XVIII

"The Woman . . . Whose Hands are as Bands"

If I looked as stricken as I felt--and I doubtless did--Barrett had

ample reason for assuming that I had been suddenly taken sick.

"Why, Jimmie, old man!" he exclaimed in instant concern; and then he

took the half-burned cigar from between my fingers and threw it away,

at the same time sending the floor boy scurrying after a drink for me.

I couldn't touch the whiskey when it came; and I was still trying to

persuade Barrett that I wasn't sick when he walked me to the elevator.

Wanting only to be free, I still had to let him go all the way with me

to the door of my room. But the moment he was gone I hurried out again

and descended to the lobby.

The night clerk knew me; or if he didn't, he knew the Little Clean-Up;

and he was quite willing to talk. Miss Geddis was only temporarily a

guest of the house, he told me. She was with a party of friends from

the East, but her Denver home was with Mrs. Altberg, a widow and a

prominent society woman. Yes, Miss Geddis was quite well known in

social circles; she was reputed to be wealthy, and the clerk understood

that she had originally come to Colorado for her health.

Under the stimulus of a particularly good gift cigar the man behind the

register grew more confidential. Miss Geddis had always impressed him

as being a woman with a history. It was not generally known, he said,

but there was a whisper that she had come perilously near getting

herself dragged into the lime-light as co-respondent in a certain

high-life divorce case. The clerk did not vouch for this, but he did

know that she had been seen often and openly in public with the man in

the case, since the granting of the divorce.

I didn't sleep very well that night, as may be imagined; and the

following day I should certainly have taken the first train for Cripple

Creek if business had permitted. But business would not permit. There

was an accumulated difference of some fifteen thousand dollars in ore

values between us and the smelter people, and I was obliged to stay on

with Barrett and help wrangle for our side in the discrepancy dispute.

At dinner time that evening I managed to elude Barrett, and upon going

to the lobby desk for my mail, found a violet-scented envelope

addressed to "Mr. James Bertrand" in a handwriting that I remembered

only too well.

To anyone looking over my shoulder the enclosed note might have read as

a casual and friendly greeting from an old acquaintance. But for me it

spelled out death and destruction.

"Dear 'Bert," it ran. "I am not going to scold you for not speaking to

me last night in the mezzanine parlor; nor for changing your name; nor

for growing a beard. But if you should call this evening between eight

and nine at Mrs. Altberg's house on the Boulevard, you will find me at

home and more than willing to listen to your apologies and explanations.

"AGATHA."

My appetite for dinner had gone glimmering when I sat at the most

secluded table the cafe afforded and went through the motions of

eating. Not for a single instant did I mistake the purport of Agatha

Geddis's note. It was not a friendly invitation; it was a veiled

command. If it should be disobeyed, I made sure that not all the money

in the Little Clean-Up's treasury could save me from going back to the

home State as a recaptured felon.

Eight o'clock found me descending from a cab at the door of a rather

dissipated looking mansion in the northern suburb. A servant admitted

me, but I had to wait alone for a quarter of an hour or more in the

stuffy and rather tawdry luxury of a great drawing-room. After a time

I realized that Agatha was making me wait purposely in a refinement of

cruelty, knowing well what torments I must be enduring.

When the suspense ended and she came into the room I saw at a glance

that she was the same woman as of old; beautiful, alluring, but

infinitely more sophisticated. Her charm now, as in girlhood, was

chiefly the charm of physical perfection; but it was not entirely

without its appeal when she made me sit beside her on the heavily

carved mock-antique sofa.

"I didn't know certainly whether you would come or not," was the way

she began on me, and if the tone was conventional I knew well enough

what lay beneath it. "Old times are old times, but----"

She was merely playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse, but I could

neither fight nor run until she gave me an opening.

"Of course you knew I would come; why shouldn't I?" I asked, striving

for some outward appearance of self-possession.

"I'm sure I don't think of any reason, if you don't," she countered.

"Did you know I was in Denver?"

"Not in Denver, no. But I heard, some time ago, that you had come to

Colorado for your health."

"It seems absolutely ridiculous, doesn't it?--to look at me now. But

really, I was very ill three years ago; and even now I can't go back

home and stay for any length of time. You haven't been back, have you,

since your--since you----"

"No; I haven't been back."

She was rolling her filmy little lace handkerchief into a shapeless

ball, and if I hadn't known her so well I might have fancied she was

embarrassed.

"I can't endure to think of that dreadful time four years ago--it is

four years, isn't it?" she sighed; then with a swift glance of the

man-melting eyes: "You hate me savagely, don't you, Bert?--you've been

hating me all these years."

