Joe's daughter, staying on and on at Dawn Hill, was chief lieutenant, if not principal, in my conspiracy to drift Anita day by day further and further into the routine of the new life. Yet neither of us had shown by word or look that a thorough understanding existed between us. My part was to be unobtrusive, friendly, neither indifferent nor eager, and I held to it by taking care never to be left alone with Anita; Alva's part was to be herself—simple and natural and sensible, full of life and laughter, mocking at those moods that betray us into the absurdity of taking ourselves too seriously.
I was getting ready a new house in town as a surprise to Anita, and I took Alva into my plot. “I wish Anita's part of the house to be exactly to her liking,” said I. “Can't you set her to dreaming aloud what kind of place she would like to live in, what she would like to open her eyes on in the morning, what surroundings she'd like to dress in and read in, and all that?”
Alva had no difficulty in carrying out the suggestions. And by harassing Westlake incessantly, I succeeded in realizing her report of Anita's dream to the exact shade of the draperies and the silk that covered the walls. By pushing the work, I got the house done just as Alva was warning me that she could not remain longer at Dawn Hill, but must go home and get ready for her wedding. When I went down to arrange with her the last details of the surprise, who should meet me at the station but Anita herself? I took one glance at her serious face and, much disquieted, seated myself beside her in the little trap. Instead of following the usual route to the house, she turned her horse into the bay-shore road.
“Several days ago,” she began, as the bend hid the station, “I got a letter from some lawyers, saying that an uncle of mine had given me a large sum of money—a very large sum. I have been inquiring about it, and find it is mine absolutely.”
I braced myself against the worst. “She is about to tell me that she is leaving,” thought I. But I managed to say: “I'm glad to hear of your luck,” though I fear my tone was not especially joyous.
“So,” she went on, “I am in a position to pay back to you, I think, what my father and Sam took from you. It won't be enough, I'm afraid, to pay what you lost indirectly. But I have told the lawyers to make it all over to you.”
I could have laughed aloud. It was too ridiculous, this situation into which I had got myself. I did not know what to say. I could hardly keep out of my face how foolish this collapse of my crafty conspiracy made me feel. And then the full meaning of what she was doing came over me—the revelation of her character. I trusted myself to steal a glance at her; and for the first time I didn't see the thrilling azure sheen over her smooth white skin, though all her beauty was before me, as dazzling as when it compelled me to resolve to win her. No; I saw her, herself—the woman within. I had known from the outset that there was an altar of love within my temple of passion. I think that was my first real visit to it.
“Anita!” I said unsteadily. “Anita!”
The color flamed in her cheeks; we were silent for a long time.
“You—your people owe me nothing” I at length found voice to say. “Even if they did, I couldn't and wouldn't takeyourmoney. But, believe me, they owe me nothing.”
“You can not mislead me,” she answered. “When they asked me to become engaged to you, they told me about it.”
I had forgotten. The whole repulsive, rotten business came back to me. And, changed man that I had become in the last six months, I saw myself as I had been. I felt that she was looking at me, was reading the degrading confession in my telltale features.
“I will tell you the whole truth,” said I. “I did use your father's and your brother's debts to me as a means of gettingtoyou. But, before God, Anita, I swear I was honest with you when I said to you I never hoped or wished to win you in that way!”
“I believe you,” she replied, and her tone and expression made my heart leap with indescribable joy.
Love is sometimes most unwise in his use of the reins he puts on passion. Instead of acting as impulse commanded, I said clumsily, “And I am very different to-day from what I was last spring.” It never occurred to me how she might interpret those words.
“I know,” she replied. She waited several seconds before adding: “I, too, have changed. I see that I was far more guilty than you. There is no excuse for me. I was badly brought up, as you used to say, but—”
“No—no,” I began to protest.
She cut me short with a sad: “You need not be polite and spare my feelings. Let's not talk of it. Let us go back to the object I had in coming for you to-day.”
“You owe me nothing,” I repeated. “Your brother and your father settled long ago. I lost nothing through them. And I've learned that if I had never known you, Roebuck and Langdon would still have attacked me.”
