At this, O’Leary, with his eyes still on Dangerfield, saw the arms relax and the head thrown back as though a weight had slipped from the shoulders. The next moment his companion had touched him on the arm and gone out, saying:
“That’s all—come!”
On the sidewalk, Dangerfield seemed to be moving blindly, for he stumbled once and had started off in adirection quite different from the corner where their taxi was waiting, when O’Leary checked him on the arm, saying:
“That’s not the way, man, to your taxi.”
At his touch Dangerfield turned, without seeming realization of where he was.
“What—what taxi?”
“The taxi we came in that’s waiting,” said O’Leary impatiently, “or shall I let it go?”
“No, no.”
They retraced their steps, but, to do so, they were forced to pass by the entrance of the church just as the wedding-party was emerging. Dangerfield stopped with an exclamation and drew himself up stiffly, while the press of the crowd brought them momentarily face to face with the bride and groom, as they came through the fringe of spectators. A curious pair they made for two who had just come from the altar. Each face seemed dominated by a sullen fury, and O’Leary, looking at them, mumbled to himself:
“’Deed they look more like they were waiting to knife each other than dreaming of wedded bliss!”
When they perceived Dangerfield, the man started back with something akin to fear in his eyes, while the woman, warned by his movement, looked up and, meeting the look of her former husband, caught her breath. For a moment the black rage which convulsed her face shook her so that she seemed on the point of breaking all restraint and turning on them. But at this dangerous moment, some one spoke to her in sharp command, seized her arm and hurried her into a carriage. O’Leary recognized Doctor Fortier.
A moment later, the whole party had disappeared down the avenue, leaving Dangerfield and O’Leary standing in the midst of a group of urchins, grocer-boys and nursery-maids,who, sensing the approach of a tragic coincident, were staring open-mouthed at the shaggy, bearlike man who continued lost in his reveries. It wasn’t until O’Leary felt impelled to recall him by a touch on his arm that Dangerfield (to keep to the name which he had voluntarily assumed) came to himself, perceived the growing curiosity of the throng with a start, brushed them aside with an angry sweep of his arms. Half an hour later, without having uttered a word, he deposited O’Leary at the Arcade, dismissed the car, and strode away down the avenue, before his companion, taken off his guard, had thought to remind him of his promise to Inga.
At eleven o’clock, Dangerfield, led by some dramatic impulse, returned to his club, from which he had exiled himself for months. From the moment that the old tugging, feverish thirst for oblivion had swept him from O’Leary into the solitude of crowds and the electric heart of the city, he had been drinking blindly, impatiently, with a need of quieting the throbbing nerves which were rapping an insistent tattoo against his brain. A dozen men were in the lounge up-stairs, old friends, who started up with exclamations of surprise at seeing the familiar tousled head with the gray lock appearing above the stairs. Quite a crowd came thronging about the prodigal returned, the more enthusiastic in that they had never expected to lay eyes on him again. He stood among them outwardly calm and smiling, his brain fighting off the numbing, confused riot that raged within it. Several, divining his condition, stole wondering, apprehensive glances at him.
He was installed in a great armchair before the blazing logs in the fireplace in the light and warmth of familiar friendly regions, and, as he put out his hands gratefully against the heat, feeling himself surrounded by friends,it seemed to him that he was a prey to some tantalizing hallucinations of happiness that must vanish at a waking start. He remained deep into the night, drinking steadily, striving to beat down the iron control of his head, which still held him cruelly to the realization of the actual. One by one the old friends were forced to leave, going silently, ominously impressed by the deliberate intensity of the man, the wildness in his eyes and the sudden fits of moody wandering. At two o’clock, all sounds had grown dulled and pleasant in his ears. He rose, walked into the office without faltering, exchanged a courteous handshake with a friend from the pool-table and asked for his account, discharged it in full, wrote out his resignation, and posted it to the board of directors. As he started to leave he found himself before the board on which was posted the list of members suspended for house-charges or non-payment of dues. All at once, a sentimental idea came to him. He examined the list carefully, found in it the names of four men, old friends in straightened circumstances, and carefully wrote down the sums of their indebtedness.
“I think I should like to attend to these,” he said politely, drawing his check-book.
Then he thanked the clerk, pocketed the receipts, insisted on buying a last round of drinks for the few late stragglers at the pool-tables, who, amazed, watched him depart without a single misstep. When he had received his coat and hat, he slipped a bill in the hand of Pedro, the Argus of the club.
“’Gainst the rules,” he said, in a whisper, “but not ordinary case. Wish you luck, Pedro!”
On the long, bleak way to the Arcade, he stopped at a drug store on Seventh Avenue, whispered a moment to a clerk in the shadows of the back counter, received asmall bottle, and as he examined it nodded with satisfaction, and went out. He entered the Arcade and stood a moment in its deserted, oppressive silence, staring at the dim interiors of shops that showed like pale catacombs on either side, and all at once broke out into a short, bitter laugh, as though this end of all had struck him as the most incongruous thing in his fantastic life. He did not wake up Sassafras, but went up the long six flights slowly, sitting down from time to time and talking to himself, his head in his hands. The corridor was deathly quiet and dim, and the one struggling, bending blue flame in the gas-jet before his room seemed to him a beacon in far-off regions as he groped his way to it. The door was unlocked—the room faintly reflecting outlines in queer distorted shadows. He sat down and stared solemnly about him. Then he rose, fumbled a moment, and found the button. The lights flashed across the room. At the table, asleep, her body sunk into weariness of long vigilance, was Inga Sonderson. At the same moment she moved, saw him, and started up with a cry of relief, which she checked with a clutching of her hand at her throat. The next moment she came swiftly over to him, all surprise banished from her face, quick and matter of fact, saying:
“Slip out of your coat. I’ll take it.”
He backed away, rebelling at her presence and the will which was there to oppose his. All at once he remembered his promise, and a cunning loophole dawned in his foggy brain.
“Came back as I promised,” he said solemnly, folding his arms in antagonism. “All right now, going out again.”
Instinctively he comprehended the persistent opposition that lay in the slender body facing him, and sought to escape it. To his surprise, she did not object, but aftera moment’s thought nodded and went toward her room.
“What are you going to do?” he said roughly.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
He laughed incredulously. The next moment she was back, enveloped in coat and muffler.
“You’re going,” he said frowning, “now?”
“Whenever you wish,” she said, her dark eyes steadily on him, without reproach or criticism.
“We’ll see,” he said, resentfully, and he started down the hall. Without a word she followed at his side.
