"I asked G.o.d to forgive me for the wrong I had done you and her.
I said I would tear that love out of my soul if it killed me, and be true to my marriage vow. I went there to tell her this and ask her to put the ocean between us. I found that she loved me even as I loved her, and she promised. As I started to leave the house, never to enter it again, I saw the card of the lawyer on her table, and the truth flashed over me that she had made this sacrifice of her fortune--greater than I had dreamed--for me and my work, and that because of this I was leaving her forever. It was more than I could bear or ask her to bear. I faced anew the facts. Our love has grown cold. We are no longer congenial. Your ways have ceased to be mine. It is wrong to love one woman and live with another.
We must separate."
"No, no, no, no, Frank, dear, my husband, my love, my own. Not this. You do not mean it!" she groaned, as she sank to the floor, buried her face in her arms and stretched out her hand until her tapering fingers rested on his broad foot.
He bent and took her hand as though to lift her.
Suddenly the fever of her hot fingers trembling with overpowering pa.s.sion, the moisture of her hand, and the tremor of her convulsed body swept his memory with the pain and rapture of his hour with Kate.
Still holding her fingers, he slipped his watch from his pocket with the other hand and glanced quickly at its face to see if it were time for his return to the Ransom house.
"Come, Ruth, this is very painful to me. You must not humiliate yourself so. You have pride and the heritage of n.o.ble blood."
She sprang to her feet and stared at him, with infinite yearning in her eyes, gave a faint cry, half anguish, half despair, and threw herself into his arms, holding him with pa.s.sionate violence while she smothered his lips and eyes with kisses.
He attempted gently to draw her arms from his neck.
"No, you shall not," she cried, holding him convulsively. "I will not let you go. You are my husband--my own, my love, the hero of my girl"s dreams, the father of my babies. I have no pride. I will do anything for you if you will only love me."
"But, Ruth, if I have ceased to love you--"
"Don"t, don"t say it!" she shrieked, placing her hand on his lips.
"I will not hear it. You do love me. This woman has lured you with her devil"s beauty, and thrown her spell over your baser nature.
Ah, Frank, dear, tell me that you love me! Lie to me as meaner men lie to their women. Such a lie I"ll hold an honour before the awful shame of desertion. You cannot humiliate me so. See, dear, I am at your feet. Have mercy on me. Do not ask me to bear more than I can endure. Am I not the mother of your children?"
Gordon frowned and withdrew her arms from his neck.
"All this is very painful, Ruth. You cannot mean it. You know I have tried to be honest. I hate a lie. I could not tell one if I tried. You cannot love me and ask this infamy. I could never lift up my head again as a leader and teacher of men and know I was a wilful liar."
The little figure shivered.
"But, Frank, I can"t give you up. It was the touch of your hand, the music of your voice that first awoke my woman"s soul. You are my mate. You cannot know the young mother-wonder, pain and joy that thrilled my heart as I first bent over Lucy"s face, your dear eyes in hers smiling at me. Our very flesh became one in Nature"s miracle of love."
"And yet our lives have somehow drifted apart, Ruth."
"But not so far, dear, as this woman has made you believe," she answered tenderly. "I have been selfish and resentful, but I will make it all up. I will lift up my head and be cheerful--live for you, work for you, think only of you, ask nothing for myself but only your presence and your love."
"But if I have given it to another--"
Again she put her hand on his lips.
"But you have not. It is madness. You could not forget our life.
Last night I lay alone in silence, with wide-open eyes, dreaming it all over again. This woman I know is more beautiful than I--three years younger; her hair is gold, mine the raven"s. She is fair and full and tall, and I am dark and small; but, Frank, dear, love is more than eyes and hair and lips and form. We have been made one in our flesh and blood and inmost soul. There is no other man than you for me. There is no music save your voice."
"Yet, if you feel this for me, and I thus wait in love on another, how can I live the lie?"
"Can you forget the sunlit days of our past?" she pleaded wistfully.
