It had all happened in a brief moment of time,--the blow, the rescue, the
kiss. But it had changed the face of the world for Vickers. What hitherto
had been clouded in dream, a mingling of sentiment, pity, tender yearning,
became at once reality. With that blow, that kiss, his soul had opened to a
new conception of life....
They drove to the Lanes' house. Isabelle had returned that day from
California, and her husband was away on business. Vickers, who had a
latch-key, let himself into the house and tapped at his sister's door. When
she saw him, she cried out, frightened by his white face:--
"Vick! What has happened?"
"Mrs. Conry is downstairs, Isabelle. I want her to stay here with you
to-night!"
"Vick! What is it?" Isabelle demanded with staring eyes.
"I will tell you to-morrow."
"No--now!" She clutched her wrap about her shiveringly and drew him within
the room.
"It's--I am going away, Isabelle, at once--with Mrs. Conry. There has been
trouble--her husband struck her on the street, when she was with me. I took
her from him."
"Vick!" Her voice trembled as she cried, "No,--it wasn't that!"
"No," he said gravely. "There was no cause, none at all. He was drunk. But
I don't know that it would have made any difference. The man is a low
brute, and her life is killing her. I love her--well, that is all!"
"Vick!" she cried; "I knew you would do some--" she hesitated before his
glittering eyes--"something very risky," she faltered at last.
He waved this aside impatiently.
"What will you do now?" she asked hesitantly.
"I don't know,--we shall go away," he replied vaguely; "but she is waiting,
needs me. Will you help her,--help _us_?" he demanded, turning to the door,
"or shall we have to go to-night?"
"Wait," she said, putting her hands on his arms; "you can't do that! Just
think what it will mean to father and mother, to everybody.... Let me dress
and take her back!" she suggested half heartedly.
"Isabelle!" he cried. "She shall never go back to that brute."
"You love her so much?"
"Enough for anything," he answered gravely, turning to the door.
In the face of his set look, his short words, all the protesting
considerations on the tip of her tongue seemed futile. To a man in a mood
like his they would but drive him to further folly. And admiration rose
unexpectedly in her heart for the man who could hold his fate in his hands
like this and unshakenly cast it on the ground. The very madness of it all
awed her. She threw her arms about him, murmuring:--
"Oh, Vick--for you--it seems so horrid, so--"
"It _is_ mean," he admitted through his compressed lips. "For that very
reason, don't you see, I will take her beyond where it can touch her, at
once, this very night,--if you will not help us!"
And all that she could do was to kiss him, the tears falling from her eyes.
"I will, Vick, dear.... It makes no difference to me what happens,--if you
are only happy!"
* * * * *
As he drove to his father's house in the damp April night, he tried to
think of the steps he must take on the morrow. He had acted irresistibly,
out of the depths of his nature, unconcerned that he was about to tear in
pieces the fabric of his life. It was not until he had let himself into the
silent house and noiselessly passed his mother's door that he realized in
sudden pain what it must mean to others.
He lay awake thinking, thinking. First of all she must telegraph for Delia
to meet them somewhere,--she must have the child with her at once; and they
must leave the city before Conry could find her and make trouble.... And he
must tell the Colonel....
The next morning when Vickers entered his sister's library, Stacia Conry
rose from the lounge where she had been lying reading a newspaper, and
waited hesitantly while he came forward. She was very pretty this morning,
with a faint touch of rose beneath her pale skin, her long lashes falling
over fresh, shy eyes. In spite of it all she had slept, while the sleepless
hours he had spent showed in his worn, white face. He put out his arms, and
she clung to him.
"We must decide what to do," he said.
"You will not leave me?" she whispered, her head lying passive against his
breast. Suddenly raising her head, she clasped her arms about his neck,
drawing him passionately to her, crying, "I love you--love you,--you will
never leave me?"
And the man looking down into her eyes answered from his heart in all
truth:--
"Never, never so long as I live!" The words muttered in his broken voice
had all the solemnity of a marriage oath; and he kissed her, sealing the
promise, while she lay passive in his arms.
Holding her thus to him, her head against his beating heart, he felt the
helplessness, the dependence of the woman, and it filled him with a
subdued, sad joy. His part was to protect her, to defend her always, and
his grip tightened about her yielding form. Their lips met again, and this
time the sensuous appeal of the woman entered his senses, clouding for the
time his delicate vision, submerging that nobler feeling which hitherto
alone she had roused. She was a woman,--his to desire, to have!
"What shall we do?" she asked, sitting down, still holding his hand.
