Money Magic Part 31

Fordyce, looking up at her, was filled with astonishment at the picture of grace and ease which she presented, as she leaned to take his hand.

She shone, unmistakable mistress of the car, while Haney filled the role of trusted Irish coachman.

As he climbed in, the young lawyer remarked merrily, "I don't know whether I approve of this extravagance or not." He tapped the car door.

"It's mighty handy for the Captain," she replied. "You see he can't get round in the street-cars very well, and he says this is cheaper than cabs in the long run."

"It has never proved economical to me; but it _is_ handy," he answered, with admiration of her growing mastery of wealth.

And so with something fiercely beating in their hearts these youthful warriors struggled to be true to others--fighting against themselves as against domestic traitors, while they talked of the mine, the state judiciary, the operators, and the unions. Their words were impersonal, prosaic of a.s.sociation, but their eyes spoke of love as the diamond speaks of light. Ben's voice, carefully controlled, was vibrant with the poetry that comes but once in the life of a man, and she listened in that perfect content which makes gold and glory but the decorations of the palace where adoration dwells.

The great, smoky, thunderous city somehow added to the sweetness of the meeting--made it the more precious, like a song in a tempest. It seemed to Ben Fordyce as if he had never really lived before. The very need of concealment gave his unspoken pa.s.sion a singular quality--a tang of the wilding, the danger-some, which his intimacy with Alice had never possessed.

The Haneys' suite of rooms at the hotel called for comment. "Surely Haney is feeling the power of money--but why not; who has a better right to lovely things than Bertha?" Then aloud he repeated: "How well you're looking--both of you! City life agrees with you. I never saw you look so well."

This remark, innocent on its surface, brought self-consciousness to Bertha, for the light of his glance expressed more than admiration; and even as they stood facing each other, alive to the same disturbing flush, Lucius called Haney from the room, leaving them alone together.

The moment of Ben's trial had come.

For a few seconds the young wife waited in breathless silence for him to speak, a sense of her own wordlessness lying like a weight upon her.

Into the cloud of her confusion his voice came bringing confidence and calm. "I feel that you have forgiven me--your eyes seem to say so. I couldn't blame you if you despised me. I won't say my feeling has changed, for it hasn't. It may be wrong to say so--it is wrong, but I can't help it. Please tell me that you forgive me. I will be happier if you do, and I will never offend again." His accent was at once softly pleading and manly, and, as she raised her eyes to his in restored self-confidence, she murmured a quaint, short, rea.s.suring phrase: "Oh, that's all right!" Her glance, so shy, so appealing, united to the half-humorous words of her reply, were so surely of the Mountain-West that Ben was quite swept from the high ground of his resolution, and his hands leaped towards her with an almost irresistible embracing impulse.

"You sweet girl!" he exclaimed.

"Don't!" she said, starting back in alarm--"don't!"

His face changed instantly, the clear candor of his voice rea.s.sured her.

"Don't be afraid. I mean what I said. You need have no fear that I--that my offence will be repeated;" then, with intent to demonstrate his self-command, he abruptly changed the subject. "The Congdons sent their love to you, and Miss Franklin commissioned me to tell you that she will give you all her time next summer--if you wish her to do so."

She was glad of this message and added: "I need her, sure thing. Every day I spend here makes me seem like Mary Ann--I don't see how people can talk as smooth as they do. I'm crazy to get to school again and make up for lost time. Joe Moss makes me feel like a lead quarter. Being here with all these nice people and not able to talk with them is no fun.

Couldn't I whirl in and go to school somewhere back here?"

"Oh no, that isn't necessary. You are getting your education by a.s.sociation--you are improving very fast."

Her face lighted up. "Am I? Do you mean it?"

"I do mean it. No one would know--to see you here--that you had not enjoyed all the advantages."

"Oh yes, but I'm such a bluff. When I open my mouth they all begin to grin. They're onto my game all right."