“What my uncle gave me has been transferred to you,” said she, woman fashion, not hearing what she did not care to heed. “I can't make you accept it; but there it is, and there it stays.”
“I can not take it,” said I. “If you insist on leaving it in my name, I shall simply return it to your uncle.”
“I wrote him what I had done,” she rejoined. “His answer came yesterday. He approves it.”
“Approves it!” I exclaimed.
“You do not know how eccentric he is,” she explained, naturally misunderstanding my astonishment. She took a letter from her bosom and handed it to me. I read:
“DEAR MADAM: It was yours to do with as you pleased. If you ever find yourself in the mood to visit, Gull House is open to you, provided you bring no maid. I will not have female servants about.
“Yours truly,
“HOWARD FORRESTER.”
“You will consent now, will you not?” she asked, as I lifted my eyes from this characteristic note.
I saw that her peace of mind was at stake. “Yes—I consent.”
She gave a great sigh as at the laying down of a heavy burden. “Thank you,” was all she said, but she put a world of meaning into the words. She took the first homeward turning. We were nearly at the house before I found words that would pave the way toward expressing my thoughts—my longings and hopes.
“You say you have forgiven me,” said I. “Then we can be—friends?”
She was silent, and I took her somber expression to mean that she feared I was hiding some subtlety.
“I mean just what I say, Anita,” I hastened to explain. “Friends—simply friends.” And my manner fitted my words.
She looked strangely at me. “You would be content with that?” she asked.
I answered what I thought would please her. “Let us make the best of our bad bargain,” said I. “You can trust me now, don't you think you can?”
She nodded without speaking; we were at the door, and the servants were hastening out to receive us. Always the servants between us. Servants indoors, servants outdoors; morning, noon and night, from waking to sleeping, these servants to whom we are slaves. As those interrupting servants sent us each a separate way, her to her maid, me to my valet, I was depressed with the chill that the opportunity that has not been seen leaves behind it as it departs.
“Well,” said I to myself by way of consolation, as I was dressing for dinner, “she is certainly softening toward you, and when she sees the new house you will be still better friends.”
But, when the great day came, I was not so sure. Alva went for a “private view” with young Thornley; out of her enthusiasm she telephoned me from the very midst of the surroundings she found “sowonderful andsobeautiful”—thus she assured me, and her voice made it impossible to doubt. And, the evening before the great day, I, going for a final look round, could find no flaw serious enough to justify the sinking feeling that came over me every time I thought of what Anita would think when she saw my efforts to realize her dream. I set out for “home” half a dozen times at least, that afternoon, before I pulled myself together, called myself an ass, and, with a pause at Delmonico's for a drink, which I ordered and then rejected, finally pushed myself in at the door. What, a state my nerves were in!
Alva had departed; Anita was waiting for me in her sitting-room. When she heard me in the hall, just outside, she stood in the doorway. “Come in,” she said to me, who did not dare so much as a glance at her.
I entered. I must have looked as I felt—like a boy, summoned before the teacher to be whipped in presence of the entire school. Then I was conscious that she had my hand—how she had got it, I don't know—and that she was murmuring, with tears of happiness in her voice: “Oh, I can'tsayit!”
“Glad you like your own taste,” said I awkwardly. “You know, Alva told me.”
“But it's one thing to dream, and a very different thing to do,” she answered. Then, with smiling reproach: “And I've been thinking all summer that you were ruined! I've been expecting to hear every day that you had had to give up the fight.”
“Oh—that passed long ago,” said I.
“But you never told me,” she reminded me. “And I'm glad you didn't,” she added. “Not knowing saved me from doing something very foolish.” She reddened a little, smiled a great deal, dazzlingly, was altogether different from the ice-locked Anita of a short time before, different as June from January. And her hand—so intensely alive—seemed extremely comfortable in mine.
Even as my blood responded to that electric touch, I had a twinge of cynical bitterness. Yes, apparently I was at last getting what I had so long, so vainly, and, latterly, so hopelessly craved. But—whywas she giving it? Why had she withheld herself until this moment of material happiness? “I have to pay the rich man's price,” thought I, with a sigh.
