Of course, being a woman, she made believe that he had taken her by storm.
"Derry, dear, how _could_ you?" she gasped, all rosy and breathless, and seemingly much occupied in smoothing her ruffled plumes during the first lull after the hurricane.
"You witch, who could resist you?" he muttered, showing well-marked symptoms of another attack.
"No, you"ll just behave, and sit exactly where I shall point out!" she cried, and her pouting confidence gave eloquent testimony to the pa.s.sing of an indelible phase in their relations. "And I am not a witch; but if you find it necessary to resist me, as you put it---- Well, there! only this once. We _must_ sit down and be serious. I have such a lot to say, and so little time in which to say it."
The new note struck by the unfettered intimacy of her manner exercised an influence which Power would have regarded as a fantastic impossibility during those moments of delirium when first she clung to him, and both were shaken by irrepressible tumult. It said, far more plainly than impa.s.sioned speech, that she had thrown down all barriers, that she had counted the cost, and was giving herself freely and gladly to her mate. The recognition of this supreme surrender by a proud woman, a woman to whom purity of thought was as the breath of life, administered a beneficial shock to his sorely tried nerves. Had a brilliant meteor flashed suddenly through s.p.a.ce, and rushed headlong toward that part of the Atlantic which lapped the southern sh.o.r.e of Rhode Island, it could not have illuminated land and sea with more incisive clarity than did Nancy"s att.i.tude light up the dark places of his mind. Some stupendous thing had happened which would account for this miracle, and he must endeavor to understand. No matter what the effort needed, he must attend to her every word. In his inmost heart he knew that he cared not a jot what set of circ.u.mstances had brought about a development which he had not dared to dream of. He recked little of the cause now that its effect was graven on tablets more lasting than bra.s.s. But it was due to Nancy that he should be able to follow and appreciate her motives. He held fast to that thought in the midst of a vertigo. A waking nightmare had been changed in an instant into a beat.i.tude akin, perilously akin, to that of the man and woman who found each other in the one perfect garden which this gray old world has seen, and no darkling vision of desert wastes and thorn-choked paths tortured the happy lovers now gazing fearlessly into each other"s shining eyes.
The heritage of "man"s first disobedience" might oppress them all too soon; but, for that night at least, it lay hidden behind the veil.
Exercising no slight command on his self-control, therefore, Power strove to revert to the well-ordered coherency of speech and action which he had schooled himself to adopt when in Nancy"s presence.
"Forgive me if I have seemed rather mad," he pleaded, seating himself at her feet, and simulating a calmness which resembled the placid center of a cyclone. "During three long years I have hungered for the taste of your lips, Dear. That is my excuse, and it should serve; for I was content to wait as many decades if Fate kept firm in her resolve to deny you to me."
"You would never have yielded if I had not used a woman"s guile?" she said, half questioning him, half stating a truism beyond reach of argument.
"There is little of guile in your nature, Nancy."
"Well, I think that is true, too; but it is equally true that a woman often takes what I may call a saner view of life than a man. She is quicker to admit the logic of accepted facts. If you discovered that some girl had won by false pretense, not your love, for love gilds the grossest clay, but your respect, as her husband, you would not spurn her with the loathing I feel now for the man who made me his wife. For that is what it has come to. I refuse to pose as Hugh Marten"s wife in the eyes of the world one moment longer than is needful to obtain my freedom. His wife I have never been in the eyes of Heaven, because my Heaven is a place of love and content, and I have neither loved my husband nor been content with him, not for a single instant. Our marriage began with a lie, and has endured on a basis of lies. Such contracts, I believe, are void in law, and the principle which governs men in business should at least apply to that most solemn of all engagements, the lifelong union of husband and wife. Hugh Marten conspired with my father--hired him, I might rather say--to drive you and me apart, Derry. The stronger and more subtle brain devised the means, and left it to the weaker one to carry out the scheme in sordid reality. As for me, I was helpless as a caged bird. How was I to guess that Marten, whom I knew only as the owner of the Bison mines and mills, had planned my capture? Even my poor, weak father did not suspect it till you were hundreds of miles away in California. And then how skilfully was the trap baited, and how swiftly it worked! You had not reached Sacramento before a lawyer wrote from Denver warning my father that the mortgagees were about to foreclose on the ranch. On several occasions previously he had been in arrears with the interest on the loan; but they had always proved considerate, and their just claims were met, sooner or later. Yet, in a year when scores of well-to-do ranchers were pressed for money, and when clemency became almost a right, these people proved implacable, and swooped down on him like a hawk on a crippled pigeon.... Derry, _you_ bought the place--who were they?"
