Part 26 (1/2)

As the old snakish glance reached him Weldon felt the old net-like sensation, the old baffled rage.

”I'm sorry, Weldon, but I can't let it go. It's no use--you can't afford it. It's all like a house you build out of cards, you see, and you can't slip out one without the whole thing caving in. Whatever I pull out I have to explain. How do you suppose I got you your fifty thousand, back there? You know I've never had much money--to call money. It's brains--what you call mind-reading, you other fellows--that I've matched against the rest of them. And I've got them where they're afraid of me. I can't drop back. Listen to me, Weldon!”

He drew his chair close and talked low and steadily for five minutes.

The air seemed to grow dense; the rustling hiss of the foam on the creamy beach was the hiss and flicker of a sea-coal fire; the grotesque shadow of the wicker chair, black on the white verandah floor, was the spread, silent bulk of a dead man.

The low voice ceased.

”How about it, Weldon?” it added abruptly, ”can you afford that?”

Weldon pushed away his chair roughly. ”Come down to my room at the bank,” he said.

Hours afterward he dragged himself into his bedroom, an older man by ten years than when he had quitted it. His body seemed heavier, his face hollower, with pinched lips and sunken eyes. The man who waited on him stared openly and mentioned the doctor, only to receive a curse for his pains--the first he had ever heard from his master.

In the late dusk his wife found him asleep in a long chair with an empty decanter beside him and heavy rugs dragged up to his chin. They tried, both of them, to make that nervous chill account for the change in him, but she watched him narrowly and he felt her eyes day and night.

Something tolled like a bell in him and never stopped for a moment: _six weeks! six weeks! six weeks!_ all his waking movements went to that intolerable rhythm; he was like a man under a gallows, with a reprieve coming to him, at the mercy of all the elements. It was observed at the bank that he worked harder and longer and much alone: they said the American blood was coming out at last, and smiled at each other.

”Only mind you don't engage us in speculations, old man,” said one of his colleagues jocosely, ”'safe and sound,' you know! Look at the States--a pretty mess that!”

Weldon turned on him in a fury of anger.

”Speculation! speculation!” he cried harshly, ”you know that I hate it like h.e.l.l!”

They were genuinely anxious about him.

One morning he found his wife in his dressing-room, white-faced over something in her hand.

”Philip! Philip!” she whispered and clung to him.

He put the s.h.i.+ning little steel-eyed thing behind him.

”My dear, don't be foolish,” he said quietly, ”if I have my reasons for wis.h.i.+ng a certain sort of protection for a few days, will you make me regret my sparing you?”

”You--you mean the bank?” she gasped.

”What else could I mean?” he said steadily, and in some quaint woman's reasoning she was appeased.

At the end of three weeks the strain eased a little. He read a letter from Webb with a grim smile, bought an American newspaper, and pa.s.sed an entire day away from the bank. His wife held her breath as she watched him, but affected not to notice the change, and he blessed her for it: his nerves were raw. Two days, three days went by. He sent out for another newspaper and later in the day raised the tiny salary of the page who had brought it to him. In the cool of the afternoon he rode with his wife, the boy on a s.h.a.ggy pony beside them, and kissed her as she turned in the saddle in the shadow of the dusk.

”You are the best wife a man ever had,” he said, looking deep into her honest brown eyes, and she galloped away from him to hide her happy tears.

The next day he told the servant to bring the parrot cage back to the verandah, where the little daughter liked to have it, and grimaced tolerantly at its strident cry:

”_Manana! manana!_”

Life is as it is, he thought, and can we hope to change it because we change? Surely not. Everything had its price, and he had really never paid the price of that ten-years-old bargain till now--he acknowledged it. Out of that blue-stained air the messenger of fate had dropped and taken his toll of youth and candour and elasticity, and departed again, and now the weight was slackening from his chest and there were but fourteen days to wait. The next day he found a second letter from Webb on his desk. To relieve him from needless anxiety, said the great financier, he wrote to inform Mr. Weldon that six weeks had proved too wide a margin and he promised himself the pleasure of a complete settlement six days from the date of writing. Weldon stared at the letter head: it had been three days on the way--that meant in three days--by the next boat! The letter was grave, but subtly jubilant.

The railroads were subdued. Blickenstern was dead, the country hailed his successor. A foundation of millions lay firm beneath his feet.