It was in reaching out for some sweetness to take away this bitter taste in my honey that I said to her, “When you gave me that money from your uncle, you did it to help me out?”
She colored deeply. “How silly you must have thought me!” she answered.
I took her other hand. As I was drawing her toward me, the sudden pallor of her face and chill of her hands halted me once more, brought sickeningly before me the early days of my courtship when she had infuriated my pride by trying to be “submissive.” I looked round the room—that room into which I had put so much thought—and money. Money! “The rich man's price!” those delicately brocaded walls shimmered mockingly at me.
“Anita,” said I, “do youcarefor me?”
She murmured inaudibly. Evasion! thought I, and suspicion sprang on guard, bristling.
“Anita,” I repeated sternly, “do you care forme?”
“I am your wife,” she replied, her head drooping still lower. And hesitatingly she drew away from me. That seemed confirmation of my doubt and I said to her satirically, “You are willing to be my wife out of gratitude, to put it politely?”
She looked straight into my eyes and answered, “I can only say there is no one I like so well, and—I will give you all I have to give.”
“Like!” I exclaimed contemptuously, my nerves giving way altogether. “And you would be mywife! Do you want me todespiseyou?” I struck dead my poor, feeble hope that had been all but still-born. I rushed from the room, closing the door violently between us.
Such was our housewarming.
For what I proceeded to do, all sorts of motives, from the highest to the basest, have been attributed to me. Here is the truth: I had already pushed the medicine of hard work to its limit. It was as powerless against this new development as water against a drunkard's thirst. I must find some new, some compelling drug—some frenzy of activity that would swallow up my self as the battle makes the soldier forget his toothache. This confession may chagrin many who have believed in me. My enemies will hasten to say: “Aha, his motive was even more selfish and petty than we alleged.” But those who look at human nature honestly, and from the inside, will understand how I can concede that a selfish reason moved me to draw my sword, and still can claim a higher motive. In such straits as were mine, some men of my all-or-none temperament debauch themselves; others thresh about blindly, reckless whether they strike innocent or guilty. I did neither.
Probably many will recall that long before the “securities” of the reorganized coal combine were issued, I had in my daily letter to investors been preparing the public to give them a fitting reception. A few days after my whole being burst into flames of resentment against Anita, out came the new array of new stocks and bonds. Roebuck and Langdon arranged with the under writers for a “fake” four times over-subscription, indorsed by the two greatest banking houses in the Street. Despite this often-tried and always-good trick, the public refused to buy. I felt I had not been overestimating my power. But I made no move until the “securities” began to go up, and the financial reporters—under the influence where not actually in the pay of the Roebuck-Langdon clique—shouted that, “in spite of the malicious attacks from the gambling element, the new securities are being absorbed by the public at prices approximating their value.” Then—But I shall quote my investors' letter the following morning:
“At half-past nine yesterday—nine-twenty-eight, to be exact—President Melville, of the National Industrial Bank, loaned six hundred thousand dollars. He loaned it to Bill Van Nest, an ex-gambler and proprietor of pool rooms, now silent partner in Hoe & Wittekind, brokers, on the New York Stock Exchange, and also in Filbert & Jonas, curb brokers. He loaned it to Van Nest without security.
“Van Nest used the money yesterday to push up the price of the new coal securities by 'wash sales'—which means, by making false purchases and sales of the stock in order to give the public the impression of eager buying. Van Nest sold to himself and bought from himself 347,060 of the 352,681 shares traded in.
“Melville, in addition to being president of one of the largest banks in the world, is a director in no less than seventy-three great industrial enterprises, including railways, telegraph companies,savings-banks and life-insurance companies. Bill Van Nest has done time in the Nevada State Penitentiary for horse-stealing.”
That was all. And it was enough—quite enough. I was a national figure, as much so as if I had tried to assassinate the president. Indeed, I had exploded a bomb under a greater than the president—under the chiefs of the real government of the United States, the government that levied daily upon every citizen, and that had state and national and the principal municipal governments in its strong box.
