that! I didn't know that
you saw through Glover. I made that excuse for you, that you were too
unsophisticated to see through him. But sizing him up for an adventurer,
you frame up a contract that----Why, I'll be hanged if I can believe
it, Crete. I simply can't believe it."
She made no defense, and he went on in the same dazed tone.
"Go out on the street and pick up the first girl you meet and bring her
in here. If I should make love to her and try to get her to marry me,
and succeed, I'd have a much better chance of happiness than this
adventure would ever give you. For, at least, I'd be swimming with both
hands free. Now listen." He seemed to become suddenly aware of her
presence again. "When I fall in love, I'll begin to think about getting
married. But I'm not going to be hurried into it by you or anybody else.
And when I decide to marry, not you nor anybody else shall stand in my
way."
She reached for him with a convulsive gesture. "Clinton, do you mean
that? Do you mean that nobody should?"
"I pledge you my word. But this has got to be a bargain. You have
demonstrated that you know how to make one. Now don't you ever let that
man cross this threshold again."
"I've got to, Clint. After what happened this afternoon, I've got to let
him come--for a while."
"Why?"
"Sit down and let me tell you about it. I'll have to tell you, or it
will eat up my heart. But the thing will seem incredible."
"Not to me. I think after what I've just heard that I can believe
anything."
"Well, you remember that I told you he had promised to read me
something that he had written?"
"Yes, advertising matter for the new Carlsbad."
"I thought it was going to be that but I was mistaken. It _was_
advertising matter, but not for Carlsbad."
"For what, then?"
"For Richard Glover."
Clinton grunted. "I see. He is trying to win you by doing the _Othello_
stunt on paper."
Marcreta appeared to weigh the suggestion. "I don't think it is entirely
that. He wants money very badly. He has to have money, a lot of it, for
this hotel venture, and he is trying every means of getting it."
"I've always been led to believe," Clinton interposed, "my friends who
write have always led me to believe that story-writing (and I assume
that this was some sort of story) is rather an uncertain means of
capitalization for a novice."
"But this story was not written by a novice, Clint." Marcreta's voice
had sunk suddenly almost to a whisper. "It was written by----"
"By whom?"
"Roger Kenwick."
Clinton Morgan stiffened in his chair. "_What?_" he cried. "You mean to
say that he had the nerve to steal the thing and bring it out under his
own name?"
"He is too clever to bring it out under his own name. He chose a
fictitious name, and he changed the opening paragraph. But except for
that and the alteration of the title, I pledge you my word, Clint, that
that story is exactly as Roger Kenwick read it to me, before he went
into the service."
There was a moment of silence. Clinton was recalling what she had said
when he came in about ghosts. He scanned her face uneasily. And he saw
in it the new expression which had startled Richard Glover. For the
first time in his life he began to think of her as she might be if she
were unhampered by physical infirmity. And then he fell to wondering
what had passed between her and Kenwick; just how far the tragedy of his
life had affected her. The Morgan reserve had kept her completely silent
upon this subject and he had never had any wish to intrude himself into
her confidence. He picked up the thread of the story where she had
dropped it. "How could it have happened? And how did he dare?"
"I can't even make a guess at how it happened, but so far as daring
goes----Well, as I said, he is desperate for money. And the thing, as
looked at from his point of view, was not so very risky. Why should it
be? He must have discovered in some way that the--the author was not a
possible source of trouble. And who else could care about it? Never in
his wildest dreams would any one conjure up the possibility that I might
know. He doesn't have the least idea, of course, that I ever knew the
real author. What a nemesis! That he should have chosen me, of all the
people in the world, for his audience! It's so impossible that he will
never suspect it."
"But what happened after he had finished? What did you do?"
"Nothing, except to compliment him on his cleverness and try to hide
every emotion that I've ever had. It was hard; I think it's the hardest
test I've ever had to meet. But it has given me something that I never
have had before." Her voice grew husky with sudden embarrassment. "O
Clint, you were right about him. I've known for quite a long time that
you were right about him, but I couldn't admit it to myself; not with
the course that I had decided to take. But, Clint, although I knew he
was calculating and sordid and insincere, I didn't know this about him.
