Money! Money! The ray of the lamps ahead, the fork of the lightning,
the flickering gaslight there at the crossroads, they were all the
color of gold and like gold--of a flame that burned. Yes, he must have
money. No matter what the voice, he must have money.
At the crossroads he halted suddenly. To the south now lay his
cousin's camp, to the north the storm.
Perversely Carl wheeled about and drove to the north. A conscience was
a luxury for a rich man. Let the thing he had done, sired by the demon
of the bottle and mothered by the hell-pit of his flaming passions,
breed its own results.
It was a fitful nerve-straining task, waiting, and he had waited now
for weeks. Waiting had bred the Voice in his conscience, waiting had
bored insidious holes in his armor of flippant philosophy through which
had crept remorse and bitter self-contempt; once it had brought a
flaming resolve brutally to lay it all before his cousin and taunt her
with a crouching ghost buried for years in a candlestick.
Then there were nights like to-night when the ghastly hell-pit was
covered, and when to tell her squarely what the future held, without
taunt or apology, stirred him on to ardent resolution.
But alas! the last was but an intermittent witch-fire leading him
through the marsh after the elusive ghosts of finer things, to flicker
forlornly out at the end and abandon him in a pit of blackness and
mockery.
Pages:
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69