"Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of VictoryI shall wear!"
"Palms of Victory,Crowns of Glory!Palms of VictoryI shall wear!"
"Palms of Victory,
Crowns of Glory!
Palms of Victory
I shall wear!"
He did not know that it was the voice of the street preacher which was singing now. The words shrieked themselves through his brain. Harry Sanderson, not Hugh Stires! Not an outcast! Not criminal, thief and forger! The curtain was rent. The dead wall in his brain was down, and the real past swept over him in an ungovernable flood. Hallelujah Jones had furnished the clue to the maze. His story was the last great wave, which had crumbled, all at once, the cliff of oblivion that the normal process of the recovered mind had been stealthily undermining. The formula, lost so long in the mysterious labyrinth of the brain, had reëstablished itself, and the thousand shreds of recollection that he had misconstrued had fallen into their true place in the old pattern. Harry Sanderson at last knew his past and all of puzzlement and distress that it had held.
Shaking in every limb and feeling all along the court-house wall like a drunken man, he made his way to the further deserted street. A passer-by would have shrunk at sight of his face and his burning eyes.
For these months, he, the Reverend Henry Sanderson, disgraced, had suffered eclipse, had been sunk out of sight and touch and hearing like a stone in a pool. For these months—through an accidental facial resemblance and a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances—he had owned the name and ignominy of Hugh Stires. And Jessica? Deceived no less than he, dating her piteous error from that mistaken moment when she had torn the bandage from her eyes on her wedding-day. She had never seen the real Hugh in Smoky Mountain. She must learn the truth. Yet, how to tell her? How could he tell herall?
At any hour yesterday, hard as the telling must have been, he could have told her. Last night the hour passed. How could he tell her now? Yet she was the real Hugh's wife by law and right; he himself could not marry her! If God would but turn back the universe and give him yesterday!
Why notbeHugh Stires? The wild idea came to him to throw away his own self for ever, never to tell her, never to return to Aniston, to live on here or fly tosome distant place, till years had made recognition impossible. He struck his forehead with his closed hand. He, a priest of God, to summon her to an illegal union? To live a serial story of hypocrisy, with the guilty shadow of the living Hugh always between them, the sword of Damocles always suspended above their heads, to cleave to the heart of his Fool's Paradise? The mad thought died. Yet what justice of Heaven was it that Jessica, whose very soul had been broken on the wheel, should now, through no conscious fault, be led by his hand through a new Inferno of suffering?
His feet dragging as though from cold, he climbed the mountain road. As he walked he took from his pocket the little gold cross, and his fingers, numb with misery, tied it to his thong watch-guard. It had been only a bauble, a pocket-piece acquired he knew not when or how; now he knew it for the badge of his calling. He remembered now that, pressed a certain way, it would open, and engraved inside were his name and the date of his ordination.
He might shut the cabin door, but he could not forbid the torturer that came with him across the threshold. He might throw himself upon his knees and bury his face in the rough skin of the couch, but he could not shut out words that blent in golden-lettered flashesacross his throbbing eyeballs:Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.
So he crouched, a man under whose feet life had crashed, leaving him pinned beneath the wreck, to watch the fire that must creep nearer and nearer.
Curiosity held Jessica until the evangelist closed his melodeon preparatory to a descent upon the dance-hall. Then, thinking of the growing dark with some trepidation—for the recent "strike" had brought its influx of undesirable characters to the town—she started toward the mountain.
Ahead of her a muffled puff-puff sounded, and the dark bulk of an automobile—the sheriff's, the only one the town of Smoky Mountain boasted—was moving slowly in the same direction, and she quickened her pace, glad of this quasi-company. It soon forged ahead, but she had passed the outskirts of the town then and was not afraid.
A little way up the ascent a cumbrous shadow startled her. She saw in a moment that it was the automobile, halted at the side of the road. Her footsteps made no sound and she was close upon it when she saw the three men it had carried standing near-by. She made to pass them, and had crossed half the intervening space, whensome instinct sent her to the shade of the trees. They had stopped opposite the hydraulic concession, where a side path left the main road—it was the same path by which she and Emmet Prendergast had taken their unconscious burden on a night long ago—leading along the hillside, overlooking the snake-like flume, and forming a steeper short-cut to the cabin above. They were conversing in low tones, and as they talked they pointed, she thought toward it.
Jessica had never in her life been an eavesdropper, but her excited senses made her anxious. Moreover, she was in a way committed, for she could not now emerge without being seen. As she waited, a man came from the path and joined the others. The sky had been overcast and gloomy, but the moon drew out just then and she saw that the new-comer, evidently a patrol, carried a rifle in the hollow of his arm. She also saw that one of the first three was the automobile's owner.
For some minutes they conversed in undertones, whose very secrecy inflamed her imagination. It seemed to her that they made some reference to the flume. Had there been another robbery of the sluice-boxes, and could they still suspect Hugh?
Dread and indignation made her bold. When they turned into the path she followed, treading noiselessly,till she was close behind them. They had stopped again, and were looking intently at a shadowy gray something that moved in the bottom below.
She heard the man who carried the rifle say, with a smothered laugh:
"It's only Barney McGinn's old white horse taking a drink out of the sluice-box. He often does that."
Then the sheriff's voice said: "McGinn's horse is in town to-night, with Barney on her back. Horse or no horse, I'm going to"—the rest was lost in the swift action with which he snatched the firearm from the first speaker, sighted, and fired.
In the still night the concussion seemed to rock the ground, and roused a hundred echoes. It startled and shocked the listening girl, but not so much as the sound that followed it—a cry that had nothing animal-like, and that sent the men running down the slope toward an object that lay huddled by the sluice-box.
In horrified curiosity Jessica followed, slipping from shadow to shadow. She saw the sheriff kneel down and draw a collapsed and empty horse's skin from a figure whose thieving cunning it would never cloak again.
"So it was you, after all, Prendergast!" the sheriff said contemptuously.
The white face stared up at them, venomous andwrithing, turning about the circle as though searching for some one who was not there.
"How did—you guess?"
The sheriff, who had been making a swift examination, answered the panted question. "You have no time to think of that now," he said.
A sinister look darted into the filming yellow eyes, and hatred and certainty rekindled them. Prendergast struggled to a sitting posture, then fell back, convulsed. "Hugh Stires! He was the only—one who knew—how it was done. He's clever, but he can't get the best of Prendergast!" A spasm distorted his features. "Wait—wait!"
He fumbled in his breast and his fingers brought forth a crumpled piece of paper. He thrust it into the sheriff's hands.
"Look! Look!" he gasped. "The man they found murdered on the claim there"—he pointed wildly up the hillside—"Doctor Moreau. I found him—dying! Stires—"
Strength was fast failing him. He tried again to speak, but only inarticulate sounds came from his throat.