He smiled. "That's because of your picturesque phrases--they like to hear you speak. I a.s.sure you no one would think of calling you awkward or--or lacking in--in charm."

Haney's return cut short this defensive dialogue, and with a sense of relief Bertha retreated--almost fled to her room--leaving the two men to discuss their business.

At the moment she had no wish to partic.i.p.ate in a labor controversy. She was entirely the woman at last, roused to the overpowering value of her own inheritance. Her desire to manage, to calculate, to plan her husband's affairs was gone, and in its place was a willingness to submit, a wish for protection which she had not hitherto acknowledged.

She brooded for a time on Ben's words, then hurriedly began to dress--with illogical desire to make herself beautiful in his eyes. As she re-entered the room she caught Haney's repeated declaration--"I will be loyal to the men"--and Ben's reply.

"Very well, I'll go back and do the best I can to keep them in line, but Williams says the governor is entirely on the side of the mine-operators."

"Does he?" retorted Haney. "Well, you say to the governor that Mart Haney was a gambler and saloon-keeper during the other 'war,' and now that he's a mine-owner, with money to hire a regiment of deppyties, his heart is with the red-neckers--just where it was. Owning a paying mine has not changed me heart to a stone."

Ben, as well as Bertha, understood the pride he took in not whiffling with the s.h.i.+ft of wind, but at the same time he considered it a foolish kind of loyalty. "Very well, I'll take the six-o'clock train to-night in order to be on hand."

"What's the rush?" said Haney; "stay on a day or two and see the town with us--'tis a great show."

Bertha, re-entering at this moment in her s.h.i.+ning gown, put the young attorney's Spartan resolution to rout. He stammered: "I ought to be on the ground before the mine-owners begin to open fire, and, besides--Alice is not very well."

At the mention of Alice's name Bertha's glance wavered and her eyelids fell. She did not urge him to stay, and Haney spoke up, heartily: "I'm sorry to hear she's not well. She was pretty as a rose the night of the dinner."

"She lives on her nerves," Ben replied, falling into sadness. "One day she's up in the clouds and dancing, the next she's flat in her bed in a darkened room unwilling to see anybody."

"'Tis the way of the White Death," thought Haney, but he spoke hopefully: "Well, spring is here and a long summer before her--she'll be herself against October."

"I trust so," said Ben, but Bertha could see that he was losing hope and that his life was being darkened by the presence of the death angel.

Haney changed the current of all their thinking by saying to Bertha: "If you are minded to go home, now is your chance, acushla. You can return with Mr. Fordyce, while Lucius and I go on to New York the morning."

"No, no!" she cried out in a panic. "No, I am going with you--I want to see New York myself," she added, in justification. The thought of the long journey with Ben Fordyce filled her with a kind of terror, a feeling she had never known before. She needed protection against herself.

"Very well," said Haney, "that's settled. Now let's show Mr. Fordyce the town."

Ben put aside his doubt and went forth with them, resolute to make a merry day of it. He seemed to regain all his care-free temper, but Bertha remained uneasy and at times abnormally distraught. She spoke with effort and listened badly, so busily was she wrought upon by unbidden thoughts. The question of her lover's disloyalty to Alice Heath, strange to say, had not hitherto troubled her--so selfishly, so childishly had her own relations.h.i.+p to him filled her mind. She now saw that Alice Heath was as deeply concerned in Ben's relations.h.i.+p to her as Haney, and the picture of the poor, pale, despairing lady, worn with weeping, persistently came between her and the scenes Mart pointed out on their trips about the city. Did Alice know--did she suspect? Was that why she was sinking lower and lower into the shadow?

With these questions to be answered, as well as those she had already put to herself concerning Mart, she could not enjoy the day's outing.

She rode through the parks with cold hands and white lips, and sat amid the color and bustle and light of the dining-room with only spasmodic return of her humorous, girlish self. The love which shone from Ben's admiring eyes only added to her uneasiness.

