"Never!"

In this moment she no longer had any doubts. She loved him madly, with an intensity that obliterated everything else. And now all this must be strangled; for, in her strange self-formed morality, such a love was unthinkable. The only man who had known how to take her, to see through her acting, to reach out roughly, brutally, like a master--this man belonged to another woman;--was barred to her forever!

"What have I done? Why--why should I be punished this way?"

Suddenly she seized a chair, and dragging it to the side window, sat down, her chin in her hands, staring through the gla.s.s at the sheer blankness of brick only a few feet away. It was beginning to be dusk.

She felt herself caught; she yielded everything. The thought of pain was so abhorrent to her nature, she had always rushed so fearfully from the contact of suffering, that, now when she was caught without escape, everything crumbled. In this abject moment, as her body yielded to the pervading process of the dusk, she turned back over the entangled progress of her life, convinced that she was paying fearfully in retribution for selfishness and wickedness.

Life, which rises out of the past in its naked proportions only when we dumbly seek a reason for the calamity that overwhelms us, came thus to her as a conviction. What had happened must be her punishment.

She saw her progress as though she were looking down at great revolving spirals, complete in themselves, yet merging in an upward progress. How many men--not by tens, but by scores--she had deliberately used in her upward striving!

"Yes; this is my punishment!" she said breathlessly. She had a feeling that they--the others--were now to be revenged.

She had only a faint impression of her home in a little village town of Ohio. Home it had never been. Her father, brilliant, erratic, emigrant from New England, half politician, half journalist, had suddenly disappeared from her life when she was not yet in her teens. They had told her many things at the time. Afterward she had divined what must have happened--unhappiness, flight with another woman, divorce. Her mother, perhaps the most to blame, had remarried immediately. She had known nothing of her step-father, only that he was some one in power in Cincinnati politics, and well-off. She had been left to the care of an aunt, and very soon she had realized that her duty in life was to make her own way.

And this way she had achieved, or rather had made others achieve for her. She had been precocious, feeling herself a little mongrel who must captivate by its tricks. How simple it had all been--this curious spiral mounting from the pillared house at the corner of the village green, through various strata, to this--to New York, and to the heart of New York at the last! She could never remember the time when she had not had the devotion of the opposite s.e.x. No one had ever needed to teach her the art of pleasing, yet she had known how to exercise it everywhere.

She remembered curious odd figures, girlhood admirers, whom she blushed now to have cared even to attract. How her ideas had changed! How she had been educated! And how many different types of men she had known! At first it had been the grocery clerk, a ruddy Saxon, who had cut prices and swollen measures, fatuously, for her sake; then a young engineer on the railroad who had appealed to her imagination; little storekeepers, a local reporter, the captain of the village nine--a giant in those days: not singly, but a dozen at once at her feet.

Next she had gone to high school in Toledo, where for the first time she had judged her local admirers by the standards of the city, a metropolis to her. There it had been another upward circle--students in the university, young lawyers, scrub doctors, embryo merchants, demiG.o.ds by comparison. This first taste of the life of the city had decided her.

She returned to her home but once--to leave it forever. She had sought a little capital and had obtained a few hundred dollars. There she had learned that her mother had been divorced, married again, and that it was quite hopeless to apply to her. She had had an enormous success on that return, with her city clothes and her imposing manners. The grocer's clerk had given up in despair at first sight; the others had hung back awed, realizing that she was not stuff for them. And here she had taken her first confidence, her first belief in her star--in her star, which was not stationary, but which should travel.

She had given, as excuse against the frantic objections of her aunt, that she must prepare herself to earn her living by stenography. She started zealously to equip herself, going to Cleveland and taking a modest hall bedroom at four dollars a week, board included. She continued firm in this resolve for exactly two weeks. But application was against her volatile nature. Besides, her masculine acquaintance had a.s.sumed such proportions that she could find no time for work. And suddenly she had met Josh Nebbins, press-agent for a local theater.

She had been attracted to him immediately by his shoes--patent leather with chamois tops, that looked like spats and distinguished him from the common herd. He wore a colored handkerchief in his breast-pocket, English style, red or green shirts, and coats with curious pointed cuffs, which she felt only a New York tailor could have imagined. He had had the greatest influence on her life. He had shown her the easy way to things people coveted, a.n.a.lyzing the philosophy of her s.e.x with his shrewd philosophy of life, contemptuous, successful and witty.

"Play the game, kid--play the game," he would say to her. "The world's full of soft suckers ready to fall for a pretty pair of lamps, and yours are A1 flashers. Make 'em give you what you want! Follow my tips and I'll show you how. And say, don't for one moment think you have to give up anything for what you get. No, sir, not Anno Domini, U. S. Ameriky!"

