The One Woman (Dixon, 1903)/Chapter 29
Gordon remained in the house during the entire afternoon.
Kate called a boy and sent two messages. One of them summoned her lawyer, the same polite gentleman who had brought the wonderful message from that house a few years before.
At 6:30 Gordon went to his study. The wind had risen steadily and was blowing now a gale from the northwest, and he could feel the cut of hail mixed with the raindrops. It was fearful under foot, and he knew his crowd would be small.
His mind was in a whirl of nervous rage.
"Bah! It's this infernal storm in the air," he cried, in disgust.
A feeling of suffocation at last mastered him. He turned the service over to an assistant, left the Temple, and returned to Gramercy Park with feverish step.
Overman was in the library in earnest consultation with Kate.
They both sprang to their feet as he hurriedly entered, and he could see that Kate was trembling with excitement and dread.
The banker was cool and insolent.
Gordon walked quickly to Kate's side and spoke in icy tones of command.
"Go to your room. I have something to say to this gentleman it will not be necessary for you to hear."
She hesitated and glanced inquiringly at Overman.
"Certainly; it's best," came his low, quick answer.
The hesitation and appeal to the new master were not lost on Gordon. He squared his gigantic shoulders, and wet his lips as if to cool them.
"Very well," she said, facing Gordon. "Before I go I wish to announce to you that it will not be convenient for you to spend another night in this house. If you do not go, I will."
He bowed politely and waved her away with a graceful gesture.
"That will do. I do not care to hear any more."
Kate turned and quickly left the room.
"Won't you sit down?" Gordon said, offering Overman a chair with excessive courtesy.
"Thanks; I prefer to stand," he answered, gruffly.
The single eye was fixed on the man opposite in a steady blaze, following every step and every movement in silence.
Gordon took his place by Overman's side, thrust his big thumbs into his vest at the armpits, and looked off into space.
"It's no use, Mark, for us to mince words," he began, in even, clear tones. "I understand the situation perfectly."
"Then the solution should be easy under your code," the banker dryly remarked.
"All I ask of you now," Gordon continued, quietly, "as my best friend, is to let my wife alone. Is that a reasonable request?"
"No," was the emphatic answer. "Did I seek your wife? Yet nothing could have wrung from me the secret of my love had you not flung the challenge in my face again and again; and even then my love for you sealed my lips until she broke the spell to-day with words that cannot be unsaid."
Gordon's face and voice softened.
"Granted, Mark, I've been a fool. I know better now. I appeal to your sense of honour and our long friendship. Let this scene end it. Let us return to the old life and its standards."
The big neck straightened.
"Then go back," he flashed, in tones that cut like steel, "to the wife of your youth and the mother of your children!"
Gordon's fist clenched; he was still a moment, and when he spoke his voice was like velvet.
"It's useless to bandy epithets, or to argue, Mark. I don't reason about this thing. I only feel. My passion is very simple, very elemental. It flouts logic and reason. This woman is mine. I have paid the price, and I will kill the man who dares to take her. Do you understand?"
The banker gave a sneering laugh, and twisted the muscles of his mouth.
"Yes, I understand, and I'm not fainting with alarm. You will be a preacher and a poser to the end."
"I have appealed to your principles and your sense of honour first," Gordon repeated, in a subdued voice.
The one eye was closed with a smile.
"Principles! Sense of honour! What principles? What sense of honour? I agree that, under the old view of marriage as a divine sacrament and a great social ordinance, sacrifice of one's desires for the sake of humanity might be noble. But in this paradise into which you have thrust me, with an invitation on your own door for all the world to enter and contest your position, and with you yourself shouting from the housetop freedom and fellowship Sense of honour? Rubbish!"
"I can see," snapped Gordon, "that one such beast as you is enough to transform heaven into hell."
Overman slowly pulled his moustache, and a grin pushed his nose upward.
"Exactly. I am the one odd individual your scheme overlooked—a normal human being with the simplest rational instincts, a clear brain and the muscle big enough to enforce a desire."
"The muscle test is yet to come," Gordon coldly interrupted.
The banker shrugged his shoulders.
"I suppose so. And you know, Frank, the fear of man is an emotion I have never experienced."
Gordon bent quickly toward him, his face quiet and pale, and said in muffled accents:
"Well, you who have never feared man, listen. Get out of this house to-night, give up my wife, never speak to her again or cross my path, or else—" a pause—"I am going to disarm you, bend your bulldog's body across my knee by an art of which I am master, close your jaw with this fist on your throat, and break your back inch by inch. Will you go?"
Overman surveyed the questioner with scorn.
"When the woman who loves me tells me to go. This is her house!" he coolly sneered.
Again the voice opposite sank to velvet tones.
"Very well, we are face to face without disguise, beast to beast. You haven't the muscle to take her. She is mine. I gave for her the deathless love of a wife, two beautiful children, a name, a career, a character, and the life of the man who gave me being, who died with a broken heart. For her I turned my back upon the poor who looked to me for help, forgot the great city I loved, overturned God's altars, scorned heaven and dared the terrors of hell. Do you think that I will give her up? I own her, body and soul. I've paid the price."
He paused a moment, quivering with passion. "I know," he went on, "I was a fool floundering in a bog of sentiment. But you—one-eyed brute—you were never deceived about anything. You set your lecherous eye on her from the first and determined to poison her mind and take her from me."
"And I will take her," came the fierce growl from the depths of his throat, "and lift her from the mire into which you have dragged her peerless being."
The man opposite gave a quick, nervous laugh.
"Well, I, who have dreamed the salvation of the world and lost my own soul, may sink to-night, but, old boy"—he paused and laughed hysterically—"I'll pull down with me into hell as I go one Wall Street banker!"
