"I can't tell you how glad I am!"

Her eyes were wide and bright, as from some great excitement, and her color was high. Once my attention was on it, I knew instantly that only some extraordinary upheaval in that household could have produced the fever that was blazing in her. Never had I seen her in any such mood as this.

"What is it?" I asked. "What has happened?"

"If anything disagreeable should be said or done this evening here," she said, "I want you to promise me that you'll restrain yourself, and not say or do any of those things that make me—that jar on me. You understand?"

"I am always myself," replied I. "I can't be anybody else."

"But you are—several different kinds of self," she insisted. "And please—this evening don't be that kind. It's coming into your eyes and chin now."

I had lifted my head and looked round, probably much like the leader of a horned herd at the scent of danger.

"Is this better?" said I, trying to look the thoughts I had no difficulty in getting to the fore whenever my eyes were on her.

Her smile rewarded me. But it disappeared, gave place to a look of nervous alarm, of terror even, at the rustling, or, rather, bustling, of skirts in the hall—there was war in the very sound, and I felt it. Mrs. Ellersly appeared, bearing her husband as a dejected trailer invisibly but firmly coupled. She acknowledged my salutation with a stiff-necked nod, ignored my extended hand. I saw that she wished to impress upon me that she was a very grand lady indeed; but, while my ideas of what constitutes a lady were at that time somewhat befogged by my snobbishness, she failed dismally. She looked just what she was—a mean, bad-tempered woman, in a towering rage.

"You have forced me, Mr. Blacklock," said she, and then I knew for just what purpose that voice of hers was best adapted—"to say to you what I should have preferred to write. Mr. Ellersly has had brought to his ears matters in connection with your private life that make it imperative that you discontinue your calls here."

"My private life, ma'am?" I repeated. "I was not aware that I had a private life."

"Anita, leave us alone with Mr. Blacklock," commanded her mother.

The girl hesitated, bent her head, and with a cowed look went slowly toward the door. There she paused, and, with what seemed a great effort, lifted her head and gazed at me. How I ever came rightly to interpret her look I don't know, but I said: "Miss Ellersly, I've the right to insist that you stay." I saw she was going to obey me, and before Mrs. Ellersly could repeat her order I said: "Now, madam, if any one accuses me of having done anything that would cause you to exclude a man from your house, I am ready for the liar and his lie."

As I spoke I was searching the weak, bad old face of her husband for an explanation. Their pretense of outraged morality I rejected at once—it was absurd. Neither up town nor down, nor anywhere else, had I done anything that any one could regard as a breach of the code of a man of the world. Then, reasoned I, they must have found some one else to help them out of their financial troubles—some one who, perhaps, has made this insult to me the price, or part of the price, of his generosity. Who? Who hates me? In instant answer, up before my mind flashed a picture of Tom Langdon and Sam Ellersly arm in arm entering Lewis' office. Tom Langdon wishes to marry her; and her parents wish it, too; he is the man she was confessing to me about—these were my swift conclusions.

"We do not care to discuss the matter, sir," Mrs. Ellersly was replying, her tone indicating that it was not fit to discuss. And this was the woman I had hardly been able to treat civilly, so nauseating were her fawnings and flatterings!

"So!" I said, ignoring her and opening my batteries full upon the old man. "You are taking orders from Mowbray Langdon now. Why?"

As I spoke, I was conscious that there had been some change in Anita. I looked at her. With startled eyes and lips apart, she was advancing toward me.

"Anita, leave the room!" cried Mrs. Ellersly harshly, panic under the command in her tones.

I felt rather than saw my advantage, and pressed it.

"You see what they are doing, Miss Ellersly," said I.

She passed her hands over her eyes, let her face appear again. In it there was an energy of repulsion that ought to have seemed exaggerated to me then, knowing really nothing of the true situation. "I understand now!" said she. "Oh—it is—loathsome!" And her eyes blazed upon her mother.

"Loathsome," I echoed, dashing at my opportunity. "If you are not merely a chattel and a decoy, if there is any womanhood, any self-respect in you, you will keep faith with me."

"Anita!" cried Mrs. Ellersly. "Go to your room!"

I had, once or twice before, heard a tone as repulsive—a female dive-keeper hectoring her wretched white slaves. I looked at Anita. I expected to see her erect, defiant. Instead, she was again wearing that cowed look.

"Don't judge me too harshly," she said pleadingly to me. "I know what is right and decent—God planted that too deep in me for them to be able to uproot it. But—oh, they have broken my will! They have broken my will! They have made me a coward, a thing!" And she hid her face in her hands and sobbed.

Mrs. Ellersly was about to speak. I could not offer better proof of my own strength of will than the fact that I, with a look and a gesture, put her down. Then I said to the girl:

"You must choose now! Woman or thing—which shall it be? If it is woman, then you have me behind you and in front of you and around you. If it is thing—God have mercy on you! Your self-respect, your pride are gone—for ever. You will be like the carpet under his feet to the man whose creature you become."

She came and stood by me, with her back to them.

"If you will take me with you now," she said, "I will go. If I delay, I am lost. I shall not have the courage. And I am sick, sick to death of this life here, of this hideous wait for the highest bidder."

Her voice gained strength and her manner courage as she spoke; at the end she was meeting her mother's gaze without flinching. My eyes had followed hers, and my look was taking in both her mother and her father. I had long since measured them, yet I could scarcely credit the confirmation of my judgment. Had life been smooth and comfortable for that old couple, as it was for most of their acquaintances and friends, they would have lived and died regarding themselves, and regarded, as well-bred, kindly people, of the finest instincts and tastes. But calamity was putting to the test the system on which they had molded their apparently elegant, graceful lives. The storm had ripped off the attractive covering; the framework, the reality of that system, was revealed, naked and frightful.

"Anita, go to your room!" almost screamed the old woman, her fury tearing away the last shreds of her cloak of manners.

"Your daughter is of age, madam," said I. "She will go where she pleases. And I warn you that you are deceived by the Langdons. I am not powerless, and"—here I let her have a full look into my red-hot furnaces of wrath—"I stop at nothing in pursuing those who oppose me—at nothing!"

Anita, staring at her mother's awful face, was shrinking and trembling as if before the wicked, pale-yellow eyes and quivering, outstretched tentacles of a devil-fish. Clinging to my arm, she let me guide her to the door. Her mother recovered speech. "Anita!" she cried. "What are you doing? Are you mad?"

"I think I must be out of my mind," said Anita. "But, if you try to keep me here, I shall tell him all—all."

Her voice suggested that she was about to go into hysterics. I gently urged her forward. There was some sort of woman's wrap in the hall. I put it round her. Before she—or I—realized it, she was in my waiting electric.

"Up town," I said to my man.

She tried to get out.

"Oh, what have I done! What am I doing!" she cried, her courage oozing away. "Let me out—please!"

"You are going with me," said I, entering and closing the door. I saw the door of the Ellersly mansion opening, saw old Ellersly, bareheaded and distracted, scuttling down the steps.

"Go ahead—fast!" I called to my man.

And the electric was rushing up the avenue, with the bell ringing for crossings incessantly. She huddled away from me into the corner of the seat, sobbing hysterically. I knew that to touch her would be fatal—or to speak. So I waited.



XXII. MOST UNGENTLEMANLY

As we neared the upper end of the park, I told my chauffeur, through the tube, to enter and go slowly. Whenever a lamp flashed in at us, I had a glimpse of her progress toward composure—now she was drying her eyes with the bit of lace she called a handkerchief; now her bare arms were up, and with graceful fingers she was arranging her hair; now she was straight and still, the soft, fluffy material with which her wrap was edged drawn close about her throat. I shifted to the opposite seat, for my nerves warned me that I could not long control myself, if I stayed on where her garments were touching me.

I looked away from her for the pleasure of looking at her again, of realizing that my overwrought senses were not cheating me. Yes, there she was, in all the luster of that magnetic beauty I can not think of even now without an upblazing of the fire which is to the heart what the sun is to a blind man dreaming of sight. There she was on my side of the chasm that had separated us—alone with me—mine—mine! And my heart dilated with pride. But a moment later came a sense of humility. Her beauty intoxicated me, but her youth, her fineness, so fragile for such rough hands as mine, awed and humbled me.

"I must be very gentle," said I to myself. "I have promised that she shall never regret. God help me to keep my promise! She is mine, but only to preserve and protect."

And that idea of responsibility in possession was new to me—was to have far-reaching consequences. Now that I think of it, I believe it changed the whole course of my life.

She was leaning forward, her elbow on the casement of the open window of the brougham, her cheek against her hand; the moonlight was glistening on her round, firm forearm and on her serious face. "How far, far away from—everything it seems here!" she said, her voice tuned to that soft, clear light, "and how beautiful it is!" Then, addressing the moon and the shadows of the trees rather than me: "I wish I could go on and on—and never return to—to the world."

"I wish we could," said I.

