IN WHICH THERE IS A FURTHER CLASH
One can only suffer so much. Poignant feeling brings its own
anaesthetic. When Stella Fyfe fell into a troubled sleep that night, the
storm of her emotions had beaten her sorely. Morning brought its
physical reaction. She could see things clearly and calmly enough to
perceive that her love for Monohan was fraught with factors that must be
taken into account. All the world loves a lover, but her world did not
love lovers who kicked over the conventional traces. She had made a
niche for herself. There were ties she could not break lightly, and she
was not thinking of herself alone when she considered that, but of her
husband and Jack Junior, of Linda Abbey and Charlie Benton, of each and
every individual whose life touched more or less directly upon her own.
She had known always what a woman should do in such case, what she had
been taught a woman should do: grin, as Monohan had said, and take her
medicine. For her there was no alternative. Fyfe had made that clear.
But her heart cried out in rebellion against the necessity. To her,
trying to think logically, the most grievous phase of the doing was the
fact that nothing could ever be the same again. She could go on. Oh,
yes. She could dam up the wellspring of her impulses, walk steadfast
along the accustomed ways. But those ways would not be the old ones.
There would always be the skeleton at the feast. She would know it was
there, and Jack Fyfe would know, and she dreaded the fruits of that
knowledge, the bitterness and smothered resentment it would breed. But
it had to be. As she saw it, there was no choice.
She came down to breakfast calmly enough. It was nothing that could be
altered by heroics, by tears and wailings. Not that she was much given
to either. She had not whined when her brother made things so hard for
her that any refuge seemed alluring by comparison. Curiously enough, she
did not blame her brother now; neither did she blame Jack Fyfe.
She told herself that in first seeking the line of least resistance she
had manifested weakness, that since her present problem was indirectly
the outgrowth of that original weakness, she would be weak no more. So
she tried to meet her husband as if nothing had happened, in which she
succeeded outwardly very well indeed, since Fyfe himself chose to ignore
any change in their mutual attitude.
She busied herself about the house that forenoon, seeking deliberately a
multitude of little tasks to occupy her hands and her mind.
But when lunch was over, she was at the end of her resources. Jack
Junior settled in his crib for a nap. Fyfe went away to that area back
of the camp where arose the crash of falling trees and the labored
puffing of donkey engines. She could hear faint and far the voices of
the falling gangs that cried: "Tim-ber-r-r-r." She could see on the
bank, a little beyond the bunkhouse and cook-shack, the big roader
spooling up the cable that brought string after string of logs down to
the lake. Rain or sun, happiness or sorrow, the work went on. She found
it in her heart to envy the sturdy loggers. They could forget their
troubles in the strain of action. Keyed as she was to that high pitch,
that sense of their unremitting activity, the ravaging of the forest
which produced the resources for which she had sold herself irritated
her. She was very bitter when she thought that.
She longed for some secluded place to sit and think, or try to stop
thinking. And without fully realizing the direction she took, she walked
down past the camp, crossed the skid-road, stepping lightly over main
line and haul-back at the donkey engineer's warning, and went along the
lake shore.
A path wound through the belt of brush and hardwood that fringed the
lake. Not until she had followed this up on the neck of a little
promontory south of the bay, did she remember with a shock that she was
approaching the place where Monohan had begged her to meet him. She
looked at her watch. Two-thirty. She sought the shore line for sight of
a boat, wondering if he would come in spite of her refusal. But to her
great relief she saw no sign of him. Probably he had thought better of
it, had seen now as she had seen then that no good and an earnest chance
of evil might come of such a clandestine meeting, had taken her stand as
final.
She was glad, because she did not want to go back to the house. She did
not want to make the effort of wandering away in the other direction to
find that restful peace of woods and water. She moved up a little on the
point until she found a mossy boulder and sat down on that, resting her
chin in her palms, looking out over the placid surface of the lake with
somber eyes.
