The Black Rider (26 page)

“I know you are.”

“You’re wrong. I won’t be treated so lightly by any man!” She added: “Besides, I think I always cared for
him more as a brother than a sweetheart. We were raised together, you know.”

“Ah, yes,” said Gerald.

“You’re not believing me again?”

“I haven’t said that.”

“It’s gospel truth! And I’ll never care for him again. I really never want to see him again. I’m only furious when I think of all the sleep I’ve lost about his going away!”

How easy, now, to say the adroit and proper words. She had opened the way for him. That was plain. She had thrust the thought of Tom Vance away from her, and she wanted Gerald to fill the vacant room. And yet there was an imp of the perverse in him. He fought against its promptings, but he could not fight hard enough.

He found himself studying her shrewdly. Would it not be delightful to show her how truly weak she was—and make her in another moment weep at the very thought of Tom Vance? He spoke against his more sane, inner promptings.

I
’m going to tell you a true story,” he said. “It will change your mind about Tommy and it will make you hate me, among other things.” “Do you want me to do that?”

“I can’t help telling you,” said Gerald. “The devil seems to be in me this morning, making me undo all my hard work. But let’s go back to that first evening when I passed you on the hillside.”

“Of course I remember.”

“I never told you why I came back. But naturally you guessed.”

“Naturally,” she said. “There aren’t many girls in Culver City.”

He raised his thin-fingered hand and brushed that thought away. He waved it into nothingness.

“I heard you call,” he said, “and then I had a shadowy glimpse of your face in the lamplight. That was enough to catch me. Mind you, it doesn’t take much…just the right touch, the right stir of the voice, a glimmer of the eyes, and a man is gone forever. I was riding on a bus in London once. A girl crossed the street and looked up to me with a smile. Not that she was smiling for me, you understand…but there was an inner joyousness….”

He paused to recall it. And Kate Maddern was still as a mouse, listening, her fingers interlaced.

“She was very beautiful,” said Gerald. “And if there had been something more, I think I should have climbed off that bus and followed her. But something was lacking.”

“A second look, perhaps,” suggested the pagan heart of Kate.

He smiled at her.

“You miss my point,” he said. “What I am trying to say is that men are sometimes carried away by shams. They think they have found the true thing, and they wake up to learn that their hands are full of fools’ gold. But when the reality comes, it has an electric touch. And when I saw you and heard your voice, Kate, I knew that you were the end of the trail.”

“Gerald,” she said, “you are making love to me shamelessly.”

“I am,” said he and lighted another cigarette. “But to continue my story…unless it bores you?”

“I am fascinated! Of course I am!”

“Very well. That night I went into Canton Douglas’s
place, and almost at once I heard some one speak to Tommy. Of course I looked, and the moment I laid eyes on him I knew that this was the man you had called to. He was handsome, clean-eyed, young, strong. He was everything that a man should be. And I managed it so that I should be asked to sit in at their game. I wanted to know more of Tommy Vance. I wanted to test the metal of my enemy.”

“Enemy?”

“Because I knew that one of us had to win, and the other one had to lose.”

She sat stiff and straight and watched him out of hostile eyes. Whatever kindliness she might feel for him now, might she not lose it if she learned the rest of his story? And yet he kept on. That imp of the perverse was still driving him as it had driven him, on a day, to lead his army of brown-skinned revolutionists into the jaws of death, tempting chance for the very sake of the long odds themselves.

“I watched Tommy Vance like a hawk,” he went on. “I was hunting for weaknesses. I was hunting for something which would prove him to be unworthy of you. And if I had found it, “—here he raised his head and met her startled glance squarely—”I should have brushed him from my path with no more care than I feel when my heel crushes a beetle. But as the game went on I saw that he was a fine fellow to the core, brave, generous, kind, and true as steel!”

He wrung those words of commendation from himself one by one.

“And I saw,” he went on, “that as long as he was on the ground my case was hopeless.”

He paused again.

“Well, in love and in war, Kate, men do bad things. I managed it so that I could leave the game when he did.