"First we must get Delia. We had better telegraph your mother at once to
meet us somewhere."
"Oh!"
"You must have Delia, of course. He will probably make trouble, try to get
hold of the child, and so we must leave here as soon as possible, to-day if
we can."
"Where shall we go?" she asked, bewildered.
"Somewhere--out of the country," he replied slowly, looking at her
significantly. "Of course it would be better to wait and have the divorce;
but he might fight that, and make a mess,--try to keep the child, you
understand."
She was silent, and he thought she objected to his summary plan. But it was
on her lips to say, 'Why not leave Delia with him until it can all be
arranged?' Something in the young man's stern face restrained her; she was
afraid of outraging instincts, delicacies that were strange to her.
"Should you mind," he asked pleadingly, "going without the divorce? Of
course to me it is the same thing. You are mine now, as I look at it,--any
marriage would mean little to either of us after--the past! Somehow to hang
about here, with the danger of trouble to you, waiting for a divorce, with
the row and all,--I can't see you going through it. I think the--other
way--is better."
She did not fully understand his feeling about it, which was that with the
soiled experience of her marriage another ceremony with him would be a mere
legal farce. To the pure idealism of his nature it seemed cleaner, nobler
for them to take this step without any attempt to regularize it in the eyes
of Society. To him she was justified in doing what she had done, in leaving
her husband for him, and that would have to be enough for them both. He
despised half measures, compromises. He was ready to cast all into his
defiance of law. Meanwhile she pondered the matter with lowered eyes and
presently she asked:--
"How long would it take to get a divorce?"
"If he fought it, a year perhaps, or longer."
"And I should have to stay here in the city?"
"Or go somewhere else to get a residence."
"And we--" she hesitated to complete the thought.
He drew her to him and kissed her.
"I think we shall be enough for each other," he said.
"I will do whatever you wish," she murmured, thus softly putting on his
shoulders the burden of the step.
He was the man, the strong protector that had come to her in her distress,
to whom she fled as naturally as a hunted animal flies to a hole, as a
crippled bird to the deep underbrush. Her beauty, her sex, herself, had
somehow attracted to her this male arm, and the right to take it never
occurred to her. He loved her, of course, and she would make him love her
more, and all would be well. If he had been penniless, unable to give her
the full protection that she needed, then they would have been obliged to
consider this step more carefully, and doubts might have forced themselves
upon her. But as it was she clung to him, trusting to the power of her sex
to hold him constant, to shield her....
"Now I must go down to the office to see my father," Vickers said finally.
"I'll be back early in the afternoon, and then--we will make our plans."
"Will you tell him, your father?" Mrs. Conry asked tensely.
"He will have to know, of course." As he spoke a wave of pain shot over the
young man's face. He stepped to the door and then turned:--
"You will telegraph about Delia,--she might meet us in New York--in two
days."
"Very well," Mrs. Conry murmured submissively.
* * * * *
The Colonel was sitting in his little corner office before the
old-fashioned dingy desk, where he had transacted so many affairs of one
sort or another for nearly thirty years. He was not even reading his mail
this morning, but musing, as he often was when the clerks thought that he
was more busily employed. Isabelle and her child had returned from
California, the day before. She had not recovered from bearing the child,
and the St. Louis doctors who had been consulted had not helped her. It
might be well to see some one in New York.... But the Colonel was thinking
most of all this morning of his son. The tenacious old merchant was
wondering whether he had done right in accepting the young man's sacrifice.
In his disgust for the do-nothing, parasitic offspring about him, perhaps
he had taken a delicate instrument and blunted it by setting it at coarse
work. Well, it was not too late to change that.
'The boy didn't start right,' the Colonel mused sadly. 'He didn't start
selling hardware on the road. He's done his best, and he's no such duffer
as Parrott's boy anyhow. But he would make only a front office kind of
business man. The business must get on by itself pretty soon. Perhaps that
idea for a selling company would not be a bad thing. And that would be the
end of Parrott and Price.'
Nevertheless, the old man's heart having come slowly to this generous
decision was not light,--if the other boy had lived, if Belle had married
some one who could have gone into the business. The bricks and mortar of
the building were part of his own being, and he longed to live out these
last few years in the shadow of his great enterprise....
"Father, can I see you about something important?"
The Colonel, startled from his revery, looked up at his son with his sweet
smile.
"Why, yes, my boy,--I wasn't doing much, and I had something to say to you.
Sit down. You got away from home early this morning."
He glanced inquiringly at his son's white, set face and tense lips. Playing
with his eye-glasses, he began to talk lightly of other matters, as was his
wont when he felt the coming of a storm.
