Big Timber Part 22

I've got my voice. I'm quite sure I can capitalize that. But I've got to go. Anything's better than this; anything that's clean and decent. I'd despise myself if I stayed on as your wife, feeling as I do. It was a mistake in the beginning, our marriage."

"Nevertheless," Fyfe said slowly, "I'm afraid it's a mistake you'll have to abide by--for a time. All that you say may be true, although I don't admit it myself. Offhand, I'd say you were simply trying to welch on a fair bargain. I'm not going to let you do it blindly, all wrought up to a pitch where you can scarcely think coherently. If you are fully determined to break away from me, you owe it to us both to be sure of what you're doing before you act. I'm going to talk plain. You can believe it and disdain it if you please. If you were leaving me for a man, a real man, I think I could bring myself to make it easy for you and wish you luck. But you're not. He's--"

"Can't we leave him out of it?" she demanded. "I want to get away from you both. Can you understand that? It doesn't help you any to pick _him_ to pieces."

"No, but it might help you, if I could rip off that swathing of idealization you've wrapped around him," Fyfe observed patiently. "It's not a job I have much stomach for however, even if you were willing to let me try. But to come back. You've got to stick it out with me, Stella. You'll hate me for the constraint, I suppose. But until--until things shape up differently--you'll understand what I'm talking about by and by, I think--you've got to abide by the bargain you made with me.

I couldn't force you to stay, I know. But there's one hold you can't break--not if I know you at all."

"What is that?" she asked icily.

"The kid's," he murmured.

Stella buried her face in her hands for a minute.

"I'd forgotten--I'd forgotten," she whispered.

"You understand, don't you?" he said hesitatingly. "If you leave--I keep our boy."

"Oh, you're devilish--to use a club like that," she cried. "You know I wouldn't part from my baby--the only thing I've got that's worth having."

"He's worth something to me too," Fyfe muttered. "A lot more than you think, maybe. I'm not trying to club you. There's nothing in it for me.

But for him; well, he needs you. It isn't his fault he's here, or that you're unhappy. I've got to protect him, see that he gets a fair shake.

I can't see anything to it but for you to go on being Mrs. Jack Fyfe until such time as you get back to a normal poise. Then it will be time enough to try and work out some arrangement that won't be too much of a hards.h.i.+p on him. It's that--or a clean break in which you go your own way, and I try to mother him to the best of my ability. You'll understand sometime why I'm showing my teeth this way."

"You have everything on your side," she admitted dully, after a long interval of silence. "I'm a fool. I admit it. Have things your way. But it won't work, Jack. This flare-up between us will only smoulder. I think you lay a little too much stress on Monohan. It isn't that I love him so much as that I don't love you at all. I can live without him--which I mean to do in any case--far easier than I can live with you. It won't work."

"Don't worry," he replied. "You won't be annoyed by me in person. I'll have my hands full elsewhere."

They rose and walked on to the house. On the porch Jack Junior was being wheeled back and forth in his carriage. He lifted chubby arms to his mother as she came up the steps. Stella carried him inside, hugging the st.u.r.dy, blue-eyed mite close to her breast. She did not want to cry, but she could not help it. It was as if she had been threatened with irrevocable loss of that precious bit of her own flesh and blood. She hugged him to her, whispering mother-talk, half-hysterical, wholly tender.

Fyfe stood aside for a minute. Then he came up behind her and stood resting one hand on the back of her chair.

"Stella."

"Yes."

"I got word from my sister and her husband in this morning's mail. They will very likely be here next week for a three days' stay. Brace up.

Let's try and keep our skeleton from rattling while they're here. Will you?"

"All right, Jack. I'll try."

He patted her tousled hair lightly and left the room. Stella looked after him with a surge of mixed feeling. She told herself she hated him and his dominant will that always beat her own down; she hated him for his amazing strength and for his unvarying sureness of himself. And in the same breath she found herself wondering if,--with their status reversed,--Walter Monohan would be as patient, as gentle, as self-controlled with a wife who openly acknowledged her affection for another man. And still her heart cried out for Monohan. She flared hot against the disparaging note, the unconcealed contempt Fyfe seemed to have for him.

Yet in spite of her eager defence of him, there was something ugly about that clash with Fyfe in the edge of the woods, something that jarred. It wasn't spontaneous. She could not understand that tigerish onslaught of Monohan's. It was more the action she would have expected from her husband.