My tone was low, but she started, drew back into the brougham, became an outline in the deep shadow. In another mood that might have angered me. Just then it hurt me so deeply that to remember it to-day is to feel a faint ache in the scar of the long-healed wound. My face was not hidden as was hers; so, perhaps, she saw. At any rate, her voice tried to be friendly as she said: "Well—I have crossed the Rubicon. And I don't regret. It was silly of me to cry. I thought I had been through so much that I was beyond such weakness. But you will find me calm from now on, and reasonable."

"Not too reasonable, please," said I, with an attempt at her lightness. "A reasonable woman is as trying as an unreasonable man."

"But we are going to be sensible with each other," she urged, "like two friends. Aren't we?"

"We are going to be what we are going to be," said I. "We'll have to take life as it comes."

That clumsy reminder set her to thinking, stirred her vague uneasiness in those strange circumstances to active alarm. For presently she said, in a tone that was not so matter-of-course as she had tried to make it: "We'll go now to my Uncle Frank's. He's a brother of my father's. I always used to like him best—and still do. But he married a woman mama thought—queer. They hadn't much, so he lives away up on the West Side—One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street."

"The wise plan, the only wise plan," said I, not so calm as she must have thought me, "is to go to my partner's house and send for a minister."

"Not to-night," she replied nervously. "Take me to Uncle Frank's, and to-morrow we can discuss what to do and how to do it."

"To-night," I persisted. "We must be married to-night. No more uncertainty and indecision and weakness. Let us begin bravely, Anita!"

"To-morrow," she said. "But not to-night. I must think it over."

"To-night," I repeated. "To-morrow will be full of its own problems. This is to-night's."

She shook her head, and I saw that the struggle between us had begun—the struggle against her timidity and conventionality. "No, not tonight." This in her tone for finality.

To argue with any woman in such circumstances would be dangerous; to argue with her would have been fatal. To reason with a woman is to flatter her into suspecting you of weakness and herself of strength. I told the chauffeur to turn about and go slowly up town. She settled back into her corner of the brougham. Neither of us spoke until we were passing Grant's Tomb. Then she started out of her secure confidence in my obedience, and exclaimed: "This is not the way!" And her voice had in it the hasty call-to-arms.

"No," I replied, determined to push the panic into a rout. "As I told you, our future shall be settled to-night." That in my tone for finality.

A pause, then: "It has been settled," she said, like a child that feels, yet denies, its impotence as it struggles in the compelling arms of its father. "I thought until a few minutes ago that I really intended to marry you. Now I see that I didn't."

"Another reason why we're not going to your uncle's," said I.

She leaned forward so that I could see her face. "I can not marry you," she said. "I feel humble toward you, for having misled you. But it is better that you—and I—should have found out now than too late."

"It is too late—too late to go back."

"Would you wish to marry a woman who does not love you, who loves some one else, and who tells you so and refuses to marry you?" She had tried to concentrate enough scorn into her voice to hide her fear.

"I would," said I. "And I shall. I'll not desert you, Anita, when your courage and strength shall fail. I will carry you on to safety."

"I tell you I can not marry you," she cried, between appeal and command. "There are reasons—I may not tell you. But if I might, you would—would take me to my uncle's. I can not marry you!"

"That is what conventionality bids you say now," I replied. And then I gathered myself together and in a tone that made me hate myself as I heard it, I added slowly, each word sharp and distinct: "But what will conventionality bid you say to-morrow morning, as we drive down crowded Fifth Avenue, after a night in this brougham?"

I could not see her, for she fell back into the darkness as sharply as if I had struck her with all my force full in the face. But I could feel the effect of my words upon her. I paused, not because I expected or wished an answer, but because I had to steady myself—myself, not my purpose; my purpose was inflexible. I would put through what we had begun, just as I would have held her and cut off her arm with my pocket-knife if we had been cast away alone, and I had had to do it to save her life. She was not competent to decide for herself. Every problem that had ever faced her had been decided by others for her. Who but me could decide for her now? I longed to plead with her, longed to let her see that I was not hard-hearted, was thinking of her, was acting for her sake as much as for my own. But I dared not. "She would misunderstand," said I to myself. "She would think you were weakening."

Full fifteen minutes of that frightful silence before she said: "I will go where you wish." And she said it in a tone that makes me wince as I recall it.

I called my partner's address up through the tube. Again that frightful silence, then she was trying to choke back the sobs. A few words I caught: "They have broken my will—they have broken my will."

* * * * *

My partner lived in a big, gray-stone house that stood apart and commanded a noble view of the Hudson and the Palisades. It was, in the main, a reproduction of a French chateau, and such changes as the architect had made in his model were not positively disfiguring, though amusing. There should have been trees and shrubbery about it, but—"As Mrs. B. says," Joe had explained to me, "what's the use of sinking a lot of cash in a house people can't see?" So there was not a bush, not a flower. Inside—One day Ball took me on a tour of the art shops. "I've got a dozen corners and other big bare spots to fill," said he. "Mrs. B. hates to give up money, haggles over every article. I'm going to put the job through in business style." I soon discovered that I had been brought along to admire his "business style," not to suggest. After two hours, in which he bought in small lots several tons of statuary, paintings, vases and rugs, he said, "This is too slow." He pointed his stick at a crowded corner of the shop. "How much for that bunch of stuff?" he demanded. The proprietor gave him a figure. "I'll close," said Joe, "if you'll give fifteen off for cash." The proprietor agreed. "Now we're done," said Joe to me. "Let's go down town, and maybe I can pick up what I've dropped."

You can imagine that interior. But don't picture it as notably worse than the interior of the average New York palace. It was, if anything, better than those houses, where people who deceive themselves about their lack of taste have taken great pains to prevent any one else from being deceived. One could hardly move in Joe's big rooms for the litter of gilded and tapestried furniture, and their crowded walls made the eyes ache.

The appearance of the man who opened the door for Anita and me suggested that our ring had roused him from a bed where he had deposited himself without bothering to take off his clothes. At the sound of my voice, Ball peered out of his private smoking-room, at the far end of the hall. He started forward; then, seeing how I was accompanied, stopped with mouth ajar. He had on a ragged smoking-jacket, a pair of shapeless old Romeo slippers, his ordinary business waistcoat and trousers. He was wearing neither tie nor collar, and a short, black pipe was between his fingers. We had evidently caught the household stripped of "lugs," and sunk in the down-at-the-heel slovenliness which it called "comfort." Joe was crimson with confusion, and was using his free hand to stroke, alternately, his shiny bald head and his heavy brown mustache. He got himself together sufficiently, after a few seconds, to disappear into his den. When he came out again, pipe and ragged jacket were gone, and he rushed for us in a gorgeous velvet jacket with dark red facings, and a showy pair of slippers.

"Glad to see you, Mr. Blacklock"—in his own home he always addressed every man as Mister, just as "Mrs. B." always called him "Mister Ball," and he called her "Missus Ball" before "company." "Come right into the front parlor. Billy, turn on the electric lights."

Anita had been standing with her head down. She now looked round with shame and terror in those expressive blue-gray eyes of hers; her delicate nostrils were quivering. I hastened to introduce Ball to her. Her impulse to fly passed; her lifelong training in doing the conventional thing asserted itself. She lowered her head again, murmured an inaudible acknowledgment of Joe's greeting.

"Your wife is at home?" said I. If one was at home in the evening, the other was also, and both were always there, unless they were at some theater—except on Sunday night, when they dined at Sherry's, because many fashionable people did it. They had no friends and few acquaintances. In their humbler and happy days they had had many friends, but had lost them when they moved away from Brooklyn and went to live, like uneasy, out-of-place visitors, in their grand house, pretending to be what they longed to be, longing to be what they pretended to be, and as discontented as they deserved.

"Oh, yes, Mrs. B.'s at home," Joe answered. "I guess she and Alva were—about to go to bed." Alva was their one child. She had been christened Malvina, after Joe's mother; but when the Balls "blossomed out" they renamed her Alva, which they somehow had got the impression was "smarter."

At Joe's blundering confession that the females of the family were in no condition to receive, Anita said to me in a low voice: "Let us go."

I pretended not to hear. "Rout 'em out," said I to Joe. "Then, take my electric and bring the nearest parson. There's going to be a wedding—right here." And I looked round the long salon, with everything draped for the summer departure. Joe whisked the cover off one chair, his man took off another. "I'll have the women-folks down in two minutes," he cried. Then to the man: "Get a move on you, Billy. Stir 'em up in the kitchen. Do the best you can about supper—and put a lot of champagne on the ice. That's the main thing at a wedding."

Anita had seated herself listlessly in one of the uncovered chairs. The wrap slipped back from her shoulders and—how proud I was of her! Joe gazed, took advantage of her not looking up to slap me on the back and to jerk his head in enthusiastic approval. Then he, too, disappeared.

A wait followed, during which we could hear, through the silence, excited undertones from the upper floors. The words were indistinct until Joe's heavy voice sent down to us an angry "No damn nonsense, I tell you. Allie's got to come, too. She's not such a fool as you think. Bad example—bosh!"

Anita started up. "Oh—please—please!" she cried. "Take me away—anywhere! This is dreadful."

