Part 10 (1/2)
She, too, was busy with her thoughts. It was not often that a thing as big as this came her way. Sheer luck it had been from the first. A suspicion that her mother had been a little over eager in urging her to go on the motor trip with the warm hearted western millionaire, a suspicion confirmed on her return by a chance word incautiously let fall; then her unlooked-for good fortune in getting the old woman gloriously drunk, and finally the startling discovery of the whole story, and her instant visit to Harry Palmer. With him, too, it had been touch and go. What if she had not been able to persuade him to listen; what if she had failed to convince him of the truth of her story? Gordon's game had been a good one. In spite of her desire for revenge, she felt a fierce admiration for his cleverness; just that one flaw, the picking of Mrs. Holton for one of his helpers, risking the taking on of a woman once notorious as a drunkard, and still given to occasional lapses. That one fact had meant Gordon's defeat and her own salvation.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Rose]
The struggle between her old infatuation for Gordon, and her hatred of Rose Ashton had been bitter, but brief. Hatred had triumphed, and yet to-night her exultation meant regret as well. The thought of holding Rose in her power made her clench her shapely hands, and brought a tigerish gleam to her bold black eyes, and still the afterthought would come that it was Gordon, after all, who would suffer most.
Gordon was the one man she had ever cared the snap of her fingers for, and to harm him--and yet, since she had had the bitterness of seeing him desert her for Rose, there was a fierce pleasure in knowing that she would be sending him where she would never again know the agony of seeing him under the spell of the girl she loathed with all her heart.
And her own future? Five thousand dollars. What could she not do with that? First, clothes, of course. She would be the best dressed woman at Bradfield's. Jewels, too. And a little laid up for a rainy day, for Annie Holton was level-headed, and saw with grim philosophy the fate of the poor, tawdry, painted things of the street, who served to point the moral, when youth and good looks have fled.
”I'm lucky,” she cried aloud challengingly, ”I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm--”
She broke off sharply with a little cry of disgust. ”You fool,” she said, in a very different tone, a tone of the bitterest self-contempt, ”you poor, weak fool! You know you're miserable. You know everything's a sham. You know your life isn't worth sixpence to you. And all because you're such a fool, with a dozen men crazy after you, you can't be satisfied because you can't have the one you want.”
The clock chimed the hour of ten. For a moment she sat silent, and then slowly nodded her head. ”It oughtn't to be so,” she said with conviction, ”but it's the truth, just the same. A woman can get along if the man she's stuck on is stuck on her--and if he isn't, she's better dead.”
In the parlor of her pretty little home on Dalton Street Rose Ashton was pacing restlessly to and fro. Finally, with a sigh of weariness, she flung herself down on the sofa, and lay quiet, gazing into the dying embers with wide-open, unseeing eyes.
Wave after wave, a flood of bitter, remorseful thoughts swept over her. What a weak thing, she mused, a woman is, after all. ”To know the right and still the wrong pursue,” she quoted to herself. ”That's what I'm doing now, and that's what I've done for a year. Perhaps, before that, I wasn't to blame, but since I met d.i.c.k it's all been so different. Now I know, and yet three times in a year I've lowered myself to depths of which no decent woman would even dream. And perhaps I've got more shame before me still. And yet I do it--hating it, protesting, drawing back, almost refusing,--and then doing it, because he tells me to. I might as well be honest. I've d.a.m.ned myself for a man who's using me to help himself, and I've done it just on the hope that he's going to be honest with me and do what he's promised.
I've done it because I'm weak, I've done it because I couldn't help myself, I've done it--because I'm a woman.”
She sat silently watching the last embers die. The clock in the square boomed the hour of ten. With a sigh of utter weariness she rose.
”Life for a woman,” she murmured, ”is safe--monotonous, perhaps, but safe--until the man comes along. And then, the old life and all its memories are gone for ever in the twinkling of an eye, and the woman's true life begins. And perhaps, after all, the old life was the better, for the new may be Heaven--and it may be h.e.l.l.”
CHAPTER XII
THE FINAL OBSTACLE
Mechanically Gordon rowed across to the darkening sh.o.r.e; mechanically he traveled the path to the road, and followed the road to the station; mechanically he boarded the train and sat quietly in his seat, to all outward appearances calm and indifferent, until the city lights gleamed a welcome through the dark, and the train clanked and b.u.mped its way over the drawbridge, and pa.s.sed from the silence of the night into the bustle and roar of the noisy, smoky station.
Outwardly composed, but his brain was all the while in a turmoil, so that some thought for which he was seeking would not come to his mind, but seemed constantly to keep just beyond his grasp. Far back in his brain a ghastly, haunting something still lurked and mocked him, and yet, seated there in the train, filled with its freight of every-day prosaic pa.s.sengers, the stout conductor roaring the indistinguishable names of the numberless little way-stations, that terrible quarter of an hour on the island seemed fantastic, unreal, impossible of truth.
He waited almost expectantly, thinking every moment to awaken as if from a nightmare, to feel some friend's hand laid upon his shoulder and to start suddenly back to life again; perchance even to see Palmer himself enter the train, and to tell him, laughing, of the curious dream.
Palmer! He pulled himself together sharply. This was no time to let his brain play him such tricks as these. Now, when he needed every atom of good judgment and cool daring at his command. Palmer himself--G.o.d! Somewhere back on the deserted island, sucked down and down into the depths of the earth, was that mangled, grinning, wide-eyed thing that had been careless, irresponsible Harry Palmer, across whose limited vision real thoughts of life--and death--had scarcely so much as pa.s.sed.
With a sudden intense effort he tore his mind free from its clinging fancies. For good or ill--the meeting on the island had been real. For good or ill--the murder was done. And now, what next? How best to carry through the game, begun selfishly, recklessly perhaps, but with no plot or even thought of bodily harm to any one, and now, almost at its ending, grown suddenly desperate and black with tragedy.
Annie Holton--he wished now that he had been more deliberate, and had asked Palmer more questions--first. And yet, in doing that, there might have been greater danger still; suspicion might have been more keenly aroused, and even as it was, the situation, indeed, seemed tolerably clear. Somehow, the girl had managed to get the story from her mother, and had gone straight to Palmer with it. Would she have told any one else? Obviously not. It was to her interest only to possess and to impart the information to Palmer. And now Palmer was out of the way--and Annie Holton was left. So much for to-night, but to-morrow--ah, that was the thought that had been eluding him--tomorrow she would know of Palmer's disappearance, and she was the only person in the world who knew that when Palmer had left the city he was bound for the island. The deduction was only too obvious.
Not alone his fortunes and his liberty, but his life itself, hung in this girl's power. To-night then, at any cost, he must see her; and to-night, somewhere, somehow, her silence must be a.s.sured.
Somehow--ah, it was just there that the problem lay. By what means, then, could he gain his end? His old relations with her, once so tenderly intimate, so fraught with reckless pa.s.sion, could he once more recall the past, and make it live again? No, scarcely that. After deserting her for Rose, and after her betrayal of his secret; hardly, it seemed, could the breach between them be healed. And even if it were possible, there again would be Rose to reckon with. Unconsciously he frowned and shook his head. No, the way out did not lie there.