CHAPTER VI
THROUGH PURPLE CURTAINS
When Nan made up her mind, she acted with lightning rapidity. She would force Stuart to an avowal of love that would fix their relation beyond disturbance by the little singer. She had too fine a sense of values to permit herself to become entangled in an intrigue.
She could wait, and gain in power for the waiting. Her physician had told her that Bivens's days were numbered. Stuart had waited twelve years in silence; he could wait the few months more of her husband's flickering life.
But on one thing she was determined. Now that another woman had appeared on the scene she would not live in suspense, she must know that he loved her still, loved her passionately, madly as she believed he did. But he must say it. She must hear his voice quiver with its old fiery intensity. She wished this as she had never longed for anything on earth, and for twelve years she had lived in a magic world where she had only to breathe a desire to have it fulfilled.
Stuart had baffled and eluded her on every point when she had thought he was about to betray his passion. Here was something mere money had no power to command. Well, she had other powers. She would use them to the limit. She would no longer risk the danger of delay.
She had no difficulty in persuading Bivens to urge Stuart to visit their country estate in the mountains of North Carolina. The doctor had ordered him there to live in the open air.
The young lawyer refused to go at first, but Bivens urged with such pathetic eagerness he was compelled to accept.
It was a warm beautiful morning the last week in March when he alighted on the platform of the little railroad station on the estate, and took his seat beside Nan in her big touring car. The fruit trees were in full bloom, and their perfume filled the air. The hum of bees and the song of birds he had known in his boyhood thrilled his heart. He drew a deep breath of joy, and without a struggle resigned himself to the charm of it all.
"It's glorious, Nan!" he exclaimed.
"Your coming makes it perfect, Jim," she answered, tenderly, and turning to the chauffeur said:
"Drive for an hour before going to the house, Collins."
The chauffeur tipped his cap and the throbbing machine shot around a curve and swept along the river's edge down the green carpeted valley which stretches out for miles below the ramparts of the great chateau on the mountain-side above.
"There's the house, Jim!" Nan cried, pointing to the heights on the left.
Stuart could not suppress an exclamation of delight.
"Magnificent!" he said, with enthusiasm.
As the river made a graceful curve the great building swept into full view—a stunning pile of marble three hundred feet long, its tower piercing the turquoise sky in solemn grandeur. The stone parapet, on which its front wall was built, rose in massive strength a hundred feet from the ledge in the granite cliff before touching the first line of the white stones of the house itself.
At the end a formal garden had been built on the foundations of masonry which cost a hundred thousand dollars.
"What a background that row of live oaks make behind the garden!" he exclaimed.
"Don't they?" she answered. "You would hardly believe it, but we planted every one of those trees."
"Nonsense! They must be two feet in diameter."
"More; not one of them is less than three. We moved a hundred of them from the woods, without breaking the dirt from their roots—built special machinery to do it. I think Cal is prouder of those trees than he is of the house."
For an hour the car swept like a spirit over the miles of smooth macadam private roads Bivens had built. At each graceful turn his wonder increased at the luxurious outlay of millions which the little man had spent to gratify a whim.
From each hilltop, as the huge gleaming castle came into view from a new angle, revealing its marvellous beauty, he thought with a touch of pity of the shambling figure of the stricken man limping through its halls helpless, lonely, miserable. What strange pranks Fate plays with the mighty as well as the lowly! So frail was the broken body now he did not dare risk a cold by taking a ride with his wife.
The machine turned suddenly up a hill and glided through two iron gates opening on the lawn and the great white chateau loomed before them in a flash of blinding beauty. Stuart caught his breath.
Turning to Nan he shook his head slowly:
"Don't you like it?" she laughed.
"I was just wondering."
"At what?"
"Whether this is the Republic for which our struggling fathers fought and died? America you know, Nan, is the tall rude youth who saw a vision, made his way into the wilderness, slept on the ground, fought with hunger and wild beasts and grew strong by the labour of his right arm. It would be a strange thing if all he has learned is to crawl back to where he started and build a castle exactly like the one from which the tyrants drove him in the Old World."
"What a strange fellow you are, Jim." Her answer carried with it a touch of resentment. "This house is mine, mine—not America's—please remember that. Let the future American take of himself!"
