The Danger Mark Part 62

Now Duane was gone; and the book lay there between her knees, all its technical vagueness menacing her with unknown terrors; and she felt that she could endure it alone no longer.

She wrote him:

"You have not been gone an hour, and already I need you. I wish to ask you about something that is troubling me; I've asked Kathleen and she doesn't know; and Dr. Bailey was horrid to me, and I tried to find out from Scott whether he knew, but he wasn't much interested. So, Duane, who else is there for me to ask except you?

And I don't exactly know whether I may speak about such matters to you, but I'm rather frightened, and densely ignorant.

"It is this, dear; in a medical book which I read, it says that hereditary taints are transmissible; that sometimes they may skip the second generation but only to appear surely in the third. But it also says that the taint is very likely to appear in _every_ generation.

"Duane, is this _true_? It has worried me sick since I read it.

Because, my darling, if it is so, is it not another reason for our not marrying?

"Do you understand? I can and will eradicate what is threatening _me_, but if I marry you--you _do_ understand, don't you? Isn't it all right for me to ask you whether, if we should have children, this thing would menace them? Oh, Duane--Duane! Have I any right to marry? Children come--G.o.d knows how, for n.o.body ever told me exactly, and I'm a fool about such things--but I summoned up courage to ask Dr. Bailey if there was any way to tell before I married whether I would have any, and he said I would if I had any notion of my duty and any pretence to self-respect. And I don't know what he means and I'm bewildered and miserable and afraid to marry you even when I myself become perfectly well. And that is what worries me, Duane, and I have n.o.body in the world to ask about it except you.

Could you please tell me how I might learn what I ought to know concerning these things without betraying my own vital interest in them to whomever I ask? You see, Kathleen is as innocent as I.

"Please tell me all you can, Duane, for I am most unhappy."

"The house is very still and full of sunlight and cut flowers. Scott is meditating great deeds, lying flat in the dirt. Kathleen sits watching him from the parapet. And I am here in the library, with that ghastly book at my elbow, pouring out all my doubts and fears to the only man in the world--whom G.o.d bless and protect wherever he may be--Oh, Duane, Duane, how I love you!"

She hurriedly directed and sealed the letter and placed it in the box for outgoing mail; then, unquiet and apprehensive regarding what she had ventured to write, she began a restless tour of the house, upstairs and down, wandering aimlessly through sunny corridors, opening doors for a brief survey of chambers in which only the shadow-patterns of leaves moved on sunlit walls; still rooms tenanted only by the carefully dusted furniture which seemed to stand there watching attentively for another guest.

Duane had left his pipe in his bedroom. She was silly over it, even to the point of retiring into her room, shredding some cigarettes, filling the rather rank bowl, and trying her best to smoke it. But such devotion was beyond her physical powers; she rinsed her mouth, furious at being defeated in her pious intentions, and, making an attractive parcel of the pipe, seized the occasion to write him another letter.

"There is in my heart," she wrote, "no room for anything except you; no desire except for you; no hope, no interest that is not yours. You praise my beauty; you endow me with what you might wish I really possessed; and oh, I really am so humble at your feet, if you only knew it! So dazed by your goodness to me, so grateful, so happy that you have chosen me (I just jumped up to look at myself in the mirror; I _am_ pretty, Duane, I've a stunning colour just now and there _is_ a certain charm about me--even I can see it in what you call the upcurled corners of my mouth, and in my figure and hands)--and I am so happy that it is true--that you find me beautiful, that you care for my beauty.... It is so with a man, I believe; and a girl wishes to have him love her beauty, too.

"But, Duane, I don't think the average girl cares very much about that in a man. Of course you are exceedingly nice to look at, and I notice it sometimes, but not nearly as often as you notice what you think is externally attractive about me.

"In my heart, I don't believe it really matters much to a girl what a man looks like; anyway, it matters very little after she once knows him.

"Of course women do notice handsome men--or what we consider handsome--which is, I believe, not at all what men care for; because men usually seem to have a desire to kick the man whom women find good-looking. I know several men who feel that way about Jack Dysart. I think you do, for one.

"Poor Jack Dysart! To-day's papers are saying such horridly unpleasant things about the rich men with whom he was rather closely a.s.sociated in business affairs several years ago. I read, but I do not entirely comprehend.

"The New York papers seem unusually gloomy this summer; nothing but predictions of hard times coming, and how many corporations the attorney-general is going to proceed against, and wicked people who loot metropolitan railways, and why the district-attorney doesn't do his duty--which you say he does--oh, dear; I expect that Scott and Kathleen and I will have to take in boarders this winter; but if n.o.body has any money, n.o.body can pay board, so everybody will be ruined and I don't very much care, for I could teach school, only who is to pay my salary if there's no money to pay it with? Oh, dear! what nonsense I am writing--only to keep on writing, because it seems to bring you a little nearer--my own--my Duane--my comrade--the same, same little boy who ran away from his nurse and came into our garden to fight my brother and--fall in love with his sister! Oh, Fate! Oh, Destiny! Oh, Duane Mallett!

