Chapter VII: Part 7

I will not deny that what I chiefly saw at that moment was a disruption that would rob me not only of the affection of the children of which I could not speak, but of Alicia, of whom I could speak even less.

Gertrude graciously lit a cigarette for me and sat down beside me. She herself, however, was not smoking.

"There is one change, Ranny," she began in a new and strange voice that was almost tender, "that would do you more good than anything else in the world--can you guess what I mean?"

"A trip abroad?" I fumbled uncertainly.

"No"--smiled Gertrude quietly laying her hand on mine, "I mean--marriage."

"Oh, my God!" I exclaimed in an agony of apprehension, and a cold perspiration bedewed my forehead. That was one thing I never had expected Gertrude to discuss with me again, even in the abstract.

I do not remember what I ate, except that the dinner was dainty and cool and exquisite. There was a dewy cup of something light and refreshing and Gertrude's frock was charming, her eyes were bright and there was a touch of color in her cheeks. She did little talking herself at first, but pressed me to tell her all I could of Pendleton.

I told her. I told her of his coming, of his air of penitence, of his returning to the offices of the insurance company and of his present effort to reestablish a home for his children. The only suppressions I was conscious of were any references to Alicia or to my own somber emotions on the score of the children. Otherwise I was frank enough, Heaven knows, for it is hard for me not to be. To the very end Gertrude did not interrupt me. Only when I had done she made one crisp, incisive comment with a faint smile that was merely a lift of the upper lip.

"The one thing I cannot understand, Ranny," she observed, "is your unreasonable skepticism."

"You feel you could trust such a man implicitly?" I demanded.

"Yes," was the firm reply. "If there is any one thing clear, it is that Jim Pendleton is genuinely penitent. Suppose that lost-memory story is all moonshine, as you and Dibdin seem to think. By coming back that way doesn't the man really display more character than if it were true? He really shows that if he's gone wrong he has the stamina to come right again--and that's a good deal in this wicked world, Ranny."

"I had not looked at it in that light," I muttered, disturbed.

"I know you haven't," she gave a triumphant laugh. "You couldn't be calm on the subject. You really are an emotional, high-strung romantic, Ranny, and I don't altogether blame you for being prejudiced. But any dispassionate person knowing the facts will tell you I am right."

"It would be difficult for me to feel dispassionate on the subject," I returned doggedly.

"Certainly it would," was her ready reply. "That's why I am glad I captured you. Some friend had to show you your own interest."

"My interest?"

"Ranny," she cried in a voice charged with purpose if not with emotion,--with an intense, a vibrating resolution that impinged like a heavy weight upon my senses. "Ranny--don't let's be children--we are too old for that. Let bygones be bygones. I'll humiliate myself before you. I--I love you, Ranny--" and her lips really quivered--"I have always loved you--will you marry me, Ranny?"

Her face seemed strange, transformed by the force of an irresistible, a final compulsion. I writhed under her gaze as one on a rack. She hung for a moment, her eyes glittering into mine, positively tremulous; I had never seen Gertrude so serious. I could not bear it. It was excruciating. I know Gertrude was not herself. I leaped from the sofa, her hand still clinging to mine.

"I can't--I can't, Gertrude," I whispered hoarsely. "Oh--I--wish--but I am horribly sorry--I can't!"

Gertrude's nerves are strong and her control over them is stronger. She gazed at me for an instant, intently, searchingly, dropped my hand and turned away.

"There is some one else," she murmured in level tones to herself; "there is some one else now."

"Yes," I breathed, "though it won't--it can't--" and I paused.

"You needn't tell me," she turned, smiling harshly. "I know--it's that girl--the gutter-sni--but it doesn't matter. Every man is a fool--and you are the least likely to prove an exception. Oh, I always knew that--felt it--but never mind. I can't humiliate myself any more, can I?--Ranny," her voice suddenly struck a quieter note. "One thing I must ask for our old friendship's sake: You will forget this--episode--will you not? And I shall try to."

"My dear Gertrude--" I threw out my hands in a gesture of helplessness. If there was any humiliation it was I who was suffering it. She looked at me calmly, stonily. The color in her cheeks was exactly the same as before. Had Gertrude stooped to rouge?

"Your dear Gertrude--yes; then that's all right. Have a drink before you go? No? Very well. You will remember some day that I have given you my best--done my best for you."

It seems inherent in the nature of woman, so cosmic is the sweep of her outlook, or else so near to the earth, that when her desires are frustrated she feels the laws of the universe are frustrated. I did not make this comment to Gertrude, however; I could only murmur an entreaty for her forgiveness--which she ignored. Her only answer was a brief hard gesture of the head, a sort of jerk that expressed at once futility, contempt and dismissal.

As one dazed and paralyzed I must have made my way somehow downstairs, into a street car or some other conveyance at Fourth Avenue and into the babel at Grand Central station. But of this I have no recollection whatsoever. It is a blank. I must have walked like a somnambulist. I never came to until I left the train at Crestlands about a quarter past nine, and the first thing I was conscious of was the pain I must have inflicted.

*CHAPTER XVIII*

I can write this almost calmly now because so much has passed since that dreadful evening and details begin to emerge cloudily from the fog of that confusion.

I remember striking out homeward from the station down our drably progressive suburban Main Street, following the bumping, grinding, loitering trolley across the little bridge over a stream that sends up a dank, fishy odor, though all the living things I have ever seen in its neighborhood were mosquitoes and water snakes.

