The Air Trust Part 12

Even while the girl's cry of "Fore!" was echoing across the green, the ball struck earth, ricochetted and sped on, away, across the turf, till it came to rest not twenty yards from the putting green of the first hole.

"Wheeoo!" whistled Waldron. "Some drive. I guess you're going to make good your threat, today, Kate of my heart!"

The smile she flashed at him showed that her resentment had, for the moment, been forgotten.

"Come on, Wally, now let's see what _you_ can do," said she, starting off down the slope, while her meek caddy tagged at a respectful distance.

Waldron, thus adjured, teed up and swung at the ball. But the Scotch had by no means steadied his aim. He foozled badly and broke his pet driver, into the bargain. The steel head of it flew farther even than the ball, which moved hardly ten yards.

"d.a.m.n!" he muttered, under his breath, choosing another stick and glancing with real irritation at Catherine's lithe, splendidly poised figure already some distance down the slope.

His second stroke was more successful, nearly equalling hers. But her advantage, thus early won, was not destined to be lost again. And as the game proceeded, Waldron's temper grew steadily worse and worse.

Thus began, for these two people, an hour destined to be fraught with such pregnant developments--an hour which, in its own way, vitally bore on the great loom now weaving warp and woof of world events.

CHAPTER XI.

THE END OF TWO GAMES.

Trivial events sometimes precipitate catastrophies. It has been said that had James MacDonald not left the farm gate open, at Hugomont, Waterloo might have ended otherwise. So now, the rupture between Catherine Flint and Maxim Waldron was precipitated by a single unguarded oath.

It was at the ninth hole, down back of the Terrace Woods bunker.

Waldron, heated by exercise and the whiskey he had drunk, had already dismissed the caddies and had undertaken to carry the clubs, himself, hoping--man-fas.h.i.+on--to steal a kiss or two from Catherine, along the edge of the close-growing oaks and maples. But all his plans went agley, for Catherine really made good and beat him, there, by half a dozen strokes; and as her little sphere, deftly driven by the putting-iron gripped in her brown, firm hands, rolled precisely over the cropped turf and fell into the tinned hole, the man e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed a perfectly audible "_h.e.l.l!_"

She stood erect and faced him, with a singular expression in those level gray eyes--eyes the look of which could allure or wither, could entice or command.

"Wally," said she, "did you swear?"

"I--er--why, yes," he stammered, taken aback and realizing, despite his chagrin, how very poor and unsportsmanlike a figure he was cutting.

"I don't like it," she returned. "Not a little bit, Wally. It isn't game, and it isn't manly. You must respect me, now and always. I can't have profanity, and I won't."

He essayed lame apologies, but a sudden, hot anger seemed to have possessed him, in presence of this free, independent, exacting woman--this woman who, worst of all, had just beaten him at the game of all games he prided himself on playing well. And despite his every effort, she saw through the veil of sheer, perfunctory courtesy; and seeing, flushed with indignation.

"Wally," she said in a low, quiet tone, fixing a singular gaze upon him, "Wally, I don't know what to make of you lately. The other night at Idle Hour, you hardly looked at me. You and father spent the whole evening discussing some business or other--"

"Most important business, my dear girl, I do a.s.sure you," protested Waldron, trying to steady his voice. "Most vitally--"

"No matter about that," she interposed. "It could have been abridged, a trifle. I barely got six words out of you, that evening; and let me tell you, Wally, a woman never forgets neglect. She may forgive it; but forget it, never!"

"Oh, well, if you put it that way--" he began, but checked himself in time to suppress the cutting rejoinder he had at his tongue's end.

"I do, and it's vital, Wally," she answered. "It's all part and parcel of some singular kind of change that's been coming over you, lately, like a blight. You haven't been yourself, at all, these few days past.

Something or other, I don't know what, has been coming between us.

You've got something else on your mind, beside me--something bigger and more important to you than I am--and--and--"

He pulled out his gold cigar-case, chose and lighted a cigar to steady his nerve, and faced her with a smile--the worst tactic he could possibly have chosen in dealing with this woman. Supremely successful in handling men, he lacked finesse and insight with the other s.e.x; and now that lack, in his moment of need, was bringing him moment by moment nearer the edge of catastrophe.

"I don't like it at all, Waldron," she resumed, again. "You were late, the other night, in taking me to the Flower Show. You were late, today, for our appointment here; and the ten minutes I gave you to get ready in, stretched out to twenty before you--"

He interrupted her with a gesture of uncontrollable vexation.

"Really, my dear Kate," he exclaimed, "if you--er--insist on holding me to account for every moment--"

"You've been drinking, too, a little," she kept on. "And you know I detest it! And just now, when I beat you in a square game, you so far forgot yourself as to swear. Now, Waldron--"

"Oh, puritanical, eh?" he sneered, ignoring the danger signals in her eyes. Even yet there might have been some chance of avoiding s.h.i.+pwreck, had he heeded those twin beacons, humbled himself, made amends by due apology and promised reformation. For though Catherine never had truly loved this man, some years older than herself and of radically different character, still she liked and respected him, and found him--by his very force and dominance--far more to her taste than the insipid hangers-on, sons of fortune or fortune-hunters, who, like the sap-brained Van Slyke, made up so great a part of her "set."

