THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM
She stretched out one arm, keeping Ten Euyck at the tips of her fingers. He seemed content to stay so, looking at her.
She was dressed in a trailing gown of silken tissue that was now gold, now silver, as the light took it; but the long vaporous slip beneath was of pale rose; molded to her motion and stirring with her breath, there dwelt in the gauze which covered her a perpetual faint flush. The stuffs were cut as low about the breast as if she had been some social queen, and her fair, pale arms were bare of gloves. Their adorable young flatness below the gleam of the slim, smooth shoulders, was now shimmered over and now revealed by short fringes of silver and gold, of cooler colored amber and crystal, which were their only sleeve; and these fringes hung about the borders of her gown and trembled into music as she moved. In the high-piled softness of her hair, diamonds glimmered like stars in a fair dusk; diamonds banded her brow in an inverted crescent; diamonds and topaz dropped in long pendants from her ears; diamonds and pearls clung round her arms; the restored necklace drooped down her breast, and the peep and shine of jewels glanced from her everywhere like glow-worms. She seemed to be clothed in fluctuant light, and yet it could not dim one radiance of her beauty. This was more than newly crowned; the rose was fully open; her loveliness had spread its folded wings and come into its own. There was no shyness now in those wide eyes; her spirit shone there, all in arms, and moved with a new and deeper strength in her young body. Very faintly, on the pure and delicate oval of her cheek, burned the soft, hot stain of rouge. This was the reality of the dear ghost, calling in the night with the rain upon its face; this was the pale girl in the gray suit who had once sat beside her mother in the corner of the coroner's office. It may be Ten Euyck thought of this; it may be she did.
"Well," she said, "have I made myself fine? Do I please you?"
He broke from his trance, took the lamp out of her hold, set it on the mantelshelf, and returned to her without a word.
"Pray speak!" she said; "I am all yours!"
"Christina!" he broke out, and caught and covered her hand with kisses.
"It is quite true. Do I do you credit?
"Look at me here,
Look at me there,
Criticize me everywhere—"
He leaned toward her and she swayed past him to the piano. Over her shoulder she sang to him—
"From head to feet
I am most sweet,
And most perfect and complete!"
She struck the chords a crash and whirled round to him with her hands in her lap. "Yes, it is quite true. From my head to my feet—" here she thrust forth through the music of the shaken fringe a slim gold shoe with its buckle winking up at him—"you have paid for every rag I stand in." Christina's accent upon the word "rag" suggested that she was accustomed to standing in something much better. "It would be hard if you were not suited. Would you like to go to your room a moment? It's all ready."
He must have considered this jabber at somewhat its true worth, for what he did was to draw up a chair and take and hold her hands. "Christina," said he, studying her face, "do you hate me so much?"
She remained a moment, silent. Then, "Yes!" she said. "I am a good hater!" And she smiled at him, a soft, stinging smile, with her eyes lingering on his.
"And yet you come—willingly—to me?"
"Willingly?" she said. "Oh, greedily!"
"Of your own suggestion?"
"Of my own suggestion."
"And on my terms?"
"Ah, no!" she cried. "On mine!"
"Well, then, for simply what you know I have?"
"For that," she said, "and nothing else."
"Great heavens!" he cried. "You're a cool hand!—You, who value yourself so well, are willing to pay so high for it."
She replied, "To the last breath of my life!"
He leaned down and kissed her wrist and then her arm, and she sat quiet in his grasp.
"What are you thinking of?" he asked, looking up.
She replied, "Of other kisses."
He sprang to his feet with a kind of snort, going to one of the windows, and Christina purled at his broad back, "Don't be angry. How can I help what I think? Have I not kept my part of the bargain? Have I not come here to meet you without another soul? To a house I never saw before? That you tell me you have hired? In a sort of wood, at night, quite alone, not even a servant—although I must say everything seems to have been well arranged and left quite handy! Would you like some supper, now? If you ordered it, I am sure it must be good. I am very obedient. All the same, I am rather hungry."
He came back to the table with the little pink line showing about his nostrils. "I do not mind your not desiring me," he said, "and perhaps, after all, I shall not mind your desiring another man. As you say, it is not a question of what you desire, but of what I do. Well, Christina, I am satisfied with your preparations for me; do you approve mine for you? You shall have servants enough, Christina, when I am sure we may not be traced by your sister's gentry! How do you like my trysting-place? You gave me very little time. If you consider it a cage, is it sufficiently gilded?"