Over the rusty iron parapet I stood leaning for a few minutes and the original thought feebly stirred my dazed brain that life was not so much a dream--as the Spaniard Calderon would have it--as it is a stream. There is no knowing what it may not bring upon its bosom.

"That's it," I muttered to myself aloud. "Life is a stream within a dream."

"That's about the size of it," gruffly remarked a passing laborer behind me, his dinner pail clanking against his side, and he burst into a hoarse guffaw.

I laughed too, and concluded that I was still maudlin at the end of my perfect day.

I left the bridge and the highway, turned to the right and began to climb the ill-lighted crooked street, anciently a Dutch cattle track, no doubt, that leads to my isolated chalet upon the rock.

With all geography, history, the visible and invisible universe to draw upon, the fathers of Crestlands had denominated this obscure street Milwaukee Avenue. Milwaukee Avenue put the last touch to my nightmarish state. A sickly laugh escaped me as I bent my back to the ascent.

A young mounted policeman, who rode like another Lancelot by this remote Shalott, interrupted his tune long enough to give me a cheery greeting and rode on humming to himself.

The September evening was mild and I vaguely purposed walking past my house and strolling about for a bit before I went in. It was early for returning from dinner in town, and I was not overanxious to encounter anybody. A sudden sense of something eerie and awesome came to me as I looked at that deeply shadowed cottage. It appeared unfamiliarly remote, detached, and I gazed upon it with a weird sense of foreboding that sent a slight shiver down my back. The window shades of the chalet were drawn with only their rectangular lines of light showing through,--light, I reflected bitterly, by which Pendleton was no doubt beguiling Alicia to desert my house and follow him.

This thought lodged like a barb in my heart and my feet suddenly turned to lead. I could not go on farther and irresistibly I felt myself drawn homeward.

The somber habit of my recent reflections urged me with a plausibility strange and inexplicable to enter my study by the window instead of the comparatively public door. The window nearly always stood open. In case of storm Griselda or Alicia would dash about the house and close the windows, beginning always with my study. But this day had been clear.

I tiptoed around through the garden to the side upon which my study window gives. From it the land slopes away under a covering of trees until it reaches the stream.

There was a light in the study, though the shade was drawn, flapping gently against the rusty wire screen. This shade, as it happens, does not quite fit. It is short a full half-inch on either side, so that the peering observer can see as much as he pleases of what is going on in that room when it is lighted.

Automatically, without any premeditation that I can now recall, I gazed into my own room like a prowling thief. The picture I saw riveted me to the spot with an irresistible magnetic force.

Alicia was reclining on my leather couch, seemingly asleep. Instinctively I knew that she had decided to wait up for me and with some book in her hands had nodded in her vigil. It was still early, but Alicia's day began early and was always charged with activity. What an exquisite picture she made as she lay there in her thin frock, with a look of childlike trust and unconsciousness--radiating beauty.

Pendleton, who at that moment entered the door of the study, possibly to find Alicia, stood for a few moments spellbound by the picture, even as I stood outside. My burglarious entry was now frustrated. I must make use of the door. But I could not move from the spot. Somehow I could not let Pendleton out of my sight.

How dared he look at her in that manner!

My nerves were suddenly tense and my muscles quivering. Strange unfamiliar thoughts of savage acts, of sudden violence, of thrusts and blows, of blood-lust seethed and bubbled within me like a lurid boiling pitch. The inhibitions and restraints of a lifetime, however, held me writhing as in a vise.

I turned away for a twinkling as though to gather resolution from the murmurous night.

On a sudden, as I peered again eagerly, I saw Pendleton's great hulk bending over her, with a look peculiar and intense, with a strange speculation in his eyes that froze me. His huge hands were spasmodically, irresistibly hovering as if to embrace her delicate unconscious shoulders. Before I knew it he was kissing her cheek and it was I--I--who felt his hot vile breath as though Alicia's face and mine were one!

I cried out in a torment of fury and pain, but only a hoarse distant sound as of some night bird issued out of my parched constricted throat.

I rattled the sash violently, seized the screen and ripped it out, tearing my hands with the cheap twisted screen frame, though I was unaware of it then. The thin opaque shade flapped defiantly in my face. And all at once I heard a piercing scream--the terrified voice of Alicia!

Rage maddened me. And because of my state, I experienced difficulty, this time of all times, in entering the window out of which normally I stepped with ease. I stumbled, slipped, fell, rose again and leaped into the room like a maniac.

But Griselda, drawn by Alicia's scream, no doubt, was already filling the doorway, facing Pendleton, and with a look of concentrated hatred that remains engraved in my memory she was saying:

"Ye blackguard! Ye vile, black-hearted blackguard!"

With a wild leap to my table I seized a pointed bronze paper cutter. I should have plunged it into his heart, but for the swift intervention of the aged Griselda.

"No!" she cried huskily, seizing the blade, "we need nae add murder to this!"

I dropped the paper cutter to the floor and threw myself at the purple throat of the beast Pendleton. For a moment the guilty hang-dog look left his eyes and with an oath he thrust out his open hands against my face to throw me off. I was blinded by his huge hot palms against my eyes but I clung convulsively to his throat. His hands spasmodically closed about my neck; a momentary blackness fell upon me but I clung, my fingers eating more savagely into the hateful flesh of his throat. The pent-up force of years of hostility was that instant in my destroying hands. He gurgled and gasped and reeled backward.

