Part 12

At least, such was her intention. But she discovered to her amazement that she was trembling--her encounter of the noon was responsible for that--and her teeth seemed inclined to hit against each other rapidly with a little clicking noise. So it seemed on the whole more expedient to blurt out her remarks without any attempt at frills or amplification.

"Why don't you ride?"

Ikey gathered herself together.

"My dear Mr. Hammond, there is a street car strike on here in San Francisco. No union wagons run out this way--and I lose my position if I use the cars."

He was welcome to that. She looked off into the distance while he assimilated it.

"I had not thought of that," he said at last slowly. "In that case there is but one thing to do. You must stop that work at once."

"And stand in the bread line? Now? Along with--those others?" A little smile twisted her lips. "I should look handsome doing that."

"But surely----"

His tone was beginning to be puzzled. So was his expression. Ikey ascertained this by allowing a glance to brush past him.

[Illustration: "'HOW DO YOU SUPPOSE I FEEL, BEING IN THIS POSITION--TO YOU?'"]

Suddenly he had changed his position. He was beside her on the ground, facing her, staring her out of countenance.

"We may as well get the clear of this right now----"

"It is needlessly clear to me, Mr. Hammond."

"But not to me. In the first place----"

"I will not trouble you----"

"It is no trouble. In the first place, has that fellow followed you, spoken to you before?"

"Never--never like that."

She wondered whether he had noticed her unsuccessful effort to rise and put an end to the interview.

"Do you know who he is?"

"He is the junior member of the firm I work for."

"_What!_ Well, I _am_ glad I smashed him." Then he added quickly, "This, of course, puts an end to your going there, at once. You've been at it too long anyway. It's stopped being a joke, and as a pose----"

"'Pose.'"

The intonation was subtle. A moment's bewilderment, and he burst out, "You're not doing this because you--_have_ to?"

"That--or something."

"But--but--Good Lord, child! Where is your money?"

With pomp and ceremony--but languidly withal, for her head was beginning to ache, and she wanted desperately to cry--she laid her purse in his hand. But she did not look at him.

The big hand closed over the flat little thing impatiently.

"I am referring to your bank account."

"And by what right----"

"We'll settle that later. The banks have opened up again----"

"That's all I have."

"But what has become--You're not going to faint?"

"No."

"Then what has become----"

Quite against her will she was beginning to find herself faintly amused. Of all pigheaded, impertinent people, this individual with whom she had hardly had more than five minutes' conversation, except at meal times during the past six weeks, was certainly the worst.

"I really must know, Miss Stanton, what has become----"

"I gave it away."

"You--gave it--_away_!" Italics could never do justice to his intonation. He was staring at her as though he considered her demented. "To whom?" came his indignant question.

After all, why not tell him? It was none of his business; and he was desperately impertinent; but she was desperately forlorn; and, though it could not better the situation to talk about it, it might better her feelings.

She slipped farther down against her rock; and he bent forward, listening intently.

"I gave it to--a relative. She was living with me at the time of the fire. We had only just come up from Los Angeles--because I wanted to--I had some property here; all my income came from it; and I felt I ought to know more about it--in case anything happened. And after the earthquake she acted as though I had led her up to the--jaws of death--and pushed her in--and later she was so afraid of typhoid--and everything. And so--at last, when the banks opened up again--I gave her all the money I had in the bank--and she went East right away--and I stayed here."

"With nothing?"

"I had fifty dollars. I was doing relief work at the Presidio, waiting for the vaults to cool off--I had a lot of paper money in a box there--and for the insurance companies to pay--and for the man who looked after my affairs to get well: he'd been hurt in the earthquake. But he didn't get well: he had a stroke, instead, and died. And his partner--they were lawyers--went away; all their books and papers and everything had been burnt up, and he didn't seem to think he could ever straighten things out; and when the vaults were opened, the paper money I had in the box was all dust--and the insurance companies haven't paid."

She shrugged her shoulders delicately over the situation, already disgusted with herself at having descended to disclosing her private affairs to a stranger.

Meanwhile, "So that's it," the stranger was saying. "I've wondered a lot."

"You needn't have troubled."

"No trouble," he blandly assured her. "Houghton always was an ass"--(Houghton was the younger lawyer. How had he known? the girl wondered)--"lighting out for Goldfield when he ought to be here, straightening out his clients' business. And so you went to work on some beggarly salary, instead of seeing about having your property put in shape again. Why didn't you lease, or----"

"I couldn't find out where it was," she retorted, furious. "I'd only been here a week when the fire came; and not for years before that."