The name of Daniel Garford had figured on many occasions in the scare-heads of the Metropolitan press, not only on account of the eccentricities of genius and the wildness of his youth, but from the fact that the name of Garford had been a social beacon for generations. Even before the Mexican War there had been a Garford who had sat in the Cabinet as Secretary of State, and from that time on, the family had progressed in power and wealth, a proud, intensely ambitious, self-willed, and dominating line of men, who, whatever their faults, were never accused of idleness. There was a restless, mental energy about these men which had driven them to the front, while the strength of the old Garford strain continued to show in their impatience of forms and traditions, their ability to originate and discover, and especially in their distinguishing trait of never being satisfied with success.
The Honorable Benjamin Garford, Daniel’s uncle, whom he resembled, according to the incomprehensible vagaries of heredity in form and temperament, had been a clear example of this boundless craze for real achievement. Though possessed of an ample fortune, he had, from his youth, devoted himself to scientific research and discussion. One of the most distinguished scholars of his day, honored by numerous European scientific bodies for discoveries in the field of electrical energy, his text-books accepted as standards, twice minister to St. Petersburg, and once to Paris, he summed up his life in one little phrase: “I die a disappointed man.” This remark, incomprehensibleto the multitude, should be retained as the key to Daniel’s character—the passionate pursuit of an ideal linked to an inevitable moment of self-appraisement and disillusion.
His life had been enveloped in storm, a whirling, breathless existence, with strange reversals of fortune, never quiet, nor long continuing along obvious lines. The quality of genius had always been in him from the lonely, tragic days of his boyhood, but a disordered, tormented genius which had made him the sport of accidental influences. Dudley Garford, his father, in a moment of intense infatuation in his early twenties, had eloped with and married a beautiful Italian girl of distinguished parentage whom he had met in his travels, and this mixture of the virility of the Garfords with the warmth and color of the South had made a genius of the boy. To this fortuitous mingling of rich strains was added the awakening touch of early sorrow and a precocious comprehension of tragedy. What father and mother had consummated in a burst of wildness, they lived to destroy in bitterness. From the earliest years of their marriage, violent quarrels had broken out, due at first to the unreasoning espionage of passionate jealousy to which the wife subjected the husband, and, later, inevitably to a succession of rapid, volatile attachments into which the husband had been driven, first, by her intolerance, and second, by the brilliant pleasure-loving qualities of his own forceful personality.
Daniel and his sister Theresa grew up in this unruly household, wide-eyed, wondering spectators of daily storms, culminating in one tragic evening when the mother, face to face at last with the acknowledged proofs of her husband’s infidelity, had abandoned herself to such a tempest of blind rage that the two children, cowering against the wall, too frightened to do aught but to cling to each other, were forced to witness the frantic struggle oftheir father with the mother who, in her hysteria, was bent on self-destruction. The scene (it had taken place in the nursery) remained in the boy’s mind with the startling horror of a nightmare—the childish toys scattered on the floor, the words of hatred and anger which struck them cold, the frightful distortion on the face of their mother, the struggle for the possession of the knife, and then her exhaustion, the low moaning broken by hysterical gasps for breath. Then, weeks later had come the parting which he did not understand in the least, for which he could find no childish reason. The little sister and the stately, resplendent mother had gone out of his life, and loneliness and silence had crept through the great house.
The boy grew up in this abandonment, brooding over memories, his imagination precociously awakened, forced into a searching of himself; self-sufficient, wandering into long explorations of the realms of the fantastic, telling himself stories at night, the despair and terror of a succession of tutors. What he saw and dimly comprehended during this period was a curious awakening to the conflict of the greed and passions of the later world. Many a night, unsuspected, he had stolen from his bed and secreted himself in the little balcony that looked down on the great drawing-room, gazing down with a puzzled wonder on the tempestuous scenes of revel and license which hid the darker side of Dudley Garford’s mercurial, triumphant public career. He saw his father with critical eyes, with an unhealthy knowledge beyond the weight of his years, and this hidden critical spectatorship made life seem to him like some whirling theatricdanse macabreof riotous emotions and vibrant colors.
Already, the exotic multiplied sensations had become translated into the bent of his imagination. He had begun to model in clay, untaught, following queer fancies; struggling to the use of childish paints, understandingnothing of mediums but delighting his eyes with odd blending and contrasts of colors, violent and barbaric in his instincts.
One night, in the weariness of his watching, he fell asleep in the balcony, was discovered, and the next week was bundled off to boarding school.
His career at school was cut abruptly at the age of sixteen by the discovery of his infatuation for the daughter of one of his teachers, a woman many years his senior with whom he had fallen violently, desperately in love, with all the unreason and blind adoration of a first passion. Brilliant, unruly, proud, delicate in health, and too absorbed in reading and the pursuit of his beloved painting, he had still about him a certain illuminating magnetism, a faith in his future, a trick of saying things others would never have said, of thinking strange thoughts that had even reached to the heart of the woman. To do her justice, she had never thought for a moment of taking advantage of the boy’s infatuation; yet the parting was difficult, and she herself suffered more than she showed.
For two years he was consigned to a ranch, to live in the open air, to harden to the weather and grow in muscle and sturdiness, roaming the great stretches, sleeping in the open, discovering that beyond the stone walls of the city, such miracles exist as the turning of the dawn, the riotous coming of the sun, the trackless map of stars, the restless stealing-in of the spring and the haunting majesty of the turning leaves. All these sensations sunk deep into his fertile imagination. An artist exiled in the fight for health gave him the first lessons, and put him through the hard grind of mechanical preparation. From the first he showed qualities which were to persist in his later work, an impatience with deliberate building and an impulse toward the dramatic interpretation of the instincts. His sketches were full of technical faults, and yet almost allheld a certain charm, something quite out of the ordinary.
From this serene calm of the open plain and a life of simple moods, he was suddenly transplanted to college in the midst of a fast New York set, with possession of an allowance which was quite sufficient to send him headlong to his own destruction. The tendency to violent extremes which was instinctive in his character made him speedily the ring-leader in the company of those who burned the midnight oil—but not in the pursuit of knowledge. In six months Daniel had been twice warned by the faculty and had managed to run through the year’s allowance. He applied for further funds to his father, who laughed and acceded, rather pleased, in his worldly way, that his son was sowing his wild oats in princely fashion. In his second year, his disordered existence had become so notorious that, after a certain episode which had figured prominently in the newspapers, wherein he had driven a coach over the front lawns of suburban Boston in the wee hours of the morning, he was summarily called before the faculty and given an opportunity to resign. On top of which came a telegram from New York summoning him to his father’s death-bed.
