Cyrus Brady - By the World Forgot - A Double Romance of the East and West

"You know that I couldn't do that," answered the girl, greatly moved by his passionate pleading. After all, she did love this man and not the other.

"You're the kind of woman that a man will do anything for. I'm sorry for Beekman, I'm sorry for everything, but I'm going to have you." He came close to her as he spoke. "Do you understand that?" he asked, raising his voice. "I did it for you, you, and no man shall balk me of my reward. If you won't come willingly, you shall come unwillingly."

"Oh," said the girl, "how horribly determined and wicked you are, and yet-"

As she looked up at him the passion with which he spoke, rough, brutal as it was, quickened again her heart that she thought was dead. For the first time in weeks the color rushed into her face.

"That's right," said Harnash, watching her narrowly. "I can still bring the blood to your cheeks."

He bent over her, he dragged her almost rudely from her seat and crushed her against him. He kissed her as roughly as he had spoken.

"This," he said, "pays for everything. If I'm found out, if I have to go to jail, I don't care. I'm glad. You love me. You can't deny it and in your heart of hearts you're glad and you'll be gladder every hour of your life."

The girl gave up. After all, what possibility of happiness did she have except with Harnash? More and more she appeared before the world as a thing cast off and scorned. Harnash's position in society and business was improving every day, but it was not that which influenced her. She really loved him. She responded to his pleading. Mistaken though he was, vicious as had been his design, that effort, wrong as was his method, showed her how much he loved her.

"You're not going to fail me now, are you? You need not answer. I can feel it in the beat of your heart against mine."

"No," said the girl. "I'm yours, I suppose."

"Don't you know?"

"Yes, I know. No one else would want me, discarded."

"I want you. I'd want you if the whole world rejected you."

"And you won't tell me where Derrick is?"

"No, it's a heavy secret to carry in one's breast. I feared that they would worm it out of me. You can't know what I've gone through," he went on. "I've been suspected and questioned and cross-questioned, but I never gave it away. It was you who kept me up. The thought of you always, you, you, you! Meanwhile I'm slaving my life out, almost wrecking my brain, to carry out these big deals, and when it is over and I have you they can do their worst. Your father, Beekman when he comes back-"

"Oh, then he will come back?"

"Of course he will. And I'll face them all. I don't know whether I have damned myself for you or not, but if I have, I don't care," he went on recklessly.

"It was my fault, anyway," said the girl. "I should have been stronger. I should not have agreed to such a marriage, and I should not have kept the agreement when I loved you."

"You need not say that," said Harnash-there was good stuff in him-"It is all my own plan and scheme. You were bound, and there was only one way to break the bond. Now I give myself six months. By that time the talk will have died out and we will be married."

"I'll marry you," said the girl, "or I'll marry no one else on earth, but before I marry you you must bring Derrick Beekman into my presence and he must release me."

"That is a harder thing than what I have done, but I'll do it. Provided you will help me."

"I will, but how?"

"When you see him you must tell him that you don't love him and that you wish to marry me."

"Very well. I'll do that part."

"And I'll do the other."

"Promise me, on your word of honor."

"Honor!" exclaimed Harnash bitterly. "Do you think, after what I have done, that I've got any honor, that you could trust to?"

"I'll be trusting myself to you," said the girl, "and you know what that implies."

"Say that you are glad that it has happened as it has, despite the scandal."

Stephanie looked at him a long time.

"You poor boy," she said, drawing his head down and kissing his forehead in that motherly way which all women have toward the men they love until the maternal affection has a chance to vent itself in the right direction. "How you must have suffered for me."

"It was nothing."

"Yes, I am glad," she said at last.

When he went to bed, what time it was when he awakened, or where he was at that moment were facts about which Derrick Beekman had no ideas whatsoever. At first he was conscious of but one thing-that he was; and that consciousness was painful, not to say harrowing, to the last degree. For one thing, he was horribly sick. The place where he lay appeared to be as unsteady as his mental condition was uncertain. He was heaved up and down, tossed back and forth, and rolled from side to side in an utterly inexplicable way to his bewildered mind. And every mad motion threw him against some bruised and painful portion of his anatomy.

As he struggled to open his eyes it seemed to him that he was lying in pitch darkness. His ears were assailed by a concatenation of discordant noises, creaks, groans, thunderous blows of which he could make nothing. No one has ever pictured hell as a place of reeking odors and hideous sounds. Why that opportunity has been neglected is not known. Certainly the popular brimstone idea of it is highly suggestive. At any rate, the bad air and other indescribable odors, to say nothing of the noises that came to him, added to his physical perturbation and wretchedness. Under the circumstances, the wonder was not so much that he did not think clearly, but that he could think at all. It was only after some moments of sickening return to consciousness that he became convinced that he was alive and somewhere.

He lay for a little while desperately trying to solve the problems presented to him by his environment, with but little immediate success. Finally, as a help toward clearing up the mystery, he decided upon exploration. Though the undertaking was painful to him, he made an effort to sit up. His head came in violent contact with something which he had not noticed in the obscurity above him and nearly knocked him senseless again. After another violent fit of sickness, he decided upon a more circumspect investigation.

He felt about with his hands and discovered that he was in some box-like enclosure one side of which seemed to be open save for a containing strip against which he had been violently hurled several times and which had prevented him from being thrown out. This enclosure was in violently agitated motion. At first, in his confusion, he decided vaguely upon a railroad train, a sleeping-car berth, but he realized that not even the roughest freight car would produce such an effect as that unless the train were running on the cross ties, in which case its stoppage would be immediate. This pitching and tossing kept on. If he had been in his clear senses, he would have known in an instant where he was, but it was only after violent effort at concentration that his aching head told him that he must be aboard a ship!

He was familiar with steamers of the more magnificent class, and with his own yacht, and the pleasure craft of his friends, and he knew enough from reading to decide that this was the forecastle of a ship. He decided that it was a wooden ship. The outer planking against which he lay was of wood. He listened next for the beat or throb of a screw, and heard none. Thinking more and more clearly, it came to him that it was a sailing ship. As his eyes became used to the obscurity, he saw abaft his feet and to his left hand, for he lay head to the bows, well forward on the port side, a square of light which betokened an open hatchway. He strained his eyes up through the hatchway. He could make out nothing. It was still daylight on deck, and that was all he could decide.