A pushing handful opened the way to the corridor, and in a moment more she was in the starlit out-of-doors, fighting down her faintness, with the babble of talk behind her and the cool breeze on her cheek.
In the room Jessica had left, the turmoil was simmering down; here and there a match was struck and showed a circle of brightness. The glimmer of one of them lit the countenance of a man who had brushed her sleeve as he entered. It was Hallelujah Jones. The evangelist had prolonged his stay at Smoky Mountain, for the town, thrilling to its drama of crime and judgment, had seemed a fruitful vineyard. He had no local interest in the trial of Hugh Stires, and had not attended its session; but he had been passing the place when the lights went out and in curiosity had crowded into the confusion, where now he looked about him with eager interest.
A candle-flame fluttered now, like a golden butterfly, on the judge's desk, another on the table inside the bar. More grew along the walls until the room was bathed in tremulous yellow light. It touched the profile of the prisoner, turned now, for his look had followed Jessica and was fixed questioningly on her empty seat. In theunseeing darkness Harry had held the white carnation to his lips before he drew its stem through his lapel.
The street preacher's jaw dropped in blank astonishment, for what he saw before him brought irresistibly back another scene that, months before, had bit into his mind. The judge's high desk turned instantly to a chapel altar, and the table back of the polished railing to a communion table. The minister that had looked across it in the candle-light had worn a white carnation in his buttonhole. His face—
Hallelujah Jones started forward with an exclamation. A thousand times his zealot imagination had pictured the recreant clergyman he had unmasked as an outcast, plunging toward the lake of brimstone. Here it was at last in his hand, the end of the story! The worst of criminals, skulking beneath an alias! He sprang up the aisle.
"Wait! wait!" he cried. "I have evidence to give!" He pointed excitedly toward Harry. "This man is not what you think! He is not—"
Forensic thunder loosed itself from the wrathful judge's desk, and crashed across the stupefied room. His gavel thumped upon the wood. "How dare you," he vociferated, "break in upon the deliberations of this court! I fine you twenty dollars for contempt!"
Felder had leaped to his feet, every sense on thequi vive. Like a drowning man he grasped at the straw. What could this man know? He took a bill from his pocket and clapped it down on the clerk's desk.
"I beg to purge him of contempt," he said, "and call him as a witness."
The district attorney broke in:
"Your Honor, I think I am within my rights in protesting against this unheard-of proceeding. The man is a vagrant of unknown character. His very action proclaims him mentally unbalanced. Beyond all question he can know nothing of this case."
"I have not my learned opponent's gift of clairvoyance," retorted Felder tartly. "I repeat that I call this man as a witness."
The judge pulled his whiskers and looked at the evangelist in severe annoyance. "Take the stand," he said gruffly.
Hallelujah Jones snatched the Bible from the clerk's hands and kissed it. Knowledge was burning his tongue. The jury were leaning forward in their seats.
"Have you ever seen the prisoner before?" asked Felder.
"Yes."
"When?"
"When he was a minister of the gospel."
Felder stared. The judge frowned. The jury looked at one another and a laugh ran round the hushed room.
The merriment kindled the evangelist's distempered passion. Sudden anger flamed in him. He leaned forward and shook his hand vehemently at the table where Harry sat, his face as colorless as the flower he wore.
"That man's name," he blazed, "is not Hugh Stires! It is a cloak he has chosen to cover his shame! He is the Reverend Henry Sanderson of Aniston!"
Harry's pulses had leaped with excitement when the street preacher's first exclamation startled the court-room; now they were beating as though they must burst. He was not to finish the losing struggle. The decision was to be taken from his hands. Fate had interfered. This bigot who had once been the means of his undoing, was to be thedeus ex machina. Through the stir about him he heard the crisp voice of the district attorney:
"I ask your Honor's permission, before this extraordinary witness is examined further," he said caustically, "to read an item printed here which has a bearing upon the testimony." He held in his hand a newspaper which, earlier in the afternoon, with cynical disregard of Felder's tactics, he had been casually perusing.
"I object, of course," returned Felder grimly.
"Objection overruled!" snapped the irritated judge. "Read it, sir."