And so Monohan surprised her. The knoll lay thick-carpeted with moss. He
was within a few steps of her when a twig cracking underfoot apprised
her of some one's approach. She rose, with an impulse to fly, to escape
a meeting she had not desired. And as she rose, the breath stopped in
her throat.
Twenty feet behind Monohan came Jack Fyfe with his hunter's stride,
soundlessly over the moss, a rifle drooping in the crook of his arm. A
sunbeam striking obliquely between two firs showed her his face plainly,
the faint curl of his upper lip.
Something in her look arrested Monohan. He glanced around, twisted
about, froze in his tracks, his back to her. Fyfe came up. Of the three
he was the coolest, the most rigorously self-possessed. He glanced from
Monohan to his wife, back to Monohan. After that his blue eyes never
left the other man's face.
"What did I say to you yesterday?" Fyfe opened his mouth at last. "But
then I might have known I was wasting my breath on you!"
"Well," Monohan retorted insolently, "what are you going to do about it?
This isn't the Stone Age."
Fyfe laughed unpleasantly.
"Lucky for you. You'd have been eliminated long ago," he said. "No, it
takes the present age to produce such rotten specimens as you."
A deep flush rose in Monohan's cheeks. He took a step toward Fyfe, his
hands clenched.
"You wouldn't say that if you weren't armed," he taunted hoarsely.
"No?" Fyfe cast the rifle to one side. It fell with a metallic clink
against a stone. "I do say it though, you see. You are a sort of a
yellow dog, Monohan. You know it, and you know that I know it. That's
why it stings you to be told so."
Monohan stepped back and slipped out of his coat. His face was crimson.
"By God, I'll teach you something," he snarled.
He lunged forward as he spoke, shooting a straight-arm blow for Fyfe's
face. It swept through empty air, for Fyfe, poised on the balls of his
feet, ducked under the driving fist, and slapped Monohan across the
mouth with the open palm of his hand.
"Tag," he said sardonically. "You're It."
Monohan pivoted, and rushing, swung right and left, missing by inches.
Fyfe's mocking grin seemed to madden him completely. He rushed again,
launching another vicious blow that threw him partly off his balance.
Before he could recover, Fyfe kicked both feet from under him, sent him
sprawling on the moss.
Stella stood like one stricken. The very thing she dreaded had come
about. Yet the manner of its unfolding was not as she had visualized it
when she saw Fyfe near at hand. She saw now a side of her husband that
she had never glimpsed, that she found hard to understand. She could
have understood him beating Monohan senseless, if he could. A murderous
fury of jealousy would not have surprised her. This did. He had not
struck a blow, did not attempt to strike.
She could not guess why, but she saw that he was playing with Monohan,
making a fool of him, for all Monohan's advantage of height and reach.
Fyfe moved like the light, always beyond Monohan's vengeful blows,
slipping under those driving fists to slap his adversary, to trip him,
mocking him with the futility of his effort.
She felt herself powerless to stop that sorry exhibition. It was not a
fight for her. Dimly she had a feeling that back of her lay something
else. An echo of it had been more than once in Fyfe's speech. Here and
now, they had forgotten her at the first word. They were engaged in a
struggle for mastery, sheer brute determination to hurt each other,
which had little or nothing to do with her. She foresaw, watching the
odd combat with a feeling akin to fascination, that it was a losing game
for Monohan. Fyfe was his master at every move.
Yet he did not once attempt to strike a solid blow, nothing but that
humiliating, open-handed slap, that dexterous swing of his foot that
plunged Monohan headlong. He grinned steadily, a cold grimace that
reflected no mirth, being merely a sneering twist of his features.
Stella knew the deadly strength of him. She wondered at his purpose, how
it would end.
The elusive light-footedness of the man, the successive stinging of
those contemptuous slaps at last maddened Monohan into ignoring the
rules by which men fight. He dropped his hands and stood panting with
his exertions. Suddenly he kicked, a swift lunge for Fyfe's body.