Christina drew a long breath. "It's wonderful. A palace—wonderful! Surely I was born to walk rooms like these! And a far cry from the little boarding-house I lived in when you first met me! God knows," said Christina, in a voice that trembled, "I am glad to be here!"
"You like it then?" he cried eagerly. "It's for sale. It shall be yours to-morrow!"
"Give me some wine!" she said. "I am tired!"
He looked at her and said, yes, she was right; and she would better have something to eat.
The wine brought back her brightness; it was she who lighted the wick, heated the supper, and set the smoking chafing-dish before him. Till it came to the serving she would not let him stir and he could only lean forward on the table, looking and looking at her. During this she said little enough, except that he must be sure to praise her cooking, for she had always boasted she could be a good wife to a poor man! But once she was seated she poured out a stream of chatter which he sometimes answered and sometimes not, being intent upon but one thing, and that was to drink deeper and deeper of her presence.
Now through much of this Herrick lost sight of them, for he had come upon an interest of his own. He had discovered in one of the balusters against which he lay the jutting head of a nail. Never was an object, not in itself alluring, more dearly welcomed. For he saw that his legs were bound with only the soft cord that had once looped back the curtains between the inner and the outer balcony; there must have been two of these cords, and if his arms were but fastened with the other the edge of the nailhead might make, in the course of time, some impression upon it. He sat up and found the nail of a good height to saw back and forth upon, and if it did not convincingly appear that any effect would be made upon the cord, at least it provided him with a violent, if furtive, exercise. This was better than to lie there and let those below saw upon his heart instead.
But he must stop at last from pure exhaustion; and at that moment there was the sound of a chair pushed back. "I thank you for your hospitality," said Christina's voice. "But, now to business. I have played in too many melodramas to sign a contract without reading it. The yacht sails at sunrise?"
"Or when you will."
"And takes with her Allegra and Mrs. Pascoe and whatever of their tribe they choose?"
"Safely and secretly to Brazil! They have chosen their own crew. They must be aboard of her already."
At such words as these Herrick may well be said to have picked up his ears. He heard Ten Euyck go on:
"She is yours, Christina; and theirs if you choose to make her so!"
"You are very generous!" said Christina dryly. "But there is only one way I can be sure of the end of all this. You know what is most important to me." Herrick, leaning against the banisters had got his eye to the opening in the valance again, and he could now see Christina with her hands in her lap facing Ten Euyck. "Have you got that letter?" she said.
Ten Euyck gave his breast a smart rap so that Christina, being so near, must have heard the paper crackle there.
"Very well," said she; "so much for the District-Attorney's mail!"
He stood up, and his voice croaked with triumph as he talked. "Christina," he said, "I have brought you that letter—it's the price of my professional, my political honor; it's bought with my disgrace, with my career! But I have brought it. I'm ridiculous to you, Christina, but who got it for you? Your friends, the Inghams? your admirer, Wheeler? your poor fool of a Herrick? your cherished jail-bird, Denny?—No, I did! This letter that I have here Ann Cornish fell ill guarding, for her vengeance. You stole and lost it. Your enterprising family broke into a post-office to get it back. But the despised policeman brings it to you."
"You got it by accident, you say," commented Christina. "Don't forget that!"
"Forget! I shall never forget the triumph of catching that gang, although I renounce it at your bidding. I shall never forget your message when the letter was barely in my hands!—
"'I know now that I am come of a family of criminals. My pride is in the dust, as deep as you could wish it. If you do not help us, if it must come out that I am tied to blackmailers whom you will catch and send to prison, I shall die of it!' Christina, can I forget that?"
"No," said Christina, "I never thought you could."
"And you will remember my answer, my dear! That I had the proof, the letter in my hand, to publish or to destroy, as you should choose. You haven't forgotten that?"
"No," said Christina again. "But the destroying, that's the thing! You'll burn it?"
"Yes."
"Before my eyes?"
"Of course."
"To-night?"
"To-morrow!"
She seemed, for a moment, to take counsel with herself. "Very well."
An extraordinary limp helplessness, a kind of dejection of acquiescence, seemed to melt her with lassitude at the words. It was enough to sicken the heart of any lover, and even Ten Euyck cried out, as if to justify himself, "Ah, remember—you gave me the slip once before!" And at the memory he seemed to lose all control of himself, falling suddenly forward, clinging to her knees and hiding his face in her skirts.
She sat for a moment motionless. Then, with fastidious deliberation, as if they were bones which a dog had dropped in her lap, she plucked up his wrists in the extreme tips of her fingers, and slowly pushed him off. "Quietly!" she said. "You are one who would always do well to be quiet!"
