BULLDOG AND MASTIFF
Gordon remained in the house during the entire afternoon.
Kate called a boy and sent two messages. One of them summoned her
lawyer, the same polite gentleman who had brought the wonderful
message from that house a few years before.
At 6:30 Gordon went to his study. The wind had risen steadily and
was blowing now a gale from the northwest, and he could feel the
cut of hail mixed with the raindrops. It was fearful under foot,
and he knew his crowd would be small.
His mind was in a whirl of nervous rage.
"Bah! It's this infernal storm in the air," he cried, in disgust.
A feeling of suffocation at last mastered him. He turned the service
over to an assistant, left the Temple, and returned to Gramercy
Park with feverish step.
Overman was in the library in earnest consultation with Kate.
They both sprang to their feet as he hurriedly entered, and he
could see that Kate was trembling with excitement and dread.
The banker was cool and insolent.
Gordon walked quickly to Kate's side and spoke in icy tones of
command.
"Go to your room. I have something to say to this gentleman it will
not be necessary for you to hear."
She hesitated and glanced inquiringly at Overman.
"Certainly; it's best," came his low, quick answer.
The hesitation and appeal to the new master were not lost on Gordon.
He squared his gigantic shoulders, and wet his lips as if to cool
them.
"Very well," she said, facing Gordon. "Before I go I wish to
announce to you that it will not be convenient for you to spend
another night in this house. If you do not go, I will."
He bowed politely and waved her away with a graceful gesture.
"That will do. I do not care to hear any more."
Kate turned and quickly left the room.
"Won't you sit down?" Gordon said, offering Overman a chair with
excessive courtesy.
"Thanks; I prefer to stand," he answered, gruffly.
The single eye was fixed on the man opposite in a steady blaze,
following every step and every movement in silence.
Gordon took his place by Overman's side, thrust his big thumbs into
his vest at the armpits, and looked off into space.
"It's no use, Mark, for us to mince words," he began, in even,
clear tones. "I understand the situation perfectly."
"Then the solution should be easy under your code," the banker
dryly remarked.
"All I ask of you now," Gordon continued, quietly, "as my best
friend, is to let my wife alone. Is that a reasonable request?"
"No," was the emphatic answer. "Did I seek your wife? Yet nothing
could have wrung from me the secret of my love had you not flung
the challenge in my face again and again; and even then my love
for you sealed my lips until she broke the spell to-day with words
that cannot be unsaid."
Gordon's face and voice softened.
"Granted, Mark, I've been a fool. I know better now. I appeal to
your sense of honour and our long friendship. Let this scene end
it. Let us return to the old life and its standards."
The big neck straightened.
"Then go back," he flashed, in tones that cut like steel, "to the
wife of your youth and the mother of your children!"
Gordon's fist clenched; he was still a moment, and when he spoke
his voice was like velvet.
"It's useless to bandy epithets, or to argue, Mark. I don't reason
about this thing. I only feel. My passion is very simple, very
elemental. It flouts logic and reason. This woman is mine. I have
paid the price, and I will kill the man who dares to take her. Do
you understand?"
The banker gave a sneering laugh, and twisted the muscles of his
mouth.
"Yes, I understand, and I'm not fainting with alarm. You will be
a preacher and a poser to the end."
"I have appealed to your principles and your sense of honour first,"
Gordon repeated, in a subdued voice.
The one eye was closed with a smile.
"Principles! Sense of honour! What principles? What sense of honour?
I agree that, under the old view of marriage as a divine sacrament
and a great social ordinance, sacrifice of one's desires for the
sake of humanity might be noble. But in this paradise into which
you have thrust me, with an invitation on your own door for all
the world to enter and contest your position, and with you yourself
shouting from the housetop freedom and fellowship---Sense of honour?
Rubbish!"
"I can see," snapped Gordon, "that one such beast as you is enough
to transform heaven into hell."
Overman slowly pulled his moustache, and a grin pushed his nose
upward.
