Chapter XIX

Ivan turned abruptly from Sarichef, and smiling faintly in appeal, stepped in front of Dorothy. Her wide-open eyes fixed on his thin, stark-white face; but her expression did not change, and she was so baffled and estranged by what had occurred that at first she seemed hardly aware of him. He reached for her hands, but she put them away from him.

“Don’t draw away,” he urged quickly. He spoke softly now, for her ears alone. “Dearest, you must forgive me.”

“I can’t forgive you,” was her subdued answer. She spoke without inflection, almost in that muttered monotone with which one talks in sleep.

“You must. It’s the only possible course. You must realize that. I don’t expect you to forget right away—even to vindicate me until I’ve at least won you to my point of view—but you _must_ forgive. Don’t you see it was all for you?

“I am aware that I charged Peter with a crime he didn’t do—that I caused him to flee, and that while he was gone he died. But Dorothy, this world is of the living. When people are dead they cease to be, so far as the living world is concerned. You have found happiness in me; don’t lose it again for an evil done long ago. Don’t let the dead past shadow the living present.

“Every man does wicked deeds, only most of them don’t get caught. Many and many a man wants to do wicked deeds that he doesn’t dare to do—to gain his ends. Other men have loved you, and have wished desperately that Peter would die and leave you free—but they haven’t loved you enough—they didn’t have the courage to make their wish come true. You know your Christian teaching—that there is no distinction drawn between him who wants to do evil and him who really does it. The thing I did many men would have been glad to do, if they had dared to take the risk.”

He paused, and the girl started to turn away. Ivan held her gently, his hands at her arms just below her shoulders. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him.

“But you must hear me. Dorothy, I wanted you, and I had to have you. I loved you enough to risk my reputation, to do evil to a respected friend, in order to win you. Am I to be punished for that? Don’t you realize that this showed a love of which your Anglo-Saxon men would be wholly incapable? Poor Peter was the victim—but he has gone now, and you must seek your happiness in me, your husband!”

“My husband!” the girl echoed, as if the thought were incredible to her.

“Yes. You are my wife. You don’t owe any more loyalty to Peter—only to me. When you married me you took me for better for worse—and that means you take my past crimes on your head. You share everything with me, and that means you share my past too. It will go hard at first, and you will be bitter; but I want you to put it out of your mind. You’ve got to be my partner now, even in my evil deeds. Dorothy, I want you to respect, rather than scorn that quality of unconquerable purpose in me that won’t let me forego the things that I want; and particularly I want you to remember that it was all for you. The thing is closed and done, part of the dead past; and I want you to put it out of your mind.”

The girl straightened and sighed. “I wish you’d go away,” she said dully. “I can’t forget it, and never can, and I can’t forgive it. Everything is over between us. Now let me go—I’m going into my tent.”

His hand pressed more tightly at her shoulders, and he looked meaningly into her eyes. “Into _our_ tent,” he corrected easily.

The girl shook her head; but her expression did not change. “No. I renounce our marriage. My door is closed to you forever.” At this point her slim body straightened, and her voice—though it did not increase in volume—took on a hushed, unmistakable tone of emphasis. “Understand everything clearly, Ivan, now as well as later. I don’t consider myself your wife from now on. I’m going to my tent—you must go to yours. Your hands have no longer any right to hold me. To-morrow the guides and I will go away in the dory, in search for the settlements. If you want to come you may, but it won’t be as my husband, and you must never appear in the United States again. You’ve asked me to choose between my husband’s honor and you, my husband’s murderer. I don’t see how you can wonder at my answer. When I get home I will tell the whole truth and try to clear Peter’s name, and take the smirch off his memory.”

At this point she paused, faltering; and for one brief instant she did not know the cause of the sudden wind of terror that blew through her being, closing her throat and choking back her brave words. In that instant Ivan’s attitude had changed. Outwardly there was little sign; possibly certain lines deepened on his white face and his vivid eyes looked dull red, like glowing, dying coals, under his fine brows. A wan smile, determined rather than cruel, curled at his lips.

It was not that he had misunderstood her words. He was not such a fool as to think this merely a burst of temporary indignation, soon to pass away. Dorothy had meant exactly what she said. Yet her opposition only made her more desirable to him, heightened the fire of his madness. His strong arms went about her, and he pressed his lips to hers.