He sat on his heels, the picture of misery, already ashamed and almost frightened at himself. And suddenly, "Christina," he whispered, while another flash branded itself across his face, "whose kisses were you thinking of?"
She did not, at first, understand; and then, remembering—"I will take a page from your book. I will tell you to-morrow."
"Was it Denny?" he snapped.
"Denny?" said she, abstractedly. "Will? God bless me, no!"
He sighed with a kind of vacancy. "You could easily tell me so!"
"Well, then," said Christina, with considerable temper, "I will tell you something else. When I came here to-night, that I might not die of my own contempt I promised myself one thing. I swore to that girl I used to be, who carried so high a head she could not breathe the same air with you and never thought to stand you miawling and whimpering here about her feet, that at least I should tell no lies of love. There shall never come one out of my mouth to you and may God hear me. So if I do not tell you the man I thought of, it is only because I can not bear to speak his name in this place!—But rest easy! I am very capricious. Things will be different to-morrow. To-morrow, if you still think it interesting, you shall know."
"Know!" he cried. And catching her arm, looked at her with a baleful face. "Yes, there's my trouble! What do I know of you at all! I met you once four years ago—well, I forget myself, I know it! But did I?—Were you even then—? Well, at the inquest, at that reception, in the station, holding to Denny, the night of your performance, and now, to-night! There's my knowledge of you! You dazzle, you befool, you drive me crazy, and you leave me empty—why should I throw my life away for that! After all, where were you when all New York was looking for you? Nearly a week! Where were you?"
"Where was I!" Christina cried. "Well, it's rather long. But does not the favorite slave always tell stories to her master? Listen to Scheherezade."
Then, for the first time, Herrick heard the story of Christina's visit to the yellow house; how she had determined that Allegra must tell the authorities, in Denny's behalf, the story of his provocation against Ingham; how then, hidden in Nancy's, she had found Allegra's hair and guessed everything. "Then it seemed that the first thing was to get Nancy away, quietly, without warning, so that there should be no danger to her. I thought that then I could manage Allegra." She had had Allegra come into town for her performance, and go straight from it to the Amsterdam, up to Christina's apartment in Christina's name; following her there she had slept on the couch, and slipped off early in the morning. Suspecting the identity of the motor, she had telephoned for it as though to meet them both, and now she went on to tell Ten Euyck of her attempt to deceive Mrs. Pascoe, as though she had come from Allegra, and of her imprisonment in the closet.
"Ah, that wretched necklace! I said to myself, 'If it comes to a fight, they may find it and take it from me.' And then I should really have been in your power! I buried it in the flower-pot, thinking to come back with reinforcements!" She told of the flight in the rain, and of the farmers who wouldn't wake up. Both men listened, absorbed, staring. And Christina said, "I was afraid to go toward Waybrook, in case those men followed me. I ran toward Benning's Point. I feared the main road, too, and I thought I could follow the short cut. It is very hilly and broken and I had never seen it before in the dark; the sheets of rain were like the heavens falling, and the wind beat out my last strength; I was mud up to my knees and I had on heavy clothes, too large for me, all dragging down with wet. Perhaps it all made me stupid; at any rate, I lost my way. Oh!" said Christina, "that was hard!" and she put her hand over her heart. "I don't know—it must have been hours—I ran and staggered and stumbled and climbed! You are to remember I had had no food all day, and little enough the day before. And by and by I fell. I got up and on again for a little, but I had hurt myself in falling, and I fell again. And this time I lay there."
Ten Euyck lifted the border of her golden dress and put it to his lips.
The moisture of self-pity swam in Christina's eyes. "Nancy!" she said. "That was worst to think of!" In her own lip she set her teeth and soon she went on—"While I was still unconscious, a man came along with a motor. Somehow, he didn't run over me; he found me. And he recognized me! He wanted the reward. He took me to his sister's; to that Riley's. They gave me all sorts of hot drinks and things; I think they saved my life. But when I tried to thank them, something very comic had happened—I had lost my voice." Christina closed her eyes.
"Well?" said Ten Euyck.
"Well, that woman said I needed sleep, so she sent her brother out of the room—but she didn't send her husband. When she found I could not speak, she pulled down the blinds of her room for fear some one should see in, and said I needn't make a fuss, trying to get away, for she knew as well as any one I was mixed up with murder and trying to clear out. She said she was not going to hold any poor girl that was in trouble, not for the few hundreds he would give her out of that reward. She was going to let me go. 'But first,' said she, 'I'll thank you to hand over that diamond necklace!'"
