Part 20

Reading, her sole resource, no longer amused her. It was a solace she had tried, and it had failed her; so she read no more, nor thought, nor worked, nor did anything but quietly endure. She affected cheerfulness when she met her father in the afternoons, and General Brandon, whom a child could deceive, thought how improved in spirits she had grown since the autumn. The General’s confidence in Clavering continued quite unshaken, and he proclaimed solemnly that no man in public life, since the foundation of the government, had been so hounded and persecuted as “that high–toned gentleman, sir, ex–Senator Clavering.”

Next to the thought of marrying Clavering, the most heart–breaking thing to Elizabeth was the memory of the rash letter she had written to Hugh Pelham. The only mitigation of this was that he would not get it for many months, perhaps never. Her cheeks burned at every recollection of it. The month had passed away at the end of which McBean had promised to appear, but so far she had heard and seen nothing more of him. She felt sure, however, that McBean had not forgotten her, and she looked for him daily. Then she must ask Clavering for money, and that would settle her fate.

One soft spring night she sat at the open window of the drawing–room, looking out on the quiet street, where the great Clavering house loomed dark and silent and deserted. There was no light in the drawing–room where Elizabeth sat, but a gas–jet in the hall cast a flame of yellow radiance in at the doorway. Elizabeth sat in the shadow and the silence. Suddenly a peremptory ring was heard at the bell, and in a minute or two Serena entered the room and handed Elizabeth a white envelope with a telegram in it.

Elizabeth had more than the usual feminine dread of a telegraphic despatch, and she held the envelope in her hand for ten minutes before she could summon courage to open it. Only Clavering or McBean could be telegraphing her, and to hear from either meant a stab. At last she forced herself to tear the envelope open. It was a cablegram from London, and read:—

“Your letter just received. Am sailing for America next Saturday. You must not, shall not, marry Clavering. Why did you not write me before? HUGH PELHAM.”

Serena, who dreaded telegrams, went back to her own regions. Presently she returned and looked in the drawing–room door at Elizabeth. She was still–sitting by the open window in the half darkness, in the same position in which she had been half an hour before. The colored woman, who knew and had known all the time that Elizabeth was unhappy, went away and was troubled in mind. Half an hour later she returned. Elizabeth had changed her position slightly. She was resting her elbows on the window–sill, and her face was buried in her hands.

“Miss ’Liz’beth,” said Serena, in her soft voice, and laying a hard, honest, sympathetic black hand on Elizabeth’s shoulder, “fur de Lord’s sake, doan’ ’stress yo’sef so. Doan’ yo’ marry dat Clavering man, nor any ‘urr man, ef you doan’ want to. Me and de Gin’l will teck keer on you. Doan’ yo’ trouble ‘bout nothin’ ’t all, honey.”

“Oh, Serena,” cried Elizabeth, raising a pale, glorified, serene face and throwing her arms around Serena’s black neck, “I am the happiest person in the world! He is coming! He will start day after to–morrow. Oh, Serena, I am not distressed, I am not frightened any more!”

“‘Tain’ dat Clavering man!” answered Serena. She alone of the whole world had suspected Clavering’s intentions.

“No, no, no! It is another man—the man I—“ Elizabeth, without finishing the sentence, slipped out of Serena’s arms, upstairs to her own room, to be alone with her happiness.

Although she had heard Clavering’s name spoken, it was near midnight before she really gave him a thought. Then she wrote him a few lines, very humble, very apologetic; but no man of sense on earth could fail to know, on reading them, that the woman who wrote them was fixed in her resolution not to marry him. And as in the case of the former letter, she watched for the passing postman in the early morning and dropped the letter at his feet.

She summoned up courage to tell her father next day that Pelham was coming. “And I am sure,” she said, blushing and faltering, “all will be right between us, and he will explain all that seemed unkind in his conduct to me.”

General Brandon was sure of it, too, just as he was sure everybody meant to do right on all occasions, and was as pleased at the notion of rehabilitating Pelham as if somebody had left him a block of stock in the Standard Oil Company.

Elizabeth scarcely knew how the next week passed, so great was her exaltation. It is said that the highest form of pleasure is release from pain. She had that, and other joys besides. It was to her as if the earth had at last recovered its balance, with Pelham once more her friend. She did not dare to whisper anything more, even to herself. And every day brought her nearer to that hour—that poignant hour—when she should see Pelham once more as he had always been to her. She scanned the newspapers, and found what steamers sailed on the Saturday. She guessed by which one Pelham would sail. She watched out eagerly when they should be reported, and the morning and afternoon papers were in her hands by the time they were left at the door.

