Chapter D: Appleton and Company (8)

"I suppose you think you have made me ashamed because I am still in a state of nature," he rejoined. "But you haven't. No matter what any man may pretend, he will care for you in the natural way as long as you look as you do." And his glance swept her in bold admiration. "As I said a while ago, I'm not jealous of Raphael. I'm jealous of all men. Sometimes I get to thinking about you--that you are somewhere--with some man, several men--their heads full of the ideas that steam in my head whenever I look at you--and I walk the floor and grind my teeth in fury."

The color was in her cheeks, though her eyes were mocking. "Go on," she said. "This is interesting."

"Yes--it must be interesting, and amusing, in view of the way I used to act. But that was your fault. You hid yourself from me then. You cheated me. You let me make a fool of myself, and throw away the best there was in my life."

"You forget your career," said she. "You aren't a human being. You are a career."

"I suppose you--a woman--would prefer an obscurity, a nobody, provided he were a sentimental, Harry-hug-the-hearth."

"I think so," she said. "A nobody with a heart rather than the greatest somebody on earth without one. Heart is so much the most important thing in the world. You'll find that out some day, when you're not so strong and self-reliant and successful."

"I have found it out," replied he. "And that is why I ask you to marry me."

"Ask me to become an incident in your career."

"No. To become joint, equal partner in our career."

She shook her head. "You couldn't, wouldn't have a partner, male or female--not yet. Besides it would be impossible for me to interest myself in getting rich or taking care of riches or distributing them among a crowd of sycophants."

"I'm not getting rich," replied he. "I'm making a good salary, and spending it almost all. But I'm not making much, outside."

"I had heard otherwise. They tell me your sort of business is about the best 'graft'--isn't that the word?--downtown, and that you are where you can get as much as you care to carry away."

"Yes. I _could_."

"But you don't? I knew it!"

Her belief in his honesty made him uncomfortable. "I didn't say I was different from the others--really different," he said hesitatingly. That very morning he had been forced to listen to a long series of reports on complaints of O.A.D. policy holders--how some had been swindled by false promises of agents whom he must shield; how others had been cheated on lapsed or surrendered policies; how, in a score of sly ways, the "gang" in control were stealing from their wards, their trusting and helpless victims. "I can't, and don't purpose to, deny," he went on to her, "that I'm part of the system of inducing some other fellow to sow, and then reaping his harvest, or most of it. I don't put it in my own barn, but I do help at the reaping. Oh, everything's perfectly proper and respectable--at least, on the surface. But--well, sometimes I get desperately sick of it all. Just now, I'm in that mood; it brought me here to-day. There's a row on down there, and it's plot and counterplot, move and check, all very exciting, but I--hate it! Nobody's to blame. It's simply a system that's grown up. And if one plays the game, why, he's got to conform to the rules."

"_If_ one plays the game."

"What's a man to do? Go back to the farm and become a slave to a railroad company or a mortgage? We can't all be painters."

She glanced at him quickly with a sudden narrowing of the eyelids that seemed to concentrate her gaze like a burning glass. "I hadn't thought of that," said she.

"If you had to be either a sheep or a shearer, which would you choose?"

"Is that how it is?"

"Pretty nearly," was his gloomy reply.

A long silence, he staring at the floor, she watching him. At last she said, "Haven't they--got--something on you--something they can use against you?"

He startled. "Where did you hear that? What did you hear?" he demanded, with an astonished look at her.

"I was lunching to-day with some people who know we used to be married, but they don't know we're good friends. They supposed I'd be glad to hear of any misfortune to you. And they said a mine was going to blow up under you, and that you'd disappear and never be heard of again."

"You can't tell me who told you?"

"No--unless it's absolutely necessary. It has something to do with an investigating committee. You're to be called quite suddenly and something is to come out--something you did that will look bad--" She came to a full stop.

His face cleared. "Oh--I know about that. I've arranged for it." His mind was free to consider her manner. "And you assumed I was guilty?"

"I didn't know," she replied. "I was sure you were no worse than the rest of them. If you hadn't come to-day, I'd have sent you warning."

His eyes lighted; he smiled triumphantly. "I told you!" he cried. "You see, you still feel that we're married, that our interests are the same."

She colored, but he could not be sure whether her irritation was against herself or against him. "You are very confident of yourself--and of me," said she ironically, and her eyes were laughing at him. "And this is the man," she mocked, "who less than three brief years ago was so eager to be rid of me!"

"Yes," he admitted, with a brave and not unsuccessful effort at brazening out what could not be denied or explained away. "But you were not the same person then that you are now."

"And whose fault was that?" retorted she. "You married me when I was a mere child. You could have made of me what you pleased. Instead, you----"

"I admit it all," he interrupted. "I married you--from a base motive, though I can plead that I glamoured it over to myself. Still, I owed it to myself and to you to have done my level best with and for you. And I shirked and skulked."

She did not show the appreciation of this abjectness which he had, perhaps unconsciously, expected. Instead, she laughed satirically, but with entire good humor. "How clever you think yourself, Horace," said she, "and how stupid you think me. That's a very old trick, to try to make a crime into a virtue by confessing it."

