I longed to draw her to me, to enfold her, to rest her head against my
heart, to hold her close and to exclude thereby all black care and
worry, all overhanging shadows, all the threatening and looming clouds
of existence--to make my world blissfully complete. But I am only
"Uncle Ranny" to her--and I felt a shudder pass down my spine.
"And you, Alicia," I managed to say. "What did you answer?"
"Of course, I said that was true--what could I say? But oh, Uncle
Ranny," she leaned toward me as she stood at my desk, "I am afraid,
Uncle Ranny! They are ours--aren't they--I know he's their father, but
I can't help feeling as though we were--handing them over to a
stranger--Oh, I suppose I ought not say it--some one we don't know at
all!"
And she burst into tears.
Blood and flesh could not bear it longer. I twitched and writhed in my
chair for an instant, then I leaped up and threw my arms about her and
strained her to me.
"My darling," I murmured brokenly, "and how do you suppose I feel?"
"I know," she sobbed and gently, very much as Jimmie or Laura might have
done, she put her arms about me and nestled as though I were some one
old and fragile for whom she had a deep affection--but that was all.
Alicia's first embrace!
And then I knew also. She did not, I trust, for an instant suspect the
bitterness of the cup I was that moment draining. But why should I
expect anything else? The guilt in my own heart tells me enough,--and
too much--of exactly where I stand. Alicia is still a child. As yet
evidently she did not even suspect that Pendleton was bent upon taking
her also. Suppose I prevented that, then what of the other three whom,
in another way, I love no less? My head was throbbing dizzily, my
pulses were beating like drums. For me this was the supreme moment of
anguish and sacrifice, the dark night of the soul, that _noche oscura_
that St. John of the Cross knows so well how to describe, that shakes
one's being and changes one's life forever more. My lot seemed to be to
sacrifice and break myself in final and complete renunciation, to drain
my cup of bitterness to its uttermost dregs.
For a moment the world was as a shadow, swaying, airy and insubstantial.
The cowled monk that is buried somewhere within me was suddenly
uppermost and the life of the world seemed sordid and leprous; a deadly
thing rotted with lusts and passions, a thing to run away from--that was
pulling me into its sensual center. But only for a moment.
Then suddenly the blood surged to my temples, as Alicia lay in my arms,
and the ancient cunning of a thousand male ancestors, of savage hunters
and crafty warriors who died that I might live, swept into my thews and
nerves and brain and I crackled with eagerness to fight for my own.
No!--I would not--could not give up all that I held dear. I would
fight! I gripped Alicia's shoulders in a spasm of fierce joy and in a
hoarse guttural voice that surprised her no more than it surprised me, I
breathed out:
"Never fear, Alicia--it can't be! It won't be. He hasn't done it yet.
I'll do something--I don't know what as yet. But give me time--a little
time--I'll work it out. We'll fight if we must--but we won't give up
tamely!"
Alicia's warm cheek against mine, though with a trust that can only be
described as childlike, was reward enough for victory, let alone for
this still empty challenge. But an irresistible, throbbing feeling of
confidence tells me that something will happen--that I shall win!
Is it simply the confidence of a fool, and the surge of melodrama that
is never very far from any of us? Possibly. But my blood still throbs
and my muscles still crackle with the strange eagerness and lust for
battle. It may be that the fragrance and the starry look of Alicia that
linger with me yet, the sweet joy and pride of Alicia when she returned
my good-night kiss before she left me, the affection with which she
clung, the reluctance with which she went, all have something to do with
this new accession of courage. But I do not comfort myself with vain
things. Alicia happens to be a girl whose affections have never been
pampered by any doting parents. If she looks upon me _in loco
parentis_, that ought to be enough for me. It is not enough. And the
pain of that leaves a barbed sting in my breast. But that wound I shall
carry gladly--I shall wear my hair shirt like the girl wife of Jacopone
da Todi--if only I can play the man.
The evening and the morning were a day--the first day of a new life, and
what a day!
I went down in the train with Pendleton and briskly suggested that he
need not hurry with his arrangements.
"I thought," said he, with a furtive, sidelong glance at me, "that my
first duty was to ease you. I owe you too much already," he added,
looking out toward the drabness of the Mt. Vernon right of way.
"It's only strangers and enemies that owe each other things;" I
countered easily. "Friends owe each other everything and nothing.
There is no audit for such accounts."
He laughed out of proportion to the deserts of this lump of wisdom and
exclaimed:
"You're great, Randolph--great!"
It was my turn to laugh, and I felt that I had the advantage of him.
With the sixth sense, or the pineal gland, or whatever it is, I was
conscious that he was a little afraid of me--and that did not damage my
temper.
"Your experience in life has been so--peculiar," I told him, "that
anybody would be glad to be of any service possible. And you must
remember that Laura was my only sister. Tell me," I added
conversationally, "don't you find the harness galling at times after
all--you have been through?"
"Galling! Say, Randolph, those little machine people in their
skyscraper beehives--cages--don't know what living is!--Freedom!" ...
For the first time I had noted the light of spontaneity glowing in his
eyes, and my heart bounded: I was about to hear a confession. But on a
sudden he checked himself and looked away. "Of course," he added in a
forced tone, "one has to face one's responsibilities. No--take it all
in all, I am glad to be doing my share of the work and carrying my
burden."
I knew he was lying. I knew that his first outburst was the true
Pendleton; that the addendum was meant, as politicians say, for home
consumption.