Both Ten Euyck and the unseen Herrick started and stared.
"She wouldn't believe me. If I didn't have it, I had hidden it since I got in the house. 'Very well, if you won't do anything for me, I think there's a gentleman who will. I think the party for me to send for is Mr. Ten Euyck.' I wasn't ready for you, then, nor did I mean to be handed over to you, like a thief done up in a bundle! But what was I to do? I was still weak and she was between me and the locked door! I'm grand at screaming," said Christina, "but I couldn't even speak! And then, out of the stones of the courtyard, heaven raised up a miracle for me!"
"It was you, then?"
"The shadow? yes. But how could I dream a friend would be going by? It was just a desperate game, a wild chance! She had been telling me what an outcry there was, how I would be recognized anywhere, and about the moving-picture, and how they played the march from Faust, now, at that film—and I thought of the reward and how there must be many looking for it. There was a piano in that room and I went to it, put my foot on the loud pedal and began to play. 'Oh,' I thought, 'will some one glance up? Will some one guess?' And then I threw the shadow on the blind! Before she could do much more than drag me away, my unsuspected friend was in the room. She didn't dare to try to keep me. He put a hat and cloak on me from her closet—oh, I'm sure he sent them back!—and snatched me off!"
"And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this friend?"
"Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her head in her hands.
This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been checked where he was.
"No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you—yes, I should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the keys and her voice breaking into song—
"I'm only a poor little singing girl
That wanders to and fro,
Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl;
At least they tell me so!
At least—"
she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck,
"At least they tell me so!"
"Christina!" he said hoarsely.
"You like personal ditties! You shall have another!
"You dressed me up in scarlet red
And used me very kindly—
But still I thought my heart would break
For the boy I left behind me!
That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of all!—
"We twa hae run about the braes
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered many a weary foot
Sin auld lang syne."
The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and fell in long, triumphing breaths, and—"Damn him!" Ten Euyck cried. "It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!"
"For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne—
Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows!
"We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
For auld lang syne.
Ah, that stays my heart!—Ten Euyck!"
"My God!" he cried. "I won't bear it!"
He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As good as dead?
"He is dead and gone, lady,
He is dead and gone,
At his heels a grass-green turf;
At his head, a stone!
Come, pluck up spirit!
"Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride!
Hark, hark, across the sea!
Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed!
Dost fear to ride with me?
—'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her face but not from his.
She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace, and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered.
"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they all there? No—here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile. "There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have changed my mind."
She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.
Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,—"Explain yourself!" He shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous outrage to commonsense.
"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't pay!"
"Not pay!"
"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored, golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot! I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish ambition—well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our first encounter, you have always typified that world."
He started back, and released her hands.
"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world, to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy to imagine that you would be under my heel.—No, I should be under yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by it!—No, I thank you!"
"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.
Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."
"Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in jail."
The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but—"Well," she said, "you the upholder of the law—you shall judge. She lived off me—that's nothing!—But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them, and made me an ignorant partner in it—that's something, you'll admit! And—Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim Ingham.—Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will—dies," cried Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message, in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"
Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands on him—O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms buried her face in them.
The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had been touched.
"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you don't mean—Herrick!"
She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for him to read.
He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him, together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.—
"'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,
He swam the Eske River—'"
Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he stay not for brake and he stop not for stone—yet ere he alights here at Netherby Gate—"
"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it, with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth—
"'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war—'
Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!—Will and Nancy; after all, they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than—me! But he is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine! He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew it—she knew it! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him too!—Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And she began to shake with weeping.
"That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do you?"
"Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped.
He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I should like those lights out!"
He went about putting out light after light, till she said,
"Leave my lamp!"
She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and seemed to illumine her within a magic circle.
"My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are? And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina—do you really think you can get away with it?"
"No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything. And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow. You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall find a way to die."
His face grayed as he looked at her.
"Do you think I am not acquainted," Christina went on, "with the story of Lucretia? I could strike a blow like hers! And oh, believe me, like her I should not die in silence!" She felt him start. "Do you suppose I should not tell why I came here? Do you by any chance suppose I should not tell what bait I had from the Inspector of Police? Ah, when we have something to lose, we stumble and make terms. But when we have no longer anything, we are the masters of terms.—Is this my last night?" Christina asked.
"By God!" he said, "you know how to defend yourself!" And his arms dropped at his side.
