The Price She Paid Part 4

And then her heart skipped a beat and her skin grew cold and a fog swirled over her brain. If she should be cast out--if she could find no work and no one to support her--would she-- "O my G.o.d!" she moaned.

"I must be crazy, to think such thoughts. I never could! I'd die first--DIE!" But if anyone had pictured to her the kind of life she was now leading--the humiliation and degradation she was meekly enduring with no thought of flight, with an ever stronger desire to stay on, regardless of pride and self-respect--if anyone had pictured this to her as what she would endure, what would she have said? She could see herself flashing scornful denial, saying that she would rather kill herself. Yet she was living--and was not even contemplating suicide as a way out!

A few days after Presbury gave her warning, her mother took advantage of his absence for his religiously observed daily const.i.tutional to say to her:

"I hope you didn't think I was behind him in what he said to you about going away?"

Mildred had not thought so, but in her mother's guilty tone and guiltier eyes she now read that her mother wished her to go.

"It'd be awful for me to be left here alone with him," wailed her mother insincerely. "Of course we've got no money, and beggars can't be choosers. But it'd just about kill me to have you go."

Mildred could not speak.

"I don't know a thing about money," Mrs. Presbury went on. "Your father always looked after everything." She had fallen into the way of speaking of her first husband as part of some vague, remote past, which, indeed, he had become for her. "This man"--meaning Presbury--"has only about five thousand a year, as you know. I suppose that's as small as he says it is. I remember our bills for one month used to be as much or more than that." She waved her useless, pretty hands helplessly. "I don't see HOW we are to get on, Mildred!"

Her mother wished her to go! Her mother had fallen under the influence of Presbury--her mother, woman-like, or rather, ladylike, was of kin to the helpless, flabby things that float in the sea and attach themselves to whatever they happen to lodge against. Her mother wished her to go!

"At the same time," Mrs. Presbury went on, "I can't live without somebody here to stand between me and him. I'd kill him or kill myself."

Mildred muttered some excuse and fled from the room, to lock herself in.

But when she came forth again to descend to dinner, she had resolved nothing, because there was nothing to resolve. When she was a child she leaned from the nursery window one day and saw a stable-boy drowning a rat that was in a big, oval, wire cage with a wooden bottom.

The boy pressed the cage slowly down in the vat of water. The rat, in the very top of the cage, watched the floor sink, watched the water rise. And as it watched it uttered a strange, shrill, feeble sound which she could still remember distinctly and terribly. It seemed to her now that if she were to utter any sound at all, it would be that one.

II

ON the Monday before Thanksgiving, Presbury went up to New York to look after one of the little speculations in Wall Street at which he was so clever. Throughout the civilized world nowadays, and especially in and near the great capitals of finance, there is a cla.s.s of men and women of small capital and of a character in which are combined iron self-restraint, rabbit-like timidity, and great shrewdness, who make often a not inconsiderable income by gambling in stocks. They buy only when the market is advancing strongly; they sell as soon as they have gained the scantest margin of profit. They never permit themselves to be tempted by the most absolute certainty of larger gains. They will let weeks, months even, go by without once risking a dollar. They wait until they simply cannot lose. Tens of thousands every year try to join this cla.s.s. All but the few soon succ.u.mb to the hourly dazzling temptations the big gamblers dangle before the eyes of the little gamblers to lure them within reach of the merciless shears.

Presbury had for many years added from one to ten thousand a year to his income by this form of gambling, success at which is in itself sufficient to stamp a man as infinitely little of soul. On that Monday he, venturing for the first time in six months, returned to Hanging Rock on the three-thirty train the richer by two hundred and fifty dollars--as large a "killing" as he had ever made in any single day, one large enough to elevate him to the rank of prince among the "sure-thing snides." He said nothing about his luck to his family, but let them attribute his unprecedented good humor to the news he brought and announced at dinner.

"I met an old friend in the street this afternoon," said he. "He has invited us to take Thanksgiving dinner with him. And I think it will be a dinner worth while--the food, I mean, and the wine. Not the guests; for there won't be any guests but us. General Siddall is a stranger in New York."

"There are Siddalls in New York," said his wife; "very nice, refined people--going in the best society."

Presbury showed his false teeth in a genial smile; for the old-fashioned or plate kind of false teeth they were extraordinarily good--when exactly in place. "But not my old friend Bill Siddall,"

said he. "He's next door to an outlaw. I'd not have accepted his invitation if he had been asking us to dine in public. But this is to be at his own house--his new house--and a very grand house it is, judging by the photos he showed me. A regular palace! He'll not be an outlaw long, I guess. But we must wait and see how he comes out socially before we commit ourselves."

"Did you accept for me, too?" asked Mrs. Presbury.

"Certainly," said Presbury. "And for your daughter, too."