He hung his head, convicted. "At least," he said humbly, "I love you now. If you will give me another chance----"

"You had as good a chance as a man could ask," she reminded him, without the anger that would have made him feel sure of her. "How you used to exasperate me! You assumed I had neither intelligence nor feeling. You were so selfish, so self-centered. I don't see how you can hope to be trusted, even as a friend. You shake me off; you see me again; find I have been somewhat improved by a stay in New York; find I am not wholly unattractive to others. Your jealousy is roused. No, please don't protest. You see, I understand you perfectly."

"I deserve it," he said.

"Do you think a woman would be showing even the small good sense you concede women, if she were to trust a man whose interest in her was based upon jealousy of another man?"

"I'm not jealous of that damned, scented foreigner, with his rings and his jeweled canes and his hand-kissing. I know it must make your honest American flesh creep to have him touch his lips to the back of your hand."

Neva blazed at him. "How dare you!" she cried, rising in her wrath. "How dare _you_ stand in my house, in my presence, and insult thus the best friend I ever had--the only friend!"

"Friend!" sneered Armstrong. "I know all about the sort of friendship that rake is capable of."

Neva was facing him with a look that blanched his face. "You will withdraw those insults to Boris," she said, in that low, even voice which is wrath's deadliest form of expression, "and you will apologize to me, or you will leave here, never to return."

"I beg your pardon," he responded instantly. "I am ashamed of having said those things. I--I ... It was jealousy. I love you, and I can't bear to think of the possibility of rivalry."

"You are swift with apologies. In the future, be less swift with impertinence and insult," she answered, showing in manner, as well, that she was far from mollified. "As between Boris's friendship and professions of love from a man who only a little while ago neglected and abandoned and forgot me----"

"For God's sake, Neva," he pleaded. "I've been paying for that. And now that you have shown me how little hope there is for me, I shall continue to suffer. Be a little merciful!"

His agitation, where usually there was absolute self-control, convinced and silenced her. Presently he said, "Will you be friends again--if I'll behave myself?"

She nodded with her humorous smile and flash of the eyes. "_If_ you behave yourself," replied she. "We were talking of--of Fosdick, was it not?"

"Fosdick!" He made a gesture of disgust. "That name! I never hear it or think of it except in connection with something repulsive. It's always like a whiff from a sewer."

"And you were about to marry his daughter!" said she, with a glance of raillery.

He reddened; anything that was past for him was so completely shut out and forgotten that, until she reminded him, the sentimental episode with Amy was as if it had not been. "Where did you hear that?" he asked, his guilty eyes lowering; for he felt she must have suspected why he had thought of marrying Amy.

"Everybody was talking about it when I came to New York."

He was silent for a moment. "Well," he finally continued, "she and I are not even friends." Into his eyes came the steely, ruthless look. "Within a week I'm going to destroy Josiah Fosdick." Then, in comment on her swiftly changing expression, "I see you don't like that."

"No," she replied bluntly.

"I'm going to do a public service," said he, absolutely unconscious of the real reason why his threat so jarred upon her. "I ought to have a vote of thanks."

She could not tell him that it was not his condemnation of Josiah but his merciless casting out of his friendship with Amy that revolted and angered and saddened her. If she did tell him, he, so self-absorbed and so bent upon his own inflexible purposes that he was quite blind to his own brutality, would merely think her jealous. Besides, she began to feel that her real ground for anger against him ought to be Josiah's fate, even if her femininity made the personal reason the stronger. She accordingly said, "You just got through telling me it was a system, and not any one man's fault."

Armstrong dismissed that with a shrug. "I'm in his way, he's in mine. One or the other has to go down. I'm seeing to it that it's not I." Then, angered by her expression, and by the sense of accusing himself in making what sounded like excuse, he cried, "Say it! You despise me!"

"It isn't a judgment," she answered; "it's a feeling."

"But you don't know what the man has done."

"One should not ask himself, What has the other man done? but, What will my self-respect let me do?"

He ignored this. "Let me tell you," he said, with a return of the imperious manner that was second nature to him nowadays. "This man brought me to New York because he found I knew how to manage the agents so that they would lure in the most suckers--that's the only word for it. When I came, I believed the O.A.D. was a big philanthropic institution--yes, I did, really! Of course I knew men made money out of it. I was making money out of it, myself. But I thought that, in the main, the object was to give people a chance to provide against old age and death."

"Yes, I remember," she said. "You used to talk about what a grand thing it was."

He laughed. "Well, we do give 'em _some_ return for their money--if they aren't careless and don't give us a chance to cheat them out of part or all of it, under the laws we've been fixing up against them. But we never give anything like what's their due. I found I was little more than a puller-in for a den of respectable thieves--that life insurance is simply another of the devices of these oily rascals here in New York--like all their big stock companies and bonding schemes and the rest of it--a trick to get hold of money and use it for their own benefit. Ours is the vilest trick of all, though--it seems to me. For we play on people's heart strings, while the other swindles appeal chiefly to cupidity." He took a magazine from the table. "Look here!" He pointed to an illustrated advertisement. "It's the 'ad' of one of our rivals--same business as ours. See the widow with the tears streaming down her cheeks, and the three little children clinging to her; see the heap of furniture on the sidewalk--that means they've ejected her for not paying the rent. And the type says, 'This wouldn't have happened if the father had been insured in the Universal.' Clever, isn't it? Well, the men back of that company and those back of ours and, worst of all, Trafford's infamous gang, all get rich by stealing from poor old people, from widows and orphans. That is Fosdick's business--robbing dead bodies, picking the pockets of calico mourning dresses."

