Читать книгу The Lightning Warrior - Max Brand - Страница 11

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Her father got out of his chair with a lurch and a jump, like a protesting lawyer at a trial. In a sense, this was a trial, with vital issues hanging upon the outcome. "Sylvia," he cried, "think what you're saying, will you? Think how you're putting yourself into his hands!"

Then Cobalt said an astounding thing. "No, no, Mister Baird. That's not the right angle and that's not the way to look at the thing at all. As a matter of fact I don't want to follow my own blind conviction. I want to do something with my eyes open and my head up. For my part I'm willing to take the opinion of you and Chalmers here to decide the case between me and Sylvia."

I thought Baird would choke, such was the violence of his conflicting emotions. He cleared his throat once or twice and then began to blink and nod, his colorless brows going up and down, his pink face reddening. "Of course, Cobalt," he conceded, "you're a gentleman. Tut, tut, my dear lad, the whole north country knows that. There is only one way in which a gentleman can act at such a time. Tut, tut, I know all of that beforehand."

"No, you don't," answered Cobalt, not violently but perfectly matter of fact. "You know what I'll do. Nobody else does, because I'm in the dark myself."

This was a considerable conversational snag, and no one could say a thing for a moment. It was Sylvia at last who remarked: "Let me try to understand, Cobalt. You want to convince yourself that you're right, and then you'll go ahead. You want to find out if, in the opinion of Dad and Mister Chalmers, I really committed myself. Then, no matter what my own opinion is, you'll go ahead?"

"You can put it that way," said Cobalt.

"I don't want to put it that way," she responded. "I want to hear you put it in your own words."

"Words are not what count from my side of the fence. Now then, Chalmers, what have you to say about the thing?"

"How can I say anything, Cobalt?" I asked him. "I don't know what passed between you and Sylvia. I only know that of course no man can hold a woman against her will to an engagement so—well, so extraordinary."

"Do you really think that?" he asked. "Then I've lost before the trial begins. Because I want a unanimous vote of yourself and Mister Baird on one side or the other as to whether or not you think Sylvia committed herself."

He was wonderfully calm as indeed he remained throughout the interview, except for a flush now and again. When I heard these last words of his, you may believe that I pricked up my ears again. I saw that this was even a more serious matter than it had seemed before far more serious.

"What happened, exactly, from your own point of view?" asked Baird, mopping his face again. For that matter I was getting pretty moist myself.

"Do you mean," said Cobalt, "from the very first?"

"Yes, tell us that," said the father, nodding and setting his jaw.

"Well, then, I'll tell you—from my viewpoint," replied Cobalt. "The moment I saw her, I wanted her."

"Say that more clearly," I suggested. "You loved her?"

"I wanted her," he insisted. "I wanted her the way a boy wants a knife that he sees in a window, or a horse in a circus, or an air rifle on a store rack. Love her? I don't know. I wanted her. I heard a yegg one day telling how he saw an emerald pendant at the throat of a woman. He couldn't get at it that night while she was wearing it, but he traced it to the bank vault in which it was kept. He blew the vault, sifted through the stuff it contained, and got his hands on the emerald. He turned around, and there were five cops with a dead bead on him. They sent him up for ten years or so. He got out, went back to the same bank, blew another vault, and was caught again. He went back to prison a second time for a longer spell. When I saw him, he was a gray-headed man. I asked him what had happened to the emerald. He took a piece of chamois out of his pocket and unwrapped it, and there was the emerald lying in the palm of his hand. He had a peaceful look in spite of his years in jail."

Sylvia, who had been listening with all her heart and soul, asked: "Tell me, did you know him well? Or did he just trust you?"

"He trusted me," said Cobalt. "All men trust me."

Well, it was rather a grand thing to hear. There was perfect truth in it, too. All men trusted Cobalt, even those who wronged him. He might kill them, but he never would slander them, try to trick them, or take them from behind. He stood up and let the fire shine in his eyes.

"I say that I saw Sylvia, and I wanted her. I tell you just how I wanted her. The way that yegg wanted the emerald. The prison meant nothing to him. Well, prison would mean nothing to me either, except that there's a slight difference. Emeralds don't grow old, women do. I want Sylvia now. I want her where I can look at her."

"When she's happy?" I suggested.

"Oh, I don't much care about that," said Cobalt. "Mad or glad or sulking or dancing or sorry or jolly, I'd be about equally glad to look at her. People spend millions for a picture. Well, there's the picture that I want."

I wondered that he could keep the emotion out of his voice, but he did. You might have thought that he was speaking for another person and not himself. You may be sure that Sylvia neither smiled nor looked self-conscious when she heard those remarks. Rather, she looked as though she were on trial for her life. In a sense she was.

"Then I went to you and told you that I wanted her. I went to her and told her I intended to have her," Cobalt went on. "That sounds eccentric. Well, it wasn't as eccentric as I may have seemed. I wanted to get her attention from the crowd for a minute. So I made a bit of noise and gesticulation—at least I caught her eye. I made her listen. Now, you tell me, Sylvia, when I informed you that I intended to marry you, you were angry, weren't you?"

"Yes, I was angry," she admitted.

"But you believed that I seriously intended doing what I said?"

"Yes," she agreed slowly, "I think that I felt that."

"You only thought so?" he repeated. "You didn't know it?"

"Yes," she said, rather faintly, "I suppose that I knew it."

"Be honest," he urged.

"I am honest," she said. She drew back in her chair, seeming to feel that the presence of his argument and his questions were hemming her in. Her eyes flashed toward her father then toward me.

"If you're honest," argued Cobalt, "you knew by the way my eyes handled your face that I wanted you as desperately as the thief wanted the emerald."

She actually raised her hand and touched her face with a startled and pained look. It was a very strange thing to see. "Yes," she said then, "I know that you wanted me. No man ever looked at me like that—as if I were not even a human being, not even a dog or a horse, just something to look at."

"Ah," said Cobalt, "that's it. Now we're getting along."

"But what's the direction of all this talk?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said. "I hope that I can give it a direction. Then we come to the time when I said good bye to you."

"You mean that I kissed you good bye?" she said. "That was only a part of the ironical game which we were playing. You know that, Cobalt. You wouldn't be unfair about that."

"That kiss? Rot!" he expostulated. "That was nothing. That made no difference to me. The touch of the wind would have been as much to me. But it gave me a chance to see what your hair was like, and I saw that it was spun finer than cobweb. I thought it would be like that, but I couldn't be sure until my eyes were close. That finished the picture. I'd seen your hand and watched it moving. So that kiss meant a good deal, but not because it was the touch of your lips."

She sighed with relief.

"Now, man," I said, breaking in because I couldn't stand the tenseness of the atmosphere, "tell me what you think, no matter what has gone before, can a girl honestly marry a man she doesn't care about? And you don't love him, Sylvia?"

She clasped her hands together and stiffened her arms a little. She closed her eyes. "I do not love him," she whispered.