“When I was seventeen, Grandfather Standish died. I wish you could understand all that followed without my telling you: how I clung to Sharpleigh as a father, how I trusted him, and how cleverly and gently he educated me to the thought that it was right and just, and my greatest duty in life, to carry out the stipulation of my grandfather’s will and marry John Graham. Otherwise, he told me—if that union was not brought about before I was twenty-two—not a dollar of the great fortune would go to the house of Standish; and because he was clever enough to know that money alone would not urge me, he showed me a letter which he said my Uncle Peter had written, and which I was to read on my seventeenth birthday, and in that letter Uncle Peter urged me to live up to the Standish name and join in that union of the two great fortunes which he and Grandfather Standish had always planned. I didn’t dream the letter was a forgery. And in the end they won—and I promised.”
She sat with bowed head, crumpling the bit of cambric between her fingers. “Do you despise me?” she asked.
“No,” he replied in a tense, unimpassioned voice. “I love you.”
She tried to look at him calmly and bravely. In his face again lay the immobility of rock, and in his eyes a sullen, slumbering fire.
“I promised,” she repeated quickly, as if regretting the impulse that had made her ask him the question. “But it was to be business, a cold, unsentimental business. I disliked John Graham. Yet I would marry him. In the eyes of the law I would be his wife; in the eyes of the world I would remain his wife—but never more than that. They agreed, and I in my ignorance believed.
“I didn’t see the trap. I didn’t see the wicked triumph in John Graham’s heart. No power could have made me believe then that he wanted to possess only me; that he was horrible enough to want me even without love; that he was a great monster of a spider, and I the fly lured into his web. And the agony of it was that in all the years since Uncle Peter died I had dreamed strange and beautiful dreams. I lived in a make-believe world of my own, and I read, read, read; and the thought grew stronger and stronger in me that I had lived another life somewhere, and that I belonged back in the years when the world was clean, and there was love, and vast reaches of land wherein money and power were little guessed of, and where romance and the glory of manhood and womanhood rose above all other things. Oh, I wanted these things, and yet because others had molded me, and because of my misguided Standish sense of pride and honor, I was shackling myself to John Graham.
“In the last months preceding my twenty-second birthday I learned more of the man than I had ever known before; rumors came to me; I investigated a little, and I began to find the hatred, and the reason for it, which has come to me so conclusively here in Alaska. I almost knew, at the last, that he was a monster, but the world had been told I was to marry him, and Sharpleigh with his fatherly hypocrisy was behind me, and John Graham treated me so courteously and so coolly that I did not suspect the terrible things in his heart and mind—and I went on with the bargain. I married him.”
She drew a sudden, deep breath, as if she had passed through the ordeal of what she had most dreaded to say, and now, meeting the changeless expression of Alan’s face with a fierce, little cry that leaped from her like a flash of gun-fire, she sprang to her feet and stood with her back crushed against the tundra flowers, her voice trembling as she continued, while he stood up and faced her.
“You needn’t go on,” he interrupted in a voice so low and terribly hard that she felt the menacing thrill of it. “You needn’t. I will settle with John Graham, if God gives me the chance.”
“You would have me stop now—before I have told you of the only shred of triumph to which I may lay claim!” she protested. “Oh, you may be sure that I realize the sickening folly and wickedness of it all, but I swear before my God that I didn’t realize it then, until it was too late. To you, Alan, clean as the great mountains and plains that have been a part of you, I know how impossible this must seem—that I should marry a man I at first feared, then loathed, then came to hate with a deadly hatred; that I should sacrifice myself because I thought it was a duty; that I should be so weak, so ignorant, so like soft clay in the hands of those I trusted. Yet I tell you that at no time did I think or suspect that I was sacrificing myself; at no time, blind though you may call me, did I see a hint of that sickening danger into which I was voluntarily going. No, not even an hour before the wedding did I suspect that, for it had all been so coldly planned, like a great deal in finance—so carefully adjudged by us all as a business affair, that I felt no fear except that sickness of soul which comes of giving up one’s life. And no hint of it came until the last of the few words were spoken which made us man and wife, and then I saw in John Graham’s eyes something which I had never seen there before. And Sharpleigh—”