"Certainly, I understand," he answered quickly, as the car stopped under the vaulted porte-cochère. "You wouldn't be a woman if you didn't feel that way. All right; I'm in your hands. To the devil with the future American!"
"That's better!" she laughed.
Stuart shook hands with Bivens and was shocked to find him so weak.
The little man held his hand with a lingering wistfulness as he looked into his friend's strong face.
"You don't know how rich you are, Jim," he said, feebly, "with this hand that grips like iron. I'd give millions to feel my heart beat like yours to-day."
"You'll get better down here," Stuart answered, cheerfully.
"I'm trying it anyhow," he said listlessly. "Make yourself at home, old boy. This house is my pride. I want Nan to show you every nook and corner in it. I wish I could trot around with you, but I can't."
"As soon as you've changed your clothes," Nan said, familiarly, "come down to the library and I'll show you around."
Stuart followed the man assigned as his valet to the electric elevator and in a minute stepped out on the fourth floor. He observed with a smile that his room number was 157.
"The idea of living in a huge hotel and calling it a home!" he mused, with grim humour. "Room 157; great Scott!"
His hostess showed him first the library. The magnificent room contained more than forty thousand volumes, bound in hand-tooled morocco.
"The funny thing, of course," Nan whispered, "is that Cal has never read one of these exquisitely bound books."
"Why on earth did he make this room the most stately and beautiful one in the house?"
"Maybe he didn't!" she laughed. "I'm going to give you a privilege no mere man has ever enjoyed in this house before—I am going to show you my own rooms. Will you appreciate the honour?"
The man answered with a bantering smile.
"If I live to tell the story!"
When the tour of inspection had been completed she led him to her own suite, which was located in the south-western corner, overlooking the magnificent formal gardens with their artificial lake, fountains, statuary and a wilderness of flowers, and farther on over the beautiful valleys of the Swannanoa and the French Broad rivers. Beyond the river valleys rose range after range of mountains until the last dim peaks were lost in the clouds.
The magnificence of her bed-room was stunning. Stuart rubbed his eyes in amazement.
The bedstead seemed a thing of life—so elaborate and wonderful was its art. Built of massive ebony with the most remarkable ivory carvings set in its gleaming black surface, artists, as many as could touch the material, had worked two years on the carving alone. The allegorical pictures cut into the broad band of ivory which ran around the frame had required the time of four art-workmen for eighteen months.
Stuart stood fascinated.
"You see that magnificent piece of ivory on the head, Jim?" she asked, with sparkling eyes.
"The most massive solid piece I ever saw!" he exclaimed. "I never dreamed the elephant had ever lived with such a tusk."
"We found him at last!" Nan cried, with pride. "It took the time of fourteen hunters in Africa for seven months."
"I can easily believe it," Stuart answered. "Ludwig of Bavaria surely never dreamed anything like this."
"The walls you see are panelled in Louis XV style, permitting the most elaborate carvings which I had heavily guilded on backgrounds of white enamel, but the thing I love best about this panelling, is not the panel at all—it's the rich purple and gold Genoese velvet. I had it made by a noted firm in Lyons. Don't you think it exquisite?"
"If I ever get rich I'll have a piece of it for the collar of my coat."
"I got my painters from Paris to do the ceilings. They worked very quickly, but they knew how to charge. The window curtains, you see, are of the same material as the purple and gold velvet in the panels, while the under curtains are hand-woven of Brussels net and interwoven with silk. The wardrobe, little washstand and dressing table are of ebony and ivory, the chairs, of solid ivory inlaid with gold and ebony, were all made to match the bedstead."
Stuart looked at his hostess curiously.
"I thought I knew you, Nan, but this is a revelation. I could never have guessed by the wildest leap of my imagination. It's beyond belief."
"Don't you like it?" she asked, with a hurt expression.
"I'm stunned. The most wonderful thing to me in the room, though, is not the bedstead, but the woman standing beside it."
A flash of light came from the dark eyes and the magnificent figure grew tense for a moment as she smiled with a look of inquiry.
"I'm lost in wonder at the riotous glory of your capacity for sensuous joy. I could imagine Juno on the heights of Olympus executing such a dream of mad luxury, but I could never have conceived of this, here, if I had not seen it. And yet, now that I see you in the setting, I'm sure you were made for it. The whole scheme is harmonious—it scares me——"
"Scares you?" she repeated with quick displeasure.