It gave him relief and a sense of doing penance, to utter these truths about himself and his associates that had been rankling in him. As he believed she knew nothing of business and as he thought her sex did not reason but only felt, he assumed she would accept his own lenient view of his personal part in the infamy, of his own deviations from the "ideal" standards. Her expression disquieted him. "The most respectable people in the country are in it, in some branch of it," he hastened to explain, without admitting to himself that he was explaining. "You must read the list of our directors."

Her silence alarmed him. He wished he had not been so frank. Recalling his words he was appalled by their brutality; he could not deny to himself that they stated the truth, and he wondered that he had not seen that truth in its full repulsiveness until now. "Of course, they don't look at it that way," he went on. "A man can get his conscience to applaud almost anything he's making money out of--the more money, the easier."

"Then they do these things quite openly?" said Neva, in amazement.

"Openly? Certainly not," replied Armstrong, with a slight smile at her innocence.

"If they don't do them openly, they know just what they're about."

"No," he said, imperious and impatient. "You don't understand human nature. You don't appreciate how men delude themselves."

His tone, its reminder of his intolerance of any independence of thought in a woman, or in anyone around him for that matter, brought the color to her cheeks. "A man who does wrong, but thinks he is doing right, is not ashamed," she answered. "If he shuffles and conceals, you may be sure he does not deceive himself, no matter how completely his pretense deceives you."

There seemed to be no answer to this. It made ridiculous nonsense of the familiar excuse for reputable rascality, the excuse he had heard a thousand times, and had accepted without question. But it also somehow seemed a home thrust through his own armor. With anger that was what he would have called feminine in its unreasonableness, he demanded, "Then you don't think I have the right to tear Fosdick down?"

"If you are going to tear them all down, and yourself, too," was her answer, slowly spoken, but firm.

He laughed ironically. "That's practical!"

"Does a thing have to be dishonorable and dishonest, to be practical?"

"From your standpoint, yes," he replied. "At this very moment Fosdick is chuckling over the scheme he thinks will surely disgrace me forever! And you are urging me to let him disgrace me. Is that what you call friendship? Is that your idea of 'heart'?"

She flushed, but rejoined undaunted, "You can juggle with your conscience all you please, Horace--just like the other men downtown. But you know the truth, in the bottom of your heart, just as they do. And if you rise by the way you've planned, you know that, when you've risen, you'll do just as he was doing."

"Then," said he, "your test of me is whether I'll let you beg off this old buzzard, Fosdick."

She made a gesture of denial and appeal. "On the contrary, I'd despise a man who did for a woman what he wouldn't do for his own self-respect." She was pale, but all the will in her character was showing itself in her face. "What is Fosdick to me? Now that you've told me about him, I think it's frightful to send men to jail for stealing bread, and leave such a creature at large. But--as to you--" Her bosom was rising and falling swiftly--"as to you, I'm not indifferent. You have stood for strength and courage, for pride--for manliness. I thought you hard and cold--but brave--really brave--too brave to steal, at least from the helpless, or to assassinate even an assassin. Now, I see that you've changed. Your ambition is dragging you down, as ambition always does. And what an ambition! To be the best, the most successful, at cheating the helpless, at robbing the dead!"

As she spoke, his expression of anger faded. When she ended, with unsteady voice and fighting back the tears, he did not attempt to reply. He had made of his face an impassive mask. They were still silent, he standing at the window, she sitting and gazing into the fire, when Molly entered to announce Raphael. He threw his coat over his arm, took up his hat. She searched his face for some indication of his thoughts, but could find none. He simply said, "I'll think it over."

*XIX*

*TWO TELEPHONE TALKS*

As Armstrong, at Fosdick's house, was waiting in a small reception room just off the front hall, he heard the old man on the stairs, storming as he descended. "It's a conspiracy," he was shouting. "You all want to kill me. You've heard the doctor say I'll die if I don't stop driving, and walk. Yet, there's that damned carriage always at the door. I can't step out that it isn't waiting for me, and you know I can't resist if I see it. It's murder, that's what it is."

"Shall I send the carriage away, sir?" Armstrong heard the butler say.

"No!" cried Fosdick, rapping the floor with his cane. "No! You know I won't send it away. I've got to get some air, and it seems to me I can't walk."

By this time he was at the door of the reception room. "Good morning, Armstrong," he said with surly politeness. "I'm sick to-day. I suppose you heard me talking to this butler here. I tell you, things to drive in are the ruin of the prosperous classes. Sell that damn motor of yours. Never take a cab, if you can help it. They're killing me with that carriage of mine. Yes--and there's that infernal cook--chef, as they call him. He's trying to earn his salary, and he's killing me doing it. I eat the poison stuff--I can't get anything else. No wonder I have indigestion and gout. No wonder my head feels as if it was on fire every morning. And my temper--I used to have a good disposition. I'm getting to be a devil. It's a conspiracy to murder me." There Fosdick noted Armstrong's expression. He dropped his private woes abruptly and said, with his wonted suavity, "But what can I do for you to-day?"

