Chapter XVIII: "The Woman . . . Whose Hands are as Bands"

If I looked as stricken as I felt--and I doubtless did--Barrett had ample reason for assuming that I had been suddenly taken sick.

"Why, Jimmie, old man!" he exclaimed in instant concern; and then he took the half-burned cigar from between my fingers and threw it away, at the same time sending the floor boy scurrying after a drink for me.

I couldn't touch the whiskey when it came; and I was still trying to persuade Barrett that I wasn't sick when he walked me to the elevator. Wanting only to be free, I still had to let him go all the way with me to the door of my room. But the moment he was gone I hurried out again and descended to the lobby.

The night clerk knew me; or if he didn't, he knew the Little Clean-Up; and he was quite willing to talk. Miss Geddis was only temporarily a guest of the house, he told me. She was with a party of friends from the East, but her Denver home was with Mrs. Altberg, a widow and a prominent society woman. Yes, Miss Geddis was quite well known in social circles; she was reputed to be wealthy, and the clerk understood that she had originally come to Colorado for her health.

Under the stimulus of a particularly good gift cigar the man behind the register grew more confidential. Miss Geddis had always impressed him as being a woman with a history. It was not generally known, he said, but there was a whisper that she had come perilously near getting herself dragged into the lime-light as co-respondent in a certain high-life divorce case. The clerk did not vouch for this, but he did know that she had been seen often and openly in public with the man in the case, since the granting of the divorce.

I didn't sleep very well that night, as may be imagined; and the following day I should certainly have taken the first train for Cripple Creek if business had permitted. But business would not permit. There was an accumulated difference of some fifteen thousand dollars in ore values between us and the smelter people, and I was obliged to stay on with Barrett and help wrangle for our side in the discrepancy dispute.

At dinner time that evening I managed to elude Barrett, and upon going to the lobby desk for my mail, found a violet-scented envelope addressed to "Mr. James Bertrand" in a handwriting that I remembered only too well.

To anyone looking over my shoulder the enclosed note might have read as a casual and friendly greeting from an old acquaintance. But for me it spelled out death and destruction.

"Dear 'Bert," it ran. "I am not going to scold you for not speaking to me last night in the mezzanine parlor; nor for changing your name; nor for growing a beard. But if you should call this evening between eight and nine at Mrs. Altberg's house on the Boulevard, you will find me at home and more than willing to listen to your apologies and explanations.

"AGATHA."

My appetite for dinner had gone glimmering when I sat at the most secluded table the cafe afforded and went through the motions of eating. Not for a single instant did I mistake the purport of Agatha Geddis's note. It was not a friendly invitation; it was a veiled command. If it should be disobeyed, I made sure that not all the money in the Little Clean-Up's treasury could save me from going back to the home State as a recaptured felon.

Eight o'clock found me descending from a cab at the door of a rather dissipated looking mansion in the northern suburb. A servant admitted me, but I had to wait alone for a quarter of an hour or more in the stuffy and rather tawdry luxury of a great drawing-room. After a time I realized that Agatha was making me wait purposely in a refinement of cruelty, knowing well what torments I must be enduring.

When the suspense ended and she came into the room I saw at a glance that she was the same woman as of old; beautiful, alluring, but infinitely more sophisticated. Her charm now, as in girlhood, was chiefly the charm of physical perfection; but it was not entirely without its appeal when she made me sit beside her on the heavily carved mock-antique sofa.

"I didn't know certainly whether you would come or not," was the way she began on me, and if the tone was conventional I knew well enough what lay beneath it. "Old times are old times, but----"

She was merely playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse, but I could neither fight nor run until she gave me an opening.

"Of course you knew I would come; why shouldn't I?" I asked, striving for some outward appearance of self-possession.

"I'm sure I don't think of any reason, if you don't," she countered. "Did you know I was in Denver?"

"Not in Denver, no. But I heard, some time ago, that you had come to Colorado for your health."