So, all might yet have been amended; but this was not to be. Never yet had "Tiger" Waldron bowed the neck to living man or woman. Dominance was his whole scheme of life. Though he might purr, politely enough, so long as his fur was smoothed the right way, a single backward stroke set his fangs gleaming and unsheathed every sabre-like claw. And now this woman, his fiancee though she was, her beauty dear to him and her charm most fascinating, her fortune much desired and most of all, an alliance with her father--now this woman, despite all these considerations, had with a few incisive words ruffled his temper beyond endurance.

So great was his agitation that, despite his strongest instinct of saving, he flung away the scarcely-tasted cigar.

"Kate," he exclaimed, his very tongue thick with the rage he could not quell, "Kate, I can't stand this! You're going too far. What do you know of men's work and men's affairs? Who are you, to judge of their times of coming and going, their obligations, their habits and man of life? What do _you_ understand--?"

"It's obvious," she replied with glacial coldness, "that I don't understand _you_, and never have. I have been living in a dream, Wally; seeing you through the gla.s.s of illusion; not reality. After all, you're like all men--just the same, no different. Idealism, self-sacrifice, con true n.o.bility of character, where are these, in you? What is there but the same old selfishness, the same innate masculine conceit and--"

"No more of this, Kate!" cried the financier, paling a little. "No more!

I can't have it! I won't--it's impossible! You--you don't understand, I tell you. In your narrow, untrained, woman's way, you try to set up standards for me; try to judge me, and dictate to me. Some old puritanical streak in you is cropping out, some blue-law atavism, some I know not what, that rebels against my taking a drink--like every other man. That cries out against my letting slip a harmless oath--again, like every other man that lives and breathes. Every man, that is, who _is_ a man, a real man, not a dummy! If you've been mistaken in me, how much more have I, in you! And so--"

"And so," she took the very words from his pale lips, "we've both been mistaken, that's all. No, no," she forbade him with raised hand, as he would have interrupted with protests. "No, you needn't try to convince me otherwise, now. A thousand volumes of speeches, after this, couldn't do it. An hour's insight into the true depths of a man's character--yes, even a moment's--perfectly suffices to show the truth. You've just drawn the veil aside, Wally, for me, and let me look at the true picture. All that I've known and thought of you, so far, has been sham and illusion.

Now, I _know_ you!"

"You--you don't, Catherine!" he exclaimed, half in anger, half contrition, terrified at last by the imminent break between them, by the thought of losing this rich flower from the garden of womanhood, this splendid financial and social prize. "I--I've done wrong, Kate. I admit it. But, truly--"

"No more," said she, and in her voice sounded a command he knew, at last, was quite inexorable. "I'm not like other women of our set, perhaps. I can't be bought and sold, Wally, with money and position. I can't marry a man, and have to live with him, if he shows himself petty, or small, or narrow in any way. I must be free, free as air, as long as I live. Even in marriage, I must be free. Freedom can only come with the union of two souls that understand and help and inspire each other. Anything else is slavery--and worse!"

She shuddered, and for a moment turned half away from him, as, now contrite enough for the minute, he stood there looking at her with dazed eyes. For a second the idea came to him that he must take her in his arms, there in the edge of the woods, burn kisses on her ripe mouth, win her back to him by force, as he had won all life's battles. He would not, could not, let this prize escape him now. A wave of desire surged through his being. He took a step toward her, his trembling arms open to seize her lithe, seductive body. But she, retreating, held him away with repellant palms.

"No, no, no!" she cried. "Not now--never that, any more! I must be free, Wally--free as air!"

She raised her face toward the vast reaches of the sky, breathed deep and for a moment closed her eyes, as though bathing her very soul in the sweet freedom of the out-of-doors.

"Free as air!" she whispered. "Let me go!"

He started violently. Her simile had struck him like a lash.

"Free--as what?" he exclaimed hoa.r.s.ely. "As _air_? But--but there's no such freedom, I tell you! Air isn't free any more--or won't be, soon! It will be everything, anything but free, before another year is gone! Free as air? You--you don't understand! Your father and I--we shall soon own the air. Free as air? Yes, if you like! For that--that means you, too, must belong to me!"

Again he sought to take her, to hold her and overmaster her. But she, now wide-eyed with a kind of sudden terror at this latest outbreak, this seeming madness on his part, which she could nowise fathom or comprehend, retreated ever more and more, away from him.

Then suddenly with a quick effort, she stripped off the splendid, blazing diamond from her finger, and held it out to him.

"Wally," said she, calm now and quite herself again, "Wally, let's be friends. Just that and nothing more. Dear, good, companionable friends, as we used to be, long years ago, before this madness seized us--this chimera of--of love!"