A certain mystery surrounded the death of Dudley Garford, which was officially given out as the result of an aggravated case of appendicitis. It was whispered that he had come by a violent death, having been shot through the lungs by an outraged husband. Certainly the habits of his later life would not have made such a result an improbability.
Daniel had never known his father, conscious always in the rare moments of their intercourse of an insuperable barrier which lay between them in the memories of his boyhood. In the last months, they had even come to the verge of an open quarrel, when the father had discovered the strength of the son’s artistic inclinations and had violentlyforbidden him a career which he looked upon with contempt.
Daniel now found himself his own master, with every avenue opened to his wish. He went to Paris. His mother, after the early death of his sister, had remarried and become the Duchesse de Senbach. Into this curious intermingling of international society which flaunts its vanities and worn passions, he entered with all the ardor of a healthy body and a lively imagination, still genuinely blinded with illusions. The artist in him, which divides life into sensations, again brought him into notoriety. He gave dinners as a grand duke might give; he lived in apartments with a retinue of servants, the cost of which was faithfully chronicled in the colored Sunday editions of his home papers with printed references to the rake’s progress. He was surrounded by a crowd of sycophants, shoddy race-track majors, princes down at the heels, and Balkan aristocrats of the gaming-tables, who fattened on his prodigality and led him into fresh excesses. He fell violently in love with a favorite of theCafé Chantants, Nina de Mauban, believed in her devotion to him, conceived the quixotic idea of lifting her out of the muddied existence she led and even announced their engagement.
The existence he had been living would have inevitably ruined him, when a new turn arrived with the panic of ’93. In a fortnight, as a result of the treachery of an executor, he found himself bankrupt. The news made a sensation here and abroad. The army of friends melted away. Creditors descended on him and drove him from his palace, and the woman he had adored departed overnight in the company of a Swedish count. When the news was brought to him, he began by flying into a paroxysm of despair and ended by bursting into laughter. The next day, with the best of good humor, he packed up hiseffects and moved over into a studio in the Rue d’Assas off the Luxembourg Gardens. His mother gave him an allowance of one hundred dollars a month, which, in his new surroundings, was a fortune. In a month he had found his happiness in a life of work among these democrats of the soul.
If he did not at once forget the woman, the memory of his existence of luxury never returned to embitter him. For years he lived with his comrades of theatelier, adopting their flowing dress and easy customs, a leader in their revelries, but a madman for work, as completely divorced from his past existence as though he had died and been born again. The two experiences as a boy and as a man had left him distrustful of women or, at least, recoiling before the intense outpouring of emotion which love meant to him. During this long student period, no woman touched his heart beyond a womanly sympathy. In fact, his attitude was the occasion of numerous jests among the more catholicly inclined, while those of more romantic persuasion did him the honor to ascribe it to the tragedy of a “grande passion.” His studio, which was magnificent for the quarter, became the refuge of the whole tribe of models and others whose living was even more precarious. At any hour of the day and night, they arrived for a bit of food, a night’s shelter, or to give him their tragic confidence, and these flitting children of the sidewalks, cynical, hardened, and sly in their dealings with other men, would melt into tears or burst into angry tirades against the injustice of established order, sitting alone with him into the long night. They taught him much of their dreadful vision of mankind and suffering in such hours of confession, which he would never have known had he approached them differently. At the bottom, pity was too deep in his soul to have permitted any other sentiment. All adored him and one, Pepita, a littleSpanish model, loved him with the love of a dog for its master. For his part, he took no credit for this open charity. As a matter of fact, it was a privileged glance into a hidden life, that interested him intensely, that roused in him long periods of meditation and revolt, that was as much a part of the architectural structure of his artistic conscience, as his boyhood, his life on the prairies, his wildness at college, or his rapid plunge through the dissipations of the brilliant world. He became known not only as an artist of bold and daring originality, but as a man who thought and reasoned.
In his third year, an event came which occasioned a new outburst of public curiosity. An aunt died and left him a legacy of fifty thousand dollars. He reappeared in society in a brilliant renaissance, took up his old habits, just as though nothing had happened; reassembled the former acquaintances, gave dinners and balls, and won enormous sums at baccarat. This lasted for almost two months, at the end of which a streak of luck set in against him and he found himself again bankrupt. Seven weeks after his departure from the studio of the Rue d’Assas, he returned penniless but happy, and announced:
“Now, if no more aunts die, I shall become an artist.”
His return was made a gala night; the quarter packed in to hear his adventures, and, in the end, the renegade was received back into the sacred enclosure, while his dress clothes and the offending hat were burned with imposing ceremonies.
When the death of his mother brought him a fortune, he remained true to his oath and the left bank of the Seine. By this time he had won his medals in the Salon and had achieved the honor of a private exhibition of water-colors which he had brought back from Algeria and the East. There were some critics who complained of the theatricquality of his art, but all conceded the individuality and the boldness of his new conceptions. His sudden spring into fame was as instantaneous as all the other phases of his existence. Everything seemed to open ahead of him for a long and brilliant career of highest achievement, when fate, which had played him a dozen queer turns, returned to intrude once more into his existence.
He was motoring along the Riviera, on a trip he had long planned to Venice and the galleries of Florence, when, as his car swerved out and around a jutting corner of rock, a sudden gust of wind caught his hat and whirled it into the lap of a young woman who was passing in a phaeton. This gust of wind decided his whole life. He fell in love with her at the first sight of her wistful Madonnalike face and trusting eyes, that strangely enough reminded him of the idealized vision of his boyhood. She was a divorcée, scarcely twenty-one, from the South, who had resumed her maiden name, Louise Fortier. He knew absolutely nothing about her except the story she told of childish innocence and the whims of a selfish libertine. Two weeks later, they returned to Paris, engaged. He had thrown himself into this new experience without the slightest distrust, with the rapturous idolatry of the boy he was. He would not have permitted her to be discussed even by his most intimate friends, though, in fact, several made hints which he was too blind to perceive. They were married a month later. One painful incident occurred. Pepita, the little Spanish model who had been devoted to him for years, attempted to take her life by swallowing poison, and though her act was detected in time to save her, the occurrence cast a shadow over the wedding.
During the first months, he found himself incomprehensibly, riotously happy. He was charmed and bewildered by his wife. They made a romantic trip throughItaly and into the East, during which she assumed subtly a great influence over his moods and ambitions. When they returned to Paris, he was more in love than ever; only, there was one thing which had gone completely out of his day, of which he never thought—his work. Their coming to New York was her suggestion. The return home was a triumph for him. For the first time, he tasted the completeness of personal success. His friends of the quarter who had returned before him hailed him as a leader. He became a personality; his eccentricities of speech and thought, the dramatic wildness, even, of his past life were now registered in his favor. He took a studio and began to work, and success continued his. Yet, at the bottom, he became conscious of a growing restlessness, of an inability to enjoy what he had won.
