Olivia came to attend the convention as Fred was a delegate from Marion County. Pauline and Gladys accepted her invitation and shared her box—the convention was held in the Saint X Grand Opera House, the second largest auditorium in the state. Pauline, in the most retired corner, could not see the Marion County delegation into which Scarborough went by substitution. But she had had a glimpse of him as she came in—he was sitting beside Fred Pierson and was gazing straight ahead, as if lost in thought. He looked tired and worn, but not cast down.
"You should have been here, Polly, when Scarborough came in," said Olivia, who was just in front of her. "They almost tore the roof off. He's got the audience with him, even if the delegates aren't. A good many of the delegates applauded, too," she added—but in a significantly depressed tone.
"Why isn't he a candidate, Mrs. Pierson?" asked Gladys.
"They wanted him to be, of course," replied Olivia, "and I think it was a mistake that he didn't consent. But he wouldn't hear of it. He said it simply wouldn't do for him to make the fight to carry the convention for himself. He said that, even if he were nominated, the other side would use it against him."
"That seems reasonable," said Gladys.
"But it isn't," replied Olivia. "He may not know it but he can lead men where they wouldn't go for his merely sending them."
"I suppose it was his modesty," suggested Gladys.
"Modesty's a good deal of a vice, especially in a leader," replied Olivia.
There was an hour of dullness—routine business, reports of committees, wearisome speeches. But, like every one of those five thousand people, Pauline was in a fever of anticipation. For, while it was generally assumed that Scarborough and his friends had no chance and while Larkin was apparently carrying everything through according to program, still it was impossible to conceive of such a man as Scarborough accepting defeat on test votes tamely taken. He would surely challenge. Larkin watched him uneasily, wondering at what point in the proceedings the gage would be flung down. Even Merriweather could not keep still, but flitted about, his nervousness of body contrasting strangely with his calmness of face; himself the most unquiet man in the hall, he diffused quiet wherever he paused.
At last came the call for nominations. When the secretary of the convention read Cass from the roll of counties, a Larkin henchman rose and spoke floridly for twenty minutes on the virtues of John Frankfort, put up as the Larkin "draw-fire," the pretended candidate whose prearranged defeat was to be used on the stump as proof that Boss Larkin and his gang had been downed. At the call of Hancock County, another—a secret—Larkin henchman rose to eulogize "that stanch foe of corporate corruption and aggression, Hancock County's favorite son, the people's judge, Judge Edward Howel Graney!" Then the roll-call proceeded amid steadily rising excitement which abruptly died into silence as the clerk shouted, with impressive emphasis, "Wayne!" That was the home county of the Scarborough candidate. A Wayne delegate rose and in a single sentence put ex-Governor Bowen in nomination. There was a faint ripple of applause which was instantly checked. A silence of several seconds and—
"Mr. Chairman, and gentle—"
It was the voice Pauline knew so well. She could not see him, but that voice seemed to make him visible to her. She caught her breath and her heart beat wildly. He got no further into seconding Bowen's nomination than the middle of the fourth word. There may have been ears offended by the thunder-clap which burst in that theater, but those ears were not Pauline's, were not in Olivia Pierson's box. And then came tumbling and roaring, huge waves of adulation, with his name shouted in voices hoarse and voices shrill like hissing foam on the triumphant crests of billows. And Pauline felt as if she were lifted from her bodily self, were tossing in a delirium of ecstasy on a sea of sheer delight.
And now he was on the platform, borne there above the shoulders of a hundred men. He was standing pale and straight and mighty. He stretched out his hand, so large and strong, and somehow as honest as his eyes; the tempest stilled. He was speaking—what did he say? She hardly heard, though she knew that it was of and for right and justice—what else could that voice utter or the brain behind those proud features think? With her, and with all there, far more than his words it was his voice, like music, like magic, rising and falling in thrilling inflections as it wove its spell of gold and fire. Whenever he paused there would be an instant of applause—a huge, hoarse thunder, the call of that mysterious and awful and splendid soul of the mass—an instant full of that one great, deep, throbbing note, then silence to hear him again.
Scarborough had measured his task—to lift that convention from the slough of sordidness to which the wiles and bribes of Dumont and his clique had lured it; to set it in the highroad of what he believed with all his intensity to be the high-road of right. Usually he spoke with feeling strongly repressed; but he knew that if he was to win that day against such odds he must take those delegates by surprise and by storm, must win in a suddenly descended whirlwind of passion that would engulf calculation and craft, sordidness and cynicism. He made few gestures; he did not move from the position he had first taken. He staked all upon his voice; into it he poured all his energy, all his fire, all his white-hot passion for right and justice, all his scorn of the base and the low.
"Head above heart, when head is right," he had often said. "But when head is wrong, then heart above head." And he reached for hearts that day.
Five minutes, and delegates and spectators were his captives. Fifteen minutes, and he was riding a storm such as comes only when the fountains of the human deeps are broken up. Thirty minutes and he was riding it as its master, was guiding it where he willed.
In vain Larkin sought to rally delegates round the shamed but steadfast nucleus of the bribed and the bossed. In vain his orator moved an adjournment until "calmness and reason shall be restored." The answer made him shrink and sink into his seat. For it was an awful, deafening roll of the war-drums of that exalted passion which Scarborough had roused.
The call of counties began. The third on the list—Bartholomew—was the first to say what the people longed to hear. A giant farmer, fiery and freckled, rose and in a voice like a blast from a bass horn bellowed: "Bartholomew casts her solid vote for Hampden Scarborough!"