"I do not know. I dealt through a lawyer, and the vendor was Mr.
Willard. He sold the property free of any enc.u.mbrance."
"Yet local opinion credited you and Mac with being a shrewd pair!" she commented, laughing softly, as if she were reviewing some tragi-comedy in a quizzical humor.
"We certainly wondered why Marten made things so easy for us--in other respects," he volunteered.
"Ah, then, you _did_ have a glimmering suspicion of the truth? I guessed it; though I could not be absolutely certain till yesterday morning, when Mr. Benson refused to answer my pointblank question. He would not lie, but he dared not tell the truth; so he fell back on the feeble subterfuge that, after the mighty interval of three and a half years, he could not recall the exact facts."
"Benson? Did you write to him?"
The surprise in Power"s voice was not feigned. He was beginning to see now something of the fixed purpose which had governed her actions during the past twenty-four hours.
"Yes," she said composedly. "It was hardly necessary, but I wanted to dispose of my last doubt; though in my own mind I was sure of the ground already. My father went straight to Denver on receipt of that letter, and, of course, chanced to travel by the same train as Hugh Marten, the man to whom the whole amount of the mortgage was little more than a day"s income. Marten was gracious, the lawyer-man adamant. Within a week I was told of a new suitor, and of my father"s certain and complete ruin if I refused him.... Ah, me! How I wept!... When did you post your first letter, Derry?"
"Two days after I arrived at the placer mine," he replied unhesitatingly. The chief revelation in Nancy"s story was her crystal-clear knowledge of facts which, he flattered himself, he had kept from her ken. Then his heart leaped at the thought that she had known of his love from the night they met in the dining-room of the Ocean House. But he choked back the rush of sentiment; for she was demanding his close attention.
"And I wrote on or about that same date," she went on. "My father--Heaven forgive him!--stole your letters to me; but the scheme for suppressing my letters to you must have been concocted before you went to Sacramento. Such foul actions are unforgivable! I, for one, refuse to be bound by the fetters which they forged. I come to you, my dear, as truly your wife, as unstained in soul and body, as though Hugh Marten had never existed!"
A sudden note of pa.s.sion vibrated in her voice, and Power realized, by a lightning flash of intuition, with what vehement decision she had severed already the knot which seemed to bind her so tightly. He fancied it was her due that he should endeavor to relax an emotional strain which was becoming unbearable.
"It"s a mighty good thing we are Americans," he said. "Here divorce is neither hard to obtain nor highly objectionable in its methods. We--at any rate, I--must consult some lawyer of experience. The laws differ in the various states. That which is murder and sudden death in Ohio is a five-dollar proposition in Illinois; but the legal intellect will throw light on our difficulty. Meanwhile----"
He stopped awkwardly, aware that, although she was apparently listening to his words, they were making no impression on her senses. A sudden silence fell, and the hitherto unheeded noises of the night smote on his ears with uncanny loudness. The leisured plash of waves so tiny that they might not be dignified by the name of breakers swelled into a certain strength and volume as his range of hearing spread, and the faint cries of invisible sea-fowl now jarred loudly on the quietude of nature. A pebble rolled down the cliff, and he could mark its constantly accelerated leaps until it reached the shingle with a crash which, even to a case-hardened pebble, betokened damage.
"Meanwhile----" prompted Nancy, in a still, small voice.
So she had followed what he was saying. What was it that he meant to say? Something about the rocks and shoals that lay ahead before he could take her to some safe anchorage. Nevertheless, he shied off at a tangent, and chose haphazard the one topic which his sober judgment might have avoided.
"I was about to utter a ba.n.a.l remark; but it may as well be put on record and dismissed," he said. "It is fortunate that I am a rich man.
Mere weight of money can achieve nothing against us; while the possession of ample means will simplify matters in so far as we are concerned personally."
"Were those really the words on the tip of your tongue, Derry?"