Fyfe leaped aside. Then he closed. Powerful and weighty a man as Monohan
was, Fyfe drove him halfway around with a short-arm blow that landed
near his heart, and while he staggered from that, clamped one thick arm
about his neck in the strangle-hold. Holding him helpless, bent
backwards across his broad chest, Fyfe slowly and systematically choked
him; he shut off his breath until Monohan's tongue protruded, and his
eyes bulged glassily, and horrible, gurgling noises issued from his
gaping mouth.
"Jack, Jack!" Stella found voice to shriek. "You're killing him."
Fyfe lifted his eyes to hers. The horror he saw there may have stirred
him. Or he may have considered his object accomplished. Stella could not
tell. But he flung Monohan from him with a force that sent him reeling a
dozen feet, to collapse on the moss. It took him a full minute to regain
his breath, to rise to unsteady feet, to find his voice.
"You can't win all the time," he gasped. "By God, I'll show you that you
can't."
With that he turned and went back the way he had come. Fyfe stood
silent, hands resting on his hips, watching until Monohan pushed out a
slim speed launch from under cover of overhanging alders and set off
down the lake.
"Well," he remarked then, in a curiously detached, impersonal tone.
"The lightning will begin to play by and by, I suppose."
"What do you mean?" Stella asked breathlessly.
He did not answer. His eyes turned to her slowly. She saw now that his
face was white and rigid, that the line of his lips drew harder together
as he looked at her; but she was not prepared for the storm that broke.
She did not comprehend the tempest that raged within him until he had
her by the shoulders, his fingers crushing into her soft flesh like the
jaws of a trap, shaking her as a terrier might shake a rat, till the
heavy coils of hair cascaded over her shoulders, and for a second fear
tugged at her heart. For she thought he meant to kill her.
When he did desist, he released her with a thrust of his arms that sent
her staggering against a tree, shaken to the roots of her being, though
not with fear. Anger had displaced that. A hot protest against his brute
strength, against his passionate outbreak, stirred her. Appearances were
against her, she knew. Even so, she revolted against his cave-man
roughness. She was amazed to find herself longing for the power to
strike him.
She faced him trembling, leaning against the tree trunk, staring at him
in impotent rage. And the fire died out of his eyes as she looked. He
drew a deep breath or two and turned away to pick up his rifle. When he
faced about with that in his hand, the old mask of immobility was in
place. He waited while Stella gathered up her scattered hairpins and
made shift to coil her hair into a semblance of Order. Then he said
gently:
"I won't break out like that again."
"Once is enough."
"More than enough--for me," he answered.
She disdained reply. Striking off along the path that ran to the camp,
she walked rapidly, choking a rising flood of desperate thought. With
growing coolness paradoxically there burned hotter the flame of an
elemental wrath. What right had he to lay hands on her? Her shoulders
ached, her flesh was bruised from the terrible grip of his fingers. The
very sound of his footsteps behind her was maddening. To be suspected
and watched, to be continually the target of jealous fury! No, a
thousand times, no. She wheeled on him at last.
"I can't stand this," she cried. "It's beyond endurance. We're like
flint and steel to each other now. If to-day's a sample of what we may
expect, it's better to make a clean sweep of everything. I've got to get
away from here and from you--from everybody."
Fyfe motioned her to a near-by log.
"Sit down," said he. "We may as well have it out here."
For a few seconds he busied himself with a cigar, removing the band with
utmost deliberation, biting the end off, applying the match, his brows
puckered slightly.
"It's very unwise of you to meet Monohan like that," he uttered finally.
"Oh, I see," she flashed. "Do you suggest that I met him purposely--by
appointment? Even if I did--"
"That's for you to say, Stella," he interrupted gravely. "I told you
last night that I trusted you absolutely. I do, so far as really vital
things are concerned, but I don't always trust your judgment. I merely
know that Monohan sneaked along shore, hid his boat, and stole through
the timber to where you were sitting. I happened to see him, and I
followed him to see what he was up to, why he should take such measures
to keep under cover."
