Chapter XV
In the meanwhile, Mr. Ladd, closely buttoned up and walking to keep himself warm, restlessly paced the drive-way, awaiting Phyllis’ return. At every nearing footfall he would stiffen and stop, and his throat would contract with something very much like trepidation. His anger was all gone. In its place was not only contrition and self-reproach for having shown her that letter, but a very real alarm of the situation he had precipitated. He had been inconceivably stupid—inconceivably unkind and blundering. He had driven the girl straight into the fellow’s arms, and had now doubled what he had to undo. Looking back on it he seemed to have said everything he ought not to have said; done everything he ought not to have done. It was a case for frankness, tenderness, and considerate understanding. Hurry, too, in such matters, was the root of all evil. Romance, like faith, grew with persecution. Gad, if she really thought herself in love with this egregious actor, he would put his pride in his pocket, invite him to the house, pretend to like him, and thus earn the right to stipulate for conventions and a long engagement. No cruel father here, but a cool man of the world, craftily leaving it to others to tittle-tattle, to disparage, and best of all to deride with a laughter infinitely more effective than the sternest and angriest of arguments. Yes, that was the program and he must put an iron hold upon himself to see that he did not swerve from it by a hair.
He ran forward in the dark as he heard some one coming, and recognized Phyllis dimly against the lighted street behind.
“Phyllis!” he cried, “Phyllis!” and he caught her hand and held it. Her touch, even more than her silence, told him how estranged they were. His agitation paralyzed his tongue; he hardly knew how to begin; he murmured under his breath, “Forgive me, forgive me”; and then, louder, with an uncontrollable resentment that flashed up in spite of all his self-warnings: “Don’t deny it—you’ve been to him!”
“I wasn’t going to deny it, Papa.”
“Where? At the theater?”
“Yes.”
“You went there alone—not even a maid with you? Have you parted with all sanity?”
His tone was overbearing, harsh, scornful. Alas, for his good and wise intentions! In the impact of two stubborn natures, each rousing in the other an invincible antagonism, there could be no tenderness, no consideration. Each was fighting with the flag nailed to the mast; she for Adair, he for his daughter.
“It was your doing, Papa. I had no alternative.”
“Oh, what a lie! I’d sooner have gone with you myself, however bitter or humiliating it might have been for me.”
The picture of such an escort to such a rendezvous made her laugh in spite of herself. It was not the kind of laughter to soften or turn away wrath. To Ladd it seemed heartlessness itself.
“It’s unbelievable,” he broke out, “my God, Phyllis, what am I to say to you? Isn’t the man self-condemned on the face of it—with his closed cabs, and underhanded meetings, and now stripping you of every rag of reputation by letting you come to him at his theater? And what do you mean by the theater, anyhow?—His dressing-room, of course?”
“Yes.”
Her answer wrung a groan from him.
“Phyllis, Phyllis!” he exclaimed. Then in an altered voice, full of irritated reasonableness, he went on: “Do you realize that we could have had the same—well, disagreement—over that Pastor fellow you were engaged to? Wouldn’t you have been just as wilful in his case—just as sure? Wouldn’t it have been the same with Baron von Piller if I had objected violently at the time you engaged yourself to him? Look back on both these affairs. You aren’t altogether a fool. Mayn’t this be a third mistake?”
She seized his hand in both her own, and squeezed it with all her strength.
“It’s because I love him like that! Not the love that comes of compliments, of attentions and flowers, but that!—But of course you don’t understand—you can’t.”
Mr. Ladd ignored this slight on his more limited knowledge, though his lip curled sardonically under his mustache.
“I am more concerned in how he loves you,” he said. “He’s acting like a cad, and you know it.”
“Papa!”
