"I think I have demonstrated the fact you mention," he replied calmly.
Florence Baker clasped her hands together. "Yes, your persistency is admirable," she said.
Ben Blair caught the word. "Persistency," he remarked, "seems the only recourse when past friendship and common courtesy are ignored."
Florence made no reply, and going forward Ben placed a chair deferentially. "It seems necessary for me to reverse the position of host and guest," he said. "Won"t you be seated?"
The girl did not stir.
"I hardly think it necessary," she answered.
"Florence," Ben Blair"s great chin lifted meaningly, "I will not be offended whatever you may do. I have something I wish to say to you.
Please sit down."
The girl hesitated, and almost against her will looked the man fairly in the eyes, while her own blazed. Once more she felt his dominance controlling her, felt as she did when, in what seemed the very long ago, he had spread his blanket for her upon the prairie earth.
She sat down.
Ben drew up another chair and sat facing her. "Why," he was leaning a bit forward, his elbow on his knee, "why, Florence Baker, have you done everything in your power to prevent my seeing you? What have I done of late, what have I ever done, to deserve this treatment from you?"
The girl evaded his eyes. "It is not usually considered necessary for a lady to give her reasons for not wishing to see a gentleman," she parried. The handkerchief in her lap was being rolled unconsciously into a tight little ball. "The fact itself is sufficient."
Ben"s free hand closed on the chair-arm with a mighty grip. "I beg your pardon," he said, "but I cannot agree with you. There"s a certain amount of courtesy due between a woman and a man, as there is between man and man. It is my right to repeat the question."
The girl felt the cord drawing tighter, felt that in the end she would bend to his will.
"And should I refuse?" she asked.
"You won"t refuse."
The girl"s eyes returned to his. Even now she wondered that they did so, that try as she might she could not deny him. His dominance over her was well-nigh absolute. Yet she was not angry. An instinct that she had felt before possessed her; the longing of the weaker for the stronger--the impulse to give him what he wished. Her whole womanhood went out to him, with an entire confidence that she would never give to another human being. Naturally, he was her mate; naturally,--but she was not natural.
She hesitated as she had done once before, a mult.i.tude of conflicting desires and ambitions seething in her brain. If she could but eliminate the artificial in her nature, the desire for the empty things of the world, then--But she could not yet give them up, and he could never be made to care for them with her. She was nearer now to giving them up, to giving up everything for his sake, than when she had sat alone with him out on the prairie. She realized this with an added complexity of emotion; but even yet, even yet--
A minute pa.s.sed in silence, a minute of which the girl was unconscious.
It was Ben Blair"s voice repeating his first question that recalled her.
This time she did not hesitate.
"I think you know the reason as well as I do. If we were mere friends or acquaintances I would be only too glad to see you; but we are not, and never can be merely friends. We have got to be either more or less." The voice, brave so far, dropped. A mist came over the brown eyes. "And we can"t be more," she added.
The man"s grip on the chair-arm loosened. He bent his face farther forward. "Miss Baker," he exclaimed. "Florence!"
Interrupting, almost imploring, the girl drew back. "Don"t! Please don"t!" she pleaded; then, as she saw the futility of words, with the old girlish motion her face dropped into her hands. "Oh, I knew it would mean this if I saw you!" she wailed. "You see for yourself we cannot be mere friends!"
The man did not stir, but his eyes changed color and seemed to grow darker. "No," he said, "we cannot be mere friends; I care for you too much for that. And I cannot be silent when I came away off here to see you. I would never respect myself again if I were. You can do what you please, say what you please, and I"ll not resent it--because it is you.
I will love you as long as I live. I am not ashamed of this, because it is you I love, Florence Baker." He paused, looking tenderly at the girl"s bowed head.
"Florence," he went on gently, "you don"t know what you are to me, or what your having left me means. I often go over to your old ranch of a night and sit there alone, thinking of you, dreaming of you. Sometimes it is all so vivid that I almost feel that you are near, and before I know it I speak your name. Then I realize you are not there, and I feel so lonely that I wish I were dead. I think of to-morrow, and the next day, and the next--the thousands of days that I"ll have to live through without you--and I wonder how I am going to do it."
The girl"s face sank deeper into her hands. A m.u.f.fled sob escaped her.
"Please don"t say any more!" she pleaded. "Please don"t! I can"t stand it!"
But the man only looked at her steadily.
