And they parted on the friendliest terms--and Norman knew that his
fortune was assured, if Galloway lived another nine months. When he was
alone, the sweat burst out upon him and, trembling from head to foot, he
locked his door and flung himself at full length upon the rug. It was
half an hour before the fit of silent hysterical reaction passed
sufficiently to let him gather strength to rise. He tottered to his desk
chair, and sat with his head buried in his arms upon the desk. After a
while the telephone at his side rang insistently. He took the receiver
in a hand he could not steady.
"Yes?" he called.
"It's Tetlow. How'd you come out?"
"Oh--" He paused to stiffen his throat to attack the words
naturally--"all right. We go ahead."
"With G.?"
"Certainly. But keep quiet. Don't let him know you've heard, if you see
him or he sends for you. Remember, it's in my hands entirely."
"Trust me." Tetlow's voice, suppressed and jubilant, suggested a fat,
hoarse rooster trying to finish a crow before a coming stone from a farm
boy reaches him. "It seems natural and easy to you, old man. But I'm
about crazy with joy. I'll come right over."
"No. I'm going home."
"Can't I see you there?"
"No. I've other matters to attend to. Come about lunch time
to-morrow--to the office, here."
"All right," said Tetlow disappointedly, and Norman rang off.
XX
In the faces of men who have dominion of whatever kind over their fellow
men--be it the brutal rule of the prize fighter over his gang or the
apparently gentle sway of the apparently meek bishop over his loving
flock--in the faces of all men of power there is a dangerous look. They
may never lose their tempers. They may never lift their voices. They may
be ever suave and civil. The dangerous look is there--and the danger
behind it. And the sense of that look and of its cause has a certain
restraining effect upon all but the hopelessly impudent or solidly
dense. Norman was one of the men without fits of temper. In his moments
of irritation, no one ever felt that a storm of violent language might
be impending. But the danger signal flaunted from his face. Danger of
what? No one could have said. Most people would have laughed at the idea
that so even tempered a man, pleased with himself and with the world,
could ever be dangerous. Yet everyone had instinctively respected that
danger flag--until Dorothy.
Perhaps it had struck for her--had really not been there when she looked
at him. Perhaps she had been too inexperienced, perhaps too
self-centered, to see it. Perhaps she had never before seen his face in
an hour of weariness and relaxation--when the true character, the
dominating and essential trait or traits, shows nakedly upon the
surface, making the weak man or woman look pitiful, the strong man or
woman formidable.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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