In the meanwhile Alicia, emerging from her bewilderment and realizing the scene enacting itself with lightning-like rapidity, gave a low cry and sat up, moaning with terror. This vision of Alicia recalled me to myself. I flung his head away from me and I myself staggered backward with the force of my effort. I was breathing like a wrestler as I stood leaning with one hand upon the table. I could not speak.

My desire was to fold Alicia in my arms, to press her to me, exulting in her safety. But I dared not move for fear I should topple and fall, with the sheer working of the rage that was tearing me.

"Go--Alicia!" I gasped out finally. "Upstairs. Leave us!" Dead, banal phrases, when I panted to pour out endearments!

With a look of wild anxiety from Pendleton to me, like a terrified doe, Alicia rose, stood for a moment irresolute, then suddenly throwing up her hands to her face, she ran out of the room with a piteous stifled cry.

We stood for a space silent, all three of us, Griselda, Pendleton and I, after the door had closed.

"Now, Pendleton," I said finally, when I was a little more sure of my voice, "nothing you can say will matter in the slightest. We saw. Question is what d'you mean to do?"

He glanced hostilely toward Griselda. She, interpreting his look, flashed defiantly, with arms akimbo.

"Look, ye villain, look your fill. I will na leave the master alone with a murderer, the likes of you! No, I will na!" How often I have wished since then that she had not been so zealous.

"Talk about murder!" Pendleton, with the ghost of a grin, pointed at the paper knife still clutched in Griselda's hand.

"You needn't be afraid on my account," I told Griselda quietly. "I don't fear him."

"I will na go away," obstinately retorted Griselda, moving forward, pushing Pendleton aside like a man, and placing her back against the door.

"Very well, Griselda," I said. "I have no secrets to hide from you. And this man has betrayed what he can never hope to hide. Pendleton, what do you mean to do?"

"Do--" muttered Pendleton, with a dark abstraction in his look, "I'd like to tell you what I'd like to do to such as you--but it isn't worth while. This namby-pamby, mollycoddle, rotten doll-life favors you. Do! If I had the money, I'd get so far away I couldn't even think of insects like you."

"Then you realize you are no more fit to take Laura's children than you're fit to live among decent people?" He was silent for a moment, with the abstraction merging into cunning in his eye, and that in turn, as though cunning were of no avail, fading into heaviness.

"They'll become like you," he finally answered with the somber trace of a sneer. "There's the oldest boy--I wish--I'd make a man of him." A snort of derision from Griselda interrupted.

"You mean a criminal," I put in, in spite of myself. "Well, you can't, Pendleton. Lift a finger and as surely as you sit there, I'll prosecute you--children or no children. Don't forget I have witnesses."

He gazed at me open-mouthed with half-defiance, half-alarm on his moist fleshy countenance.

"That's your little scheme, is it?" he muttered sardonically.

"Only if you drive me to it!"

"Blackmail, eh?"

I laughed at him. "What's the use of being melodramatic, Pendleton? You are hardly the one to talk like that."

"Where's the money Laura left?" he snapped with truculent sharpness, and I experienced a pang of pain to hear her name upon his lips. Nevertheless, I answered him evenly:

"That exists intact--about nineteen hundred dollars. It's the children's, unless I should need it for their education. I am the executor."

"Give me a thousand of that!" he cried passionately, yet with a tentative uncertainty in his voice, "and I'll go where I'll never see your face again!"

"That's a consummation, Pendleton--but of that not a penny!"

"Executor!" he repeated with vicious bitterness--"with your little laws and safeguards. God! How I hate you all! God! To be again where real men are--who move--and laugh--and live! Peddling mollycoddles--caged white mice! Damn you! I wish to God I had never met any of you!"

"You don't know how often I have wished that," I murmured, but he paid no heed.

"Lord! I want to be again where the sun shines, where a man can take a chance! I wish to God I had never met that moldy old rotten Dibdin! I was going into the commission business with an Englishman at Osaka--or I could have gone into one of the mines of Kuhara in Korea--copper--made a fortune!"--he spoke as if he were vehemently thinking aloud--"but that plausible rotter Dibdin came along--dragged me away--and I had a hankering for the lights of Broadway. Broadway! What have I seen of it? Want to put me in a cage--in a flat! Hell, man! Give me a thousand dollars--and let me--I'll pay it back!"

I did not laugh at his last words. His mention of Dibdin suddenly brought to my mind what was like a flash of light. To be rid of him was my paramount desire. Dibdin--Dibdin's check--_to be used for the children_! It lay yellowing in my pocketbook. Now if ever was the time. Never, I felt certain after Pendleton's confession, could I benefit the children more with a thousand dollars!

"Yes!" I cried explosively. "I understand you, Pendleton. I'll give you a thousand dollars. You don't belong here--it was a mistake bringing you--go where you came from--where you'll be at home." It was only afterwards I recalled that he had mentioned blackmail.

"You'll give it to me?" he exclaimed avidly, thrusting out his hand.

"Yes--I will!"

"Now?"

"To-morrow morning." His face fell.

"Some trick? You'll go back on it." I ignored him.

"But you can't sleep here," I went on. "I'll meet you in town anywhere you say. No, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll come with you to town now, to-night. To-morrow morning we'll settle it."