"I must finish," he said. "I may never have a chance to say this to you again, and something compels me to tell you of myself, for you are my good angel. In many ways it is of necessity a rough life I lead, but you are always with me, and I am the better for it. I haven"t drank a drop since I came to know that I loved you, and we ranchers are not accustomed to that, Florence. But I never will drink as long as I live; for I"ll think of you, and I couldn"t then if I would. Once you saved me from something worse than drink. There was a man who shot Mr. Rankin and before this, from almost the first thought I can remember, I had sworn that if I ever met him I would kill him. We did meet. I followed him day after day until at last I caught up with him, until he was down and my hands were upon his throat. But I didn"t hurt him, Florence, after all; I thought of you just in time."
He was silent, and suddenly the place seemed as still as an empty church. The girl"s sobs were almost hysterical. The man"s mood changed; he reached over and touched her gently on the shoulder.
"Forgive me for hurting you, Florence," he said. "I--I couldn"t help telling you."
Involuntarily the girlish figure straightened.
"Forgive you!" A tear-stained face was looking into his. "Forgive you!
I"ll never be able to forgive myself! You are a million times too good for me, Ben Blair. Forgive you! I ought never to cease asking you to forgive me!"
"Florence!" pleaded the man. "Florence!"
But the girl, in her turn, went on. "I have felt all the while that certain things I saw here were unreal, that they were not what they seemed. I have prevaricated to you deliberately. I haven"t really been here long, but it seems to me now that it"s been years. As you said I would, I"ve looked beneath the surface and seen the sham. At first I wouldn"t believe what I saw; but at last I couldn"t help believing it, and, oh, it hurt! I never expect to be so hurt again. I couldn"t be. One can only feel that way once in one"s life." The small form trembled with the memory, and the listener made a motion as if to stop her; but she held him away.
"It isn"t that I"m any longer blind; I am acting now with my eyes wide open. It is something else that keeps me from you now, something that crept in while I was learning my lesson, something I can"t tell you."
Once more the girl could not control herself, and sobbing, trembling, she covered her face. "Ben, Ben," she wailed, "why did you ever let me come here? You could have kept me if you would--you can do--anything. I would have loved you--I did love you all the time; only, only--" She could say no more.
For a second the man did not understand; then like a flash came realization, and he was upon his feet pacing up and down the narrow room. To lose an object one cares for most is one thing; to have it filched by another is something very different. He was elemental, this man from the plains, and in some phases very illogical. The ways of the higher civilization, where man loves many times, where he dines and wines in good fellowship with him who is the husband of a former love--these were not his ways. White anger was in his heart, not against the woman, but against that other man. His fingers itched to be at his throat, regardless of custom or law. Temporarily, the rights and wishes of the woman, the prize of contention, were forgotten. Two young bucks in the forest do not consider the feelings of the doe that is the reward of the victor in the contest when they meet; and Ben Blair was very like these wild things. Only by an effort of the will could he keep from going immediately to find that other man,--intuition made it unnecessary to ask his name. As it was, he wanted now to be away. The tiny room seemed all at once stifling. He wanted to be out of doors where the sun shone, out where he could think. He seized his hat, then suddenly remembered, paused to glance--and that instant was his undoing, and another man"s--Clarence Sidwell"s--salvation.
And Florence Baker, at whom he had glanced? She was not tearful or hysterical now. Instead, she was looking at him out of wide-open eyes.
Well she knew this man, and knew the volcano she had aroused.
"You won"t hurt him, Ben!" she said. "You won"t hurt him! For my sake, say you won"t!"
The devil lurking in the cowboy"s blue eyes vanished, but the great jaw was still set. He reached out and caught the girl by the shoulder.
"Florence Baker," he said, "on your honor, is he worth it--is he worth the sacrifice you ask of me? Answer!"
But the girl did not answer, did not stir. "You won"t hurt him!" she repeated. "Say you won"t!"
A moment longer Ben Blair held her; then his hands dropped and he turned toward the vestibule.
"I don"t know," he said. "I don"t know."
CHAPTER XXII
TWO FRIENDS HAVE IT OUT
Clarence Sidwell was alone in his down-town bachelor quarters; that is, alone save for an individual the club-man"s friends termed his "Man Friday," an undersized and very black negro named Alexander Hamilton Brown, but answering to the contraction "Alec." Valet, man of all work, steward, Alec was as much a fixture about the place as the floor or the ceiling; and, like them, his presence, save as a convenience, was ignored.
The rooms themselves were on the eleventh floor of a down-town office-building, as near the roof as it had been possible for him to secure suitable quarters. For eight years Sidwell had made them his home when he was in town. The circle of his friends had commented, his mother and sisters (his father had been long dead) had protested, when, a much younger man, he first severed himself from the semi-colonial mansion which for three generations had borne the name of Sidwell; but as usual, he had had his own way.