"Yes," he went on, jokingly. "It almost reconciles me to being a bachelor."
A look of pain swept the expressive face and he was sorry he had said it. The joke seemed out of harmony with her mood. She had taken herself seriously in the creation of this room, and had spent on it a round million. The effect it had produced on the man's mind was anything but flippant. He dared not tell how deeply he was moved, how every desire had awakened into fierce, cruel longing as the subtle scheme of sensuous dreaming had unfolded itself before his eyes. He began to wonder whether there were really any complexity or any mystery at all about her, whether she were not very simple and very elemental.
The picture she made standing in this wonderful room was one that never faded from his memory. The poise of her superb form; the fires that smouldered in the depths of her eyes; the tenderness with which her senses seemed to drink in the daring luxury; the smile that played about her lips, joyous, sensuous, cruel!
In vivid flashes he saw in her shining face the record of it all—the naked African hunters, crawling through forest jungles, stalking and bringing down in pools of blood the huge beasts who paid their tribute to her beauty; the army of toiling artists who bent their aching backs for days and weeks and months and years, carving the pictures in those white shining surfaces to please her fancy; the bowed figures of the weavers in Lyons and Brussels, these deft fingers working into matchless form the costly fabrics to please her eye and soothe the touch of her fingers as she drew back her curtains of purple and gold to let in the morning sunlight!
He wondered vaguely what such a woman, clothed with such power, would do if suddenly thwarted in a wish on which her heart was set?
And then it swept over him that she was no strange Egyptian princess, no sorceress of the Nile, no fairy of poet's fancy, but just the girl he had loved and lost and yet who had come back into his life in the dazzling splendour of her own day-dreams—one of the rulers of the world. He looked at her a moment and she seemed a being of another planet. He looked again and saw the laughing school-girl, his playmate on the red hills of his native state.
"Why so pensive, Jim?" she asked.
"It seems all a dream, Nan," he answered. "I'll rub my eyes and wake up directly. I thought your New York house a miracle. This is fairyland."
"Perhaps it would be," she said, looking at him a moment through half closed eyes, "if only the prince——"
A look of pain unconsciously clouded his face and the sentence was not finished.
CHAPTER VII
THE LAND OF THE SKY
On the fourth day Nan planned a coaching party to ascend Mount Mitchell, the highest peak in the Land of the Sky, the highest point of ground this side the Rockies. She had taken this trip with Stuart sixteen years before. She was then but fifteen, and he had just begun to dangle at her heels. She did not tell him their destination, but left him to discover for himself that they were travelling over the same old quiet road.
The party consisted of half a dozen boys and girls whom Nan was chaperoning, Stuart, the footman and coachman. The start was made at sunrise. The morning was glorious, the air rich with the full breath of a southern spring. The footman lifted the bugle to his lips, and its music rang over the hills and broke into a thousand echoes as its notes bounded upward from cliff to cliff. The whip cracked over the back of four sleek horses and they were off, amid screams of laughter from the youngsters.
Stuart felt his heart leap with the joy of youth. The rivers and mountains, birds and fields of his native heath were calling once more, and his soul answered with a cry!
At the foot of the first hill the coach suddenly stopped beside the banks of the Swannanoa River.
Nan leaped to the ground, drew Stuart with her to the rear of the coach, and raised her arms.
"Lift me up," she cried, laughing.
He placed his hands under her arms and with a leap and a cry of laughter she was in the empty baggage rack.
"Now up with you!" she cried.
In a moment Stuart was seated snugly by her side and the big red coach was rolling along the old road beside the banks of the laughing river.
"Now, sir," Nan whispered, "do you know where you are going?"
Stuart nodded.
"Where?" she asked, mischievously, as she laid her warm hand with a sudden grip on his.
"To a certain peak among the clouds, where you and I once went a thousand years ago."
Nan nestled a little closer—or perhaps it was the swaying of the coach that made him think she did—and softly said:
"You remember this road?"