It puzzled her, grieved her, added a little to the sorrowful weight that settled upon her. They were turbulent spirits both. The matter might not end there.

In the next ten days three separate incidents, each isolated and relatively unimportant, gave Stella food for much puzzled thought.

The first was a remark of Fyfe's sister in the first hours of their acquaintance. Mrs. Henry Alden could never have denied blood kins.h.i.+p with Jack Fyfe. She had the same wide, good-humored mouth, the blue eyes that always seemed to be on the verge of twinkling, and the same fair, freckled skin. Her characteristics of speech resembled his. She was direct, bluntly so, and she was not much given to small talk. Fyfe and Stella met the Aldens at Roaring Springs with the _Waterbug_. Alden proved a genial sort of man past forty, a big, loose-jointed individual whose outward appearance gave no indication of what he was professionally,--a civil engineer with a reputation that promised to spread beyond his native States.

"You don't look much different, Jack," his sister observed critically, as the _Waterbug_ backed away from the wharf in a fine drizzle of rain.

"Except that as you grow older, you more and more resemble the pater.

Has matrimony toned him down, my dear?" she turned to Stella. "The last time I saw him he had a black eye!"

Fyfe did not give her a chance to answer.

"Be a little more diplomatic, Dolly," he smiled. "Mrs. Jack doesn't realize what a rowdy I used to be. I've reformed."

"Ah," Mrs. Alden chuckled, "I have a vision of you growing meek and mild."

They talked desultorily as the launch thrashed along. Alden's profession took him to all corners of the earth. That was why the winter of Fyfe's honeymoon had not made them acquainted. Alden and his wife were then in South America. This visit was to fill in the time before the departure of a trans-Pacific liner which would land the Aldens at Manila.

Presently the Abbey-Monohan camp and bungalow lay abeam. Stella told Mrs. Alden something of the place.

"That reminds me," Mrs. Alden turned to her brother. "I was quite sure I saw Walter Monohan board a train while we were waiting for the hotel car in Hopyard. I heard that he was in timber out here. Is he this Monohan?"

Fyfe nodded.

"How odd," she remarked, "that you should be in the same region. Do you still maintain the ancient feud?"

Fyfe shot her a queer look.

"We've grown up, Dolly," he said drily. Then: "Do you expect to get back to G.o.d's country short of a year, Alden?"

That was all. Neither of them reverted to the subject again. But Stella pondered. An ancient feud? She had not known of that. Neither man had ever dropped a hint.

For the second incident, Paul Abbey dropped in to dinner a few days later and divulged a bit of news.

"There's been a shake-up in our combination," he remarked casually to Fyfe. "Monohan and dad have split over a question of business policy.

Walter's taking over all our interests on Roaring Lake. He appears to be going to peel off his coat and become personally active in the logging industry. Funny streak for Monohan to take, isn't it? He never seemed to care a hoot about the working end of the business, so long as it produced dividends."

Lastly, Charlie Benton came over to eat a farewell dinner with the Aldens the night before they left. He followed Stella into the nursery when she went to tuck Jack Junior in his crib.

"Say, Stella" he began, "I have just had a letter from old man Lander; you remember he was dad's legal factotum and executor."

"Of course," she returned.

"Well, do you recall--you were there when the estate was wound up, and I was not--any mention of some worthless oil stock? Some California wildcat stuff the governor got bit on? It was found among his effects."

"I seem to recall something of the sort," she answered. "But I don't remember positively. What about it?"

"Lander writes me that there is a prospect of it being salable. The company is reviving. And he finds himself without legal authority to do business, although the stock certificates are still in his hands. He suggests that we give him a power of attorney to sell this stuff. He's an awfully conservative old chap, so there must be a reasonable prospect of some cash, or he wouldn't bother. My hunch is to give him a power of attorney and let him use his own judgment."

"How much is it worth?" she asked.

"The par value is forty thousand dollars," Benton grinned. "But the governor bought it at ten cents on the dollar. If we get what he paid, we'll be lucky. That'll be two thousand apiece. I brought you a blank form. I'm going down with you on the _Bug_ to-morow to send mine. I'd advise you to have yours signed up and witnessed before a notary at Hopyard and send it too."

"Of course I will," she said.