It was, indeed, dreadful. If I could have had my way at just that moment, it would have gone hard with "Mrs. B." and "Allie"—and heavy-voiced Joe, too. But I hid my feelings.

"There's nowhere else to go," said I, "except the brougham."

She sank into her chair.

A few minutes more of silence, and there was a rustling on the stairs. She started up, trembling, looked round, as if seeking some way of escape or some place to hide. Joe was in the doorway holding aside one of the curtains. There entered in a beribboned and beflounced tea-gown, a pretty, if rather ordinary, woman of forty, with a petulant baby face. She was trying to look reserved and severe. She hardly glanced at me before fastening sharp, suspicious eyes on Anita.

"Mrs. Ball," said I, "this is Miss Ellersly."

"Miss Ellersly!" she exclaimed, her face changing. And she advanced and took both Anita's hands. "Mr. Ball is so stupid," she went on, with that amusingly affected accent which is the "Sunday clothes" of speech.

"I didn't catch the name, my dear," Joe stammered.

"Be off," said I, aside, to him. "Get the nearest preacher, and hustle him here with his tools."

I had one eye on Anita all the time, and I saw her gaze follow Joe as he hurried out; and her expression made my heart ache. I heard him saying in the hall, "Go in, Allie. It's O K"; heard the door slam, knew we should soon have some sort of minister with us.

"Allie" entered the drawing-room. I had not seen her in six years. I remembered her unpleasantly as a great, bony, florid child, unable to stand still or to sit still, or to keep her tongue still, full of aimless questions and giggles and silly remarks that she and her mother thought funny. I saw her now, grown into a handsome young woman, with enough beauty points for an honorable mention, if not for a prize—straight and strong and rounded, with a brow and a keen look out of the eyes which it seemed a pity should be wasted on a woman. Her mother's looks, her father's good sense, a personality apparently got from neither, but all her own, and unusual and interesting. No wonder the Balls felt toward her much as a pair of barn-swallows would feel if they were to hatch out an eaglet. These quiet, tame American parents that are always finding their suppressed selves, the bold, fantastic, unadmitted dreams of their youth startlingly confronting them in the flesh as their own children!

"From what Mr. Ball said,"—Mrs. Ball was gushing affectedly to Anita,—"I got an idea that—well, really, I didn't know what to think."

Anita looked as if she were about to suffocate. Allie came to the rescue. "Not very complimentary to Mr. Blacklock, mother," said she good-humoredly. Then to Anita, with a simple friendliness there was no resisting: "Wouldn't you like to come up to my room for a few minutes?"

"Oh, thank you!" responded Anita, after a quick, but thorough inspection of Alva's face, to make sure she was like her voice. I had not counted on this; I had been assuming that Anita would not be out of my sight until we were married. It was on the tip of my tongue to interfere when she looked at me—for permission to go!

"Don't keep her too long," said I to Alva, and they were gone.

"You can't blame me—really you can't, Mr. Blacklock," Mrs. Ball began to plead for herself, as soon as they were safely out of hearing. "After some things—mere hints, you understand—for I'm careful what I permit Mr. Ball to say before me. I think married people can not be too respectful of each other. I never tolerate vulgarity."

"No doubt, Joe has made me out a very vulgar person," said I, forgetting her lack of humor.

"Oh, not at all, not at all, Mr. Blacklock," she protested, in a panic lest she had done her husband damage with me. "I understand, men will be men, though as a pure-minded woman, I'm sure I can't imagine why they should be."

"How far off is the nearest church?" I cut in.

"Only two blocks—that is, the Methodist church," she replied. "But I know Mr. Ball will bring an Episcopalian."

"Why, I thought you were a devoted Presbyterian," said I, recalling how in their Brooklyn days she used to insist on Joe's going twice every Sunday to sleep through long sermons.

She looked uncomfortable. "I was reared Presbyterian," she explained confusedly, "but you know how it is in New York. And when we came to live here, we got out of the habit of church-going. And all Alva's little friends were Episcopalians. So I drifted toward that church. I find the service so satisfying—so—elegant. And—one sees there the people one sees socially."

"How is your culture class?" I inquired, deliberately malicious, in my impatience and nervousness. "And do you still take conversation lessons?"

She was furiously annoyed. "Oh, those old jokes of Joe's," she said, affecting disdainful amusement.

In fact, they were anything but jokes. On Mondays and Thursdays she used to attend a class for women who, like herself, wished to be "up-to-date on culture and all that sort of thing." They hired a teacher to cram them with odds and ends about art and politics and the "latest literature, heavy and light." On Tuesdays and Fridays she had an "indigent gentlewoman," whatever that may be, come to her to teach her how to converse and otherwise conduct herself according to the "standards of polite society."

Joe used to give imitations of those conversation lessons that raised roars of laughter round the poker table, the louder because so many of the other men had wives with the same ambitions and the same methods of attaining them.

Mrs. Ball came back to the subject of Anita.

"I am glad you are going to settle with such a charming girl. She comes of such a charming family. I have never happened to meet any of them. We are in the West Side set, you know, while they move in the East Side set, and New York is so large that one almost never meets any one outside one's own set." This smooth snobbishness, said in the affected "society" tone, was as out of place in her as rouge and hair-dye in a wholesome, honest old grandmother.

I began to pace the floor. "Can it be," I fretted aloud, "that Joe's racing round looking for an Episcopalian preacher, when there was a Methodist at hand?"

"I'm sure he wouldn't bring anything but a Church of England priest," Mrs. Ball assured me loftily. "Why, Miss Ellersly wouldn't think she was married, if she hadn't a priest of her own church."

My temper got the bit in its teeth. I stopped before her, and fixed her with an eye that must have had some fire in it. "I'm not marrying a fool, Mrs. Ball," said I. "You mustn't judge her by her bringing-up—by her family. Children have a way of bringing themselves up, in spite of damn fool parents."

She weakened so promptly that I was ashamed of myself. My only apology for getting out of patience with her is that I had seen her seldom in the last few years, had forgotten how matter-of-surface her affectation and snobbery were, and how little they interfered with her being a good mother and a good wife, up to the limits of her brain capacity.

"I'm sure, Mr. Blacklock," she said plaintively, "I only wished to say what was pleasant and nice about your fiancee. I know she's a lovely girl. I've often admired her at the opera. She goes a great deal in Mrs. Langdon's box, and Mrs. Langdon and I are together on the board of managers of the Magdalene Home, and also on the board of the Hospital for Unfortunate Gentlefolk." And so on, and on.

I walked up and down among those wrapped-up, ghostly chairs and tables and cabinets and statues many times before Joe arrived with the minister—and he was a Methodist, McCabe by name. You should have seen Mrs. Ball's look as he advanced his portly form and round face with its shaven upper lip into the drawing-room. She tried to be cordial, but she couldn't—her mind was on Anita, and the horror that would fill her when she discovered that she was to be married by a preacher of a sect unknown to fashionable circles.

"All I ask of you," said I to him, "is that you cut it as short as possible. Miss Ellersly is tired and nervous." This while we were shaking hands after Joe's introduction.

"You can count on me, sir," said McCabe, giving my hand an extra shake before dropping it. "I've no doubt, from what my young neighbor here tells me, that your marriage is already made in your hearts and with all solemnity. The form is an incident—important, but only an incident."

I liked that, and I liked his unaffected way of saying it. His voice had more of the homely, homelike, rural twang in it than I had heard in New York in many a day. I mentally doubled the fee I had intended to give him. And now Alva and she were coming down the stairway. I was amazed at sight of her. Her evening dress had given place to a pretty blue street suit with a short skirt—white showing at her wrists, at her neck and through slashings in the coat over her bosom; and on her head was a hat to match. I looked at her feet—the slippers had been replaced by boots. "And they're just right for her," said Alva, who was following my glance, "though I'm not so tall as she."

But what amazed me most, and delighted me, was that she seemed to be almost in good spirits. It was evident she had formed with Joe's daughter one of those sudden friendships so great and so vivid that they rarely lived long after the passing of the heat of the emergency that bred them. Mrs. Ball saw it, also, and was straightway giddied into a sort of ecstasy. You can imagine the visions it conjured. I've no doubt she talked house on the east side of the park to Joe that very night, before she let him sleep. However, Anita's face was serious enough when we took our places before the minister, with his little, black-bound book open. And as he read in a voice that was genuinely impressive those words that no voice could make unimpressive, I saw her paleness blanch into pallor, saw the dusk creep round her eyes until they were like stars waning somberly before the gray face of dawn. When they closed and her head began to sway, I steadied her with my arm. And so we stood, I with my arm round her, she leaning lightly against my shoulder. Her answers were mere movements of the lips.

At the end, when I kissed her cheek, she said: "Is it over?"

"Yes," McCabe answered—she was looking at him. "And I wish you all happiness, Mrs. Blacklock."

At that name, her new name, she stared at him with great wondering eyes; then her form relaxed. I carried her to a chair. Joe came with a glass of champagne; she drank some of it, and it brought life back to her face, and some color. With a naturalness that deceived even me for the moment, she smiled up at Joe as she handed him the glass. "Is it bad luck," she asked, "for me to be the first to drink my own health?" And she stood, looking tranquilly at every one—except me.

