The Way of the Strong. Cullum Ridgwell
his death.
Like many another speculator in the past, this man had become disastrously involved in a wild endeavor to corner wheat. But he found, as others had found before him, instead of completing the corner he hoped to make, he had only created a Frankenstein which threatened him with destruction. So far did he suddenly find himself involved that only financial assistance on an enormous scale could have saved him from ruin. His thoughts turned at once to Alexander Hendrie, who was then in Vancouver. He was the only man who could afford him adequate help. There was nothing for it but a desperate rush across the continent on his forlorn hope, and he undertook the journey at once, accompanied by Monica.
But like the majority of forlorn hopes inspired by ill fortune, the journey ended in dire disaster. When Louth put his proposition to the millionaire he learned to his horror that this man was actually the head of the syndicate who had been his undoing. It was an absurd blending of comedy and tragedy, yet the situation was wholly characteristic of the methods of Alexander Hendrie. The work had been carried out with all the subtlety of the astute mind which had lifted the man to his present position. It had been carried out by secret agents, and never for one moment had his name been allowed to figure in the affair. But it was Hendrie who was responsible for the shattering of the edifice of monopoly Louth had so recklessly attempted to set up; and the latter set out on his return journey a broken and beaten man.
Monica would never forget that journey, and all it meant to her. While the train was held up by a heavy snowfall at a place called Glacier, in the Rocky Mountains, Henry Louth, in his private car, took the opportunity of shooting himself. The sensation, the hubbub, the excitement the affair caused was intense; and Monica attended him during his dying moments, afterwards watching at his bedside until his body was removed by the authorities.
It was during this latter period, when the excitement had died down, and all was quiet again, that a large man entered the car from another part of the train. He came straight to the bedside and looked gravely at the dead man. Then he turned to the beautiful woman beside the bed, and looked at her with unsmiling eyes.
She knew him at once, and returned his look unflinchingly. It was Alexander Hendrie. She recognized the strong, rugged face of the man, and his abundant fair hair.
In a moment a cold resentment at the intrusion rose up in her, and, for the life of her, she could not restrain the impulse to give it expression.
"Well?" she inquired. "Are you satisfied?"
"How?"
The man displayed no emotion. His ejaculation was the expression of a mind preoccupied.
"You – you are responsible for this."
Monica's challenge came with biting coldness. But Hendrie only shook his head.
"Wrong. Guess you don't understand. Maybe most folks – who don't understand – will say that. But I'm not responsible for – that." He indicated the dead man with a contemptuous nod. "I was on a legitimate proposition to prevent the consumers of wheat being plundered. I'm losing money by what I've done. Guess he hadn't the grit to stand the racket of his dirty game. Men like him are well out of it."
Monica dropped her eyes from the steady gaze of the iron man before her. Somehow she felt ashamed of her impulsive accusation. In his concise fashion he had given her a new understanding of what had happened.
"I hadn't seen it that way before," she said, almost humbly.
Hendrie nodded.
"You were his secretary," he said, with a subtle emphasis.
"Yes."
Again the man nodded.
"I've heard of you."
Then he turned as if about to go. But he did not go. He paused, and again his steady eyes sought hers.
"Guess he's dead. I need another secretary. You can have the job."
This was Monica's first encounter with a personality which had a strange and powerful attraction for her.
Two weeks later she found herself in her new position, established in the millionaire's palatial offices in Winnipeg at, what was for her, a princely salary.
At the end of nearly two years she was still with him, a privileged, confidential secretary; and at last the woman in her was crying out against the head which had for so long governed her affairs. The woman in her had been too strenuously subjected in her eighteen years of a commercial career. She had shut her ears to every cry of rebellion for the sake of her quixotic pledge. But now they were too loud, too strong to be any longer ignored, and their incessant pleading found an almost ready ear.
Alexander Hendrie had offered her marriage. He had done more. This apparently cold commercial machine had shown her a side of his nature which the eye of his world was never permitted to witness. He had thrown open the furnace doors of his masterful soul, and she had witnessed such a fire of passionate love that left her dazed and powerless before its fierce intensity.
And she – she had needed little urging. The wonderful attraction of this personality had ripened during her two years of service. She no longer worked with every faculty straining for the handsome salary he gave her; she worked for the man. Her whole heart was wrapped up in his achievement. Yes, she knew that he stood before even her love for the boy whom she had taught to call her "mother."
That was her trouble now. That was the one all-pervading drop of gall in her cup of happiness. Dr. Strong had warned her, and now she was torn by the hardness of her lot as she gazed upon the frowning crags which loomed up on her horizon.
She rose and crossed the room to her bureau. She picked a letter up that was lying on the top of it. It was the last letter she had received from young Frank, from the farm he was on, not far from Calford, just outside the little township of Gleber. She read it through again. One paragraph particularly held her attention and she read it a second time.
"I've met such a bully girl. Her name's Phyllis Raysun. She's just about my own age. It was at a dance, at a farm twenty miles away. We danced ten dances together. Oh, mother, you will like her. She's fine. Pretty as anything, with dark eyes and dark hair – "
Monica went back to her seat at the window. There was a smile in her eyes, but there was trouble in them, too. She understood that Frank was grown up. He was grown up, and like all the rest of young people his thoughts were turning toward girls and matrimony.
Frank was still in ignorance of the facts of his birth. She, Monica, was his "mother," so far as he knew, and he understood that his father was dead. This was the belief she had brought him up to. This was the belief she hoped to keep him in. But now, all too late, she was realizing through such letters as these that a time must soon come when he would want to know more; when the preliminary lies her sister had forced her into must be augmented by a whole tissue of falsehood to keep the secret of his mother's shame from him.
Her determination to shield her sister was still her principal thought.
At all costs her promise to the dying woman must be kept. There should be no weakening. She would carefully prepare her story. Lies – it would all be lies. But she could not help it. She felt they were lies for which there was a certain justification, lies which possessed no base object, but rather the reverse.
But now had come this fresh complication in the person of Alexander Hendrie. Here was something she had never even dreamed of. He became something more than a complication. He was a threat. She could not marry him. She must definitely refuse him. And then —
Despair took hold of her and wrung her heart. Marriage she knew was forever denied her. She had known it while she dressed herself and prepared to receive the man she loved that afternoon. She had known it even while she rejoiced in her own attractiveness, and the thoughts of the love she had inspired.
She turned to the window with a deep sigh and stared hopelessly out of it at the keen winter sunshine.
To contemplate marriage with a man as passionately in love as Alexander Hendrie, a man as strong, as masterful as he, with the existence of her boy to be explained away, would be rank madness. It was hopeless, impossible. It could not be.
No, she knew. She needed no prompting.