The Alaskan (7 page)

She finished with a little gesture of despair.

"I have committed a great folly," she said, hesitating an instant in his silence. "I see very clearly now the course I should have taken. You will advise me that it is still not too late when you have heard what I am going to say. Your face is like-a rock."

"It is because your tragedy is mine," he said.

She turned her eyes from him. The color in her cheeks deepened. It was a vivid, feverish glow. "I was born rich, enormously, hatefully rich," she said in the low, unimpassioned voice of a confessional. "I don't remember father or mother. I lived always with my Grandfather Standish and my Uncle Peter Standish. Until I was thirteen I had my Uncle Peter, who was grandfather's brother, and lived with us. I worshiped Uncle Peter. He was a cripple. From young manhood he had lived in a wheel-chair, and he was nearly seventy-five when he died. As a baby that wheel-chair, and my rides in it with him about the great house in which we lived, were my delights. He was my father and mother, everything that was good and sweet in life. I remember thinking, as a child, that if God was as good as Uncle Peter, He was a wonderful God. It was Uncle Peter who told me, year after year, the old stories and legends of the Standishes. And he was always happy-always happy and glad and seeing nothing but sunshine though he hadn't stood on his feet for nearly sixty years. And my Uncle Peter died when I was thirteen, five days before my birthday came. I think he must have been to me what your father was to you."

He nodded. There was something that was not the hardness of rock in his face now, and John Graham seemed to have faded away.

"I was left, then, alone with my Grandfather Standish," she went on. "He didn't love me as my Uncle Peter loved me, and I don't think I loved him. But I was proud of him. I thought the whole world must have stood in awe of him, as I did. As I grew older I learned the worldwas afraid of him-bankers, presidents, even the strongest men in great financial interests; afraid of him, and of his partners, the Grahams, and of Sharpleigh, who my Uncle Peter had told me was the cleverest lawyer in the nation, and who had grown up in the business of the two families. My grandfather was sixty-eight when Uncle Peter died, so it was John Graham who was the actual working force behind the combined fortunes of the two families. Sometimes, as I now recall it, Uncle Peter was like a little child. I remember how he tried to make me understand just how big my grandfather's interests were by telling me that if two dollars were taken from every man, woman, and child in the United States, it would just about add up to what he and the Grahams possessed, and my Grandfather Standish's interests were three-quarters of the whole. I remember how a hunted look would come into my Uncle Peter's face at times when I asked him how all this money was used, and where it was. And he never answered me as I wanted to be answered, and I never understood. I didn't know why people feared my grandfather and John Graham. I didn't know of the stupendous power my grandfather's money had rolled up for them. I didn't know"-her voice sank to a shuddering whisper-"I didn't know how they were using it in Alaska, for instance. I didn't know it was feeding upon starvation and ruin and death. I don't think even Uncle Peter knew that ."

She looked at Alan steadily, and her gray eyes seemed burning up with a slow fire.

"Why, even then, before Uncle Peter died, I had become one of the biggest factors in all their schemes. It was impossible for me to suspect that John Graham wasanticipating a little girl of thirteen, and I didn't guess that my Grandfather Standish, so straight, so grandly white of beard and hair, so like a god of power when he stood among men, was even then planning that I should be given to him, so that a monumental combination of wealth might increase itself still more in that juggernaut of financial achievement for which he lived. And to bring about my sacrifice, to make sure it would not fail, they set Sharpleigh to the task, because Sharpleigh was sweet and good of face, and gentle like Uncle Peter, so that I loved him and had confidence in him, without a suspicion that under his white hair lay a brain which matched in cunning and mercilessness that of John Graham himself. And he did his work well, Alan."

A second time she had spoken his name, softly and without embarrassment. With her nervous fingers tying and untying the two corners of a little handkerchief in her lap, she went on, after a moment of silence in which the ticking of Keok's clock seemed tense and loud.