"The explanation is simple," she answered stiffly. "You can believe it
or not, as you choose. My being there was purely unintentional. If I had
seen him before he was close, I should certainly not have been there. I
have been at odds with myself all day, and I went for a walk, to find a
quiet place where I could sit and think."
"It doesn't matter now," he said. "Only you'd better try to avoid things
like that in the future. Would you mind telling me just exactly what you
meant a minute ago? Just what you propose to do?"
He asked her that as one might make any commonplace inquiry, but his
quietness did not deceive Stella.
"What I said," she began desperately. "Wasn't it plain enough? It seems
to me our life is going to be a nightmare from now on if we try to live
it together. I--I'm sorry, but you know how I feel. It may be unwise,
but these things aren't dictated by reason. You know that. If our
emotions were guided by reason and expediency, we'd be altogether
different. Last night I was willing to go on and make the best of
things. To-day,--especially after this,--it looks impossible. You'll
look at me, and guess what I'm thinking, and hate me. And I'll grow to
hate you, because you'll be little better than a jailer. Oh, don't you
see that the way we'll feel will make us utterly miserable? Why should
we stick together when no good can come of it? You've been good to me.
I've appreciated that and liked you for it. I'd like to be friends. But
I--I'd hate you with a perfectly murderous hatred if you were always on
the watch, always suspecting me, if you taunted me as you did a while
ago. I'm just as much a savage at heart as you are, Jack Fyfe. I could
gladly have killed you when you were jerking me about back yonder."
"I wonder if you are, after all, a little more of a primitive being than
I've supposed?"
Fyfe leaned toward her, staring fixedly into her eyes--eyes that were
bright with unshed tears.
"And I was holding the devil in me down back there, because I didn't
want to horrify you with anything like brutality," he went on
thoughtfully. "You think I grinned and made a monkey of _him_ because it
pleased me to do that? Why, I could have--and ached to--break him into
little bits, to smash him up so that no one would ever take pleasure in
looking at him again. And I didn't, simply and solely because I didn't
want to let you have even a glimpse of what I'm capable of when I get
started. I wonder if I made a mistake? It was merely the reaction from
letting him go scot-free that made me shake you so. I wonder--well,
never mind. Go on."
"I think it's better that I should go away," Stella said. "I want you to
agree that I should; then there will be no talk or anything disagreeable
from outside sources. I'm strong, I can get on. It'll be a relief to
have to work. I won't have to be the kitchen drudge Charlie made of me.
I've got my voice. I'm quite sure I can capitalize that. But I've got to
go. Anything's better than this; anything that's clean and decent. I'd
despise myself if I stayed on as your wife, feeling as I do. It was a
mistake in the beginning, our marriage."
"Nevertheless," Fyfe said slowly, "I'm afraid it's a mistake you'll have
to abide by--for a time. All that you say may be true, although I don't
admit it myself. Offhand, I'd say you were simply trying to welch on a
fair bargain. I'm not going to let you do it blindly, all wrought up to
a pitch where you can scarcely think coherently. If you are fully
determined to break away from me, you owe it to us both to be sure of
what you're doing before you act. I'm going to talk plain. You can
believe it and disdain it if you please. If you were leaving me for a
man, a real man, I think I could bring myself to make it easy for you
and wish you luck. But you're not. He's--"
"Can't we leave him out of it?" she demanded. "I want to get away from
you both. Can you understand that? It doesn't help you any to pick _him_
to pieces."
"No, but it might help you, if I could rip off that swathing of
idealization you've wrapped around him," Fyfe observed patiently. "It's
not a job I have much stomach for however, even if you were willing to
let me try. But to come back. You've got to stick it out with me,
Stella. You'll hate me for the constraint, I suppose. But until--until
things shape up differently--you'll understand what I'm talking about
by and by, I think--you've got to abide by the bargain you made with me.
I couldn't force you to stay, I know. But there's one hold you can't
break--not if I know you at all."
"What is that?" she asked icily.
"The kid's," he murmured.
Stella buried her face in her hands for a minute.
"I'd forgotten--I'd forgotten," she whispered.