"No," I said, and it was the truth, up to that time. I knew that the

feeling I had been entertaining for her had nothing in it so robust as

hatred. There was no especial need for palliating her offense--far

less, indeed, than I knew at that moment; yet I did it, saying, "You

did what you thought you had to do; possibly it was what your father

made you do--I don't know."

She was silent for a moment before she began again by asking me what

made me change my name.

"My name isn't Herbert," I explained; "it never was. I think you must

know that I was christened 'James Bertrand,' after my father."

"I didn't know it," she denied, adding: "but you have dropped the

Weyburn?"

"Naturally."

Again there was a little interval of silence, and as before, she was

the first to break it.

"So you are one of the owners of the famous Little Clean-Up? Are you

very rich, Bertie?--you see, I can't give up the old name, all at once."

"No; I am not rich--as riches are counted nowadays."

"But you are going to be in just a little while," she put in, following

the confident assertion with a query that came as suddenly as a

stiletto stab: "Who is the girl, Bertie?"

"What girl?"'

"The girl you are going to marry. I saw her with you at the Broadway

one night three weeks ago; I sat right behind you. She doesn't

'pretty' very much, to my way of thinking."

Once again I felt the murder nerve twittering. This woman with a

mocking voice and a heart of stone knew everything; I was as certain of

it as if I could have seen into the plotting brain behind the

long-lashed eyes. I knew now why she hadn't glanced aside at me as she

passed on the way to the elevators in the Brown Palace the previous

evening. She had discovered me long before. At whatever cost, I must

know how long before.

"You saw me last night, and three weeks ago at the theater," I said.

"How long have you known that I was in Colorado?"

"Ever since you came, I think," she returned quietly. "I was a member

of a private-car party up at Cripple Creek about that time--with some

of the Midland officials and their friends, you know. Our car was

taken out over a new branch line they were building at that time, and I

saw you standing beside the track. Perhaps I shouldn't have recognized

you if I hadn't been thinking so pointedly of you. The home newspapers

had told of your es--of your leaving the State; and I was

naturally--er--well, I was thinking about you, as I say."

I saw that I was completely in her power. She knew, better than anyone

else on earth, save and excepting only her father, that I was an

innocent man. But she also knew that I had broken my parole.

"What do you want of me, Agatha?" I asked; and I had to wet my lips

before I could say it.

"Supposing we say that I am asking only a little, common, ordinary

friendliness, Bertie--just for the sake of the old days, and to show

that you don't bear malice. I'm like other women; I get horribly bored

and lonesome sometimes for somebody to talk to--somebody who knows, and

for whom I don't have to wear a mask. The other girl doesn't live

here, does she?"

"No."

"That's better. When you come to Denver, you must let me see you now

and then; just for old sake's sake. You come up quite often, don't

you? But I know you do; I see your name in the arrivals quite

frequently."

I formed a swift resolve not to come as often in the future as I had in

the past, but I did not tell her so.

"You'll come to see me when you're in town," she went on. "I'll try to

learn to call you 'Jimmie,' and when we meet people, I'll promise to

introduce you as the Mr. Bertrand, of Cripple Creek and the Little

Clean-Up. Does that make you feel better?"

It made me feel as if I should like to lock my fingers around her fair

pillar-like throat. I have said that I did not hate her. But one may

kill without hatred in self-defense. Short of cold-blooded murder,

however, there was nothing I could do--nothing anyone could do. Beyond

this, she went on chatting easily and lightly of the old times in

Glendale and the people we had both known, rallying me now and then

upon my unresponsiveness. At my leave-taking, which was a full hour

later, she went with me to the hall, helped me into my overcoat, and

gave me another of the breath-taking shocks.

"There was a time, once, when you really thought you were in love with

me, wasn't there, Bertie?" she asked sweetly.

Again I told her the simple truth. "There was a time; yes. It was

when I was still young enough to carry your books back and forth on the

way to and from the old school."

"But you got bravely over it, after awhile?"

"Yes; I got over it after I grew up."

She laughed softly.

"Don't you know that is a frightfully dangerous thing to say to a

woman--to any woman, Bertie?"

"It is the honest thing to say to you."

"I suppose it is. Yet there are some things a woman likes better than

honesty. Perhaps you haven't been making love to the Cripple Creek

girl long enough to find that out. But it is so, and it always will be

so."

It was at the outer door opening that she gave me the final stab.

"I am taking your business excuse at its face value to-night and

letting you go. But the next time you come you mustn't have any

business; at least, nothing more important than entertaining me--and

that is important. Just jot that down in your little vest-pocket

memorandum, and don't allow yourself to forget it for a single moment;

not even while you are making love to Little Brown-Eyes. Good-night."