"I came to ask you to do an act of justice," replied the Westerner, looking even huger and more powerful than usual, in contrast with the other, whom age and self-indulgence were rapidly shriveling.

Armstrong's calm was aggressive, would better have become a dictator than a suitor. It was highly offensive to Fosdick, who was rapidly reaching the state of mind in which obsequiousness alone is tolerable and manliness seems insolence. But he reined in his temper and said, smoothly enough, "You can always count on me to do justice."

"I want you to give me a letter, explaining that those three hundred and fifty thousand dollars were drawn by me and paid over, at your order."

Fosdick stared blankly at him. "What three hundred and fifty thousand dollars?"

Armstrong's big hands clenched into fists and he set his teeth together sharply. Each man looked the other full in the eyes. Armstrong said, "Will you give me the letter?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," replied Fosdick steadily. "And don't explain. I can't talk business to-day."

"I've come to you, Mr. Fosdick," continued Armstrong, "not on my own account, but on yours. I ask you to give me the letter, because, if you do not, the consequences will be unfortunate--not for me, but for you."

"My dear Armstrong," said Fosdick, with wheedling familiarity of elder to younger, "I don't know what you're talking about, and I don't want to know. Look at me, and spare me. Come for a drive. I'll set you down anywhere you say. Don't be foolish, young man. Don't use language to me that suggests threats."

"That is your final answer? Is it quite useless to discuss the matter with you?"

"I'm too sick to wrangle with business to-day."

"Then you refuse to give me the letter?"

"If my doctor knew I had let anybody mention business to me, he'd desert me."

Without a further word Armstrong turned, left the room and the house. Fosdick did not follow immediately. Instead, he seated himself to puzzle at this development. "Hugo stirred him up about that, and he's simply trying to get ready for the committee," he decided. "If he knew, or even suspected, he'd act very differently. He's having his heart broken none too soon. I've never seen a worse case of swollen head. I pushed him up too fast. I'm really to blame; I'm always doing hasty, generous things, and getting myself into trouble, and those I meant to help. Poor fool. I'm sorry for him. I suppose once I get him down in his place, I'll be soft enough to relent and give him something. He's got talent. I can use him, once I have him broken to the bit."

In came Amy, the color high in her cheeks from her morning walk. She kissed him on both cheeks. "Well, well, what do _you_ want?" said he.

"How do you know I want anything?" she cried.

"In the first place, because nobody ever comes near me except to get something."

"Just as you never go near anybody except to take something," she retorted, with a pull at his mustache.

Fosdick was amused. "In the second place," he went on, "because you are affectionate--which not only means that you want something, but also that the something is a thing you feel I won't give. And you're no doubt right."

"What are you in such a good humor about?" said she. "You were cross as a bear in a swarm of bees, at breakfast."

"I'm not in a good humor," he protested. "I'm depressed. I'm looking forward to doing a very unpleasant duty to-morrow."

His daughter laughed at him. "You may be trying to persuade yourself it's unpleasant. But the truth is, you're delighted. Papa, I've been thinking about the entrance."

"Keep on thinking, but don't speak about it," retorted he, frowning.

"Really--it's an eyesore--so small, so out of proportion, so cheap----"

"Cheap!" exclaimed Fosdick. "Why, those bronze doors alone cost seventeen thousand dollars."

"Is _that_ all!" scoffed his daughter. "Trafford's cost forty thousand."

"But I'm not a thief like Trafford. And let me tell you, my child, seventeen thousand dollars at four per cent would produce each year a larger sum than the income of the average American family."

"But I've often heard you say the common people have entirely too much money, more than they know how to spend. Now--about the entrance. Alois and I----"

"When you marry Fred Roebuck, I'll let you build yourself any kind of town house you like," interrupted her father.

She perched on the arm of his chair. "Now, really, father, you know you wouldn't let me marry a man it makes me shudder to shake hands with?"

"Nonsense--a mere notion. You try to feel that way because you know you ought to marry him."

"Never--never--_never_!" cried Amy, kissing him at each "never." "Besides, he's engaged to Sylvia Barrow. He got tired of waiting for me."

Fosdick pushed away from her. "I'm bitterly disappointed in you," he said, scowling at her. "I've been assuming that you would come to your senses. What would become of you, if I had as little regard for your wishes as you have for mine?"

"Fred Roebuck was a nobody," she pleaded. "You despised him yourself. Now, papa dear, I'm thinking of marrying a somebody, a man who really amounts to something in himself."

"Who?" demanded Fosdick, bristling for battle.

"Alois Siersdorf."

Fosdick sprang up, caught her roughly by the arm. "What!" he shouted. "_What!_"

"A man you like and admire," Amy went on, getting her tears ready. "He _looks_ distinguished, and he _is_ distinguished, and is certain to be more so. Besides, what's the use of being rich, if one can't please herself when it comes to taking a husband? I want somebody I won't be ashamed of, somebody I can live near without shuddering." And the tears descended in floods.

Her father turned his rage against Alois. "The impudence of a fellow like that aspiring to a girl in your position."

"But he hasn't been impudent. He's been very humble and backward."

Josiah was busy with his own rage. "Why, he's got _nothing_!"

"Nothing but brains."