I took McCabe into the hall and paid him off.

When we came back, I said: "Now we must be going."

"Oh, but surely you'll stay for supper!" cried Joe's wife.

"No," replied I, in a tone that made it impossible to insist. "We appreciate your kindness, but we've imposed on it enough." And I shook hands with her and with Allie and the minister, and, linking Joe's arm in mine, made for the door. I gave the necessary directions to my chauffeur while we were waiting for Anita to come down the steps. Joe's daughter was close beside her, and they kissed each other good-by, Alva on the verge of tears, Anita not suggesting any emotion of any sort. "To-morrow—sure," Anita said to her. And she answered: "Yes, indeed—as soon as you telephone me." And so we were off, a shower of rice rattling on the roof of the brougham—the slatternly man-servant had thrown it from the midst of the group of servants.

Neither of us spoke. I watched her face without seeming to do so, and by the light of occasional street lamps saw her studying me furtively. At last she said: "I wish to go to my uncle's now."

"We are going home," said I.

"But the house will be shut up," said she, "and every one will be in bed. It's nearly midnight. Besides, they might not—" She came to a full stop.

"We are going—home," I repeated. "To the Willoughby."

She gave me a look that was meant to scorch—and it did. But I showed at the surface no sign of how I was wincing and shrinking.

She drew farther into her corner, and out of its darkness came, in a low voice: "How I hate you!" like the whisper of a bullet.

I kept silent until I had control of myself. Then, as if talking—of a matter that had been finally and amicably settled, I began: "The apartment isn't exactly ready for us, but Joe's just about now telephoning my man that we are coming, and telephoning your people to send your maid down there."

"I wish to go to my uncle's," she repeated.

"My wife will go with me," said I quietly and gently. "I am considerate of her, not of her unwise impulses."

A long pause, then from her, in icy calmness: "I am in your power just now. But I warn you that, if you do not take me to my uncle's, you will wish you had never seen me."

"I've wished that many times already," said I sadly. "I've wished it from the bottom of my heart this whole evening, when step by step fate has been forcing me on to do things that are even more hateful to me than to you. For they not only make me hate myself, but make you hate me, too." I laid my hand on her arm and held it there, though she tried to draw away. "Anita," I said, "I would do anything for you—live for you, die for you. But there's that something inside me—you've felt it; and when it says 'must,' I can't disobey—you know I can't. And, though you might break my heart, you could not break that will. It's as much my master as it is yours."

"We shall see—to-morrow," she said.

"Do not put me to the test," I pleaded. Then I added what I knew to be true: "But you will not. You know it would take some one stronger than your uncle, stronger than your parents, to swerve me from what I believe right for you and for me." I had no fear for "to-morrow." The hour when she could defy me had passed.

A long, long silence, the electric speeding southward under the arching trees of the West Drive. I remember it was as we skirted the lower end of the Mall that she said evenly: "You have made me hate you so that it terrifies me. I am afraid of the consequences that must come to you and to me."

"And well you may be," I answered gently. "For you've seen enough of me to get at least a hint of what I would do, if goaded to it. Hate is terrible, Anita, but love can be more terrible."

At the Willoughby she let me help her descend from the electric, waited until I sent it away, walked beside me into the building. My man, Sanders, had evidently been listening for the elevator; the door opened without my ringing, and there he was, bowing low. She acknowledged his welcome with that regard for "appearances" that training had made instinctive. In the center of my—our—drawing-room table was a mass of fresh white roses. "Where did you get 'em?" I asked him, in an aside.

"The elevator boy's brother, sir," he replied, "works in the florist's shop just across the street, next to the church. He happened to be down stairs when I got your message, sir. So I was able to get a few flowers. I'm sorry, sir, I hadn't a little more time."

"You've done noble," said I, and I shook hands with him warmly.

Anita was greeting those flowers as if they were a friend suddenly appearing in a time of need. She turned now and beamed on Sanders. "Thank you," she said; "thank you." And Sanders was hers.

"Anything I can do—ma'am—sir?" asked Sanders.

"Nothing—except send my maid as soon as she comes," she replied.

"I shan't need you," said I.

"Mr. Monson is still here," he said, lingering. "Shall I send him away, sir, or do you wish to see him?"

"I'll speak to him myself in a moment," I answered.

When Sanders was gone, she seated herself and absently played with the buttons of her glove.

"Shall I bring Monson?" I asked. "You know, he's my—factotum."

"I do not wish to see him," she answered.

"You do not like him?"

After a brief hesitation she answered, "No." Not for worlds would she just then have admitted, even to herself, that the cause of her dislike was her knowledge of his habit of tattling, with suitable embroideries, his lessons to me.

I restrained a strong impulse to ask her why, for instinct told me she had some especial reason that somehow concerned me. I said merely: "Then I shall get rid of him."

"Not on my account," she replied indifferently. "I care nothing about him one way or the other."

"He goes at the end of his month," said I.

She was now taking off her gloves. "Before your maid comes," I went on, "let me explain about the apartment. This room and the two leading out of it are yours. My own suite is on the other side of our private hall there."

She colored high, paled. I saw that she did not intend to speak.

I stood awkwardly, waiting for something further to come into my own head. "Good night," said I finally, as if I were taking leave of a formal acquaintance at the end of a formal call.

She did not answer. I left the room, closing the door behind me. I paused an instant, heard the key click in the lock. And I burned in a hot flush of shame that she should be thinking thus basely of me—and with good cause. How could she know, how appreciate even if she had known? "You've had to cut deep," said I to myself. "But the wounds'll heal, though it may take long—very long." And I went on my way, not wholly downcast.

I joined Monson in my little smoking-room. "Congratulate you," he began, with his nasty, supercilious grin, which of late had been getting on my nerves severely.

"Thanks," I replied curtly, paying no attention to his outstretched hand. "I want you to put a notice of the marriage in to-morrow morning's Herald."

"Give me the facts—clergyman's name—place, and so on," said he.

"Unnecessary," I answered. "Just our names and the date—that's all. You'd better step lively. It's late, and it'll be too late if you delay."

With an irritating show of deliberation he lit a fresh cigarette before setting out. I heard her maid come. After about an hour I went into the hall—no light through the transoms of her suite. I returned to my own part of the flat and went to bed in the spare room to which Sanders had moved my personal belongings. That day which began in disaster—in what a blaze of triumph it had ended! Anita—my wife, and under my roof! I slept with good conscience. I had earned sleep.



XXIII. "SHE HAS CHOSEN!"

Joe got to the office rather later than usual the next morning. They told him I was already there, but he wouldn't believe it until he had come into my private den and with his own eyes had seen me. "Well, I'm jiggered!" said he. "It seems to have made less impression on you than it did on us. My missus and the little un wouldn't let me go to bed till after two. They sat on and on, questioning and discussing."

I laughed—partly because I knew that Joe, like most men, was as full of gossip and as eager for it as a convalescent old maid, and that, whoever might have been the first at his house to make the break for bed, he was the last to leave off talking. But the chief reason for my laugh was that, just before he came in on me, I was almost pinching myself to see whether I was dreaming it all, and he had made me feel how vividly true it was.

"Why don't you ease down, Blacklock?" he went on. "Everything's smooth. The business—at least, my end of it, and I suppose your end, too—was never better, never growing so fast. You could go off for a week or two, just as well as not. I don't know of a thing that can prevent you."

And he honestly thought it, so little did I let him know about the larger enterprises of Blacklock and Company. I could have spoken a dozen words, and he would have been floundering like a caught fish in a basket. There are men—a very few—who work more swiftly and more surely when they know they're on the brink of ruin; but not Joe. One glimpse of our real National Coal account, and all my power over him couldn't have kept him from showing the whole Street that Blacklock and Company was shaky. And whenever the Street begins to think a man is shaky, he must be strong indeed to escape the fate of the wolf that stumbles as it runs with the pack.

"No holiday at present, Joe," was my reply to his suggestion. "Perhaps the second week in July; but our marriage was so sudden that we haven't had the time to get ready for a trip."

"Yes—it was sudden, wasn't it?" said Joe, curiosity twitching his nose like a dog's at scent of a rabbit. "How did it happen?"

"Oh, I'll tell you sometime," replied I. "I must work now."

And work a-plenty there was. Before me rose a sheaf of clamorous telegrams from our out-of-town customers and our agents; and soon my anteroom was crowded with my local following, sore and shorn. I suppose a score or more of the habitual heavy plungers on my tips were ruined and hundreds of others were thousands and tens of thousands out of pocket. "Do you want me to talk to these people?" inquired Joe, with the kindly intention of giving me a chance to shift the unpleasant duty to him.

"Certainly not," said I. "When the place is jammed, let me know. I'll jack 'em up."