I confess I was as much astounded at the effect of my bomb as old Melville must have been. I felt that I had been obscure, as I looked at the newspapers, with Matthew Blacklock appropriating almost the entire front page of each. I was the isolated, the conspicuous figure, standing alone upon the steps of the temple of Mammon, where mankind daily and devoutly comes to offer worship.
Not that the newspapers praised me. I recall none that spoke well of me. The nearest approach to praise was the “Blacklock squeals on the Wall Street gang” in one of the sensational penny sheets that strengthen the plutocracy by lying about it. Some of the papers insinuated that I had gone mad; others that I had been bought up by a rival gang to the Roebuck-Langdon clique; still others thought I was simply hunting notoriety. All were inclined to accept as a sufficient denial of my charges Melville's dignified refusal “to notice any attack from a quarter so discredited.”
As my electric whirled into Wall Street, I saw the crowd in front of the Textile Building, a dozen policemen keeping it in order. I descended amid cheers, and entered my offices through a mob struggling to shake hands with me—and, in my ignorance of mob mind, I was delighted and inspired! Just why a man who knows men, knows how wishy-washy they are as individuals, should be influenced by a demonstration from a mass of them, is hard to understand. But the fact is indisputable. They fooled me then; they could fool me again, in spite of all I have been through. There probably wasn't one in that mob for whose opinion I would have had the slightest respect had he come to me alone; yet as I listened to those shallow cheers and those worthless assurances of “the people are behind you, Blacklock,” I felt that I was a man with a mission!
Our main office was full, literally full, of newspaper men—reporters from morning papers, from afternoon papers, from out-of-town and foreign papers. I pushed through them, saying as I went: “My letter speaks for me, gentlemen, and will continue to speak for me. I have nothing to say except through it.”
“But the public—” urged one.
“It doesn't interest me,” said I, on my guard against the temptation to cant. “I am a banker and investment broker. I am interested only in my customers.”
And I shut myself in, giving strict orders to Joe that there was to be no talking about me or my campaign. “I don't purpose to let the newspapers make us cheap and notorious,” said I. “We must profit by the warning in the fate of all the other fellows who have sprung into notice by attacking these bandits.”
The first news I got was that Bill Van Nest had disappeared. As soon as the Stock Exchange opened, National Coal became the feature. But, instead of “wash sales,” Roebuck, Langdon and Melville were themselves, through various brokers, buying the stocks in large quantities to keep the prices up. My next letter was as brief as my first philippic:
“Bill Van Nest is at the Hotel Frankfort, Newark, under the name of Thomas Lowry. He was in telephonic communication with President Melville, of the National Industrial Bank, twice yesterday.
“The underwriters of the National Coal Company's new issues, frightened by yesterday's exposure, have compelled Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Mowbray Langdon and Mr. Melville themselves to buy. So, yesterday, those three gentlemen bought with real money, with their own money, large quantities of stocks which are worth less than half what they paid for them.
“They will continue to buy these stocks so long as the public holds aloof. They dare not let the prices slump. They hope that this storm will blow over, and that then the investing public will forget and will relieve them of their load.”
I had added: “But this storm won't blow over. It will become a cyclone.” I struck that out. “No prophecy,” said I to myself. “Your rule, iron-clad, must be—facts, always facts; only facts.”
The gambling section of the public took my hint and rushed into the market; the burden of protecting the underwriters was doubled, and more and more of the hoarded loot was disgorged. That must have been a costly day—for, ten minutes after the Stock Exchange closed, Roebuck sent for me.
“My compliments to him,” said I to his messenger, “but I am too busy. I'll be glad to see him here, however.”
“You know he dares not come to you,” said the messenger, Schilling, president of the National Manufactured Food Company, sometimes called the Poison Trust. “If he did, and it were to get out, there'd be a panic.”
“Probably,” replied I with a shrug. “That's no affair of mine. I'm not responsible for the rotten conditions which these so-called financiers have produced, and I shall not be disturbed by the crash which must come.”