He was walking up the hill to meet you, and I set myself to prevent him from coming to your cabin. I told myself that if I succeeded there was still a fighting chance for me. But if I failed I would pack up and leave town and forget you if I could, or at least try to obscure the memory of you with other faces and other countries. But luck helped me. There is a jealous string in every lover. I plucked at that until I had Tommy in agony.”

“How horrible!” breathed Kate Maddern.

“Yes, wasn’t it? But I was fighting for something better than life, and I took every weapon I could lay my hands on! He was a wide-eyed young optimist. But I planted the seed of eternal doubt in him. He began with an unquestioning faith in you. And before half an hour had passed, I had made a wager of a thousand dollars with him that if he left Culver City for a while and let you wonder why he had gone, when he returned he would find that you had forgotten him. Well, he made the wager, and he left the town that same night. And that’s where he is now!”

“Oh, poor Tommy!” she cried. “And I’ve doubted him and hated him all these days, when all the time….”

“When all the time he was simply making the test. But he was right, after all, and I was hopelessly wrong. At least, Kate, I’ve made a good hard fight out of it. And the other day when I taught you how to manage Sorrow…just for an instant when you leaned and laughed down to me I thought my dream was to come true after all.”

He rose from his chair and confronted her courteously.

“But to send him away by trickery…and all these days to let me think…oh, it was detestable!”

“It was detestable,” he admitted gravely.

And, encountered by that calm confession, her fire
of anger was smothered before it had gained headway. She began to regard him with a sort of blank fear.

“What is it that you do to people?” she asked suddenly throwing out her hands in a gesture of helplessness. “There is Red Charlie, who stood as though his hands were chained while you shamed him. And there is poor Tommy of whom you made a fool and sent away. And then there is Cheyenne Curly whom you have turned from a brave man into a coward! Is it hypnotism?”

“Do you think it is?” he asked. At least, they have seen the last of me around here.”

He tossed his cigarette into the fireplace.

“Perhaps the devil inspires me to mischief, but the good angel who guards you, Kate, forced me to confess, and so all the evil I have done to Tommy is undone again. I’ll leave tonight and trail him until I find him. I’ll give him back to you as I found him. And, having been tried by fire, you’ll go on loving each other to the end of time!”

He picked up his hat.

“You see that I retain one grace in a graceless life. I shall not ask you to forgive me, Kate.”

“You are going…really?”

“Yes.”

“To get Tommy?”

“Yes.”

“For Heaven’s sake, Gerald, don’t do that!”

The hat dropped from his finger tips.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean…nothing! Only, don’t you see…?”

She had fallen deeper and deeper into a confusion of words from which she could not extricate herself. Now she looked around her as though searching for a place of retreat.

“Won’t you understand?” she pleaded.

“Understand what?” asked Gerald huskily.

Then, as some wild glimmer of hope dawned on his brain, he sprang to her and drew her to the window so that the gray and pale light of the winter day beat remorselessly into her face.

“Kate!” he cried. “Speak to me!”

She had buried her face in the crook of her arm.

“Let me go!” whispered Kate.

Instantly, his hands fell away from her. And there she stood blindly swaying.

“Oh,” she said, “it is hypnotism. And what have you done to me? What have you done to me?”

“I’ve loved you, my dear, with all the strength that is in me!”

“Hush!”

“It is solemn truth.”

She broke into inexplicable tears and dropped into a chair, and Gerald, white-faced, trembling as Cheyenne Curly had trembled in Canton’s place, stood beside her.

“Tell me what I can do, Kate. Anything…and I’ll do it. But it tortures me with fire to see you weep!”

“Only don’t leave me,” she whispered.

He was instantly on his knees beside her.

“I didn’t know until you spoke of going,” she sobbed. “And then it came over me in a wave. I had never really loved Tommy. He was simply a big brother. I was simply so used to him. You see that, Gerald?”

“I’m trying to see it, dear. But my mind is a blank. I can’t make out what is happening, except that you are not hating me as I thought you would, Kate. Is that true?”

“Come closer!”