"Brains!" Fosdick snorted contemptuously. "Why, they're a drug on the market. I can buy brains by the hundred. Men with brains are falling over each other downtown, trying to sell out for a song."

"Not brains like his," she protested.

"Better--a hundred times better. Why, his brain belongs to me. I've bought it. I have it whenever and for whatever I want."

"I--I love him, father," she sobbed, hiding her face in his shoulder. "I've tried my best not to. But I can't live without him. I--I--_love_ him!"

Fosdick was profoundly moved. There were tears in his eyes, and he gently stroked her hair. She reached out for his hand, took it, kissed it, and put it under her cheek--she hated to have anyone touch her hair, which was most troublesome to arrange to her liking. "Listen to me, child," said the old man. "You remember when Armstrong was trying to impose on your tender heart? You remember what I said? Was I not right? Aren't you glad you took my advice?"

"But I never loved him--really," said Amy.

"And you don't love Alois. You couldn't love one of our dependents. You have too much pride for that. But, again I want to warn you. There's a reason--the best of reasons--why you must not be even friendly with--this young Siersdorf. I can't explain to you. He's an adventurer like Armstrong. Wait a few days--a very few days, Amy. He has been careful to let you see only the one side of him. There's another side. When you see that, you'll be ashamed you ever thought of him, even in jest. You'll see why I want you to be safely established as the wife of some substantial man."

"Tell me what it is, father."

"I tell nothing," replied Fosdick. "Wait, and you will see."

"Is it something to his discredit? If so, I can tell you right now it isn't true."

"Wait--that's all. Wait."

"But, father--after all he's done for us, isn't it only fair to warn him?"

"Warn him of what?"

"Of what you say is going to happen."

"If you want to do yourself and me the greatest possible damage, you'll hint to him what I've said. Do you understand?"

"It isn't fair not to warn him," she insisted. And she released herself from his arms and faced him defiantly. "I tell you, I love him, father!"

"Was ever parent so cursed in his children!" cried Fosdick. "I'm in the house of my enemies. I tell you, Amy, you are to keep your mouth _shut_!" He struck the floor sharply with his cane. "I will be obeyed, do you hear?"

"And I tell you, father," retorted Amy, "that I'm going to warn him. He's straight and honest, and he loves me and he has done things for me, for us, that make us his debtor."

Fosdick threw up his arms in angry impotence. "Do your damnedest!" he cried. "After all, what can you tell him? You can only throw him into a fever and put him in a worse plight. But I warn you that, if you disobey me, I'll make you pay for it. I'll cut off your allowance. I'll teach you what it means to love and respect a father." And he raged out of the house.

Even as her father went, Amy felt in the foundation of her defiance the first tremors of impending collapse. She rushed upstairs to the telephone; she would not let this impulse to do the generous, no, simply the decent, thing ooze away as her impulses of that sort usually did, if she had or took time to calculate the personal inconvenience from executing them. After a rather common and most pleasing human habit, she regarded herself as generous, and was so regarded, because she had generous impulses; to execute them was, therefore, more or less superfluous. In this particular instance, however, she felt that impulse was not enough; there must be action.

"Is it you?" came in Alois's voice, just in time to stimulate her flagging energy. "I was about to call _you_ up."

"I must see you at once," said Amy, with feverish eagerness. "I've got something very, very important to say to you." She hesitated, decided that she must commit herself beyond possibility of evasion--"something about an attempt to do you a great injury."

"Oh!" His tone was curiously constrained; it seemed to her that there was terror, guilt, in it. "Shall I come up? I've just found out I must sail for Europe at noon."

"At noon! _To-day?_"

"In about two hours. And I must say good-by to you. It's very sudden. I haven't even told my sister yet, though she's in the next room, here."

"I'll come down--that is--I'll try to." Amy felt weak, sick, sinking, suffocating in a whirl of doubts and fears. "You are going on business?"

"Yes," came the answer in a voice that rang false. "On business. I'll be away only a few weeks, I think."

"If I shouldn't be able to come--good-by," said Amy.

"But I hope-- Let me come-- Wouldn't that be better?"

Not a word about what she had said, when it ought to have put him into a quiver of anxiety; certainly, his going abroad looked like knowledge, guilt, flight. "No--no--you mustn't come," she commanded. "I'll do my best to get to you." And she added, "We might simply miss each other, if you didn't wait there."

"Please--Amy!"

She shivered. How far she had gone with him! And her father was right! "Good-by," she faltered, hastily ringing off.

If she could have seen him, her worst suspicions would have been confirmed; for his hair was mussed and damp with sweat, his skin looked as if he were in a garish light. He tried to compose himself, went in where his sister was at work--absorbed in making the drawings of a new kind of chimney-piece she had been thinking out. "Cis," he said, in an uncertain voice, "I'm off for Europe at noon."

She wheeled on him. "Fosdick?"

He nodded. "His secretary, Waller, was just here."

A few seconds during which he could feel the energy of her swift thoughts. Then, "Wait!" she commanded, and darted into her private office, closing the door.

She was gone twenty minutes. "The person I was calling up hadn't got in," she explained, when she returned. "I had to wait for him. You are to stay here--you are not to go in any circumstances."

"I must go," was his answer in a dreary tone. "I promised Fosdick, and I daren't offend him. Besides--well, it's prudent."