Vickers listened patiently, staring straight across his father to the wall,
and when the Colonel came to a full pause,
"Father, you said you were ready for me to take a vacation. I must go at
once, to-day if possible. And, father, I can't come back."
The old man moved slightly in his chair. It was his intention to offer the
young man his freedom, but it hurt him to have it taken for granted in this
light manner. He waited.
"Something has happened," Vickers continued in a low voice, "something
which will alter my whole life."
The Colonel still waited.
"I love a woman, and I must take her away from here at once."
"Who is she?" the old man asked gently.
"Mrs. Conry--"
"But she's a married woman, isn't she, Vick?"
"She has a dirty brute of a husband--she's left him forever!"
The Colonel's blue eyes opened in speechless surprise, as his son went on
to tell rapidly what had happened the previous night. Before he had
finished the old man interrupted by a low exclamation:--
"But she is a married woman, Vickers!"
"Her marriage was a mistake, and she's paid for it, poor woman,--paid with
soul and body! She will not pay any longer."
"But what are you going to do, my boy?"
"I love her, father. I mean to take her away, at once, take her and her
child."
"Run away with a married woman?" The Colonel's pale face flushed slightly,
less in anger than in shame, and his eyes fell from his son's face.
"I wish with all my heart it wasn't so, of course; that she wasn't married,
or that she had left him long ago. But that can't be helped. And I don't
see how a divorce could make any difference, and it would take a long time,
and cause a dirty mess. He's the kind who would fight it for spite, or
blackmail. Perhaps later it will come. Now she must not suffer any more. I
love her all the deeper for what she has been through. I want to make her
life happy, make it up to her somehow, if I can."
The Colonel rose and with an old man's slow step went over to the office
door and locked it.
"Vickers," he said as he turned around from the door, still averting his
shamed face, "you must be crazy, out of your mind, my son!"
"No, father," the young man replied calmly; "I was never surer of anything
in my life! I knew it would hurt you and mother,--you can't understand. But
you must trust me in this. It has to be."
"Why does it have to be?"
"Because I love her!" he burst out. "Because I want to save her from that
man, from the degradation she's lived in. With me she will have some joy,
at last,--her life, her soul,--oh, father, you can't say these things to
any one! You can't give good reasons."
The old merchant's face became stern as he replied:--
"You wish to do all this for her, and yet you do not mean to marry her."
"I can't marry her! I would to-day if I could. Some day perhaps we
can,--for the sake of the child it would be better. But that makes no
difference to me. It is the same as marriage for us--"
"'Doesn't make any difference'--'the same as marriage'--what are you
talking about?"
The young man tried to find words which would fully express his feeling. He
had come a long way these last hours in his ideas of life; he saw things
naked and clear cut, without dubious shades. But he had to realize now that
what _his_ soul accepted as incontrovertible logic was meaningless to
others.
"I mean," he said at last slowly, "that this woman is the woman I love. I
care more for her happiness, for her well-being than for anything else in
life. And so no matter how we arrange to live, she is all that a woman can
be to a man, married or not as it may happen."
"To take another man's wife and live with her!" the Colonel summed up
bitterly. "No, Vick, you don't mean that. You can't do a dirty thing like
that. Think it over!"
So they argued a little while longer, and finally the old man pleaded with
his son for time, offering to see Mrs. Conry, to help her get a separation
from her husband, to send her abroad with her child,--to all of which
Vickers replied steadily:--
"But I love her, father--you forget that! And she needs me now!"
"Love her!" the old man cried. "Don't call that love!"
Vickers shut his lips and rose, very white.
"I must go now. Let's not say any more. We've never had any bitter words
between us, father. You don't understand this--do you think I would hurt
you and mother, if it didn't have to be? I gave up my own life, when it was
only myself at stake; but I cannot give her up--and everything it will mean
to her."
The Colonel turned away his face and refused to see his son's outstretched
hand. He could not think without a blush that his son should be able to
contemplate this thing. Vickers, as he turned the handle of the door,
recollected something and came back.
"Oh, you must cancel that stock agreement. I shouldn't want to own it now
that I have quit. The other things, the money, I shall keep. You would like
me to have it, father, and it will be quite enough."
The old man made a gesture as if to wave aside the money matter.
"Good-by, father!" he said slowly, tenderly.
"You'll see your mother?"
"Yes--I'm going there now."
Thus father and son parted.
* * * * *
Nothing, it seemed to Vickers, after this painful half hour, could be as
miserable as what he had been through, and as a matter of fact his
interview with his mother was comparatively easy.