He was a moment silent, his mouth twitching, his eyes drinking her up. Christina had, in argument, that better sort of eloquence that calls up convincing pictures. Doubtless, he knew she might denounce his theft of the letter. Doubtless he saw her, then, clay-cold; lost to him, utterly. On the other hand, to lose her, now, was a thing outside nature and not to be endured. So that suddenly he broke out in a kind of high, hoarse whisper; "Christina, there's another way! I never meant to marry—but—Christina, shall it be that?"
"What!" she exclaimed. It was a volcanic outcry, not a question. She stretched out her two arms, with the palms of her hands lifted against him, and laughter and amazement seemed to course through her and to wave and shine out of her face, like fire in a wind.
"Christina," he said; "Christina, I will marry you!—Oh, Christina, isn't that the way! There's your ambition! There's your satisfaction! There's the world under your shoe! Christina, will you?"
"Is it possible?" she said. And again—"Is it possible! What! Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck and the girl in the moving-picture show? 'Mr. Ten Euyck' and the sister of a jail-bird! Eh, me, my poor soul, is it as bad as that?" Her laughter died and her brows clouded. "It's a far cry, Ten Euyck, since you stole my kiss on the sly! You laid the first bruise on my soul! You put the first slur and sense of shame into the shabby little girl in the stock-company who had no one to defend her but a boy as poor as herself. What did it feel like, dear sir, that check? We have come a long way since then, but have you forgotten? And does the pure patrician and the representative of high life now lay the cloak of his great name down at my feet? To walk on it, yes! But to pick it up? After all, I think it would be stopping! Ah, my good fellow, I don't jump at it!"
"I know you don't! That's why I want you! I've been jumped at all my life!" Thus Ten Euyck, holding her fast, his face burning darkly under her little blows of speech, and his pulse rising with the sense of battle. "I think I've never known a woman who wouldn't have given her eyes to marry me! I've never taken a step among them without looking out for traps! Christina, I long to do the trapping and the giving, yes, and the taking, for myself! You don't want me; well, I want you! Yes, for my wife! I see it now. You dislike me, you despise me. Well, your dislike doesn't count; believe me, you'd not despise me long! I'd rather see you bearing my name—you, with another man for me to wipe out of your heart, you, as cold as ice and as hard as nails to me,—than any of those soft, waiting women! See, we'll play a great trick on the world! We'll be married to-morrow! We'll sail for Europe. From there we'll send back word we've been married all along. People shall think that when you left me the other night I followed you; that we fooled them from the beginning, and when next they see you, you shall be on my arm! Come, Christina, will not that be a reëntry? Will not the world be vanquished, then?"
"Hush!" she said, with lifted finger. "I thought I heard some one!" She lifted the lamp from the mantelshelf and going to the window held it far out into the darkness with an anxious face. "No!" she breathed. Ten Euyck observed with joy that her manner to him had changed; it had become that of a fellow-conspirator. Up and down the terrace she sent the light, her apprehensive eyes searching the shadows and the bushes. "No!" said she again, "I was wrong."
She came back to him flushed and eager, and setting the light upon the table, he caught her hands. "Remember!" he said, "otherwise I shall stop your sister. And where will your name be then?"
Her nostrils widened, her eyes contracted, doubt succeeded to triumph in her face. "If it were not the truth!" she said.
"What do you mean?"
"If there were no such necessity! If you did not have my name in your power at all. If you have no such letter!"
"Christina!"
"It is what I have doubted from the beginning! How do I know you haven't lied to me all along? I ask you if you have that letter, and you thump your breast! I ask you to show it to me and you answer, 'To-morrow'! Traps—did you say? Did you think I was to be caught in a trap? When you were looking for a poor gull, did you cast eyes on Christina Hope? If you had that proof to show me, you wouldn't hesitate! There is no such letter—I can see it in your face!"
He took the letter from his coat and held it up.
"Oh, well," Christina said, "I see an envelope. Am I to marry for an envelope?"
He cast the envelope away, folded the letter to a certain page and held it for her to read.
She read it and a faintness seized her. She stood there, swaying, with closed eyes, and he put an arm about her for support. She leaned upon him, and he put down his mouth to hers. "Christina, look up!" he cried. "Don't be afraid! Don't tremble so! My darling, here's your first wedding-present!" And, alarmed by her half-swoon, transported by that surrender in his arms, he held the letter above the lamp and let its edge catch fire.
Christina opened her sick eyes and they dwelt dully on the paper and then with pleasure on the little flame. "Let me!" she breathed. "Yes, let me. It's my right."
He put the burning paper in her hands, smiling on her with a tender playfulness. "Take care!" he said.