"'Lois," said Narcisse earnestly, "I give you my word of honor, it would be the very worst step you could take, to obey Fosdick and go. I promise you that, if you stay, all will be well. If you go, you would better throw yourself into the sea, midway, for you will ruin your reputation--ours."

He dropped into a chair. "My instinct is against going," he confessed. "I've done nothing. I haven't got a cent that doesn't belong to me honestly. But, Cis, I simply mustn't offend Fosdick."

"Because of Amy?"

"Yes."

"If you go, you'll have no more chance for her than--than a convict in a penitentiary."

"You know something you are not telling me?"

"I do. Something I can't tell you."

He supported his aching head with his hands and stared long at the floor. "I'll not go!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet suddenly. "I've done nothing wrong. I'll not run away."

Narcisse had been watching him as if she were seeing him struggling for his life in deep water before her very eyes. At his words, at his expression, like his own self, the brother she had brought up and guarded and loved with the love that is deeper than any love which passion ever kindled--at this proclamation of the victory of his better self, she burst into tears. "'Lois! 'Lois!" she sobbed. "Now I can be happy again. If you had gone it would have killed me." And the tone in which she said it made him realize that she was speaking the literal truth.

The natural color was coming back to his face. He patted her on the shoulder. "I'm not a weak, damn fool clear through, Cissy," cried he, "though, I must say, I've got a big, broad streak of it. You are sure of your ground?"

"Absolutely," she assured him, radiant now, and so beautiful that even he noted and admired. But then, he was in the mood to appreciate her. So long as the way was smooth, he could neglect her and put aside her love, as we all have the habit of neglecting and taking for granted, in fair weather, the things that are securely ours. But, let the storms come, and how quickly we show that we knew all the time, in our hearts, whom we could count on, could draw upon for strength and courage--the few, real friends--perhaps, only one--and one is quite enough, is legion, if it be the right one.

"You're not trusting to somebody else?" said he.

"Of course I am. But he's a real somebody, one I'd stake my life on. 'Lois, I know."

"That settles it," said he. "But even if you weren't sure, even if I were certain the worst would overtake me, I'd not budge out of this town. As for Amy, if she's what I think her, she'll stand the test. If not-- After all, I don't need anybody but you, Cissy."

And he embraced and kissed her, and went back to his own part of the offices, head high and step firm. He stirred round there uneasily for a while, then shut himself in with the telephone and called up Fosdick's house. "I wish to speak to Miss Fosdick," he said. Presently he heard Amy's voice. "Well, Hugo?"

"It isn't your brother," said Alois. "It's I."

"Oh!" Her tone was very different--and he did not like it, though he could not have said why. "The servant," she explained, "said she thought it was Hugo."

"I've changed my mind about going abroad. You said you wanted to see me about some matter. I think--in fact, I'm sure--I know what you mean. Don't trouble; I'll come out all right. By the way, please tell your father I'm not going, will you?"

"Father!" she exclaimed. "Did _he_ want you to go?"

"I'd rather not talk about that. It's a matter of business. Please don't give him the impression I told you anything. Really, I haven't--have I?"

"Did father want you to go abroad?" insisted Amy.

"I can't talk about it over the telephone. I'll tell you when I see you--all about it--if you think you'd be interested."

"Please answer my one question," she pleaded. "Then I'll not bother you any more."

"Then--yes." He waited for her next remark, but it did not come. "Are you still there?"

"Yes," came her answer, faint and strange.

"What is it?" he cried. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing. Good-by--and--I'm _so_ glad you're not going--oh, I can't express how glad--_Alois_!"

She did not give him the chance to reply.

*XX*

*BORIS DISCLOSES HIMSELF*

Hugo, sitting to Boris for the portrait afterward locally famous as "The Young Ass," fell into the habit of expatiating upon Armstrong. His mind was full of the big Westerner, the author of the most abject humiliation of his life, the only one he could not explain away, to his own satisfaction, as wholly some one else's fault. Boris humored him, by discreetly sympathetic response even encouraged him to talk freely; nor was Boris's sole reason the undeniable fact that when Hugo was babbling about Armstrong, his real personality disported itself unrestrained in the features the painter was striving to portray. The wisest parent never takes a just measure of his child; and, while the paternal passion is tardier in beginning than the maternal, it is full as deluding once it lays hold. Fosdick thought he regarded Hugo as a fool; also he had fresh in mind proof that Hugo was highly dangerous to any delicate enterprise. Yet he confided in him that they would both be soon signally revenged upon the impudent upstart. He did not tell how or when; but Hugo guessed that it would be at the coming "investigation."

A very few days after his father had told him, he told Boris. What possible danger could there be in telling a painter who hadn't the slightest interest in business matters, and who hadn't the intellect to understand them? For Hugo had for the intellect of the painter the measureless contempt of the contemptible. Also, Boris patterned his dress after the Continental fashions for which Hugo, severely and slavishly English in dress, had the Englishman's derisive disdain. Boris listened to Hugo's confidence with no sign, of interest or understanding, and Hugo babbled on. Soon, Boris knew more than did Hugo of the impending catastrophe to the one man in the whole world whom he did the honor of hating.