"When you lay on the sands of the beach in old Virginia and held my hand while I read to you, idly dreaming through that wonderful summer before our first-born came sailing into port from G.o.d"s blue sea! You said I was beautiful then. And you were so tender and gracious in your strength. No other woman can ever be to you this first girl-mother."
Her voice melted into a sob. She tried to go on and bit her swollen lips.
Then she rose quietly, and walked to the window and looked down at the city below, whose roar had drowned the music of her life.
He sat silent, waiting for her to regain her strength. He knew that he had the power of hypnotic suggestion over her in his iron will, and that she was beginning to recognise the inevitable.
She turned and faced him again, the hungry fires in her eyes burning with mystic radiance. A tiny stream of blood ran down from her lip and stood in the dimple of her chin. She drew a delicate lace handkerchief from her bosom and wiped the blood away until it ceased to flow. And then in low accents she said:
"You are going to leave me, my love. I feel the cold chill on my heart. It is G.o.d"s will; I bow to it. One look into your dear eyes, one last embrace, one farewell kiss, and you will be gone. A little gift I will make you in this, the saddest, lowliest hour my soul has ever known. This handkerchief, stained with blood from lips you have kissed so tenderly in the past--that bled to-day because I tried to keep back the cries of a broken heart. I ask that you keep this as a token of my love."
She handed it to him and Gordon placed it in his pocket with a sigh, brushing a tear from his own eyes.
CHAPTER XIV
THE VOICE OF THE SIREN
Gordon left the house with a lingering look at Ruth"s window and turned his face toward Gramercy Park, where another woman was waiting for his footstep.
He had suffered intensely in the scene with his wife. He did not believe it possible that she retained such power over him. He drew a deep breath of relief that it was over. Her pride would come to the rescue; for he knew that with her tenderness she combined strength, and with her delicacy, supreme energy.
The exaltation of his great victory of yesterday welled within him and drowned the sense of pain. It had been the most momentous day of his life. Visions of his Temple with gorgeous dome of gold--rising in the sky from its pile of gleaming marble rose before his fancy.
He could hear the peal of the grand organ, the swell of the chorus choir, and the response from five thousand eager faces before him.
He was speaking with inspiration as never before. He was leading not a forlorn hope against overwhelming odds, but a triumphant host of free, G.o.dlike men and women to certain victory.
He thought of the love that filled the heart of the woman to whom he was hurrying, that she should do this unheard of thing while yet breathing the breath of the capital of Mammon.
And then there stole over him, as oil on slumbering fires, the memory of her kisses, the melting languor of her eyes, the odour of her hair, the fever of her creamy flesh, until his senses reeled as drunk with wine. A smile played about his lips; he quickened his pace, lifted his head high, his nostrils dilated wide; he looked dreamily over the housetops into the sky and saw only the face of a woman.
He was in the grip of superhuman impulses. In the quickened throb of his heart and the rush of his blood was the sweep of subconscious forces of nature playing their role in the cosmic drama of all sentient life, laughing at man"s laws, making and unmaking the history of races and worlds.
He was justifying his desires now in his new-found Social philosophy, which he had studied closely since Overman"s suggestion of its scope.
He knew instinctively that between these elemental impulses and the Moral Law there was war. He would reconcile them by leading a revolution that should decree a new basis for the Moral Law itself.
He would make these very subconscious forces the expression of the highest Moral Law. It suddenly flashed over him that this was the key to the paradox of life. He would be the prophet of the new era, and this beautiful woman his comrade in leadership in the Social Revolution it must bring.
His face flushed with the new enthusiasm, and the glorious autumn day about him seemed one with his spirit. The sky was cloudless with fresh breezes sweeping over the seas from the south.
When he stepped to the downtown platform his eye wandered up and down Twenty-third Street and Sixth Avenue and lingered on rivers of women, below.
His own drama, his million-dollar gift, the enormous sensation it had made in the morning press, had not produced a ripple on this swirling tide of flesh. They crowded the windows filled with feathers and hats, elbowed and jostled one another on the pavements, pushed and squeezed and trampled each other"s feet and skirts fighting for standing room around the Monday bargain counters, oblivious of the existence of the spiritual world, church, G.o.d, or devil.