----"and not put yourself in a position where you get insulted by some little scrub who isn't fit for you to walk on.--Are you going to faint?"

"No."

"Then what's the matter?" inquired the clod at her side.

"Nothing," she fibbed promptly. How different this creature was from Bixler McFay! Bixler had never pried into her private affairs, or evinced an interest in her possessions, or insisted on answers she did not wish to give, or pursued topics she did not care for. Bixler had none of the bluntness, the pigheadedness, the brutality of this--but then, there was no comparing the two. Only, she had vowed not to think of Bixler any more. He was not worth it.

"Nothing's the matter with me," she said. "Only, when I got back to the boarding-house after--after downtown to-day, the landlady said I'd have to pay sixty a month or leave at once, and--and she hadn't saved any lunch for me, and----"

"And you've been eating----"

He looked at the candy-bag and the morsel of bun with horror.

"I thought they'd cheer me up," Ikey murmured meekly, "but they've made me feel--kind of queer."

"That settles it." The big hand came down forcefully upon his knee. "We'll get the thickest steak you ever laid your eyes on in about two minutes. But first--we'll get married."

"What!"

III

What happened after that Ikey could never clearly remember. Bits of the ensuing conversation came back to her, memories of the sickening rage, the stupefying bewilderment that possessed her, and the exhaustion that followed. But order there was none. And she was sure she never got the whole of it.

At one stage in the proceedings she had observed in a haughty voice that she did not care to have his sympathy--or pity--take that form.

"Oh, it's not that," he assured her pleasantly; "but I'm tired of knocking around the world alone. I need an anchor. I think you"--he looked at her impersonally, but politely--"would make a good anchor."

"You mean you want me to reform you!"

He smiled a careful smile.

"No-o. I don't feel the need of reforming. There's nothing the matter with me----"

"How lovely to have such a high opinion of oneself."

"Yes. Isn't it? But as I was saying----"

At another stage she tried to take refuge behind the usual platitude: she did not love him.

He considered this--at ease before her, his hands in his pockets.

"Well, when it comes to that, I don't love you, either"--Ikey gasped--"but I don't consider that that makes any difference."

Another break.

Then, "What'll you do, if you don't?" he had asked her in a businesslike manner. "You're just on the verge of a breakdown"--She knew it; and his tone of conviction did not add to her sense of security--"Another scene like to-day's would upset you completely. You say you have no friends or relatives here; and there's no one you want to go to away from here. And besides, I can look after you a great deal better than you can look after yourself."

There must have been much arguing after that. There must have; for she had not the slightest intention of being disposed of in this medieval fashion. But in the midst of some determined though shaky sentence of hers, he had said quite kindly and finally that they need not discuss the matter any further--besides, she had to have a good stiff lunch right off--and had piloted her carefully, but with no over-powering air of devotion, out of the empty lots, around the corner, and into an automobile.

"It was all the fault of that wretched beefsteak," mourned Ikey an hour or two later. "If I'd only had it before, it never would have happened--never. I shall always have a grudge against it. What am I to do now?"

The automobile had conveyed them smoothly, first, to a clergyman's, of all people; next, to a restaurant; then, to the boarding-house, where her few belongings had found their way into a telescope basket; and now it was conveying them through the bedraggled outskirts of the city into the country beyond.

A hatchet-faced chauffeur was manipulating things in front; while the unspeakable man in gray sat unemotionally beside her in the tonneau and looked the other way.

"What am I to do now?" The bewildered girl found no answer to the one question of her mind. "Why don't you faint?" she asked herself severely. "Why don't you faint? If you had an idea of helping me out of this pickle, you'd do it at once, and never come to at all, and then have brain fever. It's the only decent solution. Instead of that, here you are, feeling--actually comfortable."

She stared ahead of her with miserable eyes.

"It was all that miserable beefsteak. The thing must have been six inches thick. Beast; why couldn't he have taken me to the restaurant first? Then I'd never have gone to the clergyman's. And that license. Where did he get it? We never stopped for one--he just pulled it out of his pocket, as though it had been a handkerchief. Ikey, you're married, _married_--do you quite understand?--to a man who wears ready-made clothes and doesn't love you and lives in an attic boarding-house bed-room. And what is he doing with this automobile? And what is his business? Oh, he's probably a chauffeur; and he's borrowed his employer's bubble; and this other chauffeur in front's his best friend and ashamed of him on account of the beefsteak business. He'd better be. But what shall I say to him? What shall I _say_?--Oh--h"--heaven-sent inspiration--"I'll say nothing at all. I will be--so different."