Gradually, the obsession which had clouded his vision began to lift from his eyes. He saw her as she was, this woman to whom he had chosen to fasten the chains of his existence. He was proud of her, of her charm, of the magnetism she exerted over other men, of the admiration she evoked in the brilliant formal society into which she had led him, but he perceived at last that she neither understood what he was working for nor was able to assist him in the least. He found himself divided against himself, as it were, leading two opposite lives.
He began to ask himself questions. He said to himself that he was famous and envied, that everything he did succeeded, and that yet he was not happy. He sought in himself some explanation. He recalled two sayings, one that of his uncle who, at the end of a life heaped with honors, could say: “I die a disappointed man,” and the remark of his old professor: “In art, the critical age is forty, up to then one can promise, after then one must achieve.” He began to feel this crisis in his life, to ask himself whether he had in him the strength to revolt orwhether he would renounce the ambitious flights of his old ideals in the easy satisfaction of what the public called success. For he perceived clearly that the fault lay in him, that he no longer lived in his art, that he served two gods, and that in this divided allegiance lay the death of all his struggling toward true greatness. He sought to make his wife understand and found a blank incomprehension. Then he tried to order his life on new lines, to divide the year into two parts, and to regain in solitary summers on unfrequented islands something of the old enthusiastic concentration.
But he found that the habits of home, of pleasant friends, of the woman who held him by mysterious impulses, were too strong, and he came to the day when he understood his uncle, and said to himself:
“It is ended. I shall not do what I want to do. It is beyond me, as my life has been cast.”
A profound melancholy came over him and, in his secret heart, undivined by his closest friends the cancer of disillusionment began to grow. His eccentricities increased. He had scenes with his wife in which he burst into violent tirades or scornful laughter which she could not understand. Though he never accused her, he repeated often bitterly to himself that his career was a sacrifice to the woman, who neither appreciated nor perceived the sacrifice.
During these years, he had never, for an instant, entertained the slightest suspicion of his wife. He gave her absolute faith. His theory of marriage was not as a reciprocal tyranny but as a free union. He did not claim any right over her actions or attempt to limit her interests in other men. In the beginning he had explained himself at length.
“If the day ever comes when you find that you love another man, come to me and tell me,” he said.“I shall not stand in your way, no matter how I may feel. Marriage exists only so long as it is voluntary on both sides. All I demand is that there should be no deceit, that each should remember the dignity of the other.”
“If you say that you don’t love me!” she said, laughing, but a little anxious.
“You are wrong; I love you in my own way.”
She was silent quite a while, watching him.
“And if—if the other thing should happen,” she said, pretending to make a jest of it. “If I did deceive you, what would you do?”
“Don’t joke about such things,” he said, frowning; “I am serious, Louise.”
Several times, as though to tease him, she came back to this question, but each time peremptorily he refused to discuss it.
He was not jealous, or, rather, he held jealousy unworthy of him. He would have scorned to exercise the slightest supervision over his wife’s actions. On one occasion, when he had taken up a branch telephone, he had cut in on a conversation which would have aroused any one but a man as blind or as loyal as he was. He had replaced the receiver. He would have been ashamed to listen, and even referred to it jestingly, without notice of the alarm which showed in her eyes. One afternoon, coming home contrary to his habit, he let himself into his apartment and stopped at the sound of voices from his wife’s salon. He listened and discovered, without shadow of a doubt, that the man with whom she was arguing was her lover.
The discovery of his wife’s infidelity was so swift, so convincing, so utterly unexpected that every mental function seemed to stop. Garford stood still, a long moment, doing absolutely nothing. Then his whole body was seized with a confusing fever; his heart seemed to swell within him and to leap against its walls. In a flash, his head cleared as though swept by a gust of wind. He felt a tingling, throbbing sensation throughout his body, accompanying this abrupt mental clarity; all other sounds without him ceased. It was as though only one thing existed, something which echoed through his brain—one question: “What am I going to do?”
If he had gone in, he would have killed them, then and there, under his hands, one after the other, blindly, unreasoningly, in brute instinct, without knowing just what he was doing. Only a door stood between him and a crime. At this moment, the bell rang. On such trivialities destinies turn. The shrill, piercing sound recalled him to the outer world. He was able to add to the obsessing question in the hollow of his consciousness one other thought: “Some one is coming.” Registering two perceptions, he became again a reasoning man. He withdrew softly, mounted to the mezzanine floor of the apartment, and went out.
When he had, in some measure, recovered control over his reason, the first emotion was one of complete stupefaction. Why had she done this? He had given her everything. He had given her even the sacrifice of hisdeepest ambitions without ever reproaching her. And he had been rewarded by the lowest deceit.
“Has a woman no gratitude?” he asked himself, in man’s eternal miscomprehension of feminine motives.
This was the one thing he could not comprehend. He could not forbid her loving another. This was something in the domain of the instincts which might conceivably happen. But he had a right to demand that she should not strike him in his private honor. At first, no other thought came to him than that his wife loved the man whose voice he had recognized. That she could have been actuated by any other emotion was too horrible to contemplate. Yet he could not comprehend the choice.
“She loves him—Reggie Bowden—Bowden, of all men! How is it possible?” he kept repeating to himself.
Of all the men who surrounded her and paid her court, the discovery that he had been betrayed for young Bowden wounded him most. For Bowden was of the type he particularly detested, a trifler in all things, drifting through life on a family name, a smiling face and a well-groomed body, social jester and leader of cotillions, a tyrant of the ballroom. That this man could be preferred to him curiously enough humiliated him more than if her choice had been one who was her intellectual equal. The more he analyzed the situation, the more a tormenting doubt returned. A hundred trivial incidents of the past thronged to his memory with a new significance until he felt he should go mad unless he knew the truth.
In three months, it lay before him in its multiplied, shameful detail—not only the present but the past, the record of her first marriage and even before. He went to the friends who, he remembered, had dropped vague hints and forced from them what they knew or suspected. Then, for the first time, it flashed over how his name had been bandied about, a thing of mockery and light contempt,even to the point that he might have been held cognizant, and he said to himself in dull rage: “I was wrong; I should have killed her—that would have been my justification.”