"I've seen it a hundred times in my dreams since that wonderful day. It winds along the banks of the Swannanoa for twenty miles, always climbing higher and higher until the river becomes a limpid trout stream. We stop at the old road-house, stay all night, and next morning take the bridle path with the funny pack-horses and climb to the first mountain top, still following the little stream. We stoop to drink from the spring which is the river's source—a deep bold spring hung with long festoons of green moss and set with ferns and rhododendron——"
"Fine, Jimmy, fine!" she cried with girlish mockery. "Your geography lesson was perfect! You can walk home with me after school."
Stuart looked at her and broke into a laugh. Again they were boy and girl, and the only change he could see was that she was more splendidly beautiful at thirty-one than she had ever promised to be at fifteen.
The spirit of joy was resistless. He flung to the winds the last shred of conventional dignity as the coach rolled lazily over the rocky road, throwing them from side to side.
"You remember how shocked you were in this same seat, Jim, that day in the sweet long ago when the old coach threw me into your arms?"
"Yes, I felt that I was taking a mean advantage of you."
"I blushed furiously, didn't I?"
"Yes, and I wonder now what your real thoughts were; you don't remember, I suppose?"
"As distinctly as though it were yesterday," Nan answered, dreamily.
"What did you think of my embarrassment?"
"I thought you were an awful fool not to accept more gracefully and thankfully the providence which threw a pretty girl your way."
The coach gave a sudden lurch and threw her into Stuart's arms again.
"And now?" he cried, laughingly, as he held her firmly for a moment, to prevent her falling.
She blushed furiously, threw the ringlets of dark hair from her face and drew back to her position.
"Now, of course, it's unlawful," she answered with sober playfulness.
The man watched her slyly for the next half-mile. She was very, very quiet. Was he mistaken in the idea that her body had trembled with unusual violence for the moment he had held her? Or was it the quiver of the coach over the gravel in the road and the swaying of their seat? The sense of danger which the little incident roused was only momentary. The scenes through which they were passing were resistless. He caught the odour of crushed violets from the fence corner and the smell of the young grass broken beneath the hoof of a horse; the ploughman was turning at the end of the row. The low music of the river and the panorama of white fleeting clouds across the blue of matchless southern skies, awoke a thousand memories. Again he was a Southern boy. He heard the laughter of big-mouthed, jolly negroes eating watermelons in the shade of great trees and the song of mocking birds in the stillness of summer nights!
A rabbit ran across the road and he smiled at the recollection of his first hunt. A quail whistled from the tangle of blackberry briars by the roadside. He looked quickly and saw the bob white sitting on the top rail of the old worn fence.
He seized Nan's arm.
"Look, Nan!"
She looked and smiled and the tears came unbidden. She turned away a moment and he didn't see.
They spent the night at the same old road-house and slept on feather beds. He hadn't felt the touch of a feather bed in years. He dreamed that he was at school again, a man of thirty-five, playing marbles with a crowd of towheaded boys and they were beating him at the game while Nan was standing near, her long plait of black hair hanging down her back, laughing at him because he was barefooted! He woke with a groan, shook off the nightmare, and slept soundly until morning.
They started next day at eight o'clock with the pack-horses to make the trip along the dim bridle trail, fourteen miles up the sides of frowning cliffs and over the tops of balsam-crowned peaks to the summit of Mount Mitchell.
Nan led the way, mounted on a sure-footed young stallion, and Stuart followed her on a little black mule he had selected from the barn for his exact likeness to one he had raised as a pet when a boy. The youngsters came struggling after them, mounted on an assortment of shaggy, scrubby looking animals that knew the mountain path as a rabbit knows his trail in the jungle.
They stopped for luncheon at the spring which forms the source of the Swannanoa and Stuart drank again from its cold limpid waters, while Nan's laughter rang in his ears.
At one o'clock they passed through the first series of clouds and out into the sunlight beyond. The next line of clouds was dark and threatening and suddenly poured rain. Slowly but surely the horses picked their way up the mountain-side through the storm and suddenly walked out into the sunlight again; they looked down on the smooth flat surface of the clouds through which they had passed.
"Glorious!" Stuart cried.
"We didn't see this when we came before, you remember," she answered. "It rained all the way up."
"Yes, it rains up here almost every day in the year, but the guide says we're going to get a view of six states to-morrow."