She was very lovely in a new gown that disclosed her firm, rounded young bosom, like a rosebud within its calyx--the distraction upon her brow somehow adding to the charm of her face--and Ben thought her the most wonderful girl he had ever known, so outwardly at ease and in command was she. "Could any one," he thought, "be more swiftly adaptable?"

They went to the theatre, and her beauty and her curiously unsmiling face aroused the admiration and curiosity of many others of those who saw her. At last, under the influence of the music, her eyes lost their shadow and grew tender and wistful. She ceased to question herself and gave herself up to the joy of the moment. The play and the melody--hackneyed to many of those present--appealed to her imagination, liberating her from the earth and all its concerns. She turned to Ben with eyes of rapture, saying, "Isn't it lovely!"

And he, to whom the music was outworn and a little shoddy, instantly agreed. "Yes, it is very beautiful," and he meant it, for her pleasure in it brought back a knowledge of the charm it had once possessed.

They dined together at the hotel, but the thought of Ben's departure brought a pang into Bertha's heart, and she fell back into her uneasy, distracted musing. She was being tempted, through her husband, who repeated with the half-forgetfulness of age and weakness, "You'd better go back with Mr. Fordyce, Bertie," but there was something stronger than her individual will in her reply--some racial resolution which came down the line of her good ancestry, and with almost angry outcry she answered:

"There's no use talking that! I'm going with you," and with this she ended the outward siege, but the inward battle was not closed till she had taken and dropped the hand her lover held out in parting next morning, and even then she turned away, with his eyes and the tender cadences of his voice imprinted so vividly on her memory that she could not banish them, and she set face towards the farther East with the contest of duty and desire still going forward in her blood.

CHAPTER XX

BERTHA MEETS MANHATTAN

It was a green land in which she woke. The leaves were just putting forth their feathery fronds of foliage, and the shorn lawns, the waving floods of growing wheat, and the smooth slopes of pastures presented pleasant pictures to the mountain-born girl. These thickly peopled farm-lands, the almost contiguous villages, the constant pa.s.sing of trains roused in her a surprise and wonder which left her silent. Such weight of human life, such swarming populations, appalled her. How did they all live?

At breakfast Haney was in unusual flow of spirits. "'Twas here I rode the trucks of a freight-car," he said once and again. "In this town I slept all night on a bench in the depot.... I know every tie from here to Syracuse. I wonder is the station agent living yet. 'Twould warm me heart to toss him out ten dollars for that night's lodging. Them was the great days! In Syracuse I worked for a livery-stableman as hostler, and I would have gone hungry but for the scullion Maggie. Cross-eyed was Maggie, but her heart beat warm for the lad in the loft, and many's the plates of beef and bowls of hot soup she handed to me--poor girl! I'd like to know where she is; had I the power of locomotion I'd look her up, too."

Again Bertha was brought face to face with the great sacrifice she was obscurely contemplating. The magic potency of money was brought before her eyes as she contrasted the ragged, homeless boy with the man who sat beside her. The fact that he had not earned the money only made its magic the more clearly inherent in the gold itself. It panoplied the thief's carriage. It made dwarfs admirable, and gave dignity and honor to the lowly. It made it possible for Marshall Haney to retrace in royal splendor the perilous and painful journey he had made into the West some thirty years ago--rewarding with regal generosity those who threw him a broken steak or a half-eaten roll--and she could imaginatively enter into the exquisite pleasure this largess gave the man.

"And there was Father McBreen," he resumed, with a chuckle--"'sure the mark of Satan is on the b'y,' he used to say every time my mother told him of one of my divilments. And he was right. All the same, I'd like to drop in on him and surprise him with a check"--at the moment he forgot that he was old and a cripple--"just to let him know the divil hadn't claimed me yet. I'd like to show him me wife." He put his hand on her arm and smiled. "Sure the old man would revise his prediction could he see you; he might say the divil had got _you_--but he couldn't pity me."