A blind terror had clutched the heart of the girl leaning from the shadow. "Doctor Moreau"—"murdered." Why, he had been one of Hugh's friends! Why did this man couple Hugh's name with that worst of crimes? What dreadful thing was he trying to tell? She hardly repressed a desire to scream aloud.
"Be careful what you say, Prendergast," said the sheriff sternly.
The wretched man gathered force for a last effort. His voice came in a croaking whisper:
"It was Stires killed him. Moreau wrote it down—and I—kept the paper. Tell Hugh—we break—even!"
That was all. His head fell back with a shiver, and Emmet Prendergast was gone on a longer journey than ever his revenge could warm him.
While the man whom the town knew as Hugh Stires listened to the tale of the street preacher, another, unlike yet curiously like him in feature, had slowly climbed the hilly slope from the north by the sanatorium road. He walked with a jaunty swagger bred of too frequent applications to a flask in his pocket.
Since the evening of the momentous scene in the chapel with Harry Sanderson, Hugh had had more and more recourse to that black comforter. It had grown to be his constant companion. When, late on the night of the game, some miles away, he had gloatingly counted the money in his pockets, he had found nearly a thousand dollars in double-eagles, and a single red counter—the last he had had to stake against Harry's gold. He put the crimson disk into his pocket, "to remember the bishop by," he thought with a chuckle, but the fact that for each of the counters Harry had won he had sworn to render a day of clean and decent living, he straightway forgot. For the other's position he had wasted nopity. Harry would find it difficult to explain the matter to the bishop! Well, if it "broke" him, served him right! What business had he to set himself so far above every one else?
For some time thereafter Hugh had seriously contemplated going abroad, for a wholesome fear had dogged him in his flight from Smoky Mountain. For weeks he had travelled by night, scanning the daily newspapers with a desperate anxiety, his ears keen for hue and cry. But with money in his pocket, courage returned, and in the end fear lulled. There had been no witness to that deed on the hillside. There might be suspicion, but no more! At length the old-time attraction of the race-course had absorbed him. He had followed the horses in "the circuit," winning and losing, consorting with the tipsters, growing heavier with generous living, and welcoming excitement and change. But the ghost of Doctor Moreau haunted him, and would not be exorcized.
Money, however, could not last always, and a persistent run of ill luck depleted his store. When poverty again was at his elbow a vagrant rumor had told him, with the usual exaggerations, of the rich "find" on the Little Paymaster Claim on Smoky Mountain. Too late he cursed the reasonless panic that had sent him intoflight. Had the ground been "jumped" by some one who now profited? Nevertheless, it was still his own to claim; miners' law gave him a year, and he had left enough possessions in the cabin, he thought cunningly, to disprove abandonment. He dreaded a return, but want and cupidity at length overcame his fears. He had arrived at Smoky Mountain on this night to claim his own.
As he walked unsteadily along, Hugh drank more than once from the flask to deaden the superstitious dread of the place which was stealing over him. On the crest of the ridge he skirted the sanatorium grounds and at length gained the road that twisted down toward the lights of the town. In the dubious moonlight he mistook the narrow trail to the Knob for the lower path to the cabin. As he turned into it, the report of a rifle came faintly from the gulch below. It seemed to his excited senses like the ghostly echo of a shot he had himself fired there on a night like this long before—a hollow echo from another world.
He quickened his steps and stumbled all at once into the little clearing that held the new-made grave and Jessica's statue. The sight terrified his intoxicated imagination. His hair rose. The name on the headstone wasStires, and there was himself—no, a ghostof himself!—sitting near! He turned and broke into a run down the steep slope. In his fear—for he imagined the white figure was pursuing him—he tripped and fell, regained his feet, rushed across the level space, threw his weight against the cabin door, and burst into the room.
A dog sprang up with a growl, and in the light of the fire that burned on the hearth, a man sitting at the rough-hewn table lifted a haggard face from his arms and each recognized the other.
The ghost was gone now before firelight and human presence, and Hugh, with a loud laugh of tipsy incredulity, stood staring at the man before him.
"Harry Sanderson!" he cried. "By the great horn spoon!" His shifty eyes surveyed the other's figure—the corduroys, the high laced boots, the soft blue flannel shirt. "Not exactly in purple and fine linen," he said—the impudent swagger of intoxication had slipped over him again, and his boisterous laugh broke with a hiccough. "I thought the gospel game was about played out that night in the chapel. And now you are willing to take a hint from the prodigal. How did you find my nest? And perhaps you can tell me who has been making himself so infernally at home here lately?"
"Ihave," said Harry evenly.
Hugh's glance, that had been wavering about the neat interior, returned to Harry, and knowledge and anger leaped into it. "So it was you, was it? You are the one who has been trying his hand as a claim-jumper!" He lurched toward the table and leaned upon it. "I've always heard that the devil took care of his own. The runaway rector stumbles on my manor, and with his usual luck—'Satan's luck' we called it at college—steps in just in time to strike it rich!"
He stretched his hand suddenly and caught a tiny object that glittered against Harry's coat—the little gold cross, which the other had tied to his watch-guard. The thong snapped and Hugh sent the pendant rattling across the doorway.
"You were something of a howling swell as a parson," he said insolently, "but you don't need the jewelry now!"
Harry Sanderson's eyes had not left Hugh's face; he was thinking swiftly. The bolt from the blue had been so recent that this sudden apparition seemed a natural concomitant of the situation. Only the problem was no longer imminent; it was upon him. Jessica was not for him—he had accepted that. Though the clock might not turn backward, this man must stand between them. Yet his presence now in the predicament wasintolerable. This drunken, criminal maligner had it in his power to precipitate the climax for her in a coarse and brutalexposé. Hugh had no idea of the true tangle, else he had not been seen in the town. But if not to-night, then to-morrow! Harry's heart turned cold within him. If he could eliminate Hugh from the problem till he could see his way!
"Well," said Hugh with a sneer, "what have you got to say?"
Harry rose slowly and pushed the door shut. "When we last met," he said, "what you most wanted was to leave the country."
"I changed my mind," retorted Hugh. "I've got a right to do that, I suppose. I've come back now to get what is mine, and I'll have it, too!" He rapped the table with his knuckles.
Hugh had no recollection now of past generosities. His selfish materialism saw only money that might be his. "I know all about the strike," he went on, "and there's no green in my eye!"
"How much will you take for the property?"
Hugh laughed again jeeringly. "That's your game, is it? But I'm not such a numskull! Whatever you could offer, it's worth more to me. You've found a good thing here, and you'd like to skin me as a butcher skinsa sheep." In the warmer air of the cabin the liquor he had drunk was firing his brain, and an old suspicion leaped to his tongue.