"Exactly. I am the one odd individual your scheme overlooked--a
normal human being with the simplest rational instincts, a clear
brain and the muscle big enough to enforce a desire."
"The muscle test is yet to come," Gordon coldly interrupted.
The banker shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose so. And you know, Frank, the fear of man is an emotion
I have never experienced."
Gordon bent quickly toward him, his face quiet and pale, and said
in muffled accents:
"Well, you who have never feared man, listen. Get out of this
house to-night, give up my wife, never speak to her again or cross
my path, or else--" a pause--"I am going to disarm you, bend your
bulldog's body across my knee by an art of which I am master, close
your jaw with this fist on your throat, and break your back inch
by inch. Will you go?"
Overman surveyed the questioner with scorn.
"When the woman who loves me tells me to go. This is her house!"
he coolly sneered.
Again the voice opposite sank to velvet tones.
"Very well, we are face to face without disguise, beast to beast.
You haven't the muscle to take her. She is mine. I gave for her the
deathless love of a wife, two beautiful children, a name, a career,
a character, and the life of the man who gave me being, who died
with a broken heart. For her I turned my back upon the poor who
looked to me for help, forgot the great city I loved, overturned
God's altars, scorned heaven and dared the terrors of hell. Do you
think that I will give her up? I own her, body and soul. I've paid
the price."
[Illustration: "Driving his great fingers into his throat."]
He paused a moment, quivering with passion. "I know," he went on,
"I was a fool floundering in a bog of sentiment. But you--one-eyed
brute--you were never deceived about anything. You set your lecherous
eye on her from the first and determined to poison her mind and
take her from me."
"And I will take her," came the fierce growl from the depths of
his throat, "and lift her from the mire into which you have dragged
her peerless being."
The man opposite gave a quick, nervous laugh.
"Well, I, who have dreamed the salvation of the world and lost my
own soul, may sink to-night, but, old boy"--he paused and laughed
hysterically--"I'll pull down with me into hell as I go one Wall
Street banker!"
"Talk is cheap," Overman hissed. "Make the experiment. You're
keeping a lady waiting."
Gordon stepped quickly to the desk and picked up two ivory-handled
daggers with keen ten-inch blades, used as paper knives, and handed
one to Overman.
"These little toys," he said, playfully, "were a wedding present
from my wife on our second anniversary."
"Which wife?" snarled the big, sneering mouth.
Gordon went on meditatively.
"They are the finest Italian steel--sharp medicine for friends to
take and give, but it will cure our ills. I never quite understood
before what you meant by the fighting instinct when I used to watch
you fasten those little devilish points on your Game chickens. I
know now. I feel it throb in every nerve and muscle. The impulse
to kill you is so simple and so sweet, it would be a crime against
nature to deny it."
Overman threw his head to one side, frowned and peered at the man
before him curiously.
"Do you ever get tired of preaching? The articulation of wind is
a strange mania!"
"Pardon me if I've tired you," came the answer in mellow tones.
"You'll need a long rest after to-night, and you'll get it."
Gordon locked the doors, placed the blower over the flickering
embers in the grate, and put his hand on the electric switch.
"I am going to put this light out for the sake of the comradeship
and chivalry we once held in common. I could kill you at one blow
from that blind side of your head. I'll fight you fair. That is a
bow to the higher law in the preliminary ritual of nature. But down
below, in these muscles, throb forces older than the soul, that
link us in kinship to the tiger and the wolf"--his voice sank to
a dreamy monotone. "You sneaked into my home in the dark to rob
me of my own. In the dark, we will settle on the price. I paid for
this treasure an immortal soul. It's worth as much to you."
He turned the switch, and then darkness and silence that could be
felt and tasted--only the thrash of the storm against the blinds
without.
With catlike tread they began to move around the room on the velvet
carpet. They made the circuit twice, and found they were following
each other. They both stopped, apparently at the same moment,
wheeled, and again made the round in a circle without meeting, now
and then stumbling against a piece of furniture.