Pauline had thought she heard that multitude speak before. But she now knew she had heard hardly more than its awakening whisper. For, with the pronouncing of that name, the tempest really burst. She sprang to her feet, obeying the imperious inward command which made every one in that audience and most of the delegates leap up. And for ten long minutes, for six hundred cyclonic seconds, the people poured out their passionate adoration. At first Scarborough flung out his arms, and all could see that he was shouting some sort of protest. But they would not hear him now. He had told them WHAT to do. He must let them say HOW to do it.
Pauline looked out at those flaming thousands with the maddest emotions streaming like lightning from their faces. But she looked without fear. They—she—all were beside themselves; but it was no frenzy for blood or for the sordid things. It was the divine madness of the soldier of the right, battling for THE CAUSE, in utter forgetfulness of self and selfishness. "Beautiful! Beautiful!" she murmured, every nerve tingling. "I never knew before how beautiful human beings are!"
Finally the roll-call could proceed. Long before it was ended the necessary votes had been cast for Scarborough, and Larkin rose to move that the nomination be made unanimous—Larkin, beaten down in the open, was not the man to die there; he hastened to cover where he could resume the fight in the manner most to his liking. Again Scarborough was borne to the platform; again she saw him standing there—straight and mighty, but deathly pale, and sad—well he might be bowed by the responsibility of that mandate, given by the god-in-man, but to be executed by and through plain men. A few broken, hesitating words, and he went into the wings and left the theater, applause sweeping and swirling after him like a tidal wave.
Pauline, coming out into the open, looked round her, dazed. Why, it was the same work-a-day world as before, with its actions so commonplace and selfish, with only its impulses fine and high. If these moments of exaltation could but last, could but become the fixed order and routine of life! If high ideal and courage ruled, instead of low calculation and fear! She sighed, then her eyes shone.
"At least I have seen!" she thought. "At least I have lived one of those moments when the dreams come true. And 'human being' has a new meaning for me."
Two men, just behind her in the crowd, were talking of Scarborough. "A demagogue!" sneered one.
"A demi-god," retorted the other. And Pauline turned suddenly and gave him a look that astonished and dazzled him.
Six weeks later, on the morning after the general election, Dumont awoke bubbling over with good humor—as always, when the world went well with him and so set the strong, red currents of his body to flowing in unobstructed channels.
He had not gone to bed the previous night until he had definite news from Indiana, Illinois and New York, the three states in which his industrial-political stakes were heaviest. They had gone as he wished, as he and his friends had spent large sums of money to assist them to go. And now a glance at the morning papers confirmed his midnight bulletins. Indiana, where he had made the strongest efforts because the control of its statute book was vital to him, had gone his way barely but, apparently, securely; Scarborough was beaten for governor by twenty-five hundred. Presently he had Culver in to begin the day's business. The first paper Culver handed him was a cipher telegram announcing the closing of an agreement which made the National Woolens Company absolute in the Northwest; the second item in Culver's budget was also a cipher telegram—from Merriweather. It had been filed at four o'clock—several hours later than the newspaper despatches. It said that Scarborough's friends conceded his defeat, that the Legislature was safely Dumont's way in both houses. Culver always sorted out to present first the agreeable part of the morning's budget; never had he been more successful.
At the office Dumont found another cipher telegram from Merriweather: "Later returns show Scarborough elected by a narrow majority. But he will be powerless as Legislature and all other state offices are with us."
Dumont crushed the telegram in his hand. "Powerless—hell!" he muttered. "Does he think I'm a fool?" He had spent three hundred thousand dollars to "protect" his monopoly in its home; for it was under Indiana laws, as interpreted by Dumont's agents in public office, that the main or holding corporation of his group was organized. And he knew that, in spite of his judges and his attorney-general and his legislative lobby and his resourceful lawyers and his subsidized newspapers, a governor of Scarborough's courage and sagacity could harass him, could force his tools in public office to activity against him, might drive him from the state. Heretofore he had felt, and had been, secure in the might of his millions. But now— He had a feeling of dread, close kin to fear, as he measured this peril, this man strong with a strength against which money and intrigue were as futile as bow and arrow against rifle.
He opened the door into the room where his twenty personal clerks were at work. They glanced at his face, winced, bent to their tasks. They knew that expression: it meant "J. D. will take the hide off every one who goes near him to-day."
"Tell Mr. Giddings I want to see him," he snapped, lifting the head of the nearest clerk with a glance like an electric shock.
The clerk rose, tiptoed away to the office of the first vice-president of the Woolens Trust. He came tiptoeing back to say in a faint, deprecating voice: "Mr. Giddings isn't down yet, sir."
Dumont rolled out a volley of violent language about Giddings. In his tantrums he had no more regard for the dignity of his chief lieutenants, themselves rich men and middle-aged or old, than he had for his office boys. To the Ineffable Grand Turk what noteworthy distinction is there between vizier and sandal-strapper?
"Send him in—quick,—you, as soon as he comes," he shouted in conclusion. If he had not paid generously, if his lieutenants had not been coining huge dividends out of his brains and commercial audacity, if his magnetic, confidence-inspiring personality had not created in the minds of all about him visions of golden rivers widening into golden oceans, he would have been deserted and execrated. As it was, his service was eagerly sought; and his servants endured its mental and moral hardships as the prospector endures the physical cruelties of the mountain fastnesses.
He was closing his private door when the door-boy from the outermost of that maze of handsome offices came up to him with a card.
"Not here," he growled, and shut himself in.