His voice outrang hers. “Love,” he cried, with piercing contempt, “that kind of love is the commonest thing there is. There isn’t a drab on the streets who hasn’t tasted it to the dregs. God help you when you wake up, and see this man as he is—schemer, scoundrel, blackguard. Do you think I don’t know? Do you think I haven’t run across hundreds? Do you think I’m going to let an adventurer like that get his hooks into you, and drag you down into his own filthy mire? You’re the only thing I have in life; I live for you; there isn’t an hour of the day when you’re not in my mind. You can’t dismiss all this at the nod of a stranger. It carries its obligations—for you, too; the obligation of more than twenty years; not for feeding and clothing you, I don’t mean anything so banal—but the deeper one of a love that has kept you warm and happy—that has grown without your knowing it to be a very part of you, as it is all of me.”
Had he stopped there the harm might still have been undone. But with a perversity inexplicable at that moment when the tide had turned, and responsive tears were streaming down those girlish cheeks, he had a sudden outburst of rancor that destroyed everything he had gained.
“To think that anybody named Cyril Adair—my God, Cyril Adair, with its suggestion of sticky sweetness, and tinsel, and footlights, and mock heroics—could come between two sane, grown-up people like you and me!—Cyril Adair!” he repeated, and laughed mirthlessly.
There was nothing he could have urged against Adair that could have hurt her more. A young and devoted woman can always find excuses for her lover’s past. It belongs to a time before her little hand had been stretched out to save him, before she had brought hope and light to one who had never known either, and had consequently—and naturally—abandoned himself to despair. With a feeling surely divine, and often justified by results, she never doubts her ability to wash that black sheep to the fleecy whiteness of her own dainty wool. But poor Cyril’s name was a very different matter; it was worse in its pinchbeck and aristocratic pretensions, and school-girl-novel picturesqueness than the most crimson of sins. It would still be stamped on the luckless sheep after he had been whitened as white as snow—the Scarlet Letter of vulgarity, so to speak—affronting good taste on every hill-side. Nothing more showed the degree of Phyllis’ infatuation than that she had been able to tolerate this name; and now, to have it flung in her face, with an emphasis so sneering—the one taunt for which she had no answer—was more than she felt herself able to bear.
She drooped beside her father, realizing the futility of any further argument, and of a sudden so tired that the woes of the world seemed to be on her shoulders. Her voice, when at last she broke the silence, was weary, though with none of the weariness of surrender, but rather that of a settled and altogether sad determination.
“We seem to have said all there is to say—good night, Papa.”
He would have detained her, but she moved away from him, and preceded him into the house. He followed, respecting her wish to terminate the scene. He was weary, too, and no less willing to be alone. He had to think and to act, and much had to be done that night.
They met at breakfast as usual. She kissed him dutifully, and poured out his coffee as though this Wednesday morning was no different from any other Wednesday morning. They talked on indifferent subjects until the servants had left them. Then the suspended battle was renewed.
“My dear,” said Mr. Ladd, with an uncertain smile, “I am thinking of sending you on a visit to your Aunt Sarah’s. It will be better for both of us to stay apart for a time, and see matters with a little more calmness and—consideration for each other. There’s no sense in being over-hasty, and making momentous resolutions in this twinkling-of-an-eye sort of way. There’s lots of time—oceans of time. You may change, I may change—for I don’t set up to be inflexible, and neither do you. Yes, you’ll go to your Aunt Sarah’s, and then to Paris with her if you like, or Monte Carlo. I guess I can fix it up to the nines, even to a look-in at Paquin’s, and one of those expensive strolls down the Rue de La Paix. Go ahead—why not?”
“I’d rather stay here, Papa.”
“Phyllis, this is a request—a favor to me. I want you to.”
“When?”
“Why not the noon train? I’ve taken a drawing-room for you, and a berth for your maid—and Sarah’s expecting you.”
“You told her?”
He made no attempt to avoid the implication of her eyes.
“No,” he replied. “No, I don’t believe in roaring out your troubles over the long distance ’phone. It was enough to call it an impulse. With you, my dear, that is always a sufficient reason.”—They both laughed, and Mr. Ladd’s anxious cordiality redoubled at so favorable a symptom. “If it’s the real thing, Phyllis, time won’t hurt it.”