It was dusk when the party reached the summit. The horses were loosened to graze in the open field and the guides hurried to build a fire in front of the cave made by a projecting ledge of rock beneath which the party was to sleep.
The bed of balsam boughs was too sharp a contrast to Nan's million-dollar-room to permit Stuart much sleep. Besides the youngsters were giggling and laughing and joking most of the night. Only a big log marked the partition wall between the men's and women's side of the cave. The space was so limited it was necessary to sleep close together. The girls and boys never grew tired cracking silly jokes about the magnificence of their sleeping quarters. In vain Nan begged for quiet. It was three o'clock before they were still at last and she fell into a deep sleep.
Stuart rose, sat before the log fire and watched the regular rise and fall of her bosom as she slept like a child. On a distant mountain-side he heard the howl of a lonely wolf. Sixteen years ago the mountains were full of them and they came quite close. He was reminded of the narrowing strip of the savage world, fast disappearing before the march of civilization.
"I wonder if we'll ever conquer the last jungle—the heart of man?" he mused. "Somehow I have my doubts, and yet the faith never dies."
Again he looked at the sleeping woman and a wave of fierce mad rebellion swept his heart. Somewhere inside of him he heard the lonely cry of another wolf.
"She's mine—mine! Nature gave her to me in the morning of life—I was a fool. I should have taken her by force, if need be, and she would have thanked me in after years. She has complied with the conventions of Society and trampled the highest law of Life. Why not smash convention now at the call of that law?"
Again the wolf howled in the distant darkness and it seemed the echo of his own mad cry. He waked from his reverie with an angry start. He shuddered that he could have harboured the thought for a moment.
The eastern horizon was beginning to glow with the dawn. He rose, walked to the summit, and sat down on the pile of stones that marked the grave of Professor Mitchell. He watched in silence until he saw the sun's red rim suddenly leap above the blue-black peaks of the east and drive the last shadow of the night from the valleys below. With their fading mists he felt the darkness lift from his own heart and the sunlight of reason stream in. A new joy welled up from the depths of his spirit. He was alive to his finger tips and his imagination glowed with the consciousness that life was strong and clean, and worth while.
"With the help of God I'll keep it so, too!" he cried. "I'm ready for the fight now. Let it come."
He knew instinctively that it was coming. He felt it in every word that had fallen from Nan's lips since they left on this trip. He felt it most keenly of all when she was silent, read it in the tremour of her mouth, the shadowy tenderness of her eyes, the low, deep tones of her voice. What he couldn't know was how hard that fight was going to be!
Both Nan and the youngsters slept like children until nine o'clock. He helped the guides prepare breakfast without waking the sleepers and called them at nine.
By ten o'clock breakfast was over, the guides had formed two exploring parties and set out with the young people chattering and laughing. "We'll keep house, Jim, here in God's palace among the clouds, until they return."
"Yes," he answered, cheerily, "and it will be fun to keep it alone, won't it, with no restraints or studied pretense, no crowd of fools or liveried flunkies near at hand; only these big dark balsams for sentinels."
They sat down on the ledge of rock which formed their cave-house and gazed over the marvellous panorama of a world transformed into blue billowy mountains, flying clouds and turquoise skies. Over it all brooded the deep solemn silence of eternity. Not a sound reached the ear from earth or air. Far up in the sky an eagle poised and looked below in silence. Not a house could be seen as far as the eye could reach; only here and there a white patch on the dark blue mountain-side showed like a farmer's scar that hadn't healed. These were the fields of farmers on the lower ranges, but their houses were hidden among the trees.
Nan was leaning back on her elbow on the blanket Stuart had spread for her, watching his face change its mood with each flying cloud.
"Our luck is wonderful to-day, Nan," he said at last. "The guides say this is one of the rarest days a traveller ever finds on this peak. We might come a hundred times and never strike it again."
"Why?" she asked lazily.
"The air's so crisp and clear. A mountain fifty miles away seems a stone's throw. We've but to sweep the horizon with a single turn of the head and see six states of the Union. Eastward stretches North Carolina, to the coast, to the north there in that bristling line of lower hills stands old Virginia. To the west loom the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky and southward rise the crags of western Georgia and South Carolina—but it don't seem so wonderful to you, I suppose."
"Why not?"
"You must see most of it from your windows every day."
