Part 14

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."