"I know you, Satan Sanderson," he sneered. "You were always the same precious hypocrite in the old days, pretending to be so almighty virtuous, while you looked out for number one. I saw through you then, too, when you were posing as my friend and trying your best all along to queer me with the old man! I knew it well enough. I knew what the reason was, too! You wanted Jessica! You—"
Self-control left Harry suddenly, as a ship's sail is whipped from its gaskets in a white squall. Before the words could be uttered, his fingers were at Hugh's throat.
At that instant there was the sound of running feet outside, a hurried knock at the door and an agitated voice that chilled Harry's blood to ice.
His hands relaxed their hold; he dragged Hugh to the door of the inner room, thrust him inside, shut and bolted it upon him.
Then he went and opened the outer door.
Jessica's eyes met Harry's in a look he could not translate, save that it held both yearning and anguish.
The accusation of Prendergast had stunned her faculties. As in an evil dream, with the low breeze murmuring by and the fitful moon overhead, she had seen the sheriff rise to his feet and methodically put the fragment of paper into his pocket-book. A moment later she was running up the dark path, her thoughts a confusion in which only one coherent purpose stood distinct—to warn him. They would know no need to hasten. If the man she loved had reached the cabin, she would be before them.
Not that she believed him guilty; in his lost past there could be no stain so dark as that! She recalled the look of personal hatred she had once surprised on Prendergast's face. He hated Hugh, and dying, had left this black lie behind to do him a mischief. He was innocent, innocent! But would the charge not be believed? They would arrest him, drag him down to thetown, to the brick jail on the court-house square. The community was prejudiced. Innocent men had been convicted before of crimes they never committed. In those breathless minutes she did not reason further; she knew only that a vital danger threatened him, and that he must fly from it. The lighted pane had told her the occupant of the cabin had returned.
She stood before the door, her hands clasped tightly, her eyes on Harry's face, even in this crucial moment drinking in thirstily what she saw there; for in this crisis, hanging on the narrow verge of catastrophe, when he had need to summon all his store of poise and contained strength, his look melted over her in a mist of tenderness.
"What has happened?" he asked.
He did not offer to touch or to kiss her, but this she did not remember till afterward. In what words could she tell him? Would he think she believed him guilty when she besought him to fly? She answered simply, directly, with only a deep appeal in her eyes:
"Men will be here soon—men from the town. I overheard them. I wanted to let you know!" she hesitated; it had grown all at once difficult to put into words.
"Coming here? Why?"
"To arrest a man who is accused of murder."
If her eyes could have pierced the bolted door a few feet away! If she could have seen that listening face behind it, as her clear tones fell, grow instinct with recognition, amazement, and evil suspicion—a look that her last word swept into a sickly gray terror! If she could have heard the groan from the wretched man beyond!
"Whose murder?"
"Doctor Moreau's."
In all Harry Sanderson's life was to be never such a moment of revealment. He knew that she meant himself. The murderer of Doctor Moreau—Hugh's one-time crony and loose associate, who had shared in the plunder of the forged draft, and had then abandoned his cat's-paw to discovery! The man Hugh had promised to "pay off for it some time!" Had Moreau also made this his stamping-ground? A swift memory swept him of Hugh's hang-dog look, his nervous dread when he had begged in the chapel study for money with which to leave the country. It did not need the smothered gasp from behind the bolted door to point the way to the swift conclusion Harry's mind was racing to. A dull flush spread to his forehead.
Jessica waited with caught breath, searching his countenance. It was told now, but he must know that she had not credited it—that "for better, for worse," shemust believe in him now. "I knew, oh, I knew!" she cried. "You need not tell me!"
The hell of two passions that were struggling within him—a savage exultation and a submerging wave of pity for her utter ignorance, her blind faith, for the painful dénouement that was rushing upon her—died, and left him cold and still. "No," he said gravely, "I am not the man they want. It has all come back to me—the past that I had lost. Such a crime has no part in it."
At another time the abrupt news of this retrieval must have affected her strangely, for she had wondered much concerning the return of that memory that held alike their early love and his own tragedy and shame. Now, however, a greater contingency absorbed her. He must go, and without delay. Her lips were opened to speak when he closed the door behind him and stepped quickly down toward her. At all odds, he was thinking, she must not see the man in that inner room! If she remained he could not guess what shock might result.
"Jessica," he said, "you have tried to save me from danger to-night. I need a greater service of you now; it is to ask no questions, but to go at once. I can not explain why, but you must not stay here a moment."
"Oh," she cried bitterly, "you don't intend to leave! You choose to face it, and you want to spare me. Ifyou really want to spare me, you will go! Why, you would have no chance where they have hated you so. Prendergast was killed robbing the sluice to-night, and he lied—lied—lied! He swore you did it, and they will believe it!"
He put back her beseeching hands. How could he explain? Only to get her away—to gain time—to think!
"Listen!" she went on wildly. "They will wait to carry him to the town. I can go and bring my horse here for you. There is time! You have only to send me word, and I will follow you to the end of the world! Only say you will go!"
He caught at the straw. The expedient might serve.
"Very well," he said; "bring him to the upper trail, and wait there for me."
She gave a sob of relief at his acquiescence. "I will hurry, hurry!" she cried, and was gone, swift as a swallow-flight, into the darkness.
As he reëntered the cabin, the calmness fell from Harry Sanderson as a mask drops, and the latent passion sprang in its place. He crossed the room and drew the bolt for the wretched man who, after one swift glance at his face, grovelled on his knees before him, sobered and shivering.
"For God's sake, Harry, you won't give me up?" Hugh cried. "You can't mean to do that! Why, we were in college together! I'd been drinking to-night, or I wouldn't have talked to you as I did. I'm sober enough now, Harry! You can have the claim. I'll give it to you and all you've got out of it. Only let me go before they come to take me!"
Harry drew his feet from the frantic hands that clasped them. "Did you kill Moreau?" he asked shortly.
"It was an accident," moaned Hugh. "I never intended to—I swear to Heaven I didn't! He hounded me, and he tried to bleed me. I only meant to frighten him off! Then—then—I was afraid, and I ran for it. That was when I came to you at Aniston and—we played." Hugh's breath came in gasps and drops of sweat stood on his forehead.
A weird, crowding clamor was sweeping through Harry's brain. When, at the sound of Jessica's voice, he had thrust Hugh into the inner room, it had been only to gain time, to push further back, if by but a moment, the shock which was inevitable. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, Fate had swept the board. Hugh's worthless life was forfeit. He would stand no longer between him and Jessica! The enginery of the law would be their savior.
