We faced each other, each measuring the other. And as his glance quailed before mine, I turned away to conceal my exultation. In a comparison of resources this man who had plotted to crush me was to me as giant to midget. But I had the joy of realizing that man to man, I was the stronger. He had craft, but I had daring. His vast wealth aggravated his natural cowardice—crafty men are invariably cowards, and their audacities under the compulsion of their ravenous greed are like a starving jackal's dashes into danger for food. My wealth belonged to me, not I to it; and, stripped of it, I would be like the prize-fighter stripped for the fight. Finally, he was old, I young. And there was the chief reason for his quailing. He knew that he must die long before me, that my turn must come, that I could dance upon his grave.
XXV. “MY WIFE MUST!”
As I drove away, I was proud of myself. I had listened to my death sentence with a face so smiling that he must almost have believed me unconscious; and also, it had not even entered my head, as I listened, to beg for mercy. Not that there would have been the least use in begging; as well try to pray a statue into life, as try to soften that set will and purpose. Still, many a man would have weakened—and I had not weakened. But when I was once more in my apartment—in our apartment—perhaps I did show that there was a weak streak through me. I fought against the impulse to see her once more that night; but I fought in vain. I knocked at the door of her sitting-room—a timid knock, for me. No answer. I knocked again, more loudly—then a third time, still more loudly. The door opened and she stood there, like one of the angels that guarded the gates of Eden after the fall. Only, instead of a flaming sword, hers was of ice. She was in a dressing-gown or tea-gown, white and clinging and full of intoxicating hints and glimpses of all the beauties of her figure. Her face softened as she continued to look at me, and I entered.
“No—please don't turn on any more lights,” I said, as she moved toward the electric buttons. “I just came in to—to see if I could do anything for you.” In fact, I had come, longing for her to do something for me, to show in look or tone or act some sympathy for me in my loneliness and trouble.
“No, thank you,” she said. Her voice seemed that of a stranger who wished to remain a stranger. And she was evidently waiting for me to go. You will see what a mood I was in when I say I felt as I had not since I, a very small boy indeed, ran away from home; I came back through the chilly night to take one last glimpse of the family that would soon be realizing how foolishly and wickedly unappreciative they had been of such a treasure as I; and when I saw them sitting about the big fire in the lamp-light, heartlessly comfortable and unconcerned, it was all I could do to keep back the tears of strong self-pity—and I never saw them again.
“I've seen Roebuck,” said I to Anita, because I must say something, if I was to stay on.
“Roebuck?” she inquired. Her tone reminded me that his name conveyed nothing to her.
“He and I are in an enterprise together,” I explained. “He is the one man who could seriously cripple me.”
“Oh,” she said, and her indifference, forced though I thought it, wounded.