"Well, no," he admitted.
"Are you afraid of hurting my feelings?"
"You are right, Dear. As between you and me there should be no concealment. We have to face the immediate future. We must consider how to surmount the interval, short though it may be----"
"Interval! What interval?"
"You cannot secure a divorce without some sort of legal process, and the law refuses to be hurried."
"Ah, yes. Divorce--law--they are words which have little meaning here and now."
"But they are all-important. Awhile ago you spoke of your Paris friends, and there are others, like Mrs. Van Ralten, whose sympathies and help will be of real value in years to come. You see, I want you to hold your pretty little head higher as Mrs. John Darien Power than you ever held it as Mrs. Hugh Marten."
"That will cost no great effort, Derry. If we have to pa.s.s through an ordeal of publicity, we can surely use the vile means for our own ends, so that our friends may know the whole truth.... Derry, if you were not such a good and honorable man, you would not be so dense."
In his anxiety to follow each twist and turn of her reasoning he had crept nearer, and was now on his knees, having imprisoned her hands in his, and peering intently into her face. In that dim light her eyes shone like faintly luminous twin stars, and he laughed joyously when, to his thinking, he had solved the doubt that was troubling her.
"If it will help any that all the world should know that I, the aforesaid John Darien Power, have been, and am, and will ever remain frantically in love with a lady heretofore described as Nancy Willard, I shall nail a signed statement to that effect on the Casino notice-board tomorrow morning," he vowed.
She gently released her hands, placed them lovingly on his cheeks, and drew him close, so that he could not choose but yield to any demand she might make.
"Derry," she said, kissing him with that soothing air of maternity which is a woman"s highest endowment, "though I am going to say something dreadfully forward and bold, I shall risk all lest I lose you, and, if that happens, my poor heart will break and be at rest forever. Even now you do not see whither I am leading you. You never would see unless I spoke plainly. My love for you may be fierce and terrible; but I am only a weak woman, a woman just emerged from girlhood, and I want to be saved from myself. If, for your dear sake, I am to cut adrift from the past, I cannot be left alone. By your side I can face the storm, but I shudder at the thought of protests, appeals, influences perhaps more potent than I imagine in my present new-found mood of hatred of the wrong which has been done me. Derry, why, do you think, have I asked you to leave Newport early tomorrow?"
Stirred by a common impulse, they both stood upright. All at once she seemed to be unable to bear his burning gaze any longer, and her head sank on his breast. He had thrown a protecting arm around her shoulders, and he felt her supple body quiver under a sob which she tried to restrain.
"Nancy," he whispered, "am I to take you with me?"
"Yes," she said brokenly.
"You mean that we are to be a law unto ourselves, and thereby make divorce proceedings inevitable? I must put it that way, my dear one! I must understand!"
"Yes, Derry. You _must_ understand. There is no other way."
He held her so tightly that he became aware of the mad racing of her heart, and a great pity stirred his inmost core. How she must have suffered! What agony was this forced discarding, one by one, of her maidenly defenses! Though he had been blind and deaf solely because of the depth and intensity of his love and reverence, he could utter now only a halting plea that would explain his slowness of perception.
"Forgive me, Dear!" he murmured. "I can find nothing better to say than that--forgive me! I was so absorbed in my own dream of happiness that I gave no heed to the means. But I shall never again be so thoughtless."
"Thoughtless!" She raised her sweet face once more, tear-stained and smiling. "You thoughtless, Derry? Women thank G.o.d for that sort of thoughtlessness in men like you!"
And with that, before he could forestall or even divine her intention, she had withdrawn from his embrace, and had run lightly up half a dozen of the Forty Steps.
"Come!" she cried, with an alteration of manner and voice that was almost stupefying to her hearer. "We have been here an unconscionable time, and just think how awful it will be if our cabman has taken home his tired horse! Of course, even at the twelfth hour, I have loads of things to pack. And, since I don"t know where I am going, the task of selecting a reasonable stock of clothes is too appalling for words. Oh, don"t gaze at me as if I were a ghost, Derry! I am not about to flit away into s.p.a.ce. You will have another half hour of my company; because, let that poor horse do his best, we sha"n"t reach our respective habitations till long after eleven o"clock."