Monica"s challenge came with biting coldness. But Hendrie only shook his head.
"Wrong. Guess you don"t understand. Maybe most folks--who don"t understand--will say that. But I"m not responsible for--that." He indicated the dead man with a contemptuous nod. "I was on a legitimate proposition to prevent the consumers of wheat being plundered. I"m losing money by what I"ve done. Guess he hadn"t the grit to stand the racket of his dirty game. Men like him are well out of it."
Monica dropped her eyes from the steady gaze of the iron man before her. Somehow she felt ashamed of her impulsive accusation. In his concise fashion he had given her a new understanding of what had happened.
"I hadn"t seen it that way before," she said, almost humbly.
Hendrie nodded.
"You were his secretary," he said, with a subtle emphasis.
"Yes."
Again the man nodded.
"I"ve heard of you."
Then he turned as if about to go. But he did not go. He paused, and again his steady eyes sought hers.
"Guess he"s dead. I need another secretary. You can have the job."
This was Monica"s first encounter with a personality which had a strange and powerful attraction for her.
Two weeks later she found herself in her new position, established in the millionaire"s palatial offices in Winnipeg at, what was for her, a princely salary.
At the end of nearly two years she was still with him, a privileged, confidential secretary; and at last the woman in her was crying out against the head which had for so long governed her affairs. The woman in her had been too strenuously subjected in her eighteen years of a commercial career. She had shut her ears to every cry of rebellion for the sake of her quixotic pledge. But now they were too loud, too strong to be any longer ignored, and their incessant pleading found an almost ready ear.
Alexander Hendrie had offered her marriage. He had done more. This apparently cold commercial machine had shown her a side of his nature which the eye of his world was never permitted to witness. He had thrown open the furnace doors of his masterful soul, and she had witnessed such a fire of pa.s.sionate love that left her dazed and powerless before its fierce intensity.
And she--she had needed little urging. The wonderful attraction of this personality had ripened during her two years of service. She no longer worked with every faculty straining for the handsome salary he gave her; she worked for the man. Her whole heart was wrapped up in his achievement. Yes, she knew that he stood before even her love for the boy whom she had taught to call her "mother."
That was her trouble now. That was the one all-pervading drop of gall in her cup of happiness. Dr. Strong had warned her, and now she was torn by the hardness of her lot as she gazed upon the frowning crags which loomed up on her horizon.
She rose and crossed the room to her bureau. She picked a letter up that was lying on the top of it. It was the last letter she had received from young Frank, from the farm he was on, not far from Calford, just outside the little township of Gleber. She read it through again. One paragraph particularly held her attention and she read it a second time.
"I"ve met such a bully girl. Her name"s Phyllis Raysun. She"s just about my own age. It was at a dance, at a farm twenty miles away. We danced ten dances together. Oh, mother, you will like her. She"s fine.
Pretty as anything, with dark eyes and dark hair----"
Monica went back to her seat at the window. There was a smile in her eyes, but there was trouble in them, too. She understood that Frank was grown up. He was grown up, and like all the rest of young people his thoughts were turning toward girls and matrimony.
Frank was still in ignorance of the facts of his birth. She, Monica, was his "mother," so far as he knew, and he understood that his father was dead. This was the belief she had brought him up to. This was the belief she hoped to keep him in. But now, all too late, she was realizing through such letters as these that a time must soon come when he would want to know more; when the preliminary lies her sister had forced her into must be augmented by a whole tissue of falsehood to keep the secret of his mother"s shame from him.
Her determination to shield her sister was still her princ.i.p.al thought.
At all costs her promise to the dying woman must be kept. There should be no weakening. She would carefully prepare her story. Lies--it would all be lies. But she could not help it. She felt they were lies for which there was a certain justification, lies which possessed no base object, but rather the reverse.
But now had come this fresh complication in the person of Alexander Hendrie. Here was something she had never even dreamed of. He became something more than a complication. He was a threat. She could not marry him. She must definitely refuse him. And then----
Despair took hold of her and wrung her heart. Marriage she knew was forever denied her. She had known it while she dressed herself and prepared to receive the man she loved that afternoon. She had known it even while she rejoiced in her own attractiveness, and the thoughts of the love she had inspired.