"Of course, of course," I muttered hastily, "but we're only human." And
alternately I cudgeled my poor wits to stand by me and prayed to them as
to deities to light my way.
This lawless spirit, Pendleton, I had a vague gleam of intuition, was
repenting his return to the yoke of duty, to the restraints of
civilization. What, then, was it that held him? It was not a suddenly
developed conscience. Of that I was certain. There was a problem I
must solve and solve immediately.
We parted with cordiality at Grand Central station and twenty minutes
later I was one of those little machines functioning at Visconti's.
"I want a draft at thirty days," I was saying, "for ten thousand lire on
Naples. Your best rate at that date." And with the receiver to my ear
I heard a voice within me, independent of the telephone, whispering:
"Could it be that he too is bewitched by Alicia?--with all his roving
and experience--or is it his sense of duty to his children?"
"Four ninety-eight," said the exchange man, Hoskyns, at the National
City, and "four ninety-eight," I repeated after him automatically.
"Can't you do better--at thirty days?" And the independent voice in my
brain put in: "Perhaps I am hipped upon the subject of Alicia?" And so
the morning wore on.
Gertrude, to my surprise and confusion, rang me up at eleven.
"Good morning, Ranny," she opened sweetly. "You haven't kept your
promise, have you?"
"Promise?" I repeated dully. "What promise?"
"You said you would keep me informed about Pendleton's return. You
haven't done it--have you?"
"But you have been away for the summer, haven't you?" I ventured
desperately.
"Yes, and I am back," she murmured gently, "and still--better come and
lunch with me to-day--don't you think so?"
If there's any one thing that my career as a business man has done for
me, it is to implant in my heart a hatred for procrastination and
shiftiness. I had no luncheon engagement, and yet I despairingly told
her I had.
"Dinner," she answered, "would suit me even better."
"I ought to go home," I protested feebly, with a sinking instinctive
feeling that I really ought not to resume such relations with Gertrude.
"We'll have an early little meal, at six-thirty," she smoothly ignored
me, "Until then, good-by."
I clicked the receiver angrily for a moment, but Gertrude had hung up.
Her high-handed manner irritated me, but that was her characteristic.
We were more leagues apart, Gertrude and I, than ever she or I could
travel backward. And though the results of our meeting seemed to be
unsatisfactory to Gertrude, I must in justice to her admit that she is
always an admirable hostess.
I had telephoned to my house that I was not to be expected to dinner,
and when Griselda had dryly answered, "Ye don't know what ye'll miss," I
thought with a pang that I knew more about that than she did. Gertrude's
calm and comfortable atmosphere, however, her deep chairs and sofas and
the air of excluding a disorderly world, were not disagreeable to one
fresh from the filthy pavements south of Fourth Street. Could those
junk shops, paper-box factories, delicatessen "garages" and machine
shops be in the same world with Gertrude's flat, in Gramercy Park? Yet
they were only a little more than a mile away, and those were my real
world, my daily environment. Gertrude's flat was now foreign ground.
"Yes--goose of a man!--don't you see? What could be better? The man
comes back anxious to reassume his responsibilities. You have had a
Hades of a time, but you have done the square thing, acquitted yourself
like a man and a hero. And now the little romance ends happily and
everything is satisfactory and you are free again--what could be more
delightful?"
The heaviness of my heart portended anything but delight, but I remained
silent.
"Don't think I am being trivial, Ranny," she resumed with a more sober
vehemence. "It was a wonderful thing to do. I feel I was wrong in what
I advised in the past. Your sticking to the children has done heaps for
you--for your development, I mean--more for you than for them, perhaps,"
she inserted as a parenthesis with a laugh. "But don't be quixotic now.
Everything's coming right in the best of all possible worlds. So don't
go throwing a wrench into the machinery just because you've had the
wrench in your hand so long you can't think what else to do with it!"
"I am not good at changes," I murmured gloomily. "I was catapulted from
one kind of life into another by main force of circumstances. Now I
don't feel I can stand being shot back into something else. The wear
and tear, the strain is too great."
I will not deny that what I chiefly saw at that moment was a disruption
that would rob me not only of the affection of the children of which I
could not speak, but of Alicia, of whom I could speak even less.
Gertrude graciously lit a cigarette for me and sat down beside me. She
herself, however, was not smoking.
"There is one change, Ranny," she began in a new and strange voice that
was almost tender, "that would do you more good than anything else in
the world--can you guess what I mean?"
"A trip abroad?" I fumbled uncertainly.
"No"--smiled Gertrude quietly laying her hand on mine, "I
mean--marriage."
"Oh, my God!" I exclaimed in an agony of apprehension, and a cold
perspiration bedewed my forehead. That was one thing I never had
expected Gertrude to discuss with me again, even in the abstract.
I do not remember what I ate, except that the dinner was dainty and cool
and exquisite. There was a dewy cup of something light and refreshing
and Gertrude's frock was charming, her eyes were bright and there was a
touch of color in her cheeks. She did little talking herself at first,
but pressed me to tell her all I could of Pendleton.
I told her. I told her of his coming, of his air of penitence, of his
returning to the offices of the insurance company and of his present
effort to reestablish a home for his children. The only suppressions I
was conscious of were any references to Alicia or to my own somber
emotions on the score of the children. Otherwise I was frank enough,
Heaven knows, for it is hard for me not to be. To the very end Gertrude
did not interrupt me. Only when I had done she made one crisp, incisive
comment with a faint smile that was merely a lift of the upper lip.