"It seems absolutely ridiculous, doesn't it?--to look at me now. But really, I was very ill three years ago; and even now I can't go back home and stay for any length of time. You haven't been back, have you, since your--since you----"

"No; I haven't been back."

She was rolling her filmy little lace handkerchief into a shapeless ball, and if I hadn't known her so well I might have fancied she was embarrassed.

"I can't endure to think of that dreadful time four years ago--it is four years, isn't it?" she sighed; then with a swift glance of the man-melting eyes: "You hate me savagely, don't you, Bert?--you've been hating me all these years."

"No," I said, and it was the truth, up to that time. I knew that the feeling I had been entertaining for her had nothing in it so robust as hatred. There was no especial need for palliating her offense--far less, indeed, than I knew at that moment; yet I did it, saying, "You did what you thought you had to do; possibly it was what your father made you do--I don't know."

She was silent for a moment before she began again by asking me what made me change my name.

"My name isn't Herbert," I explained; "it never was. I think you must know that I was christened 'James Bertrand,' after my father."

"I didn't know it," she denied, adding: "but you have dropped the Weyburn?"

"Naturally."

Again there was a little interval of silence, and as before, she was the first to break it.

"So you are one of the owners of the famous Little Clean-Up? Are you very rich, Bertie?--you see, I can't give up the old name, all at once."

"No; I am not rich--as riches are counted nowadays."

"But you are going to be in just a little while," she put in, following the confident assertion with a query that came as suddenly as a stiletto stab: "Who is the girl, Bertie?"

"What girl?"'

"The girl you are going to marry. I saw her with you at the Broadway one night three weeks ago; I sat right behind you. She doesn't 'pretty' very much, to my way of thinking."

Once again I felt the murder nerve twittering. This woman with a mocking voice and a heart of stone knew everything; I was as certain of it as if I could have seen into the plotting brain behind the long-lashed eyes. I knew now why she hadn't glanced aside at me as she passed on the way to the elevators in the Brown Palace the previous evening. She had discovered me long before. At whatever cost, I must know how long before.

"You saw me last night, and three weeks ago at the theater," I said. "How long have you known that I was in Colorado?"

"Ever since you came, I think," she returned quietly. "I was a member of a private-car party up at Cripple Creek about that time--with some of the Midland officials and their friends, you know. Our car was taken out over a new branch line they were building at that time, and I saw you standing beside the track. Perhaps I shouldn't have recognized you if I hadn't been thinking so pointedly of you. The home newspapers had told of your es--of your leaving the State; and I was naturally--er--well, I was thinking about you, as I say."

I saw that I was completely in her power. She knew, better than anyone else on earth, save and excepting only her father, that I was an innocent man. But she also knew that I had broken my parole.

"What do you want of me, Agatha?" I asked; and I had to wet my lips before I could say it.

"Supposing we say that I am asking only a little, common, ordinary friendliness, Bertie--just for the sake of the old days, and to show that you don't bear malice. I'm like other women; I get horribly bored and lonesome sometimes for somebody to talk to--somebody who knows, and for whom I don't have to wear a mask. The other girl doesn't live here, does she?"

"No."

"That's better. When you come to Denver, you must let me see you now and then; just for old sake's sake. You come up quite often, don't you? But I know you do; I see your name in the arrivals quite frequently."

I formed a swift resolve not to come as often in the future as I had in the past, but I did not tell her so.

"You'll come to see me when you're in town," she went on. "I'll try to learn to call you 'Jimmie,' and when we meet people, I'll promise to introduce you as the Mr. Bertrand, of Cripple Creek and the Little Clean-Up. Does that make you feel better?"

It made me feel as if I should like to lock my fingers around her fair pillar-like throat. I have said that I did not hate her. But one may kill without hatred in self-defense. Short of cold-blooded murder, however, there was nothing I could do--nothing anyone could do. Beyond this, she went on chatting easily and lightly of the old times in Glendale and the people we had both known, rallying me now and then upon my unresponsiveness. At my leave-taking, which was a full hour later, she went with me to the hall, helped me into my overcoat, and gave me another of the breath-taking shocks.