Schilling gave me a genuine look of mingled pity and admiration. “I suppose you know what you're about,” said he, “but I think you're making a mistake.”
“Thanks, Ned,” said I—he had been my head clerk a few years before, and I had got him the chance with Roebuck which he had improved so well. “I'm going to have some fun. Can't live but once.”
“I know some people,” said he significantly, “who would go toanylengths to get an enemy out of the way.” He had lived close enough to Roebuck to peer into the black shadows of that satanic mind, and dimly to see the dread shapes that lurked there.
“I'm the safest man on Manhattan Island for the present,” said I.
“You remember Woodrow? I've always believed that he was murdered, and that the pistol they found beside him was a 'plant.'”
“You'd kill me yourself, if you got the orders, wouldn't you?” said I good-humoredly.
“Not personally,” replied he in the same spirit, yet serious, too, at bottom. “Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired to kill a man for five hundred dollars.”
I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds, was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He, personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for dividends.
Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and prostitution—for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so “respectable,” the applause for “success” so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of envy and idealism. And it usually is, I must admit.
Schilling lingered. “I hope you won't blame me for lining up against you, Matt,” said he. “I don't want to, but I've got to.”
“Why?”
“You know what'd become of me if I didn't.”
“You might become an honest man and get self-respect,” I suggested with friendly satire.
“That's all very well for you to say,” was his laughing retort. “You've made yourself tight and tidy for the blow. But I've a family, and a damned expensive one, too. And if I didn't stand by this gang, they'd take everything I've got away from me. No, Matt, each of us to his own game. Whatisyour game, anyhow?”
“Fun—just fun. Playing the pipe to see the big fellows dance.”
But he didn't believe it. And no one has believed it—not even my most devoted followers. To this day Joe Ball more than half suspects that my real objective was huge personal gain. That any rich man should do anything except for the purpose of growing richer seems incredible. That any rich man should retain or regain the sympathies and viewpoint of the class from which he sprang, and should become a “traitor” to the class to which he belongs, seems preposterous. I confess I don't fully understand my own case. Who ever does?
My “daily letters” had now ceased to be advertisements, had become news, sought by all the newspapers of this country and of the big cities in Great Britain. I could have made a large saving by no longer paying my sixty-odd regular papers for inserting them. But I was looking too far ahead to blunder into that fatal mistake. Instead, I signed a year's contract with each of my papers, they guaranteeing to print my advertisements, I guaranteeing to protect them against loss on libel suits. I organized a dummy news bureau, and through it got contracts with the telegraph companies. Thus insured against the cutting of my communications with the public, I was ready for the real campaign.
It began with my “History of the National Coal Company.” I need not repeat that famous history here. I need recall only the main points—how I proved that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share, that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred, that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking coal railways, in ejecting American labor and substituting helots from eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning to unload the mass of almost worthless securities at high prices, then to get from under the market and let the bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per cent, on the actual capital invested. Less and dearer coal; lower wages and more ignorant laborers; enormous profits absorbed without mercy into a few pockets.
On the day the seventh chapter of this history appeared, the telegraph companies notified me that they would transmit no more of my matter. They feared the consequences in libel suits, explained Moseby, general manager of one of the companies.
“But I guarantee to protect you,” said I. “I will give bond in any amount you ask.”
“We can't take the risk, Mr. Blacklock,” replied he. The twinkle in his eye told me why, and also that he, like every one else in the country except the clique, was in sympathy with me.
My lawyers found an honest judge, and I got an injunction that compelled the companies to transmit under my contracts. I suspended the “History” for one day, and sent out in place of it an account of this attempt to shut me off from the public. “Hereafter,” said I, in the last paragraph in my letter, “I shall end each day's chapter with a forecast of what the next day's chapter is to be. If for any reason it fails to appear, the public will know that somebody has been coerced by Roebuck, Melville & Co.”
