Branded Part 23

"AGATHA."

My appet.i.te for dinner had gone glimmering when I sat at the most secluded table the cafe afforded and went through the motions of eating. Not for a single instant did I mistake the purport of Agatha Geddis's note. It was not a friendly invitation; it was a veiled command. If it should be disobeyed, I made sure that not all the money in the Little Clean-Up's treasury could save me from going back to the home State as a recaptured felon.

Eight o'clock found me descending from a cab at the door of a rather dissipated looking mansion in the northern suburb. A servant admitted me, but I had to wait alone for a quarter of an hour or more in the stuffy and rather tawdry luxury of a great drawing-room. After a time I realized that Agatha was making me wait purposely in a refinement of cruelty, knowing well what torments I must be enduring.

When the suspense ended and she came into the room I saw at a glance that she was the same woman as of old; beautiful, alluring, but infinitely more sophisticated. Her charm now, as in girlhood, was chiefly the charm of physical perfection; but it was not entirely without its appeal when she made me sit beside her on the heavily carved mock-antique sofa.

"I didn't know certainly whether you would come or not," was the way she began on me, and if the tone was conventional I knew well enough what lay beneath it. "Old times are old times, but----"

She was merely playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse, but I could neither fight nor run until she gave me an opening.

"Of course you knew I would come; why shouldn't I?" I asked, striving for some outward appearance of self-possession.

"I'm sure I don't think of any reason, if you don't," she countered.

"Did you know I was in Denver?"

"Not in Denver, no. But I heard, some time ago, that you had come to Colorado for your health."

"It seems absolutely ridiculous, doesn't it?--to look at me now. But really, I was very ill three years ago; and even now I can't go back home and stay for any length of time. You haven't been back, have you, since your--since you----"

"No; I haven't been back."

She was rolling her filmy little lace handkerchief into a shapeless ball, and if I hadn't known her so well I might have fancied she was embarra.s.sed.

"I can't endure to think of that dreadful time four years ago--it is four years, isn't it?" she sighed; then with a swift glance of the man-melting eyes: "You hate me savagely, don't you, Bert?--you've been hating me all these years."

"No," I said, and it was the truth, up to that time. I knew that the feeling I had been entertaining for her had nothing in it so robust as hatred. There was no especial need for palliating her offense--far less, indeed, than I knew at that moment; yet I did it, saying, "You did what you thought you had to do; possibly it was what your father made you do--I don't know."

She was silent for a moment before she began again by asking me what made me change my name.

"My name isn't Herbert," I explained; "it never was. I think you must know that I was christened 'James Bertrand,' after my father."

"I didn't know it," she denied, adding: "but you have dropped the Weyburn?"

"Naturally."

Again there was a little interval of silence, and as before, she was the first to break it.

"So you are one of the owners of the famous Little Clean-Up? Are you very rich, Bertie?--you see, I can't give up the old name, all at once."

"No; I am not rich--as riches are counted nowadays."

"But you are going to be in just a little while," she put in, following the confident a.s.sertion with a query that came as suddenly as a stiletto stab: "Who is the girl, Bertie?"

"What girl?"'

"The girl you are going to marry. I saw her with you at the Broadway one night three weeks ago; I sat right behind you. She doesn't 'pretty' very much, to my way of thinking."

Once again I felt the murder nerve twittering. This woman with a mocking voice and a heart of stone knew everything; I was as certain of it as if I could have seen into the plotting brain behind the long-lashed eyes. I knew now why she hadn't glanced aside at me as she pa.s.sed on the way to the elevators in the Brown Palace the previous evening. She had discovered me long before. At whatever cost, I must know how long before.

"You saw me last night, and three weeks ago at the theater," I said.

"How long have you known that I was in Colorado?"

"Ever since you came, I think," she returned quietly. "I was a member of a private-car party up at Cripple Creek about that time--with some of the Midland officials and their friends, you know. Our car was taken out over a new branch line they were building at that time, and I saw you standing beside the track. Perhaps I shouldn't have recognized you if I hadn't been thinking so pointedly of you. The home newspapers had told of your es--of your leaving the State; and I was naturally--er--well, I was thinking about you, as I say."