Half an hour later the sounds of an angry tumult in the clerks' room made him fling his door open. "What the—" he began, his heavy face purple, then stopped amazed.
The outside doorkeeper, the watchman and several clerks were engaged in a struggle with Fanshaw. His hat was off, his hair wild, his necktie, shirt and coat awry.
"There you are now—I knew you were in," he shouted, as he caught sight of Dumont. "Call these curs off, Jack!"
"Let him alone," snarled Dumont.
Fanshaw was released. He advanced into Dumont's office, straightening his clothing and panting with exertion, excitement and anger. Dumont closed the door. "Well," he said surlily. "What d' you want?"
"I'll have to go to the wall at half-past ten if you don't help me out," said Fanshaw. "The Montana election went against my crowd—I'm in the copper deal. There's a slump, but the stock's dead sure to go up within a week."
"In trouble again?" sneered Dumont. "It's been only three months since I pulled you through."
"You didn't lose anything by it, did you?" retorted Fanshaw—he had recovered himself and was eying Dumont with the cool, steady, significant stare of one rascal at another whom he thinks he has in his power.
Before that look Dumont flushed an angrier red. "I won't do it again!" and he brought his fist down with a bang.
"All I want is five hundred thousand to carry my copper for a week at the outside. If I get it I'll clear a million. If I don't"—Fanshaw shrugged his shoulders—"I'll be cleaned out." He looked with narrowed, shifting eyes at Dumont. "My wife has all she's got in this," he went on, "even her jewels."
Dumont's look shot straight into Fanshaw's.
"Not a cent!" he said with vicious emphasis. "Not a red!"
Fanshaw paled and pinched in his lips. "I'm a desperate man. I'm ruined. Leonora—"
Dumont shook his head, the veins swelling in his forehead and neck. The last strand of his self-restraint snapped. "Leave her out of this! She has no claim on me NOW—and YOU never had."
Fanshaw stared at him, then sprang to his feet, all in a blaze. "You scoundrel!" he shouted, shaking his fist under Dumont's nose.
"If you don't clear out instantly I'll have you thrown out," said Dumont. He was cool and watchful now.
Fanshaw folded his arms and looked down at him with the dignified fury of the betrayed and outraged. "So!" he exclaimed. "I see it all!"
Dumont pressed an electric button, then leaned back in his revolving chair and surveyed Fanshaw tranquilly. "Not a cent!" he repeated, a cruel smile in his eyes and round his mouth. The boy came and Dumont said to him: "Send the watchman."
Fanshaw drew himself up. "I shall punish you," he said. "Your wealth will not save you." And he stalked past the gaping office boy.
He stood in front of the Edison Building, looking aimlessly up and down the street as he pulled his long, narrow, brown-gray mustache. Gloom was in his face and hate in his heart—not hate for Dumont alone but hate for all who were what he longed to be, all rich and "successful" men. And the towering steel and stone palaces of prosperity sneered down on him with crushing mockery.
"Damn them all!" he muttered. "The cold-hearted thieves!"
From his entry into that district he had played a gambling game, had played it dishonestly in a small way. Again and again he had sneakingly violated Wall Street's code of morality—that curious code with its quaint, unexpected incorporations of parts of the decalogue and its quainter, though not so unexpected, infringements thereof and amendments thereto. Now by "pull," now by trickery, he had evaded punishment. But apparently at last he was to be brought to bar, branded and banished.
"Damn them all!" he repeated. "They're a pack of wolves. They've got me down and they're going to eat me."
He blamed Dumont and he blamed his wife for his plight—and there was some justice in both accusations. Twenty years before, he had come down to "the Street" a frank-looking boy, of an old and distinguished New York family that had become too aristocratic for business and had therefore lost its hold upon its once great fortune. He was neither a good boy nor a bad. But he was weak, and had the extravagant tastes and cynical morals to which he had been bred; and his intelligent brain was of the kind that goes with weakness—shrewd and sly, preferring to slink along the byways of craft even when the highway of courage lies straight and easy. But he had physical bravery and the self-confidence that is based upon an assured social position in a community where social position is worshiped; so, he passed for manly and proud when he was in reality neither. Family vanity he had; personal pride he had not.
In many environments his weakness would have remained hidden even from himself, and he would have lived and died in the odor and complacence of respectability. But not in the strain and stress of Wall Street. There he had naturally developed not into a lion, not even into a wolf, but into a coyote.
Wall Street found him out in ten years—about one year after it began to take note of him and his skulking ways and his habit of prowling in the wake of the pack. Only his adroit use of his family connections and social position saved him from being trampled to death by the wolves and eaten by his brother coyotes. Thereafter he lived precariously, but on the whole sumptuously, upon carcasses of one kind and another. He participated in "strike" suits against big corporations—he would set on a pack of coyotes to dog the lions and to raise discordant howls that inopportunely centered public attention upon leonine, lawless doings; the lions would pay him well to call off the pack. He assisted sometimes wolves and sometimes coyotes in flotations of worthless, or almost worthless, stocks and bonds from gold and mahogany offices and upon a sea of glittering prospectuses. He had a hand in all manner of small, shady transactions of lawful, or almost lawful, swindling that were tolerated by lions and wolves, because at bottom there is a feeling of fellowship among creatures of prey as against creatures preyed upon.
There were days when he came home haggard and blue in the lips to tell Leonora that he must fly. There were days when he returned from the chase, or rather from the skulk, elated, youthful, his pockets full of money and his imagination afire with hopes of substantial wealth. But his course was steadily downward, his methods steadily farther and farther from the line of the law. Dumont came just in time to save him, came to build him up from the most shunned of coyotes into a deceptive imitation of a wolf with aspirations toward the lion class.
