Out of the Primitive Part 60

"'Gratulations!" said a harsh voice, seemingly almost in their ears.

They looked up, startled. Blake stood close to them, at the end of the table, with his soft hat in his half-raised left hand, and his s.h.a.ggy fur coat hanging limp from his bowed shoulders. He stood with perfect steadiness. Only in the fixed stare of his bloodshot eyes and the twitching of the muscles in his gray-white face could they perceive the mental stress and excitement under which he was laboring.

"Tom!" stammered the Englishman. "You here!"

"Couldn't get Ashton started," replied Blake. His voice was hoa.r.s.e and rasping but not thick. Though he spoke slowly, his enunciation was distinct. "His man just carried him out. I've been waiting to slip out, unseen, this way. I ask you to excuse me. Long's I'm here, I'll make the best of it I can. Congratulations to you! Best man wins!"

While he was speaking, Genevieve had drawn her hand out of the unconscious clasp of Lord James and slowly risen from her chair. Her face was as white as Blake's; her eyes were wide with fear and pity and horror.

"You!--how could you do it?" she gasped. "When I had given you the second chance--to fail again!" The sight of his powerful jaw, clenched and resolute, stung her into an outburst of angry scorn. "Fail, fail!

always fail! yet with that look of strength! To come here with that look, after failing again so utterly, miserably--in my house! You coward!"

"That's it," a.s.sented Blake in a dead monotone. "Only pity is you couldn't see it sooner. But you know me now. Ought to 've known me from the first. I didn't get drunk there in Mozambique 'cause I hadn't the stuff. You might have known that. But now it's settled. I've proved myself a brute and a fizzle--been proving it ever since Ashton got a bottle and showed me into a little room. We've been guzzling whiskey in there ever since. His man took him out dead drunk. So far I'm only--"

"Tom!" broke in Lord James. "No more of that! Tell the truth--tell her why you did it!"

"Tell her--when she's guessed already. But if you say so, Jimmy--It's the first time I ever owned up I'm a quitter. Great joke that, when all my life I haven't been anything else,--hobo, fizzle, quitter, b.u.m--"

"Gad! Not that drivel! If you can't explain to her, then keep silent."

"No, I don't keep silent till I've had my say," rejoined Blake morosely. "Needn't think I don't know just what I'm saying and what I'm doing." His voice harshened and broke with a despair that was all the more terrible for the deadness of his tone. "G.o.d! That's why the whiskey won't work. I've poured it down like water, but it's no use--it won't work! I can't forget I've lost out!"

Genevieve leaned toward him, half frenzied, her face crimson and her gentle eyes ablaze with scorn. "And you--you!--claiming to be sober--come in here and say that to me!--that you've deliberately sought to intoxicate yourself in my house--in my house! You haven't even the decency to go away to do it! You must flaunt your shame in my face!"

"I told you I meant to slip out unseen," he mumbled, for the moment weakening in his determination to vilify himself. "Didn't think you'd give me the gaff--when it was all for you."

"For me!" she cried, in a storm of hysteria--"for me! Oh! To destroy all my love for you--my trust in the courage, the strength, the heroism I thought was yours! Oh! And to prove yourself a brute, a mere brute!--here in my own house!--my guest! Oh! oh! I hate you! I hate you!"

She flung herself, gasping and quivering, into her chair, in a desperate effort to regain self-control.

Blake bent over her and murmured with profound tenderness: "There, there, little girl! Don't take on so! I ought to 've cleared out right at first--that's a fact. But I didn't mean to bother you. Just blundered in. But I'm glad to know you've found out the truth. Long's you know for sure that you hate me, 't won't take you long to feel right toward him. He's all I'm not. Mighty glad you're going to be happy. Good-bye!"

Genevieve had become very still. But she neither looked up at him nor spoke when he stopped. He turned steadily about and started toward the door of the cardroom. Lord James thrust back the heavy chair and sprang to place himself before his friend.

"Wait, Tom!" he demanded. "Can't you see? She's overcome. Good G.o.d! You can't go off this way! You must wait and tell her the truth--how it happened--why you did it!"

Blake looked at him quietly and spoke in a tone of gentle warning, as one speaks to a young child: "Now, now, Jimmy boy, get out of my way.

Don't pester me. Just think how easily I could smash you--and I'm not so far from it. Stand clear, now."

"No! In justice to yourself--to her!"

"That's all settled. Let me by."

He stepped to one side, but Lord James again interfered. "No, Tom, not till you've told her! You shall not go!"

The Englishman stood resolute. Blake shook his head slowly, and spoke in a tone of keen regret: "Sorry, Jimmy; but if you _will_ have it!"