"But not with your eyes, Jim!" she cried. "I have everything and I have nothing. There is no meaning to anything we do or see or possess if the one thing we desire is withheld."
"I might have made that speech, Nan," he said thoughtfully. "It sounds strange on your lips."
"With my houses in town and country, with every whim of body and soul apparently gratified, perhaps it does sound strange. But suppose that all this madness of luxury, at which you wonder, is but the vain effort of a hungry heart?"
The man was silent. The question was too dangerous to try to answer, too dangerous to leave unanswered.
"You haven't answered," she insisted.
"No. Answers to such questions don't come so glibly here in these silent places, Nan," he responded seriously.
"That's why I brought you here," she confessed. "Besides, I knew you loved this wild spot. The memory of your rapture that day, sixteen years ago, has never left me."
"You used to love such places, too," he said looking away over the blue billows. "What deep-toned eternal things they spoke! How small and contemptible the struggle of the insects in those valleys below!"
"Come back to my question," the woman insisted, with quiet determination. "You are not a coward. The time has come in our lives when we should begin to see things as they are."
"I've been trying to do that for a long time," he answered sorrowfully.
"And haven't succeeded," she added promptly. "The trouble is, Jim, that life is a tissue of lies. We are born in lies, grow up in lies, live and move and have our being in lies. Our highest wisdom is the law of hypocrisy which we call diplomacy. I've found that society is one living lie. We say 'good morning' and wish we could murder the man we greet. We say 'call again' and wish it may be never. We live two lives or we don't live at all—one outward and visible, the other secret. We must be true to one and laugh at the other. I'm growing sick of lies!"
Stuart looked at her flushed face with a deepening thrill of the drama of the soul its quick changing expression shadowed.
"Well?"
"I've grown to feel of late," she went on rapidly, "that it's a shame to dodge. The only law my husband has ever known is to take what he wants. I've the right to live my own life. We must each of us choose our world, the one of conventions and shams or the big one that's beyond—the world of reality, where free men and women live and work in freedom while youth and daring lead the way."
She paused and Stuart's lips parted in amazement. Never had he heard such eloquence from the woman before him. Words leaped from her heart, quivering with emotion, her whole being stirred to its depths.
"Jim," she went on falteringly, "I'm lonely and heartsick. I'm trying to tell you that I want your love; that I can't live any longer without it."
Her head sank, low and a sob caught her voice.
"There I've told you—I've no pride left. Tell me that you love me. I want to hear it a thousand times. I want it, right or wrong!"
She paused a moment and looked through a tear into his pale, serious face.
"I know that you love me," she went on. "It's only your stubborn pride that keeps you silent now. My God! Speak! Say something, if only to curse me!"
"You should have thought of this, Nan, before these gray hairs began to creep into my hair."
"I did, Jim!" she cried, eagerly bending, near. "God knows I fought! You never knew it, but I did. For whole nights I wrestled with the fiend that tempted me and fought for my love. It took days and weeks to strangle its hold on my heart and force me to betray myself. If I had seen you on the day of my marriage I would have leaped from the carriage, rushed to your side, and fainted in your arms. With the despair of a lost soul I searched the faces of the staring crowd, hoping against hope that I might see you. Oh, Jim, it's not too late to live! Look at me, dearest, and say it's not. For God's sake tell me that you love me still! Am I old? Am I faded?"
The man had felt sure of himself when she began, but the tenderness, the passion, the yearning appeal of her voice were more than he could resist. A wave of desperate longing convulsed his being. He seized her hand with cruel force.
"Look into my eyes, Nan!" he cried, "and let me see the bottom of your soul!"
She lifted her dark lustrous eyes, devouring him with love.
"You'll find only your image there, Jim."
He looked at her sternly.
"Before I take you into my arms and smother you with kisses," he whispered fiercely, "there mustn't be any mistake this time. I've got to know that your love for me is the biggest thing in your life—the only thing in your life!"
"I swear it!" she gasped.
"You've got to prove it; I'm going to put you to the test."
"Any test!" she broke in quickly.
"I warn you," he went on, with increasing seriousness, "the test will be a real one. You and I, Nan, could never be happy with the shadow of Bivens's fortune over us."
