The Deluge Part 28

"Hardly," I answered dryly. Hardly, indeed! For I was seeing now all that I had been hiding from myself since I became infatuated with Anita and made marrying her my only real business in life.

We faced each other, each measuring the other. And as his glance quailed before mine, I turned away to conceal my exultation. In a comparison of resources this man who had plotted to crush me was to me as giant to midget. But I had the joy of realizing that man to man, I was the stronger.

He had craft, but I had daring. His vast wealth aggravated his natural cowardice--crafty men are invariably cowards, and their audacities under the compulsion of their ravenous greed are like a starving jackal's dashes into danger for food. My wealth belonged to me, not I to it; and, stripped of it, I would be like the prize-fighter stripped for the fight. Finally, he was old, I young. And there was the chief reason for his quailing. He knew that he must die long before me, that my turn must come, that I could dance upon his grave.

XXV. "MY WIFE MUST!"

As I drove away, I was proud of myself. I had listened to my death sentence with a face so smiling that he must almost have believed me unconscious; and also, it had not even entered my head, as I listened, to beg for mercy.

Not that there would have been the least use in begging; as well try to pray a statue into life, as try to soften that set will and purpose. Still, many a man would have weakened--and I had not weakened. But when I was once more in my apartment--in our apartment--perhaps I did show that there was a weak streak through me. I fought against the impulse to see her once more that night; but I fought in vain. I knocked at the door of her sitting-room--a timid knock, for me. No answer. I knocked again, more loudly--then a third time, still more loudly. The door opened and she stood there, like one of the angels that guarded the gates of Eden after the fall. Only, instead of a flaming sword, hers was of ice. She was in a dressing-gown or tea-gown, white and clinging and full of intoxicating hints and glimpses of all the beauties of her figure. Her face softened as she continued to look at me, and I entered.

"No--please don't turn on any more lights," I said, as she moved toward the electric b.u.t.tons. "I just came in to--to see if I could do anything for you." In fact, I had come, longing for her to do something for me, to show in look or tone or act some sympathy for me in my loneliness and trouble.

"No, thank you," she said. Her voice seemed that of a stranger who wished to remain a stranger. And she was evidently waiting for me to go. You will see what a mood I was in when I say I felt as I had not since I, a very small boy indeed, ran away from home; I came back through the chilly night to take one last glimpse of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp-light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of strong self-pity--and I never saw them again.

"I've seen Roebuck," said I to Anita, because I must say something, if I was to stay on.

"Roebuck?" she inquired. Her tone reminded me that his name conveyed nothing to her.

"He and I are in an enterprise together," I explained. "He is the one man who could seriously cripple me."

"Oh," she said, and her indifference, forced though I thought it, wounded.

"Well," said I, "your mother was right."

She turned full toward me, and even in the dimness I saw her quick sympathy--an impulsive flash instantly gone. But it had been there!

"I came in here," I went on, "to say that--Anita, it doesn't in the least matter. No one in this world, no one and nothing, could hurt me except through you. So long as I have _you_, they--the rest--all of them together--can't touch me."

We were both silent for several minutes. Then she said, and her voice was like the smooth surface of the river where the boiling rapids run deep: "But you _haven't_ me--and never _shall_ have. I've told you that. I warned you long ago. No doubt you will pretend, and people will say, that I left you because you lost your money. But it won't be so."

I was beside her instantly, was looking into her face. "What do you mean?"

I asked, and I did not speak gently.

She gazed at me without flinching. "And I suppose," she said satirically, "you wonder why I--why you are repellent to me. Haven't you learned that, though I may have been made into a moral coward, I'm not a physical coward?

Don't bully and threaten. It's useless."

I put my hand strongly on her shoulder--taunts and jeers do not turn me aside. "What did you mean?" I repeated.

"Take your hand off me," she commanded.

"What did you mean?" I repeated sternly. "Don't be afraid to answer."

She was very young--so the taunt stung her. "I was about to tell you," said she, "when you began to make it impossible."

I took advantage of this to extricate myself from the awkward position in which she had put me--I took my hand from her shoulder.

"I am going to leave you," she announced.

"You forget that you are my wife," said I.

"I am not your wife," was her answer, and if she had not looked so childlike, there in the moonlight all in white, I could not have held myself in check, so insolent was the tone and so helpless of ever being able to win her did she make me feel.