Leonora knew that he was small, but she thought all men small—she had supreme contempt for her own sex; and it seemed to her that men must be even less worthy of respect since they were under the influence of women and lavished time and money on them. Thus she was deceived into cherishing the hope that her husband, small and timid though he was, would expand into a multi-millionaire and would help her to possess the splendors she now enjoyed at the expense of her associates whom she despised. She was always thinking how far more impressive than their splendor her magnificence would be, if their money were added to her brains and beauty.
Dumont had helped Fanshaw as much as he could. He immediately detected the coyote. He knew it was impossible to make a lion or even a wolf out of one who was both small and crooked. He used him only in minor matters, chiefly in doing queer, dark things on the market with National Woolens, things he indirectly ordered done but refused to know the details of beyond the one important detail—the record of checks for the profits in his bank account. For such matters Fanshaw did as well as another. But as Dumont became less of a wolf and more of a lion, less of a speculator and more of a financier, he had less and less work of the kind Fanshaw could do.
But Leonora, unaware of her husband's worthlessness and desperate in her calamities, sneered and jeered and lashed him on—to ruin. The coyote could put on the airs of a lion so long as the lion was his friend and protector; when he kept on in kingly ways after the lion had cast him off, he speedily came to grief.
As he stood looking helplessly up and down Broad Street he was debating what move to make. There were about even measures of truth and falsehood in his statement to Dumont—he did need two hundred thousand dollars; and he must have it before a quarter past two that day or go into a bankruptcy from which he could not hope to save a shred of reputation or to secrete more than fifty thousand dollars.
"To the New York Life Building," he finally said to the driver as he got into his hansom. Then to himself: "I'll have a go at old Herron."
He knew that Dumont and Herron had quarreled, and that Herron had sold out of the National Woolens Company. But he did not know that Herron was a man with a fixed idea, hatred of Dumont, and a fixed purpose, to damage him at every opportunity that offered or could be created, to ruin him if possible.
When the National Woolens Company was expanded into the huge conglomerate it now was—a hundred millions common, a hundred millions preferred, and twenty millions of bonds—Herron had devised and directed the intricate and highly perilous course among the rocks of law and public opinion in many states and in the nation. It was a splendid exhibition of legal piloting, and he was bitterly dissatisfied with the modest reward of ten millions of the preferred stock which Dumont apportioned to him. He felt that that would have been about his just share in the new concern merely in exchange for his stock in the old. When he found Dumont obdurate, and grew frank and spoke such words as "dishonor" and "dishonesty" and got into the first syllable of "swindling," Dumont cut him off with—
"If you don't like it, get out! I can hire that sort of work for half what I've paid you. You're swollen with vanity. We ought to have a young man in your position, anyhow."
Herron might have swallowed the insult to his pride as a lawyer. But the insult to his pride in his youth! He was fifty-seven and in dress and in expression was stoutly insisting that he was still a young man whom hard work had made prematurely gray and somewhat wrinkled. Dumont's insinuation that he was old and stale set a great fire of hate blazing; he, of course, told himself and others that his wrath was stirred solely because his sense of justice had been outraged by the "swindling."
Fanshaw entered Herron's office wearing the jaunty air of arrogant prosperity, never so important as when prosperity has fled. But Herron's shrewd, experienced eyes penetrated the sham. He had intended to be cold. Scenting a "hard-luck yarn" and a "touch" he lowered his temperature to the point at which conversation is ice-beset and confidences are frozen tight.
Fanshaw's nerve deserted him. "Herron," he said, dropping his prosperous pose, "I want to get a divorce and I want to punish Dumont."
Herron's narrow, cold face lighted up. He knew what everybody in their set knew of Fanshaw's domestic affairs, but like everybody else he had pretended not to know. He changed his expression to one of shock and indignation.
"You astound me!" he exclaimed. "It is incredible!"
"He told me himself not an hour ago," said Fanshaw. "I went to him as a friend to ask him to help me out of a hole. And—" He rose and theatrically paced the floor.
Herron prided himself upon his acute conscience and his nice sense of honor. He felt that here was a chance to wreak vengeance upon Dumont—or rather, as he put it to himself, to bring Dumont to an accounting for his depravity. Just as Dumont maintained with himself a character of honesty by ignoring all the dubious acts which his agents were forced to do in carrying out his orders, so Herron kept peace with a far more sensitive conscience by never permitting it to look in upon his mind or out through his eyes.
"Frightful! Frightful!" he exclaimed, after a long pause in which his immured and blindfold conscience decided that he could afford to support Fanshaw. "I knew he was a rascal in business—but THIS!"
There was genuine emotion in his voice and in his mind. He was strict to puritanic primness in his ideals of feminine morality; nor had he been relaxed by having a handsome wife, looking scarce a day over thirty behind her veil or in artificial light, and fond of gathering about her young men who treated him as if he were old and "didn't count."
"You are certain, Fanshaw?"
"I tell you, he hinted it himself," replied Fanshaw. "And instantly my eyes were opened to scores of damning confirmations." He struck his forehead with his open hand. "How blind I've been!" he exclaimed.
Herron shook his head sympathetically and hastened on to business.
"WE can't handle your case," he said. "But Best and Sharpless, on the floor above, are reliable. And I'll be glad to help you with advice. I feel that this is the beginning of Dumont's end. I knew such insolent wickedness could not have a long course."
