The Beloved Stranger

Chapter 12




Arla’s triumph was brief. She found Carter anything but a lover the next morning. He was surly and crabbed to her at breakfast, found fault with her attire and her makeup, told her her lips were too red for good taste, even went so far as to say that Miss Cameron never stained her fingernails. Arla felt as if she had been stabbed. She could scarcely finish her breakfast.

But because she had determined to make this marriage a success, she bore his criticism, even ignoring his reference to his other bride though the tears were not far away, and a smoldering fire burned in her eyes. Was this other girl to be held up to her as a paragon the rest of her days? Oh, he was cruel!

She studied his sullen face, his selfish lips, and saw these traits in him for the first time!

And she, by marrying him in that underhanded way, had forfeited a right to protest against such words. She could not flare out at him and tell him he had loved her enough to marry her and therefore he need not compare her with another. He had not married her by his own initiative; she had married him, and taken him as it were unaware, where he could not help himself.

The cold flamed into her face and then receded, leaving it deathly white and making the redness of her lips but the more startling!

Then when they went on deck, almost the first person he sighted was a man from whom he had borrowed largely but a few days before on the strength of his marriage into the Catherwood fortune.

Without explanation he dashed around a group of deck chairs, upsetting one in his haste, colliding with a man, and swinging around to the other side of the ship without any seeming reason at all.

Arla followed him breathlessly, trying not to appear to be running a race. She was nonplussed. What was the matter with Carter? She had never seen him act in such a crazy way.

When she at last came to a stop, panting at the secluded hiding place that he had selected, she watched him in dismay. His face was actually lowering.

“What in the world is the matter with you, Carter?” she asked, almost tenderly. She began to think perhaps all that had happened yesterday had unsettled his mind.

“Everything in the world is the matter with me!” he said in a harsh tone. “Everything terrible that could happen to a man in any position!”

Arla studied him, still with that troubled look in her eyes, knowing that he would presently explain himself. She had not been his secretary for some months without knowing his habits.

“That was Mr. Sheldon that we passed as we came up the companionway. Didn’t you recognize him?” He turned and glared at her as if she were responsible for Mr. Sheldon being on board.

“Sheldon? What Sheldon?” asked Arla in a pleasant tone. “I don’t know any Mr. Sheldon, do I?”

“No!” said Carter. “You don’t know him, socially of course, but it’s not many hours since you witnessed his signature on some papers in the office!”

He paused impressively.

Arla looked puzzled and waited again, but Carter was still trying to impress her. At such time he could take on a fairly ponderous look, though he was not a large man, by merely swelling up proudly and looking down at her.

“Well, what of it?” asked Arla half impatiently after she had waited a reasonable time for explanation.

“What of it? And you can say what of it! You who wrote out those papers for him to sign, you who heard the whole conversation and know that it was on the strength of my expectation of being able to raise a large sum in the near future that he loaned me the money I needed to finance—” He stopped abruptly, conscious that this very wedding trip was a part of the business he had to finance, the ring that sparkled on her finger, the pearls she had worn to the altar. He couldn’t quite tell her that! Even in his present state of mind, he couldn’t be as raw as that.

“Well—?” she said again almost haughtily, watching him narrowly. His whole attitude toward her, his very tone had become offensive.

“Well? No, there is nothing well about it!” he snapped. “That man is a friend of the Catherwoods. He knows the Catherwood lawyer intimately. And he knows Sher—he knows Miss Cameron by sight. I have been with her when we met him. Don’t you realize—? You can’t be so blind as not to know that it would be nothing short of disastrous for him to know what has happened! Why, it’s even conceivable that he might stop payment on that check now. He could radio a message to his bank, you know. And then I’d be in a worse hole than I’m in already. You know as well as I do.”

“Well, but he couldn’t possibly know what had happened from merely meeting us together on deck!” said Arla haughtily.

“Couldn’t he? You don’t think he’s sharp enough? Well, let me tell you he’s keen. How long do you think it would take him to cancel his agreement if he discovers that instead of marrying an heiress I am tied to a penniless secretary?”

The words cut to the quick! Arla caught her breath and set her lovely teeth sharply in her red underlip, trembling with humiliation and anger.

He cast a furtive glance at her and grew only the more hateful, realizing perhaps to what depths he had descended.

“Well, you needn’t cry-baby about that!” he said sharply. “You might as well understand what kind of a hole you’ve put me in!”

“I’ve put you in—!” said Arla fiercely. “I!”

“Yes, you!” said the man, now beyond all bounds of self-control. “I didn’t do it, did I? It was you who came to the Catherwood house fifteen minutes before the hour set for the wedding and got hysterics all over the place and drove me crazy so that I didn’t know what I was doing! It was you that staged a scene with Sherrill and got yourself married to me, wasn’t it? I didn’t know anything about it, did I? What could I do?”

There was an ominous silence while Arla struggled to control her voice. Presently she spoke in a tone of utter sadness as if she were removed from him by eons of time.

“Then all you told me last night was untrue!” she said. “Then you lied to me about your great love that you said you had for me!”

Suddenly the man grew red and shamed looking.

“I didn’t say it was a lie!” he said. “This has nothing to do with that!”

“No, but I did!” said Arla. “And it has everything to do with that! I went through agony and humiliation to save you from marrying a girl you did not love because I believed you still loved me, and had only fallen for her because you needed her money. I was trying to save you from yourself, to save our love that in the past has been so sweet and true. And this is what I get! You tell me I have put you in a hole! Well, I’m in the same hole! What do you think it is for me to be married to a man that talks that way? Do you think I’m enjoying a wedding trip like this?”

