Part 45 (1/2)
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”WOLF GRASPED HER.”]
”You say this to me after all that Catherine has been to you and your life?”
”And why not? If I no longer love, should I be chained?”
”And this is the ideal you came here to build?” she asked, with scorn.
”Certainly. It is the essence of Socialism. In my next proclamation I shall declare for the freedom of love. Every great Socialist has preached this. Marriage and the family form the tap-root out of which the whole system of capitalism grew. The system can never be destroyed until the family is annihilated. I had thought you a woman whose brilliant intellect had faced this issue and broken the chains of a degrading bourgeois morality.”
”The chains of love, I find, are very sweet,” she interrupted, with dreamy tenderness.
”You talk this twaddle about romantic love? You, the leader of a revolution! Come, you are no longer a child. We are living now in the world of freedom and reality where men and women say the unspoken things and live to the utmost reach of their being, body and soul.”
”Is it a world worth living in?” she asked.
”Was the old world of family life, of starvation and misery, worth living in?” Wolf retorted.
”Perhaps I might have said no an hour ago, but now that my lips have met my lover's the dream of the old family life, with its sanct.i.ty and purity, begins to call me. And something deep down within answers with a cry of joy. Why should you desire me, knowing that I thus love another?”
”You can love where you like,” he snapped, as his big jaws came together. ”I can get along without your love. I just want you--and I'm going to have you!”
”I'll die first!”
”We shall see. Time works wonders.”
With a shudder Barbara turned and left him.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
EQUALITY
Barbara asked Wolf for permission to visit Norman in prison.
The Regent shook his head.
”No, my little beauty, it's not wise. I promise you that not a hair of his head shall be harmed. He is safe and well. If you wish to test my power, try to bribe my guards and see him.”
Day after day Barbara sought in vain to gain admittance to the jail, send or receive a message from within. Her lover had disappeared as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed his body.
The episode of the dredge was the last effort to question the power of the regent. The day after its capture Wolf put the men who had helped Norman build it to work operating the big machine, and its huge pumps began to throb in perfect time, piling ton on ton of gold-bearing sand and gravel into the flumes, as faithful to the touch of the thief who had stolen it as to the hand of the man of genius who invented it.
The head machinist he ordered to build five duplicates, and placed the entire working force of the mechanical department at once on the job.
The daily _New Era_ received a number of protests against the outrage of the inventor's arrest and imprisonment. Two protests were signed by the names of the writers, Diggs and the Bard. There appeared in the paper a warning editorial against sneaks who, under cover of the cause of justice, were seeking to aid treason and rebellion against the State.
Diggs and the Bard were summoned before Wolf in person.
The regent fixed his gray eyes on Diggs, and the man of questions forgot to smile.