“Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.”
Then suddenly Laura, reckless of her wedding finery, forgetful of trivialities, crossed the room and knelt down at the side of the bed. Her head in her folded arms, she prayed—prayed in the little unstudied words of her childhood, prayed that God would take care of her and make her a good girl; prayed that she might be happy; prayed to God to help her in the new life, and that she should be a good and loyal wife.
And then as she knelt there, all at once she felt an arm, strong, heavy even, laid upon her. She raised her head and looked—for the first time—direct into her husband’s eyes.
“I knew—” began Jadwin. “I thought—Dear, I understand, I understand.”
He said no more than that. But suddenly Laura knew that he, Jadwin, her husband, did “understand,” and she discovered, too, in that moment just what it meant to be completely, thoroughly understood—understood without chance of misapprehension, without shadow of doubt; understood to her heart’s heart. And with the knowledge a new feeling was born within her. No woman, not her dearest friend; not even Page had ever seemed so close to her as did her husband now. How could she be unhappy henceforward? The future was already brightening.
Suddenly she threw both arms around his neck, and drawing his face down to her, kissed him again and again, and pressed her wet cheek to his—tear-stained like her own.
“It’s going to be all right, dear,” he said, as she stood from him, though still holding his hand. “It’s going to be all right.”
“Yes, yes, all right, all right,” she assented. “I never seemed to realise it till this minute. From the first I must have loved you without knowing it. And I’ve been cold and hard to you, and now I’m sorry, sorry. You were wrong, remember that time in the library, when you said I was undemonstrative. I’m not. I love you dearly, dearly, and never for once, for one little moment, am I ever going to allow you to forget it.”
Suddenly, as Jadwin recalled the incident of which she spoke, an idea occurred to him.
“Oh, our bargain—remember? You didn’t forget after all.”
“I did. I did,” she cried. “I did forget it. That’s the very sweetest thing about it.”
VI
The months passed. Soon three years had gone by, and the third winter since the ceremony in St. James’ Church drew to its close.
Since that day when—acting upon the foreknowledge of the French import duty—Jadwin had sold his million of bushels short, the price of wheat had been steadily going down. From ninety-three and ninety-four it had dropped to the eighties. Heavy crops the world over had helped the decline. No one was willing to buy wheat. The Bear leaders were strong, unassailable. Lower and lower sagged the price; now it was seventy-five, now seventy-two. From all parts of the country in solid, waveless tides wheat—the mass of it incessantly crushing down the price—came rolling in upon Chicago and the Board of Trade Pit. All over the world the farmers saw season after season of good crops. They were good in the Argentine Republic, and on the Russian steppes. In India, on the little farms of Burma, of Mysore, and of Sind the grain, year after year, headed out fat, heavy, and well-favoured. In the great San Joaquin valley of California the ranches were one welter of fertility. All over the United States, from the Dakotas, from Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, and Illinois, from all the wheat belt came steadily the reports of good crops.
But at the same time the low price of grain kept the farmers poor. New mortgages were added to farms already heavily “papered”; even the crops were mortgaged in advance. No new farm implements were bought. Throughout the farming communities of the Middle West there were no longer purchases of buggies and parlour organs. Somewhere in other remoter corners of the world the cheap wheat, that meant cheap bread, made living easy and induced prosperity, but in the United States the poverty of the farmer worked upward through the cogs and wheels of the whole great machine of business. It was as though a lubricant had dried up. The cogs and wheels worked slowly and with dislocations. Things were a little out of joint. Wall Street stocks were down. In a word, “times were bad.” Thus for three years. It became a proverb on the Chicago Board of Trade that the quickest way to make money was to sell wheat short. One could with almost absolute certainty be sure of buying cheaper than one had sold. And that peculiar, indefinite thing known—among the most unsentimental men in the world—as “sentiment” prevailed more and more strongly in favour of low prices. “The ‘sentiment,’ ” said the market reports, “was bearish”; and the traders, speculators, eighth-chasers, scalpers, brokers, bucket-shop men, and the like—all the world of La Salle Street—had become so accustomed to these Bear conditions, that it was hard to believe that they would not continue indefinitely.
Jadwin, inevitably, had been again drawn into the troubled waters of the Pit. Always, as from the very first, a Bear, he had once more raided the market, and had once more been successful. Two months after this raid he and Gretry planned still another coup, a deal of greater magnitude than any they had previously hazarded. Laura, who knew very little of her husband’s affairs—to which he seldom alluded—saw by the daily papers that at one stage of the affair the deal trembled to its base.
But Jadwin was by now “blooded to the game.” He no longer needed Gretry’s urging to spur him. He had developed into a strategist, bold, of inconceivable effrontery, delighting in the shock of battle, never more jovial, more daring than when under stress of the most merciless attack. On this occasion, when the “other side” resorted to the usual tactics