“Well, it was none of my doings!” said the man, shrugging his shoulders angrily. “I told you what kind of a fix I was in. I explained the whole matter to you, didn’t I?”

“Not until you had failed to get me to go out west on a vacation where I couldn’t find out about it until afterward! Not until your wedding invitations were about to come out,” said Arla steadily.

“Well, I tried to tell you before. I tried to let you know by my actions—!”

“Yes, you tried to be disagreeable to me!” said Arla. “I suppose I ought to have understood you were trying to cast me off like a worn-out garment. But I didn’t! I thought you were worried about your business. I forgave everything because—I—loved you!”

The man gave an angry exclamation.

“There you are bawling again! Oh, women! They do nothing but make trouble, and then they weep about it. A man is a fool to have anything to do with women!”

Arla lifted angry eyes.

“You would have talked that way to your paragon of a Sherrill Cameron, I suppose?” she said, dashing away her tears.

He gave her a furious look.

“Can anything be more tantalizing than a jealous woman?” he sneered. “Well, I think we’ve gone far enough. I didn’t come up here to listen to the kind of talk you’ve been giving me. I wanted to make you understand that we’re in a very critical situation and we’ve got to do something about it! We’ve simply got to avoid meeting people, at least together.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“Just what I said! We can’t afford to have Sheldon get onto this. And he isn’t the only one on board that knows us. I met Bixby this morning in the smoking room. He asked after Sh—he asked after the bride, of course, and made some silly joke about having admired her first, and I had to tell him you were seasick, that you were a bad sailor and might not be able to appear at meals during the voyage. He knows Sheldon, you know, is a sort of a henchman of his, and it won’t do to have him talking. I think that’s our best bet anyhow to save complications; just you stay close in your cabin, except late at night we can slip out and take a walk on deck where the rest don’t usually come.”

A wave of indignation passed over Arla’s beautiful face.

“So that is the way you intend to treat me on my wedding trip!” she said bitterly. “Keep me shut up in my room! Your bride! Well, I’ll know how much to believe the next time you tell me you love me! How about you staying in and letting me do the talking?”

“But don’t you see that wouldn’t do? They all know Sh—that is, they all knew Miss Cameron.”

“I see that you are perfectly crazy about money. You love money better than honor or decency or me.”

“Now you’re being unreasonable!” said the man irritably. “I’ve told you our fortune hangs upon what happens in the next few days. I can’t help it, can I, that my investments failed? Everybody else is having the same trouble. If the wedding had gone through as planned, there wouldn’t have been any trouble about money. I could have gotten around the old lady and gotten a loan of a hundred thousand or two to tide me over. But now—”

“But now, since she found you out and the fortune isn’t available, you mean to take it out on me—who really is the wronged one from the beginning. Well, I won’t stand for it, that’s all! I’m not going to stay shut in and have you roaming around perhaps with some handsome brunette who has another fortune lying around!”

Her eyes were blazing wrathfully. Her tone was low but very angry. He watched her furtively. It wouldn’t do to let her get started on that line. She could mess things up a lot more if she chose to.

“Look here, Arla!” He swung around upon her. “Be sensible! Haven’t I told you that my business will go under completely and leave me utterly bankrupt if I can’t tide over the next six months and pay my indebtedness? And now, just when I think I’m going to be able to swing it, you get childish and balk at helping me.”

“I’m not childish, and I don’t balk at helping you when it’s right and reasonable. But I won’t be lied about, and I don’t intend to allow anybody to mix me up with the girl you didn’t marry, not to save twenty businesses. Besides, I don’t see what a mere fifty thousand matters. Even if Mr. Sheldon does refuse to pay the twenty-five thousand now, and the other twenty-five thousand in two or three months, you still have a lot more thousands that you can’t do anything about. You can’t save your business any way you try, and it’s better to realize that and give it up. Just let them take over what you have, and don’t try to launch out. Begin again in a small way and I’ll help you!”

“Ah, but there’s where you are mistaken, Arla! I’ve found a way. I’m sure I’ve found a way to swing the rest of that. Just last night a way came. I can’t tell you about it yet, but it’s sure! And we shall be on easy street yet, my girl! Just have a little patience. A day or two after we’ve landed on the other side, I shall have everything all fixed up.”

His eyes narrowed and he looked at her cunningly.

She gave him a quick furtive glance.

“And suppose you didn’t? Suppose you are mistaken?” Her breath came sharply. “Don’t you know you are throwing away something sweeter and finer than any money or any business that you could ever have?”

Perhaps because her words went deeper than she understood, they angered him the more.

“Get out of my way!” he roared, forgetting he was on an ocean liner. “If you’re my wife, take my orders, then! Don’t you dare to stir out of the cabin again in daylight unless I say you may. Go! I don’t want to see you anymore; you make me tired! Talk about wedding trips? I’m having a glorious one!”

“Hush!” said Arla imperatively in a low controlled voice. “There’s your Mr. Sheldon just below you coming up the stairs!”

Carter turned and saw the puffy red face of the financier advancing pompously up to where he stood, but when he turned back to give Arla a warning scowl, she was not there. There seemed no way that she could have gone, but she was gone. Carter was left embarrassed and awkward to meet the dignified scrutiny of the man he wished to placate. He wished frantically that he knew how much of his conversation had been overheard.