Neither crime nor penalty was of his making. He owed Hugh nothing—the very money he had taken from the ground, save a bare living, had gone to pay his thievery. He could surrender him to the law, then take Jessica far away where the truth would come mercifully softened by distance and lightened by future happiness. It was not his to intervene, to cozen Justice, to compound a felony and defeat a righteous Providence! He owed mercy to Jessica. He owed none to this cringing, lying thing before him, who now reminded him of that chapel game that had ruined the Reverend Henry Sanderson!
"When we played!" he echoed. "How have you settled your debt—the 'debt of honor' you once counted so highly? How have you lived since then? Have you paid me those days of decent living you staked, and lost?"
Hugh looked past him with hollow, hunted gaze. There was no escape, no weapon to his hand, and those eyes were on him like unwavering sparks of iron.
"But I will!" he exclaimed desperately. "If you'll only help me out of this, I'll live straight to my dying day! You don't know how I've suffered, Harry, or you'd have some mercy on me now! I can never get away from it! That's why I was drunk to-day. Nightand day I see him—Moreau, as I saw him lying here that night on the hillside. He haunts me! You don't know what it means to be always afraid, to wake up in the night with the feel of handcuffs on your wrists, to know that such a thing is behind you, following you, following you, never letting you rest, never forgetting!" A choking sob burst from his lips. "Let me go, Harry," he pleaded; "for my father's sake!"
"Your father is dead," said Harry.
"Then for old-time's sake!" He tried to clasp Harry's knees. "They may be here at any minute! I must have been seen as I crossed the mountain! I thought it would never come out, or I wouldn't have come! I'll go far enough away. I'll go to South America, and you will never see me alive again, neither you nor Jessica! I knew her voice just now—I know she's here. I don't care how or why! You don't need to give me up to get her! I'll give her to you! For God's sake, Harry, listen! Jessica wouldn't want to see me hung! Forhersake!"
Harry caught his breath sharply. The thrust had gone deep; it had sheared through the specious arguments he had been weaving. The commandment that an hour before had etched itself in letters of fire upon his eyelids hung again before him. He had coveted hisneighbor's wife. This man, felon as he was—pitiful hound to whom the news of his father's death brought no flicker of sorrow or remorse, who now offered to barter Jessica for his own safety!—he himself, however unwittingly, had irreparably wronged. Between them stood the accusing wraith of one immortal hour, when the heart of love had beat against his own. If he delivered Hugh to the hangman, would it be for justice's sake?
The scales fell from his eyes. For him, loving Jessica, it could be only a dastard act. Yet if he aided the real Hugh to escape, he, the supposititious Hugh who had played his rôle, must continue it. He must second the villainy, and in so doing play the cheaply tragic part. He must pose as an accused murderer before the town whose good opinion he had longed to gain—before Jessica!—until Hugh had had time to win safe away! He might do even more. The real Hugh would stand small chance; even were the evidence not flawless, the old record would condemn him. But he himself had lightened that record. He had gained liking and sympathy; there might be a chance for him of acquittal.
If this might only be! The truth then need never be known and Hugh Stires, to all belief having been put once in jeopardy, need fear no more. Life would bebefore him again, to pay the days of righteous living he had played for in the chapel game, to reverse the record of his selfish and remorseless career. If the trial went against him—Hugh would have had his chance, would be far away. He, Harry Sanderson, would not have betrayed him. A hundred people, if he chose to summon them, would establish his own identity. It would be cheating justice, making a mock of law, but he was in a position where human statute must yield to a higher rule of action. The law might punish, but he would have been true to his own soul. Jessica would understand. The truth held pain and shame for her, but he would have tried to save her from a greater. And he would have cancelled his debt to Hugh!
It was the Harry Sanderson of St. James parish, of the scrupulous conscience—whose college career as Satan Sanderson had come to be a fiery sore in his breast—who now spoke:
"Get up!" he said. "Have you any money?"
Hugh rose, trembling and ashen. "Hardly ten dollars," he answered.
Harry considered hastily. He was almost penniless; nearly all his share of the strike had gone to repay the forged draft. "I have no ready cash," he said, "but the night we played in the chapel, I left a thousand dollarsin my study safe. I have not been there since." He took pencil and paper from his pocket and wrote down some figures hastily. "Here is the combination. You must try to get that money."
"Wait," he added, as Hugh's hand was on the latch. He must risk nothing; he could make assurance doubly sure. "A half-mile from the foot of the mountain, where the road comes in from Funeral Hollow, wait for me. I will bring a horse there for you."
Hugh crushed the paper into his pocket and opened the door. "I'll wait," he said. He darted out, slipped around the corner of the cabin, and stealthily disappeared.
Harry sat down upon the doorstep. The strain had been great; in the reaction, he was faint, and a mist was before his eyes. The die was cast. Hugh could easily escape; until he himself spoke, he would not even be hunted. He, Harry Sanderson, was the scapegoat, left to play his part.
How long he sat there he did not know. He sprang up at a muffled sound. He had still a work to do before they came—for Hugh! He saw in an instant, however, that it was Jessica, leading her horse by the bridle.
"I could not wait," she breathed. "You did not come, and I was afraid!"
Mounting, he leaned from the saddle and took both her hands in his—still he did not kiss her.
"Jessica, you believe I am innocent?" he asked anxiously.
"Yes—yes!"
"Will you believe what I am doing is for the best?"
"Always, always!" she whispered, her voice vibrating. "Only go!"
"Whatever happens?"
"Whatever happens!"
He released her hands and rode quickly up the grassy path.
As she stood looking after him, a dog's whine came from the cabin. She ran and released the spaniel and took him up in her arms.
As she did so a sparkle caught her eye. It came from the tiny gold cross lying where Hugh had flung it, near the lighted doorway. She picked it up, looked at it a moment abstractedly and thrust it into her pocket—scarce consciously, for her heart was keeping time to the silenced hoof-beat that was bearing the man she loved from danger.
Where the way opened into the gloomy cut of Funeral Hollow, Harry dismounted and went forward slowlyafoot, leading the horse, till a figure stepped from a clump of bushes to meet him with an exclamation of relief. Hugh had waited at the rendezvous in shivering apprehension and dismal suspicion of Harry's intentions, and had not approached till he had convinced himself that the other came alone. He wrung Harry's hand as he said:
"If I get out of this, I'll do better the rest of my life, I will, upon my soul, Harry!"
"You may not be able to get into the chapel," said Harry; "my rooms"—he felt his cheek burn as he spoke—"may be occupied. On the chance that you fail, take this." He took off the ruby ring, whose interlaced initials had once fortified him in his error of identity. "The stone is worth a good deal. It should be enough to take you anywhere."
Hugh nodded, slipped the ring on his finger, and rode quickly off. Then Harry turned and walked rapidly back toward the town.