On and on and on went the machine. The girl closed her eyes upon the dusty, dun-colored landscape.

"Serves me right for turning over my bank account to Cousin Mary and--and----"

She had fallen asleep, propped up in her corner of the machine--worn out by this climax to the weeks that had gone before.

The man at her side turned and looked at her. His face no longer wore its placidly and conventionally polite expression.

IV

"The thirteenth move. Didn't I _say_ it would be unlucky!"

Ikey had fled to the garden, letter in hand, to review the situation. The low clouds threatened rain. But what did that matter? The house stifled her with its large, low, mannish rooms and continued reminder of Arthur Hammond; and she had to think--think--think everything out from the very beginning.

That first evening--when she wakened in the dusk at his side in the automobile and stared bewildered at the dim outline of the low, rambling brown house tucked away among shrubbery under a load of vines--how quick he had been to reassure her, to explain that a friend of his, who had expected to come here with his bride, had had to go to Mexico instead and had asked him to occupy the bungalow until their return. A woman and a Chinaman went with the place; and she would have the run of a large garden. She could get rested there; and he could go to and from town every day.

And the days that followed--how careful he had been; how matter-of-fact and unemotional; never touching her; never making any sudden motion towards her; never referring to that short ten minutes at the clergyman's; never going near the two rooms the respectable English housekeeper had conducted her to that first evening.

"Almost as though he were trying to tame a bird," she had thought half whimsically, after the first days, when the feeling of weariness and fright had worn down and a great relief and great thankfulness had taken its place, that she should never see the boarding-house again with its sneering, insulting landlady, or the office where that man with the eager, shifty, cruel little eyes held rule.

And so she had set herself about it, resolutely, though bewildered, to be an anchor to this big, unemotional young man who had so suddenly come out of the background of her existence and was occupying all possible space immediately behind the footlights.

She did not at all know what an anchor did, or said, or how it acted. But the very perplexity for some reason or other sent her spirits sky-high. And she pottered about the garden with him, and whizzed about the country in the automobile,--it belonged to the same friend who wanted him to look after the place,--and poked about the queer, rambling house, content to see no one else and talk to no one else and amazed at herself that this should be so.

Only once had he made any reference to their situation, when he suggested that it might be as well under the circumstances for her to call him Arthur.

"I shall never call you Arthur. Never," she told him hotly. "I loathe the name. Always have. It sounds so deadly respectable."

"You don't care for respectability?" His tone was _so_ affable.

Ikey considered. "It may have advantages, in some cases. But----"

"Then what am I to be called?"

She might have retorted that she should call him nothing at all: he never addressed her by any name. Instead, she answered, "Boobles."

"Boobles?"

"Boobles," she repeated firmly. And then came laughter. Ikey's rages had a way of breaking up in inconvenient bursts of hilarity these days.

But what difference did that make now? What difference did anything make?

"I don't see," Ikey said to herself desperately, "what makes me so stupid. I'm afflicted with chronic mental nearsightedness. Most distressing. This is really a tragedy I'm mixed up in--a tragedy. And tragedy's a thing I never cared for."

She collapsed miserably on a bench and stared at the letter.

"It's queer how tragedy and going to sea give you the same feeling."

It was not pity--oh, no--that had made him want to marry her. And it was not love. And it was not because he needed an anchor. Not he. He was not that kind. It was simply because she was his opportunity. Yes; that was the word. And she had never suspected.

Not that afternoon in the vacant lot, when he had inquired so exhaustingly as to her bank account.

Not the next week, when he appeared from town in the middle of the afternoon, all unheralded and paler than ordinary, with papers to sign, and the exhilarating news that the insurance companies had paid up, and a new bank-book with her name and comforting fat figures in it.

How desperately glad she had been over that. For hot shame possessed her at her appearance--shabby clothes and hardly any of them, when his ready-made dust-colored garments had immediately been replaced by the well-fitting blue serge that was her special weakness in masculine attire. She had invested heavily in frills and slowly regained her self-respect.

And not when he had appeared with a list of her property--how had he come by that list?--stating that he had made arrangements to lease certain pieces and rebuild at once on the others, and asking her approval of the final arrangements.

She had not suspected him then, either, idiot that she was. She had been too busy being rested, being thankful, being happy in the big garden, tucked away from the people who had failed her and the ghastly city and the memory of its great disaster.