That afternoon—or, was it the next?—I happened to go home early. I have never been able to keep alive anger against any one. My anger against Anita had long ago died away, had been succeeded by regret and remorse that I had let my nerves, or whatever the accursed cause was, whirl me into such an outburst. Not that I regretted having rejected what I still felt was insulting to me and degrading to her; simply that my manner should have been different. There was no necessity or excuse for violence in showing her that I would not, could not, accept from gratitude what only love has the right to give. And I had long been casting about for some way to apologize—not easy to do, when her distant manner toward me made it difficult for me to find even the necessary commonplaces to “keep up appearances” before the servants on the few occasions on which we accidentally met.
But, as I was saying, I came up from the office and stretched myself on—the lounge in my private room adjoining the library. I had read myself into a doze, when a servant brought me a card. I glanced at it as it lay upon his extended tray. “Gerald Monson,” I read aloud. “What does the damned rascal want?” I asked.
The servant smiled. He knew as well as I how Monson, after I dismissed him with a present of six months' pay, had given the newspapers the story—or, rather, his version of the story—of my efforts to educate myself in the “arts and graces of a gentleman.”
“Mr. Monson says he wishes to see you particular, sir,” said he.
“Well—I'll see him,” said I. I despised him too much to dislike him, and I thought he might possibly be in want. But that notion vanished the instant I set eyes upon him. He was obviously at the very top of the wave. “Hello, Monson,” was my greeting, in it no reminder of his treachery.
“Howdy, Blacklock,” said he. “I've come on a little errand for Mrs. Langdon.” Then, with that nasty grin of his: “You know, I'm looking after things for her since the bust-up.”
“No, I didn't—know,” said I curtly, suppressing my instant curiosity. “What does Mrs. Langdon want?”
“To see you—for just a few minutes—whenever it is convenient.”
“If Mrs. Langdon has business with me, I'll see her at my office,” said I. She was one of the fashionables that had got herself into my black books by her treatment of Anita since the break with the Ellerslys.
“She wishes to come to you here—this afternoon, if you are to be at home. She asked me to say that her business is important—and very private.”
I hesitated, but I could think of no good excuse for refusing. “I'll be here an hour,” said I. “Good day.”
He gave me no time to change my mind.
Something—perhaps it was his curious expression as he took himself off—made me begin to regret. The more I thought of the matter, the less I thought of my having made any civil concession to a woman who had acted so badly toward Anita and myself. He had not been gone a quarter of an hour before I went to Anita in her sitting-room. Always, the instant I entered the outer door of her part of our house, that powerful, intoxicating fascination that she had for me began to take possession of my senses. It was in every garment she wore. It seemed to linger in any place where she had been, for a long time after she left it. She was at a small desk by the window, was writing letters.
“May I interrupt?” said I. “Monson was here a few minutes ago—from Mrs. Langdon. She wants to see me. I told him I would see her here. Then it occurred to me that perhaps I had been too good-natured. What do you think?”
I could not see her face, but only the back of her head, and the loose coils of magnetic hair and the white nape of her graceful neck. As I began to speak, she stopped writing, her pen suspended over the sheet of paper. After I ended there was a long silence.
“I'll not see her,” said I. “I don't quite understand why I yielded.” And I turned to go.
“Wait—please,” came from her abruptly.
Another long silence. Then I: “If she comes here, I think the only person who can properly receive her is you.”
“No—you must see her,” said Anita at last. And she turned round in her chair until she was facing me. Her expression—I can not describe it. I can only say that it gave me a sense of impending calamity.
“I'd rather not—much rather not,” said I.
“I particularly wish you to see her,” she replied, and she turned back to her writing. I saw her pen poised as if she were about to begin; but she did not begin—and I felt that she would not. With my mind shadowed with vague dread, I left that mysterious stillness, and went back to the library.
It was not long before Mrs. Langdon was announced. There are some women to whom a haggard look is becoming; she is one of them. She was much thinner than when I last saw her; instead of her former restless, petulant, suspicious expression, she now looked tragically sad. “May I trouble you to close the door?” said she, when the servant had withdrawn.
I closed the door.