"The one thing I cannot understand, Ranny," she observed, "is your
unreasonable skepticism."
"You feel you could trust such a man implicitly?" I demanded.
"Yes," was the firm reply. "If there is any one thing clear, it is that
Jim Pendleton is genuinely penitent. Suppose that lost-memory story is
all moonshine, as you and Dibdin seem to think. By coming back that way
doesn't the man really display more character than if it were true? He
really shows that if he's gone wrong he has the stamina to come right
again--and that's a good deal in this wicked world, Ranny."
"I had not looked at it in that light," I muttered, disturbed.
"I know you haven't," she gave a triumphant laugh. "You couldn't be calm
on the subject. You really are an emotional, high-strung romantic,
Ranny, and I don't altogether blame you for being prejudiced. But any
dispassionate person knowing the facts will tell you I am right."
"It would be difficult for me to feel dispassionate on the subject," I
returned doggedly.
"Certainly it would," was her ready reply. "That's why I am glad I
captured you. Some friend had to show you your own interest."
"My interest?"
"Ranny," she cried in a voice charged with purpose if not with
emotion,--with an intense, a vibrating resolution that impinged like a
heavy weight upon my senses. "Ranny--don't let's be children--we are too
old for that. Let bygones be bygones. I'll humiliate myself before
you. I--I love you, Ranny--" and her lips really quivered--"I have
always loved you--will you marry me, Ranny?"
Her face seemed strange, transformed by the force of an irresistible, a
final compulsion. I writhed under her gaze as one on a rack. She hung
for a moment, her eyes glittering into mine, positively tremulous; I had
never seen Gertrude so serious. I could not bear it. It was
excruciating. I know Gertrude was not herself. I leaped from the sofa,
her hand still clinging to mine.
"I can't--I can't, Gertrude," I whispered hoarsely. "Oh--I--wish--but I
am horribly sorry--I can't!"
Gertrude's nerves are strong and her control over them is stronger. She
gazed at me for an instant, intently, searchingly, dropped my hand and
turned away.
"There is some one else," she murmured in level tones to herself; "there
is some one else now."
"Yes," I breathed, "though it won't--it can't--" and I paused.
"You needn't tell me," she turned, smiling harshly. "I know--it's that
girl--the gutter-sni--but it doesn't matter. Every man is a fool--and
you are the least likely to prove an exception. Oh, I always knew
that--felt it--but never mind. I can't humiliate myself any more, can
I?--Ranny," her voice suddenly struck a quieter note. "One thing I must
ask for our old friendship's sake: You will forget this--episode--will
you not? And I shall try to."
"My dear Gertrude--" I threw out my hands in a gesture of helplessness.
If there was any humiliation it was I who was suffering it. She looked
at me calmly, stonily. The color in her cheeks was exactly the same as
before. Had Gertrude stooped to rouge?
"Your dear Gertrude--yes; then that's all right. Have a drink before you
go? No? Very well. You will remember some day that I have given you
my best--done my best for you."
It seems inherent in the nature of woman, so cosmic is the sweep of her
outlook, or else so near to the earth, that when her desires are
frustrated she feels the laws of the universe are frustrated. I did not
make this comment to Gertrude, however; I could only murmur an entreaty
for her forgiveness--which she ignored. Her only answer was a brief
hard gesture of the head, a sort of jerk that expressed at once
futility, contempt and dismissal.
As one dazed and paralyzed I must have made my way somehow downstairs,
into a street car or some other conveyance at Fourth Avenue and into the
babel at Grand Central station. But of this I have no recollection
whatsoever. It is a blank. I must have walked like a somnambulist. I
never came to until I left the train at Crestlands about a quarter past
nine, and the first thing I was conscious of was the pain I must have
inflicted.
*CHAPTER XVIII*
I can write this almost calmly now because so much has passed since that
dreadful evening and details begin to emerge cloudily from the fog of
that confusion.
I remember striking out homeward from the station down our drably
progressive suburban Main Street, following the bumping, grinding,
loitering trolley across the little bridge over a stream that sends up a
dank, fishy odor, though all the living things I have ever seen in its
neighborhood were mosquitoes and water snakes.
Over the rusty iron parapet I stood leaning for a few minutes and the
original thought feebly stirred my dazed brain that life was not so much
a dream--as the Spaniard Calderon would have it--as it is a stream.
There is no knowing what it may not bring upon its bosom.
"That's it," I muttered to myself aloud. "Life is a stream within a
dream."
"That's about the size of it," gruffly remarked a passing laborer behind
me, his dinner pail clanking against his side, and he burst into a
hoarse guffaw.
I laughed too, and concluded that I was still maudlin at the end of my
perfect day.
I left the bridge and the highway, turned to the right and began to
climb the ill-lighted crooked street, anciently a Dutch cattle track, no
doubt, that leads to my isolated chalet upon the rock.
With all geography, history, the visible and invisible universe to draw
upon, the fathers of Crestlands had denominated this obscure street
Milwaukee Avenue. Milwaukee Avenue put the last touch to my nightmarish
state. A sickly laugh escaped me as I bent my back to the ascent.
A young mounted policeman, who rode like another Lancelot by this remote
Shalott, interrupted his tune long enough to give me a cheery greeting
and rode on humming to himself.