To be rid of him--to get him out from under this roof--seemed suddenly a great, a priceless boon.

"God! I could kiss you!" he cried in derisive exultation.

"Go pack your things," I said, through the tumult in my brain. "I'll call a cab--or better still, you telephone Hickson, Griselda. I'll go and help him."

Pendleton nodded with grim insolence and shouldered out of the door.

"A better night's work ye've never done in your life," flashed Griselda, with a look of approbation that pleased me as much as any praise I have ever received; and she shuffled out to the telephone.

For one moment of silence I stood alone in the middle of my study, throbbing with a jumble of half-formed thoughts and racing flashes of ideas upon none of which my mind was able to fasten. But this single fact finally emerged from the welter: It was I, by my own act, who was now sending the father of Laura's children into exile. But on the heels of that came the certain conviction that never had any judge since justice was invented made a more accurate decision. And it seemed to me then as though something new and massive and stubborn and hard was born in my bosom that solidified and toughened me: That, come sorrow or joy, I should be able to present a surer front to their encounter, a greater certitude in meeting them. I felt myself at last an active, fashioned and tempered part of the machinery of life, and all my past seemed as chaff that had been blown by the winds of circumstance.

Alicia! My heart cried out for her! But I could not go to her now. I must clean my house for her and when next I saw her it should be in a cleared and wholesome atmosphere that no longer reeked of Pendleton. I made my way to his room and opened the door.

"Have you packing space enough?" I asked him coldly.

"I could use another suit case," he muttered.

"I'll give you mine," I told him and brought forth my bag from a closet in the hall. Whether Alicia had heard any or all of our words I could not tell. The children were evidently sleeping. I walked on tiptoe.

"Where d'you intend to go?" growled Pendleton, without looking at me.

"To an hotel," I told him curtly--"any hotel you like."

"Go to the Hotel de Gink for all I care," he muttered and went on with his packing.

"Do you want to see the children before you go?"

I could not forbear asking him that. He paused for a moment and straightened up, breathing heavily. Then he shook his head. "No--I guess not."

The tin taxicab was rattling at the door, and Griselda came futilely to announce it.

"You'll hear from me to-morrow morning some time," I whispered to her quickly, as Pendleton, stooping under his bags, lumbered on in front of me. "Look after Alicia--and the others."

"Ay," she murmured, "have no fear."

There was a train, and in the longest half-hour of any journey we were at the Manhattan Hotel. Adjoining rooms were assigned to us with a bathroom between. There had been a sort of intoxication about the entire business that had carried me on with a blind nameless force as one is carried in a dream. Once I was alone in the four walls of the impersonal chamber, a sudden lassitude fell upon me, followed by an immense wave of dreariness. How somber and sinister was life, full of a drab and hidden tragedy. Trafficking with Pendleton--slaving at Visconti's--the dreams that had been mine! And this was the life I was living. Suppose in the morning he should refuse? On a sudden my door opened and Pendleton's hatless head appeared.

"Sure you won't back out in the morning?"

And again my nerves snapped back into their steel-like tension.

"Not even doomsday morning."

"Will you have a drink on it?"

"No," I told him, "but there is no reason why you shouldn't have one."

"I think I will," he said, and with a malign gleam of triumph he approached the telephone in my room.

"The bar!" he demanded, and when the connection was made he added: "Two rye highs for 436." Then he turned his face toward me and grinned.

"Now, Randolph," he began quite amicably, "why keep me here any longer than you can help?"

"What d'you mean?"

"This: It's only about half-past ten--quarter to eleven. There is--there must be a train for the West round midnight. Why prolong the sweet agony of parting--why not let me go?"

"Now? You must be crazy!" I exploded nervously. "How can I get the money for you? Besides, there's another thing--I want you to sign something--something a lawyer must draw up--a paper of some sort--so you can't repeat this business."

"So that's it--is it?" he nodded his heavy head up and down, as though thinking aloud. "Well, put that out of your mind. I'll sign nothing. Take me for a fool? Here's your chance. Give me the money now and let me go or the deal's off. See? I'm just as anxious to go as you're to have me go. But I wasn't born yesterday. I'll sign no papers in any damn lawyer's office. Take it or leave it. That's that!"

There was something unspeakably horrible to me about sitting there and chaffering with this man whose every word breathed contamination. For a moment the thought of Dibdin came to me. I would call upon Dibdin in this emergency. Dibdin had hardly been near me of late. Excepting for an occasional luncheon together or a sporadic telephone conversation, I had scarcely seen him. It was as though he dreaded to encounter the monster Pendleton, whom, in a sort he had himself brought into being, and was only waiting until I should be free of him. But somehow I could not then call Dibdin. This was _my_ crisis and my mind revolted at dragging any one else into it. Oddly enough it was not the children that seemed to be the barrier, but Alicia. The picture of Pendleton obscenely hovering over her came scorching, before my vision and I at once, dismissed the thought of calling upon Dibdin. The club,--that was my one chance of getting cash at that hour.

"What's the matter with your club?" Pendleton snapped me up so suddenly that I was startled. Could that fleshy brute read my thoughts?

"Just what I was thinking of," I murmured excitedly and snatched up the telephone. "Give me 9100 Bryant."

"Damn it--you're a sport! I like a dead game bird like you."