It made Joe uneasy for me even to talk of using my "language"—he would have crawled from the Battery to Harlem to keep me from using it on him. So he silently left me alone. My system of dealing face to face with the speculating and investing public had many great advantages over that of all the other big operators—their system of hiding behind cleverly-contrived screens and slaughtering the decoyed public without showing so much as the tip of a gun or nose that could be identified. But to my method there was a disadvantage that made men, who happened to have more hypocrisy and less nerve than I, shrink from it. When one of my tips miscarried, down upon me would swoop the bad losers in a body to give me a turbulent quarter of an hour.

Toward ten o'clock, my boy came in and said: "Mr. Ball thinks it's about time for you to see some of these people."

I went into the main room, where the tickers and blackboards were. As I approached through my outer office I could hear the noise the crowd was making—as they cursed me. If you want to rile the true inmost soul of the average human being, don't take his reputation or his wife; just cause him to lose money. There were among my speculating customers many with the even-tenored sporting instinct. These were bearing their losses with philosophy—none of them had swooped on me. Of the perhaps three hundred who had come to ease their anguish by tongue-lashing me, every one was a bad loser and was mad through and through—those who had lost a few hundred dollars were as infuriated as those whom my misleading tip had cost thousands and tens of thousands; those whom I had helped to win all they had in the world were more savage than those new to my following.

I took my stand in the doorway, a step up from the floor of the main room. I looked all round until I had met each pair of angry eyes. They say I can give my face an expression that is anything but agreeable; such talent as I have in that direction I exerted then. The instant I appeared a silence fell; but I waited until the last pair of claws drew in. Then I said, in the quiet tone the army officer uses when he tells the mob that the machine guns will open up in two minutes by the watch: "Gentlemen, in the effort to counteract my warning to the public, the Textile crowd rocketed the stock yesterday. Those who heeded my warning and sold got excellent prices. Those who did not should sell to-day. Not even the powerful interests behind Textile can long maintain yesterday's prices."

A wave of restlessness passed over the crowd. Many shifted their eyes from me and began to murmur.

I raised my voice slightly as I went on: "The speculators, the gamblers, are the only people who were hurt. Those who sold what they didn't have are paying for their folly. I have no sympathy for them. Blacklock and Company wishes none such in its following, and seizes every opportunity to weed them out. We are in business only for the bona fide investing public, and we are stronger with that public to-day than we have ever been."

Again I looked from coward to coward of that mob, changed from three hundred strong to three hundred weak. Then I bowed and withdrew, leaving them to mutter and disperse. I felt well content with the trend of events—I who wished to impress the public and the financiers that I had broken with speculation and speculators, could I have had a better than this unexpected opportunity sharply to define my new course? And as Textiles, unsupported, fell toward the close of the day, my content rose toward my normal high spirits. There was no whisper in the Street that I was in trouble; on the contrary, the idea was gaining ground that I had really long ceased to be a stock gambler and deserved a much better reputation than I had. Reputation is a matter of diplomacy rather than of desert. In all my career I was never less entitled to a good reputation than in those June days; yet the disastrous gambling follies, yes, and worse, I then committed, formed the secure foundation of my reputation for conservatism and square dealing. From that time dates the decline of the habit the newspapers had of speaking of me as "Black Matt" or "Matt" Blacklock. In them, and therefore in the public mind, I began to figure as "Mr. Blacklock, a recognized authority on finance," and such information as I gave out ceased to be described as "tips" and was respectfully referred to as "indications."

No doubt, my marriage had something to do with this. Probably one couldn't borrow any great amount of money in New York directly and solely on the strength of a fashionable marriage; but, so all-pervading is the snobbishness there, one can get, by making a fashionable marriage, any quantity of that deferential respect from rich people which is, in some circumstances, easily convertible into cash and credit.

I searched with a good deal of anxiety, as you may imagine, the early editions of the afternoon papers. The first article my eye chanced upon was a mere wordy elaboration of the brief and vague announcement Monson had put in the Herald. Later came an interview with old Ellersly.

"Not at all mysterious," he had said to the reporters. "Mr. Blacklock found he would have to go abroad on business soon—he didn't know just when. On the spur of the moment they decided to marry." A good enough story, and I confirmed it when I admitted the reporters. I read their estimates of my fortune and of Anita's with rather bitter amusement—she whose father was living from hand to mouth; I who could not have emerged from a forced settlement with enough to enable me to keep a trap. Still, when one is rich, the reputation of being rich is heavily expensive; but when one is poor the reputation of being rich can be made a wealth-giving asset.

Even as I was reading these fables of my millions, there lay on the desk before me a statement of the exact posture of my affairs—a memorandum made by myself for my own eyes, and to be burned as soon as I mastered it. On the face of the figures the balance against me was appalling. My chief asset, indeed my only asset that measured up toward my debts, was my Coal stocks, those bought and those contracted for; and, while their par value far exceeded my liabilities, they had to appear in my memorandum at their actual market value on that day. I looked at the calendar—seventeen days until the reorganization scheme would be announced, only seventeen days!

Less than three business weeks, and I should be out of the storm and sailing safer and smoother seas than I had ever known. "To indulge in vague hopes is bad," thought I, "but not to indulge in a hope, especially when one has only it between him and the pit." And I proceeded to plan on the not unwarranted assumption that my Coal hope was a present reality. Indeed, what alternative had I? To put it among the future's uncertainties was to put myself among the utterly ruined. Using as collateral the Coal stocks I had bought outright, I borrowed more money, and with it went still deeper into the Coal venture. Everything or nothing!—since the chances in my favor were a thousand, to practically none against me. Everything or nothing!—since only by staking everything could I possibly save anything at all.

The morality of these and many of my other doings in those days will no doubt be condemned. By no one more severely than by myself—now that the necessities which then compelled me have passed. There is no subject on which men talk and think, more humbug than on that subject of morality. As a matter of fact, except in those personal relations that are governed by the affections, what is morality but the mandate of policy, and what is policy but the mandate of necessity? My criticism of Roebuck and the other "high financiers" is not upon their morality, but upon their policy, which is short-sighted and stupid and base. The moral difference between me and them is that, white I merely assert and maintain my right to live, they deny the right of any but themselves to live. I say I criticize them; but that does not mean that I sympathize with the public at large in its complainings against them. The public, its stupidity and cupidity, creates the conditions that breed and foster these men. A rotten cheese reviling the maggots it has bred!

In those very hours when I was obeying the imperative law of self-preservation, was clutching at every log that floated by me regardless of whether it was my property or not so long as it would help me keep my head above water—what was going on all round me? In every office of the down town district—merchant, banker, broker, lawyer, man of commerce or finance—was not every busy brain plotting, not self-preservation but pillage and sack—plotting to increase the cost of living for the masses of men by slipping a little tax here and a little tax there on to everything by which men live? All along the line between the farm or mine or shop and the market, at every one of the toll-gates for the collection of just charges, these big financiers, backed up by the big lawyers and the rascally public officials, had an agent in charge to collect on each passing article more than was honestly due. A thousand subtle ways of levying, all combining to pour in upon the few the torrents of unjust wealth. I laugh when I read of laboring men striking for higher wages. Poor, ignorant fools—they almost deserve their fate. They had better be concerning themselves with a huge, universal strike at the polls for lower prices. What will it avail to get higher wages, as long as the masters control and recoup on the prices of all the things for which those wages must be spent?

I lived in Wall Street, in its atmosphere of the practical morality of "finance." On every side swindling operations, great and small; operations regarded as right through long-established custom; dishonest or doubtful operations on the way to becoming established by custom as "respectable." No man's title to anything conceded unless he had the brains to defend it. There was a time when it would have been regarded as wildly preposterous and viciously immoral to deny property rights in human beings. There may come a time—who knows?—when "high finance's" denial of a moral right to property of any kind may cease to be regarded as wicked; may become a generally accepted canon, as our Socialist friends predict. However, I attempt no excuses for myself; I need them no more than a judge in the Dark Ages needed to apologize for ordering a witch to the stake. I could no more have done differently than a fish could breathe on land or a man under water. I did as all the others did—and I had the justification of necessity. Right of might being the prevailing code, when men set upon me with pistols, I met them with pistols, not with the discarded and antiquated weapons of sermon and prayer and the law.

And I thought extremely well of myself and of my pistols that June afternoon, as I was hurrying up town the moment the day's settlement on 'Change was finished. I had sent out my daily letter to investors, and its tone of confidence was genuine—I knew that hundreds of customers of a better class would soon be flocking in to take the places of those I had been compelled to teach a lesson in the vicissitudes of gambling. With a light heart and the physical feeling of a football player in training, I sped toward home.

Home! For the first time since I was a squat little slip of a shaver the word had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps, if the only other home of mine had been less uninviting, I should not have looked forward with such high beating of the heart to that cold home Anita was making for me. No, I withdraw that. It is fellows like me, to whom kindly looks and unsought attentions are as unfamiliar as flowers to the Arctic—it is men like me that appreciate and treasure and warm up under the faintest show or shadowy suggestion of the sunshine of sentiment. I'd be a little ashamed to say how much money I handed out to beggars and street gamins that day. I had a home to go to!

As my electric drew up at the Willoughby, a carriage backed to make room for it. I recognized the horses and the coachman and the crest.