"There was a time, once, when you really thought you were in love with me, wasn't there, Bertie?" she asked sweetly.

Again I told her the simple truth. "There was a time; yes. It was when I was still young enough to carry your books back and forth on the way to and from the old school."

"But you got bravely over it, after awhile?"

"Yes; I got over it after I grew up."

She laughed softly.

"Don't you know that is a frightfully dangerous thing to say to a woman--to any woman, Bertie?"

"It is the honest thing to say to you."

"I suppose it is. Yet there are some things a woman likes better than honesty. Perhaps you haven't been making love to the Cripple Creek girl long enough to find that out. But it is so, and it always will be so."

It was at the outer door opening that she gave me the final stab.

"I am taking your business excuse at its face value to-night and letting you go. But the next time you come you mustn't have any business; at least, nothing more important than entertaining me--and that is important. Just jot that down in your little vest-pocket memorandum, and don't allow yourself to forget it for a single moment; not even while you are making love to Little Brown-Eyes. Good-night."

The old-fashioned preachers used to describe a terrifying hell in which fire and brimstone and all manner of physical torments awaited the impenitent. I was brought up to believe implicitly in such a hell, but the puerility of it as compared with the refined tortures which I endured that winter can never be set forth in any words of mine.

With a desire keener than the hunger of the famishing for respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's; that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible morass of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning, was waiting to engulf me.

But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master of circumstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the great gold camp; and that--if what Barrett had said were true--Polly herself had to be considered.

So the double life began and continued. In Cripple Creek I was Mary Everton's lover; in Denver I was Agatha Geddis's bondman and slave. Oftener and oftener, as the winter progressed, the business of the mine took me to the capital; and Agatha never let me escape. One time it would be a theater party, at which I would be obliged to meet her friends; people who, as I soon learned, were of the ultra fast set. At another it would be a driving party to some out-of-town resort with the same, or a worse, crowd; midnight banquetings, with champagne in the finger-bowls, cocktails to go before and after, and quite likely some daring young woman to show us a new dance, with the cleared dinner-table for a stage. Many times I tried to dodge; to slip into Denver on the necessary business errand and out again before the newspapers could publish my arrival. It was no use. That woman's ingenuity, prescience, intuition--whatever it may be called, was simply devilish. Before I could turn around, my summons would find me, and I had to obey or take the consequences.

Now and again I rebelled, even as the poorest worm will turn if it be sufficiently trodden upon; but that, too, was useless. My tormentor held me in a grip of steel. Worse than all, the dog's life she was leading me caused me to lose all sense of proportion. As a choice between two evils, a return to prison would have been far more endurable than this indefinite sentence of degradation Agatha Geddis was making me serve. But I could not see this: all I could see was that this woman had the power to make a total wreck of all that I had builded. The larger fact that I was myself the principal contributor to the wreck, helping it on by the time-serving course I was pursuing, did not lay hold of me.

One night, or rather early one morning, when I had taken her home from a road-house revel so shameful that the keeper of the place had practically turned us out, I asked her where all this was to end.

"Perhaps it will end when I have taught you how to make love to me again," she returned flippantly.

"And if I refuse to learn?"

Her smile was no longer alluring; it was mockingly triumphant.

"You can't keep it up indefinitely--with the Cripple Creek girl, I mean, Bertie"--she still called me "Bertie" or "Herbert" when we were alone together. "Sooner or later, she is going to find out what you are doing to her; and after that, the fireworks."

I shook my head. "It is hard to decide, sometimes, Agatha, whether you are a woman or merely a she-devil in woman's shape."

"Oh, I'm a woman--all woman."

"But the motive," I gritted. "If I had done you the greatest injury a woman could suffer--if you had a lifelong grudge to satisfy--you could hardly be more vindictively merciless."

Her smile at this was not pleasant to look upon.

"Somebody has said that the keenest pleasure in life is the pleasure of absolute possession. I own you, Bertie Weyburn, body and soul, and you know it. If you were a big enough man, you'd kill me: if you were big enough in another way, you'd defy me and take what is coming to you."

