Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [343]
Rearden whirled around. Dagny was walking past them, but she stopped.
“How do you do,” she said to Lillian, bowing, her face expressionless.
“I am so sorry, Miss Taggart,” said Lillian, smiling, “you must forgive me if I don’t know the appropriate formula of condolences for the occasion.” She noted that Dagny and Rearden had not greeted each other. “You’re returning from what was, in effect, the funeral of your child by my husband, aren’t you?”
Dagny’s mouth showed a faint line of astonishment and of contempt. She inclined her head, by way of leave-taking, and walked on.
Lillian glanced sharply at Rearden’s face, as if in deliberate emphasis. He looked at her indifferently, puzzled.
She said nothing. She followed him without a word when he turned to go. She remained silent in the taxicab, her face half-turned away from him, while they rode to the Wayne-Falkland Hotel. He felt certain, as he looked at the tautly twisted set of her mouth, that some un-customary violence was raging within her. He had never known her to experience a strong emotion of any kind.
She whirled to face him, the moment they were alone in his room.
“So that’s who it is?” she asked.
He had not expected it. He looked at her, not quite believing that he had understood it correctly.
“It’s Dagny Taggart who’s your mistress, isn’t she?”
He did not answer.
“I happen to know that you had no compartment on that train. So I know where you’ve slept for the last four nights. Do you want to admit it or do you want me to send detectives to question her train crews and her house servants? Is it Dagny Taggart?”
“Yes,” he answered calmly.
Her mouth twisted into an ugly chuckle; she was staring past him. “I should have known it. I should have guessed. That’s why it didn’t work!”
He asked, in blank bewilderment, “What didn’t work?”
She stepped back, as if to remind herself of his presence. “Had you-when she was in our house, at the party—had you, then ... ?”
“No. Since.”
“The great businesswoman,” she said, “above reproach and feminine weaknesses. The great mind detached from any concern with the body ...” She chuckled. “The bracelet ...” she said, with the still look that made it sound as if the words were dropped accidentally out of the torrent in her mind. “That’s what she meant to you. That’s the weapon she gave you.”
“If you really understand what you’re saying—yes.”
“Do you think I’ll let you get away with it?”
“Get away ... ?” He was looking at her incredulously, in cold, astonished curiosity.
“That’s why, at your trial—” She stopped.
“What about my trial?”
She was trembling. “You know, of course, that I won’t allow this to continue.”
“What does it have to do with my trial?”
“I won’t permit you to have her. Not her. Anyone but her.”
He let a moment pass, then asked evenly, “Why?”
“I won’t permit it! You’ll give it up!” He was looking at her without expression, but the steadiness of his eyes hit her as his most dangerous answer. “You’ll give it up, you’ll leave her, you’ll never see her again!”
“Lillian, if you wish to discuss it, there’s one thing you’d better understand: nothing on earth will make me give it up.”
“But I demand it!”
“I told you that you could demand anything but that.”
He saw the look of a peculiar panic growing in her eyes: it was not the look of understanding, but of a ferocious refusal to understand—as if she wanted to turn the violence of her emotion into a fog screen, as if she hoped, not that it would blind her to reality, but that her blindness would make reality cease to exist.
“But I have the right to demand it! I own your life! It’s my property. My property—by your own oath. You swore to serve my happiness. Not yours—mine! What have you done for me? You’ve given me nothing, you’ve sacrificed nothing, you’ve never been concerned with anything but yourself—your work, your mills, your talent, your mistress! What about me? I hold first claim! I’m presenting it for collection! You’re the account I own!”
It was the look on his face that drove her up the rising steps of her voice, scream by scream, into terror.