The next morning the _News-Record's_ double-leaded "leader" on the Coal Trust was a discharge of heavy artillery. But it was artillery in retreat. And in the succeeding days, the retreat continued--not precipitate but orderly, masterly.

Ten days after their talk on the "coal conspiracy" Marian greeted him late in the afternoon with "Oh, such a row with Mrs. Mercer!"

"Mrs. Mercer! Why, what was she angry about?"

"She wasn't--at least, not at first. It was I. I went to see her and she asked me to thank you for stopping that fight on the coal conspiracy."

"That was tactful of her," Howard said, turning away to hide his nervousness.

"And I told her that you had not stopped, that you wouldn't stop until you had broken it up. And she smiled in a superior way and said I was quite mistaken, that I didn't read the paper, I haven't read it for several days, but I knew _you_, dear, and I remembered what you had said. And so we just had it. We were polite but furious when I went. I shall never go near her again."

"But, unfortunately, we have stopped. We had to do it. We could accomplish nothing."

"Oh, it doesn't matter. What angered me was her insinuation."

"That was irritating. But, tell me, what if it had been true?" Howard's voice was strained and he was looking at her eagerly, with fever in his eyes.

"But it couldn't be. It isn't worth while imagining. You could not be a coward and a traitor." So complete was her confidence in him that suspicion of him was impossible.

"Would you sit in judgment on me?"

"Not if I could help it."

"But you can--you could help it." His manner was agitated, and he spoke almost fiercely. "I am free," he went on, and as she watched his eyes she understood why men feared him. "I do what I will. I am not accountable to you, not even to you. I have never asked you to approve of me, to approve what I do, to love me. You are free also, free to love, free to withdraw your love. I follow the law of my own being. You must take me as you find me or not at all."

She tried to stop him but could not. His words poured on. He leaned forward and took her hand and his eyes were brilliant and piercing. "I love you," he said. "Ah, how I love you--not because you love me, not because you are an angel, not because you are a superior being. No, not for any reason in all this wide world but because you are you. Do what you will and I shall love you. Whether I had to look up among the stars or down in the mire to find you, I would look just as steadily, just as proudly."

He drew along breath and his hand trembled. "If I were a traitor, then, if you loved me, you would say, 'What! Is he to be found among traitors?

How I love treason!' If I were a coward, liar, thief, a sum of all the vices, then, if you ever had loved me you would love me still. I want no love with mental reservations, no love with ifs and buts and provided-thats. I want love, free and fearless, that adapts itself to changing human nature as the colour of the sea adapts itself to the colour of the sky; love that does not have to be cajoled and persuaded lest it be not there when I most need it. I want the love that loves."

"You know you have it." She had been compelled by his mood and was herself in a fever. She looked at him with the expression which used to make his nerves vibrate. "You know that no human being ever was more to another than I to you. But you can't expect me to be just the same as you are. I love _you_--not the false, base creature you picture. I admire the way you love, but I could not love in that way. Thank G.o.d, my love, my dear--I shall never be put to that test. For my love for you is my--my all."

"We are very serious about a mere supposition."

Howard was laughing, but not naturally. "We take each the other far too seriously. I'm sorry you idealise me so. Who knows--you might find me out some day--and then--well, don't blame me."

Marian said no more, but late that evening she put her hands on his shoulders and said: "You're not hiding something from me--something we ought to bear together?"

"Not I." Howard smiled down into her eyes and kissed her.

His mood of reaction, of hysteria had pa.s.sed. He was thinking how little in reality she had had to do with his outburst. He had not been addressing her at all, except as she seemed to him for the moment the embodiment of his self-respect--or rather, of an "absurd," "extremely youthful" ideal of self-respect which he had "outgrown."

XXV.

THE PROMISED LAND.

A woman with a powerful personality may absorb in herself a man of strong and resolute ambition, may compel him to make her his career, to feel that to get and to keep her is all that he asks from destiny. But Marian was not such a woman.

She had come into Howard's life at just the time and in just the way to arouse his latent pa.s.sion for power and to give it a sufficient initial impetus. It was love for her that set him to lifting himself from among those who work through themselves alone to the potent few who work chiefly by directing the labour of others.