“I've come,” she began, without seating herself, “to make you as unhappy, I fear, as I am. I've hesitated long before coming. But I am desperate. The one hope I have left is that you and I between us may be able to—to—that you and I may be able to help each other.”
I waited.
“I suppose there are people,” she went on, “who have never known what it was to—really to care for some one else. They would despise me for clinging to a man after he has shown me that—that his love has ceased.”
“Pardon me, Mrs. Langdon,” I interrupted. “You apparently think your husband and I are intimate friends. Before you go any further, I must disabuse you of that idea.”
She looked at me in open astonishment. “You do not know why my husband has left me?”
“Until a few minutes ago, I did not know that he had left you,” I said. “And I do not wish to know why.”
Her expression of astonishment changed to mockery. “Oh!” she sneered. “Your wife has fooled you into thinking it a one-sided affair. Well, I tell you, she is as much to blame as he—more. For he did love me when he married me; did love me until she got him under her spell again.”
I thought I understood. “You have been misled, Mrs. Langdon,” said I gently, pitying her as the victim of her insane jealousy. “You have—”
“Ask your wife,” she interrupted angrily. “Hereafter, you can't pretend ignorance. For I'll at least be revenged. She failed utterly to trap him into marriage when she was a poor girl, and—”
“Before you go any further,” said I coldly, “let me set you right. My wife was at one time engaged to your husband's brother, but—”
“Tom?” she interrupted. And her laugh made me bite my lip. “So she told you that! I don't see how she dared. Why, everybody knows that she and Mowbray were engaged, and that he broke it off to marry me.”
All in an instant everything that had been confused in my affairs at home and down town became clear. I understood why I had been pursued relentlessly in Wall Street; why I had been unable to make the least impression on the barriers between Anita and myself. You will imagine that some terrible emotion at once dominated me. But this is not a romance; only the veracious chronicle of certain human beings. My first emotion was—relief that it was not Tom Langdon. “I ought to have known she couldn't care forhim,” said I to myself. I, contending with Tom Langdon for a woman's love had always made me shrink. But Mowbray—that was vastly different. My respect for myself and for Anita rose.
“No,” said I to Mrs. Langdon, “my wife did not tell me, never spoke of it. What I said to you was purely a guess of my own. I had no interest in the matter—and haven't. I have absolute confidence in my wife. I feel ashamed that you have provoked me into saying so.” I opened the door.
“I am not going yet,” said she angrily. “Yesterday morning Mowbray and she were riding together in the Riverside Drive. Ask her groom.”
“What of it?” said I. Then, as she did not rise, I rang the bell. When the servant came, I said: “Please tell Mrs. Blacklock that Mrs. Langdon is in the library—and that I am here, and gave you the message.”
As soon as the servant was gone, she said: “No doubt she'll lie to you. These women that steal other women's property are usually clever at fooling their own silly husbands.”
“I do not intend to ask her,” I replied. “To ask her would be an insult.”
She made no comment beyond a scornful toss of the head. We both had our gaze fixed upon the door through which Anita would enter. When she finally did appear, I, after one glance at her, turned—it must have been triumphantly—upon her accuser. I had not doubted, but where is the faith that is not the stronger for confirmation? And confirmation there was in the very atmosphere round that stately, still figure. She looked calmly, first at Mrs. Langdon, then at me.
“I sent for you,” said I, “because I thought that you, rather than I, should request Mrs. Langdon to leave your house.”
At that Mrs. Langdon was on her feet, and blazing. “Fool!” she flared at me. “Oh, the fools women make of men!” Then to Anita: “You—you—But no, I must not permit you to drag me down to your level. Tell your husband—tell him that you were riding with my husband in the Riverside Drive yesterday.”
I stepped between her and Anita. “My wife will not answer you,” said I. “I hope, Madam, you will spare us the necessity of a painful scene. But leave you must—at once.”
She looked wildly round, clasped her hands, suddenly burst into tears. If she had but known, she could have had her own way after that, without any attempt from me to oppose her. For she was evidently unutterably wretched—and no one knew better than I the sufferings of unreturned love. But she had given me up; slowly, sobbing, she left the room, I opening the door for her and closing it behind her.