"When I was seventeen, Grandfather Standish died. I wish you could understand all that followed without my telling you: how I clung to Sharpleigh as a father, how I trusted him, and how cleverly and gently he educated me to the thought that it was right and just, and my greatest duty in life, to carry out the stipulation of my grandfather's will and marry John Graham. Otherwise, he told me-if that union was not brought about before I was twenty-two-not a dollar of the great fortune would go to the house of Standish; and because he was clever enough to know that money alone would not urge me, he showed me a letter which he said my Uncle Peter had written, and which I was to read on my seventeenth birthday, and in that letter Uncle Peter urged me to live up to the Standish name and join in that union of the two great fortunes which he and Grandfather Standish had always planned. I didn't dream the letter was a forgery. And in the end they won-and I promised."

She sat with bowed head, crumpling the bit of cambric between her fingers. "Do you despise me?" she asked.

"No," he replied in a tense, unimpassioned voice. "I love you."

She tried to look at him calmly and bravely. In his face again lay the immobility of rock, and in his eyes a sullen, slumbering fire.

"I promised," she repeated quickly, as if regretting the impulse that had made her ask him the question. "But it was to be business, a cold, unsentimental business. I disliked John Graham. Yet I would marry him. In the eyes of the law I would be his wife; in the eyes of the world I would remain his wife-but never more than that. They agreed, and I in my ignorance believed.

"I didn't see the trap. I didn't see the wicked triumph in John Graham's heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess onlyme ; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought grew stronger and stronger in me that I had lived another life somewhere, and that I belonged back in the years when the world was clean, and there was love, and vast reaches of land wherein money and power were little guessed of, and where romance and the glory of manhood and womanhood rose above all other things. Oh, I wanted these things, and yet because others had molded me, and because of my misguided Standish sense of pride and honor, I was shackling myself to John Graham.

"In the last months preceding my twenty-second birthday I learned more of the man than I had ever known before; rumors came to me; I investigated a little, and I began to find the hatred, and the reason for it, which has come to me so conclusively here in Alaska. I almost knew, at the last, that he was a monster, but the world had been told I was to marry him, and Sharpleigh with his fatherly hypocrisy was behind me, and John Graham treated me so courteously and so coolly that I did not suspect the terrible things in his heart and mind-and I went on with the bargain.I married him. "

She drew a sudden, deep breath, as if she had passed through the ordeal of what she had most dreaded to say, and now, meeting the changeless expression of Alan's face with a fierce, little cry that leaped from her like a flash of gun-fire, she sprang to her feet and stood with her back crushed against the tundra flowers, her voice trembling as she continued, while he stood up and faced her.

"You needn't go on," he interrupted in a voice so low and terribly hard that she felt the menacing thrill of it. "You needn't. I will settle with John Graham, if God gives me the chance."

"You would have me stopnow -before I have told you of the only shred of triumph to which I may lay claim!" she protested. "Oh, you may be sure that I realize the sickening folly and wickedness of it all, but I swear before my God that I didn't realize it then, until it was too late. To you, Alan, clean as the great mountains and plains that have been a part of you, I know how impossible this must seem-that I should marry a man I at first feared, then loathed, then came to hate with a deadly hatred; that I should sacrifice myself because I thought it was a duty; that I should be so weak, so ignorant, so like soft clay in the hands of those I trusted. Yet I tell you that at no time did I think or suspect that I was sacrificingmyself ; at no time, blind though you may call me, did I see a hint of that sickening danger into which I was voluntarily going. No, not even an hour before the wedding did I suspect that, for it had all been so coldly planned, like a great deal in finance-so carefully adjudged by us all as a business affair, that I felt no fear except that sickness of soul which comes of giving up one's life. And no hint of it came until the last of the few words were spoken which made us man and wife, and then I saw in John Graham's eyes something which I had never seen there before. And Sharpleigh-"

Her hands caught at her breast. Her gray eyes were pools of flame.