The September evening was mild and I vaguely purposed walking past my
house and strolling about for a bit before I went in. It was early for
returning from dinner in town, and I was not overanxious to encounter
anybody. A sudden sense of something eerie and awesome came to me as I
looked at that deeply shadowed cottage. It appeared unfamiliarly
remote, detached, and I gazed upon it with a weird sense of foreboding
that sent a slight shiver down my back. The window shades of the chalet
were drawn with only their rectangular lines of light showing
through,--light, I reflected bitterly, by which Pendleton was no doubt
beguiling Alicia to desert my house and follow him.
This thought lodged like a barb in my heart and my feet suddenly turned
to lead. I could not go on farther and irresistibly I felt myself drawn
homeward.
The somber habit of my recent reflections urged me with a plausibility
strange and inexplicable to enter my study by the window instead of the
comparatively public door. The window nearly always stood open. In
case of storm Griselda or Alicia would dash about the house and close
the windows, beginning always with my study. But this day had been
clear.
I tiptoed around through the garden to the side upon which my study
window gives. From it the land slopes away under a covering of trees
until it reaches the stream.
There was a light in the study, though the shade was drawn, flapping
gently against the rusty wire screen. This shade, as it happens, does
not quite fit. It is short a full half-inch on either side, so that the
peering observer can see as much as he pleases of what is going on in
that room when it is lighted.
Automatically, without any premeditation that I can now recall, I gazed
into my own room like a prowling thief. The picture I saw riveted me to
the spot with an irresistible magnetic force.
Alicia was reclining on my leather couch, seemingly asleep.
Instinctively I knew that she had decided to wait up for me and with
some book in her hands had nodded in her vigil. It was still early, but
Alicia's day began early and was always charged with activity. What an
exquisite picture she made as she lay there in her thin frock, with a
look of childlike trust and unconsciousness--radiating beauty.
Pendleton, who at that moment entered the door of the study, possibly to
find Alicia, stood for a few moments spellbound by the picture, even as
I stood outside. My burglarious entry was now frustrated. I must make
use of the door. But I could not move from the spot. Somehow I could
not let Pendleton out of my sight.
How dared he look at her in that manner!
My nerves were suddenly tense and my muscles quivering. Strange
unfamiliar thoughts of savage acts, of sudden violence, of thrusts and
blows, of blood-lust seethed and bubbled within me like a lurid boiling
pitch. The inhibitions and restraints of a lifetime, however, held me
writhing as in a vise.
I turned away for a twinkling as though to gather resolution from the
murmurous night.
On a sudden, as I peered again eagerly, I saw Pendleton's great hulk
bending over her, with a look peculiar and intense, with a strange
speculation in his eyes that froze me. His huge hands were
spasmodically, irresistibly hovering as if to embrace her delicate
unconscious shoulders. Before I knew it he was kissing her cheek and it
was I--I--who felt his hot vile breath as though Alicia's face and mine
were one!
I cried out in a torment of fury and pain, but only a hoarse distant
sound as of some night bird issued out of my parched constricted throat.
I rattled the sash violently, seized the screen and ripped it out,
tearing my hands with the cheap twisted screen frame, though I was
unaware of it then. The thin opaque shade flapped defiantly in my face.
And all at once I heard a piercing scream--the terrified voice of
Alicia!
Rage maddened me. And because of my state, I experienced difficulty,
this time of all times, in entering the window out of which normally I
stepped with ease. I stumbled, slipped, fell, rose again and leaped into
the room like a maniac.
But Griselda, drawn by Alicia's scream, no doubt, was already filling
the doorway, facing Pendleton, and with a look of concentrated hatred
that remains engraved in my memory she was saying:
"Ye blackguard! Ye vile, black-hearted blackguard!"
With a wild leap to my table I seized a pointed bronze paper cutter. I
should have plunged it into his heart, but for the swift intervention of
the aged Griselda.
"No!" she cried huskily, seizing the blade, "we need nae add murder to
this!"
I dropped the paper cutter to the floor and threw myself at the purple
throat of the beast Pendleton. For a moment the guilty hang-dog look
left his eyes and with an oath he thrust out his open hands against my
face to throw me off. I was blinded by his huge hot palms against my
eyes but I clung convulsively to his throat. His hands spasmodically
closed about my neck; a momentary blackness fell upon me but I clung, my
fingers eating more savagely into the hateful flesh of his throat. The
pent-up force of years of hostility was that instant in my destroying
hands. He gurgled and gasped and reeled backward.
In the meanwhile Alicia, emerging from her bewilderment and realizing
the scene enacting itself with lightning-like rapidity, gave a low cry
and sat up, moaning with terror. This vision of Alicia recalled me to
myself. I flung his head away from me and I myself staggered backward
with the force of my effort. I was breathing like a wrestler as I stood
leaning with one hand upon the table. I could not speak.
My desire was to fold Alicia in my arms, to press her to me, exulting in
her safety. But I dared not move for fear I should topple and fall,
with the sheer working of the rage that was tearing me.
"Go--Alicia!" I gasped out finally. "Upstairs. Leave us!" Dead, banal
phrases, when I panted to pour out endearments!
With a look of wild anxiety from Pendleton to me, like a terrified doe,
Alicia rose, stood for a moment irresolute, then suddenly throwing up
her hands to her face, she ran out of the room with a piteous stifled
cry.