When the club answered, I asked whether Mr. Fred Salmon happened to be in and was informed that the doorman thought he was and that he would page him. I sat waiting with the receiver to my ear.

"Tell you what I'll do," said Pendleton, under the stimulus of expectation. "If you pull this off for me so I can start to-night, while the mood's on me, I'll sign any damn thing you please."

"Hello!" I suddenly heard in Fred Salmon's deep voice, "Salmon speaking."

"Fred," I told him, "this is Randolph Byrd."

"Hello, Ranny!" he broke in exuberantly. "Well, of all the ghosts--" but I checked him.

"--I want to cash a check for a thousand dollars right now, Fred. I am at the Manhattan Hotel. The banks are closed. Will you do this for me: Ask at the office and turn out your pockets and get what you can from any of the card players there and anybody else you know. Do you follow me?"

"I get you all right--all right--" said the voice of Fred, hardening to a businesslike tone now that money was in question. "Hold the wire a minute, Ran. I'll see what I can do."

Fred's raucous voice was as plainly audible to Pendleton as it was to me.

"Get it," he muttered. "Get it. I'd hate to wait till to-morrow."

I nodded. To be rid of him to-night would be a vast relief. And I longed to return home.

"I guess we can fix it all right," came Fred's voice in the telephone. "But you'd better come over with the check. There's about six hundred dollars in the club till. I have a couple of hundred with me. And we can raise the rest."

Pendleton heard him.

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll fix up about a berth with the head porter in the meanwhile."

"What's the big idea?" was Fred's greeting, as I entered the club.

"Private," I told him laconically. "Sending a man to the antipodes because he's unfit to live in this climate."

"Oh--sick man?" Fred was sympathetic.

"Very sick," I told him. "Incurable,"

Fifteen minutes later I was in the hotel, handing Pendleton the money.

"Now what d'you want me to sign?" he queried carelessly.

"Not a thing," I answered. For on a sudden the futility of holding Pendleton to any bond overwhelmed me. Any respite, even a few weeks from his presence, seemed a paradise. Paradise seemed cheap at a thousand dollars. And who can safeguard paradise? Besides, if I knew my man at all, it would be some time before he would return to an environment he so thoroughly loathed. I was no more safe with his signature than without--and no less.

"That's about all, then," he said, and he had the decency not to hold out his hand. "Good luck," he added in an undertone.

I made no answer and turned my face away from him with a wonderful sense of relief.

No sooner had the porter bustled out with his things and the door closed than I looked toward my own small bag with the dominant thought of returning home. But I could not move. I found myself shaking like a leaf and I sank down in the nearest chair, quivering as though the vibration in my nerves would hurl my body to pieces. No, I could not go home in this state. And taking off my coat with hands that shook as in a palsy, I threw myself upon the bed. But before I passed into the sleep of stupefied exhaustion a single insistent foreboding kept dully throbbing through my brain.

"He will come back--Pendleton will come back!"

*CHAPTER XIX*

Exultation filled me when I awoke late in the morning.

Though I had slept in my clothes and felt particularly disheveled, I stripped with the joy of an athlete after a victory and plunged into the cool invigorating bath.

Pendleton was gone! I do not remember the emotions of Sinbad when he had rid himself of the Old Man of the Sea. But his emotions must have resembled mine. My heart sang, I sang myself. I was manumitted. I was free. To my intimate journal may I not say that I felt myself a man?

I had fought the beast at Ephesus, my pulses blasphemously and jubilantly informed me, and by the Lord, I had won!

The children were mine! Alicia was mine! Would that I could bind them to me with triple brass. But I have bound them. In ridding myself of Pendleton, I had made them securely mine. Suppose he should return one day? They would be grown--reared by me. He would be merely the family skeleton. What is a family without a skeleton? He was that now. He wouldn't matter. It is human destiny to revolve about the child, about children. With the exception of Pendleton the outcast and Gertrude the--well, Gertrude--every one attained completeness only in rearing the next generation. And as I rubbed my body with the coarse towel I felt complete!

As for Alicia--ah--well, who was I to expect from life _everything_? At any rate she was mine, now, even as the children were mine. And the very first thing I would do--oh, jeweled inspiration--is to adopt her, legally and formally. That thought suddenly made the blood sing in my ears to so delicious a tune that absurdly, ridiculously, I began like some pagan or satyr to dance about the room. _Mine, mine, mine_! I danced into the room in which Pendleton had not slept and with crazy gestures made as if to sweep his memory out of the garish window. I had saved the children and safeguarded Alicia.

I felt I had played the man. And let no man say he has lived until he has fought for those he loves. Inevitably my mind dwelt upon Alicia. Who is that child? What were her beginnings? Did she come out of the sea and chaos of life only to vanish in some bitter poignant dream like that of last night? I only knew that she was mine now and that I would bind her to me yet more strongly. I would not ask for too much; I would be humbly grateful. She had come into my life as a divine offering and I would not question overmuch. There is no other origin. I felt supremely, tremulously content. If only she would abide and never leave me!

And it occurred to me, as I stood shaving before the mirror, that life is a beleaguered city, with deadly arrows falling over the wall, and the great enemy, death, certain to enter in the end. But by virtue of the love implanted in the human heart, one may snatch many hours of happiness amid the tumult and the shouting in the winding ways.

Over my hasty breakfast I recalled with a shock of guilt that I had not yet communicated with Griselda. But as I was already late I decided I should call her from the office.