The sheriff stopped his automobile before the dingy telegraph office. The street had been ringing that evening with more exciting events than it had known in a year.
"He's off," he said disgustedly to the men who had curiously gathered. "He must have got wind of it somehow, and he had a horse ready. We traced the hoof-prints from the cabin as far as the Hollow. I'm going to use the wire."
"That's a lie!" rumbled an angry voice behind him, as Devlin strode into the crowd. "Hugh Stires gave himself up fifteen minutes ago at the jail."
"How do you know that?" demanded the sheriff, relieved but chagrined at his fool's-errand.
"Because I saw him do it," answered Devlin surlily. "I was there."
"Well, it saves trouble for me. That'll tickle you, Felder," the sheriff added satirically, turning toward the lawyer. "You're a sentimentalist, and he's been your special fancy. What do you think now, eh?"
"I'll tell you whatIthink," said Devlin, his big hands working. "I think it's a damned lie of Prendergast's!"
"Oh, ho!" exclaimed the sheriff amusedly. "You once danced to a different tune, Devlin!"
The blood was in the big, lowering face. "I did," he admitted. "I went up against him when the liquor was in me, and by the same token he wiped this street with me. He stood me fair and he whipped me, and I needed it, though I hated him well enough afterwards. An'—an'—"
He gulped painfully. No one spoke.
"It's many's the time since then I've wished the hand was shrivelled that heaved that rock at him in the road! The day when I saw my bit of a lass, holdin' to the horse's mane, ridin' to her death in the Hollow—an'—when he brought her back—" He stopped, struggling with himself, tears rolling down his cheeks.
"No murderer did that!" he burst out. "We gave him the back of the hand an' the sole of the foot, an' we kept to it, though he fought it down an' lived straight an' decent. He never did it! I don't care what they say! I'll see Prendergast in hell before I'll believe it, or any dirty paper he saved to swear a man's life away."
The listeners were silent. No one had ever heard sucha speech from the huge owner of the dance-hall. The sheriff lighted a cigar before he said:
"That's all right, Devlin. We all understand your prejudices, but I'm afraid they haven't much weight with legal minds, like Mr. Felder's here, for instance."
"Excuse me," said Felder. "I fear my prejudices are with Devlin. Good night," he added, moving up the street.
"Where are you bound?" asked the other casually.
"To the jail," answered the lawyer, "to see a client—I hope."
The sheriff emitted a low whistle. "Ihope there'll be enough sane men left to get a jury!" he said.
At the sound of steps in the jail corridor and the harsh grating of the key in the lock, Harry rose hastily from the iron cot whereon he had been sitting and took a step forward.
"Jessica!" he exclaimed.
She came toward him, her breath hurried, her cheek pale. Tom Felder's face was at her shoulder. "I have a little matter to attend to in the office," he said, nodding to Harry. "I shall wait for you there, Miss Holme."
She thanked him with a grateful look, and as he vanished, Harry took her hand and kissed it. He longed to take her in his arms.
"I heard of it only at noon," she began, her voice uncertain. "I was afraid they would not let me see you, so I went to Mr. Felder. They were saying on the street that he had offered to defend you."
"I had not been here an hour when he came," he said.
"I know you have no money," she went on; "I knowwhat you did with the gold you found. And I have begged him to let me pay for any other counsel he will name. I have not told him—what I am to you, but I have told him that I am far from poor, and that nothing counts beside your life. He says you have forbidden him to do this—forbidden him to allow any help from any one. Hugh, Hugh! Why do you do this? The money should be yours, not mine, for it was your father's! Itisyours, for I am your wife!"
He kissed her hand again without answering.
"Haven't I a right now to be at your side? Mayn't I tell them?"
He shook his head. "Not yet, Jessica."
"I must obey you," she said with a wan smile, "yet I would share your shame as proudly as your glory! You are thinking me weak and despicable, perhaps, because I wanted you to go away. But women are not men, and I—I love you so, Hugh!"
"I think you are all that is brave and good," he protested.
"I want you to believe," she went on, "that I knew you had done no murder. If an angel from Heaven had come to declare it, I would not have believed it. I only want now to understand."
"What do you not understand?" he asked gently.
She half turned toward the door, as she said, in a lower key: "Last night I was overwrought. I had no time to reason, or even to be glad that you had recovered your memory. I thought only of your escaping somewhere—where you would be safe, and where I could follow. But after you had gone, many things came back to me that seemed strange—something curious in your manner. You had not seemed wholly surprised when I told you you were accused. Why did you shut the cabin door, and speak so low? Was there any one else there when I came?"
He averted his face, but he did not answer. She was treading on near ground.
"My horse came back this afternoon," she continued. "He had been ridden hard in the night and his flanks were cut cruelly with a whip. You did not use him, but some one did."
She waited a moment, still he made no reply.
"I want to ask you," she said abruptly, "do you know who killed Doctor Moreau?"
His blood chilled at the question. He looked down at her speechless. "You must let me speak," she said. "You won't answer that. Then you do know who really did it. Oh, I have thought so much since last night! For some reason you are shielding him. Was it theman who was in the cabin—who rode my horse? If he is guilty, why do you help him off, and so make yourself partly guilty?"
He looked down at her and put a finger on her lips. "Do you remember what you told me last night—that you would believe what I did was for the best?"
"But I thought then you were going away! How can I believe it now? Why, they hang men who murder, and it is you who are accused! If you protect the real murderer, you will have to stand in his place. The whole town believes you are guilty—I see it in all their faces. They are sorry, many of them, for they don't hate you as they did, but they think you did it. Even Mr. Felder, though I have told him what I suspect, and though he is working now to defend you!"
"Jessica," he urged, "you must trust me and have faith in me. I know it is hard, but I can't explain to you! I can't tell you—yet—why I do as I am doing, but you must believe that I am right."
She was puzzled and confused. When she had put this and that together, guided by her intuition, the conclusion that he knew the guilty one had brought a huge relief. Now this fell into disarray. She felt beneath his manner a kind of appeal, a deprecation, almost a hidden pity for her—as though the danger were hers,not his, and she the one caught in this catastrophe. She looked at him pale and distraught.
"You speak as if you were sorry for me," she said, "and not for yourself. Is it because you know you are not in real danger—that you know the truth must come out, only you can't tell it yourself, or tell me either? Is that it?"
A wave of feeling passed over Harry, of hopeless longing. Whichever way the issue turned there was anguish for her—for she loved him. If he were acquitted, she must learn that past love between them had been illicit, that present love was shame, and future love an impossibility. Convicted, there must be added to this the bitter knowledge that her husband in very truth was a murderer, doomed to lurk in hiding so long as he might live. Yet not to reassure her now was cruelty.
