It will be asked why he could not Have married Phyllis properly and honestly? Apart from other considerations was she not the only daughter of a millionaire father? How did Adair come to overlook this very obvious advantage, and embark instead on all the troubles and vexations attending an illicit connection? To answer this question it is necessary to go back four or five years, and rake up his marriage with Ruby Raeburn, the dancer. She, too, had been the daughter of a rich man--Laidlaw Wright, the Michigan lumber king. Adair had thought he was doing a very good thing for himself. To have a father-in-law who is a "lumber king" has a pleasant sound. Without knowing exactly how it was to happen, he looked forward confidently to a flow of dollars in his direction, either in cash, or vicariously in royal "tips." Surely a lumber king would take care of his own--and of his own's husband. Ruby herself had not been above reproach in holding out the bait, and everybody had congratulated him, or sneered at him for "marrying money." Alas, for the disillusion that followed. Laidlaw Wright was the hardest-fisted man on the Lakes, and no bulldog, guarding a lunch basket, could have shown more formidable fangs than he at any hand slipping towards his money-bags. Adair learned the sad truth that when you possess the millionaire's daughter, it does not necessarily follow that you possess the millionaire. His dead body must too often be crossed first--and this event, however desirable, can not be unduly hurried.
And meanness was not the only drawback to Laidlaw Wright's character. He could spend money as viciously as he withheld it, and make of it a whip of scorpions for the scourging of sons-in-law. When Adair's domestic unhappiness reached the acute stage, the cantankerous old fellow jumped into the ring, snorting battle and destruction. Money was poured out like water; giants of the bar were retained at enormous fees; detective bureaus' worked night and day. Adair was shadowed; his door was burst open at a time of all others when he would have much preferred to have it stay shut; statutes of which he had never dreamed, lying hidden and unrepealed in the dark recesses of the law, were evoked against him with startling effect. He was sent to prison in default of the bail he could not give. Then after eighteen weary days, which the giants of the bar would willingly have made eighteen months, he was tried, and his case dismissed. But as he left the court room he was again arrested. That implacable old man, with his cohorts of lawyers and detectives, had furbished up fresh charges. The indictment was a mile long. Again there was bail, default, and gnashing of teeth in a stinking cell. Of course, he had legal remedies, but these involved legal tender. He had spent his last dollar; legal remedies had to be paid for, and he had nothing to pay with. A wealthy and vindictive man, if he choose to do so, and does not grudge the outlay, can make our judicial machinery into a most serviceable steam-roller.
After the divorce, when all seemed settled and done with, there were alimony bomb-shells to be contended with. This tribute on his son-in-law's freedom became the obsessing prepossession of Laidlaw Wright's life. He subordinated the lumber business to collecting this forty-five dollars a week, until it became Adair's fixed and unalterable purpose to escape payment by every means in his power. North or South, East or West, the battle went on. Injunctions, contempt proceedings, printed forms in immense envelopes, beginning with the familiar phrase: "You are cited to appear before Judge So-and-So to show cause why that you, etc., etc."--rained on Adair's head wherever Saturday night might find it. Incidentally eyes were blackened; blood streamed on box-office floors; bandaged functionaries and limping attorneys cried for vengeance in shabby court rooms--and not only cried, but often got it, in a heaping measure. And afar, the lumber king, like a horrible spider whose net covered the country from sea to sea, kept the wires busy and hot with hate.
When Ruby was killed in what was called "the hansom cab mystery"--an ugly affair that was never really cleared up--the old man probably mourned less for her than for the loss of his cheerless hobby--the persecution of Cyril Adair. However wealthy you are, you can not move the legal steam-roller without at least a pretense of justification; and now the justification lay with Ruby Raeburn in the grave, as stilled as her dancing feet, as finished and done with as the life that had gone out so tragically.
It had all left Adair with a profound hatred of marriage, and a still profounder hatred of rich fathers-in-law. The one suggested jail, mortification, alimony, raided box-offices, large and determined individuals bursting in your doors; the other an unrelenting monster, pitiless and crafty, trailing after you night and day, like a bloodhound. There was no glamour to Adair in Robert Ladd's millions, but rather a sinister and awful significance; and as for marrying Phyllis, and putting his head again in that noose--who that had been in hell ever willingly went back to it? The very thought made him shudder. He might be weak and impulsive, and easily swept off his feet by her damned beauty--but he wasn't as weak and impulsive as that!
CHAPTER XIII
As had been previously arranged he met her the next day at the same place. He had come in a closed cab, which he had left a couple of blocks away, and he insisted on their returning to it, and having out their talk in its shelter. Phyllis demurred at first; it wore an unpleasant look to her; it was not fear exactly--she trusted Adair too absolutely for that--but rather a disinclination in which good taste played the bigger part. It seemed to her low, and discreditable, and unworthy. Her love was too fine a thing, and too dear to her, to have it associated with dingy cushions, a dirty floor carpet, and the vulgarizing secrecy of that shabby interior. It took some persuasion to get her to consent; and though she did so at last under the spell of that irresistible voice, it was with a sudden quenching of the brightness that had illumined her heart.
But it never occurred to her to think the worse of Adair. A man could not be expected to have the sensitiveness of a woman. His love was like himself, robust and masterful; he fastened a string to your little collar, and dragged you after him with a splendid insouciance. Every one of your four little paws might be holding back; you might be whimpering most pitifully, but if he wanted a closed cab, in you had to go, whether you liked it or not. Not that you would have had him different; it was sweet to submit; and if he were big, and direct, and unshakable--so, too, was his love.
They drove slowly through the suburban streets, locked in each other's arms. He kissed her back to happiness, to rapture, the discreet twilight screening them in its shadow. Her qualms disappeared, her reluctance, her shrinkings from the ugliness and commonness of that horrid old box. Nothing mattered so long as they could be together, and in her exaltation she even suffered some pangs of remorse for having resisted his pleadings at all.--She had never cared for children, but as her arms were clasped about his neck, she felt a welling tenderness for him that opened her understanding to the love of a mother for her babe--the divine compassion, the exquisite desire to protect and shield, the willingness, if need be, to die herself rather than to have it suffer the least of harm. She whispered this to him in words so sincere and moving, with eyes so moist, and lips so quivering, and her whole young face so glorified by the shining soul within, that Adair would have been less than human had he not succumbed.
He was abashed; his carefully rehearsed plans were glad to creep out of sight and hide; it would have needed very little for him to fall on his knees, penitent and ashamed, and blurt out--not the truth; the truth wasn't tellable--but enough to make him seem less of a beast to himself, less of a hypocrite and villain. But he paused midway; and the impulse, which, if he had allowed it to control him might have carried him into unsuspected regions of honor and manliness, died still-born; and left him--if not exactly what he had been--at least not so very much the better.