We stood for a space silent, all three of us, Griselda, Pendleton and I,
after the door had closed.
"Now, Pendleton," I said finally, when I was a little more sure of my
voice, "nothing you can say will matter in the slightest. We saw.
Question is what d'you mean to do?"
He glanced hostilely toward Griselda. She, interpreting his look,
flashed defiantly, with arms akimbo.
"Look, ye villain, look your fill. I will na leave the master alone
with a murderer, the likes of you! No, I will na!" How often I have
wished since then that she had not been so zealous.
"Talk about murder!" Pendleton, with the ghost of a grin, pointed at
the paper knife still clutched in Griselda's hand.
"You needn't be afraid on my account," I told Griselda quietly. "I
don't fear him."
"I will na go away," obstinately retorted Griselda, moving forward,
pushing Pendleton aside like a man, and placing her back against the
door.
"Very well, Griselda," I said. "I have no secrets to hide from you.
And this man has betrayed what he can never hope to hide. Pendleton,
what do you mean to do?"
"Do--" muttered Pendleton, with a dark abstraction in his look, "I'd
like to tell you what I'd like to do to such as you--but it isn't worth
while. This namby-pamby, mollycoddle, rotten doll-life favors you. Do!
If I had the money, I'd get so far away I couldn't even think of insects
like you."
"Then you realize you are no more fit to take Laura's children than
you're fit to live among decent people?" He was silent for a moment,
with the abstraction merging into cunning in his eye, and that in turn,
as though cunning were of no avail, fading into heaviness.
"They'll become like you," he finally answered with the somber trace of
a sneer. "There's the oldest boy--I wish--I'd make a man of him." A
snort of derision from Griselda interrupted.
"You mean a criminal," I put in, in spite of myself. "Well, you can't,
Pendleton. Lift a finger and as surely as you sit there, I'll prosecute
you--children or no children. Don't forget I have witnesses."
He gazed at me open-mouthed with half-defiance, half-alarm on his moist
fleshy countenance.
"That's your little scheme, is it?" he muttered sardonically.
"Only if you drive me to it!"
"Blackmail, eh?"
I laughed at him. "What's the use of being melodramatic, Pendleton?
You are hardly the one to talk like that."
"Where's the money Laura left?" he snapped with truculent sharpness, and
I experienced a pang of pain to hear her name upon his lips.
Nevertheless, I answered him evenly:
"That exists intact--about nineteen hundred dollars. It's the
children's, unless I should need it for their education. I am the
executor."
"Give me a thousand of that!" he cried passionately, yet with a
tentative uncertainty in his voice, "and I'll go where I'll never see
your face again!"
"That's a consummation, Pendleton--but of that not a penny!"
"Executor!" he repeated with vicious bitterness--"with your little laws
and safeguards. God! How I hate you all! God! To be again where real
men are--who move--and laugh--and live! Peddling mollycoddles--caged
white mice! Damn you! I wish to God I had never met any of you!"
"You don't know how often I have wished that," I murmured, but he paid
no heed.
"Lord! I want to be again where the sun shines, where a man can take a
chance! I wish to God I had never met that moldy old rotten Dibdin! I
was going into the commission business with an Englishman at Osaka--or I
could have gone into one of the mines of Kuhara in Korea--copper--made a
fortune!"--he spoke as if he were vehemently thinking aloud--"but that
plausible rotter Dibdin came along--dragged me away--and I had a
hankering for the lights of Broadway. Broadway! What have I seen of it?
Want to put me in a cage--in a flat! Hell, man! Give me a thousand
dollars--and let me--I'll pay it back!"
I did not laugh at his last words. His mention of Dibdin suddenly
brought to my mind what was like a flash of light. To be rid of him was
my paramount desire. Dibdin--Dibdin's check--_to be used for the
children_! It lay yellowing in my pocketbook. Now if ever was the
time. Never, I felt certain after Pendleton's confession, could I
benefit the children more with a thousand dollars!
"Yes!" I cried explosively. "I understand you, Pendleton. I'll give
you a thousand dollars. You don't belong here--it was a mistake
bringing you--go where you came from--where you'll be at home." It was
only afterwards I recalled that he had mentioned blackmail.
"You'll give it to me?" he exclaimed avidly, thrusting out his hand.
"Yes--I will!"
"Now?"
"To-morrow morning." His face fell.
"Some trick? You'll go back on it." I ignored him.
"But you can't sleep here," I went on. "I'll meet you in town anywhere
you say. No, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll come with you to town
now, to-night. To-morrow morning we'll settle it."
To be rid of him--to get him out from under this roof--seemed suddenly a
great, a priceless boon.
"God! I could kiss you!" he cried in derisive exultation.
"Go pack your things," I said, through the tumult in my brain. "I'll
call a cab--or better still, you telephone Hickson, Griselda. I'll go
and help him."
Pendleton nodded with grim insolence and shouldered out of the door.
"A better night's work ye've never done in your life," flashed Griselda,
with a look of approbation that pleased me as much as any praise I have
ever received; and she shuffled out to the telephone.