During these three months there were moments when he felt himself perilously close to the borders of his sanity. Added to the disillusion and melancholy of the artist, the blow to the man himself had been so crushing and so penetrating that every illusion had gone as completely from his mental outlook as though, at a stroke, all colors had been lifted from the visible world. Only one thought upheld him—the idea of vengeance and the cleansing of his name. When he was completely satisfied with his investigations, he left ostensibly on a hunting-trip, returned to New York secretly, and advised by his detectives, came to his apartment-building at night.
He tried the door with his latch-key and found it barred. He mounted to the mezzanine floor, tried the door, and found it locked. At that hour, the servants would have left the apartment. He descended, had himself taken up by the service elevator and entered by the kitchen. He knew where he would find them. On the second floor was a little salon which gave into his wife’s bedroom, from which it formed the only exit. They had just returned from the opera; the young man’s coat and hat were on a chair, the odor of a cigar in the corridors.
Bowden was alone, in an armchair by the little lamp, skimming a paper while waiting for Mrs. Garford to return from her bedroom. All at once a sense of something unusual in the air made him lower his paper and glance up. At his side, the husband was standing. He started to his feet with a smothered exclamation, but a hand restrained him.
“Not a sound; I want to give her a surprise.”
There was a smile on Garford’s lips as he laid his fingeracross them in warning, but this smile terrified the lover. He felt himself trapped, unable to warn the woman, forced helplessly to await the moment of her reëntry and the shock of her surprise. He did not make a sound because he still hoped and because he was a coward. The two men remained thus a full five minutes, without moving, awaiting her return. All at once, from the further room, a light voice began to hum an aria of the evening, broke off, and called out:
“Getting impatient?”
At these words, Bowden felt the blood running out of his veins. Then there came the rustle of a dress and Louise, in an Oriental negligée of gold, blended with greens and reds, came lightly to the door.
Garford had placed himself so that he could observe Bowden’s actions in the reflection of a mirror, while turning his back to him. The young man’s hand went up in frantic warning.
At the sight of her husband, she stood transfixed, unable to move or utter a sound, and the color went out of her face so abruptly that the dabs of rouge on her cheeks stood hideously out.
“Quite a surprise, isn’t it?” Garford said with a laugh.
She murmured something inaudible.
“What! You don’t kiss me?”
She looked at him a moment, looked at Bowden, and came slowly across the yellow Chinese rug, a long moment when she felt her knees sagging under her.
“He knows!” she said to herself. “Will he strangle me?”
And she reached him and offered up her cold lips. He kissed them. At the moment his arms touched her she could not repress a shudder.
“What’s the matter?” he said, looking at her.
“You frightened me,” she said, in a whisper, her handto her heart, for the test had been almost beyond her strength.
“What! I frightened you?”
“You know sudden surprises affect me like this,” she said, trying to recover her wits.
“You don’t ask me why I have come,” he said quietly.
“Bad news?” she forced herself to say.
“You might call it that.”
This gave Bowden his opportunity. He rose hastily.
“I hope it’s not serious,” he said glibly. “If you’ll permit me—” He offered his hand. “I know you wish to talk this over alone. Mrs. Garford, I hope your headache will be better to-morrow. It was a shame to miss that last act.”
He had quite recovered himself with the prospect of a flight that providentially opened to him. He bowed a little doubtfully to Garford, but the husband nodded and sat down. Bowden exchanged glances with the wife, slipped on his coat, and took up his hat. The woman looked at him in terror; she saw to the bottom of his soul and comprehended that he was deserting her. Garford, meanwhile, had risen, gone to the table and turned, his arms folded, leaning against its side.
Bowden made a final bow and went to the door. Almost immediately he came back.
“Why, it’s locked!”
“What’s that?” said Garford, lifting his head.
“Why, it’s locked!” said Bowden, who felt the room beginning to reel about him.
“Yes; I locked it.”
Despite the uncanny sense of terror which began to creep over him, the young man managed to blurt out:
“But why—what does this mean?”
The woman, who understood by this time that she was fighting for her life, joined in his remonstrances.
“Dan—are you crazy—you can’t act this way—what do you mean?”
Garford returned to the chair, and this nervous shifting did not escape her, or the straining of his clasped fingers held against his lips as he answered, with forced calm:
“You should know.”
She tried, while gaining time, to turn it off lightly while assuming an attitude of frankness:
“Surely, you don’t object to Mr. Bowden’s coming in here for a nightcap and a cigar! You are not as prudish as that, and if you were, you know I have done it a hundred times; that would be too ridiculous, Dan! You aren’t going to make a scene over this!”
“Is that all you have to say to me—that I should know,” he asked, when she had finished.
She bit her lip, tried to answer, and succeeded only in staring at him. She also began to be horribly afraid.
“And you, Mr. Bowden?”
The young fellow had an answer ready, glib on his tongue, but, at the look in the husband’s eyes, it vanished. In the palms of his hands the perspiration began to rise. Before the avenging dignity in the glance of this man whom he had so many times smiled at in the satisfied disdain of the social freebooter, he felt himself all at once insignificant, as a chip of wood swept under a great surf. She understood that she could expect no help from him and desperately began to counterfeit anger.
“I will not be insulted like this,” she cried furiously. “I demand that you open that door and end this absurd, this humiliating scene. I——”
“Stop!” he said roughly, and she comprehended how completely he dominated the scene by the cold weakness, the powerless sense of inaction which fell on her at the sound of his voice.“Tell Mr. Bowden what I laid down to you as the rules of our marriage.”
“What do you mean?” she stammered.
“Tell him what I have told you I expected from you as my due.”
“But I don’t understand why—why——”
“Tell him.”
“Why, you said, you said,” she faltered, “in case either of us found—no—no, this is too absurd——”
“Either of us found we had come to love another,” he took up; “go on.”
“That we should tell the other,” she said, hardly able to get the words out.
“Honestly and loyally,” he broke in, “and that there should be no restraint on this liberty of choice as there could be no deceit out of respect for the other. Is that right?”
She nodded, staring at his arms and great hands, fearing their brute strength.
“You did not tell that to Mr. Bowden,” he continued.
Bowden, who felt himself cornered, advanced, and said with a last show of courage:
“Mr. Garford, I don’t understand this scene in the least and I must insist—insist, do you hear—that you open that door.”
Garford rose, and, though his voice still maintained a certain calm, his hands twitched at his sides, as he said,
“Bowden, you don’t think this was an accident, do you?”
“Why, what—what do you mean?”
“Iknow!”
As he said this for the first time, the rage in his soul came thronging into the exclamation. He caught at a chair to steady himself. Bowden recoiled in terror; the woman, shrieking, flung herself at the feet of her husband, crying:
“Don’t kill me, Dan; don’t kill me!”