The old-fashioned preachers used to describe a terrifying hell in which

fire and brimstone and all manner of physical torments awaited the

impenitent. I was brought up to believe implicitly in such a hell, but

the puerility of it as compared with the refined tortures which I

endured that winter can never be set forth in any words of mine.

With a desire keener than the hunger of the famishing for

respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly

before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to

Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On

my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just

detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's;

that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible

morass of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning,

was waiting to engulf me.

But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his

powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master

of circumstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's

sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent

that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly

Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the

great gold camp; and that--if what Barrett had said were true--Polly

herself had to be considered.

So the double life began and continued. In Cripple Creek I was Mary

Everton's lover; in Denver I was Agatha Geddis's bondman and slave.

Oftener and oftener, as the winter progressed, the business of the mine

took me to the capital; and Agatha never let me escape. One time it

would be a theater party, at which I would be obliged to meet her

friends; people who, as I soon learned, were of the ultra fast set. At

another it would be a driving party to some out-of-town resort with the

same, or a worse, crowd; midnight banquetings, with champagne in the

finger-bowls, cocktails to go before and after, and quite likely some

daring young woman to show us a new dance, with the cleared

dinner-table for a stage. Many times I tried to dodge; to slip into

Denver on the necessary business errand and out again before the

newspapers could publish my arrival. It was no use. That woman's

ingenuity, prescience, intuition--whatever it may be called, was simply

devilish. Before I could turn around, my summons would find me, and I

had to obey or take the consequences.

Now and again I rebelled, even as the poorest worm will turn if it be

sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor

held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was

leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice

between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more

endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis

was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was

that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had

builded. The larger fact that I was myself the principal contributor

to the wreck, helping it on by the time-serving course I was pursuing,

did not lay hold of me.

One night, or rather early one morning, when I had taken her home from

a road-house revel so shameful that the keeper of the place had

practically turned us out, I asked her where all this was to end.

"Perhaps it will end when I have taught you how to make love to me

again," she returned flippantly.

"And if I refuse to learn?"

Her smile was no longer alluring; it was mockingly triumphant.

"You can't keep it up indefinitely--with the Cripple Creek girl, I

mean, Bertie"--she still called me "Bertie" or "Herbert" when we were

alone together. "Sooner or later, she is going to find out what you

are doing to her; and after that, the fireworks."

I shook my head. "It is hard to decide, sometimes, Agatha, whether you

are a woman or merely a she-devil in woman's shape."

"Oh, I'm a woman--all woman."

"But the motive," I gritted. "If I had done you the greatest injury a

woman could suffer--if you had a lifelong grudge to satisfy--you could

hardly be more vindictively merciless."

Her smile at this was not pleasant to look upon.

"Somebody has said that the keenest pleasure in life is the pleasure of

absolute possession. I own you, Bertie Weyburn, body and soul, and you

know it. If you were a big enough man, you'd kill me: if you were big

enough in another way, you'd defy me and take what is coming to you."

"And since I am not yet ready to become either a murderer or a martyr?"

"You will probably do the other remaining thing--marry me some day and

give me a chance to teach you how to spend the money which, thus far,

you don't seem to know what to do with."

"You have money enough of your own--or your father's," I retorted.

"I'd rather spend yours," she said coolly.

It was the old _impasse_ at which we had arrived a dozen times before,

only the wretched involvement seemed to be adding coil upon coil with

the passing of time. I have often wondered if she really meant the

marriage threat. At this distance in time it appears extremely

doubtful. She may have had moments in which the steadily augmenting

output of the Little Clean-Up tempted her, but this is only a surmise.

And a little later I was to learn that during this very winter when she

was dragging me bound and helpless at the end of her trail-rope, she

was--but I need not anticipate.

"You have me bluffed to a standstill, but sometimes I wonder if it

isn't only a bluff," I said, in reply to her remark that she'd rather

spend my money than her father's. "What if I should tell you here and

now that this is the end of It?--that you can't make a plaything of me

any longer? What would you do?"

"There are a number of things I might do--to one who is so temptingly

vulnerable as you are, Bertie. For one, I might send a wire to the

sheriff of the home county, or to the warden of the penitentiary.

Really, when I come to think of it, I'm not sure that I oughtn't to do

it, anyway, on the score of public morals. Nobody would blame me; and

some few would applaud."

"Morals!" I exploded. "You don't know the meaning of the word!"

"Maybe not," she rejoined lightly. "Not many women do. But sending

the wire would be a rather crude way of bringing you to terms;

especially since I know of at least one better way. I'm going to

hazard a guess. You haven't told the Cripple Creek girl anything about

your past?"