Black is White

by George Barr McCutcheon

This much the three men who lifted him from hell were able to learn from lips that knew not what they said, and they were filled with pity. Later on, in a rational weakness, he told them more, and without curses. A deep, silent, steadfast bitterness succeeded the violent ravings. He became a wayfarer with them, quiet, dogged, fatal; where they went he also went; what they did so also did he.

Soon he led, and they followed. Into the dark places of the world they plunged. Perils meant little to him, death even less. They no longer knew days of privation, for he shared his wealth with them; but they knew no rest, no peace, no safety. Life had been a whirlwind before they came upon James Brood; it was a hurricane afterward.

Twice John Desmond, younger than Dawes and Riggs, saved the life of James Brood by acts of unparalleled heroism: once in a South African jungle when a lioness fought for her young, and again in upper India when, single-handed, he held off a horde of Hindus for days while his comrade lay wounded in a cavern. Dawes and Riggs, in the Himalayas, crept down the wall of a precipice, with five thousand feet between them and the bottom of the gorge, to drag him from a narrow ledge upon which he lay unconscious after a misstep in the night. More than once—aye, more than a dozen times—one or the other of these loyal friends stood between him and death, and times without number he, too, turned the grim reaper aside from them.

John Desmond, gay, handsome, and still young as men of his kind go, met the fate that brooks no intervention. He was the first to drop out of the ranks. In Cairo, during a curious period of inactivity some ten months after the advent of James Brood, he met the woman who conquered his venturesome spirit; a slim, clean, pretty English governess in the employ of a British admiral's family. They were married inside of a fortnight. After the quiet little ceremony, from which the sinister presence of James Brood was missing, he shook the bronzed hands of his older comrades, and gave up the life he had led for the new one she promised. At the pier Brood appeared and wished him well, and he sailed away on a sea that bade fair to remain smooth to the end of time. He was taking her home to the little Maryland town that had not seen him in years.

Ten years passed before James Brood put his foot on the soil of his native land. Then he came back to the home of his fathers, to the home that had been desecrated, and with him came the two old men who now sat in his huge library before the crackling fire. He could go on with life, but they were no longer fit for its cruel hardships. His home became theirs. They were to die there when the time came.

Brood's son was fifteen years of age before he knew, even by sight, the man whom he called father. Up to the time of the death of his mother who died heart-broken in her father's home—he had been kept in seclusion.

There had been deliberate purpose in the methods of James Brood in so far as this unhappy child was concerned. When he cast out the mother he set his hand heavily upon her future.

Fearing, even feeling, the infernal certainty that this child was not his own, he planned with diabolical cruelty to hurt her to the limit of his powers and to the end of her days. He knew she would hunger for this baby boy of hers, that her heart could be broken through him, that her punishment could be made full and complete.

He sequestered the child in a place where he could not be found, and went his own way, grimly certain that he was making her pay! She died when Frederic was twelve years old, without having seen him again after that dreadful hour when, protesting her innocence, she had been turned out into the night and told to go whither she would, but never to return to the house she had disgraced. James Brood heard of her death when in the heart of China, and he was a haggard wreck for months thereafter.

He had worshipped this beautiful Viennese. He could not wreak vengeance upon a dead woman; he could not hate a dead woman. He had always loved her. It was after this that he stood on the firing-line of many a fiercely fought battle in the Orient, inviting the bullet that would rip through his heart.