On the Saturday afternoon, which was warm and summer–like, Elizabeth was watching at the window for the afternoon newspaper—the morning newspaper had not chronicled the arrival of any of the Saturday steamers. When the negro newsboy threw it on the doorway, she ran out, and in her eagerness stood bareheaded on the steps, looking for the names of the incoming steamers. She found them—all the Saturday steamers had arrived to the day, and at an early hour. And Hugh Pelham might come at any moment! The thought brought the red blood to her cheeks and a quivering smile to her lips.

She looked down the street, under an archway of green, where played a fountain in a little open space, with brilliant tulip beds. The avenue into which the street debouched was gay with carriages and autos and merry, well–dressed girls and men, tripping along by twos and threes. As she gazed toward it, a hansom clattered up and in it sat Clavering. His arrival was so sudden that he could not but note the change in Elizabeth. He had thought on his first glance that he had never seen her look so youthful and so handsome. She had in truth regained much of her lost beauty, and when she saw him and recognized him, the pallor, the shame, the repulsion, in her face were eloquent. She drew back from him involuntarily, and her greeting, although gentle, did not conceal her feelings in the least.

As usual, Clavering appeared to be in the pink of condition. The crisis through which he had lately passed, the shock of the disappointment contained in Elizabeth’s letter, his four days of hard travel, had left no mark upon him. He was a strong man in physique as well as in will. Elizabeth showed great embarrassment, but Clavering met her without the least awkwardness. As soon as they were alone in the drawing–room, cool and darkened from the too ardent sun, Clavering came to the point.

“I was, of course, astounded to receive your letter,” he said. “I was on my ranch. I had just arrived, and was sitting down to supper when the mail was brought from the post–office twenty miles away. I found if I left at once I could make the midnight train, and that would give me fast connections all the way through. So, when I had finished my supper—it took me just twenty minutes—you know a ranchman’s supper isn’t a function, so to speak—I got on horseback and rode nearly thirty miles in four hours and a half. I had been riding all day, too. So you see I’m a very determined lover. This is my first love, you know,—the first like this, I mean,—and I couldn’t afford to throw it away.”

He was smiling now. The idea that the slim woman, dressed in black, sitting before him, with the red and white coming and going in her cheeks, could seriously resist him really seemed preposterous to him. Elizabeth remained silent, and Clavering knew that silence in a woman is momentous. As she made no reply he said, after a long pause, “And how about that other man?”

Elizabeth had said no word in her letter about any one else, and started at Clavering’s words. “I—I—” She could get no farther. It was in the beginning only a shrewd surmise of Clavering’s, but Elizabeth’s faltering words and shrinking manner had confirmed it.

“I knew, of course, another man had turned up; that’s why I came post–haste,” coolly remarked Clavering. “Now tell me all about him.”

Elizabeth was forced to answer. “It is—there was—my husband’s cousin, Major Pelham.”

“Oh, yes; the fellow that persecuted you after your husband’s death. He, however, is hardly the man to interfere with me.”

“I—I don’t understand it quite. I thought he knew all that was being done. But I had a cablegram from him.”

“You must have written to him.”

“Yes.”

“Before or after you wrote me?”

“Before. And when I got his reply by cable I wrote you.”

“I see. You prefer to marry him?”

“Major Pelham has not asked me to marry him,” replied Elizabeth, with dignity.

“But he will. Elizabeth, you are promised to me. I told you I loved you—not in the flowery style of a young loon, but of a man who has worked and thought and fought and seen enough to make him know his own mind. Of course I can’t coerce you, but the man who gets you away from me may look out for himself. See, the habits of a man’s early life and thought never leave him. My first instinct has always been to take care of my own, and I was bred and made my mark in a country where neither wife–stealing nor sweetheart–stealing is permitted. Sometimes wives and sweethearts were stolen, but it was a dangerous business. Oh, I don’t mean to use a gun; that went out twenty–five years ago. But there are many ways of ruining a man—and a woman, too.”

He spoke quite pleasantly, sitting close to Elizabeth and holding his crape–covered hat in his hand. There was nothing to indicate vengeance in Clavering’s easy, graceful manner and charming voice, but Elizabeth shuddered at the truth of what his speech might mean.

“Now tell me how you feel toward this man Pelham?”

“Major Pelham was my best friend during all my married life. I could not understand his conduct to me after my husband’s death. One night lately I felt the impulse to write to him—shall I tell you everything?”

“Yes.” Clavering was all calm attention then.

“It was the night after our last interview. It come over me that—that I would rather die than marry you. Yes, I mean what I say. I didn’t mean to kill myself. Oh, no! But I would rather have been killed than married to you.”

Clavering’s ruddy face grew pale. He got up, walked about the room, and sat down again, still close to Elizabeth. He saw she did not mean to be intentionally cruel, but was striving earnestly to tell him the whole truth.

