The Last Woman Part 2

"You have forgotten one thing, Mr. Morton; you have forgotten that I used the words, 'a willing party.'" She spoke calmly, half-smiling; but he was still insistent.

"Did you mean by their use that I am to understand that the circ.u.mstance meets with your entire approval?" he asked, slowly and with distinctness. A heavy frown was gathering on his brows.

"Yes; quite so."

"Do you love the man who is the other party to the--er--business transaction?" This time, he turned his head and looked squarely at her, gazed with his serious hazel eyes, deep into her darker ones--gazed searchingly and longingly.

"You have no right to ask me such a question as that," she told him.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Langdon." He turned his eyes to the front again; "but I think I have a distinct right to do so, and I don't believe it is your privilege to deny it. I have loved you from the first moment I saw you. Please, don't interrupt me now, for I must say the few words I have in mind. I'll not look at you. The others won't hear me. By reason of my great love for you, even though there is no response in your heart for me, I certainly have the right to ask that question; and, also, I believe I have the right to demand an answer.

If you love that other man, and if you will tell me that you do, I shall have nothing more to say; but if you do not love him, you shall not be his wife so long as I have my two hands and can remember how to hold a gun." It sounded theatrical, but he did not mean it so; and a "gun" and its use, was the strongest form of expression he could think of, at that moment. It had formed the court of last resort throughout his youth in the great West, and just now he felt that the expression fitted the present case admirably. What reply Patricia might have made to this characteristic statement by the young Montana ranchman will never be known, for at that instant they were interrupted by the other pa.s.sengers of the car, who sought to draw Patricia into conversation with them.

She accepted the interruption gratefully as well as gracefully; it offered an easy escape from a trying situation, and it was not until the car was drawn up in front of the door of her own home and she was about to leave it that she spoke again with Morton, save in a general way. Now, he leaned quickly nearer to her and said, in a tone so low that the others could not hear:

"I shall call upon you to-morrow evening--Sunday--if I may." Then he laughed and, with narrowed eyelids, added: "I'll come to the house whether I may or not. But you will receive me, won't you? Say that you will!" And Patricia nodded brightly, in reply, as she crossed the pavement toward the front steps of her father's princely mansion. At the door, she paused and looked after the car as it rolled up the avenue; and, with a half-smile of troubled perplexity, she murmured:

"I wish, now, that I had not given my word to that 'business transaction.' Richard Morton might have offered a better solution of my problem. Only, it would have been unfair--and cruel; and I have never been either the one, or the other; never, yet!" Then, she pa.s.sed into the house.

Downtown in the private office of Stephen Langdon, Roderick Duncan stepped from the inner sanctum into the presence of the banker just as the latter started to his feet after the sudden and unexpected departure of his daughter. For an interval, the young man and the old faced each other in silence, the latter with a cynical and satirical smile on his strong face, the former with an unmistakable frown of anger.

"You're a darned old fool, Langdon!" Duncan exclaimed hotly, after that pause; and he clenched his hands until his knuckles turned white under the strain, half-raising the right one, until it seemed as if he intended to strike a blow with it. But Patricia's father gave no heed to the gesture. Instead, he dropped back upon his chair, and laughed aloud, ere he replied:

"I suspect, my boy, that there is a pair of us."

CHAPTER II

ONE WOMAN WHO DARED

These two men, the banker who had weathered so many financial storms of "the street" and had inevitably issued from the wreckage unscathed and buoyant, and the young multi-millionaire who faced him with uplifted hand even after the former returned to his chair, were exact opposites in everything save wealth alone. Roderick Duncan, son and heir of Stephen Langdon's former partner, was the possessor, by inheritance, of one of those colossal fortunes which are expressed in so many figures that the average man ceases to contemplate their meaning. Nevertheless, Duncan had kept himself clean and straight. In person, he was tall, handsome, distinguished in appearance, and genuinely a fine specimen of young American manhood. The older man regarded him with undoubted approval, and affection, too, while Duncan lowered the partly uplifted arm, and permitted the anger to die out of his face slowly. But there remained a decidedly troubled expression in his gray eyes, and there were two straight lines between his brows--lines of anxiety which would not disappear, wholly. He was plainly perplexed and, also, as plainly frightened by the almost tragic climax that had just occurred.

The elder man, whose face was always a mask save when he was alone with his daughter, or with this young man who now stood before him, had been at first angered by the words and conduct of Patricia. But the exclamation uttered by the young Croesus impressed him ludicrously, notwithstanding the financial straits he was supposed to be in, and he grinned broadly into the anxious face that glowered upon him. Langdon's heart was not at stake; he had no woman's love to lose, or even to risk losing; and so far as the financial character of his troubles was concerned, he knew that Roderick Duncan would provide the millions he needed, in any case. That fact was not dependant upon any whim of Patricia's. Langdon could afford to laugh, believing that the rupture in the relations of these young people would be healed quickly. The old man did desire that the two should marry; he wished it more than anything else, save possibly the winning of his "street"

contests.

It was the younger man who broke the silence. He did it first by striking a match on the sole of his shoe and lighting a cigar; then by crossing to one of the chairs at the oblong table, into which he literally threw himself; and as he did this, he exclaimed, with an expression of petulance that might have belonged to a boy better than to a man:

"Well, you've made a mess of it, haven't you? You have got us both into a very devil of a fix. I ought to have shot you, or myself, before I consented to such a fool plan as that one was. Oh, yes; we're in a fix all right!"