"It is not that, Jessica," he said gravely; "yet you must not fear for me—for my life. Try to believe me when I say that some time you will understand and know that I did only what I must."
"Will that be soon?" she asked.
"I think it may be soon," he answered.
Her face lighted. The puzzle and dread lifted. "Oh, then," she said—"oh, then, I shall not be afraid. I can not share your thoughts, nor your secret, and I mustrebel at that. You mustn't blame me—I wouldn't be a woman if I did not—but I love you more than all the world, and I shall believe that you know best. Hugh," she added softly, "do you know that—you haven't kissed me?"
Before her upturned, pleading eyes and trembling lips, the iron of his purpose bent to the man in him, and he took her into his arms.
A frosty gloom was over the city of Aniston, moon and stars hidden by a cloudy sky, from which a light snow—the first of the season—was sifting down. The streets were asleep; only occasional belated pedestrians were to be seen in the chilly air. These saw a man, his face muffled from the snowflakes, pass hurriedly toward the fountained square, from whose steeple two o'clock was just striking. The wayfarer skirted the square, keeping in cover of the buildings as though avoiding chance observation, till he stood on the pavement of a Gothic chapel fronting the open space.
Here he paused and glanced furtively about him. He could see the entrance to the minister's study, at which he had so often knocked and the great rose-window of the audience-room where he had once gamed with Harry Sanderson. This was the building he must enter like a thief.
On the night of his flight from Smoky Mountain, Hugh had ridden hard till dawn, abandoning the horseto find its way back as best it might. Hidden in a snug retreat, he had slept through the next day, to recommence his journeying at nightfall. He had thus been obliged to make haste slowly and had lost much valuable time. For two days after his arrival, he had hung about outside the town in a fever of impatience; for though he had readily ascertained that the premises were unoccupied, the first night he had been frightened away by the too zealous scrutiny of a policeman, and on the next he had been unable to force the door. That morning he had secured a skeleton-key, and now the weather was propitious for his purpose.
After a moment's reconnoitering, he scaled the frost-fretted iron palings and gained the shelter of the porch. He tried the key anxiously; to his relief it fitted. Another minute and he stood in the study, the door locked behind him, his veins beating with excitement.
He felt along the wall, drawing his hand back sharply as it encountered the electric switch. He struck a waxfuséeand by its feeble ray gazed about him. The room looked as it had always looked, with Harry's books on the shelves, and his heavy walking-stick in the corner, and there against the wall stood the substantial iron safe that held his own ransom. Crouching down before it, he took from his pocket the paper upon which waswritten the combination; ten to the right, five to the left, twice nineteen to the right—
The match scorched his fingers, and he lighted another and began to turn the knob. The lock bore both figures and letters in concentric rings, and he saw that the seven figures Harry had written formed a word. Hugh dropped the match with a smothered exclamation, for the word was Jessica! So Harry really had loved her in the old days! Had he profited by that wedding-day expulsion to make love to her himself? Yet on the night of the game with Harry in the chapel the house in the aspens had been closed and dark. How had she come to be in Smoky Mountain? His father was dead—so Harry had said. If so, the money had gone to her, no doubt. Well, at any rate, she had never been anything to him and he was no dog-in-the-manger. What he needed now was the thousand dollars, and here it was. He swung the massive door wide and took out the canvas bag. With this and the ruby ring—it must easily be worth as much again—he could put the round world between himself and capture.
He closed the safe, and with the bag of coin in his hand, groped his way to the door of the chapel. It was less dark there, for the snow was making a white night outside, and the stained glass cast a wan glimmer acrossthe aisles. He could almost see himself and Harry Sanderson sitting in the candle-light at the communion table inside the altar-rail, almost hear the musical chink of the gold! His hand wandered to his pocket, where lay the one wax wafer he had kept as a pocket-piece. At that altar he had sworn to pay a day of clean living for each of the counters he had lost. He had not kept that oath, and now vengeance was near to overtaking him. He shuddered. He had turned over a new leaf this time in earnest, and he would make up for the broken vow!
But meanwhile he greatly needed sleep, and to-night in the open that was out of the question. He could gain several good hours' rest where he was, and still get away before daybreak. He drew together the altar-cushions and lay down, the canvas bag beside him, but he was cold, and at length he rose and went into the vestry for a surplice. He wrapped this about him, and, lighting a cigarette, lay down again. He was very tired, but his limbs twitched from nervousness. He lighted one cigarette after another, but sleep was coy. He tried to woo it with nonsense rhymes, but the lines ran together. He tried the remedy of his restless, precocious childhood—the counting of innumerable sheep as they leaped the hurdle one by one; but now all of the sheep were black. There came before his eyes, uncalled, the portrait of hisdead mother, that had always hung at home in the wainscoted library. In her memory his father had built this very chapel. He wondered again whether she had looked like the picture.
A softer feeling came to him. She would be sorry if she could know his plight. Perhaps if she had lived his life might have been different. Slow tears stole down his cheeks—not now of affected sentimentalism, or of hysterical self-pity, but warmer drops from some deeper well that had not overflowed since he was a little boy. If he had the chance he would live from now on so that if she were alive she need not be ashamed! The promise he made himself at that moment was an honester one than all his selfish years had known, for it sprang not from dread, but from the better feeling that his maturity had trampled and denied. He felt a kind of peace—the first real peace he had known since his school-days—and with it drowsiness came at last. With the drops wet on his cheek, forgetfulness found him. In a few minutes he was sleeping heavily.
The last half-consumed cigarette dropped from his relaxing fingers to the cushion, where it made a smoldering nest of fire. A tiny tongue of flame caught the edge of a wall-hanging, ran up to the dry oaken rafters and speedily ignited them. In fifteen minutes theinterior of the chapel was a mass of flame, and Hugh woke gasping and bewildered.
With a cry of alarm he sprang to his feet, seized the bag of coin and ran to the door of the study. In his haste he stumbled against it, and the dead-lock snapped to. He was a prisoner now, for he had left the skeleton-key in the inside of the outer door. Clutching his treasure, he ran to the main entrance; it was fast. He tried the smaller windows; iron bars were set across them. He made shift to wrap the surplice about his mouth, against the stifling smoke and fiery vapors. The bag dropped from his hand and the gold rolled about the floor. He stooped and clutched a handful of the coins and crammed them into his pocket. Was he to die after all like this, caught like a rat in a trap? In his panic of terror he forgot all necessity of concealment; he longed for nothing so much as discovery by those whose cries he now heard filling the waking street. Many voices were swelling the clamor there. Bells were pealing a terror-tongued alarm, but those on the spot saw that the structure was doomed. Hugh screamed desperately, but the roar of the flames overhead and the angry crackling of the woodwork drowned all else. The roof timbers were snapping, the muffling surplice was scorching, a thousand luminous points about himwere bursting into fire in the sickening heat. He pounded with all his might upon the door panels, but in vain. Who outside could have imagined that a human being was pent within that fiery furnace?