"And since I am not yet ready to become either a murderer or a martyr?"

"You will probably do the other remaining thing--marry me some day and give me a chance to teach you how to spend the money which, thus far, you don't seem to know what to do with."

"You have money enough of your own--or your father's," I retorted.

"I'd rather spend yours," she said coolly.

It was the old _impasse_ at which we had arrived a dozen times before, only the wretched involvement seemed to be adding coil upon coil with the passing of time. I have often wondered if she really meant the marriage threat. At this distance in time it appears extremely doubtful. She may have had moments in which the steadily augmenting output of the Little Clean-Up tempted her, but this is only a surmise. And a little later I was to learn that during this very winter when she was dragging me bound and helpless at the end of her trail-rope, she was--but I need not anticipate.

"You have me bluffed to a standstill, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't only a bluff," I said, in reply to her remark that she'd rather spend my money than her father's. "What if I should tell you here and now that this is the end of It?--that you can't make a plaything of me any longer? What would you do?"

"There are a number of things I might do--to one who is so temptingly vulnerable as you are, Bertie. For one, I might send a wire to the sheriff of the home county, or to the warden of the penitentiary. Really, when I come to think of it, I'm not sure that I oughtn't to do it, anyway, on the score of public morals. Nobody would blame me; and some few would applaud."

"Morals!" I exploded. "You don't know the meaning of the word!"

"Maybe not," she rejoined lightly. "Not many women do. But sending the wire would be a rather crude way of bringing you to terms; especially since I know of at least one better way. I'm going to hazard a guess. You haven't told the Cripple Creek girl anything about your past?"

I was silent.

"I thought not," she went on smoothly. "With some women, perhaps with most women, it wouldn't make any great difference, one way or the other. So far as anybody out here knows to the contrary, you are a free man--and a rich one; and so long as you haven't committed bigamy or something of that sort, the average girl wouldn't care the snap of her finger. Up to a few days ago I thought the brown-eyed little thing you brought up here one night last fall to the theater was the average girl. But now I know better."

It had always seemed a sheer sacrilege to even mention Mary Everton in Agatha Geddis's presence. But this time I broke over.

"You know who she is?" I queried.

"I do now. And I know her _metier_ even better than you do, Bertie, dear. She might go to her grave loving you to distraction, but she would never have an ex-convict for the father of her children--not if she knew it. It's in the Everton blood. Anybody who knew Phineas Everton as you and I did in the old school-days, ought to know exactly what to expect of his daughter."

I sat up quickly, and the lights in the high-swung drawing-room chandelier began to turn red for me.

"You devil! Do you mean to say that you would tell Polly Everton?" I burst out savagely.

"I'm not going to tell her because you are not going to drive me to it,"--this with a half-stifled yawn behind a faultless white hand that was just beginning to show the blue veining of bad hours and dissipation. Then: "Go back to your hotel and go to bed, Bertie. You'll wake up in a better frame of mind a few hours later, perhaps. Kiss me, and say good-night."

As I have confessed, I carried a gun in those days; had carried one ever since that memorable afternoon when I had dropped from the trolley-car in Cripple Creek to preface the opening of our business office by going first to a hardware shop for the purchase of a weapon. After leaving the Altberg house I dismissed the night-owl cab on the north bank of the river and crossed the Platte on the viaduct afoot.

Half-way over I stopped to look down into the winter-dry bed of the stream. There was one way out of the wretched labyrinth of shame and double-dealing into which my weakness and cowardice had led me. The weapon sagged heavily in my pocket as if it were a sentient thing trying in some dumb fashion to make its presence felt.

It was but a gripping of the pistol and a quick pull at the trigger, and I should be out of the labyrinth for good and all. I don't know why I didn't do it; why I hadn't done it long before--or rather, I do know. It was because, when the deciding moment came, I was always confronted by a vivid and soul-harrowing flash-light picture of Polly Everton's face as it would look when they should tell her.