"Talk is cheap," Overman hissed. "Make the experiment. You're keeping a lady waiting."
Gordon stepped quickly to the desk and picked up two ivory-handled daggers with keen ten-inch blades, used as paper knives, and handed one to Overman.
"These little toys," he said, playfully, "were a wedding present from my wife on our second anniversary."
"Which wife?" snarled the big, sneering mouth.
Gordon went on meditatively.
"They are the finest Italian steel—sharp medicine for friends to take and give, but it will cure our ills. I never quite understood before what you meant by the fighting instinct when I used to watch you fasten those little devilish points on your Game chickens. I know now. I feel it throb in every nerve and muscle. The impulse to kill you is so simple and so sweet, it would be a crime against nature to deny it."
Overman threw his head to one side, frowned and peered at the man before him curiously.
"Do you ever get tired of preaching? The articulation of wind is a strange mania!"
"Pardon me if I've tired you," came the answer in mellow tones. "You'll need a long rest after to-night, and you'll get it."
Gordon locked the doors, placed the blower over the flickering embers in the grate, and put his hand on the electric switch.
"I am going to put this light out for the sake of the comradeship and chivalry we once held in common. I could kill you at one blow from that blind side of your head. I'll fight you fair. That is a bow to the higher law in the preliminary ritual of nature. But down below, in these muscles, throb forces older than the soul, that link us in kinship to the tiger and the wolf"—his voice sank to a dreamy monotone. "You sneaked into my home in the dark to rob me of my own. In the dark, we will settle on the price. I paid for this treasure an immortal soul. It's worth as much to you."
He turned the switch, and then darkness and silence that could be felt and tasted—only the thrash of the storm against the blinds without.
With catlike tread they began to move around the room on the velvet carpet. They made the circuit twice, and found they were following each other. They both stopped, apparently at the same moment, wheeled, and again made the round in a circle without meeting, now and then stumbling against a piece of furniture.
Gordon suddenly stopped, held his breath, and waited for his enemy to overtake him. He could hear Overman's heavy breathing at each muffled step. When he approached so close he could feel the movement of his body in the air, he suddenly sprang on him, plunging the dagger in his body, and bore him to the floor, knocking the blower from the grate in the struggle.
Over and over on the velvet carpet, dimly lighted now from the glowing coals, they rolled, growling, snarling, cursing in low, half-articulate gasps, thrusting the steel into flesh and bone, nerve and vein and artery.
Gordon suddenly plunged his dagger with a crash in Overman's shoulder, snatched at it, and broke it smooth at the hilt.
Throwing his opponent to one side by a quick movement, he sprang to his feet, and as Overman rose, fastened his enormous hairy left hand on his throat and closed it with the clutch of a bear. His enemy writhed and plunged the steel twice to the hilt in Gordon's breast before his big right hand found the knife and wrenched it from his grasp.
Then slowly, silently, inch by inch, he bent the banker's body over his knee, driving his great fingers into his throat, until the spinal column snapped with a dull crack.
The limp form sank to the floor, and the two big hands clutched the throat until every finger left its black print as if branded red hot into the massive neck.
A quick knock, and Kate's excited voice called:
"Open this door!"
Throwing the body behind the desk in the centre of the room, he felt for the switch, turned on the light, unlocked the door, stepped back and said:
"Come in."
Kate quickly opened the door and rushed into the room. He locked it and put the key in his pocket without a word.
She turned on him a face blanched with speechless horror as he slowly advanced on her in silence, his eyes wide open, cold and set.
The blood was running down across his cheek in a stream from a wound in the upper edge of his high forehead.
She stood dumb with physical fear.
He came close, in laboured breath, his face still sick and white with the desire to kill.
The voice was hard and metallic with the vibrant ring of steel.
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"Say your prayers, young woman," he said, slowly. "You are going on a long journey from whence no traveler has yet returned."
She staggered and caught a chair, trembling and shivering.
"Frank, dear, have you gone mad?" she gasped.
"Yes, I went mad in this house one day at the sight of your devil's beauty, and I have been mad from that hour. Now we have come to the end."
"You will not kill me?" she begged, in piteous fear. "I cannot die; I am afraid. Surely you love me; you cannot"
He seized her wrists and she cowered with a scream. He held them in one hand and with the other swept her magnificent hair around her throat, grasped it in his iron fist, and thus choking her, thrust the shivering figure backward into the chair.
She managed to free her hands, threw her arms around his neck, and tried to smother him with kisses.
"Frank, dear, I'll love you. Surely you will not kill me. Have pity for all that I have been to you in the past"
"Hush," he said softly, putting his big hand over her full lips. "Why such childish terror? Love has its moments of sublime cruelty. This impulse to kill is only the awful desire for utter possession, the climax of love. I'll go with you. Neither life nor death shall take you from me."
With a tremulous moan, she sank into a swoon in his arms.
He loosed the hair from her throat, paused, and looked tenderly at the still white face.
Then he sighed, groaned and kissed her.
"No, no, no, no; not that!" he cried, beneath his breath. "How beautiful she is! I brought her to this. Yes, I was the master of her heart and life. I could have made her anything, angel or devil. I have made her what she is. One last kiss"—he bent and gently touched her lips—"and this the end."
With tenderness he laid her on the lounge, loosed her corsage, smoothed gently the tangled hair from her white face, closed the door, and went to his room.
He bathed the blood from his forehead and bound it with a piece of plaster. His head began to swim. A sharp pang shot through his breast, and he felt he was suffocating.
He began to shiver with the instinctive desire to escape, threw some things into a bag he usually carried, stopped and scowled with uncertainty.
"What's the use? What is there to live for?"
Yet the big muscular hands kept on at their task.
An hour later he struggled and staggered up the hill through the black, roaring storm and rang Ruth's doorbell.