“I almost broke down myself,” said I to Anita. “Poor woman! How can you be so calm? You women in your relations with each other are—a mystery.”
“I have only contempt for a woman who tries to hold a man when he wishes to go,” said Anita, with quiet but energetic bitterness. “Besides”—she hesitated an instant before going on—“Gladys deserves her fate. She doesn't really care for him. She's only jealous of him. She never did love him.”
“How do you know?” said I sharply, trying to persuade myself it was not an ugly suspicion in me that lifted its head and shot out that question.
“Because he never loved her,” she replied. “The feeling a woman has for a man or a man for a woman, without any response, isn't love, isn't worthy the name of love. It's a sort of baffled covetousness. Love means generosity, not greediness.” Then—“Why do you not ask me whether what she said is true?”
The change in her tone with that last sentence, the strange, ominous note in it, startled me,
“Because,” replied I, “as I said to her, to ask my wife such a question would be to insult her. If you were riding with him, it was an accident.” As if my rude repulse of her overtures and my keeping away from her ever since would not have justified her in almost anything.
She flushed the dark red of shame, but her gaze held steady and unflinching upon mine. “It was not altogether by accident,” she said. And I think she expected me to kill her.
When a man admits and respects a woman's rights where he is himself concerned, he either is no longer interested in her or has begun to love her so well that he can control the savage and selfish instincts of passion. If Mowbray Langdon had been there, I might have killed them both; but he was not there, and she, facing me without fear, was not the woman to be suspected of the stealthy and traitorous.
“It was he that you meant when you warned me you cared for another man?” said I, so quietly that I wondered at myself; wondered what had become of the “Black Matt” who had used his fists almost as much as his brains in fighting his way up.
“Yes,” she said, her head down now.
A long pause.
“You wish to be free?” I asked, and my tone must have been gentle.
“I wish to free you,” she replied slowly and deliberately.
There was a long silence. Then I said: “I must think it all out. I once told you how I felt about these matters. I've greatly changed my mind since our talk that night in the Willoughby; but my prejudices are still with me. Perhaps you will not be surprised at that—you whose prejudices have cost me so dear.”
I thought she was going to speak. Instead she turned away, so that I could no longer see her face.
“Our marriage was a miserable mistake,” I went on, struggling to be just and judicial, and to seem calm. “I admit it now. Fortunately, we are both still young—you very young. Mistakes in youth are never fatal. But, Anita, do not blunder out of one mistake into another. You are no longer a child, as you were when I married you. You will be careful not to let judgments formed of him long ago decide you for him as they decided you against me.”
“I wish to be free,” she said, each word coming with an effort, “as much on your account as on my own.” Then, and it seemed to me merely a truly feminine attempt to shirk responsibility, she added, “I am glad my going will be a relief to you.”
“Yes, it will be a relief,” I confessed. “Our situation has become intolerable.” I had reached my limit of self-control. I put out my hand. “Good-by,” I said.
If she had wept, it might have modified my conviction that everything was at an end between us. But she did not weep. “Can you ever forgive me?” she asked.
“Let's not talk of forgiveness,” said I, and I fear my voice and manner were gruff, as I strove not to break down. “Let's try to forget.” And I touched her hand and hastened away.
When two human beings set out to misunderstand each other, how fast and far they go! How shut-in we are from each other, with only halting means of communication that break down under the slightest strain!
As I was leaving the house next morning, I gave Sanders this note for her:
“I have gone to live at the Downtown Hotel. When you have decided what course to take, let me know. If my 'rights' ever had any substance, they have starved away to such weak things that they collapse even as I try to set them up. I hope your freedom will give you happiness, and me peace.”
“You are ill, sir?” asked my old servant, my old friend, as he took the note.
“Stay with her, Sanders, as long as she wishes,” said I, ignoring his question. “Then come to me.”
His look made me shake hands with him. As I did it, we both remembered the last time we had shaken hands—when he had the roses for my home-coming with my bride. It seemed to me I could smell those roses.