Little Lost Sister Part 45

"No, John," Grogan spoke deliberately. "You can't kill off a great and righteous movement by choking a few newspapers. The newspapers are powerful but their power has its limits. That girl has built a fire under this town that will rage in spite of you or me, or any one else. We can't stop it." Grogan rose. "That's all," he said, "I just dropped in to let you know how I feel about it. I thought I might be able to persuade you to get out of this fight. I guess, John, you're incorrigible. Well, no hard feelings."

Boland laughed. "Have a drink as you go out. You need something to cheer you up."

Grogan stopped. "Where's Harry?" he asked suddenly.

Boland flushed and his brow darkened.

"I don't know," he answered. "He and I have had a misunderstanding. He insists on marrying this Welcome girl. I don't know where he is and I don't care."

Grogan looked surprised. "John," he said, "I'd feel sorry for you if I didn't know you are lying. You do care. You can't conceal it. You care now, and worse you'll be caring more and more as time goes on. John, there are some things even you can't do."

"Well, Mike, what are they?"

"You can't beat Nature and you can't beat G.o.d. Good day."

In vain Boland scoffed at Grogan's sentimentalism. Again and again the words rose in his mind:

You can't beat Nature and you can't beat G.o.d.

The telephone rang. At the other end of the wire was that senator who had been at his conference. He asked Boland in a frightened voice if he had seen the papers, and then rang off.

Boland, alarmed, sent a boy in haste for the latest editions. The boy returned and spread them out on the desk before him.

Again the telephone rang. This time it was the clergyman who had partic.i.p.ated in the conference.

"Do you know that Mary Randall is out in a statement that she knows full details of what she calls the plot that resulted in the liberation of Martin Druce?" he demanded. "She says she will give the whole thing to the newspapers later. They are calling it in the streets below my study window now. Can't something be done to head off that statement?"

"What would you suggest? Why don't you see some of the editors?" Boland returned.

"Oh, that's impossible. My dear Boland, think of me. If my name should be published in this connection my reputation would be ruined."

Boland laughed savagely into the telephone and hung up the receiver, only to lift it again and hear another appeal for help, this from the publisher. He also feared ruin.

Another call. The politician whose power in a great political party was a by-word was barking at the other end of the wire. He accused Boland of destroying him.

"You've destroyed us," he yelped. "We're ruined. You've blundered."

Boland was beyond speech by this time. He seized his hat and rushed out into the street. Everywhere boys were shouting the extras. Several people who recognized him as he pa.s.sed paused to look after him curiously. He walked directly to his club.

A few men gathered there reading newspapers paused to look after him curiously, bowed coldly and at once resumed reading. Others seemed to avoid him. Boland felt that the newspapers' conspicuous comment on a certain financial magnate prominent in the electrical world in connection with the vice-scandal pointed at him too plainly for any one in Chicago to misunderstand.

He called his car and drove to his lonely home.

That night John Boland had a strange vision. He saw an eternity of pain and everlasting darkness. Through it the nightmare of his past life in strangely terrifying pictures pa.s.sed before his mind.

Scenes of his boyhood, the panorama of his young manhood, pictures of his battle for success against overwhelming forces in the great city. These pictures returned again and again, vivid in their relief. He saw again the death of his wife and the spirit of darkness that had then come to walk beside him, taunting him that now he was of necessity a cold, calculating, lonely, indomitable man, not knowing how to give to his only son fatherly tenderness.

This phase pa.s.sed. He seemed to enter into a larger world full of terrifying monsters, all of human form. One he recognized as Druce, another as Anson, a third as the senator whose seat he had helped to get.

And with them came a host of smaller figures, some struggling for life, and being crushed down into oblivion under his inexorable progress, some fighting with one another lest they too be torn down and crushed before him.

There were piteous girl faces and worn kindly faces of women and men and these had gone down before the others because they had not the power of resistance needed in this battle. It was a great whirling nightmare of continuous struggle.

And always walking by his side and seeming to grow stronger and more terrible as he tore his path through every obstacle strode his guide, the spirit of darkness.

At last they were alone, he and the spirit. And the spirit turned upon him and clutched him by the throat. He struggled in that grasp just as others had struggled in his own grasp, tortured and futile. And again those words from Grogan:

_"You can't beat Nature and you can't beat G.o.d!"_

Sweat stood out on John Boland's forehead.

He awoke with a mighty effort and sat upright. Around him was the emptiness and loneliness of the great bed-chamber. He saw with eyes wide open and brain alert a picture that looked like a reality and not a vision.

It was of a trembling man bent with age and loneliness.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE CALL OF ETERNITY

Elsie walked on and on eastward towards the lake. For a week she had been living alone in a room she had found near the park on the night that she left Harvey Spencer, telephoning in the drug-store. She had resolved that instant to go. It was to be "Now or never"--and she hurried away in an opposite direction from the hiding place--and from Druce.

The little money that he had put in her hands for drugs had somehow lasted her until now. She had been too ill to go out, her body racked with fever.

She was conscious that she must tomorrow find some work to do, for the landlady had twice asked her for the next week's rent. She looked in at the door of a laundry where a German woman was singing as she ironed children's dresses by the light of a flaring gas jet. It looked pleasant and peaceful in there. Perhaps that motherly woman would let her work with her. She would see tomorrow.

Elsie walked on towards the lake. She wanted to look at the water. She wanted to breathe the cool breath of great winds coming over the water to cool this fierce fire of shame and horror fevering her soul, flaming in her delicate cheeks.

Elsie came to the lake front at a wide high lot between two comfortable mansions on Sheridan Road.

Lights of homes shone through the night's darkness. Beams as of suns.h.i.+ne danced across the water.

A light from an upper chamber in the nearest home shone across her and streamed onward to the sands.

Elsie stood clasping and unclasping her little slender hands. The waters,--they could wash away that blow, the marks of that blow, wash away those words threatening death from one who had killed something in her heart. She realized that she was not afraid, facing the life to come.

She was afraid only to go on living in the same world with one who had taken her girlhood and her womanhood, afraid only of this frightful fever in her veins, of this poison that was consuming her.

Out yonder were the cool deeps of death--of death? What then? Far across the waves she saw a light.

It was as if her spirit went to meet the light, went in quest of the meaning of such a beacon light across black waters.

The light seemed to grow bigger and bigger as she gazed. By flinging her frail body into the dreadful surges could one reach peace and safety?

Faintly her spirit heard the answer of the pursuing hound of heaven, faintly she heard the call of eternity and of the Eternal Love.

The great black billows called to her. Elsie wondered what all the poor girls the waves toss up along the sh.o.r.es say to their Maker. She seemed to feel with them as she stood there, how the waves seize the bodies of the lost,--how the undertow takes them. Elsie put her hands to her face.