"You understand, don't you?" he said hesitatingly. "If you leave--I keep
our boy."
"Oh, you're devilish--to use a club like that," she cried. "You know I
wouldn't part from my baby--the only thing I've got that's worth
having."
"He's worth something to me too," Fyfe muttered. "A lot more than you
think, maybe. I'm not trying to club you. There's nothing in it for me.
But for him; well, he needs you. It isn't his fault he's here, or that
you're unhappy. I've got to protect him, see that he gets a fair shake.
I can't see anything to it but for you to go on being Mrs. Jack Fyfe
until such time as you get back to a normal poise. Then it will be time
enough to try and work out some arrangement that won't be too much of a
hardship on him. It's that--or a clean break in which you go your own
way, and I try to mother him to the best of my ability. You'll
understand sometime why I'm showing my teeth this way."
"You have everything on your side," she admitted dully, after a long
interval of silence. "I'm a fool. I admit it. Have things your way. But
it won't work, Jack. This flare-up between us will only smoulder. I
think you lay a little too much stress on Monohan. It isn't that I love
him so much as that I don't love you at all. I can live without
him--which I mean to do in any case--far easier than I can live with
you. It won't work."
"Don't worry," he replied. "You won't be annoyed by me in person. I'll
have my hands full elsewhere."
They rose and walked on to the house. On the porch Jack Junior was being
wheeled back and forth in his carriage. He lifted chubby arms to his
mother as she came up the steps. Stella carried him inside, hugging the
sturdy, blue-eyed mite close to her breast. She did not want to cry, but
she could not help it. It was as if she had been threatened with
irrevocable loss of that precious bit of her own flesh and blood. She
hugged him to her, whispering mother-talk, half-hysterical, wholly
tender.
Fyfe stood aside for a minute. Then he came up behind her and stood
resting one hand on the back of her chair.
"Stella."
"Yes."
"I got word from my sister and her husband in this morning's mail. They
will very likely be here next week for a three days' stay. Brace up.
Let's try and keep our skeleton from rattling while they're here. Will
you?"
"All right, Jack. I'll try."
He patted her tousled hair lightly and left the room. Stella looked
after him with a surge of mixed feeling. She told herself she hated him
and his dominant will that always beat her own down; she hated him for
his amazing strength and for his unvarying sureness of himself. And in
the same breath she found herself wondering if,--with their status
reversed,--Walter Monohan would be as patient, as gentle, as
self-controlled with a wife who openly acknowledged her affection for
another man. And still her heart cried out for Monohan. She flared hot
against the disparaging note, the unconcealed contempt Fyfe seemed to
have for him.
Yet in spite of her eager defence of him, there was something ugly about
that clash with Fyfe in the edge of the woods, something that jarred. It
wasn't spontaneous. She could not understand that tigerish onslaught of
Monohan's. It was more the action she would have expected from her
husband.
It puzzled her, grieved her, added a little to the sorrowful weight that
settled upon her. They were turbulent spirits both. The matter might not
end there.
In the next ten days three separate incidents, each isolated and
relatively unimportant, gave Stella food for much puzzled thought.
The first was a remark of Fyfe's sister in the first hours of their
acquaintance. Mrs. Henry Alden could never have denied blood kinship
with Jack Fyfe. She had the same wide, good-humored mouth, the blue eyes
that always seemed to be on the verge of twinkling, and the same fair,
freckled skin. Her characteristics of speech resembled his. She was
direct, bluntly so, and she was not much given to small talk. Fyfe and
Stella met the Aldens at Roaring Springs with the _Waterbug_. Alden
proved a genial sort of man past forty, a big, loose-jointed individual
whose outward appearance gave no indication of what he was
professionally,--a civil engineer with a reputation that promised to
spread beyond his native States.
"You don't look much different, Jack," his sister observed critically,
as the _Waterbug_ backed away from the wharf in a fine drizzle of rain.
"Except that as you grow older, you more and more resemble the pater.
Has matrimony toned him down, my dear?" she turned to Stella. "The last
time I saw him he had a black eye!"