"I can't go," said Mildred. "I'm dining with the Fa.s.setts."

The family no longer had a servant in constant attendance in the dining-room. The maid of many functions also acted as butler and as fetch-and-carry between kitchen and butler's pantry. Before speaking, Presbury waited until this maid had withdrawn to bring the roast and the vegetables. Then he said:

"You are going, too, miss." This with the full infusion of insult into the "miss."

Mildred was silent.

"Bill Siddall is looking for a wife," proceeded Presbury. "And he has Heaven knows how many millions."

"Do you think there's a chance for Milly?" cried Mrs. Presbury, who was full of alternating hopes and fears, both wholly irrational.

"She can have him--if she wants him," replied Presbury. "But it's only fair to warn her that he's a stiff dose."

"Is the money--CERTAIN?" inquired Mildred's mother with that shrewdness whose rare occasional displays laid her open to the unjust suspicion of feigning her habitual stupidity.

"Yes," said Presbury amiably. "It's nothing like yours was. He's so rich he doesn't know what to do with his income. He owns mines scattered all over the world. And if they all failed, he's got bundles of railway stocks and bonds, and gilt-edged trust stocks, too. And he's a comparatively young man--hardly fifty, I should say. He pretends to be forty."

"It's strange I never heard of him," said Mrs. Presbury.

"If you went to South America or South Africa or Alaska, you'd hear of him," said Presbury. He laughed. "And I guess you'd hear some pretty dreadful things. When I knew him twenty-five years ago he had just been arrested for forging my father's name to a check. But he got out of that--and it's all past and gone. Probably he hasn't committed any worse crimes than have most of our big rich men. Bill's handicap has been that he hadn't much education or any swell relatives. But he's a genius at money-making." Presbury looked at Mildred with a grin. "And he's just the husband for Mildred. She can't afford to be too particular. Somebody's got to support her. _I_ can't and won't, and she can't support herself."

"You'll go--won't you, Mildred?" said her mother. "He may not be so bad."

"Yes, I'll go," said Mildred. Her gaze was upon the untouched food on her plate.

"Of course she'll go," said Presbury. "And she'll marry him if she can. Won't you, miss?"

He spoke in his amiably insulting way--as distinguished from the way of savagely sneering insult he usually took with her. He expected no reply. She surprised him. She lifted her tragic eyes and looked fixedly at him. She said:

"Yes, I'll go. And I'll marry him if I can."

"I told him he could have you," said Presbury. "I explained to him that you were a rare specimen of the perfect lady--just what he wanted--and that you, and all your family, would be grateful to anybody who would undertake your support."

Mrs. Presbury flushed angrily. "You've made it perfectly useless for her to go!" she cried.

"Calm yourself, my love," said her husband. "I know Bill Siddall thoroughly. I said what would help. I want to get rid of her as much as you do--and that's saying a great deal."

Mrs. Presbury flamed with the wrath of those who are justly accused.

"If Mildred left, I should go, too," cried she.

"Go where?" inquired her husband. "To the poorhouse?"

By persistent rubbing in Presbury had succeeded in making the truth about her poverty and dependence clear to his wife. She continued to frown and to look unutterable contempt, but he had silenced her. He noted this with a sort of satisfaction and went on:

"If Bill Siddall takes her, you certainly won't go there. He wouldn't have you. He feels strongly on the subject of mothers-in-law."

"Has he been married before?" asked Mrs. Presbury.

"Twice," replied her husband. "His first wife died. He divorced the second for unfaithfulness."

Mildred saw in this painstaking recital of all the disagreeable and repellent facts about Siddall an effort further to humiliate her by making it apparent how desperately off she was, how she could not refuse any offer, revolting though it might be to her pride and to her womanly instincts. Doubtless this was in part the explanation of Presbury's malicious candor. But an element in that candor was a prudent preparing of the girl's mind for worse than the reality. That he was in earnest in his profession of a desire to bring about the match showed when he proposed that they should take rooms at a hotel in New York, to give her a chance to dress properly for the dinner. True, he hastened to say that the expense must be met altogether out of the remnant of Mildred's share of her father's estate, but the idea would not have occurred to him had he not been really planning a marriage.

Never had Mildred looked more beautiful or more attractive than when the three were ready to sally forth from the Manhattan Hotel on that Thanksgiving evening. At twenty-five, a soundly healthy and vigorous twenty-five, it is impossible for mind and nerves, however wrought upon, to make serious inroads upon surface charms. The hope of emanc.i.p.ation from her hideous slavery had been acting upon the girl like a powerful tonic. She had gained several pounds in the three intervening days; her face had filled out, color had come back in all its former beauty to her lips. Perhaps there was some slight aid from art in the extraordinary brilliancy of her eyes.

Presbury inventoried her with a succession of grunts of satisfaction.