Fanshaw drew Herron on to tell the story of his wrongs—the "swindling." Before it was ended Fanshaw saw that he had found a man who hated Dumont malignantly and was thirsting for vengeance. This encouraged him to unfold his financial difficulties. Herron listened sympathetically, asked ingeniously illuminating questions, and in the end agreed to tide him over. He had assured himself that Fanshaw had simply undertaken too large an enterprise; the advance would be well secured; he would make the loan in such a way that he would get a sure profit, and would also bind Fanshaw firmly to him without binding himself to Fanshaw. Besides—"It wouldn't do for him to go to the wall just now."
Arm in arm they went up to Best and Sharpless' to take the first steps in the suit. Together they went down-town to relieve Fanshaw of the pressure of the too heavy burden of copper stocks; then up to their club where he assisted Fanshaw in composing the breaking-off letter to Leonora.
While the Fanshaw-Herron storm was slowly gathering in Dumont's eastern horizon, two others equally black were lifting in the west.
In the two months between Scarborough's election and his inauguration, the great monopolies thriving under the protection of the state's corrupted statute-book and corrupted officials followed the lead of their leader, Dumont's National Woolens Company, in making sweeping but stealthy changes in their prices, wages, methods and even in their legal status. They hoped thus to enable their Legislature plausibly to resist Scarborough's demand for a revision of the laws—why revise when the cry of monopoly had been shown to be a false issue raised by a demagogue to discredit the tried leaders of the party and to aggrandize himself? And, when Scarborough had been thoroughly "exposed," business could be resumed gradually.
But Scarborough had the better brain, and had character as well. He easily upset their program and pressed their Legislature so hard that it was kept in line only by pouring out money like water. This became a public scandal which made him stronger than ever and also made it seem difficult or impossible for the monopolies to get a corruptible Legislature at the next election. At last the people had in their service a lawyer equal in ability to the best the monopolies could buy, and one who understood human nature and political machinery to boot.
Dumont began to respect Scarborough profoundly—not for his character, which made him impregnable with the people, but for his intellect, which showed him how to convince the people of his character and to keep them convinced. When Merriweather came on "to take his beating" from his employer he said among other things deprecatory: "Scarborough's a dreamer. His head's among the clouds." Dumont retorted: "Yes, but his feet are on the ground—too damned firmly to suit me." And after a moment's thought, he added: "What a shame for such a brain to go to waste! Why, he could make millions."
He felt that Gladys was probably his best remaining card. She had been in Indianapolis visiting the whole of February, Scarborough's second month as governor, and had gone on to her brother in New York with a glowing report of her progress with Scarborough's sister Arabella, now a widow and at her own invitation living with him in Indianapolis to relieve him of the social duties of his office. She was a dozen years more the Arabella who had roused her father's wrath by her plans for educating her brother "like a gentleman"; and Olivia and Fred were irritated and even alarmed by her anything but helpful peculiarities—though Scarborough seemed cheerful and indifferent enough about them.
It was a temperamental impossibility for Dumont to believe that Scarborough could really be sincere in a course which was obviously unprofitable. Therefore he attached even more importance to Arabella's cordiality than did Gladys herself. And, when the Legislature adjourned and Scarborough returned to Saint X for a brief stay, Dumont sent Gladys post-haste back to the Eyrie—that is, she instantly and eagerly acted upon his hint.
A few evenings after her return, she and Pauline were on the south veranda alone in the starlight. She was in low spirits and presently began to rail against her lot.
"Don't be absurd," said Pauline. "You've no right to complain. You have everything—and you're—free!"
That word "free" was often on Pauline's lips in those days. And a close observer might have been struck by the tone in which she uttered it. Not the careless tone of those who have never had or have never lost freedom, but the lingering, longing tone of those who have had it, and have learned to value it through long years without it.
"Yes—everything!" replied Gladys, bitterly. "Everything except the one thing I want."
Pauline did not help her, but she was at the stage of suppressed feeling where desire to confide is stronger than pride.
"The one thing I want," she repeated. "Pauline, I used to think I'd never care much for any man, except to like it for him to like me. Men have always been a sort of amusement—and the oftener the man changed, the better the fun. I've known for several years that I simply must marry, but I've refused to face it. It seemed to me I was fated to wander the earth, homeless, begging from door to door for leave to come in and rest a while."
"You know perfectly well, Gladys, that this is your home."
"Of course—in a sense. It's as much my home as another woman's house could be. But"—with a little sob—"I've seen my mate and I want to begin my nest."
They were side by side on a wide, wicker sofa. Pauline made an impulsive move to put her arm round Gladys, then drew away and clasped her hands tightly in her lap.
Gladys was crying, sobbing, brokenly apologizing for it—"I'm a little idiot—but I can't help it—I haven't any pride left—a woman never does have, really, when she's in love—oh, Pauline, do you think he cares at all for me?" And after a pause she went on, too absorbed in herself to observe Pauline or to wonder at her silence: "Sometimes I think he does. Again I fear that—that he doesn't. And lately—why doesn't he come here any more?"
"You know how busy he is," said Pauline, in a voice so strained that Gladys ought to have noticed it.
"But it isn't that—I'm sure it isn't. No, it has something to do with me. It means either that he doesn't care for me or that—that he does care and is fighting against it. Oh, I don't know what to think." Then, after a pause: "How I hate being a woman! If I were a man I could find out the truth—settle it one way or the other. But I must sit dumb and wait, and wait, and wait! You don't know how I love him," she said brokenly, burying her face in the ends of the soft white shawl that was flung about her bare shoulders. "I can't help it—he's the best—he makes all the others look and talk like cheap imitations. He's the best, and a woman can't help wanting the best."