“I have often heard of your power over other men, and I am sure you have great power over women too; for I felt in some way obliged to marry you unless some one came in to help me. And then I thought of Hugh Pelham, and I thought it would be at least two or three months before he got my letter; but he was evidently in London, and he cabled back. I feel sure he reached New York early this morning.”

“And did that money you owed have anything to do with it?”

“Yes. It troubled me dreadfully.”

“And for a paltry thousand or two you have broken your word to me, broken it when I needed most of all your faith in me?”

“It was not the money wholly.”

“It was also that I had lost my seat in the Senate of the United States?”

“Not altogether that; but I knew—I knew—I was at the Capitol that day.”

“Pardon me, but you don’t know. What does a woman know about such things? How do you know what it is for a man as strong as I am, as mature as I am, and with such a history as I have, to love? Yes, by God, to love for the first time. What does a woman’s pale reflection of passion know of the love of a man like me? I know all about life and death too. I have been a half–dozen times within six inches of a bullet that was extremely likely to be shot into my brain. I have felt the whir of a knife, that sometimes got planted in me, but never quite far enough to kill me. I have signed my name fifty times to things that meant either millions of dollars to me or state’s prison. These are only a few of the things that I know all about, but I tell you, Elizabeth Darrell, that they all seem like milk and water compared with what I feel for you. Do you know that the first time I saw you, when you were a mere slip of a girl, that night I crushed your little pearl heart under my foot, I felt a strange, even a superstitious interest in you? I never forgot you; and the first moment I saw you that Sunday afternoon, last November, something came over me which made everything in the world seem small, beside the thought of winning you. I have gone through a good deal since, but nothing has really mattered to me except you.” Clavering stopped. His voice, always earnest, had remained calm and even low.

Elizabeth was trembling from head to foot. Her resolution never to marry Clavering was not shaken in the least, or even touched, but like a child who has heedlessly set the torch to a powder magazine, she was appalled at her own work. She remained silent—what was there for her to say? And then she saw a figure pass the bowed shutters, making a shadow flit across the floor; and it was the shadow of Hugh Pelham. She sprang to her feet, a new light in her eyes which Clavering had never seen before. Clavering was for an instant as completely forgotten as if he had never been. He saw his fate in that look, that action. He rose, too, and the next moment Hugh Pelham walked into the room. He was visibly older, more weather–beaten, than he had been two years before, and, although ten years Clavering’s junior, he looked quite the same age. Evil–doing is very often good for the physical man and well–doing bad for the physical man. The two men instinctively recognized each other at the first glance, and hated each other instantly with a mortal hatred. Elizabeth stood next Pelham. She had given him her hand without a word, and he held it firmly.

Clavering turned to Elizabeth and said: “When can I see you again? Pray make it as soon as possible. That much I can ask, after what has passed between us.”

“Excuse me,” said Pelham, politely, “but I don’t think Mrs. Darrell can see you again.”

A dull red showed under Clavering’s skin, and a slight tremor shook his massive figure. It was a situation hard for any man to bear, and almost intolerable to James Clavering. He said the only thing possible under the circumstances. “I must decline to accept your decision. It rests with Mrs. Darrell.”

Elizabeth turned to Major Pelham. “Will you kindly leave me with Mr. Clavering for a moment? It is his right, and later I will explain all to you.”

Pelham, with a bow, walked out of the drawing–room, and, opening the street door, gazed upon the great pile of stone which the Claverings had lately inhabited. Clavering, when he and Elizabeth were alone, said at once:—

“I know how it is; I saw it in your face and eyes when the other man came. I am not one likely to ask for quarter or give quarter. I accept my fate as I accepted my expulsion from the Senate and the loss of many millions of dollars. There are in the world compensations to me for the other things. For the loss of you there is no compensation. It is my first and my last chance of leading a better life, for I swear to you, Elizabeth, I meant to lead a better life if you had married me. But now—it doesn’t matter in the least. I was born a hundred years too late; then I should have married you by force. I would have given my seat in the Senate to have seen such a look in your eyes when I came in as I saw when the other man came. Good–by, Elizabeth.”

Elizabeth gave him her hand. In all their acquaintance this was the first glimpse, the first suspicion, she had had that anything like a noble and uplifting love existed in Clavering; but he, this man, smirched all over, a bad husband, a bad father, who knew no truth nor honesty in his dealings with men or other women, loved once, truly, and at the moment of losing everything else he lost the only thing worthy the name of love which he had ever known in his whole life. He held Elizabeth’s hand in his; he had never so much as kissed it. He raised it to his lips, but Elizabeth drawing back with a violent and undisguised repulsion, he at once dropped it again. He looked at her for a full minute, compelling her against her will to meet his gaze, and then, turning, walked out of the house. On the steps outside he passed Pelham. Neither man spoke.