"But, its shadow can't be over us! It's going to be yours. He has given it to me—his death is only a question of a year or two—and I'm going to give it all to you."
The strong jaws closed with sudden energy.
"There's not a dollar of his millions that isn't smirched. I'd sooner wear the rags of a leper than soil my hands with it."
"Then I'll have to hold it in trust for you," she laughed.
"There's where the test comes—you can't do it. If you love me you will have to give up these millions."
"Jim, you're not serious?"
"Never more serious in my life."
Nan gazed at him in astonishment and broke into a low laugh.
"Of course, you're teasing me. You can't be in earnest in such an absurd dime-novel idea! Give away this enormous fortune, this power equal to the sway of kings which you can wield with a strength and dignity the man who made it never knew? You can't be in earnest?"
"I am," was the firm answer.
The woman placed her hand tenderly in his and nestled close to his side.
"Come, Jim, dear, this is a practical world, you have some common sense even if you are a man of genius; you're not insane!"
"I think not," he answered, soberly.
"You can not make this absurd demand on me," she repeated slowly, "knowing the awful price I paid for these millions?"
"It's because I know it that I make the demand," he went on, passionately. "We are face to face now, you and I, with all the little subterfuges and lies of life torn from our eyes. The fact that the price at which he bought you was high—say a hundred millions—does not change the fact. I refuse to share with the woman I love the price for which she sold herself, whether the sum be a hundred dollars or a hundred millions! I can forgive and have forgiven the wrong you've done me, but I could never share its conscious degradation."
A flush of anger overspread Nan's face.
"Jim, this is stupid pride, the stupidest of all pride, the vainest and the meanest, the pride of the poor man. It's detestable. I thought you were greater. There's some excuse for the pride of wealth, but there's none for the pride of poverty!"
"It's a question of character," was the firm answer. "It cuts to the deepest issues of life between us. There can be no compromise."
Nan looked at him in despair, her eyes suddenly clouding with tears.
Nan looked at him in despair"Nan looked at him in despair"
"What do you mean when you say give up these millions?"
"Just what I say," he answered quickly.
"But I couldn't throw them into the street, what would I do with them?"
"You can give them back to the people, the public, from whom they were taken; the people whose labour created their value. That's what an honest man does when he finds he has wronged his neighbour. The things we possess come at last to possess us. In a very deep and real sense they give to us their character. An ermine robe that covers a leper does not make him a king, but the royal robe at last breathes leprosy. You can't separate money from the process of its making. It has no value in itself. It is only a symbol, and always takes a soul from the hand of its creator. There's not a stone in your palaces whose cement was not mixed in human tears. The stain of blood is in every scarlet thread of your carpets, rugs, and curtains. Your magnificent paintings, your gorgeous furniture, your beds of ebony and carved ivory—do you think these things possess no soul? Do you think they could not laugh at me?"
"Surely, you are not such a weakling!" Nan cried, with a flush of contempt.
"If to hold honour dearer than life is the creed of a weakling, I am one."
"But you are talking like a mad anarchist. His money was made as all great fortunes are made."
"So much the worse for our financiers. Civilization must rest at least on justice or it can't endure."
"But, Jim, no matter what your theories of life or your ambitions, these millions will make them more powerful."
"It's not true. Not a single great man whose words have moulded the world was rich. The combined fortunes of Darwin, Mozart, Shakespeare, Raphael, Aristotle, Socrates, Mohammed, and Buddha weren't equal to the possessions of even the smallest and most insignificant member of our mob of six thousand millionaires—six thousand nobodies! Don't think, dear, that you haven't tempted me in the past. You have. The glitter of your millions once blinded me and I was on the point of surrender, but I've won out. I've entered at last—to stay—into the Kingdom of Mind, that lies beyond the rule of greed, where beauty, heroism, and genius have built their altar-fires and keep them burning. You'll have to come with me, Nan, into this enchanted land. Your estate is large only if you don't lift up your head and look farther. You own a hundred thousand acres in the mountains, and yet, after all, it's but a tiny speck on the horizon of one little corner of a state. Beyond is the great world with its beautiful rivers, its valleys, its shining shores and emerald seas. This big world is mine—the Alps and the Mountains of the Moon and your little blue hills also are on my estate. I've come to know at last that the man is richest who breathes deepest, sees farthest, hears best, and has the widest and most helpful influence on his fellow-man. Lord Beaconsfield died with a paltry estate of two hundred thousand dollars. He had the chance, while prime minister, to take for himself a personal fortune whose annual income would have been $25,000,000. Instead he gave it all to the people of England and died poor. I'd rather do such a deed for my country than hold the combined fortunes of all our six thousand little millionaires.