"How long has Mrs. Ellersly been with my wife?" I asked the elevator boy, as he was taking me up.

"About half an hour, sir," he answered. "But Mr. Ellersly—I took up his card before lunch, and he's still there."

Instead of using my key, I rang the bell, and when Sanders opened, I said: "Is Mrs. Blacklock in?" in a voice loud enough to penetrate to the drawing-room.

As I had hoped, Anita appeared. Her dress told me that her trunks had come—she had sent for her trunks! "Mother and father are here," said she, without looking at me.

I followed her into the drawing-room and, for the benefit of the servants, Mr. and Mrs. Ellersly and I greeted each other courteously, though Mrs. Ellersly's eyes and mine met in a glance like the flash of steel on steel. "We were just going," said she, and then I felt that I had arrived in the midst of a tempest of uncommon fury.

"You must stop and make me a visit," protested I, with elaborate politeness. To myself I was assuming that they had come to "make up and be friends"—and resume their places at the trough.

She was moving toward the door, the old man in her wake. Neither of them offered to shake hands with me; neither made pretense of saying good-by to Anita, standing by the window like a pillar of ice. I had closed the drawing-room door behind me, as I entered. I was about to open it for them when I was restrained by what I saw working in the old woman's face. She had set her will on escaping from my loathed presence without a "scene;" but her rage at having been outgeneraled was too fractious for her will.

"You scoundrel!" she hissed, her whole body shaking and her carefully-cultivated appearance of the gracious evening of youth swallowed up in a black cyclone of hate. "You gutter-plant! God will punish you for the shame you have brought upon us!"

I opened the door and bowed, without a word, without even the desire to return insult for insult—had not Anita evidently again and finally rejected them and chosen me? As they passed into the private hall I rang for Sanders to come and let them out. When I turned back into the drawing-room, Anita was seated, was reading a book. I waited until I saw she was not going to speak. Then I said: "What time will you have dinner?" But my face must have been expressing some of the joy and gratitude that filled me. "She has chosen!" I was saying to myself over and over.

"Whenever you usually have it," she replied, without looking up.

"At seven o'clock, then. You had better tell Sanders."

I rang for him and went into my little smoking-room. She had resisted her parents' final appeal to her to return to them. She had cast in her lot with me. "The rest can be left to time," said I to myself. And, reviewing all that had happened, I let a wild hope send tenacious roots deep into me. How often ignorance is a blessing; how often knowledge would make the step falter and the heart quail!



XXIV. BLACKLOCK ATTENDS FAMILY PRAYERS

During dinner I bore the whole burden of conversation—though burden I did not find it. Like most close-mouthed men, I am extremely talkative. Silence sets people to wondering and prying; he hides his secrets best who hides them at the bottom of a river of words. If my spirits are high, I often talk aloud to myself when there is no one convenient. And how could my spirits be anything but high, with her sitting there opposite me, mine, mine for better or for worse, through good and evil report—my wife!

She was only formally responsive, reluctant and brief in answers, volunteering nothing. The servants waiting on us no doubt laid her manner to shyness; I understood it, or thought I did—but I was not troubled. It is as natural for me to hope as to breathe; and with my knowledge of character, how could I take seriously the moods and impulses of one whom I regarded as a childlike girl, trained to false pride and false ideals? "She has chosen to stay with me," said I to myself. "Actions count, not words or manner. A few days or weeks, and she will be herself, and mine." And I went gaily on with my efforts to interest her, to make her smile and forget the role she had commanded herself to play. Nor was I wholly unsuccessful. Again and again I thought I saw a gleam of interest in her eyes or the beginnings of a smile about that sweet mouth of hers. I was careful not to overdo my part.

As soon as we finished dessert I said: "You loathe cigar smoke, so I'll hide myself in my den. Sanders will bring you the cigarettes." I had myself telephoned for a supply of her kind early in the day.

She made a polite protest for the benefit of the servants; but I was firm, and left her free to think things over alone in the drawing-room—"your sitting-room," I called it, I had not finished a small cigar when there came a timid knock at my door. I threw away the cigar and opened. "I thought it was you," said I. "I'm familiar with the knocks of all the others. And this was new—like a summer wind tapping with a flower for admission at a closed window." And I laughed with a little raillery, and she smiled, colored, tried to seem cold and hostile again.

"Shall I go with you to your sitting-room?" I went on. "Perhaps the cigar smoke here—"

"No, no," she interrupted; "I don't really mind cigars—and the windows are wide open. Besides, I came for only a moment—just to say—"

As she cast about for words to carry her on, I drew up a chair for her. She looked at it uncertainly, seated herself. "When mama was here—this afternoon," she went on, "she was urging me to—to do what she wished. And after she had used several arguments, she said something I—I've been thinking it over, and it seemed I ought in fairness to tell you."

I waited.

"She said: 'In a few days more he'—that meant you—'he will be ruined. He imagines the worst is over for him, when in fact they've only begun.'"

"They!" I repeated. "Who are 'they'? The Langdons?"

"I think so," she replied with an effort. "She did not say—I've told you her exact words—as far as I can."

"Well," said I, "and why didn't you go?"

She pressed her lips firmly together. Finally, with a straight look into my eyes, she replied: "I shall not discuss that. You probably misunderstand, but that is your own affair."

"You believed what she said about me, of course," said I.

"I neither believed nor disbelieved," she answered indifferently, as she rose to go. "It does not interest me."

"Come here," said I.

I waited until she reluctantly joined me at the window. I pointed to the steeple of the church across the way. "You could as easily throw down that steeple by pushing against it with your bare hands," I said to her, "as 'they,' whoever they are, could put me down. They might take away my money. But if they did, they would only be giving me a lesson that would teach me how more easily to get it back. I am not a bundle of stock certificates or a bag of money. I am—here," and I tapped my forehead.

She forced a faint, scornful smile. She did not wish me to see her belief of what I said.

"You may think that is vanity," I went on. "But you will learn, sooner or later, the difference between boasting and simple statement of fact. You will learn that I do not boast. What I said is no more a boast than for a man with legs to say, 'I can walk.' Because you have known only legless men, you exaggerate the difficulty of walking. It's as easy for me to make money as it is for some people to spend it."

It is hardly necessary for me to say I was not insinuating anything against her people. But she was just then supersensitive on the subject, though I did not suspect it. She flushed hotly. "You will not have any cause to sneer at my people on that account hereafter," she said. "I settled that to-day."

"I was not sneering at them," I protested. "I wasn't even thinking of them. And—you must know that it's a favor to me for anybody to ask me to do anything that will please you—Anita!"

She made a gesture of impatience. "I see I'd better tell you why I did not go with them to-day. I insisted that they give back all they have taken from you. And when they refused, I refused to go."

"I don't care why you refused, or imagined you refused," said I. "I am content with the fact that you are here."

"But you misunderstand it," she answered coldly.

"I don't understand it, I don't misunderstand it," was my reply. "I accept it."

She turned away from the window, drifted out of the room—you, who love or at least have loved, can imagine how it made me feel to see Her moving about in those rooms of mine.

While the surface of my mind was taken up with her, I must have been thinking, underneath, of the warning she had brought; for, perhaps half or three-quarters of an hour after she left, I was suddenly whirled out of my reverie at the window by a thought like a pistol thrust into my face. "What if 'they' should include Roebuck!" And just as a man begins to defend himself from a sudden danger before he clearly sees what the danger is, so I began to act before I even questioned whether my suspicion was plausible or absurd. I went into the hall, rang the bell, slipped a light-weight coat over my evening dress and put on a hat. When Sanders appeared, I said: "I'm going out for a few minutes—perhaps an hour—if any one should ask." A moment later I was in a hansom and on the way to Roebuck's.

* * * * *

When Roebuck lived near Chicago, he had a huge house, a sort of crude palace such as so many of our millionaires built for themselves in the first excitement of their new wealth—a house with porches and balconies and towers and minarets and all sorts of gingerbread effects to compel the eye of the passer-by. But when he became enormously rich, so rich that his name was one of the synonyms for wealth, so rich that people said "rich as Roebuck" where they used to say "rich as Croesus," he cut away every kind of ostentation, and avoided attention.

He took advantage of his having to remove to New York where his vast interests centered; he bought a small and commonplace and, far a rich man, even mean house in East Fifty-Second Street—one of a raw, and an almost dingy looking row at that. There he had an establishment a man with one-fiftieth of his fortune would have felt like apologizing for. To his few intimates who were intimate enough to question him about his come-down from his Chicago splendors he explained that he was seeing with clearer eyes his responsibilities as a steward of the Lord, that luxury was sinful, that no man had a right to waste the Lord's money.

The general theory about him was that advancing years had developed his natural closeness into the stingiest avariciousness. But my notion is he was impelled by the fear of exciting envy, by the fear of assassination—the fear that made his eyes roam restlessly whenever strangers were near him, and so dried up the inside of his body that his dry tongue was constantly sliding along his dry lips. I have seen a convict stand in the door of his cell and, though it was impossible that any one could be behind him, look nervously over his shoulder every moment or so. Roebuck had the same trick—only his dread, I suspect, was not the officers of the law, even of the divine law, but the many, many victims of his merciless execution of "the Lord's will."

