"Why?" and the Secretary actually laughed, a smooth, noiseless laugh, but a laugh nevertheless, though so full of a snaky cunning that Prescott started as if he had been bitten. "Why, because I wished you, Robert Prescott, whom I feared, to become so entangled that you would be helpless in my hands, and that you have done. If I wish I can have you dismissed from the army in disgrace—shot, perhaps, as a traitor. In any event, your future lies in the hollow of my hand. You are wholly at my mercy. I speak a word and you are ruined."
"Why not speak it?" Prescott asked calmly. His first impulse had passed, and though his tongue was dry in his mouth the old hardening resolve to fight to the last came again.
"Why not speak it? Because I do not wish to do so—at least, not yet. Why should I ruin you? I do not dislike you; on the contrary, I like you, as I have told you. So, I shall wait."
"What then?"
"Then I shall demand a price. I am not in this world merely to pass through it mechanically, like a clock wound up for a certain time. No; I want things and I intend to have them. I plan for them and I make sacrifices to get them. My one desire most of all is Helen Harley, but you are in the way. Stand out of it—withdraw—and no word of mine shall ever tell what I know. So far as I am concerned there shall be no Lucia Catherwood. I will do more: I will smooth her way from Richmond for her. Now, like a wise man, pay this price, Captain Prescott. It should not be hard for you."
He spoke the last words in a tone half insinuating, half ironical. Prescott flushed a deep red. He did love Helen Harley; he had always loved her. He had not been away from her so much recently because of any decrease in that love; it was his misfortune—the pressure of ugly affairs that compelled him. Was the love he bore her to be thrown aside for a price? A price like that was too high to pay for anything.
"Mr. Secretary," he replied icily, "they say that you are not of the South in some of your characteristics, and I think you are not. Do you suppose that I would accept such a proposition? I could not dream of it. I should despise myself forever if I were to do such a thing."
He stopped and faced the Secretary angrily, but he saw no reflection of his own wrath in the other's face; on the contrary, he had never before seen him look so despondent. There was plenty of expression now on his countenance as he moodily kicked a lump of snow out of his way. Then Mr. Sefton said:
"Do you know in my heart I expected you to make that answer. You would never have put such an alternative to a rival, but I—I am different. Am I responsible? No; you and I are the product of different soils and we look at things in a different way. You do not know my history. Few do here in Richmond—perhaps none; but you shall know, and then you will understand."
Prescott saw that this man, who a moment ago was threatening him, was deeply moved, and he waited in wonder.