Hate is an unusual emotion in a man so tolerant, so cynical, at once superior and conscious of it. But, watching Armstrong with Neva, watching Neva when Armstrong was about, Raphael had come to feel rather than to see that there was some tie between them. He had no difficulty in imagining the nature of this tie. A man and a woman who have lived together may, often do, remain entire strangers; but however constrained and shy and unreal their intimacy may have been, still that intimacy has become an integral part of their secret selves. It is the instinctive realization of this, rather than physical jealousy, that haunts and harrows the man who knows his wife or mistress did not come to him virgin, and that does not leave him until the former husband or lover is dead. Boris did not for an instant believe Neva could by any possibility fall in love with Armstrong--what could she, the artistic and refined, have in common with Armstrong, crude, coarse, unappreciative of all that meant life to her? A man could care without mental or heart sympathy, and a certain kind of woman; but not a Neva, whose delicacy was so sensitive that he, with all his expert delicacy of touch, all his trained softness of reassuring approach, was still far from her. No, Neva could never love Armstrong. But why did she not detest him? Why did she tolerate a presence that must remind her of repulsive hours, of moments of horror too intense even to quiver? "It is the feminine, the feline in her," he reflected. "She is avenging herself in the pleasure of watching his torment."

That was logical, was consoling. However, Boris was wishing she would get her fill of vengeance and send the intruder about his stupid, vulgar business. Hugo's news thrilled him. "I hope the hulk will have to fly the country," he said to himself. He did not hope, as did Hugo, that Armstrong would have to go to the penitentiary. Such was his passion for liberty, for the free air and sunshine, that he could not think with pleasure of even an enemy's being behind bolts and bars and the dank dusk of high, thick prison walls. As several weeks passed without Armstrong's calling--he always felt it when Armstrong had been there--he became as cheerful, as gay, and confident as of old.

But he soon began to note that Neva was not up to the mark. "What is it?" he at once asked himself in alarm whose deep, hidden causes he did not suspect, so slow are men of his kind to accuse themselves of harboring so vanity-depressing a passion as jealousy. "Has he got wind of his danger? Has he been trying to work on her sympathies?" He proceeded to find out.

"What's wrong, my dear?" asked he, in his gentle, caressing, master-to-pupil way. "You aren't as interested as you were. This sunshine doesn't reflect from your face and your voice as it should."

"I've been worried about a friend of mine," confessed she. "There's no real cause for worry, but I can't shake off a foreboding."

"Tell me," urged he. "It'll do you good."

"It's nothing I can talk about. Really, I'm not so upset as you seem to imagine."

But a few moments later he heard a deep sigh. He glanced at her; she was staring into vacancy, her face sad, her eyes tragic. In one of these irresistible gusts of passion, he flung down his brushes, strode up to her. "What has that scoundrel been saying to you?" he demanded.

She startled, rose, faced him in amazement.

"Boris!" she cried breathlessly.

The body that is molded upon a spirit such as his--or hers--becomes as mobile to its changes as cloud to sun and wind. Boris's good looks always had a suggestion of the superhuman, as if the breath of life in him were a fiercer, more enduring flame than in ordinary mortals. That superhuman look it was that had made Neva, the sensitive, the appreciative, unable ever quite to shake off all the awe of him she had originally felt. The man before her now had never looked so superhuman; but it was the superhumanness of the fiend. She shrank in fascinated terror. His sensuous features were sensuality personified; his rings, his jeweled watch guard, his odor of powerful perfume, all fitted in with his expression, where theretofore they had seemed incongruous. "Boris!" she repeated. "Is that _you_?"

Her face brought him immediately back to himself, or rather to his normal combination of cynical good-humored actuality and cynical good-humored pose. The vision had vanished from her eyes, so utterly, so swiftly, that she might have thought she had been dreaming, had it not remained indelibly upon her mind--especially his eyes, like hunger, like thirst, like passion insatiable, like menace of mortal peril. It is one thing to suspect what is behind a mask; it is quite another matter to see, with the mask dropped and the naked soul revealed. As she, too, recovered herself, her terror faded; but the fascination remained, and a certain delight and pride in herself that she was the conjurer of such a passion as that. For women never understand that they are no more the authors of the passions they evoke than the spark is the author of the force in the dynamite it explodes or of the ensuing destruction; if the dynamite is there, any spark, rightly placed, will do the work.

"Yes, it's I," replied Raphael, rather confusedly. He was as much disconcerted by what he had himself seen of himself, as by having shown it to her. A storm that involves one's whole being stirs up from the bottom and lifts to the surface many a strange secret of weakness and of wickedness, none stranger than the secrets of one's real feelings and beliefs, so different from one's professions to others and to himself. Raphael had seen two of these secrets--first, that he was insanely jealous of Armstrong; second, that he was in love with Neva. Not the jealousy and the love that yet leave a man master of himself, but the jealousy and the love that enslave. In the silence that followed this scene of so few words and so strong emotions, while Neva was hanging fascinated over the discovery of his passion for her, he was gazing furtively at her, the terror that had been hers now his.

