By the World Forgot: A Double Romance of the East and West. Brady Cyrus Townsend
have to. For if I didn't there would be no submitting to force majeure. No, my dear boy, it is quite hopeless."
"It isn't. For the last time, will you marry me?"
"As I have answered that appeal a hundred times in the last six months, I cannot."
"Are there any conditions under which you could?"
"Two."
"What are they?"
"What is the use of talking about them? They cannot occur."
"Nevertheless tell me what they are. I've got everything I've ever gone after heretofore. I've got some of your father's perseverance."
"You called it obstinacy a while ago."
"Well, it's perseverance in me. What are your conditions?"
"The consent of two people."
"And who are they?"
"My father and my fiancé."
"I have your own, of course."
"Yes, and you have my heartiest prayer that you may get both. Oh," she went on, throwing up her hands. "I don't think I can stand any more of this. I know what I must do and you must not urge me. These scenes are too much for me."
"Why did you come here, then?" asked the man. "You know I can't be in your presence without appealing to you."
"To show you this," said the girl, drawing a yellow telegram slip from her bag which she had thrown on the desk.
"Is it from him? I had one, too," answered the man, picking it up.
"Of course," said the girl, "since you and he are partners in business. I never thought of that. I should not have come."
"Heaven bless you for having done so. Every moment that I see you makes me more determined. If I could see you all the time and-"
"He'll be here in a month," interrupted the girl. "He wants the wedding to take place immediately and so do I."
"Why this indecent haste?"
"It has been a year since the first postponement and-Oh, what must be must be! I want to get it over and be done with it. I can't stand these scenes any more than you can. Look at me."
The man did more than look. The sight of the piteous appealing figure was more than he could stand. He took her in his arms again.
"I wish to God he had drowned in the South Seas," he said savagely.
"Oh, don't say that. He's your best friend," interposed the girl, laying her hand upon his lips.
"But you are the woman I love, and no friendship shall come between us."
The girl shook her head and drew herself away.
"I must go now. I really can't endure this any longer."
"Very well," said the man, turning to get his hat.
"No," said the girl, "you mustn't come with me."
"As you will," said the other, "but hear me. That wedding is set for thirty days from today?"
"Yes."
"Well, I'll not give you up until you are actually married to him. I'll find some way to stop it, to gain time, to break it off. I swear you shan't marry him if I have to commit murder."
She thought he spoke with the pardonable exaggeration of a lover. She shook her head and bit her lip to keep back the tears.
"Good-bye," she said. "It is no use. We can't help it."
She was gone. But the man was not jesting. He was in a state to conceive anything and to attempt to carry out the wildest and most extravagant proposition. He sat down at his desk to think it over, having told his clerks in the outer office that he was not to be disturbed by any one for any cause.
CHAPTER II
THE STUBBORNNESS OF STEPHANIE
At one point of the triangle stands the beautiful Stephanie Maynard; at another, George Harnash, able and energetic; at the third, Derrick Beekman, who was a dilettante in life. George Harnash is something of a villain, although he does not end as the wicked usually do. Derrick Beekman is the hero, although he does not begin as heroes are expected to do. Stephanie Maynard is just a woman, heroine or not, as shall be determined. Before long the triangle will be expanded into a square by the addition of another woman, also with some decided qualifications for a heroine; but she comes later, not too late, however, to play a deciding part in the double love story into which we are to be plunged.
Of that more anon, as the sixteenth century would put it; and indeed this story of today reaches back into that bygone period for one of its origins. Romance began-where? when? All romances began in the Garden of Eden, but it needs not to trace the development of this one through all the centuries intervening between that period and today. This story, if not its romance, began with an arrangement. The arrangement was entered into between Derrick Beekman senior, since deceased, and John Maynard, still very much alive.
Maynard was a new man in New York, a new man on the street. He was the head of the great Inter-Oceanic Trading Company. The Maynard House flag floated over every sea from the mast heads, or jack staffs, of the Maynard ships. Almost as widely known as the house flag was the Maynard daughter. The house flag was simple but beautiful; the daughter was beautiful but by no means simple. She was a highly specialized product of the nineteenth century. Being the only child of much money, she was everything outwardly and visibly that her father desired her to be, and to make her that he had planned carefully and spent lavishly. With her father's undeniable money and her own undisputed beauty she was a great figure in New York society from the beginning.
No one could have so much of both the desirable attributes mentioned-beauty and money-and go unspoiled in New York-certainly not until age had tempered youth. But Stephanie Maynard was rather an unusual girl. Many of her good qualities were latent but they were there. It was not so much those hidden good qualities but the dazzling outward and visible characteristics that had attracted the attention of old Derrick Beekman.
Beekman had everything that Maynard had not and some few things that Maynard had-in a small measure, at least. For instance, he was a rich man, although his riches could only be spoken of modestly beside Maynard's vast wealth.
But Beekman added to a comfortable fortune an unquestioned social position; old, established, assured. Those who would fain make game of him behind his back-such a thing was scarcely possible to his face-used to say that he traced his descent to every Dutchman that ever rallied around one-legged, obstinate, Peter Stuyvesant and his predecessors. The social approval of the Beekmans-originally, of course, Van Beeckman-was like a lettre de cachet. It immediately imprisoned one in the tightest and most exclusive circle of New York, the social bastille from which the fortunate captive is rarely ever big enough to wish to break out.
Beekman's pride in his ancestry was only matched by his ambitions for his son, like Stephanie Maynard, an only child. If to the position and, as he fancied, the brains of the Beekmans could be allied the fortune and the business acumen of the Maynards, the world itself would be at the feet of the result of such a union. Now Maynard's money bought him most things he wanted but it had not bought and could not buy Beekman and that for which he stood. Maynard's beautiful daughter had to be thrown into the scales.
Maynard had no ancestry in particular. Self-made men usually laugh at the claims of long descent, but secretly they feel differently. Being the Rudolph of Hapsburg of the family is more of a pose or a boast than not. I doubt not that even the great Corsican felt that in his secret heart which he revealed to no one. Maynard's patent of nobility might date from his first battle on the stock exchange, his financial Montenotte, but in his heart of hearts he would rather it had its origin in some old and musty parchment of the past.
Beekman, who was much older than Maynard, had actually helped that young man when he first started out to encounter the world and the flesh and the devil in New York and to beat them down or bring them to heel. A friendship, purely business at first, largely patronizing in the beginning on the one hand, deferentially grateful on the other, had grown up between the somewhat ill-sorted pair. And it had not been broken