She had taken his tips, followed his leads. She had soon learned how to acquire whatever she needed. If it was a dress, there was always an admirer in a wholesale store who frantically insisted on the privilege of making a present. Another placed a carriage at her disposal, grateful for the privilege of her company when it pleased her. Other presents were easily convertible.

Nebbins had even changed her name. She had been called Flossie, a contraction from Florence. He had disapproved and invented Dore, and she had accepted enthusiastically. She had a strange intuition that what he did would result for her good, and obeyed implicitly--yes, with even an uneducated admiration. They had become engaged. She would have married him, but he was too much in love not to be proud. He wanted three thousand in the bank, and so they had waited.

Through his offices, she had begun as a super in the local stock company, advancing to an occasional speaking part. She had been at home at once on the stage; she felt born for this. The next season she had entered another stock company playing a circuit, as a regular member.

She had wept desperately on leaving Nebbins, completely under his ascendency. She had even offered at the last moment to throw up everything and marry him. He had refused honestly. She had not seen him since.

This memory tortured her. She had soon progressed to where she had seen him in true perspective, or rather in his ridiculous lights. She quickly grew ashamed of the romance. It was something she would have blotted from her life, the more so because at the bottom she felt an obligation, and it revolted her to think that what she was become had, at a critical moment, depended on a Yankee press-agent named Josh Nebbins, who wore ridiculous patent leather shoes with chamois tops!

She was ashamed, and at the same time she was afraid--afraid lest at some time this persistent man, to whom her word had once indiscreetly been given, should surge up out of the past and claim her! He had been the only man from whom she had ever directly accepted money. It had not been much,--a hundred dollars given as a reserve; they were engaged to be married; he had silenced her objections,--but still the fact remained. She had a thousand times resolved to pay it back--to rid herself of this fetter of the past. She had never done so. This was her greatest reproach.

From Nebbins on, the way had not been difficult. She had never saved much money, nor continued long in one opportunity; but she had learned confidence, and how easy opportunities rise for a pretty girl with audacity and wit. But always, in her progress from city to capital, from capital to metropolis, she felt a shadowy crowd of men, reproachful and embittered. She had never been affected by the pangs she had awakened, nor paused to think that there could be any wrong in using whatever presented itself to her--never before. But to-night, alone, facing her first defeat, revolted and stricken, she felt guilty--horribly guilty; and as her faith was simple, and G.o.d had always appeared to her as a good friend, she sought His reasons in her past, and said to herself:

"Yes; that is why it has come--that is why I am punished! Oh, I must be very wicked!"

In this conviction, her offending seemed to her enormous, unending. From the day of her arrival in New York until now, she felt that she had never been anything but selfish, cruel, mercenary and calculating. No!

Certainly she had not scrupled to use men ... and what men she had known, had availed herself of, climbed above, and discarded. Now the smoke wreaths of her progress swirled more rapidly, thickly revolving, mounting more slowly. She had found her dinners in humble restaurants, paid for in half-dollars by young men already pinched in the struggle of salaries, young men in whom that spark of hope of which Harrigan Blood had spoken burned heedlessly--dreaming a miraculous future and the winning of another Helen. Next it was the coa.r.s.e world of the theater and the restaurants--heavy sated types of men, demanding their brutal pay, men who disgusted her, with whom she could not share the same air, dangerous antagonists. Another swirl, another chance opportunity, and she was out of the contagion, unscotched, meeting at last men of good manners, gentlemen in name and often in heart. What an incredible progress it had been! She saw few faces distinctly, but in the covetous, brutal, chivalrous, or adoring crowd she remembered here and there a look, a word, something that had struck her by its ridicule, by its cruelty, or inclined her to a sudden gentleness.

She, too--how she had changed through all this! How ridiculous had been her early admirations, how childish her ambitions! What a change had come within--an education of all her tastes, a desire for the beautiful, a longing for refinement, a need of distinction to respond to her abiding sense of delicacy.

Yes; to acquire all this she had done much harm, inflicted useless pain on many. But now retribution had come, inexorable. That she had never thought of--that she too could suffer. And she did suffer, abjectly, hopelessly, sitting there pressed against the window-frame, staring at the unseen wall across which the figures of the past went swirling down in long revolving spirals, like the slow undulating swirls of smoke.

There was no way out. She would never see him again--he would never seek her. She was accursed, punished for all past wickedness, singled out for tragedy by fate.

What now could become of her. What could she fall back on? Who could help her? She was horribly alone--and afraid.

That night she dreamed a terrible dream. She was dining at Tenafly's in the midst of a great company. Ma.s.singale was there. By some strange turn, Mrs. Ma.s.singale did not exist; instead, it seemed to her that he was bending over her saying:

"It's all a mistake. I'm not married; I've never been married. That was my brother's wife. You are to be Mrs. Ma.s.singale. Do you understand?