Pauline rose and leaned against the railing—she could evade the truth no longer. Gladys was in love with Scarborough, was at last caught in her own toils, would go on entangling herself deeper and deeper, abandoning herself more and more to a hopeless love, unless—
"What would you do, Pauline?" pleaded Gladys. "There must be some reason why he doesn't speak. It isn't fair to me—it isn't fair! I could stand anything—even giving him up—better than this uncertainty. It's—it's breaking my heart—I who thought I didn't have a heart."
"No, it isn't fair," said Pauline, to herself rather than to Gladys.
"I suppose you don't sympathize with me," Gladys went on. "I know you don't like him. I've noticed how strained and distant you are toward each other. And you seem to avoid each other. And he'll never talk of you to me. Did you have some sort of misunderstanding at college?"
"Yes," said Pauline, slowly. "A—a misunderstanding."
"And you both remember it, after all these years?"
"Yes," said Pauline.
"How relentless you are," said Gladys, "and how tenacious!" But she was too intent upon her own affairs to pursue a subject which seemed to lead away from them. Presently she rose.
"I'll be ashamed of having confessed when I see you in daylight. But I don't care. I shan't be sorry. I feel a little better. After all, why should I be ashamed of any one knowing I care for him?" And she sighed, laughed, went into the house, whistling softly—sad, depressed, but hopeful, feeling deep down that she surely must win where she had never known what it was to lose.
Pauline looked after her. "No, it isn't fair," she repeated. She stayed on the veranda, walking slowly to and fro not to make up her mind, for she had done that while Gladys was confessing, but to decide how she could best accomplish what she saw she must now no longer delay. It was not until two hours later that she went up to bed.
When Gladys came down at nine the next morning Pauline had just gone out—"I think, Miss Gladys, she told the coachman to drive to her father's," said the butler.
Gladys set out alone. Instead of keeping to the paths and the woods along the edge of the bluff she descended to the valley and the river road. She walked rapidly, her face glowing, her eyes sparkling—she was quick to respond to impressions through the senses, and to-day she felt so well physically that it reacted upon her mind and forced her spirits up. At the turn beyond Deer Creek bridge she met Scarborough suddenly. He, too, was afoot and alone, and his greeting was interpreted to her hopes by her spirits.
"May I turn and walk with you?" he asked.
"I'm finding myself disagreeable company today."
"You did look dull," she said, as they set out together, "dull as a love-sick German. But I supposed it was your executive pose."
"I was thinking that I'll be old before I know it." His old-young face was shadowed for an instant. "Old—that's an unpleasant thought, isn't it?"
"Unpleasant for a man," said Gladys, with a laugh, light as youth's dread of age. "For a woman, ghastly! Old and alone—either one's dreadful enough. But—the two together! I often think of them. Don't laugh at me—really I do. Don't you?"
"If you keep to that, our walk'll be a dismal failure. It's a road I never take—if I can help it."
"You don't look as though you were ever gloomy." Gladys glanced up at him admiringly. "I should have said you were one person the blue devils wouldn't dare attack."
"Yes, but they do. And sometimes they throw me."
"And trample you?"
"And trample me," he answered absently.
"That's because you're alone too much," she said with a look of tactful sympathy.
"Precisely," he replied. "But how am I to prevent that?"
"Marry, of course," she retorted, smiling gaily up at him, letting her heart just peep from her eyes.
"Thank you! And it sounds so easy! May I ask why you've refused to take your own medicine—you who say you are so often blue?"
She shrugged her shoulders. "I've always suspected the men who asked me. They were—" She did not finish what she feared might be an unwise, repelling remark in the circumstances.
"They were after your money," he finished for her.
She nodded. "They were Europeans," she explained. "Europeans want money when they marry."
"That's another of the curses of riches," he said judicially. "And if you marry a rich man over here, you may be pretty sure he'll marry you for your money. I've observed that rich men attach an exaggerated importance to money, always."
"I'd prefer to marry a poor man," she hastened to answer, her heart beating faster—certainly his warning against rich suitors must have been designed to help his own cause with her.
"Yes, that might be better," he agreed. "But you would have to be careful after you were married or he might fancy you were using your money to tyrannize over him. I've noticed that the poor husbands of rich women are supersensitive—often for cause."
"Oh, I'd give it all to him. He could do what he pleased with it. I'd not care so long as we were happy."
Scarborough liked the spirit of this, liked her look as she said it.
"That's very generous—very like you," he replied warmly. "But I don't think it would be at all wise. You'd be in a dangerous position. You might spoil him—great wealth is a great danger, and when it's suddenly acquired, and so easily— No, you'd better put your wealth aside and only use so much of it as will make your income equal to his—if you can stand living economically."
"I could stand anything with or from any one I cared for." Gladys was eager for the conversation to turn from the general to the particular. She went on, forcing her voice to hide her interest: "And you, why don't you cure your blues?"
"Oh, I shall," he replied carelessly. "But not with your medicine. Every one to his own prescription."
"And what's yours for yourself?" said Gladys, feeling tired and nervous from the strain of this delayed happiness.
"Mine?" He laughed. "My dreams."
"You are a strange combination, aren't you? In one way you're so very practical—with your politics and all that. And in another way—I suspect you of being sentimental—almost romantic."
"You've plucked out the heart of my mystery. My real name is non Quixote de Saint X."