He had been fancying he was leading her along the flower-walled path he had trod so often with some passing embodiment of his passing fancy, was luring her to the bower where he had so often taught what he called and thought "the great lesson." Instead, he was himself being whirled through space--whither? "I love her!" he said to himself, tears in his eyes and tears and fears in his heart. "This is not like the others--not at all--not at all. I love her, and I am afraid." And then there came to him a memory--a vision--a girl whom he had taught "the great lesson" years before; she had disappeared when he grew tired--or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, when he had exhausted for the time the capacity of his nerves; for how can a man grow tired of what he never had?--and the rake kills the bird for the one feather in its crest. At any rate, he sent her away; he was seeing now the look in her eyes, as she went without a murmur or a sigh. And he was understanding at last what that look meant. In the anguish of an emotion like remorse, yet too selfish, perhaps, too self-pitying for remorse, he muttered, "Forgive me. I didn't know what I was doing."

The vision faded back to the oblivion from which it had so curiously emerged. He glanced at Neva again, with critical eyes, like a surgeon diagnosing stolidly his own desperate wound. She was, or seemed to be, busy at her easel. He could study her, without interruption. He made slow, lingering inventory of her physical charms--beauties of hair and skin and contour, beauties of bosom's swell and curve of arm and slant of hip and leg. No, it was not in any of these, this supreme charm of her for him. Where then?

For the first time he saw it. He had been assuming he was regarding her as he had regarded every other woman in the long chain his memory was weaving from his experiences and was coiling away to beguile his days of the almond tree and the bated sound of the grinding. And he had esteemed these women at their own valuation. It was the fashion for women to profess to esteem themselves, and to expect to be esteemed, for reasons other than their physical charms. But Boris, searcher into realities, held that only those women who by achievement earn independence as a man earns it, have title to count as personalities, to be taken seriously in their professions. He saw that the women he knew made only the feeblest pretense to real personal value other than physical; they based themselves upon their bodies alone. So, women had been to him what they were to themselves--mere animate flesh.

He attached no more importance--beyond polite fiction--than did they themselves to what they thought and felt; it was what men thought of their persons, what feelings their persons roused in men--that is, in him. And he meted out to them the fate they expected, respected him the more for giving them; when they ceased to serve their sole purpose of ornament or plaything he flung them away, with more ceremony, perhaps, but with no less indifference than the emptied bottles of the scent he imported in quantity and drenched himself with.

But he saw the truth about Neva now--saw why, after the few first weeks of their acquaintance, he had not even been made impatient by her bad days--the days when her skin clouded, her eyes dimmed, her hair lost its luster, and the color, leaving her lips, seemed to take with it the dazzling charm of her blue-white teeth. Why? Because her appeal to his senses was not so strong as her appeal to-- He could not tell what it was in him this inner self of hers appealed to. Heart? Hardly; that meant her physical beauty. Intellect? Certainly not that; intellect rather wearied him than otherwise, and the sincerest permanent longing of his life was to cease from thinking, to feel, only to feel--birds, flowers, perfumed airs, the thrill of winds among grasses and leaves, sunshine, the play of light upon women's hair, the ecstasy of touch drifting over their smooth, magnetic bodies. No, it was neither her intellect nor her heart, any more than it was her loveliness. Or, rather, it was all three, and that something more which makes a man happy he knows not why and cares not to know why.

"I would leave anyone else to come to her," he said to himself. "And if anyone else lured me away from her, it would be only for the moment; I would know I should have to return to her, as a dog to its master." He repeated bitterly, mockingly, "As a dog to its master. That's what it means to be artist--more woman than man, and more feminine than any woman ever was."

He stood behind her, looking at her work. "You'd better stop for to-day," he said presently. "You're only spoiling what you did yesterday."

"So I am," said she.

She put down palette and brushes with a sigh and a shrug. When she turned, he stood his ground and looked into her eyes. "I've been letting outside things come between me and my work," she went on, pretending to ignore his gaze.

"You guessed my secret a few minutes ago?" he asked.

She nodded, and it half amused, half hurt him to note that she was physically on guard, lest he should seize her unawares.

His smile broadened. "You needn't be alarmed," said he, clasping his hands behind his back. "I've no intention of doing it."

She was smiling now, also. "Well," she said. "What next?"

"Why are you afraid?"

"I am not afraid." She clasped her hands behind her, like his, looked at him with laughing, level eyes; for he and she were of the same height. "Not a bit."

"Why were you afraid?" he corrected. "You never were before."

She seemed to reflect. "No, I never was," she admitted. Her gaze dropped and her color came.

"Neva," he said gently, "do you love me?"

She lifted her eyes, studied him with the characteristic half closing of the lids that made her gaze so intense and so alluring. He could not decide whether that gaze was coquetry, as he hoped, or simply sincere inquiry, as he feared. "I do not know," she said. "I admire and respect you above all men."

He laughed, carefully concealing how her words had stung him. "Admire! Respect!" He made a mocking little bow. "I thank you, madam. But--in old age--after death--is soon enough for that cold grandeur."

"I do not know," she repeated. "I had never thought about it until a while ago--when you--when your expression--" She dropped her gaze again. "I can't explain."

Coquetry or shyness? He could not tell. "Neva, do you love anyone else?"

"I think--not," replied she, very low.

His eyes were like a tiger peering through a flower-freighted bush. "You love Armstrong," he urged, softly as the purr before the spring.

She was gazing steadily at him now. "We were talking of you and me," rejoined she, her voice clear and positive. "If I loved you, it would not be because I did not love some other man. If I did not love you it would not be because I did love some other."