For one moment of silence I stood alone in the middle of my study,
throbbing with a jumble of half-formed thoughts and racing flashes of
ideas upon none of which my mind was able to fasten. But this single
fact finally emerged from the welter: It was I, by my own act, who was
now sending the father of Laura's children into exile. But on the heels
of that came the certain conviction that never had any judge since
justice was invented made a more accurate decision. And it seemed to me
then as though something new and massive and stubborn and hard was born
in my bosom that solidified and toughened me: That, come sorrow or joy,
I should be able to present a surer front to their encounter, a greater
certitude in meeting them. I felt myself at last an active, fashioned
and tempered part of the machinery of life, and all my past seemed as
chaff that had been blown by the winds of circumstance.
Alicia! My heart cried out for her! But I could not go to her now. I
must clean my house for her and when next I saw her it should be in a
cleared and wholesome atmosphere that no longer reeked of Pendleton. I
made my way to his room and opened the door.
"Have you packing space enough?" I asked him coldly.
"I could use another suit case," he muttered.
"I'll give you mine," I told him and brought forth my bag from a closet
in the hall. Whether Alicia had heard any or all of our words I could
not tell. The children were evidently sleeping. I walked on tiptoe.
"Where d'you intend to go?" growled Pendleton, without looking at me.
"To an hotel," I told him curtly--"any hotel you like."
"Go to the Hotel de Gink for all I care," he muttered and went on with
his packing.
"Do you want to see the children before you go?"
I could not forbear asking him that. He paused for a moment and
straightened up, breathing heavily. Then he shook his head. "No--I
guess not."
The tin taxicab was rattling at the door, and Griselda came futilely to
announce it.
"You'll hear from me to-morrow morning some time," I whispered to her
quickly, as Pendleton, stooping under his bags, lumbered on in front of
me. "Look after Alicia--and the others."
"Ay," she murmured, "have no fear."
There was a train, and in the longest half-hour of any journey we were
at the Manhattan Hotel. Adjoining rooms were assigned to us with a
bathroom between. There had been a sort of intoxication about the entire
business that had carried me on with a blind nameless force as one is
carried in a dream. Once I was alone in the four walls of the
impersonal chamber, a sudden lassitude fell upon me, followed by an
immense wave of dreariness. How somber and sinister was life, full of a
drab and hidden tragedy. Trafficking with Pendleton--slaving at
Visconti's--the dreams that had been mine! And this was the life I was
living. Suppose in the morning he should refuse? On a sudden my door
opened and Pendleton's hatless head appeared.
"Sure you won't back out in the morning?"
And again my nerves snapped back into their steel-like tension.
"Not even doomsday morning."
"Will you have a drink on it?"
"No," I told him, "but there is no reason why you shouldn't have one."
"I think I will," he said, and with a malign gleam of triumph he
approached the telephone in my room.
"The bar!" he demanded, and when the connection was made he added: "Two
rye highs for 436." Then he turned his face toward me and grinned.
"Now, Randolph," he began quite amicably, "why keep me here any longer
than you can help?"
"What d'you mean?"
"This: It's only about half-past ten--quarter to eleven. There
is--there must be a train for the West round midnight. Why prolong the
sweet agony of parting--why not let me go?"
"Now? You must be crazy!" I exploded nervously. "How can I get the
money for you? Besides, there's another thing--I want you to sign
something--something a lawyer must draw up--a paper of some sort--so you
can't repeat this business."
"So that's it--is it?" he nodded his heavy head up and down, as though
thinking aloud. "Well, put that out of your mind. I'll sign nothing.
Take me for a fool? Here's your chance. Give me the money now and let
me go or the deal's off. See? I'm just as anxious to go as you're to
have me go. But I wasn't born yesterday. I'll sign no papers in any
damn lawyer's office. Take it or leave it. That's that!"
There was something unspeakably horrible to me about sitting there and
chaffering with this man whose every word breathed contamination. For a
moment the thought of Dibdin came to me. I would call upon Dibdin in
this emergency. Dibdin had hardly been near me of late. Excepting for
an occasional luncheon together or a sporadic telephone conversation, I
had scarcely seen him. It was as though he dreaded to encounter the
monster Pendleton, whom, in a sort he had himself brought into being,
and was only waiting until I should be free of him. But somehow I could
not then call Dibdin. This was _my_ crisis and my mind revolted at
dragging any one else into it. Oddly enough it was not the children
that seemed to be the barrier, but Alicia. The picture of Pendleton
obscenely hovering over her came scorching, before my vision and I at
once, dismissed the thought of calling upon Dibdin. The club,--that was
my one chance of getting cash at that hour.
"What's the matter with your club?" Pendleton snapped me up so suddenly
that I was startled. Could that fleshy brute read my thoughts?
"Just what I was thinking of," I murmured excitedly and snatched up the
telephone. "Give me 9100 Bryant."
"Damn it--you're a sport! I like a dead game bird like you."
When the club answered, I asked whether Mr. Fred Salmon happened to be
in and was informed that the doorman thought he was and that he would
page him. I sat waiting with the receiver to my ear.
"Tell you what I'll do," said Pendleton, under the stimulus of
expectation. "If you pull this off for me so I can start to-night,
while the mood's on me, I'll sign any damn thing you please."
"Hello!" I suddenly heard in Fred Salmon's deep voice, "Salmon
speaking."
"Fred," I told him, "this is Randolph Byrd."
"Hello, Ranny!" he broke in exuberantly. "Well, of all the ghosts--"
but I checked him.
"--I want to cash a check for a thousand dollars right now, Fred. I am
at the Manhattan Hotel. The banks are closed. Will you do this for me:
Ask at the office and turn out your pockets and get what you can from
any of the card players there and anybody else you know. Do you follow
me?"
