Louis Tracy

“ She felt now that she had been tricked into a loveless marriage; that Marten had purchased her with exactly the same cold calculation of values which he would have applied to a business undertaking. Willard had proved as potter’s clay in his hands, and every turn and twist of the project was clear to her vision as though her husband, yielding to sardonic impulse, had set forth the unsavory story in black and white. But it was one thing to recognize how she had been duped, and another to strike out boldly for instant freedom. And in that respect the woman was braver than the man. ”

“ Farewell, Derry. I kiss you, in a waking dream. No matter what the world has in store for you—though some other fair woman may quicken into life because of you—though men may honor your name and exalt you to the high places—you will never forget the girl you once held dear. As a souvenir, I send you all that is left of the bunch of white heather which formed my wedding bouquet. Did you see it that day when you hid on the ledge, and watched the triumphal start of a journey which has led me into such strange places and is now to end so soon? ”

“ Well, that little shack up there stands on the ledge where I rediscovered the lode after being nearly crushed to death. I crawled to within a few yards of this very spot; so resolved was I that no one should rob me of the price I was paid for Nancy. I am the same man now that I was then, Dacre—and in a very similar mood. Strain! I have been strained to the limit. I have thought of taking my own life; not from lack of capacity to endure further ills, but from sheer disgust at the crassness of things. ”

“ Well, I think that is true, too; but it is equally true that a woman often takes what I may call a saner view of life than a man. She is quicker to admit the logic of accepted facts. If you discovered that some girl had won by false pretense, not your love, for love gilds the grossest clay, but your respect, as her husband, you would not spurn her with the loathing I feel now for the man who made me his wife. For that is what it has come to. I refuse to pose as Hugh Marten’s wife in the eyes of the world one moment longer than is needful to obtain my freedom. ”

“ Nancy rose. She was deathly white, and the tears still coursed silently down her cheeks; but despair had benumbed her emotions, and she spoke calmly.
“You are sentencing me to death,” she said.
“Am I? Then Power dies, too,” he cried.
“No. That is not in the bond. You stipulate that I shall return to Marten as his wife, and that I am not to take my own life. But if my heart breaks, and I die, you will have glutted your bitter malice already, and Derry, too, must not provide you with a victim.”
“People don’t die of broken hearts.”
“Every woman who has loved will think differently. ”

“ He put his hands to his face, as if the gesture would close out forever the horrific vision which the memory of that gray-haired woman in San Francisco was beginning to dispel. For the first time in his young life he had felt the lust of slaying, and the instinct of the jungle thrilled through every nerve, till his nails clenched and his teeth bit in a spasm of sheer delirium.
MacGonigal, despite his present load of flesh, must have passed through the fiery furnace himself in other days; for he recognized the varying phases of the obsession against which Power was fighting. ”

“ My love for you may be fierce and terrible; but I am only a weak woman, a woman just emerged from girlhood, and I want to be saved from myself. If, for your dear sake, I am to cut adrift from the past, I cannot be left alone. By your side I can face the storm, but I shudder at the thought of protests, appeals, influences perhaps more potent than I imagine in my present new-found mood of hatred of the wrong which has been done me. Derry, why, do you think, have I asked you to leave Newport early tomorrow? ”

“ Some men, he knew, would have tossed every record of the past into the fire, and married the woman of their choice without other than a momentary qualm of conscience. That course, to him, was a sheer impossibility. While the dead Nancy and her living child stood in the gates of Eden, and option lay only between wedding Marguerite Sinclair and blowing out his brains, he would die unhesitatingly. But, if he continued to live, what was the outlook? Wine, women—debauchery, lewdness? His soul sickened at the notion. ”

“ The British army seems to turn out a certain type of tall, straight, clean-limbed, and clear-eyed young officer as though he were cast in a mold. Power appraised him rightly at the first glance—a gentleman, who held honor dear and life cheap, a man of high lineage and honest mind, a Scot with a fox-hunting strain in him, a youngster who would put his horse at a shire fence or lead his company in a forlorn hope with equal nonchalance and determination—not, perhaps, markedly intellectual, but a direct descendant of a long line of cavaliers whose all-sufficing motto was, “God, and the King.” ”

“ But I knew what happened on that June day in the Gulch, for I could read your soul mirrored in your eyes; so now I give you one final memento, and hug the belief that you will press it to your lips. My poor secret dies with me, perhaps. I don’t imagine that the man whom I used to revere as a father will satisfy an unfathomable spite by denying my child the tending and luxury it will receive in Hugh Marten’s care. I could write reams of a woman’s sad longings, of explanations that would lead nowhere ”