I didn't think he hadn't a sense of honor. If I had suspected that, it
would have made everything different. But you can see," she went on
eagerly, "you can see now why I must let him go on coming here for a
while? Why I can't let him get beyond my sight?"
Her brother nodded. "Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself, that's
the idea, isn't it?"
"I've got to be very careful, you see. He has told me a good many things
about himself of late, and I'm trying to fit them all together. Some of
them don't match at all. And now that he has revealed himself, I'm
beginning to doubt everything. That Mont-Mer secretaryship, for
instance, looks very improbable to me now. I've questioned him about
several prominent people down there, and he doesn't seem to have heard
of any of them."
"Well, don't worry any more about it just now, Crete. Let's hustle
something to eat and call it a day."
When his sister had gone to bed that night Clinton sat for a long time
in the library, staring into the fireplace. The little scene which had
been enacted there a few hours earlier had stirred him to the depths of
his being. It brought him perplexity and a poignant self-reproach. The
fact that she was not the crying type of woman made her emotional
abandon a particularly haunting thing.
"I've been an awful ass," he muttered. "I can't see just now where it is
exactly that I failed. But it's evident that somewhere along the line
I've acted like one of the early Christian martyrs."
He picked up a little volume that was lying at his elbow. It was a
dainty thing bound in gold and ivory. He remembered that Roger Kenwick
had given it to his sister on that last night when he had come to bid
her good-by. He had never looked into it before. Now he turned the pages
idly. It was modern verse, and he read intermittently here and there.
Among the leaves he came at last upon a folded bit of paper. It was in
Marcreta's handwriting; evidently something that she had copied. He
tilted it under the light and read the trio of stanzas.
I cannot drive thee from my memory;
I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.
Is there no corner of oblivion's realm
Whence thy uneasy spirit may depart?
If love were dead, if love could only die,
And leave me desolation and despair;
The emptiness of day, the aching night,
All these at last my soul could learn to bear.
But ever when I think thy fire is spent
And seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain,
Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light--
And all my altar flames to life again.
Clinton Morgan folded the bit of paper with reverent fingers. For he
knew, all at once, that this was not a copy of anything, but that he had
unwittingly torn aside the veil of his sister's secret soul. He felt all
of the honorable man's repugnance against outraged decency. The scrap of
paper seemed to scorch his fingers. With a punctilious regard for
detail, which he knew to be absurd, he tried to find the exact page
where it had been concealed. Then he put the volume back upon the table
and went over to the window. His conjectures concerning this romance had
come to an end. Now he knew, and knowing felt suddenly weighted with
guilt.
He could imagine now how she must have felt as she had sat, a few hours
before, listening to the paragraphs of Kenwick's masterpiece as they
fell from the glib tongue of Richard Glover. There was an expression
almost of awe upon his face. She could write all that, feel all that
for one man, and then deliberately plan to marry another, to set _him_
free! The thing seemed preposterous, and yet he knew it to be true.
And then his thoughts reverted to Kenwick, and the days that now seemed
almost like the unreal days of a dream, when he had first known him over
at the fraternity-house in Berkeley. He recalled the night when he had
brought him home to dinner and introduced him to Marcreta and tried to
make him show off for her like a trained puppy. Perhaps it would have
been better if he had never brought him. But these things were in the
hands of fate and fate has an infinite number of tools. Standing there
at the window, gazing at the reflection of the gas logs mirrored against
the black pane, he found himself growing suddenly resentful of the
casual emergencies of life. Mere cobweb threads they were but upon them
hung the destinies of human souls. You turned the first corner instead
of the second in an hour of aimless wandering, and the circulation of
your life current was completely changed. It was folly to believe that
all the corners were posted with signs to be read and heeded by that
secret autocrat, the subconscious mind. The intricacies of such a
universe made the brain reel. It was better to believe that we played
the game blind, and that the stakes were to the courageous.
He went back to the table and turned out the reading-lamp, blotting out
the sight of the white and gold book.
"Lord! What a pity!" he murmured. "She would have been such an
inspiration to him. It was the devil's own luck. Poor Kenwick! Poor
little Crete!"