How swift is mischief to enter in the thoughts of desperate men I discovered bitterly only a few minutes later.

For the first word I received upon entering Visconti's was that Griselda had called me repeatedly and Griselda's news chilled and numbed every fiber in my body.

Alicia had disappeared!

Pendleton! That was the thought that seared my brain.

"You--don't think"--I stammered brokenly to Griselda, "that she--that Pendleton--"

"I have thought of that," was her reply. "But--no! It canna be possible. She hated him--no! She must hae gone before ye left the house. I looked into her room soon after and she wasna there. I thought the girlie was hiding somewhere--or maybe she had run out into the garden until the mischief should blow over. I looked high and low; I called her in the garden. But she was nowhere to be found."

"Did she take any things?" I queried huskily.

"A wee bundle--" said Griselda--"night things and the like."

The shuddering dismay of that moment I shall never forget.

"Did she talk with--with him at all during the evening?" The words struggled out of my parched throat in spite of me, and I should have hated to see my own eyes.

"Ay," said Griselda, "that he did, the leper! All the evening he was wheedling her to come to him with the bairns when he set up his house. She was weeping sair to me in the kitchen afterward. It was to ask you if you wanted her to go that she waited for you in the study--and fell asleep, the poor maidie!"

"And what did you say to her?" I all but whispered into the mouthpiece.

"I told the lass not to greet," shouted Griselda. "I told her I could nae believe it would happen. He would never take the bairns. And if he did he would nae keep them. He was a bad one--the evil brute! But she was frightened, the puir lassie!"

"Very well, Griselda," I muttered stonily. "I must think. I shall call you a little later. Don't alarm the others."

She hated him, had said Griselda! There was a meager ray of comfort. But do what I would, my stunned mind continued to flutter heavily like a half-scorched moth around the ugly, sinister vision of Pendleton. Could he be at the bottom of Alicia's disappearance? How had he contrived the trick? If only I had gone to the station with him! Was it that that accounted for his hurry to be gone? No! It was impossible. Ought I to start in pursuit at once? No, no, no! I could not believe it. It could not be--not of her own free will! Yet my heart was lacerated by the possibility. When I lifted my head from my bosom, I gasped in a desolation of emptiness.

I had stifled the prompting to call Dibdin last night, but now I felt I must find him. I needed the solace and advice of a friend. I rose heavily and put on my hat. Visconti had not yet come in.

"Tell Mr. Visconti," I said to Varesi, my young understudy, "that I have been called away suddenly, on a serious private matter. I shall telephone him later."

"Yes, Mr. Byrd," responded Varesi, his lustrous Italian eyes flashing sympathy. He thought, no doubt, from what he must have overheard, that some rascal had run off with my younger sister--a killing matter, very possibly, to a properly constituted male. Had he known the truth, his Latin mind would have been shocked at my seeming Anglo-Saxon composure. Out of doors I heaved a deep sigh and boarded a north-bound elevated train for the eighties, where Dibdin has his lodgings, near the Museum of Natural History.

I found Dibdin not at his lodging but at the Museum, directing the rearrangement of the Polynesian section in the light of his additions to it.

He turned one intense glance upon me without speaking, hurriedly gave some directions to the men at work, and led me to an alcove where there was a bench.

"Now, let's hear--" he said. "What's he been doing?" He concluded at once that Pendleton was at the bottom of whatever wild appearance I must have presented.

Briefly, but without omitting any essential detail, I gave him an account of all that had happened the previous evening, including Griselda's announcement of the morning.

"And you think he enticed her to go off with him?" he demanded.

"Well--what do you think?" I queried.

"I think no," said Dibdin. "What does Griselda say?"

"She says Alicia hated him."

"Then take her word for it!" snapped Dibdin. "But why the devil didn't you call me last night from the Manhattan?" he turned upon me angrily.

"Why didn't I?" I murmured. "Maybe it's because you've done enough--maybe it's because there are some things a man wants to do without assistance."

Dibdin glanced at me sharply and gave a low whistle.

"Oh, that's it--" he muttered--"I see," and he looked away.

I am certain that at that moment Dibdin read my secret. For his expression swiftly changed. He grew suddenly warm and friendly, more than his usual self.

"A fine job you did there, Randolph," he cried, clapping my shoulder; "an excellent piece of work. I certainly admire your technique. As for Alicia--she didn't go with him--of that I feel sure!" I could have groveled before him in gratitude for those words.

"But where do you suppose she is?" I could not help eagerly asking. There was a gleam of amusement mingled with the sympathy in his eyes.

"Not very far, I imagine. We'll find her. Have no fear. Young girls are funny things. The instinct of sacrifice and the instinct of independence are always struggling in a woman like the twins in Rebekah's womb. When they're young it hits them very hard. Some notion like that must have swamped Alicia--sacrifice--earn her own living--ceasing to be a source of trouble--who knows? They don't think when they're young--or even when they're old. They feel. We'll find her--but we've got to think. Pull yourself together, old man."

"How," I asked in stupefaction, "do you come to know all that about women?" And my heart felt perceptibly lightened at his words.

"Oh, I've been studying them all my life," he laughed. "Never having had one of my own, I've been watching and thinking about the whole sex all over the earth. We'll find her. Have you communicated with the police?"

At the word "police," my heart turned leaden again.

