Perplexity was in her darkened eyes. Happiness and sorrow, doubt and delight grew along each path--thickly interwoven--and decision became each day more difficult. It was hateful to lie under the charge of having married merely for a gambler's money, and yet to plunge her mother and herself back into poverty would seem to others the act of one insane. As she pondered the problem of her life she lost all of her girlish lightness of heart and lay in her luxurious bed a brooding, troubled woman.

She could have gone on indefinitely with the half-filial, half-fraternal relationship into which she and Mart had fallen, but the thought of that other most intimate, most elemental union which his touch had made more definite than ever before produced in her a shudder of repulsion, of positive loathing. She could no longer endure the clasp of his hand, and in spite of herself she was forced, by contrasting experience, to acknowledge the allurement which lay in Ben Fordyce's handsome face and strong and graceful body.

"I must go away--for a while at least. I'll go back to the ranch and think it over."

And yet even the ranch was partly Haney's! How could she escape from her indebtedness to him? To what could she turn to make a living? To leave this big house and her horses, her garden, her dresses and jewels, required heroic resolution, but what of the long days of toil and dulness to which she must return?

Worn with the ceaseless alternations of these thoughts, she fell into a dream that was half a waking vision. She thought she had just packed a bag with the gown she wore the night she came to Haney's rescue, when he came shuffling into her room and said: "Where are you goin', darlin'?"

She replied: "To the ranch--to think things over."

The tears came to his eyes, and he said: "'Tis the sun out of me sky when ye go, Bertie. Do not stay long."

She promised to be back soon, but rode away with settled intent never to return.

No one knew her on the train, for she had drawn her veil close and sat very still. It seemed that she went near the mine in some strange way, and at the switch Williams got on the train to stop her and persuade her to return. He was terribly agitated. "Didn't you know Mart is sick?" he said, in a tone of reproach. It seemed as if a broad river of years flowed between herself and the girl who used to see this queer little man enter her hotel door--but he was unchanged. "You can't do this thing!" he went on, his lips trembling with emotion.

"What thing?" she asked.

"Fordyce tells me you're going to throw poor old Mart overboard."

"That's my notion--I can't be his wife, and so I'm getting out," she answered.

"But, girl, you can't do that!" and he swore in his excitement. "Mart needs you--we all need you. It'll kill him."

"I can't help it!" she answered, with infinite weariness in throat and brain. "I pa.s.s it up, and go back to my brother."

"I don't see why."

"Because I've no right to Mart's money."

"You're crazy to think of such a thing. You a queen! Who's goin' to catch the money when you drop it?" he asked, and helplessly added: "I don't believe you. You're kiddin', you're tryin' us out."

"I'm doing nothing to earn this luxury."

"Doing nothing! My G.o.d, you've made Mart Haney over new. You've converted him--as they say, you've redeemed him. Let me tell you something, little sister, Mart worships you. It does him good just to _see_ you. You don't expect the moon to fry bacon, do you? Stars don't run pumps! Mart is satisfied. Every time you speak to him or pa.s.s by him he gets happy all the way through--I know, for I feel just the same."

There was something in his eloquence that went to the heart of the dreaming girl. If any one in her world was to be trusted it was this ugly little man, who never presumed to ask even a smile for himself, and whose unswerving loyalty to Mart made her own flight a base and cruel act; and yet even as he pleaded his face faded and she fancied herself stepping from the train in Sibley, unnoticed by even the hackmen, who used to bring the humbler pa.s.sengers of each train to the door of the Golden Eagle Hotel.

She walked up the sidewalk, surprised to find it changed to brick. The hotel was gone, and in its place stood a saloon marked, "Haney's Place."

This hardened her heart again. "That settles it!" she said, bitterly.

"He's gone back to his old business."

The road out to the ranch seemed very long and hot, but she had no money, not a cent left with which to hire a carriage, and she kept saying to herself: "If Mart knew this, he'd send Lucius and the machine.

I reckon he'd be sorry to see me walking in this dust. It's a good thing I have my old brown dress on." She pa.s.sed lovingly, regretfully over the splendid gowns which hung in her wardrobe. "What will become of them?"

she asked. "Fan can't wear them." This called up a vision of Fan and her eldest daughter, sweeping about in her splendor, her opera-cloak only half encompa.s.sing the mother, while the girl swished over the floor in the gown she had worn at her last dinner in the East. She laughed and cried at the same time--it was painful to see them thus abused.

Then she seemed suddenly to enter the grove of twisted, hag-like cedars which stood upon the mesa back of the ranch-house. "By-and-by I will look like this," she dreamed, and laid her hand on one that was ragged and gnarled and gray with a thousand years of sun and wind, and even as she stood there, with the old crones moaning round her, Ben suddenly confronted her.

Her first impulse was for flight, so sad and bitter was his face. She began to pity him. His boyhood seemed to have slipped from him like a gay cloak, revealing the stern man beneath.

He met her gravely, self-containedly, yet with restrained pa.s.sion, and his voice was sternly calm as he began: "I have come to ask you what you wish to do with Marshall Haney's inheritance? I will not be a party to your action. I helped him plan out his will, and he said he could trust you to do the right thing, and I have come to tell you that his will must be yours."