Fyfe did not give her a chance to answer.
"Be a little more diplomatic, Dolly," he smiled. "Mrs. Jack doesn't
realize what a rowdy I used to be. I've reformed."
"Ah," Mrs. Alden chuckled, "I have a vision of you growing meek and
mild."
They talked desultorily as the launch thrashed along. Alden's profession
took him to all corners of the earth. That was why the winter of Fyfe's
honeymoon had not made them acquainted. Alden and his wife were then in
South America. This visit was to fill in the time before the departure
of a trans-Pacific liner which would land the Aldens at Manila.
Presently the Abbey-Monohan camp and bungalow lay abeam. Stella told
Mrs. Alden something of the place.
"That reminds me," Mrs. Alden turned to her brother. "I was quite sure I
saw Walter Monohan board a train while we were waiting for the hotel car
in Hopyard. I heard that he was in timber out here. Is he this Monohan?"
Fyfe nodded.
"How odd," she remarked, "that you should be in the same region. Do you
still maintain the ancient feud?"
Fyfe shot her a queer look.
"We've grown up, Dolly," he said drily. Then: "Do you expect to get back
to God's country short of a year, Alden?"
That was all. Neither of them reverted to the subject again. But Stella
pondered. An ancient feud? She had not known of that. Neither man had
ever dropped a hint.
For the second incident, Paul Abbey dropped in to dinner a few days
later and divulged a bit of news.
"There's been a shake-up in our combination," he remarked casually to
Fyfe. "Monohan and dad have split over a question of business policy.
Walter's taking over all our interests on Roaring Lake. He appears to be
going to peel off his coat and become personally active in the logging
industry. Funny streak for Monohan to take, isn't it? He never seemed
to care a hoot about the working end of the business, so long as it
produced dividends."
Lastly, Charlie Benton came over to eat a farewell dinner with the
Aldens the night before they left. He followed Stella into the nursery
when she went to tuck Jack Junior in his crib.
"Say, Stella" he began, "I have just had a letter from old man Lander;
you remember he was dad's legal factotum and executor."
"Of course," she returned.
"Well, do you recall--you were there when the estate was wound up, and I
was not--any mention of some worthless oil stock? Some California
wildcat stuff the governor got bit on? It was found among his effects."
"I seem to recall something of the sort," she answered. "But I don't
remember positively. What about it?"
"Lander writes me that there is a prospect of it being salable. The
company is reviving. And he finds himself without legal authority to do
business, although the stock certificates are still in his hands. He
suggests that we give him a power of attorney to sell this stuff. He's
an awfully conservative old chap, so there must be a reasonable prospect
of some cash, or he wouldn't bother. My hunch is to give him a power of
attorney and let him use his own judgment."
"How much is it worth?" she asked.
"The par value is forty thousand dollars," Benton grinned. "But the
governor bought it at ten cents on the dollar. If we get what he paid,
we'll be lucky. That'll be two thousand apiece. I brought you a blank
form. I'm going down with you on the _Bug_ to-morow to send mine. I'd
advise you to have yours signed up and witnessed before a notary at
Hopyard and send it too."
"Of course I will," she said.
"It isn't much," Benton mused, leaning on the foot of the crib, watching
her smooth the covers over little Jack. "But it won't come amiss--to me,
at least. I'm going to be married in the spring."
Stella looked up.
"You are?" she murmured. "To Linda Abbey?"
He nodded. A slight flush crept over his tanned face at the steady look
she bent on him.
"Hang it, what are you thinking?" he broke out. "I know you've rather
looked down on me because I acted like a bounder that winter. But I
really took a tumble to myself. You set me thinking when you made that
sudden break with Jack. I felt rather guilty about that--until I saw how
it turned out. I know I'm not half good enough for Linda. But so long as
she thinks I am and I try to live up to that, why we've as good a chance
to be happy as anybody. We all make breaks, us fellows that go at
everything roughshod. Still, when we pull up and take a new tack, you
shouldn't hold grudges. If we could go back to that fall and winter, I'd
do things a lot differently."