She turned to the window with a deep sigh and stared hopelessly out of it at the keen winter sunshine.
To contemplate marriage with a man as pa.s.sionately in love as Alexander Hendrie, a man as strong, as masterful as he, with the existence of her boy to be explained away, would be rank madness. It was hopeless, impossible. It could not be.
No, she knew. She needed no prompting. Her course lay clear before her.
She dared not sacrifice the hard struggles of those eighteen years for this love which had at last come into her life. She knew now how she had sacrificed herself on the altar of affection when she pledged herself to the care of her sister"s child. That sacrifice must go on to the end, come what might. It was hard, hard, but she resolutely faced the destiny which she had marked out for herself.
That was why she had not telephoned to her employer to put him off.
That was why she had specially prepared her toilet to receive him. She would definitely refuse to marry him. But she would rather lacerate her already wounded heart by the painful delight of an interview, than shut out of her life this one pa.s.sionate memory under the cold seal of an envelope.
It was her woman"s way, but it was none the less sincere, none the less strong.
CHAPTER II
ALEXANDER HENDRIE
Had Monica only known it her weakness lay in the very strength of that loyalty which held her to her promise to her dead sister. She was far too honest to deal successfully in affairs which demanded the smallest shadow of subterfuge. At the best she could only hope to lie blunderingly, and to blunder in falsehood leads to sure disaster.
So she had no real understanding of that which lay before her, the endless troubles she was preparing for herself and those belonging to her. The pity of it. One could almost imagine the Angel of Truth wringing his hands, and weeping for the mistaken honesty which clung to a quixotic promise given eighteen years ago to a dying woman.
It was a nervous, troubled woman who started at the clang of the bell at her outer door. She turned with terrified eyes to the silver clock which stood on her bureau. It was four o"clock. Four o"clock to the minute; and instinctively her hands went up to her hair, and nimble fingers lightly patted it.
For a moment she stood irresolutely staring before her. She seemed in desperate doubt, as though laboring under desire to greet her visitor, while instinctively fearing the outcome of his visit. The next moment her silken skirts rustled as she hurriedly pa.s.sed out to her front door.
Alexander Hendrie followed her into the sitting-room, and promptly its femininity gave way to the atmosphere which his personality seemed to shed upon all that encountered it.
It was not an essentially refined personality, it was too rugged, too grimly natural, too suggestive of Nature in her harsher moments to possess any of the softer refinements of life. A bald, broken crag set in the midst of a flower garden of perfect order would rob its surroundings of its delicate charm and trifling beauties. So it was with the man, Hendrie, in the essentially feminine room which was Monica"s care. He dwarfed the refinements of it with a magnetic claim for his own rugged picturesqueness.
He was a man of something over six feet in height. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh upon his muscular, erect form, which was clad in the simple fashion of a well-tailored man who takes but little interest in his clothes. But these things were almost lost sight of in the absorbing interest of his rather plain face.
An artist painting the picture of a Viking of old would have reveled in such a face, and such a wealth of waving fair hair. He would have caught the look of confidence, the atmosphere of victory which lay in every detail of the strong mold in which his features were cast.
It was a face full of faults, yet it was such a combination of strength and mentality that no eye trained to the study of physiognomy could have resisted it. The lines in it were p.r.o.nounced. Yet every line was a definite indication of the power behind it. There was a contemplative light shining in the keen gray eyes which told of perfect control of all emotions; there was a definite indentation between the fair, ample brows, which suggested a power of concentration. The nose was broad and p.r.o.nounced, with curiously sensitive nostrils. The cheekbones were lean and broad. The mouth was broad, too, but firmly closed, and quite free from the least suggestion of animal sensuality. Yet it was a hard face; not hard in the sense of cruelty, it was hard in its definite, almost relentless purpose.
Monica realized something of all this as she brought a large rocker forward for his use; and her heart failed her as she remembered the mission that had brought him to her apartment.
"You"re pretty comfortable here, Monica," he said, glancing round with a faintly approving smile, as he dropped into the rocker.
The woman followed his glance with a responsive smile.
"Thanks to you," she said readily, without noting one detail of the tastefully arranged furnishings which had brought forth his comment.
The man"s brows went up in swift inquiry.