"I get you all right--all right--" said the voice of Fred, hardening to
a businesslike tone now that money was in question. "Hold the wire a
minute, Ran. I'll see what I can do."
Fred's raucous voice was as plainly audible to Pendleton as it was to
me.
"Get it," he muttered. "Get it. I'd hate to wait till to-morrow."
I nodded. To be rid of him to-night would be a vast relief. And I
longed to return home.
"I guess we can fix it all right," came Fred's voice in the telephone.
"But you'd better come over with the check. There's about six hundred
dollars in the club till. I have a couple of hundred with me. And we
can raise the rest."
Pendleton heard him.
"Go ahead," he said. "I'll fix up about a berth with the head porter in
the meanwhile."
"What's the big idea?" was Fred's greeting, as I entered the club.
"Private," I told him laconically. "Sending a man to the antipodes
because he's unfit to live in this climate."
"Oh--sick man?" Fred was sympathetic.
"Very sick," I told him. "Incurable,"
Fifteen minutes later I was in the hotel, handing Pendleton the money.
"Now what d'you want me to sign?" he queried carelessly.
"Not a thing," I answered. For on a sudden the futility of holding
Pendleton to any bond overwhelmed me. Any respite, even a few weeks
from his presence, seemed a paradise. Paradise seemed cheap at a
thousand dollars. And who can safeguard paradise? Besides, if I knew
my man at all, it would be some time before he would return to an
environment he so thoroughly loathed. I was no more safe with his
signature than without--and no less.
"That's about all, then," he said, and he had the decency not to hold
out his hand. "Good luck," he added in an undertone.
I made no answer and turned my face away from him with a wonderful sense
of relief.
No sooner had the porter bustled out with his things and the door closed
than I looked toward my own small bag with the dominant thought of
returning home. But I could not move. I found myself shaking like a
leaf and I sank down in the nearest chair, quivering as though the
vibration in my nerves would hurl my body to pieces. No, I could not go
home in this state. And taking off my coat with hands that shook as in
a palsy, I threw myself upon the bed. But before I passed into the
sleep of stupefied exhaustion a single insistent foreboding kept dully
throbbing through my brain.
"He will come back--Pendleton will come back!"
*CHAPTER XIX*
Exultation filled me when I awoke late in the morning.
Though I had slept in my clothes and felt particularly disheveled, I
stripped with the joy of an athlete after a victory and plunged into the
cool invigorating bath.
Pendleton was gone! I do not remember the emotions of Sinbad when he
had rid himself of the Old Man of the Sea. But his emotions must have
resembled mine. My heart sang, I sang myself. I was manumitted. I was
free. To my intimate journal may I not say that I felt myself a man?
I had fought the beast at Ephesus, my pulses blasphemously and
jubilantly informed me, and by the Lord, I had won!
The children were mine! Alicia was mine! Would that I could bind them
to me with triple brass. But I have bound them. In ridding myself of
Pendleton, I had made them securely mine. Suppose he should return one
day? They would be grown--reared by me. He would be merely the family
skeleton. What is a family without a skeleton? He was that now. He
wouldn't matter. It is human destiny to revolve about the child, about
children. With the exception of Pendleton the outcast and Gertrude
the--well, Gertrude--every one attained completeness only in rearing the
next generation. And as I rubbed my body with the coarse towel I felt
complete!
As for Alicia--ah--well, who was I to expect from life _everything_? At
any rate she was mine, now, even as the children were mine. And the
very first thing I would do--oh, jeweled inspiration--is to adopt her,
legally and formally. That thought suddenly made the blood sing in my
ears to so delicious a tune that absurdly, ridiculously, I began like
some pagan or satyr to dance about the room. _Mine, mine, mine_! I
danced into the room in which Pendleton had not slept and with crazy
gestures made as if to sweep his memory out of the garish window. I had
saved the children and safeguarded Alicia.
I felt I had played the man. And let no man say he has lived until he
has fought for those he loves. Inevitably my mind dwelt upon Alicia.
Who is that child? What were her beginnings? Did she come out of the
sea and chaos of life only to vanish in some bitter poignant dream like
that of last night? I only knew that she was mine now and that I would
bind her to me yet more strongly. I would not ask for too much; I would
be humbly grateful. She had come into my life as a divine offering and
I would not question overmuch. There is no other origin. I felt
supremely, tremulously content. If only she would abide and never leave
me!
And it occurred to me, as I stood shaving before the mirror, that life
is a beleaguered city, with deadly arrows falling over the wall, and the
great enemy, death, certain to enter in the end. But by virtue of the
love implanted in the human heart, one may snatch many hours of
happiness amid the tumult and the shouting in the winding ways.
Over my hasty breakfast I recalled with a shock of guilt that I had not
yet communicated with Griselda. But as I was already late I decided I
should call her from the office.
How swift is mischief to enter in the thoughts of desperate men I
discovered bitterly only a few minutes later.
For the first word I received upon entering Visconti's was that Griselda
had called me repeatedly and Griselda's news chilled and numbed every
fiber in my body.
Alicia had disappeared!
Pendleton! That was the thought that seared my brain.