"I went to my room. I didn't lock my door, because never had it been necessary to do that. I didn't cry. No, I didn't cry. But something strange was happening to me which tears might have prevented. It seemed to me there were many walls to my room; I was faint; the windows seemed to appear and disappear, and in that sickness I reached my bed. Then I saw the door open, and John Graham came in, and closed the door behind him, and locked it. My room. He had come intomy room! The unexpectedness of it-the horror-the insult roused me from my stupor. I sprang up to face him, and there he stood, within arm's reach of me, a look in his face which told me at last the truth which I had failed to suspect-or fear. His arms were reaching out-

"'You are my wife,' he said.

"Oh, I knew, then. 'You are my wife,' he repeated. I wanted to scream, but I couldn't; and then-then-his arms reached me; I felt them crushing around me like the coils of a great snake; the poison of his lips was at my face-and I believed that I was lost, and that no power could save me in this hour from the man who had come to my room-the man who was my husband. I think it was Uncle Peter who gave me voice, who put the right words in my brain, who made me laugh-yes, laugh, and almost caress him with my hands. The change in me amazed him, stunned him, and he freed me-while I told him that in these first few hours of wifehood I wanted to be alone, and that he should come to me that evening, and that I would be waiting for him. And I smiled at him as I said these things, smiled while I wanted to kill him, and he went, a great, gloating, triumphant beast, believing that the obedience of wifehood was about to give him what he had expected to find through dishonor-and I was left alone.

"I thought of only one thing then-escape. I saw the truth. It swept over me, inundated me, roared in my ears. All that I had ever lived with Uncle Peter came back to me. This was not his world; it had never been-and it was not mine. It was, all at once, a world of monsters. I wanted never to face it again, never to look into the eyes of those I had known. And even as these thoughts and desires swept upon me, I was filling a traveling bag in a fever of madness, and Uncle Peter was at my side, urging me to hurry, telling me I had no minutes to lose, for the man who had left me was clever and might guess the truth that lay hid behind my smiles and cajolery.

"I stole out through the back of the house, and as I went I heard Sharpleigh's low laughter in the library. It was a new kind of laughter, and with it I heard John Graham's voice. I was thinking only of the sea-to get away on the sea. A taxi took me to my bank, and I drew money. I went to the wharves, intent only on boarding a ship, any ship, and it seemed to me that Uncle Peter was leading me; and we came to a great ship that was leaving for Alaska-and you know-what happened then-Alan Holt."

With a sob she bowed her face in her hands, but only an instant it was there, and when she looked at Alan again, there were no tears in her eyes, but a soft glory of pride and exultation.

"I am clean of John Graham," she cried. "Clean!"

He stood twisting his hands, twisting them in a helpless, futile sort of way, and it was he, and not the girl, who felt like bowing his head that the tears might come unseen. For her eyes were bright and shining and clear as stars.

"Do you despise me now?"

"I love you," he said again, and made no movement toward her.

"I am glad," she whispered, and she did not look at him, but at the sunlit plain which lay beyond the window.

"And Rossland was on theNome , and saw you, and sent word back to Graham," he said, fighting to keep himself from going nearer to her.

She nodded. "Yes; and so I came to you, and failing there, I leaped into the sea, for I wanted them to think I was dead."

"And Rossland was hurt."

"Yes. Strangely. I heard of it in Cordova. Men like Rossland frequently come to unexpected ends."

He went to the door which she had closed, and opened it, and stood looking toward the blue billows of the foothills with the white crests of the mountains behind them. She came, after a moment, and stood beside him.

"I understand," she said softly, and her hand lay in a gentle touch upon his arm. "You are trying to see some way out, and you can see only one. That is to go back, face the creatures I hate, regain my freedom in the old way. And I, too, can see no other way. I came on impulse; I must return with impulse and madness burned out of me. And I am sorry. I dread it. I-would rather die."