Uttering a hoarse cry, with the strength of despair, Hugh wrenched a pew from the floor and made of it a ladder to reach the rose-window. Mounting this, he beat frantically with his fist upon the painted glass. The crystal shivered beneath the blows, and clinging to the iron supports, his beard burnt to the skin, he set his face to the aperture and drew a gulping breath of the sweet, cold air. In his agony, with that fiery hell opening beneath him, he could see the massed people watching from the safety that was so near.
"Look! Look!" The sudden cry went up, and a thrill of awe ran through the crowd. The glass Hugh had shattered had formed the face of the Penitent Thief in the window-design, and his outstretched arms fitted those of the figure. It was as though by some ghastly miracle the painted features had suddenly sprung into life, the haggard eyes opened in appeal. The watchers gasped in amazement.
The flame was upon him now. He was going to his last account—with no time to alter the record. But had not his sleeping vow been one of reformation? He triedto shriek this to the deaf heavens, but all the spellbound watchers heard was the cry: "Lord, Lord, remember—" And this articulate prayer from the crucified malefactor filled them with a superstitious horror. In the crowd more than one covered his face with his hands.
All at once there came a shout of warning. The wall opened outward, tottered and fell.
Then it was that they saw the writhing figure, tangled in the twisted lead bars of the wrecked rose-window. Shielding their faces from the unendurable heat, they reached and bore it to safety, laying it on the crisp, snowy grass, and tearing off the singed and smoking ministerial robes.
Judge Conwell was one of these. In the flaring confusion he leaned over the figure—the gleam of the ruby ring on the finger caught his eye. He bent forward to look into the drawn and distorted face.
"Good God!" he said. "It's Harry Sanderson!"
In communities such as Smoky Mountain the law moves with fateful rapidity. Harry had been formally arraigned the second morning after his self-surrender and had pleaded not guilty. The Grand Jury was in session—indeed, had about finished its labors—and there had been no reason for delay. All necessary witnesses for the state were on the ground, and Felder for his part had no others to summon. So that when Doctor Brent, one keen forenoon, swung himself off a Pullman at the station, returning from his ten days' absence, he found the town thrilling with the excitement of the first day of the trial. Before he left the station, he had learned of Prendergast's death and accusation and knew that Tom Felder had come to the prisoner's defense.
Doctor Brent had taken no stock in the young lawyer's view of Hugh Stires. The incident that they had witnessed on the mountain road—it had troubled him during his trip—had been to him only another chapter in the hackneyed tragedy of romantic womanhoodflattered by a rascal. He was inclined now to lay the championship as much to interest in Jessica as in the man who had won her love.
He walked thoughtfully to his friend's deserted office, and leaving his suit-case there, betook himself to the filled court-room, where Smoky Mountain had gathered to watch Felder's fight for the life and liberty of the man who for days past had been the center of interest. The court had opened two hours before and half the jury had been selected. He found a seat with some difficulty, and thereafter his attention was given first to the bench where the prisoner sat, and second to a chair close to the railing beside Mrs. Halloran's, where a girl's face glimmered palely under a light veil.
Toward this chair the hundreds of eyes in the room that morning had often turned. Since the day Mrs. Halloran had surprised Jessica at work upon the rock statue, she had kept her counsel, but as the physician had conjectured, the monument had been stumbled upon and had drawn curious visitors. Thus the name on the grave had become common property and the coincidence had been chattered of. That Jessica had chiselled the statue was not doubted—she had bought the tools in town, and old Paddy Wise, the blacksmith, had sharpened them for her. The story Prendergast had told inthe general store, too, had not been forgotten, and the aid she had given the fever-stricken man had acquired a new significance in face of the knowledge that she had more than once been admitted to the jail with Felder. No one in Smoky Mountain would have ventured to "pump" the lawyer, and the town had been too mindful of its manners to catechize her, but it had buzzed with theories. From the moment of the opening of the trial she had divided interest with the prisoner.
The first appearance of the latter, between two deputies, had caused a murmur of surprise. In the weeks of wholesome toil and mountain air, the sallow, haggard look that Harry had brought to the town had gradually faded; his step had grown more elastic, his cheek ruddier, his eye a clearer blue. The scar on his temple had become less noticeable. Day by day, he had been growing back to the old look. The beard and mustache now were gone; the face they saw was smooth-shaven, calm, alien and absorbed. He had bowed slightly to the judge, shaken hands gravely with Felder and sat down with a quick, flashing smile at the quivering face behind the veil. He had seemed of all there the one who had least personal concern in the deliberations that were forward. Yet beneath that mask of calmness Harry's every nerve was stretched, every sense restive.
In the interviews he had had with his client, Felder had been puzzled and nonplussed. To tell the truth, when he had first come to his defense it had been not with a conviction of his innocence, but with a belief in the present altered character that made the law's penalty seem excessive and supererogatory; in fine, that whatever he might have deserved when he did it—assuming that he did it—he did not deserve hanging now. But the man's manner had made him lean more and more upon an assumption of actual innocence. In the end, while discarding Jessica's reasoning, he had accepted her conclusion. The man was certainly guiltless. Since this time, he had felt his position keenly. It had been one thing to do the very best possible for a presumptively guilty man—to get him off against the evidence if he could; it was a vastly different thing to defend one whom he believed actually guiltless against damning circumstance.
With the filling of the jury-box the court adjourned for an hour and Doctor Brent saw the two women's figures disappear with Felder into a side room, while the prisoner was taken in charge by the deputies. The doctor lunched hastily at the Mountain Valley House, irritated out of his usual urbanity by the chatter of the crowded dining-room, realizing then how busy gossiphad been with Jessica's name. He walked back to the court-room moodily smoking.
The afternoon session commenced with a concise opening by the district attorney; Felder's reply was as brief, and the real business of the day began with the witnesses for the state.
