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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-fashion—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 ejaculated a perfectly audible " Hell! "
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 assure 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 sex; 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 shipwreck, 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 fiancée 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 glass of illusion; not reality. After all, you're like all men—just the same, no different. Idealism, self-sacrifice, con true nobility 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 hoarsely. "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!"
As a bull charging, is struck to the heart by the sword of the matador, and stops in his tracks, motionless and dazed before he falls, so "Tiger" Waldron stopped, wholly stunned by this abrupt and crushing denouement.
For a moment, man and woman faced each other. Not a word was spoken. Catherine had no word to say; and Waldron, though his lips worked, could bring none to utterance. Then their eyes met; and his lowered.
"Good-bye," said she quietly. "Good-bye forever, as my betrothed. When we meet again, Wally, it will be as friends, and nothing more. And now, let me go. Don't come with me. I prefer to be alone. I'd rather walk, a bit, and think—and then go back quietly to the club-house, and so home, in my car. Don't follow me. Here—take this, and—good-bye."
Mechanically he accepted the gleaming jewel. Mechanically, like a man without sense or reason, he watched her walk away from him, upright and strong and lithe, voluptuous and desirable in every motion of that splendid body, now lost to him forever. Then all at once, entering a woodland path that led by a short cut back to the club-house, she vanished from his sight.
Vanished, without having even so much as turned to look at him again, or wave that firm brown hand.
Then, seeming to waken from his daze, "Tiger" laughed, a terrible and cruel laugh; and then he flung a frightful blasphemy upon the still June air; and then he dashed the wondrous diamond to earth, and stamped and dug it with a perfect frenzy of rage into the soft mold.
And, last of all, with lowered head and lips that moved in fearful curses, he crashed away into the woods, away from the path where the girl was, away from the club-house, away, away, thirsting for solitude and time to quell his passion, salve his wounded pride and ponder measures of terrible revenge.
The diamond ring, crushed into the earth, and the golf clubs, lying where they had fallen from the disputants' hands, now remained there as melancholy reminders of the double game—love and golf—which had so suddenly ended in disaster.