He stood swaying under the shock of her body against his knees, recovering his self-control, with a smile of contempt at the young coward shrinking against the wall, a moment that paid him back for the humiliation of months.
“I am not going to kill you—not yet,” he said slowly. “Get up!”
She obeyed.
“This man is your lover, then?”
She looked at him, did not dare to equivocate, and bent her head in acquiescence.
“That is so, isn’t it, Bowden?” he said, without doing him the honor to look at him.
“Yes.”
“That is all that is necessary,” he said; but the shock of the answers had been so intense that it was a moment before he could continue. “I shall trouble you only a moment. The case is quite plain. I am the third. You would have saved us all this if you had come to me openly.”
Then she understood his object. She put out her hands frantically.
“You’re going to divorce me,” she cried hysterically.
Bowden, by the table, still weak from the imminence of the horror which passed, took out his handkerchief and began to mop his brow.
“No. In our set whatever happens, we do not fasten that stain upon the woman,” Garford said. “You will divorce me—and at once. The cause will be desertion. After which, within forty-eight hours you will marry this man. These are myorders!”
“Marry—marryhim!” she cried, suddenly perceiving the pitfall. “But I don’t want—you can force a divorce—but you can’t——” Her voice broke. “You can’t do that!”
Bowden, aghast before the prospect, cried:
“Absurd—no, no—absurd!”
“What!” said Garford, in a voice like thunder; “do you mean to say you don’t love him?”
She looked at her lover, bit her lip, started to speak, and all at once sat down, crossing her arms and looking at her husband as though she could murder him. She saw in a flash the completeness of his revenge, and she admired him that he could be so strong. Bowden, who did not seize the significance of the question as quickly as the woman, saw only the ridicule that would face him in a marriage with a woman whose intrigues had been common gossip. The fear of ridicule gave him a touch of courage which nothing else could have aroused. He broke out furiously:
“This is too ridiculous—and it’s none of your business!”
“Bowden, look out!” said Garford, beginning to grow hot. “Do you mean to tell me that when I eliminate myself you refuse to marry her?”
“I refuse,” he said doggedly; at which the woman swung about, mortally humiliated, and gave him a look of undying hatred.
“You refuse?” said Garford between his teeth.
“I do.”
“Then, just what have you been doing here, Mr. Bowden?” he said slowly, and gradually, with his eyes on the other, his feet crept over the rug. All at once he saw red, caught the young man as he turned to escape, and, his hands at his throat, bent him backward over the table as though he had been a straw. Louise, even at such a moment with the dread of society before her eyes, was shrieking:
“Don’t kill him; don’t kill him, Dan!”
Bowden’s eyes began to bulge and his face to go purple.He made a frantic sign of surrender and fell choking to the floor.
“Well?” said Garford.
“I will—anything—anything!”
“Within forty-eight hours after my name is freed, you marry this woman! What she does from then on will be on your name—not mine.” He looked a moment, even with a fierce leap of triumph, at the cringing body of the man who had humiliated him in his secret pride. “I’m not going to take any promises from you—but I think you understand now what I will do if my orders are not carried out to the hour!” And as Bowden made no answer, he put out his foot in a crowning insult and stirred the abject body. “Do you?”
“Yes; yes!”
“Good!” He turned to the woman, who had waited this outcome in stubborn terror. “I have made certain investigations. Would you like your future husband to know what I know?”
“Quite unnecessary,” she said, looking down.
“That means you will do exactly as I say.”
She nodded.
“As for what you are thinking,” he said, with a final quixotic disdain, “don’t worry. You will not need for money. The day after your marriage, I will settle my income on you.” And as she looked up with a start she couldn’t restrain, he added, with a scornful gesture of his thumb at Bowden:“I am buying him for you—to keep my name clean!”
The reaction from the finality of this scene drove Garford into a high fever. The shock to his nervous system, already under constant pressure, during the preceding weeks, had culminated in the outburst of that moment when he had held Bowden’s head in his hands and watched it go purple. For a week, the pulsation of his heart increased to such an alarming velocity, filling his lungs as fast as his gasping breathing could discharge the air, that the doctor, fearing for his life, had him conveyed to a hospital. It was here that Doctor Fortier, working behind the scenes of the consultation-room, had made his first attempt to have him placed in an asylum.
His wife’s brother had consistently remained in the background. He had seen him only at rare intervals, and always with a sensation of dislike which amounted to a physical antipathy. Between the sister and brother, each a daring climber, filled with the contempt of petty obstacles, there were queer, unspoken comprehensions. Doctor Fortier had branched into other fields beyond the narrow limits of his profession. His name had been associated with land-development schemes and promoting syndicates. He had prospered, grown wealthy, risked too much, been bankrupted, and had slowly wormed his way back along the speculative highway. He made no pretense at morality, disdaining, in the boldness of his nature, the cloak of hypocrisy that others assumed before the world. In the present case, he flung himself into the battle for his sister’s future without a restraining scruple.
Among the crowd of admirers who surrounded Louise Fortier was a certain direct and unworldly person, David Macklin, made rich into the millions by a casual freak of nature which stored treasures of oil beneath the tax-ridden farms of his ancestors. Louise Fortier, with the instinctive sense of defense of the woman even toward the undivined dangers of the future, had assumed toward this blunt and simple nature an attitude of grateful comradeship. She consulted him on trivial decisions; she assumed the frank intimacy of a privileged confidant, and she confided in him the burden of her imaginary woes. He had the self-made man’s contempt for conventionalities. When he fell in love with her, he thought of only one thing: carrying her off, breaking the chain that bound her, of a divorce that would make her free for him. She checked him, well pleased, satisfied for the present to have him in reserve. When she had seen the apparition of her husband, after the first cold fear for her own safety, even mingled with her terror had been the thought, “If I can only escape, there is still Macklin.” Hence her horror when she had perceived the full extent of Garford’s revenge and the ridicule which would fasten on her with a marriage to a social idler ten years her junior.
The crisis which faced her astute, practical mind left her under no illusions. She understood the society in which she moved, the enemies she had made, and the revenge they would attempt. With the gossip already clinging to her name, marriage to Bowden meant also social ostracism. In the catastrophe which threatened, she needed a cloak of at least twenty millions, for there are well-defined degrees in society’s tolerance. To save herself by Macklin she was ready for anything—any lie or any humiliation.
Doctor Fortier, consulted, had immediately evolved the daring plan of having the husband declared insane, acourse not so difficult as it seemed, on account of the many known eccentricities of his character and the final disorder into which the discovery of his wife’s true character had thrown him.