Pelham went into the drawing–room, where Elizabeth stood, pale and trembling. As he closed the door after him she said in an indescribable voice, “He never kissed me—he never so much as kissed my hand.”

“I don’t think you would ever have married him in any event, Elizabeth,” replied Pelham, gently. “But let us not speak of him. I came home as soon as I could—I had not had any news from England after I was well in the interior of Africa. I knew nothing of what had been done until I got your letter. I was coming to you, anyway—your year of widowhood was over. Oh, Elizabeth, how could you misjudge me as you did?”

* * * * *

Clavering found himself in the largest room of the large suite of rooms he occupied at the most expensive hotel in Washington. The April sun was just setting, and it flamed upon a huge mirror directly opposite the luxurious chair in which he sat. He looked at his own image reflected full length in the glass. It seemed to be moving, to be surrounded by other figures. He saw them well—painted and bedizened women, some of them loaded with jewels and with coronets on their heads. Their faces were beautiful and engaging and made his pulses leap, and then suddenly these faces changed into those of vultures with bloody beaks and hungry eyes. Then there were men, some in court dress and with orders sparkling on their breasts. All of them had a foreign look, they spoke a language he only half understood; and they too changed into hungry, distorted figures which he knew were the shapes of vampires and harpies. They smiled upon him and fawned upon him, and he saw himself smiling back, rather pleased, it appeared. Sometimes he and this crowd were moving through splendid rooms; there were balls and dinners going on, and he could hear the clash and rhythm of orchestras. Again, they were in dismal business offices, or in raging crowds upon Continental bourses. At first he was always surrounded, and it seemed as if he were losing something all the time.

Gradually the men and women about him no longer fawned upon him. They were familiar with him; then they jeered him; and presently they menaced him. They tried to strangle him, to rob him, and he had lost something—money or power or capacity, or perhaps all three, and he could not defend himself. And they grew more and more foreign to him, he could not understand their language at all. They talked among themselves, and he did not know what they were saying. And after a while he grew helpless, and did not know where he was; and then he saw himself standing on a bridge at night, in a foreign city. There were many lights upon the bridge, which were reflected in the black and rushing river. He was about to throw himself into the river, when it suddenly came to him that it was cold and he was thinly clad and hungry. And then he knew that he was in a strange country, and it came to him that he would return to his own land, to a place where there was warmth and comfort and the strange thing he had lost would be awaiting him. But then he heard wolfish voices shrieking at him out of the darkness that he had no home, no country—that he would never again be warmed and fed, and invisible hands like lions’ claws were clutching him and thrusting him into the dark waters, and he could only feebly resist them. There was a great mocking, reddish moon in the wild night sky and it reeled about and fell into an abyss of black clouds and then dropped into the blacker river. And the stars were going out one by one, so that the heavens and the earth had a blackness of the blackest night.

This produced a kind of horror in him, which made him cry out—a loud cry, he thought it. But it was really low and half smothered. And to his amazement he was not in his room at the hotel, but standing in the doorway of his own house. It was night, and he heard a great clock inside his own house strike the hour—nine o’clock. He could not remember how or why he had got from his hotel to his deserted house. He saw the caretaker, an old hobgoblin of a negro, peer at him from a basement window, and he shrank behind the great stone pillars of the doorway. It was a warm, soft spring night, without a moon, but the purple floor of heaven glittered with palpitating stars. The street was always a quiet one; to–night it was so strangely still that he feared to move lest his footfall should sound too loud. And while he stood, dazed and hesitating within his doorway, he saw two figures come together down the street and stop at Elizabeth’s house. One was Elizabeth, the other was the man she loved. The night was so warm that the house door was left open. Clavering watched the two figures mount the steps and go into the house. The man touched Elizabeth’s arm in helping her up the steps. It was a simple, conventional thing, but Clavering saw revealed in it a love so deep, so constant, so passionately tender, that he thought he had never seen real love before. He turned away, to enter upon the fate that had been laid bare to him.

THE END

THE SEA–WOLF

By JACK LONDON

Author of “The Call of the Wild,” “The Faith of Men,” etc.

With Illustrations by W. J. Aylward

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THE CROSSING

By WINSTON CHURCHILL

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With Illustrations in Colors

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The Queen’s Quair, or The Six Years’ Tragedy

By MAURICE HEWLETT

Author of “Richard Yea–and–Nay,” “The Forest Lovers,” etc.

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WHOSOEVER SHALL OFFEND

By F. MARION CRAWFORD

Author of “The Heart of Rome,” “Saracinesca,” “Via Crucis,” etc.

_Illustrated by Horace T. Carpenter_

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THE COMMON LOT

By ROBERT HERRICK