His bandaged right fist drove out and struck squarely on the point of his friend's jaw. His nerves of sensation were so blunted by the liquor he had drunk that he struck far harder than he intended. Lord James dropped without a groan, and lay stunned. Blake stared down at him, and then slowly swung around to look at Genevieve.

She had risen and stood with her hands clutching the edge of the table.

Her face was distorted with horror and loathing.

"You coward!--you murderer!" she gasped.

"Yes, that's it," he a.s.sented--"brute, drunkard, coward, murderer--all go together. You're right to hate me! But you can't hate me half as much as I hate myself. That's h.e.l.l all right--to hate yourself."

Suddenly he flung out his arms toward her and his voice softened to pa.s.sionate tenderness. "G.o.d! but it's worth the price!--to save you, Jenny! I'd do it all over again, a thousand times, to make you happy, little girl!"

She shrank back and flung up her arm in a gesture of bewilderment, which he mistook for fear.

"Don't be afraid," he rea.s.sured. "I'm going."

He turned hastily, stooped to feel the heart of the unconscious man, and rose to swing across to the cardroom door. He pa.s.sed out swiftly and closed the door behind him, without pausing for a backward glance.

Genevieve stared after him, dazed and bewildered by her half realization of the truth. The door had closed between them--what seemed to her an age had pa.s.sed--when the full realization of what he had done flashed in upon her clouded brain like a ray of glaring white light.

She flung out her arms and cried entreatingly: "Tom! Tom--dearest!"

She tried to dart around the table, but swayed and tottered, barely saving herself from the fall by sinking into a chair. The heavy, m.u.f.fled clang of the street door came to her as from a vast distance.

The merciful darkness closed over her.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

A BRIDGE GAME

The cold snap at Michamac had been broken for nearly a month, and work on the bridge was progressing with unprecedented rapidity.

Two days after the ball, Ashton had returned to the bridge sobered and chastened. The change in him may have been due to another cut in his allowance, or to a peppery interview during which Mr. Leslie had sought to browbeat him into resigning his position.

Whatever the cause of his change of heart, Ashton had so far proved himself almost feverishly eager to establish a record. Griffith, badly shaken by the failure and disappearance of Blake, had been peremptorily ordered South by his physician. Seizing the opportunity, Ashton, instead of interfering with the work, as McGraw expected, had astonished the phlegmatic general foreman by pushing operations with utmost zeal and energy.

More mechanics and laborers had been hired, and the augmented force divided into three eight-hour shifts. All day, in sun or fog or snow, and all night, under the bluish glare of the arc-lights, the expert bridgemen toiled away upon the gaunt skeleton of the gigantic bridge, far out and above the abyss of the strait. Not a moment of the twenty-four hours was lost.

But the Resident Engineer's brief spurt of energy had already notably relaxed, when, one sunny day near the end of March, a man not a member of the train crew nor a regular pa.s.senger came in on the afternoon train. As he emerged from under a coal car, one of the switchmen stared at him blankly, swore a few lurid oaths, and laughed.

The brake-rider had paid for his ride, though not in money. He limped as he walked off, and the gray pallor of his unshaven face was grotesquely shaded and blotched with coal dust. His shoddy clothes were torn and mud-stained, his soft hat begrimed and shapeless, his cheap shoes too far gone for repair. Yet for all his shiftless footwear and his limp, his stride was long and quick.

A watchman caught sight of him, and hurried after, to warn him off the grounds. The hobo disappeared behind a pile of girders. When the watchman turned the corner, his quarry had disappeared. He shook his head doubtfully at the bridge-service train, which was backing out along the track before him with a load of eyebars and girders. There was reason to believe that the hobo had boarded it; but if so, it was under too speedy headway for the rheumatic watchman to follow.

His suspicions were well founded. As the train clattered past the unlovely buildings of rough lumber and sheet iron cl.u.s.tered about the bridge terminus, the stranger clambered up between two of the swaying cars and perched himself upon the wheel-like top of the handbrake.

Seated thus, with feet dangling and hands thrust carelessly into the pockets of his disreputable coat, he gazed intently about at the bridge, regardless of the bitter sting of the lake wind.

The train rattled out across the sh.o.r.e span and along the anchor arm of the south cantilever. The brake-rider scrutinized the immense webs and lofty towers with the look of a father greeting his first-born. The train rolled on out between the towers and beyond, where swarms of carpenters and laborers were laying beams and stringers and floor planking and piling up immense stacks of material to be used farther out. The finishing gangs were following up the steel workers as fast as they could be pushed.

Beyond them, out near the end of the extension-arm, the electro-magnetic cranes of the huge main traveller were sorting and shifting forward a great heap of structural steel. The material thus handled came within the reach of the smaller traveller, which crouched upon the top-chords like a skeleton spider, swinging out the steel as wanted to the end of the unfinished suspension span.