A chance remark of one of the attending nurses, the mere dropping of Doctor Fortier’s name, had aroused Garford’s suspicions. He questioned adroitly and learned that his brother-in-law was of the hospital staff. Once on his guard, he noticed the constant surveillance over his actions, his words, habits, even to the silent moods of the day. He divined the pitfall and the danger not only to himself, but to his cherished scheme of revenge, suddenly calmed the fever of excitement, and ended the torturing nights of insomnia. To the surprise of every one, his pulse became normal again; he slept, and all signs of mental irritation vanished. Three days later, he walked out of the hospital, apparently cured.
The realization of the peril he had escaped left, however, a haunting memory, even an inner dread of the possibility of a mental breakdown. The shadow of Doctor Fortier seemed constantly close to him, spying on his movements with cynical exultant expectancy, biding the opportune moment. Two further attempts had been made to seize him by force, one at the bachelor apartment where he had taken up his residence and the second at his home, where he had been decoyed by an urgent message from his wife. Each attempt had failed—the first due to the accidental arrival of friends, the second to a warning which had arrived to him from some unknown source, from a servant, perhaps, to whom he had been kind. In the suspense in which he was living, he plunged into the oblivion of dissipation at a pace which only his extreme impulses could carry him, until his excesses had become notorious. His lawyers represented to him that such public outbursts could not fail but play into the hands ofhis enemies, who would be able to demand his commitment with every degree of plausibility. He then resolved to pursue his galloping way to destruction in some convenient hidden outpost of the city, and, seeking to hide his identity under the name of Dangerfield and to disappear completely, had come to Teagan’s Arcade. Despite the pleadings of his lawyers, he had insisted on the full quixotic program of flinging his fortune into the faces of those who had wronged him, knowing well that they would humiliate themselves to the point of accepting it in some convenient disguise. Also, he had come to hate the very idea of money, which had never come into his life but to disorganize it, which had so often dragged him from the inspired simplicity of his artist’s isolation into the disillusioning and fatiguing notoriety of the brilliant rushing world.
The suit for divorce had been forced on his wife by his threat to bring an action himself with all the consequent publicity of details. She recoiled before this and accepted the inevitable. As a matter of fact, she comprehended that a divorce was necessary; indeed, she had welcomed it in her new-found ambition to marry Macklin. She hoped that, with time, the determination of her husband would turn from the ultimatum he had delivered, particularly as she knew that his lawyers, in their effort to save the quixotic artist from robbing himself, were urging him to be satisfied with a divorce which would carry with it no financial imposition. When gradually she perceived the character of his obsessed resolution, she determined on a decisive step. Whatever the advice of her counsellors she had never, for a moment, the slightest doubt what he would do in case she dared to disobey him. This was the situation the night of the boxing party when the door had suddenly opened to Dangerfield upon the unwelcome figure of his wife.
The last visitor had crowded awkwardly out of the studio; the door had closed, and they remained standing, face to face. She turned, drew the bolt, flung back the heavy veil which protected her, and said gently:
“Put on your things first, Dan.”
“What do you want? Why do you come here?” he said frowning, lowering angrily at her, the clumsy gloves still on his hands, his body red and white under the glare of the top light.
“To throw myself on your mercy,” she said, dropping her hands in a hopeless surrender. “To do anything you want.”
“Anything but one,” he cut in.
“Anything but one,” she said, in a whisper, and her hands closed in tension at the slender throat.
The evil passion of revenge momentarily possessed him, at the thought that this woman who had so often mocked him in her heart as an easy dupe, had, at last, come here to taste the bitterness of humiliation herself, in order to escape the fate he had commanded. He wished to enjoy this reversal of the rôles, and, in an ugly mood, turned his back on her, walked over to the couch, and flung himself into a sweater. She watched him, without moving, until he had returned and faced her, and, from the cruelty in his eyes and the smile over his lips, she comprehended how hopeless was her mission. An inspiration came to her. She said rapidly:
“Wait until you understand why I have come.”
“Why have you come?” he said, smiling, expectant of the lie.
She was able to shudder, counterfeiting a physical repulsion so finely that he was half-deceived.
“First, to tell you that I will not accept a cent of that money from you. I may be everything—but I am not—that!” she said, looking down to avoid his eyes.“You can make me marry Bowden, but, if you do, I shall never touch a cent of your money.”
“So you have made up your mind to marry him?”
“If you insist, I have no choice,” she said, without resistance.
He thought:
“H’m, this is the first stage.” Aloud, he said, “My dear Louise, if you do not marry him, you admit that you are a——” He hesitated, in his disgust before the word to characterize her action.
“I admit it all,” she said.
A flash of anger shook him at the thought. He said angrily:
“You may. I do not. I do not admit to you, to Bowden, or to the world that the woman who bears my name can be such a creature. That is the point.”
She sat down on the edge of a chair, checked at her first attempt, staring at the carpet, her lips compressed, her agile mind racing ahead, conscious of the cruel enjoyment with which he watched and waited.
“There is no use in going on,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “This interview is very painful to me.”
She made no answer, though her slender eyebrows came into a closer contraction which sent little furrows shooting over her forehead and brought drawn lines down to her lips. He did not insist. He was curious with the sense of some impending danger. Why had she come—the true, the final reason which would emerge at the end?
At this moment, she raised her eyes and fixed her glance on him in a long, penetrating stare.
“She has come to see if I am drinking myself to death.” The thought flashed over him. He smiled and said coldly: “Never fear—I shall hold out!”
Whatever the thought in her mind, she rose, glancedaround the room, and her fingers closed over her throat as though overcome with emotion.
“It’s too frightful for words!” she said.
“What is?”
“What I have done,” she said, in a whisper. “To find you here in such a place.” She went to the window which gave over the roofs, raised the shade on that forlorn prospect, and pulled it down again with a shudder. Prepared as he was for duplicity, he did not, at that moment, suspect the motive of this reconnoitering. She came back, drawing her hand over her eyes.
“I deserve no mercy,” she said, staring away from him.
“But you have come here to get it,” he said cynically.
“Yes.”
“It is useless.”
“If I agree to the divorce—it is as good as granted—why do you insist on my marrying Bowden?”
“For the honor of my name,” he said angrily. “I do not deny you the right to love another; but I do not acknowledge that you can soil my honor by a vulgar deception. If I had believed otherwise that night, I should have killed you.”
She shrugged her shoulders.
“Then kill me now.”
“Then what you were had still power to hurt me,” he said coldly.