Pavlof, who watched from the mouth of the dugout, grunted softly, as if in reflection of his master’s passion. Pete made one uneasy move in the shadows, but he was not yet sure of his course, and preparations were not yet complete, so he paused, waiting for what might befall. Dorothy struggled in a sudden frenzy of hate and scorn, as if the kiss had ravished her integrity. For a single instant Ivan held her helpless—just long enough to show her he was her master—then he let her go.

“Oh!” she breathed. “You wouldn’t dare——”

She halted because she was afraid to go on. Ivan was fully wakened now. He was shaking off the last vestiges of his conventionality as a dog shakes off water, and with it went the veneer that western civilization had bestowed upon him. This rock-ribbed waste of barrens beside the sea had always possessed a deep, stirring appeal for him; and to-night he yielded to it as never before. It called to his deeply hidden primitive side, and what was left him, there in the weird firelight, was altogether Asia.

The racial differences she had seen in him had been vague and of not great importance before; but now they estranged her and terrified her. The slant of his smoky, shadowed eyes seemed, in her imagination, accentuated; she felt that the dread spirit of sleeping passion that was the soul of this strange, far-western night had passed to him, and was coming to life within him. The cultured gentleman, the distinguished, gracious social favorite that she had known in the South had passed away, in the fierce passion of this desperate hour, and only the Mongol was left, the ravisher out of Asia.

“I dare do anything—that is my right,” he told her simply, no longer careful to lower his voice. “Dorothy, you are my wife. You are mine, and those kisses are mine. What I want I will take.”

“But I told you I renounced that marriage——”

Ivan smiled, as if in perfect self-confidence. “You can’t renounce it! A marriage lasts forever—from _our_ point of view.” She knew that he was speaking not alone of his particular tribe and country, but of the whole East. “You are my wife, legally and definitely; and never for a moment believe that this is a Western marriage. Please don’t confuse me with a Westerner, or think that we will live by a Western code. I fancy you will find that we of the East look on womanhood a little differently from the men to whom you are accustomed, but you’ll get used to it in time. I pleaded with you at first, which is not in the code; but I don’t intend to plead with you any more. You are a Mongol’s wife, and that means you will give what he asks, think what he says for you to think, and do what he says to do. In time you will learn it is the best way—to let your husband decide all these hard matters. Don’t let there be any more talk of renunciation—of what you will do and what you will not do.” He paused to steady his vibrant, tremulous voice. “Dorothy, we of the East do not worship womanhood in the way the Anglo-Saxon does—we only worship the beauty and the rapture we get out of womanhood. Such is woman’s place—to give us that. When a woman marries a man of my breed, he owns her—body and soul!”

A sudden, upward-flaring of the camp fire showed the strange scene in vivid detail. It showed Ivan, his thin, almost-beautiful face strikingly pale and drawn from the devastation of his passions, his white hands tremulous with restrained power, standing beside the fire confronting the girl; it showed Dorothy, cowering from him, her beautiful hands clasped at her breast, her red mouth ugly and haggard from the extremes of terror, and every trace of her lovely, dull-red coloring wiped from her face; it showed the dark forms of Sarichef, and the two packers at the shadowed mouth of the dugout, and Pete, at his watch at the far edge of the circle of firelight; it showed the commonplace fixtures of the camp, and, farther off, a thin white ghost with outstretched, arms that was the cross marked with Peter Newhall’s name; and it showed faintly the alternate charge and retreat of the ocean’s white-maned cavalry on the beach. Pete needed to look but once at the slight, cowering figure of the girl—pleading with hands and eyes, broken with terror and despair—to know that the affair was swiftly reaching its inevitable climax. An instrument long and dark, on which occasionally the firelight found a restless, reflected gleam, stood against the wall of the dugout, and moving quietly, he took it into his hands.

“You _wouldn’t_ take me against my will, Ivan,” she pleaded, trying to convince herself as well as the obdurate figure before her. “Ivan, you have forgotten who I am—who you are. You are not a beast——”

“We don’t consider it beastly, among the Mongols, to bend our wives to our will. I know what you _were_, if that’s what you mean, and what you are now. You were an American lady, rich and great, spoiled by the weakness you Americans know as chivalry—but now you’re a Mongol’s wife, and therefore a Mongol’s property. You are not supposed to have a will from this time on, Dorothy, except as you reflect _my_ will.”