She turned to the letter again. Bixler McFay had always written a good letter. This time he quite surpassed himself.

Heart-broken, unreconciled; his hopes shipwrecked; his faith destroyed. How could she have treated him so? She had been practically engaged to him; and she had left him a prey to every horrible emotion at a time when one word would have put his mind at rest. No clew as to her whereabouts by which he could trace her.

She passed that over with her little crooked, sarcastic smile. She had telegraphed and written both--and the second letter had been registered. He had probably forgotten that little fact. But it was of little consequence now. The sting lay in what followed.

And then what did he learn? the letter inquired. That a man he supposed to be his friend, a fellow he had met daily in Arizona for a couple of months at a time, had systematically pumped him about her; had taken means of ascertaining her financial status, and, recognizing her as his opportunity (that was where the word came from) had rushed off to San Francisco, married her hand over fist, and launched himself as a capitalist--on her capital. And she had allowed it.

The girl dropped the pages in her lap. Her little fist came down on top of them.

"It's a despicable letter," she told herself hotly. "And what he thinks to gain by it, I don't know. He just wants to make trouble.--And he has," she breathed with a downward sigh.

The question was, what to do now. And pride stood at her elbow and pointed out the only course.

This Arthur Hammond, this big, quiet, self-contained, efficient, indifferent young man--whose opportunity she was--must never know that she knew, or, knowing, cared.

That was the only solution. Pride forbade a scene--on his account; on hers; on Bixler McFay's; on everybody's, when it came to that. No one should know--anything.

"After a while I shall get quite old and pin-cushiony," she assured herself, "and pricks won't prick; and nothing will matter. I must be quite affable, and quite indifferent, and always polite--for women are only rude to men they care about." Her lips trembled. "It's all happened before, hundreds of times to hundreds of women--and money is very interesting to men--and there's no reason why this shouldn't happen to you, Ikey, dear--and a hundred of years from now it won't make any difference anyway.

"But I'll never tell him anything again----"

For latterly she had told him many things about herself--young lonesomenesses that nothing could dispel; family hunger for brothers and sisters and all the ramifications of a home; and, half unconsciously, her utter content with the present. She turned hot at the thought of it all.

"But one thing I won't stand." She jumped up and made for the house. "He shan't have my photograph on his dressing-table."

She had seen it there one day on passing his open door, and had wondered, wide-eyed, how he came by it--it was one she had had taken in the East--and had felt unaccountably shy at the thought of asking him about it.

She tore into the house, to get it, to destroy it, to tear it into tiny bits, and trample upon it--at once, without a moment to lose--when, rushing up the porch steps, she collided with the one person of all others she least expected to see.

V

Late afternoon. The house was very still. Outside, the rain was falling, falling, and the shrubs bent under their burden of shining drops. Inside, the fire crackled and whispered and the girl lay in the big armchair and looked around the room.

The fireplace; the big, rich rugs; the dark paneling; the fine, unemotional pictures--no wonder the whole place had reminded her of Arthur Hammond. She ought to have known. She ought to have known.

She heard his step in the hall. His door banged, once; twice; again. Then, his voice, asking Eliza some question, and the murmur of the housekeeper's reply.

Then he came in.

She did not speak or move, and his, "Good-evening" was presently followed by the easy question: "What's the matter?"

Then she turned on him.

"Is it true that this house belongs to you?"

A pause. Then he answered slowly,

"Yes."

"And the grounds?"

"Yes."

"And the automobile--is yours?"

"Yes."

He stood quietly watching her. She knew it, though she did not look at him. She took a deep breath.

"Those insurance companies have not paid," she said in a stifled voice. "You told me they had. You--you gave me--Where did all that money come from I've been spending?"

"Well, I suppose originally it was mine."

"Then it's true you are a millionaire?"

"Ye-es. Just about, I guess."

"And my property--all those buildings that burnt up were mortgaged and--and I couldn't have rebuilt--and everybody knew it--except me. The money that's putting them up again----"

"I arranged about that. But what difference does it make?"

"What did you do it for?"

"I thought you'd feel better to have an income again--and on account of other people, too. It made me hot to have you treated as though you were--just anybody at all--simply because your income happened to be short for a time. And--and I thought you'd rather have it that way than take it from me--at the first," he ended lamely.

She jumped up and confronted him, white with rage.

"How dared you do that? How dared you? How do you suppose I feel, being in this position--to you?"

"I hope you don't feel at all. And besides--But how did you find out about this?"