That's why every one is here!"

She had looked around and seen so many faces: Sa.s.soon, with his mounting mustache; Mrs. Sa.s.soon, judging her through a lorgnette; Lindaberry, De Joncy, Mr. Peavey, who was wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, Busby, Stacey even.

All at once some one was standing at her side,--some one who wore patent leathers with chamois tops,--and Josh Nebbins, in a purple shirt and green and black check suit, derby on one side, was grinning at her, saying:

"h.e.l.lo, kid! Here I am. Made my wad. Come to get you!"

Next she was on the edge of a precipice. Some one had his arms about her, holding her back, and some one else was trying to pull her over.

She was crying:

"Don't let him throw me over. Don't, please! I'll love you, only you, Your Honor!"

But, to her surprise, it was not Ma.s.singale who was trying to save her; it was Lindaberry.

And the man who had her by the arm, pulling her over, she could not see; only she could see far down, hundreds of miles, to a little thread of a stream. Stones were slipping under her feet; she was going over; and all at once she looked up. A pair of patent leathers with chamois tops! It was Josh Nebbins.

She awoke with a scream.

CHAPTER XV

The next morning she resolved to go at once to Blainey, to fling herself heart and soul into her profession, to get an engagement in some stock company. She hesitated, and ended by putting it off till the next day.

She said to herself that she must seek relief in flight, a new life, new friends for a month at least, until she should be stronger. She said it to herself each day, and each day she tarried. Perhaps she hoped for some sign of weakness on Ma.s.singale's part, an overture that would give her the confidence of a scornful rejection. But each day pa.s.sed without word or sign from him. This firmness, this regained control, this one man who could steadfastly avoid her, obsessed her. She sought not to think of him--and his image intruded itself every day, at every moment.

When the telephone rang its always mysterious call, she went to it with a tense arrestation of her nerves expectant of his voice, fearing--hoping. At the theater or the opera, in her first sweeping glance over the audience, it was always his face she sought. She sought it in the chances of the crowded streets, and with a restless glance searched among the carriages as she pa.s.sed alone, or in gay company, up the avenue. She knew where he held court, following the calendar in the newspaper, and often she was tempted to steal in at the back of the dim, crowded court room, un.o.bserved--just why, with what undefined hope, she did not know. This impulse she resisted but never confidently conquered. Each day she repeated that she must go; each day she tarried.

For two weeks she led a dulled and purposeless existence. She succeeded in crowding the day, in shutting out opportunity for thought, in consuming the night so as to return with enough fatigue to fall into heavy troubled slumber. The bright moments were those when she went with Snyder's little girl on brief excursions into the country, for a moment's forgetfulness among the woods, an hour of willing slavery to childish whims, throwing herself into foolish romping games that brought a comforting sense of the world's unrealities. The sensation that childish clinging brought her at times surprised her by its intensity.

She had never thought of having children, and yet this child awoke strange yearnings. Troubled, she told herself that it was the weakness of her suffering intensified by loneliness, and satisfied herself with this reply.

Her days were curiously divided. She saw Harrigan Blood and Sa.s.soon, but to their a.s.siduous pursuit she flung only crumbs. She saw them in the tantalizing publicity of the down-stairs parlor--rarely, for an hour perhaps; but she steadfastly refused further concessions. Busby, clearly inspired, sought to entice her to many alluring entertainments, some conventional, others not quite so. She refused all. She avoided all parties where she might encounter the one man, avoiding too that entourage of his which she had so eagerly sought with a sense of right on the occasion of the luncheon to De Joncy.

Instead, she sought desperately to return to the light bantering existence she had formerly known. The glimpses she had had into the upper world frightened her. It laid before her crude vanities which she would have preferred to ignore; it started temptations where she had been conscious of none. In her present depression, an instinct bade her flee all that dazzled her; a voice whispered to her that, in the mad impulses of a groping despair, she might not always resist, or care to resist--that it were better not to know that luxury and power lay so easily at hand, ready on the feminine fingers of Sa.s.soon or the imperious clutch of Harrigan Blood.

Nor was the temptation a fancied one, for the hunger that had awakened was an inner one. In her short glimpse of luxury she had become aware of new longings, material cravings, vanities of the flesh. Occasionally in the mornings, to escape from her moods, she went out for long walks past tempting shop-windows--those shop-windows of New York, more devastating than all the flesh hunters, on whose balances lie how many feminine souls! She would stop breathlessly, hypnotized, hanging on visions of gorgeous silks, imperial furs, opera-cloaks that might transform a peasant into a queen, jewels that danced before her eyes, fascinating them strangely with their serpentine coldness.