"You--don't think"--I stammered brokenly to Griselda, "that she--that
Pendleton--"
"I have thought of that," was her reply. "But--no! It canna be
possible. She hated him--no! She must hae gone before ye left the
house. I looked into her room soon after and she wasna there. I
thought the girlie was hiding somewhere--or maybe she had run out into
the garden until the mischief should blow over. I looked high and low; I
called her in the garden. But she was nowhere to be found."
"Did she take any things?" I queried huskily.
"A wee bundle--" said Griselda--"night things and the like."
The shuddering dismay of that moment I shall never forget.
"Did she talk with--with him at all during the evening?" The words
struggled out of my parched throat in spite of me, and I should have
hated to see my own eyes.
"Ay," said Griselda, "that he did, the leper! All the evening he was
wheedling her to come to him with the bairns when he set up his house.
She was weeping sair to me in the kitchen afterward. It was to ask you
if you wanted her to go that she waited for you in the study--and fell
asleep, the poor maidie!"
"And what did you say to her?" I all but whispered into the mouthpiece.
"I told the lass not to greet," shouted Griselda. "I told her I could
nae believe it would happen. He would never take the bairns. And if he
did he would nae keep them. He was a bad one--the evil brute! But she
was frightened, the puir lassie!"
"Very well, Griselda," I muttered stonily. "I must think. I shall call
you a little later. Don't alarm the others."
She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort.
But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a
half-scorched moth around the ugly, sinister vision of Pendleton. Could
he be at the bottom of Alicia's disappearance? How had he contrived the
trick? If only I had gone to the station with him! Was it that that
accounted for his hurry to be gone? No! It was impossible. Ought I to
start in pursuit at once? No, no, no! I could not believe it. It could
not be--not of her own free will! Yet my heart was lacerated by the
possibility. When I lifted my head from my bosom, I gasped in a
desolation of emptiness.
I had stifled the prompting to call Dibdin last night, but now I felt I
must find him. I needed the solace and advice of a friend. I rose
heavily and put on my hat. Visconti had not yet come in.
"Tell Mr. Visconti," I said to Varesi, my young understudy, "that I have
been called away suddenly, on a serious private matter. I shall
telephone him later."
"Yes, Mr. Byrd," responded Varesi, his lustrous Italian eyes flashing
sympathy. He thought, no doubt, from what he must have overheard, that
some rascal had run off with my younger sister--a killing matter, very
possibly, to a properly constituted male. Had he known the truth, his
Latin mind would have been shocked at my seeming Anglo-Saxon composure.
Out of doors I heaved a deep sigh and boarded a north-bound elevated
train for the eighties, where Dibdin has his lodgings, near the Museum
of Natural History.
I found Dibdin not at his lodging but at the Museum, directing the
rearrangement of the Polynesian section in the light of his additions to
it.
He turned one intense glance upon me without speaking, hurriedly gave
some directions to the men at work, and led me to an alcove where there
was a bench.
"Now, let's hear--" he said. "What's he been doing?" He concluded at
once that Pendleton was at the bottom of whatever wild appearance I must
have presented.
Briefly, but without omitting any essential detail, I gave him an
account of all that had happened the previous evening, including
Griselda's announcement of the morning.
"And you think he enticed her to go off with him?" he demanded.
"Well--what do you think?" I queried.
"I think no," said Dibdin. "What does Griselda say?"
"She says Alicia hated him."
"Then take her word for it!" snapped Dibdin. "But why the devil didn't
you call me last night from the Manhattan?" he turned upon me angrily.
"Why didn't I?" I murmured. "Maybe it's because you've done
enough--maybe it's because there are some things a man wants to do
without assistance."
Dibdin glanced at me sharply and gave a low whistle.
"Oh, that's it--" he muttered--"I see," and he looked away.
I am certain that at that moment Dibdin read my secret. For his
expression swiftly changed. He grew suddenly warm and friendly, more
than his usual self.
"A fine job you did there, Randolph," he cried, clapping my shoulder;
"an excellent piece of work. I certainly admire your technique. As for
Alicia--she didn't go with him--of that I feel sure!" I could have
groveled before him in gratitude for those words.
"But where do you suppose she is?" I could not help eagerly asking.
There was a gleam of amusement mingled with the sympathy in his eyes.
"Not very far, I imagine. We'll find her. Have no fear. Young girls
are funny things. The instinct of sacrifice and the instinct of
independence are always struggling in a woman like the twins in
Rebekah's womb. When they're young it hits them very hard. Some notion
like that must have swamped Alicia--sacrifice--earn her own
living--ceasing to be a source of trouble--who knows? They don't think
when they're young--or even when they're old. They feel. We'll find
her--but we've got to think. Pull yourself together, old man."
"How," I asked in stupefaction, "do you come to know all that about
women?" And my heart felt perceptibly lightened at his words.
"Oh, I've been studying them all my life," he laughed. "Never having had
one of my own, I've been watching and thinking about the whole sex all
over the earth. We'll find her. Have you communicated with the police?"
At the word "police," my heart turned leaden again.
"The--p-police!" I stammered aghast. "Invoke the publicity that
means?--Horrible!" A shudder ran down my back.
"Right again!" cried Dibdin, nudging me. "Young man, you have an
appreciation! Quite useless--the police. But you still--have a
suspicion of Pendleton, haven't you?" I found myself wishing that even
the best of men weren't so ready to imagine themselves amateur
detectives. The very core of my heart of hearts, Alicia, had
disappeared, and I wanted swift concrete help, not speculative
questions.