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"He is dead!" he replied.

Her heart turned to ice at the sound of his words, so clear, succinct, and piercing; then the cedars began to wail and wail, and sway in eldrich grief, but she who felt most remorse could not utter a sound to prove her own despair; and in the tumult her dream ended abruptly, and she woke to hear the night wind whistling weirdly through the screen of her open window.

She lay in silence, shuddering with the subsiding terror of her vision, till she came to a full realization of the fact that it was all but a night terror and that Mart was still alive and her decision not yet irrevocably made.

She shuddered again--not in grief, but in terror--as she relived the vivid hour of self-chosen poverty which her dream had brought her. Yes, the magic of wealth had spoiled her for Sibley and the ranch. To go back there was impossible. "I will try the East," she said. "The Mosses will help me." And yet to return to Chicago--after having played the grand lady--would be bitterly hard. Suppose her friends should meet her with cold eyes and hesitating words? Suppose they, too, had loved her money and not herself? Suppose even Joe, who seemed as true as Williams, should prove to be a selfish sycophant. Ah yes, it would be a different city with the magic of Haney's money no longer hers to command.

In this hour of deepest misery and despair the sheen of his gold returned like sunlight after a storm; and yet, even as she permitted herself to imagine how sweetly the new day would dawn with her determination to remain the mistress of this great house, the old fear, the new disgust, returned to plague her. Her love for Ben Fordyce came also--and the knowledge that Alice was dying of a broken heart because of Ben's growing indifference--all these perplexities made the coming of sunlight a mockery.

She rose to the new day quite as undecided as before and more deeply saddened. One thing was plain--Ben should come no more to visit her--for Alice's sake he must keep the impersonal att.i.tude of the legal adviser.

In that way alone could even the semblance of peace be won.

CHAPTER XXVI

ALICE VISITS HANEY

Alice Heath was dying of something far subtler than "the White Death,"

to which Haney so often referred. Tortured by Ben's studied tenderness when at her side, she suffered doubly when he was away, knowing all too well that his keenest pleasure now lay in Bertha's companionship. Her doubt darkened into despair. In certain moments of exaltation she rose to such heights of impersonal pa.s.sion as to acknowledge fully, generously, the claims of youth and health--admitting that she and Marshall Haney were the offenders and not the young lovers, whose desire for happiness was but an irresistible manifestation of the mystic force which binds the generations together.

"Why do we not quietly take ourselves off and make them happy?" she asked herself. "Of what selfish quality is our love? Here am I only a spiteful, hopeless invalid--I hate myself, I despise my body and everything I am. I loathe my wrinkled face, my shrivelled hands, my flat chest. I am fit only to be bride to death. I'm tired of the world--tired of everything--and yet I do not die. Why can't I die?"

These moods never soared high enough (or sank quite low enough) to permit the final severing stroke, and she ended each of them in a flood of tears, filled with ever-greater longing for the beautiful young lover whose heart had wandered away from her. It was hard not to welcome him when he came, but infinitely harder to send him away, for life held no other solace, the day no other aim.

In her saner moments she was aware of her own misdemeanor. She knew that her morbid questioning, her ceaseless grievings were wearing away her vital force, and that no doctor could ever again medicine her to sweet sleep, that no wind or cloud would bring coolness to her burning brain.

"I am no longer worthy of any man's love," she admitted to her higher self.

She did not question Ben's honor--he was of those who keep faith. "He has no hope of ever being other than the distant lover of Bertha Haney, and he is ready to fulfil his word to me, but I will not permit him to bind himself to me. It would be a crime to lay upon him the burden of a wife old before her time, sterile and doomed to a slow decline." She revolted, too, at the thought of having a husband, whose heart was elsewhere, whose restless desire could not be held within the circuit of his wife's arms--and yet she could not give him up.

As her flesh lost its weight and her blood its warmth, her mind burned with even more mysterious brightness, sending out rays of such perilous sublimation that she was able to perceive, as no earthly inhabitant should do, the jealously guarded secrets of those surrounding her, and on the night of Bertha's struggle against her fate she divined in some supersensuous way the tumult in the young wife's mind.

She laughed at first with a cruel, bitter delight, but at last her n.o.bler self conquered and she resolved to have private speech with Haney. She perceived a danger in the ever-deepening pa.s.sion of the young lovers. She began to fear that their love might soon break over all barriers, and this she was still sane enough of thought and generous enough of soul to wish to prevent.

Her decision to act was hastened by a slurring paragraph in the morning paper wherein veiled allusion was made to "a developing scandal." She lay abed all the forenoon brooding over it, and when she rose it was to dress for her visit to Haney. Sick as she was and almost hysterical with her mood, she ordered a carriage and drove to the gambler's house, hoping to find him alone, determined upon an interview.

It chanced that he was sitting in his place upon the porch watching the gardener spraying a tree. He greeted his visitor most cordially, inviting her to a seat. "Bertie is down town, but she'll be back soon."

"I'm glad she is away, Captain Haney, for I have something to say to you alone."