Circumstantially speaking, the evidence was flawless. Doctor Moreau, while little known and less liked, had figured in the town as a promoter and an inventor of "slick" stock schemes. He had come there with Hugh Stires, from Sacramento, where they had had a business partnership—of short duration. There had been bad blood between them there, as the latter had once admitted. The prisoner had preëmpted the claim on Smoky Mountain in an abortive "boom" which Moreau had engineered, and over whose proceeds the pair, it was believed, had fallen out. He had then, to use the attorney's phrase, "swapped the devil for the witch," and had taken up with Prendergast, who by the manner of his taking off had finally justified a jail record in another state. Soon after this break Hugh Stires had vanished. On the day following his last appearance in the town, the body of Moreau had been found on the Little Paymaster Claim, shot by a cowardly bullet through the back—a fact which precluded the possibilitythat the deed had been done in self-defense. There was evidence that he had died a painful and lingering death. Suspicion had naturally pointed to the vanished man, and this suspicion had grown until, after some months' absence, he had returned, alleging that he had lost his memory of the past, to resume his life in the cabin on the mountain and his partnership with the thief Prendergast. The two had finally quarrelled and Prendergast had taken up his abode in the town. Subsequent to this, the latter had been heard to make dark insinuations, unnoted at the time but since grown significant, hinting at criminal knowledge of the prisoner. The close of this chapter had been Prendergast's dismal end in the gulch, when he had produced the scrap of paper which was the crux of the case. He declared he had found Moreau dying; that the latter had traced with his own hand the accusation which fastened the crime upon Hugh Stires. Specimens of Moreau's handwriting were not lacking and seemed to prove beyond question its authenticity.
Such were the links of the coil which wound, with each witness, closer and closer—none knew better how closely than Harry Sanderson himself. As witness succeeded witness, his heart sank. Jessica's burden was not to be lightened; Hugh must remain a Cain, adweller in the dark places of the earth. In the larger part, his own sacrifice was to fail!
In his cross-examination Felder had fought gamely to lighten the weight of the evidence: The prisoner's old associations with Moreau had been amicable, else they would not have come to Smoky Mountain together; if he had been disliked and avoided, the circumstance was referable rather to his companionships than to his own actions; whatever the pervasive contempt, there had been nothing criminal on the books against him. The lawyer's questions touched the baleful whisper that had become allegation and indictment, a prejudged conviction of guilt. They made it clear that the current belief had been the fruit of antipathy and bias; that it had been no question of evidence; so far as that went, he, Felder, might have done the deed, or Prendergast, or any one there. But Smoky Mountain would have said, as it did say, "It was Hugh Stires!" He compelled the jury to recognize that but one bit of actual evidence had been offered—there had been no eye-witness, no telltale incident. All rested upon a single scrap of paper, a fragment of handwriting in no way difficult of imitation, and this in turn upon the allegation of a thief, struck down in an act of crime, whose word in an ordinary case of fact would not be worth a farthing.No motive had been alleged for the killing of Moreau by the prisoner, but Prendergast had had motive enough in his accusation. It had been open knowledge that he hated Hugh Stires, and his own character made it evident that he would not have scrupled to fasten a murder upon him.
But as Felder studied the twelve grave faces in the jury-box, who in the last analysis were all that counted, he shared his client's hopelessness. Judgment and experience told him how futile were all theories in the face of that inarticulate but damning witness that Prendergast had left behind him. So the afternoon dragged through, a day for the State.
Sunset came early at that season. Dark fell and the electric bulbs made their mimic day, but no one left the room. The outcome seemed a foregone conclusion. The jurymen no longer gazed at the prisoner, and when they looked at one another, it was with grim understanding. As the last witness for the State stepped down and the prosecutor rested, the judge glanced at the clock.
"There is a bare half-hour," he said tentatively. "Perhaps the defense would prefer not to open testimony till to-morrow."
Felder had risen. He saw his opportunity—to bring out sharply a contrasting point in the prisoner's favor,the one circumstance, considered apart, pointing toward innocence rather than guilt—to leave this for the jury to take with them, to off-set by its effect the weight of the evidence that had been given.
"I will proceed, if your Honor pleases," he said, and amid a rustle of surprise and interest called Jessica to the stand.
As she went forward to the witness chair, she put back the shielding veil, and her face, pale as bramble-bloom under her red-bronze hair, made an appealing picture. A cluster of white carnations was pinned to her coat and as she passed Harry she bent and laid one in his hand. The slight act, not lost upon the spectators, called forth a sibilant flutter of sympathy. For it wore no touch of designed effect; its impulse was as pure and unmistakable as its meaning.
Harry had started uncontrollably as she rose, for he had had no inkling of the lawyer's intention, and a flush darkened his cheek at the cool touch of the flower. But this faded to a settled pallor, as under Felder's grave questioning she told in a voice as clear as a child's, yet with a woman's emotion struggling through it, the story of her disregarded warning. While she spoke pain and shame travelled through his every vein, for—though technically she had not brought herself into theperplexing purview of the law—she was laying bare the secret of her own heart, which now he would have covered at any cost.
"That is all, your Honor," said Felder, when Jessica had finished her story.
"Do you wish to cross-examine?" asked the judge perfunctorily.
The prosecutor looked at her an instant. He saw the faintness in her eyes, the twitching of the gloved hand on the rail. "By no means," he said courteously, and turned to his papers.
At the same moment, as Jessica stepped into the open aisle, the ironic chance which so often relieves the strain of the tragic by a breath of the banal, treated the spellbound audience to a novel sensation. Every electric light suddenly went out, and darkness swooped upon the town and the court-room. A second's carelessness at the power-house a half-mile away—the dropping of a bit of waste into a cog-wheel—and the larger mechanism that governed the issues of life and death was thrown into instant confusion. Hubbub arose—people stood up in their places.
The judge's gavel pounded viciously and his stentorian voice bellowed for order.
"Keep your seats, everybody!" he commanded. "Mr.Clerk, get some candles. This court is not yet adjourned!"
To Jessica the sudden blankness came with a nervous shock. Since that first meeting in the jail she had pinned her faith on the reassurance that had been given her. She had fought down doubt and questioning and leaned hard upon her trust. But in her overwrought condition, as the end drew near with no solution of the enigma, this faith sometimes faltered. The mystery was so impenetrable, the peril so imminent! To-day, in the court-room, her subtle sense had told her that, belief and conviction aside, a pronounced feeling of sympathy existed for the man she loved. She had not needed Mrs. Halloran's comforting assurances on this score, for the atmosphere was surcharged with it. She had felt it when she laid the carnation in his hand, and even more unmistakably while she had given her testimony. She had realized the value of that one unvarnished fact, introduced so effectively—that he had had time to get away, and instead had chosen to surrender himself.
Yet even as she thrilled to the responsive current, Jessica had not been deceived. She felt the pitiful impotence of mere sympathy against the apparent weight of evidence that had frightened her. Surely,surely, if he was to save himself, the truth must come out speedily! But the end of it all was in sight and he had not spoken. To-day as she watched his face, the thought had come to her that perhaps his reassurance had been given only to comfort her and spare her anguish. The thought had come again and again to torture her; only by a great effort had she been able to give her testimony. As the pall of darkness fell upon the court-room, it brought a sense of premonition, as though the incident prefigured the gloomy end. She turned sick, and stumbled down the aisle, feeling that she must reach the outer air.