"Here is a curious phenomenon. Listen:

"Away from you I have a woman's courage to tell you how I long for you, how my heart and my arms ache for you. But when I am with you I'm less of a woman and more of a girl--a girl not yet accustomed to some things--always guarded, always a little reticent, always instinctively recoiling from the contact I really like, always a little on the defensive against your lips, in spite of myself--against your arms--where, somehow, I cannot seem to stay long at a time--will not endure it--_cannot_, somehow.

"Yet, here, away from you, I so long for your embrace, and cannot imagine it too long, too close, too tender to satisfy my need of you.

"And this is my second letter to you within the hour--one hour after your departure.

"Oh, Duane, I do truly miss you so! I go about humming that air you found so quaint:

"'Lisetto quittee la plaine, Moi perdi bonheur a moi, Yeux a moi semblent fontaine, Depuis moi pas mire toi,'

and there's a tear in every note of it, and I'm the most lonely girl on the face of the earth to-day.

"GERALDINE QUI PLEURE."

"P.S.--Voici votre pipe, Monsieur!"

CHAPTER XIV

THE PROPHETS

August in town found an unusual number of New York men at the clubs, at the restaurants, at the summer theatres. Men who very seldom shoved their noses inside the metropolitan oven during the summer baking were now to be met everywhere and anywhere within the financial district and without. The sky-perched and magnificent down-town "clubs" were full of men who under normal circ.u.mstances would have remained at Newport, Lenox, Bar Harbor, or who at least would have spent the greater portion of the summer on their yachts or their Long Island estates.

And in every man's hand or pocket was a newspaper.

They were scarcely worth reading for mere pleasure, these New York newspapers; indeed, there was scarcely anything in them to read except a daily record of the steady decline in securities of every description; paragraphs noting the pa.s.sing of dividends; columns setting forth minutely the opinions of very wealthy men concerning the business outlook; chronicles in detail of suits brought against railroads and against great industrial corporations; accounts of inquiries by State and by Federal authorities into combinations resulting in an alleged violation of various laws.

Here and there a failure of some bucket-branded broker was noted--the reports echoing like the first dropping shots along the firing line.

Even to the most casual and uninterested outsider it was evident that already the metropolis was under a tension; that the tension was increasing almost imperceptibly day by day; that there seemed to be no very clear idea as to the reason of it, only a confused apprehension, an apparently unrea.s.suring fear of some grotesque danger ahead, which daily reading of the newspapers was not at all calculated to allay.

Of course there were precise reasons for impending trouble given and reiterated by those amateurs of finance and politics whose opinions are at the disposal of the newspaper-reading public.

Prolixity characterised these solemn utterances, packed full of cant phrases such as "undigested securities" and "the treacherous attack on the nation's integrity."

Two princ.i.p.al reasons were given for the local financial uneasiness; and the one made the other ridiculous--first, that the nation's Executive was mad as Nero and had deliberately begun a senseless holocaust involving the entire nation; the other that a "panic" was due, anyway.

It resembled the logic of the White Queen of immortal memory, who began screaming before she p.r.i.c.ked her finger in order to save herself any emotion after the pin had drawn blood.

Men knew in their hearts that there was no real reason for impending trouble; that this menace was an unreal thing, intangible, without substance--only a shadow cast by their own a.s.sininity.

Yet shadows can be made real property when authority so ordains. Because there was once a man with a donkey who met a stranger in the desert.

The stranger bargained for and bought the donkey; the late owner shoved the shekels into his ample pockets and sat down in the mule's shadow to escape the sun; and the new owner brought suit to recover the rent due him for the occupation of the shadow cast by his donkey.

There was also a mule which waited seven years to kick.

There are a.s.ses and mules and all sorts of shadows. The ordinance of authority can affect only the shadow; the substance is immutable.

Among other serious gentlemen of consideration and means who had been unaccustomed to haunt the metropolis in the dog days was Colonel Alexander Mallett, President of the Half Moon Trust Company, and incidentally Duane's father.

His town-house was still open, although his wife and daughter were in the country. To it, in the comparative cool of the August evenings, came figures familiar in financial circles; such men as Magnelius Grandcourt, father of Delancy; and Remsen Tappan, and James Cray.

Others came and went, men of whom Duane had read in the newspapers--very great men who dressed very simply, very powerful men who dressed elaborately; and some were young and red-faced with high living, and one was damp of hair and long-nosed, with eyes set a trifle too close together; and one fulfilled every external requisite for a "good fellow"; and another was very old, very white, with a nut-cracker jaw and faded eyes, blue as an unweaned pup's, and a cream-coloured wig curled glossily over waxen ears and a bloodless and furrowed neck.

All these were very great men; but they and Colonel Mallett journeyed at intervals into the presence of a greater man who inhabited, all alone, except for a crew of a hundred men, an enormous yacht, usually at anchor off the white masonry cliffs of the seething city.

All alone this very great man inhabited the huge white steamer; and they piped him fore and they piped him aft and they piped him over the side.