"If you're both really and truly in love," Stella said quietly, "that's
about the only thing that matters. I hope you'll be happy. But you'll
have to be a lot different with Linda Abbey than you were with me."
"Ah, Stella, don't harp on that," he said shame-facedly. "I was rotten,
it's true. But we're all human. I couldn't see anything then only what I
wanted myself. I was like a bull in a china shop. It's different now.
I'm on my feet financially, and I've had time to draw my breath and take
a squint at myself from a different angle. I did you a good turn,
anyway, even if I was the cause of you taking a leap before you looked.
You landed right."
Stella mustered a smile that was purely facial. It maddened her to hear
his complacent justification of himself. And the most maddening part of
it was her knowledge that Benton was right, that in many essential
things he had done her a good turn, which her own erratic inclinations
bade fair to wholly nullify.
"I wish you all the luck and happiness in the world," she said gently.
"And I don't bear a grudge, believe me, Charlie. Now, run along. We'll
keep baby awake, talking."
"All right." He turned to go and came back again.
"What I really came in to say, I've hardly got nerve enough for." He
sank his voice to a murmur. "Don't fly off at me, Stell. But--you
haven't got a trifle interested in Monohan, have you? I mean, you
haven't let him think you are?"
Stella's hands tightened on the crib rail. For an instant her heart
stood still. A wholly unreasoning blaze of anger seized her. But she
controlled that. Pride forbade her betraying herself.
"What a perfectly ridiculous question," she managed to reply.
He looked at her keenly.
"Because, if you have--well, you might be perfectly innocent in the
matter and still get in bad," he continued evenly. "I'd like to put a
bug in your ear."
She bent over Jack Junior, striving to inject an amused note into her
reply.
"Don't be so absurd, Charlie."
"Oh, well, I suppose it is. Only, darn it, I've seen him look at you in
a way--Pouf! I was going to tell you something. Maybe Jack has--only
he's such a close-mouthed beggar. I'm not very anxious to peddle
things." Benton turned again. "I guess you don't need any coaching from
me, anyhow."
He walked out. Stella stared after him, her eyes blazing, hands clenched
into hard-knuckled little fists. She could have struck him.
And still she wondered over and over again, burning with a consuming
fire to know what that "something" was which he had to tell. All the
slumbering devils of a stifled passion awoke to rend her, to make her
rage against the coil in which she was involved. She despised herself
for the weakness of unwise loving, even while she ached to sweep away
the barriers that stood between her and love. Mingled with that there
whispered an intuition of disaster to come, of destiny shaping to
peculiar ends. In Monohan's establishing himself on Roaring Lake she
sensed something more than an industrial shift. In his continued
presence there she saw incalculable sources of trouble. She stood
leaning over the bed rail, staring wistfully at her boy for a few
minutes. When she faced the mirror in her room, she was startled at the
look in her eyes, the nervous twitch of her lips. There was a physical
ache in her breast.
"You're a fool, a fool," she whispered to her image. "Where's your will,
Stella Fyfe? Borrow a little of your husband's backbone.
Presently--presently it won't matter."
One can club a too assertive ego into insensibility. A man may smile and
smile and be a villain still, as the old saying has it, and so may a
woman smile and smile when her heart is tortured, when every nerve in
her is strained to the snapping point. Stella went back to the living
room and sang for them until it was time to go to bed.
The Aldens went first, then Charlie. Stella left her door ajar. An hour
afterward, when Fyfe came down the hall, she rose. It had been her
purpose to call him in, to ask him to explain that which her brother had
hinted he could explain, what prior antagonism lay between him and
Monohan, what that "something" about Monohan was which differentiated
him from other men where she was concerned. Instead she shut the door,
slid the bolt home, and huddled in a chair with her face in her hands.
She could not discuss Monohan with him, with any one. Why should she
ask? she told herself. It was a closed book, a balanced account. One
does not revive dead issues.