This state of mind is not uncommon among the very rich men, especially those who have come up from poverty. Those who have inherited great wealth, and have always been used to it, get into the habit of looking upon the mass of mankind as inferiors, and move about with no greater sense of peril than a man has in venturing among a lot of dogs with tails wagging. But those who were born poor and have risen under the stimulus of a furious envy of the comfortable and the rich, fancy that everybody who isn't rich has the same savage hunger that they themselves had, and is ready to use similar desperate methods in gratifying it. Thus, where the rich of the Langdon sort are supercilious, the rich of the Roebuck sort are nervous and often become morbid on the subject of assassination as they grow richer and richer.

The door of Roebuck's house was opened for me by a maid—a man-servant would have been a "sinful" luxury, a man-servant might be the hireling of plotters against his life. I may add that she looked the cheap maid-of-all-work, and her manners were of the free and fresh sort that indicates a feeling that as high, or higher, wages, and less to do could be got elsewhere.

"I don't think you can see Mr. Roebuck," she said.

"Take my card to him," I ordered, "and I'll wait in the parlor."

"Parlor's in use," she retorted with a sarcastic grin, which I was soon to understand.

So I stood by the old-fashioned coat and hat rack while she went in at the hall door of the back parlor. Soon Roebuck himself came out, his glasses on his nose, a family Bible under his arm. "Glad to see you, Matthew," said he with saintly kindliness, giving me a friendly hand. "We are just about to offer up our evening prayer. Come right in."

I followed him into the back parlor. Both it and the front parlor were lighted; in a sort of circle extending into both rooms were all the Roebucks and the four servants. "This is my friend, Matthew Blacklock," said he, and the Roebucks in the circle gravely bowed. He drew up a chair for me, and we seated ourselves. Amid a solemn hush, he read a chapter from the big Bible spread out upon his lean lap. My glance wandered from face to face of the Roebucks, as plainly dressed as were their servants. I was able to look freely, mine being the only eyes not bent upon the floor.

It was the first time in my life that I had witnessed family prayers. When I was a boy at home, my mother had taken literally the Scriptural injunction to pray in secret—in a closet, I think the passage of the Bible said. Many times each day she used to retire to a closet under the stairway and spend from one to twenty minutes shut in there. But we had no family prayers. I was therefore deeply interested in what was going on in those countrified parlors of one of the richest and most powerful men in the world—and this right in the heart of that district of New York where palaces stand in rows and in blocks, and where such few churches as there are resemble social clubs for snubbing climbers and patronizing the poor.

It was astonishing how much every Roebuck in that circle, even the old lady, looked like Roebuck himself—the same smug piety, the same underfed appearance that, by the way, more often indicates a starved soul than a starved body. One difference—where his face had the look of power that compels respect and, to the shrewd, reveals relentless strength relentlessly used, the expressions of the others were simply small and mean and frost-nipped. And that is the rule—the second generation of a plutocrat inherits, with his money, the meanness that enabled him to hoard it, but not the scope that enabled him to make it.

So absorbed was I in the study of the influence of his terrible master-character upon those closest to it, that I started when he said: "Let us pray." I followed the example of the others, and knelt. The audible prayer was offered up by his oldest daughter, Mrs. Wheeler, a widow. Roebuck punctuated each paragraph in her series of petitions with a loudly-whispered amen. When she prayed for "the stranger whom Thou has led seemingly by chance into our little circle," he whispered the amen more fervently and repeated it. And well he might, the old robber and assassin by proxy! The prayer ended and, us on our feet, the servants withdrew; then, awkwardly, all the family except Roebuck. That is, they closed the doors between the two rooms and left him and me alone in the front parlor.

"I shall not detain you long, Mr. Roebuck," said I. "A report reached me this evening that sent me to you at once."

"If possible, Matthew," said he, and he could not hide his uneasiness, "put off business until to-morrow. My mind—yours, too, I trust—is not in the frame for that kind of thoughts now."

"Is the Coal organization to be announced the first of July?" I demanded. It has always been, and always shall be, my method to fight in the open. This, not from principle, but from expediency. Some men fight best in the brush; I don't. So I always begin battle by shelling the woods.

"No," he said, amazing me by his instant frankness. "The announcement has been postponed."

Why did he not lie to me? Why did he not put me off the scent, as he might easily have done, with some shrewd evasion? I suspected I owed it to my luck in catching him at family prayers. For I know that the general impression of him is erroneous; he is not merely a hypocrite before the world, but also a hypocrite before himself. A more profoundly, piously conscientious man never lived. Never was there a truer epitaph than the one implied in the sentence carved over his niche in the magnificent mausoleum he built: "Fear naught but the Lord."

"When will the reorganization be announced?" I asked.

"I can not say," he answered. "Some difficulties—chiefly labor difficulties—have arisen. Until they are settled, nothing can be done. Come to me to-morrow, and we'll talk about it."

"That is all I wished to know," said I, with a friendly, easy smile. "Good night."

It was his turn to be astonished—and he showed it, where I had given not a sign. "What was the report you heard?" he asked, to detain me.

"That you and Mowbray Langdon had conspired to ruin me," said I, laughing.

He echoed my laugh rather hollowly. "It was hardly necessary for you to come to me about such a—a statement."

"Hardly," I answered dryly. Hardly, indeed! For I was seeing now all that I had been hiding from myself since I became infatuated with Anita and made marrying her my only real business in life.

We faced each other, each measuring the other. And as his glance quailed before mine, I turned away to conceal my exultation. In a comparison of resources this man who had plotted to crush me was to me as giant to midget. But I had the joy of realizing that man to man, I was the stronger. He had craft, but I had daring. His vast wealth aggravated his natural cowardice—crafty men are invariably cowards, and their audacities under the compulsion of their ravenous greed are like a starving jackal's dashes into danger for food. My wealth belonged to me, not I to it; and, stripped of it, I would be like the prize-fighter stripped for the fight. Finally, he was old, I young. And there was the chief reason for his quailing. He knew that he must die long before me, that my turn must come, that I could dance upon his grave.



XXV. "MY WIFE MUST!"

As I drove away, I was proud of myself. I had listened to my death sentence with a face so smiling that he must almost have believed me unconscious; and also, it had not even entered my head, as I listened, to beg for mercy. Not that there would have been the least use in begging; as well try to pray a statue into life, as try to soften that set will and purpose. Still, many a man would have weakened—and I had not weakened. But when I was once more in my apartment—in our apartment—perhaps I did show that there was a weak streak through me. I fought against the impulse to see her once more that night; but I fought in vain. I knocked at the door of her sitting-room—a timid knock, for me. No answer. I knocked again, more loudly—then a third time, still more loudly. The door opened and she stood there, like one of the angels that guarded the gates of Eden after the fall. Only, instead of a flaming sword, hers was of ice. She was in a dressing-gown or tea-gown, white and clinging and full of intoxicating hints and glimpses of all the beauties of her figure. Her face softened as she continued to look at me, and I entered.

"No—please don't turn on any more lights," I said, as she moved toward the electric buttons. "I just came in to—to see if I could do anything for you." In fact, I had come, longing for her to do something for me, to show in look or tone or act some sympathy for me in my loneliness and trouble.

"No, thank you," she said. Her voice seemed that of a stranger who wished to remain a stranger. And she was evidently waiting for me to go. You will see what a mood I was in when I say I felt as I had not since I, a very small boy indeed, ran away from home; I came back through the chilly night to take one last glimpse of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp-light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of strong self-pity—and I never saw them again.

"I've seen Roebuck," said I to Anita, because I must say something, if I was to stay on.

"Roebuck?" she inquired. Her tone reminded me that his name conveyed nothing to her.

"He and I are in an enterprise together," I explained. "He is the one man who could seriously cripple me."

"Oh," she said, and her indifference, forced though I thought it, wounded.

"Well," said I, "your mother was right."

She turned full toward me, and even in the dimness I saw her quick sympathy—an impulsive flash instantly gone. But it had been there!

"I came in here," I went on, "to say that—Anita, it doesn't in the least matter. No one in this world, no one and nothing, could hurt me except through you. So long as I have you, they—the rest—all of them together—can't touch me."

We were both silent for several minutes. Then she said, and her voice was like the smooth surface of the river where the boiling rapids run deep: "But you haven't me—and never shall have. I've told you that. I warned you long ago. No doubt you will pretend, and people will say, that I left you because you lost your money. But it won't be so."

I was beside her instantly, was looking into her face. "What do you mean?" I asked, and I did not speak gently.

She gazed at me without flinching. "And I suppose," she said satirically, "you wonder why I—why you are repellent to me. Haven't you learned that, though I may have been made into a moral coward, I'm not a physical coward? Don't bully and threaten. It's useless."

I put my hand strongly on her shoulder—taunts and jeers do not turn me aside. "What did you mean?" I repeated.

"Take your hand off me," she commanded.