“It is the real thing, Papa.”
“But you will go?”
“No.”
“Phyllis, I insist.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s impossible.”
“You have to. You must.”
“I won’t!”
It is the terrible part of stereotyped situations that people will make use of the stereotyped expressions that go with them. Mr. Ladd was the kindest and most devoted father on earth, yet the venerable formula rose to his lips: “You defy me under my own roof?”
It of course forced out the stereotyped reply: “I can leave it.”
Mr. Ladd, in silence, looked at her long and steadily; then he bent his head. She saw nothing but the iron-gray hair; the stooping, dejected shoulders; the hand, lying as limp as dead, on the damask cloth.
“Papa?”
No answer.
“Papa?”
She ran to his side, all revolt gone, her only thought to comfort him. Her bare arms entwined themselves about his neck in a paroxysm of remorse; her bosom swelled; her voice was incoherent as she lavished her young tenderness upon him. It was a moment that would decide her life. Had her father left the initiative to her, had he been content to accept mutely these tokens of her surrender—he would have won, then and there, and nothing again would ever have come between them. But with blind stupidity he had to persevere with the intention their clash had interrupted.
“I will tell you my real reason for wanting you to get away,” he said. “It wasn’t what you thought at all—it was to spare you unnecessary pain. Last night I sent Reynolds, our best secret-service man, to New York with carte blanche to confer with the Pinkertons and ransack this fellow’s record from top to bottom. From what Reynolds told me he already knew—I mean what’s said down-town, I believe it will be a black one, so black that there won’t be any question about your giving him up—just on the facts brought out—facts that can not be disproved or contested. Reynolds—”
“But, Papa, I don’t understand. You are setting detectives to go back over his life, like a criminal? Detectives?”
“Yes.”
“But how dishonorable, how infamous!”
“Oh, it’s done every day; it’s common, my dear; if the man’s straight it can’t hurt him—but if he has anything to hide, why, we turn on the search-light, and find out what’s wrong.—It’s all done secretly; he won’t know; don’t worry about that.—I expect a full report in a few days, and would rather not have you here when I get it.”
“And do you think that’s fair or right, or anything but—fiendish?”
“How do you know he isn’t married, Phyllis?”—he shot this at her mercilessly. “How do you know anything except what he’s told you? You may be willing to believe him, and all that—but I’m your father, and I want to know, and by God, I’m going to know!”
“Papa, don’t!”
“Aha, you’re not very confident, are you?”
“He’s a man. I don’t doubt he’s been foolish, and bad, and fast, but to see it written down cold-bloodedly on sheets of paper is more than I can bear. I am willing to ignore that; I am willing to take him as he is now. Oh, Papa, a woman can forgive so much.”
“Yes, my dear, and a great deal that a father never could.”
“I beg you, Papa, I implore you to telegraph to them to stop.”
“It’s too late—besides it has to be done; I insist on it; I’m going to strip that man’s past to the bone.”
“Even if it costs you me? Even if this is the end of everything between us?”
“Fiddle-de-dee, these theatrics are unworthy of you! You’re going to take the noon train to Sarah’s, and behave yourself; and this business, however disagreeable to both of us, has got to go through.”
Her lips tightened mutinously. She was not a young woman who could be driven.
“I’ll stay here, or walk right out of your house—and you know where.”
“Then stay,” he cried, rising wrathfully, “and may God forgive you for the misery you are bringing down on me. I’m only trying to do what’s best, and you treat me as though I was one of that fellow’s cruel parents on the stage! It’s no time to mince matters, and I tell you straight out, Phyllis, he’s a blackguard and a scoundrel, and when you see the Pinkertons’ report, I guess you’ll go down on your knees and beg my pardon for your heartlessness and obstinacy.”
He glared at her, expecting a retort that would add fresh fuel to his anger, but she was silent, downcast, trembling. The answer she made was to herself, inaudible save to her anguished soul: “Oh, that Saturday night were here!”