"The--p-police!" I stammered aghast. "Invoke the publicity that means?--Horrible!" A shudder ran down my back.

"Right again!" cried Dibdin, nudging me. "Young man, you have an appreciation! Quite useless--the police. But you still--have a suspicion of Pendleton, haven't you?" I found myself wishing that even the best of men weren't so ready to imagine themselves amateur detectives. The very core of my heart of hearts, Alicia, had disappeared, and I wanted swift concrete help, not speculative questions.

I admitted that I had a lingering suspicion of Pendleton.

"Then, this is what we do," Dibdin rubbed his forehead as over a problem in chess. "We see a private detective agency here and acquaint them with the facts. Have them pick up Pendleton on the way--he hasn't reached Chicago yet, you know--and see if he's traveling alone. If he is, let him go on his way. If not--then, a description of the girl--you understand--"

A livid fury possessed me suddenly as I saw the all too vivid picture that Dibdin had evoked and was now trying to believe.

"No, no!" I cried. "I am going myself. I dare not--I cannot trust anybody else to do this. You don't know--you can't understand--"

"I know only too damned well," growled Dibdin staring at me quizzically. "But I am trying to show you sense--difficult, I admit, to one in your condition. However, I must try again," he went on with the patience of resignation.

"You are only one man--don't you see? A detective agency is an organization of many men in different places who can concentrate on the same job simultaneously. At this minute they would know on which train he might be traveling and some one or several could already be watching for his arrival. Suppose they miss him. There are many hotels in Chicago--there are many trains leaving for the coast--don't you see?"

"Yes," I breathed brokenly. "Then it's useless."

"Far from it," he laughed. "Come with me."

Less than an hour later we were at the Mahoney Detective Agency and a suave young Irishman was listening without emotion or eagerness to my story supplemented by Dibdin's interpolations. He seemed to care little for what concerned me most, but he was keen for personal details of Pendleton's appearance, height, build, clothes, lettering on his luggage and so on.

When it came to giving a detailed description of Alicia, my confusion was so pitiful that even the young detective glanced at me only once and then, like the gentleman he was, looked sedulously down upon the paper before him.

"Sixteen--in her seventeenth year!" he murmured in astonishment.

"But she is an unusual girl--well grown for her age," I caught him up.

"I see," he murmured gravely. "What's the color of her hair?"

I went on as best I could with the description.

"I could save you money," he smiled blandly, "by telling you that the girl is not with him--" and I could have wrung his hand like a brother's. "But," he added, "it won't cost much to pick him up. I'll have news for you to-morrow this time, I'm thinking."

As I sat down to lunch with Dibdin at his club, though in truth nothing was farther from my cravings than food, he suddenly burst forth into hearty laughter.

"So it's my thousand you gave Pendleton?" he chuckled. "That was sheer inspiration, Randolph--sheer, unadulterated genius! If you weren't so lugubrious just now, I could accuse you of a high ironic sense of humor that only a great man would be capable of!"

How terrible were the next twenty-four hours, in spite of Dibdin's companionship and his efforts to cheer me, no one will ever know. No funeral could possibly have darkened my household to such an extent. I dreaded to be seen by the children, who walked about like wraiths under the sense of tragedy. I dreaded to tell them lies and yet I could not tell them the truth. Finally I felt I must say something to Laura and Randolph.

The departure of their father they received without the least surprise. Randolph inquired where he had gone, but this, I answered, I could not tell him, save that he had gone West. But the absence of Alicia left them puzzled and strained and awed. Alicia's disappearance shook them almost as it had shaken me.

"When will she be back?" demanded Randolph.

"I don't know exactly," I answered miserably, "soon, I hope."

The following morning I gave up all thought of going to the office. If my mysterious truancy should cost me my job, then it must be so. I hovered in the region of the telephone. Again and again I was about to call up Mahoney's, but I forebore. Finally, toward noon, I could wait no longer. When the connection was made, I gave my name and asked for the young man who had charge of my case.

"Was just going to call you," was the bland apologetic answer. "Your man is at the La Salle Hotel, going out on the Santa Fe to-night. He is alone and arrived alone last night. We'll see whether he starts alone to-night."

Then, of course, I cursed myself for my folly in thinking that it might be otherwise and realized that I had really thought nothing of the sort.

But where in the meanwhile was Alicia?

I had believed myself by now schooled to emergencies, but here was an emergency that left me dazed and helpless. I had fondly thought myself a match for life, but life was crushing me with pain like a blind force.

I leaped up suddenly and wandered about the house and the garden like a dog searching miserably for a departed loved one. There was the stream--but I turned from it shivering. No--that was impossible! The sense of life in Alicia, her vitality, was too potent, too radiant to suffer extinction. I looked up at my little nest from the edge of the muddy stream, that frail eyrie upon the rock that I had felt so nestling, secure; barred by the trunks of intervening trees, it now seemed a prison. A faint breeze that was stirring the leaves made them murmurous with secret things which my heart cried out to interpret. Was it a litany, a dirge, or a whisper of hope? I could not read the riddle, but my bruised spirit was passionately clinging to hope.

Dibdin pretended not to observe my vagaries; when I returned I found him absorbed in Epictetus.

"This is rather good," he growled, pointing to a passage and puffing his pipe as he spoke:

"Have you not received facilities by which you may support any event? Have you not received a manly soul? Have you not received patience?"