"And has your Dulcinea red hands and a flat nose and freckles like the lady of Toboso?" Gladys' hands were white, her nose notably fine, her skin transparently clear.
"Being Don Quixote, I don't know it if she has."
"And you prefer to worship afar, and to send her news of your triumphs instead of going to her yourself?"
"I dare not go." He was looking away, far away. "There are wicked enchanters. I'm powerless. She alone can break their spells."
They walked in silence, her heart beating so loudly that she thought he must be hearing it, must be hearing what it was saying. Yes—she must break the spells. But how—but how? What must she say to make him see? Did he expect her to ask him to marry her? She had heard that rich women often were forced to make this concession to the pride of the men they wished to marry. On the other hand, was there ever a man less likely than Scarborough to let any obstacle stand between him and what he wanted?
The first huge drops of a summer rain pattered in big, round stains, brown upon the white of the road. He glanced up—a cloud was rolling from beyond the cliffs, was swiftly curtaining the blue.
"Come," he commanded, and they darted into the underbrush, he guiding her by her arm. A short dash among the trees and bushes and they were at the base of the bluff, were shielded by a shelf of rock.
"It'll be over soon," he assured her. "But you must stand close or you'll be drenched."
A clap of thunder deafened them as a flame and a force enswathed the sycamore tree a few yards away, blowing off its bark, scattering its branches, making it all in an instant a blackened and blasted wreck. Gladys gave a low scream of terror, fell against him, hid her face in his shoulder. She was trembling violently. He put his arm round her—if he had not supported her she would have fallen. She leaned against him, clinging to him, so that he felt the beat of her heart, the swell and fall of her bosom, felt the rush of her young blood through her veins, felt the thrill from her smooth, delicate, olive skin. And he, too, was trembling—shaken in all his nerves.
"Don't be afraid," he said—in his voice he unconsciously betrayed the impulse that was fighting for possession of him.
She drew herself closer to him with a long, tremulous sigh.
"I'm a coward," she murmured. "I'm shaking so that I can't stand." She tried to draw herself away—or did she only make pretense to him and to herself that she was trying?—then relaxed again into his arms.
The thunder cracked and crashed; the lightnings leaped in streaks and in sheets; the waters gushed from the torn clouds and obscured the light like a heavy veil. She looked up at him in the dimness—she, too, was drunk with the delirium of the storms raging without and within them. His brain swam giddily. The points of gold in her dark eyes were drawing him like so many powerful magnets. Their lips met and he caught her up in his arms. And for a moment all the fire of his intensely masculine nature, so long repressed, raged over her lips, her eyes, her hair, her cheeks, her chin.
A moment she lay, happy as a petrel, beaten by a tempest; a moment her thirsty heart drank in the ecstasy of the lightnings through her lips and skin and hair.
She opened her eyes to find out why there was a sudden calm. She saw him staring with set, white face through the rain-veil. His arms still held her, but where they had been like the clasp of life itself, they were now dead as the arms of a statue. A feeling of cold chilled her skin, trickled icily in and in. She released herself—he did not oppose her.
"It seems to me I'll never be able to look you—or myself—in the face again," he said at last.
"I didn't know it was in me to—to take advantage of a woman's helplessness."
"I wanted you to do what you did," she said simply.
He shook his head. "You are generous," he answered. "But I deserve nothing but your contempt."
"I wanted you to do it," she repeated. She was under the spell of her love and of his touch. She was clutching to save what she could, was desperately hoping it might not be so little as she feared. "I had the—the same impulse that you had." She looked at him timidly, with a pleading smile. "And please don't say you're sorry you did it, even if you feel so. You'll think me very bold—I know it isn't proper for young women to make such admissions. But—don't reproach yourself—please!"
If she could have looked into his mind as he stood there, crushed and degraded in his own eyes, she would have been a little consoled—for, in defiance of his self-scorn and self-hate, his nerves were tingling with the memory of that delirium, and his brain was throbbing with the surge of impulses long dormant, now imperious. But she was not even looking toward him—for, through her sense of shame, of wounded pride, her love was clamoring to her to cry out: "Take me in your arms again! I care not on what terms, only take me and hold me and kiss me."
The rain presently ceased as abruptly as it had begun and they returned under the dripping leaves to the highroad. She glanced anxiously at him as they walked toward the town, but he did not speak. She saw that if the silence was to be broken, she must break it.
"What can I say to convince you?" she asked, as if not he but she were the offender.
He did not answer.
"Won't you look at me, please?"
He looked, the color mounting in his cheeks, his eyes unsteady.
"Now, tell me you'll not make me suffer because you fancy you've wronged me. Isn't it ungallant of you to act this way after I've humiliated myself to confess I didn't mind?"
"Thank you," he said humbly, and looked away.
"You won't have it that I was in the least responsible?" She was teasing him now—he was plainly unaware of the meaning of her yielding. "He's so modest," she thought, and went on: "You won't permit me to flatter myself I was a temptation too strong even for your iron heart, Don Quixote?"
He flushed scarlet, and the suspicion, the realization of the truth set her eyes to flashing.
"It's before another woman he's abasing himself," she thought, "not before me. He isn't even thinking of me." When she spoke her tone was cold and sneering: "I hope she will forgive you. She certainly would if she could know what a paladin you are."
He winced, but did not answer. At the road up the bluffs she paused and there was an embarrassed silence. Then he poured out abrupt sentences:
"It was doubly base. I betrayed your friendly trust, I was false to her. Don't misunderstand—she's nothing to me. She's nothing to me, yet everything. I began really to live when I began to love her. And—every one must have a—a pole-star. And she's mine—the star I sail by, and always must. And—" He halted altogether, then blundered on: "I shall not forgive myself. But you—be merciful—forgive me—forget it!"