Gordon suddenly stopped, held his breath, and waited for his enemy
to overtake him. He could hear Overman's heavy breathing at each
muffled step. When he approached so close he could feel the movement
of his body in the air, he suddenly sprang on him, plunging the
dagger in his body, and bore him to the floor, knocking the blower
from the grate in the struggle.
Over and over on the velvet carpet, dimly lighted now from the
glowing coals, they rolled, growling, snarling, cursing in low,
half-articulate gasps, thrusting the steel into flesh and bone,
nerve and vein and artery.
Gordon suddenly plunged his dagger with a crash in Overman's
shoulder, snatched at it, and broke it smooth at the hilt.
Throwing his opponent to one side by a quick movement, he sprang
to his feet, and as Overman rose, fastened his enormous hairy left
hand on his throat and closed it with the clutch of a bear. His
enemy writhed and plunged the steel twice to the hilt in Gordon's
breast before his big right hand found the knife and wrenched it
from his grasp.
Then slowly, silently, inch by inch, he bent the banker's body
over his knee, driving his great fingers into his throat, until
the spinal column snapped with a dull crack.
The limp form sank to the floor, and the two big hands clutched
the throat until every finger left its black print as if branded
red hot into the massive neck.
A quick knock, and Kate's excited voice called:
"Open this door!"
Throwing the body behind the desk in the centre of the room, he
felt for the switch, turned on the light, unlocked the door, stepped
back and said:
"Come in."
Kate quickly opened the door and rushed into the room. He locked
it and put the key in his pocket without a word.
She turned on him a face blanched with speechless horror as he slowly
advanced on her in silence, his eyes wide open, cold and set.
The blood was running down across his cheek in a stream from a
wound in the upper edge of his high forehead.
She stood dumb with physical fear.
He came close, in laboured breath, his face still sick and white
with the desire to kill.
The voice was hard and metallic with the vibrant ring of steel.
"Say your prayers, young woman," he said, slowly. "You are going
on a long journey from whence no traveler has yet returned."
She staggered and caught a chair, trembling and shivering.
"Frank, dear, have you gone mad?" she gasped.
"Yes, I went mad in this house one day at the sight of your devil's
beauty, and I have been mad from that hour. Now we have come to
the end."
"You will not kill me?" she begged, in piteous fear. "I cannot die;
I am afraid. Surely you love me; you cannot--"
He seized her wrists and she cowered with a scream. He held them in
one hand and with the other swept her magnificent hair around her
throat, grasped it in his iron fist, and thus choking her, thrust
the shivering figure backward into the chair.
She managed to free her hands, threw her arms around his neck, and
tried to smother him with kisses.
"Frank, dear, I'll love you. Surely you will not kill me. Have pity
for all that I have been to you in the past--"
"Hush," he said softly, putting his big hand over her full lips.
"Why such childish terror? Love has its moments of sublime cruelty.
This impulse to kill is only the awful desire for utter possession,
the climax of love. I'll go with you. Neither life nor death shall
take you from me."
With a tremulous moan, she sank into a swoon in his arms.
He loosed the hair from her throat, paused, and looked tenderly at
the still white face.
Then he sighed, groaned and kissed her.
"No, no, no, no; not that!" he cried, beneath his breath. "How
beautiful she is! I brought her to this. Yes, I was the master of
her heart and life. I could have made her anything, angel or devil.
I have made her what she is--One last kiss"--he bent and gently
touched her lips--"and this the end."
With tenderness he laid her on the lounge, loosed her corsage,
smoothed gently the tangled hair from her white face, closed the
door, and went to his room.
He bathed the blood from his forehead and bound it with a piece
of plaster. His head began to swim. A sharp pang shot through his
breast, and he felt he was suffocating.
He began to shiver with the instinctive desire to escape, threw
some things into a bag he usually carried, stopped and scowled with
uncertainty.
"What's the use? What is there to live for?"
Yet the big muscular hands kept on at their task.
An hour later he struggled and staggered up the hill through the
black, roaring storm and rang Ruth's doorbell.