He spoke in his usual rather quiet voice, yet she knew that the fire that consumed him was at a desperate height. He no longer attempted self-restraint. Asia was in dominance, and he moved toward her like a glorious tiger—the very spirit of Asia—toward its prey.

“If you hold me again, I’ll cry for help,” she told him, half-whispering.

“Cry for help, if you want to. I’ll shoot Pete down like the Western cur he is if he dares to interfere. But I judge he’s lived at this edge of the East long enough to learn not to interfere in a man’s family affairs. Those men know I’m in my rights—even your chivalrous Southerners would know that, whether they pretended to or not. Allow me to convince you just what good calling for help would do.”

He half turned and called quietly to Pavlof. His tone was unmistakably that of an imperious master to his slave; he might have been an Oriental sultan calling to one of the eunuchs of his harem. Yet Pavlof did not take offense. He hurried, fawning, into the circle of light.

“My bride here is a little unruly,” Ivan said easily. “You know how it is, sometimes, Pavlof. She’s just a little nervous and rebellious—and I might need a very slight amount of help.”

Pavlof bowed slightly; but he did not speak. The lines seemed to deepen and strengthen on his dusky face as he waited for his orders; otherwise he gave no sign.

“We’re going to change our plans, Pavlof,” Ivan went on. “We’re not going to the Outside, after all. I want you to be the head guide from now on, and I want you to guide us to one of the Esquimo villages—avoiding carefully all white settlements. This lady and I are going to lose ourselves among the natives until she learns to think differently along certain lines. She objects somewhat to going, and I’m afraid that for a few days, until she gets the right point of view, we’ll have to treat her like a prisoner. I might need you, from time to time, to help guard.”

Pavlof nodded, but he showed no disrespect to his master by even the slightest glimmer of a leering smile. There was no help for Dorothy here. He seemed to take this strange situation wholly as a matter of course, just as Ivan had known he would take it; and Dorothy glimpsed again the great universe that separates the races.

“Of course I can depend on you?” Ivan asked.

“Sure. She your wife. What you say goes.”

“That’s all for now. She might even attempt to escape from my tent to-night, but I don’t think I’ll need your help.” He paused, waiting till the man moved back to his dugout. “You’ll find the other breed’s point of view just the same, Dorothy,” he explained. “If you hadn’t married me he’d be glad to fight for you. Now you’re my wife he’ll obey me. Of course Sarichef is my faithful servant—in everything. Are you convinced?”

There was no help here. Likely even Pete would admit the Mongol’s ownership of her, body and soul. A single dry sob rasped at her throat, and she turned as if about to dart away in flight into the night and the storm. But even this doubtful mercy was not vouchsafed her. Ivan moved toward her, a motion fast as the leap of a tiger, yet giving no image of great exertion, and his arms pinned hers to her side. Then, with no show of effort, he lifted her bodily and started into the tent.

Pete the guide stepped into the circle of firelight. His rifle rested in the hollow of his arm. His rugged, weather-beaten face was stark white.

“Put her down,” he said slowly.

Ivan turned in infinite scorn, as he set the girl on her feet. He met the man’s quiet, unfaltering gaze. He saw, dimly, that the hand that held the weapon was steady as a vice of iron.

“You’re taking a dangerous risk, Pete,” he said evenly. “Put up that gun and close your eyes if you don’t like what you see, and most of all don’t start anything that you can’t carry through. I’ll do what I like with this woman. She is my wife.”

Pete’s quiet gaze did not waver. The ruddy light poured over him. “She is not your wife,” he said clearly.

Ivan opened his lips, and his arms were limp at his side. Dorothy uttered one long-drawn gasp that whispered strangely in the silence. For her the veil still hid the truth, but it was being swept away like mist before the blast of the gale. She felt just at the eve of some profound climax.

Ivan fought away an inexplicable sense of dismay, a vague, creepy terror that had penetrated to his heart. “Are you a fool?” he asked. “You saw me marry her. The marriage was legal.”

Pete shook his head. “It was not legal. It couldn’t be legal. She is Peter Newhall’s wife!”

“_But Peter Newhall is dead!_” Ivan’s voice was shrill and strange, not his own. A light grew on Dorothy’s stricken face until it was a white flame, surpassing belief.

“He was dead to the living world, but he has risen,” was the answer. “I am Peter Newhall.”