"You are my wife and you will stay here with me," I reiterated, my brain on fire.

"I am my own, and I shall go where I please, and do what I please," was her contemptuous retort. "Why won't you be reasonable? Why won't you see how utterly unsuited we are? I don't ask you to be a gentleman--but just a man, and be ashamed even to wish to detain a woman against her will."

I drew up a chair so close to her that to retreat, she was forced to sit in the broad window-seat. Then I seated myself. "By all means, let us be reasonable," said I. "Now, let me explain my position. I have heard you and your friends discussing the views of marriage you've just been expressing.

Their views may be right, may be more civilized, more 'advanced' than mine.

No matter. They are not mine. I hold by the old standards--and you are my wife--mine. Do you understand?" All this as tranquilly as if we were discussing fair weather. "And you will live up to the obligation which the marriage service has put upon you."

She might have been a marble statue pedestaled in that window seat.

"You married me of your own free will--for you could have protested to the preacher and he would have sustained you. You tacitly put certain conditions on our marriage. I a.s.sented to them. I have respected them.

I shall continue to respect them. But--when you married me, you didn't marry a dawdling dude chattering 'advanced ideas' with his head full of libertinism. You married a man. And that man is your husband."

I waited, but she made no comment--not even by gesture or movement. She simply sat, her hands interlaced in her lap, her eyes straight upon mine.

"You say let us be reasonable," I went on. "Well, let us be reasonable.

There may come a time when woman can be free and independent, but that time is a long way off yet. The world is organized on the basis of every woman's having a protector--of every decent woman's having a husband, unless she remains in the home of some of her blood-relations. There may be women strong enough to set the world at defiance. But you are not one of them--and you know it. You have shown it to yourself again and again in the last forty-eight hours. Your bringing-up has kept you a child in real knowledge of real life, as distinguished from the life in that fashionable hothouse. If you tried to a.s.sert your so-called independence, you would be the easy prey of a scoundrel or scoundrels. When I, who have lived in the thick of the fight all my life, who have learned by many a surprise and defeat never to sleep except with the sword and gun in hand, and one eye open--when I have been trapped as Roebuck and Langdon have just trapped me--what chance would a woman like you have?"

She did not answer or change expression.

"Is what I say reasonable or unreasonable?" I asked gently.

"Reasonable--from _your_ standpoint," she said.

She gazed out into the moonlight, up into the sky. And at the look in her face, the primeval savage in me strained to close round that slender white throat of hers and crush and crush until it had killed in her the thought of that other man which was transforming her from marble to flesh that glowed and blood that surged. I pushed back my chair with a sudden noise; by the way she trembled I gaged how tense her nerves must be. I rose and, in a fairly calm tone, said: "We understand each other?"

"Yes," she answered. "As before."

I ignored this. "Think it over, Anita," I urged--she seemed to me so like a sweet, spoiled child again. I longed to go straight at her about that other man. I stood for a moment with Tom Langdon's name on my lips, but I could not trust myself. I went away to my own rooms.

I thrust thoughts of her from my mind. I spent the night gnawing upon the ropes with which Mowbray Langdon and Roebuck had bound me, hand and foot. I now saw they were ropes of steel--and it had long been broad day before I found that weak strand which is in every rope of human make.

XXVI. THE WEAK STRAND

No sane creature, not even a sane bulldog, will fight simply from love of fighting. When a man is attacked, he may be sure he has excited either fear or cupidity, or both. As far as I could see, it was absurd that cupidity was inciting Langdon and Roebuck against me. I hadn't enough to tempt them.

Thus, I was forced to conclude that I must possess a strength of which I was unaware, and which stirred even Roebuck's fears. But what could it be?

Besides Langdon and Roebuck and me there were six princ.i.p.als in the proposed Coal combine, three of them richer and more influential in finance than even Langdon, all of them except possibly d.y.k.eman, the lawyer or navigating officer of the combine, more formidable figures than I. Yet none of these men was being a.s.sailed. "Why am I singled out?" I asked myself, and I felt that if I could answer, I should find I had the means wholly or partly to defeat them. But I could not explain to my satisfaction even Langdon's activities against me. I felt that Anita was somehow, in part at least, the cause; but, even so, how had he succeeded in convincing Roebuck that I must be clipped and plucked into a groundling?