"Yes," I muttered dejectedly, "all very well, but Epictetus never lost Alicia."

Dibdin laughed shortly. "Now," he said, "we must start out to find her. Though my feeling is she'll come back of her own accord very soon. The girl was frightened--no more."

I ignored the last part of his speech but leaped at the first.

"How would you start?" I queried sharply.

"What is the high-sounding name of that institution where she was brought up?"

"Oh, don't tell them, for Heaven's sake," I cried out in alarm. "If she is not there and they learn I have lost her, they'll never consent to my adopting her; they'll consider me irresponsible."

"Don't let's be fools," retorted Dibdin. "Those people are not. Do you know how many boys, girls, men and women turn up 'willfully missing' every year?" No, I didn't know.

"But, by George!" he suddenly clapped his forehead in a burst of inspiration--"Sergeant Cullum! Ever hear of Sergeant Cullum?." I shook my head. "He is a policeman I know who has a genius for finding missing persons. It's positively a sixth sense with him. He's a prodigy--has traveled everywhere--a human bloodhound--he is the man to go to!"

"But--the police!" I stammered.

"Yes, I know--but we'll see whether we can make him take this as a private case--out of hours--I'll find him!"

The surge of hope to my eyes must have told Dibdin better than any words I could have uttered what I felt at that instant.

"But first we'll call that institution," he directed. "You put in a call for the number and I'll tell you what to say."

"You needn't," I decided after a moment's reflection. "I know. I shall simply inquire about the regulations governing adoptions. I can so word it that if Alicia is there they will tell me."

"Ah, now your brain is functioning again," he concluded. "That being so, I shall leave you and look up Cullum at the bureau of missing persons."

Then I recalled that I had met with the phrase in newspapers. The fact that missing persons were so numerous that a bureau of the metropolitan police was required to handle them cheered me more than any other single fact. It was consoling to feel that even, in my peculiar misery I had joined a great multitude who suffered the loss of loved ones, even as in toil and labor and poverty I had merged into the vast majority.

When Dibdin left me I learned that I might adopt Alicia without any great obstacles, if she were willing, but I was no wiser as to her whereabouts. The Home, in the person of the Matron, inquired how "she was getting along." She was obviously not there, and I experienced a misery of guilt as though I had robbed the world of its dearest possession and then lost it.

Alone and bereft I sat, sinking to a mere pin's point in my abasement. I had begun to believe myself schooled in life, something of a man among men. But my own ineffectiveness was now dismally revealed to me. I had proved myself incapable of guarding even what was dearest to me in the world. I was at the bottom of an abyss from which I now felt hopeless to scramble upward. The sheer and beetling walls of granite were overpoweringly steep and forbidding. For the first time in long years, I believe I mentally prayed. I waited for Dibdin.

And then suddenly, as is the way with me when I am at the bottom, my spirits bounded upward. Alicia would come back to me, I felt in a sudden surge of assurance. At that moment I felt sure that she was thinking of me, that she was yearning to return. And before I knew it, I was blocking in magnificent plans for her education, for making a splendid woman of her, even though she already seemed perfect, of supplementing nature's handiwork with all the force that was in me. I saw her resplendent, a shining creature, the woman of my dreams! What a florid designer is hope!

But why should she have been taken from me so abruptly? The vast mystery of life encompassed me again like a shell, impenetrable--a carapace through which nature must supply the openings--and she had evidently not supplied them. Would Dibdin never come with his policeman?

Books, for so long my mainstay and support, were now useless to me. I turned over many volumes idly but my mind no longer reacted to that old and magical alchemy. The volume of Epictetus that Dibdin had fingered might have been a seed catalogue, so remote it seemed and so null. I was now a ghost among my books: I was plunged in "The Woods of Westermain," and my memory flung me the lines:

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form;
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.

It was clear. I must toss my heart up with the lark to fare fairly, even though my pain was great.

Late that afternoon; Dibdin returned, bringing Sergeant Cullum.

That excellent policeman gave me more hope than any one, excepting my own heart, had yet succeeded in doing. He insisted upon being made privy to all the circumstances, to which he listened, his broad shaven face turned ceilingward, with the rapt air of a mystic, expecting momentarily that lightning flash of inspiration that would reveal all. Then he asked to be allowed to wander by himself throughout the house, over which he went pointing and sniffing like some well-trained hound. In the end he declared himself satisfied.

"Now give me a little time," he said.

"But what means--how do you go to work?" I asked, nettled that he should see possibilities regarding Alicia that I had overlooked.

"I swear, Mr. Byrd, I don't know," he answered reverently. "I wait for guidance."

"Guidance?" I faltered.

"Yes--from on high."

"You depend on that--only?"

"Only!--Well, yes and no. I pray, Mr. Byrd--I pray."

"You have no other means?" I queried, with a sinking heart.

"What other means are there," he demanded with glowing eyes, "that the Lord can't supply? What detective in the world can equal the Lord--tell me that, Mr. Byrd."

I saw that I was in the presence of a fanatic and I stood abashed.

"The best man in the Department," Dibdin put in encouragingly. "Sergeant Cullum _is_ the bureau of missing persons."

"Give me a little time," he urged again, with the fervid intensity of prayer--Time! And it was Alicia who was missing!

I shook his hand and gave him time and parted from him with a hope that I should not have to wait for his ecstatic visions to restore her.