"How so?" asked the old man, rising and selecting a chair at the opposite side of the table, and calmly lighting a fresh cigar, while he swung one leg across the corner of the solid piece of furniture.

"Patricia won't stand for that little scheme of yours, not for a minute; and you know it, Uncle Steve." This was an affectionate term of familiarity which Duncan sometimes used in addressing Patricia's father. "I was afraid of it when you proposed it, but I allowed myself, like an idiot, to be influenced by you. I tell you, Langdon, she won't stand for it; not for a minute. I have made her angry, many times before now, but I have never known her to be quite so contemptuously angered."

"No," said Langdon, and he chuckled audibly. "I agree with you. I think my little girl is going to make it hot for you before we are through with this deal. In fact, I shouldn't wonder if she made it warm for both of us. She is like her old dad about one thing--she won't be driven."

The younger man said something under his breath which, because it was not audible to his companion, need not be repeated here; but it was probably not an expression that he would have used in polite society.

He drummed on the table with his fingertips, and smoked savagely.

"You're mighty cheerful about it, aren't you?" he demanded, with sarcastic emphasis. "What I want to know is, how are we going to fix it up?"

"Fix what up?"

"Why, this business about collateral, and all that rot, with Patricia.

How are we going to square ourselves? That's what I'd like to know!

Maybe you can see a way out of it, but I'm darned if I can."

The banker took the cigar from his mouth, flicked the ashes into the cuspidor, removed his leg from the table, and replied calmly, with a half-smile:

"It looks to me as if it were all fixed up, now. Patricia has agreed to marry you all right; she told me in plain English that I could deliver the goods. You heard her, didn't you? As far as I can see, she has only raised the ante just a little--a small matter of ten millions, which you won't mind at all. What's the matter with you, anyhow? You get what you wanted--Patricia's consent to an early marriage." The old man grinned maddeningly at his companion.

"Confound you!" shouted Duncan, starting to his feet, and he smashed one hand down upon the top of the table, in the intensity of the resentment he felt at this remark.

"Do you suppose--d.a.m.n you!--that I want her like that? Can't you see how the whole thing outraged her? She hates me now, with every fibre of her being. She hates me, and you, too, for this day's work!"

Langdon shrugged his shoulders.

"You want her, don't you?" he asked, placidly, as if he were inquiring about a quotation on 'change.

"Of course, I want her. G.o.d only knows how greatly I want her."

"Well, you get her, don't you, by this transaction? She'll keep the terms of the agreement. She's enough like me for that. She said I could deliver the goods. She meant it, too. You get her, don't you?"

"Yes--but how?" was the sulky reply. "How do I get her? What will she do to me, after I do get her? Tell me that, confound you!"

The old man chuckled again. "I am not a mind-reader," he said.

"What will she do to me, Uncle Steve? What did she threaten? What am I to expect from her, now?"

"Oh, I don't know. I confess that I don't. Sometimes, Patricia is a little too much for the old man, Roderick," he added, wistfully. Then, with another change of manner, he exclaimed: "But you get her! And I get the twenty-millions credit. What more can either of us ask? Eh?"

"The twenty millions have nothing to do with it, and you know it. They never did have anything to do with it, and you know that, also. It was only your cursed suggestion, that we should make her promise to marry me the condition of keeping you from failure. You know as well as I do that there is nothing belonging to me which you cannot have at any time, for the asking; and that you do not stand, and have not stood, in any more danger of failure than I do."

"I would have failed if I had not known where to get the credit for the twenty millions," the banker remarked, quietly.

"Yes; but--confound it--you did know. You only had to ask me. But instead of doing it in a straight, business-like way, you set that horrible fly to buzzing in my ears, that we could make use of the circ.u.mstance to compel Patricia to an immediate consent. And I, like a fool, listened to you. Patricia never meant not to marry me; but now--!"

He strode across the floor, then back again to his chair and flung himself into it. The old man watched him warily, keen-eyed, observant, and with a certain expression of fondness that no one but his daughter and this young man had ever compelled from him. But, presently, he emitted another chuckling laugh; and said:

"That was a sharp stroke of hers to have the ten millions paid over to her. It was worthy of her old dad; eh? She is a bright one, all right.

She's a chip off the old block, my boy. I couldn't have done it better, myself."

"d.a.m.n you!" Duncan exclaimed, and he sprang to his feet, grasped his hat, and rushed from the office to the street with much more apparent excitement than Patricia herself had shown. He had the feeling that he had allowed himself to be tricked into the commission of an unmanly act, and he was thoroughly ashamed of it.

Stephen Langdon, left alone, chuckled again, although his face quickly fell into that reposeful, mask-like expression which was habitual to it--an expression not to be changed by the loss or gain of millions.

He remained for a time quietly in the chair he had been occupying, but soon he rose and crossed to his desk, throwing back the top of it. He pulled a bundle of papers from one of the pigeonholes and calmly examined certain portions of them. He glanced over three letters left there by his stenographer for him to sign and post. These he signed, and after enclosing them in their respective envelopes, dropped them lightly into a side-pocket of his coat. Then, he pulled toward him the bracket that held the telephone, and placed the receiver against his ear. Having presently secured the desired number, he said: