The Dust Flower Part 46

"Then I want my girl."

It was some seconds before Rash could get his dulled mind into play.

Moreover, the encounter was of a kind which made him feel sick and disgusted.

"Whom do you mean?" he managed to ask, at last.

"You know very well who I mean. I mean Letty Gravely. I'm her father; and by G.o.d, if you don't give her up--with big damages----"

"I can't give her up, because she's not here."

"Not here? She was d.a.m.n well here the day before yesterday."

"Yes; she was here the day before yesterday; but she disappeared last night."

"Ah, cut that kind o' talk. I'm wise, I am. You can't put that bunk over on me. She's in there, and I'm goin' to get her."

"I wish she was in there; but she's not."

"How do I know she's not?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to take my word for it."

"Like h.e.l.l I'll take your word for it. I'm goin' to see for myself."

"I don't see how you're going to do that."

"I'm goin' in with you."

"That wouldn't do you any good. Besides, I can't let you."

The man became more bullying. "See here, son. This game is my game.

Did j'ever see a thing like this?"

Watching the movement of his hand Rash saw the handle of a revolver displayed in a side pocket.

"Yes, I've seen a thing like that; but even if it was loaded--which I don't believe it is--you've too much sense to use it. You might shoot me, of course; but you wouldn't find the girl in the house, because she isn't there."

"Well, I'm goin' to see. You march. Up you go, and open that door, and I'll follow you."

"Oh, no, you won't." Allerton looked round for the policeman who occasionally pa.s.sed that way; but though a lighted car crashed down Madison Avenue there was no one in sight. He might have called in the hope of waking the men upstairs, but that seemed cowardly. Though in a physical encounter with a ruffian like this he could hardly help getting the worst of it--especially in his state of half intoxication--it was the encounter itself that he loathed, even more than the defeat. "Oh, no, you won't," he repeated, taking one step upward, and turning to defend his premises. "I don't mean that you shall come into this house, or ever see the girl again, if I can prevent it."

"Oh, you don't, don't you?"

"No, I don't."

"Then take that."

The words were so quickly spoken, and the blow in his face so unexpected, that Rash staggered backwards. Being on a step he had little or no footing, and having been drinking his balance was the more quickly lost.

"And that!"

A second blow in the face sent him down like a stone, without a struggle or a cry.

He fell limply on his back, his feet slipping to the sidewalk, his body sagging on the steps like a bit of string, accidentally dropped there. The hat, which fell off, remained on the step beside the head it had been covering.

The man leaped backward, as if surprised at his own deed. He looked this way and that, to see if he had been observed. A lighted car crashed up Madison Avenue, but otherwise the street remained empty.

Creeping nearer the steps he bent over his victim, whose left hand lay helpless and outstretched. Timidly, gingerly, he put his fingers to the pulse, starting back from it with a shock. He spoke but two words, but he spoke them half aloud.

"Dead! G.o.d!"

Then he walked swiftly away into Madison Avenue, where he soon found a car going southward.

Chapter XXIV

Barbara was late for breakfast. Miss Walbrook, the aunt, was scanning the morning paper, her refined, austere Americanism being as noticeable in the dining-room as elsewhere in the house. Everything was slender and strong; everything was American, unless it was the Persian rug. On the paneled walls there were but three portraits, a Boston ancestress, in lace cap and satins, painted by Copley; a Philadelphia ancestor in the Continental uniform, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and her New York grandmother, painted by Thomas Sully, looking over her shoulder with the wild backward glance that artist gives to the girl Victoria in the Metropolitan Museum. In a flat cabinet along a wall was the largest collection of old American gla.s.s to be found in the country.

Barbara rushed in, with apologies for being late. "I didn't sleep a wink. It doesn't seem to me as if I should ever sleep again. Where's my cup?"

"Wildgoose will bring it. As the coffee had grown cold he took that and the cup to keep warm. What's the matter?"

Wildgoose stepped in with the missing essentials. A full-fed, round-faced, rubicund man of fifty-odd he looked a perennial twenty-five. Barbara began to minister to herself.

"Oh, everything's the matter. I told you yesterday that that girl had run away. Well, I begin to wish she'd run back again."

Miss Walbrook, the elder, had this in common with Miss Henrietta Towell, that she believed it best for everyone to work out his own salvation. Barbara had her personal life to live, and while her aunt would help her to live it, she wouldn't guide her choice. She continued, therefore, to scan the paper till her niece should say something more.

She said it, not because she wanted to give information, but because she was temperamentally outspoken. "I begin to wish there were no men in the world. If women are men in a higher stage of development, why didn't men die out, so that we could be rid of them? Isn't that what we generally get from the survival of the fittest?"

Miss Walbrook's thin, clear smile suggested the edge of a keenly tempered blade. "I've never said that women were men in a higher stage of development. I've said that in their parallel states of development women had advanced a stage beyond men. You may say of every generation born that women begin where men leave off. I suppose that that's what's meant by the myth of Eve springing from Adam's side. It was to be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away from him. If it wasn't for Eve's vitality the human race would still be in the Stone Age."

Barbara harked back to what for her was the practical. "Some of us are in the Stone Age as it is. I'm sure Rash Allerton is as nearly an elemental as one can be, and still belong to clubs and drive in motorcars."

Miss Walbrook risked her principles of non-interference so far as to say: "It's part of our feminine lack of development that we're always inclined to look back on the elemental with pity, and even with regret. The woman was never born who didn't have in her something of Lot's wife."

"Thank you, Aunt Marion. In a way that lets me out. If I'm no weaker than the rest of my s.e.x----"

"Than many of the rest of your s.e.x."

"Very well, then; than many of the rest of my s.e.x; if I'm no weaker than that I don't have to lose my self-respect."

"You don't have to lose your self-respect; you only risk--your reason."

Barbara stared at her. "That's the very thing I'm afraid of. I'd give anything for peace of mind. How did you know?"

"Oh, it doesn't call for much astuteness. I don't suppose there's a married woman in the world in full command of her wits. You've noticed how foolish most of them are. That's why. It isn't that they were born foolish. They've simply been addled by enforced adaptation to mates of lower intelligence. Oh, I'm not scolding. I'm merely stating a natural, observed, psychological fact. The woman who marries says good-bye to the orderly working of her faculties. For that she may get compensations, with which I don't intend to find fault. But compensations or no, to a clear-thinking woman like----"