CHAPTER VII
ALIXand Alan were in the grip of a fever that is hard to break save through satiety and ruin. They were still held apart by generations of sound tradition, but against this bulwark the full flood of modern life,as they lived it, was directed. In Alan there was a counter-strain, a tradition of passion that predisposed him to accept the easy tenets of the growing sensual cult. As he found it more and more difficult to turn his thoughts away from Alix, he strove to regain the clear-headedness that only a year before had held him back from definite moral surrender.
With her things had not gone so far. From the security of the untempted she had watched her chosen world play with fire, and only now, when temptation assailed her, did she realize the weakness that lies in every woman once her outposts have fallen and her bare heart becomes engaged in the battle.
One early morning Nance sent for Alan. He found her alone. She had been crying. He came to her where she stood by the fire, and she turned and put her arms around his neck. She tried to smile, but her lips twitched.
“Alan,” she said, “I want you to go away.”
Alan was touched. He caught her wrists and took her arms from about his neck.
“You mustn’t do that sort of thing to me, Nance. I’m not fit for it.” He made her sit down on a great sofa before the fire and sat down beside her. “You remind me to-day of the most beautiful thing I ever heard said of you—by a spiteful friend.”
“What was it?” said Nance, turning her troubled eyes to him.
“She said, ‘She is only beautiful in her own home.’ I never understood it before. It’s a great thing to be beautiful in one’s own home.”
“Oh, Alan,” said Nance, catching his hand and holding it against her breast, “itisa great thing. It’s the greatest thing in life. That’s why I sent for you—because you are wrecking forever your chance of being beautiful in your own home. And worse than that, you are wrecking Alix’s chance. Of course you are blind. Of course you are mad. Iunderstand, Alan, but I want to hold you close to my heart until you see—until the fever is cooled. You and Alix cannot do this thing. It isn’t as though her people and ours were of the froth of the nation. You and she started life with nothing but Puritan to build on. You may have built just play-houses of sand, but deep down the old rock foundation must endure. You must take your stand on that.”
Her eyes had been fixed in the fire, but now she turned them to his face. Alan sat with head hanging forward, his gaze and thoughts far beyond the confines of the room. Then he shook himself and got up to go.
“I wish we could, Nance,” he said gravely, and then added half to himself, half to her, “I’ll try.”
For some days Alan had been prepared to go away and take Alix with him, should she consent. Upon his arrival he had had an interview with McDale & McDale, in the course of which that firm opened its eyes and its pocket wider than it ever had before.
“You are out for money, Mr. Wayne,” had been the feeble remonstrance of the senior member.
“Just money,” replied Alan. “If you owed as much as I do, you would be out for it, too. Of course you’re not. What do you want? You’ve got my guaranty—ten per cent. under office estimates for work and time.”
When Alan left McDale & McDale’s offices he had contracted more or less on his own terms, and McDale, Jr., said to the senior:
“He’s only twenty-six—a boy. How did he beat us?”
“By beating Walton’s record first,” replied McDale, Sr. “And how he did that, time will show.”
As he walked slowly back from Nance’s, Alan was thinking that, after all, there was no reason why he should not cut and run—no reason except Alix.
He reached his rooms. As he crossed the threshold a premonition seized him. He felt as though some one were there. He glanced hurriedly about. The rooms were still in the disorder in which he had left them, and they were empty. Then he saw that he had stepped on a note that had been dropped through the letter-slip. He picked it up. A thrill went through him as he recognized Alix’s handwriting. There was no stamp. It must have been delivered by hand. He tore it open and read: “You said that a moment’s notice was all you asked. I will take the Montreal express with you to-day.”
Alan’s blood turned to liquid fire. Thenote conjured before him a vision of Alix. He crushed it, and held it to his lips and laughed, not jeeringly, but in pure, uncontrolled excitement.
ITwas not a coincidence that Gerry had sought out Alix at the very hour that Nance was summoning Alan. Gerry and Nance were driven by the same forewarning of catastrophe. Gerry had felt it first, but he had been slow to believe, slower to act. He had no precedent for this sort of thing. His whole being was in revolt against the situation in which he found himself. It was after a sleepless night, a most unheard of thing with him, that he decided he could let things go no longer. He went to Alix’s room, knocked, and entered.