To Mrs. Price her son's determination was merely an unexpected outburst of
wild folly, such as happened in other families,--coming rather late in
Vick's life, but by no means irremediable. Vickers had fallen into the
hands of a designing woman, who intended to capture a rich man's son. Her
first thought was that the Colonel would have to buy Mrs. Conry off, as Mr.
Stewart had done in a similar accident that befell Ted Stewart, and when
Vickers finally made it plain to her that his was not that kind of case,
she fell to berating him for the scandal he would create by "trapesing off
to Europe with a singer." Oddly enough that delicate modesty, like a
woman's, which had made it almost impossible for the Colonel to mention the
affair, did not seem to trouble her. To live with another man's wife was in
the Colonel's eyes a sin little short of incest, and more shocking than
many kinds of murder. But his wife, with a deeper comprehension of the
powers of her sex, of the appeal of woman to man, saw in it merely a
weakness that threatened to become a family disgrace. When she found after
an hour's talk that her arguments made no impression, while Vickers sat,
harassed and silent, his head resting on his hands, she burst into tears.
"It's just like those things you read of in the papers," she sobbed, "those
queer Pittsburg people, who are always doing some nasty thing, and no
decent folks will associate with them."
"It's not the thing you do, mother; it's the way you do it, the purpose,
the feeling," the young man protested. "And there won't be a scandal, if
that's what's troubling you. You can tell your friends that I have gone
abroad suddenly for my health."
"Who would believe that? Do you think her husband's going to keep quiet?"
Mrs. Price sniffled, with considerable worldly wisdom.
"Well, let them believe what they like. They'll forget me in a week."
"Where are you going?"
"To Europe, somewhere,--I haven't thought about the place. I'll let you
know."
"And how about her child?"
"We shall take her with us."
"She wants her along, does she?"
"Of course!"
Vickers rose impatiently.
"Good-by, mother."
She let him kiss her.
"I shall come to see you sometimes, if you want me to."
"Oh, you'll be coming back fast enough," she retorted quickly.
And then she straightened the sofa pillows where he had been sitting and
picked up a book she had been reading. As Vickers went to his room to get a
bag, Isabelle opened the door of her mother's room, where she had been
waiting for him. She put her arms about his neck, as she had that night of
her marriage on the station platform at Grafton, and pressed him tightly to
her.
"Vick! Vick!" she cried. "That it had to be like this, your love! Like
this!"
"It had to be, Belle," he answered with a smile. "It comes to us in
different ways, old girl."
"But you! You!" She led him by the hand to the sofa, where she threw
herself, a white exhausted look coming into her face. He stroked her hair
with the ends of his fingers. Suddenly she half turned, grasping his hand
with both of hers.
"Can you be happy--really happy?"
"I think so; but even that makes no difference, perhaps. I should do it all
the same, if I knew it meant no happiness for me."
She looked at him searchingly, trying to read his heart in his eyes. After
the year of her marriage, knowing now the mystery of human relations, she
wondered whether he might not be right. That precious something, pain or
joy, which was wanting in her union he might find in this forbidden
by-path, in this woman who seemed to her so immeasurably beneath her
brother. She kissed him, and he went away.
When the hall door clicked, she rose from the lounge and dragged herself to
the window to watch him, holding her breath, her heart beating rapidly,
almost glad that he was strong enough to take his fate in his hands, to
test life, to break the rules, to defy reason! "Vick, dear Vick," she
murmured.
In the room below Mrs. Price, also, was looking out of the bay window,
watching her son disappear down the avenue. She had not been reading, and
she had heard him come down into the hall, but let him go without another
word. He walked slowly, erect as the Colonel used to walk. Tears dropped
from her eyes,--tears of mortification. For in her heart she knew that he
would come back some day, this woman who had lured him having fallen from
him like a dead leaf. She sat on at the window until the Colonel's figure
appeared in the distance coming up the avenue. His head was bent; he looked
neither to the right nor to the left; and he walked very slowly, like an
old man, dragging his feet after him. He was crushed. It would not have
been thus if he had lost his fortune, the work of all his years. Such a
fate he would have looked in the eye, with raised head....
That night Vickers and Stacia Conry left for New York, and a few days later
Mrs. Price read their names in a list of outgoing passengers for Genoa. She
did not show the list to the Colonel, and their son's name was never
mentioned in the house.
When the people who knew the Prices intimately began to whisper, then
chatter, they said many hard things of Vickers, chiefly that he was a Fool,
a judgment that could not be gainsaid. Nevertheless the heart of a Fool may
be pure.