“ Nancy Willard—she was Nancy Marten now! He awoke to a dim perception of his surroundings by hearing his teeth grating. And even that trivial thing brought an exquisite pain of memory; for Nancy, reading a book one day, came across a passage in which some disappointed rascal had “ground his teeth in baffled rage,” and he had joined in her shout of glee at the notion that anyone should express emotion so crudely. So, then, a man might really vent his agony in that way! ”

“ If it were possible, which it is not, that some new whim drove her back to America, am I a toy dog to be whistled to heel as soon as her woman’s caprice dictates? To please her father, she married Marten; to placate her father, she has gone back to Marten; to gratify some feminine impulse, she flung herself in my arms; when impulse, or duty as she calls it, again overcomes reason, she may summon her obedient slave once more. ”

“ Be sure that an anxious mother had long ago formed a remarkably accurate opinion as to the circumstances attending Nancy Willard’s wedding; but, being a wise woman, she said no word to her son concerning it, and was content to pray that the cloud might lift from off his soul, and that he might yet meet a girl who would make him a good and loving wife. For that is the way of women who are mothers—they find real joy only in the well-being of their offspring. ”

“ I am not even taking any great risk, because there isn’t a jury in America that would convict a father for killing the man who betrayed his daughter while her husband’s back was turned. The dirty hound! I’ve got both him and you in a tight place, and now you’re going to suffer, each of you. Condemn him to death if you like. I don’t care a red cent which way your choice goes. But, if you want him to live, you must return to Marten, and be his good and loving wife once more. No, you gain nothing by shrinking away in horror at the notion. ”

“ When all is said and done, a little dinner à l’Italienne might pass by way of a joke—a harmless escapade at the best, or worst. But, when I reach my hotel and find a note announcing that the man is leaving Newport unexpectedly, and when I hear at the Casino that the woman also is arranging to meet her father in New York, with equal unexpectedness, I am inclined to ask the man, he being something more than a mere acquaintance, if there is not a very reasonable probability that he is making a damned fool of himself. ”

“ Such a scene might well lull the beholder to rest; but Power was blind to its charms. He was reviewing, in an aimless way, the associations which that very apartment held for him. Changed though it was out of all semblance to the poverty-stricken living-room of the ranch, Nancy’s spirit had never been wholly exorcised. He pictured her slim and lissome figure as she had stood with him at the window many an evening, and watched the purple shadows stealing over the hills. In that room she had married Marten. ”

“ Power passed unheeded that sudden flame of passionate resentment.
“It is natural, in a sense, that you should misread the actual course of events,” he said. “You may not be aware that I have been a constant visitor to this part of Devonshire during many years, and that, in hiring Valescure, you were really seeking me instead of me, as you imagine, seeking you. I met Nancy by accident. We became friends. It was the impulse of a girl deprived of the one adviser in whom she should have complete trust that led her to confide in me.” ”

“ Then he strolled out, went downtown by street car, and met Nancy when she alighted from a rickety cab at the door of Pestalozzi’s café. She wore a cream-tinted dress, and her piquant features were daintily framed in a big Leghorn hat. It pleased him to find that she had not even deigned to veil her face, and her cheerful cry of recognition showed no conscience-stricken sense of guilt because of a meeting which, if known, must have excited the suspicions of her intimates.
“Ah, there you are, Derry!” she said. “Was there ever a more punctual person? Am I late? ”

“ Sometimes, when the written or printed word insisted on making him famous, if Bison was too remote a sanctuary, he would disappear for many months on end, either hobnobbing with Dacre in Devonshire or elsewhere, or taking protracted tours in out-of-the-way countries like East Africa, Siberia, or the Balkans.
Naturally, he had adventures and misadventures. No man can scour the earth, year in and year out—be he rich as Crœsus or kindly as Francis d’Assisi—without enduring vicissitudes, whether they arise from the haphazard casualties of travel or are the outcome of sheer human perversity. ”

“ Her listless tone might have annoyed a weaker man; but Marten only laughed pleasantly.
“I should be very unhappy if he had insisted on keeping you,” he said. “Of course, you hate having to part from him, and from a place where you have lived during a few careless years; but you will soon learn to love the big world to which I am taking you. Colorado in June is all very well; but it can’t begin to compare with London in July, the Engadine in August, and Paris in September. Don’t forget that the proper study of mankind is man—and woman.” ”