I saw that I was completely in her power. She knew, better than anyone else on earth, save and excepting only her father, that I was an innocent man. But she also knew that I had broken my parole.

"What do you want of me, Agatha?" I asked; and I had to wet my lips before I could say it.

"Supposing we say that I am asking only a little, common, ordinary friendliness, Bertie--just for the sake of the old days, and to show that you don't bear malice. I'm like other women; I get horribly bored and lonesome sometimes for somebody to talk to--somebody who knows, and for whom I don't have to wear a mask. The other girl doesn't live here, does she?"

"No."

"That's better. When you come to Denver, you must let me see you now and then; just for old sake's sake. You come up quite often, don't you? But I know you do; I see your name in the arrivals quite frequently."

I formed a swift resolve not to come as often in the future as I had in the past, but I did not tell her so.

"You'll come to see me when you're in town," she went on. "I'll try to learn to call you 'Jimmie,' and when we meet people, I'll promise to introduce you as the Mr. Bertrand, of Cripple Creek and the Little Clean-Up. Does that make you feel better?"

It made me feel as if I should like to lock my fingers around her fair pillar-like throat. I have said that I did not hate her. But one may kill without hatred in self-defense. Short of cold-blooded murder, however, there was nothing I could do--nothing anyone could do. Beyond this, she went on chatting easily and lightly of the old times in Glendale and the people we had both known, rallying me now and then upon my unresponsiveness. At my leave-taking, which was a full hour later, she went with me to the hall, helped me into my overcoat, and gave me another of the breath-taking shocks.

"There was a time, once, when you really thought you were in love with me, wasn't there, Bertie?" she asked sweetly.

Again I told her the simple truth. "There was a time; yes. It was when I was still young enough to carry your books back and forth on the way to and from the old school."

"But you got bravely over it, after awhile?"

"Yes; I got over it after I grew up."

She laughed softly.

"Don't you know that is a frightfully dangerous thing to say to a woman--to any woman, Bertie?"

"It is the honest thing to say to you."

"I suppose it is. Yet there are some things a woman likes better than honesty. Perhaps you haven't been making love to the Cripple Creek girl long enough to find that out. But it is so, and it always will be so."

It was at the outer door opening that she gave me the final stab.

"I am taking your business excuse at its face value to-night and letting you go. But the next time you come you mustn't have any business; at least, nothing more important than entertaining me--and that is important. Just jot that down in your little vest-pocket memorandum, and don't allow yourself to forget it for a single moment; not even while you are making love to Little Brown-Eyes. Good-night."

The old-fas.h.i.+oned preachers used to describe a terrifying h.e.l.l in which fire and brimstone and all manner of physical torments awaited the impenitent. I was brought up to believe implicitly in such a h.e.l.l, but the puerility of it as compared with the refined tortures which I endured that winter can never be set forth in any words of mine.

With a desire keener than the hunger of the famis.h.i.+ng for respectability and the privilege of living open-eyed and honestly before all men, I was forced, from the night of that first visit to Agatha Geddis, to lead a wretched, fear-frozen, double existence. On my return to Cripple Creek after the interview which I have just detailed, I swore roundly that I would stop going to the Everton's; that, come what might, Polly should never be dragged into the horrible mora.s.s of degradation which I saw clearly, even at that bare beginning, was waiting to engulf me.

But at best, a man is only a man, human in his desires, human in his powers of resistance; and a man in love can rarely be a complete master of circ.u.mstances. Though I had been holding back, both for Barrett's sake and because of my own wretched handicap, it soon became apparent that I had gone too far to be able to retreat with honor; that Polly Everton's name had already been coupled with mine in the gossip of the great gold camp; and that--if what Barrett had said were true--Polly herself had to be considered.

So the double life began and continued. In Cripple Creek I was Mary Everton's lover; in Denver I was Agatha Geddis's bondman and slave.