She fell into silence again before this check to the outburst she had prepared. At the end, she said slowly:
“Is it to punish me or to cleanse your name?”
“To cleanse my name,” he said emphatically.
A ray of light appeared to her.
“You wish whatever I do in the future to be under another name but yours.”
“Precisely.”
“Very well; I am ready to marry immediately, in the forty-eight hours as you require—but not Bowden.”
He was caught unawares. He asked himself rapidly who it could be whom she had been able to dominate thus in her moment of peril, and, carried away by this curiosity, he said:
“Who is it?”
“Mr. David Macklin wishes to marry me the moment I am free.”
“Macklin!” he exclaimed, his astonishment so visibly naïve that she was hard put to it to check a smile. “Well, that is a surprise.”
“Why?”
“I had not counted on Macklin,” he said cynically. “If he is another one, I knew nothing of it.”
“He has never been my lover—really—if that is what you mean,” she said quickly.
He looked at her, at this strange woman who had lived so many years by his side, and even as she in the scene of her confession had yielded him an involuntary tribute for his mastery of the scene, he felt an almost animal admiration for the genius of fascination in her which could achieve such a stroke in the moment of her humiliation.
“I wonder what story you could have told him,” he said, yielding frankly to this impulse.
“That is not the point,” she said indifferently. “But, first, I want you to know me as I am. Your detectives have told you much. It is nothing to the reality.”
“Is it possible there is more?” he said coldly.
“You shall judge; I shan’t withhold anything,” she said heavily, and lines of age and weariness came into her face as she doggedly came to her decision. “You will loathe me, but you will understand why I am as I am. I don’t ask you to take me back; I admit I cannot be true to any man.”
Deceived by his silence, counting on the gentleness and charity in his nature, seeking the dramatic appeal to his sympathies, perhaps with a wild hope that she might paint such a picture that he would turn from his revenge by the very revulsion of his loathing, she began a story of a distorted childhood, of a corrupt and venal home, a terrible, incomprehensible history which he, held though he was by the whispered tragic procession of ghoulish memories, did not entirely believe. The first leaden, sullen attitude continued in the mechanical, colorless recital. The tears, one by one, rose in her eyes and traveled slowly down her cheeks, without a note of suffering breaking into her voice. He listened, fascinated, incredulous, asking himself if human artifice could invent such a history.
“That was my childhood. The rest?—nothing else matters,” she said, with a shrug of her shoulder. “You know the rest—half of it. Could you expect anything else?” She took out her handkerchief—her voice had not risen—and carefully suppressed the tears gathered on her eyes. Then she extended her hands in a little movement of appeal.
“Well?”
There was a long, tense silence.
“What a monster!” he said at last.
She believed that she had won, that she had humbled herself so low in this hideous confession that she was now beneath his contempt. She flung herself at his feet, clinging to them, crying:
“Dan, Dan, let me go—let me go—don’t drag us both down!”
“Dragyoudown!” He burst into a wild laugh.
She rose, abruptly disillusioned, and looked at him as though she would spring at his throat.
“Keep on looking at me like that,” he said coldly.“Now we have the truth!”
“I swear—” she began vehemently.
“Don’t,” he cut in. “I don’t believe you, and if I did, a thousand times more reason why you should have played square with me.”
She knew that she had lost, even at the moment when in her self-admiration for thetour-de-forceshe had invented, she had felt that success must be hers. She saw a side of the man she had never suspected, the side which no woman perceives until she is on the point of losing the man who has lived at her side, and she said to herself: “I have underrated him.”
“Louise, I told you a lie,” he said. “I wish to punish you. That is the truth. I have that in me, too.” He felt the rapid mounting of his pulse, the inner raging excitement starting up, and he checked the cruel words which were on his tongue, afraid of where an outburst of passion would fling him, saying instead: “Are you through?”
She looked at him and began to laugh.
“That is better,” he said cynically.
“I did not lie to you,” she said abruptly.
“Perhaps not entirely.”
“You won’t change, then?”
He shook his head.
She drew a long breath, went over to the dressing-table and rearranged her hair which, at the moment when she had thrown herself at his feet, had become disarranged. She took her time, adjusting many little trifles, assuring herself that all trace of her emotion had disappeared. When she returned to where he had waited motionless, she said:
“I’m sorry. It’s all very foolish. You are ruining yourself.” He took up her coat and held it for her. “I shan’t trouble you again,” she continued. “It is final, isn’t it?”
He opened the door, aware of the hammering at his heart and the dangerous tension of all his nerves.
“Too late—I’ve said it—you’ve got just four days more.”
“I’ve been a fool. It is useless to ask you to forgive me. I do, though,” she said bitterly enough, yet to him the motion seemed counterfeit.
He laughed a scornful laugh.
“With all your cleverness you’re not clever enough. You should have known the man you’re dealing with.”
The next moment they were in the hall, and he perceived that they had been overheard.
The rest is known; her attempt to lure him downstairs to where Doctor Fortier and his aides were waiting (an attempt frustrated by the intuition of Inga and the interference of O’Leary); Dangerfield’s alarm at the menace he felt about him; his enforced abstinence, and the obsession that gradually took possesion of him that he was being watched, an obsession which was justified by the subsequent attempt which nearly succeeded in delivering him into the hands of Doctor Fortier. The constant thought of the outer danger raised up in his soul the fear of the inner thing, that something worse than death which, at times, in his physical weakness seemed to cry out in the hollow of his brain. When he had whispered to Inga the thing he feared, he had but hinted at the inner torment through which he was passing. To hold on to himself a little longer, to realize the vengeance he had determined was his sole engrossing thought, and then, one way or the other, to pull the numbing clouds of oblivion about his head and sink out of sight—a failure. For he had reached that utterly hopeless point in the life of a man of talent when he has seen everything, been everything, hoped everything, and come to utter disillusionment, too profound in artistic vision to trick himself intovain hopes, too keen in worldly knowledge not to perceive the tragedy of what might have been. Had the wreck of his home come before the surrender of his vision, he would have reacted, forgotten all in the return to untrammeled simplicity and dedication to work. The contrary was true, and, in the whole world, there was nothing to fall back on—no object, and no living person. With Inga, he felt strange actions and reactions. In her presence, the quiet, unquestioning devotion of her personality roused him sometimes to moments of vain regret. He had even said to himself that such a personality, absolutely devoted, demanding nothing but to serve him, unflinching in her loyalty, would have been the companion he craved and needed. He often thought bitterly that it was the final irony of fate that, in the end, in such an abandoned corner of the world, he should have found her—too late.