Alix was up, though the hour was early for her. Fresh from her bath, she sat in a sheen of blue dressing-gown before the mirror doing her own hair. Gerry glanced about him and into the bath-room, looking for the maid.
“Good morning,” said Alix. “She’s not here. Did you want to see her?”
Gerry winced at the levity. He wondered how Alix could play the game she was playing and be gay. Alix finished doing her hair.
“There,” she said with a final pat, and turned to face Gerry.
He was standing beside an open window. He could feel the cold air on his hands. He felt like putting his head out into it. His head was hot.
“Alix,” he said suddenly without looking at her, “I want you to drop Alan.”
“But I don’t want to drop Alan,” replied Alix, lightly.
Gerry whirled around at her tone. His nostrils were quivering. To his amazement, his hands fairly itched to clutch her beautiful throat. He could hardly control his voice.
“Stop playing, Alix,” he gulped. “There’s never been a divorcée among the Lansings nor a wife-beater, and one is as near this room as the other right now.”
Gerry regretted the words as soon as he had said them, but Alix was not angry. She looked at him through narrowed eyes. She speculated on the sensation of being once again roughly handled by this rock of a man. Only once before had she seen Gerry angry and the sight had fascinated her then, as it did now. There was something tremendous and impressive in his anger and struggle for control—a great torrent held back by a great strong dam. She almost wished it would break through. She could almost find it in her to throw herself on the flood and let it carry her whither it would. She said nothing.
Gerry bit his lips and turned from her.
“And Alan, of all men!” he went on. At the words the current of her thoughts was changed. She found herself suddenly on the defensive. “Do you think you are the first woman he has played with and betrayed?” Gerry’s lip was curved to a sneer. “A philanderer, a man who surrounds himself with tarnished reputations.”
A dull glow came into Alix’s cheeks.
“Philanderers are of many breeds,” she said. “There are those who have the wit to philander with woman, and those who can rise only to a whisky or a golf-club. Whatever else Alan may be, he is not a time-server.”
Once aroused, Alix had taken up the gantlet with no uncertain hand. Her first words carried the war into the enemy’s camp, and they were barbed.
“What do you mean?” said Gerry, dully. He had not anticipated a defense.
“I mean what you might have deduced with an effort. What are you but a philanderer in little things where Alan is in great? What have you ever done to hold me or any other woman? I respected you once for what you were going to be. That has died. Did you think I was going to make you into a man?”
Gerry stood, breathing hard, a great despondency in his heart. Alix went on pitilessly:
“What have you become? A monumental time-server on the world, and you are surprised that a worker reaches the prize that you can not attain! ‘All things come to him who waits.’ That’s a trite saying; but how about this? There are lots of things that come to him who only waits that he could do without. The trouble with you is that you have built your life altogether on traditions. It is a tradition that your women are faithful; so you need not exert yourself to holding yours. It is a tradition that you can do no wrong; so you need not exert yourself to doing anything at all. You are playing with ghosts, Gerry. Your party was over a generation ago.”
Alix had calmed down. There was still time for Gerry to choke her to good effect. The hour could yet be his. But he did not know it. Smarting under the lash of Alix’s tongue, he made a final and disastrous false step.
“You try to humiliate me by placing me back to back with Alan?” he said, with his new-born sneer. Alix appraised it with calm eyes, and found it rather attractive. “Well, let me tell you that Alan is so small a man that if I dropped out of the world to-day, he’d sail for Africa to-morrow and think for the rest of his life of his escape from you as a close shave.”
Alix sprang to her feet. She was trembling. Gerry felt a throb of exultation. It was his turn to wound.
“What do you mean?” said Alix, very quietly; but it was the quiet of suppressed passion at white heat.
“I mean that Alan is the kind of man who finds other men’s wives an economy. He would take everything you have that’s worth taking, but not you.”
Alix’s eyes blazed at him from her white face. “Please go away,” she said. He started to speak. “Please go away,” she repeated. Her lips were quivering, and her face twitched in a way that was terrifying to Gerry. He hurried out, repeating to himself over and over: “You have made Alix cry. You have made Alix cry.”
Alix toyed with the silver on her dressing-table until he had gone, and then she swept across the room to her little writing-desk and wrote the note that Alan had found half an hour later in his rooms.