Once in this cla.s.s, once having tasted the joy of power, Howard was lost to her. She was unable to restrain or direct, or even clearly to understand. She became an incident in his life. As riches came with power, they pushed him to one side in her life. Living in separate parts of a large house, leading separate lives, rarely meeting except when others were present--following the typical life of New Yorkers of fortune and fashion--they gradually grew to know little and see little and think little each of the other.

There was no abruptness in the transition. Every day had contributed its little toward widening the gap. There was no coolness, no consciousness of separation; simply the slow formation of the habit of complete independence each of the other.

His ambitions absorbed his thought and his time. To them he found her very useful. The social side--forming and keeping up friendly relations with the families whose heads were men of influence--was a vital part of his plan. But he used her just as he used every and any one else whom he found capable of contributing to his advancement; and, as she never insisted upon herself, never sought to influence or even to inquire into his course of action, she did not find him out.

She was in a vague way an unhappy woman. A discontent, a feeling that her life was incomplete, perpetually teased her. He was distinctly unhappy, often gloomy, at times morose. In her rare a.n.a.lytic moods she attributed their failure to prolong the happiness of their courtship to the hard work which kept him from her, kept them from enjoying the great love which she a.s.sumed they felt each for the other. She would not and could not see that that love had long disappeared, leaving a mask of forms, of phrases and of impulses of pa.s.sion to conceal its departure.

And to this view he outwardly a.s.sented, when she suggested it; but he knew that she was deceiving herself as to him, and wondered if she were not deceiving herself as to her own feelings.

Up to the time of the "Coal Conspiracy" and his attempt to put himself straight with her, the idea of his love for her and of her oneness with him had at least a hold upon his imagination. He then saw how far apart they had drifted; and he dismissed from his mind even the pretense that love played any part in his life. After that definite break with principle and self-respect for the sake of his coal holdings, his Wall Street friends and his newspaper career, the development of his character continued along strictly logical lines with accelerating speed. And it was accompanied by an ever franker, more cynical acceptance of the change.

He could not deceive himself, nor can any man with the clearness of judgment necessary to great achievement--although many "successful" men, for obvious reasons of self-interest, diligently encourage the popular theory of warped conscience. He was well aware that he had shifted from the ideal of use _to_ his fellow-beings to the ideal of use _of_ his fellow-beings, from the ideal of character to the ideal of reputation.

And he knew that the two ideals can not be combined and that he not only was not attempting to combine them but had no desire so to do. He despised his former ideals; but also he despised himself for despising them.

His quarrel with himself was that he seemed to himself a rather vulgar sort of hypocrite. This was highly disagreeable to him, as his whole nature tended to make him wish to be himself, to make him shrink from the part of the truckler and the sycophant which he was playing so haughtily and so artistically. At times it exasperated him that he could not regard his change of front as a deliberate sale for value received, and not as the weak and cowardly surrender which he saw that it really was.

On the day after Howard's forty-fourth birthday Coulter fell dead at the entrance to the Union Club. When Stokely heard of it he went direct to the _News-Record_ office.

"I happen to know something about Coulter's will," he said to Howard.

"The _News-Record_ stock is to be sold and you and I are to have the first chance to take it at three hundred and fifty--which is certainly cheap enough."

"Why did he arrange to dispose of the most valuable part of his estate?"

"Well, we had an agreement about it. Then, too, Coulter had no faith in newspapers as a permanent investment. You know there are only the widow, the girl and that worthless boy. Heavens, what an a.s.s that boy is!

Coulter has tied up his estate until the youngest grandchild comes of age. He hopes that there will be a son among the grandchildren who will realise his dream."

"Dream?" Howard smiled. "I didn't know that Coulter ever indulged in dreams."

"Yes, he had the rich man's mania--the craze for founding a family. So everything is to be put into real estate and long-term bonds. And for years New York is to be reminded of Samuel Coulter by some incapable who'll use his name and his money to advertise nature's contempt for family pride in her distributions of brains. I think even a fine tomb is a wiser memorial."

"Well, how much of the stock shall you take?" Howard asked.

"Not a share," Stokely replied dejectedly. "Coulter couldn't have died at a worse time for me. I'm tied in every direction and shall be for a year at least. So you've got a chance to become controlling owner."

"I?" Howard laughed. "Where could I get a million and a half?"

"How much could you take in cash?"

"Well--let me see--perhaps--five hundred thousand."