"What did you mean?" I repeated sternly. "Don't be afraid to answer."

She was very young—so the taunt stung her. "I was about to tell you," said she, "when you began to make it impossible."

I took advantage of this to extricate myself from the awkward position in which she had put me—I took my hand from her shoulder.

"I am going to leave you," she announced.

"You forget that you are my wife," said I.

"I am not your wife," was her answer, and if she had not looked so childlike, there in the moonlight all in white, I could not have held myself in check, so insolent was the tone and so helpless of ever being able to win her did she make me feel.

"You are my wife and you will stay here with me," I reiterated, my brain on fire.

"I am my own, and I shall go where I please, and do what I please," was her contemptuous retort. "Why won't you be reasonable? Why won't you see how utterly unsuited we are? I don't ask you to be a gentleman—but just a man, and be ashamed even to wish to detain a woman against her will."

I drew up a chair so close to her that to retreat, she was forced to sit in the broad window-seat. Then I seated myself. "By all means, let us be reasonable," said I. "Now, let me explain my position. I have heard you and your friends discussing the views of marriage you've just been expressing. Their views may be right, may be more civilized, more 'advanced' than mine. No matter. They are not mine. I hold by the old standards—and you are my wife—mine. Do you understand?" All this as tranquilly as if we were discussing fair weather. "And you will live up to the obligation which the marriage service has put upon you."

She might have been a marble statue pedestaled in that window seat.

"You married me of your own free will—for you could have protested to the preacher and he would have sustained you. You tacitly put certain conditions on our marriage. I assented to them. I have respected them. I shall continue to respect them. But—when you married me, you didn't marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband."

I waited, but she made no comment—not even by gesture or movement. She simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight upon mine.

"You say let us be reasonable," I went on. "Well, let us be reasonable. There may come a time when woman can be free and independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman's having a protector—of every decent woman's having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some of her blood-relations. There may be women strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of them—and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight hours. Your bringing-up has kept you a child in real knowledge of real life, as distinguished from the life in that fashionable hothouse. If you tried to assert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat never to sleep except with the sword and gun in hand, and one eye open—when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me—what chance would a woman like you have?"

She did not answer or change expression.

"Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?" I asked gently.

"Reasonable—from your standpoint," she said.

She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise; by the way she trembled I gaged how tense her nerves must be. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: "We understand each other?"

"Yes," she answered. "As before."

I ignored this. "Think it over, Anita," I urged—she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.

I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot. I now saw they were ropes of steel—and it had long been broad day before I found that weak strand which is in every rope of human make.



XXVI. THE WEAK STRAND

No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either fear or cupidity, or both. As far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt them. Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what could it be?

Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me there were six principals in the proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in finance than even Langdon, all of them except possibly Dykeman, the lawyer or navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures than I. Yet none of these men was being assailed. "Why am I singled out?" I asked myself, and I felt that if I could answer, I should find I had the means wholly or partly to defeat them. But I could not explain to my satisfaction even Langdon's activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow, in part at least, the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded in convincing Roebuck that I must be clipped and plucked into a groundling?

"It must have something to do with the Manasquale mines," I decided. "I thought I had given over my control of them, but somehow I must still have a control that makes me too powerful for Roebuck to be at ease so long as I am afoot and armed." And I resolved to take my lawyers and search the whole Manasquale transaction—to explore it from attic to underneath the cellar flooring. "We'll go through it," said I, "like ferrets through a ship's hold."

As I was finishing breakfast, Anita came in. She had evidently slept well, and I regarded that as ominous. At her age, a crisis means little sleep until a decision has been reached. I rose, but her manner warned me not to advance and try to shake hands with her.

"I have asked Alva to stop with me here for a few days," she said formally.

"Alva!" said I, much surprised. She had not asked one of her own friends; she had asked a girl she had met less than two days before, and that girl my partner's daughter.

"She was here yesterday morning," Anita explained. And I now wondered how much Alva there was in Anita's firm stand against her parents.

"Why don't you take her down to our place on Long Island?" said I, most carefully concealing my delight—for Alva near her meant a friend of mine and an advocate and example of real womanhood near her. "Everything's ready for you there, and I'm going to be busy the next few days—busy day and night."

She reflected. "Very well," she assented presently. And she gave me a puzzled glance she thought I did not see—as if she were wondering whether the enemy was not hiding new and deeper guile under an apparently harmless suggestion.

"Then I'll not see you again for several days," said I, most businesslike. "If you want anything, there will be Monson out at the stables where he can't annoy you. Or you can get me on the 'long distance.' Good-by. Good luck."

And I nodded carelessly and friendlily to her, and went away, enjoying the pleasure of having startled her into visible astonishment. "There's a better game than icy hostility, you very young, young lady," said I to myself, "and that game is friendly indifference."

Alva would be with her. So she was secure for the present and my mind was free for "finance."

At that time the two most powerful men in finance were Galloway and Roebuck. In Spain I once saw a fight between a bull and a tiger—or, rather the beginning of a fight. They were released into a huge iron cage. After circling it several times in the same direction, searching for a way out, they came face to face. The bull tossed the tiger; the tiger clawed the bull. The bull roared; the tiger screamed. Each retreated to his own side of the cage. The bull pawed and snorted as if he could hardly wait to get at the tiger; the tiger crouched and quivered and glared murderously, as if he were going instantly to spring upon the bull. But the bull did not rush, neither did the tiger spring. That was the Roebuck-Galloway situation.

How to bait Tiger Galloway to attack Bull Roebuck—that was the problem I must solve, and solve straightway. If I could bring about war between the giants, spreading confusion over the whole field of finance and filling all men with dread and fear, there was a chance, a bare chance, that in the confusion I might bear off part of my fortune. Certainly, conditions would result in which I could more easily get myself intrenched again; then, too, there would be a by no means small satisfaction in seeing Roebuck clawed and bitten in punishment for having plotted against me.

Mutual fear had kept these two at peace for five years, and most considerate and polite about each other's "rights." But while our country's industrial territory is vast, the interests of the few great controllers who determine wages and prices for all are equally vast, and each plutocrat is tormented incessantly by jealousy and suspicion; not a day passes without conflicts of interest that adroit diplomacy could turn into ferocious warfare. And in this matter of monopolizing the coal, despite Roebuck's earnest assurances to Galloway that the combine was purely defensive, and was really concerned only with the labor question, Galloway, a great manufacturer, or, rather, a huge levier of the taxes of dividends and interest upon manufacturing enterprises, could not but be uneasy.

Before I rose that morning I had a tentative plan for stirring him to action. I was elaborating it on the way down town in my electric. It shows how badly Anita was crippling my brain, that not until I was almost at my office did it occur to me: "That was a tremendous luxury Roebuck indulged his conscience in last night. It isn't like him to forewarn a man, even when he's sure he can't escape. Though his prayers were hot in his mouth, still, it's strange he didn't try to fool me. In fact, it's suspicious. In fact—"

Suspicious? The instant the idea was fairly before my mind, I knew I had let his canting fool me once more. I entered my offices, feeling that the blow had already fallen; and I was surprised, but not relieved, when I found everything calm. "But fall it will within an hour or so—before I can move to avert it," said I to myself.

And fall it did. At eleven o'clock, just as I was setting out to make my first move toward heating old Galloway's heels for the war-path, Joe came in with the news: "A general lockout's declared in the coal regions. The operators have stolen a march on the men who, so they allege, were secretly getting ready to strike. By night every coal road will be tied up and every mine shut down."

Joe knew our coal interests were heavy, but he did not dream his news meant that before the day was over we would be bankrupt and not able to pay fifteen cents on the dollar. However, he knew enough to throw him into a fever of fright. He watched my calmness with terror. "Coal stocks are dropping like a thermometer in a cold wave," he said, like a fireman at a sleeper in a burning house.

"Naturally," said I, unruffled, apparently. "What can we do about it?"

"We must do something!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, we must," I admitted. "For instance, we must keep cool, especially when two or three dozen people are watching us. Also, you must attend to your usual routine."

"What are you going to do?" he cried. "For God's sake, Matt, don't keep me in suspense!"

"Go to your desk," I commanded. And he quieted down and went. I hadn't been schooling him in the fire-drill for fifteen years in vain.

I went up the street and into the great banking and brokerage house of Galloway and Company. I made my way through the small army of guards, behind which the old beast of prey was intrenched, and into his private den. There he sat, at a small, plain table, in the middle of the room without any article of furniture in it but his table and his chair. On the table was a small inkstand, perfectly clean, a steel pen equally clean, on the rest attached to it. And that was all—not a letter, not a scrap of paper, not a sign of work or of intention to work. It might have been the desk of a man who did nothing; in fact, it was the desk of a man who had so much to do that his only hope of escape from being overwhelmed was to despatch and clear away each matter the instant it was presented to him. Many things could be read from the powerful form, bolt upright in that stiff chair, and from the cynical, masterful old face. But to me the chief quality there revealed was that quality of qualities, decision—the greatest power a man can have, except only courage. And old James Galloway had both.