"I shall do neither," she replied curtly, jealousy and vanity stamping down the generous impulse that rose in response to his appeal. And she went up her road. A few yards and she paused, hoping to hear him coming after her. A few yards more and she sat down on a big boulder by the wayside. Until now all the wishes of her life had been more or less material, had been wishes which her wealth or the position her wealth gave had enabled her instantly to gratify. She buried her face in her arms and sobbed and rocked herself to and fro, in a cyclone of anger, and jealousy, and shame, and love, and despair.
"I hate him!" she exclaimed between clenched teeth. "I hate him, but—if he came and wanted me, oh, how I would LOVE him!"
Meanwhile Pauline was at her father's.
"He isn't down yet," said her mother. "You know, he doesn't finish dressing nowadays until he has read the papers and his mail. Then he walks in the garden."
"I'll go there," said Pauline. "Won't you bring him when he's ready?"
She never entered the garden that the ghosts of her childhood—how far, far it seemed!—did not join her, brushing against her, or rustling in tree and bush and leafy trellis. She paused at the end of the long arbor and sat on the rustic bench there. A few feet away was the bed of lilies-of-the-valley. Every spring of her childhood she used to run from the house on the first warm morning and hurry to it; and if her glance raised her hopes she would kneel upon the young grass and lower her head until her long golden hair touched the black ground; and the soil that had been hard and cold all winter would be cracked open this way and that; and from the cracks would issue an odor—the odor of life. And as she would peer into each crack in turn she would see, down, away down, the pale tip of what she knew to be an up-shooting slender shaft. And her heart would thrill with joy, for she knew that the shafts would presently rise green above the black earth, would unfold, would blossom, would bloom, would fling from tremulous bells a perfumed proclamation of the arrival of spring.
As she sat waiting, it seemed to her that through the black earth of her life she could see and feel the backward heralds of her spring—"after the long winter," she said to herself.
She glanced up—her father coming toward her. He was alone, was holding a folded letter uncertainly in his hand. He looked at her, his eyes full of pity and grief. "Pauline," he began, "has everything been—been well—of late between you and—your husband?"
She started. "No, father," she replied. Then, looking at him with clear directness: "I've not been showing you and mother the truth about John and me—not for a long time."
She saw that her answer relieved him. He hesitated, held out the letter.
"The best way is for you to read it," he said. It was a letter to him from Fanshaw. He was writing, he explained, because the discharge of a painful duty to himself would compel him "to give pain to your daughter whom I esteem highly," and he thought it only right "to prepare her and her family for what was coming, in order that they might be ready to take the action that would suggest itself." And he went on to relate his domestic troubles and his impending suit.
"Poor Leonora!" murmured Pauline, as she finished and sat thinking of all that Fanshaw's letter involved.
"Is it true, Polly?" asked her father.
She gave a great sigh of relief. How easy this letter had made all that she had been dreading! "Yes—it's true," she replied. "I've known about—about it ever since the time I came back from the East and didn't return."
The habitual pallor of her father's face changed to gray.
"I left him, father." She lifted her head, impatient of her stammering. A bright flush was in her face as she went on rapidly: "And I came to-day to tell you the whole story—to be truthful and honest again. I'm sick of deception and evasion. I can't stand it any longer—I mustn't. I—you don't know how I've shrunk from wounding mother and you. But I've no choice now. Father, I must be free—free!"
"And you shall be," replied her father. "He shall not wreck your life and Gardiner's."
Pauline stared at him. "Father!" she exclaimed.
He put his arm round her and drew her gently to him.
"I know the idea is repellent," he said, as if he were trying to persuade a child. "But it's right, Pauline. There are cases in which not to divorce would be a sin. I hope my daughter sees that this is one."
"I don't understand," she said confusedly. "I thought you and mother believed divorce was dreadful—no matter what might happen."
"We did, Pauline. But we—that is, I—had never had it brought home. A hint of this story was published just after you came last year. I thought it false, but it set me to thinking. 'If your daughter's husband had turned out to be as you once thought him, would it be right for her to live on with him? To live a lie, to pretend to keep her vows to love and honor him? Would it be right to condemn Gardiner to be poisoned by such a father?' And at last I saw the truth, and your mother agreed with me. We had been too narrow. We had been laying down our own notions as God's great justice."
Pauline drew away from her father so that she could look at him. And at last she saw into his heart. "If I had only known," she said, and sat numb and stunned.
"When you were coming home from college," her father went on, "your mother and I talked over what we should do. John had just confessed your secret marriage—"
"You knew that!"
"Yes, and we understood, Polly. You were so young—so headstrong—and you couldn't appreciate our reasons."
Pauline's brain was reeling.
"Your mother and I talked it over before you got home and thought it best to leave you entirely free to choose. But when we saw you overcome by joy—"
"Don't!" she interrupted, her voice a cry of pain. "I can't bear it! Don't!" Years of false self-sacrifice, of deceiving her parents and her child, of self-suppression and self-degradation, and this final cruelty to Gladys—all, all in vain, all a heaping of folly upon folly, of wrong upon wrong.
She rushed toward the house. She must fly somewhere—anywhere—to escape the thoughts that were picking with sharp beaks at her aching heart. Half-way up the walk she turned and fled to a refuge she would not have thought of half an hour before to her father's arms.
"Oh, father," she cried. "If I had only known you!"