"You think, dear, that you are in Society. But the real aristocracy has always been one of brains and ethics. The people in your little world live for money. They do not possess it, they are possessed by it. They are slaves. You will have to come with me, into the great free world—if you love me."
"If I love you?" Nan cried, with trembling lips. "Don't speak that way. If you only knew! My love for you has kept me alive through all that I've endured. It's the only thing that's worth the struggle; but I can't think. Your demand is so sudden, so stunning, so terrifying, I don't know what to say. My life and all I have is too short to make atonement to you and I can't afford to make a mistake. I want to be sure. A year from now you might see things differently."
"We can never be anything to each other," he answered firmly, "on any other terms than the renunciation of all that Bivens leaves. I don't care what you do with it, just so you wash your hands of it. You and I must begin life just where we left off when the shadow of his money darkened the world for us both. You must give it up."
"It's hard, dearest," she said with a sob, "for your sake it's hard. I've dreamed so many wonderful things that would come to pass when I made you the master of these millions."
"You must choose between his money and my love; you can't have both."
She gazed at him with a desperate yearning.
"I'll do anything you wish, only love me, dearest," she sobbed. "I am yours, body and soul, all that I am and all that I have. You can do with it as you please! All I ask is to be loved—loved—loved—and that you never leave me!"
But even as she spoke, her mind was made up. She would reserve at least half her fortune secretly. When they were married she could persuade him to be reasonable.
"All right, then it's settled, but it must be everything with me or nothing. I won't shake hands with my friend and make love to his wife. You must cease to be his wife now."
"But how—what do you mean?" she asked, white with sudden fear.
"Leave your husband, your palaces, your millions and join me to-morrow night on the Limited for New York. Bring only a change of clothes in a single trunk and a hand-bag. My money must be sufficient. I'll wire for passage on an outgoing steamer. We'll spend two years in Europe and return to America when we please. Are you ready?"
"Oh, Jim, dear," she faltered—"you know that would be madness!"
"Certainly it's madness, the madness of a great love! Come, why do you hesitate?"
The lines of her body relaxed and she began to softly sob. The man waited in silence for her to speak.
"I've done you harm enough, dearest," she said at last. "I can't do this."
"And your thought is only of me, Nan?" he asked with piercing intensity.
"And of myself," she acknowledged brokenly. "I couldn't do such an insane, vulgar thing."
"I didn't think you could," was the bitter response.
"All I ask," she pleaded, "is to hear you say that you love me now—just as I am with all my faults. Can't we be patient and yet honest with one another in the secret world in which our real lives are lived? In that world I am yours, and you are mine, but a woman's heart starves at last for the words of love, she must have them or die."
"Well, I shall not speak," he answered savagely. "Your husband is the master of millions, but I am the master of something bigger—I am the master of myself."
He paused, lowered his head and looked at her through his heavy eyebrows drawn down for the moment a veil over his soul.
"You must remember," he went on slowly, "that there's something inside a real man that claims one woman all his own. No man ever surrenders this ideal without the death of his self-respect. I will not play a second fiddle to your little husband. There's something that seals my lips, the soul of my soul, the thing that says 'I will' and 'I will not,' the power that links me to the infinite and eternal."
The strong face glowed with emotion. The utter sincerity of his deep vibrant tones were at last convincing. The dark head dropped lower. When she lifted it at last two despairing tears were shining in her eyes.
"I understand, Jim," she said simply, "We will go on as we have. I'll wait in silence."
He rose and lifted her to her feet. The voices of the youngsters rang up the mountain's side.
"No, we can't go on like this now, Nan," he said with quiet strength. "The silence has been broken between us. Your husband is my friend, and from to-day our lives must lie apart. It's the only way."
She extended her hand and he pressed it tenderly. Her voice was the merest sobbing whisper when she spoke: "Yes, Jim, I suppose it's the only way."