He leaned nearer her covered face. And suddenly she caught at him and pressed her face into the hollow of his shoulder.

“How can you be so blind!” she breathed. “Oh, don’t you see, and haven’t you seen almost from the first, that I have loved you, Gerald? And, oh, even when you tell all that is worst in you, it only makes me care for you more and more. What have you done to me?”

“Kismet!” murmured Gerald and, raising his head high, he looked up to the raw-edged rafters and through them and beyond them to the hope of heaven.

A
n hour later, Gerald was riding Sorrow straight into the heart of a snow-laden wind, for some action he must have to work out the delirious joy which filled him, and which packed and crammed his body to a frenzy of recklessness. The very edge of the wind was nothing to him and, when the driven snow stung his lips, he laughed at it. For this was his home land, his native country, and all that it held was good to him, for was it not the land, also, which held Kate Maddern?

Lord bless her, and again, Lord bless her! He laughed to himself once more, and this time with tears in his eyes, to think how blind he had been to the truth. And he remembered how, with tears and with laughter, she had confessed that the rolling away of the boulder and the telling of that story to him had all been anxiously planned before in the hope that he would speak then, if ever.

“And I shall be good to her,” said Gerald solemnly to himself. “I shall be worthy of her. Yes, I shall be very worthy of her, so far as a man may be! I shall make her a
queen. I shall give her all the beauty of background which she needs. Her hand on velvet…a jewel at her throat and another in her hair….”

His thoughts darted away, every one winged. The energy which he had wasted here and there and everywhere he would now concentrate upon the grand effect. No matter for the wild failures which had marked his past. Was not even the young manhood of Napoleon filled with vain effort and foolish adventures? There was still time and to spare for the founding of an empire!

It was a glorious ride, and the flush of glory was still in his cheeks and bright in his eyes when he came back to the hotel. And there, in the window, he saw a great, rough wreath of evergreen. He studied it in amazement. It was not like Culver City to waste time and energy on such adornments when there was gold to be dug.

Of the proprietor, behind the stove inside, he asked his question.

“And you don’t know?” asked the latter with a twinkle in his eye.

“Of what?” asked Gerald.

“It’s Christmas, man! Tomorrow will be Christmas! And tonight will be Christmas Eve!”

Gerald stared at him, then laughed aloud with the joy of it. This surely was the hand of fate, which brought him for a present, on the eve of the day of giving, Kate Maddern and all her beauty and all her heart and soul, like a great empire!

He went up the stairs still laughing, with the voice of the proprietor coming dimly behind him: “There’s a gentleman waiting in your room for you, Mr. Kern. He looked like I might tell him to go up and make himself to home….”

The rest was lost and Gerald, kicking open the door of his room, looked across to no other than Louis

Jerome Banti sitting in Gerald’s chair and pouring over Gerald’s own Bible. The act in which he was engaged shocked Gerald hardly less than the sight of Banti’s face in this place. It was like seeing the devil busy over the word of God.

“In the name of heaven, Banti,” he said, “how do you come here?”

“In the name of despair, Monsieur Lupri, what keeps you here?”

“Hush!” cautioned Gerald, raising his finger. “There are ears in the wall to hear that name.”

“Are there not?” and Banti chuckled, rubbing his hands together. “Yes, ears in the stones to hear, and a tongue in the wind to give warning of it!”

They shook hands, and as their fingers touched a score of wild pictures slid through the memory of Gerald, fleeter than the motion picture flashes its impressions on the screen—a cold winter morning on a road in Provence, with the crackle of the exhaust thrown back to them from the hills as their machine fled among the naked vineyards—and a night on the Bosphorus when they were stealing, with their launch full of desperadoes, toward the great hulk of the Turkish man-of-war—and a day in hot Smyrna when the….

“Banti here…Banti of all men, and in this of all places.”

“And you, my dear Gerald?”

“How did you find me? How on earth did you trail me?”

“How does one follow the path of fire? By the burned things it has touched.”

“But I left you with the death sentence.…”

“Over my head, and three days of life before me.”