Holding the newspaper to a candle, the lawyer readin an even voice, prefacing his reading with the journal's name and date:
"This city, which was aroused in the night by the burning of St. James Chapel, will be greatly shocked to learn that its rector, the Reverend Henry Sanderson, who has been for some months on a prolonged vacation, was in the building at the time, and now lies at the city hospital, suffering from injuries from which it is rumored there is grave doubt of his recovery."
"This city, which was aroused in the night by the burning of St. James Chapel, will be greatly shocked to learn that its rector, the Reverend Henry Sanderson, who has been for some months on a prolonged vacation, was in the building at the time, and now lies at the city hospital, suffering from injuries from which it is rumored there is grave doubt of his recovery."
In the titter that rippled the court-room Harry felt his heart bound and swell. Under the succinct statement he clearly discerned the fact. He saw the pitfall into which Hugh had fallen—the trap into which he himself had sent him on that fatal errand with the ruby ring on his finger. "Grave doubt of his recovery!"—a surge of relief swept over him to his finger-tips. Dead men can not be brought to bar—so Jessica would escape shame. With Hugh passed beyond human justice, he could declare himself. The bishop had guarded his secret, and saved the parish from an unwelcome scandal. He could explain—could tell him that illness and unbalance lay beneath that chapel game! He could take up his career! He would be free to go back—to be himself again—to be Jessica's—if Hugh died! The reading voice drummed in his ears:
"The facts have not as yet been ascertained, but it seems clear that the popular young minister returned to town unexpectedly last night, and was asleep in his study when the fire started. His presence in the building was unguessed until too late, and it was by little short of a miracle that he was brought out alive."As we go to press we learn that Mr. Sanderson's condition is much more hopeful than was at first reported."
"The facts have not as yet been ascertained, but it seems clear that the popular young minister returned to town unexpectedly last night, and was asleep in his study when the fire started. His presence in the building was unguessed until too late, and it was by little short of a miracle that he was brought out alive.
"As we go to press we learn that Mr. Sanderson's condition is much more hopeful than was at first reported."
Harry's heart contracted as if a giant hand had clutched it. His elation fell like a rotten tree girdled at the roots. If Hughdid notdie! He chilled as though in a spray of liquid air. Hugh's escape—the chance his conscience had given him, was cut off. He had not betrayed him when the way was open; how could he do so now when flight was barred? If to deliver him then to the hangman would have been cowardice, how much more cowardly now, when it was to save himself, and when the other was helpless? And the law demanded its victim!
As a drowning man sees flit before him the panorama of his life, so in this clarifying instant these lurid pictures of the tangle of his past flashed across Harry's mental vision.
The judge reached for the newspaper the lawyer held, ran his eye over it, and brought his gavel down with an angry snort.
"Take him away," he said. "His testimony is ordered stricken from the records. The fine is remitted, Mr. Felder—we can't make you responsible for lunatics. Bailiff, see that this man has no further chance to disturb these proceedings. The court stands adjourned."
Felder had been among the last to leave the court-room. He was discomfited and angry. He had meant to make a telling point for the defense, and the unbalanced imagination of a strolling, bigot gospeller had undone him. His own precipitate and ill-considered action had uncovered an idiotic mare's-nest, to taint his appeal with bathos and open his cause with a farcical anti-climax. He glumly gathered his scattered papers, put with them the leaf of the newspaper from which the district attorney had read, and despatched the lot to his office by a messenger.
At the door of the court-house Doctor Brent slipped an arm through his.
"Too bad, Tom," he said sympathizingly. "I don't think you quite deserved it."
Felder paced a moment without speaking. "I need evidence," he said then, "—anything that may help. I made a mistake. You heard all the testimony?"
The other nodded.
"What did you think of it?"
"What could any one think? I give all credit to your motive, Tom, but it's a pity you're mixed up in it."
"Why?"
"Because, if there's anything in human evidence, he's a thoroughly worthless reprobate. He lay for Moreau and murdered him in cold blood, and he ought to swing."
"The casual view," said the lawyer gloomily. "Just what I should have said myself—if this had happened a month ago."
His friend looked at him with an amused expression. "I begin to think he must be a remarkable man!" he said. "Is it possible he has really convinced you that he isn't guilty?"
Felder turned upon the doctor squarely. "Yes," he returned bluntly. "He has. Whatever I may have believed when I took this case, I have come to the conclusion—against all my professional instincts, mind you—that he never killed Moreau. I believe he's as innocent as either you or I!"
The physician looked puzzled. "You believe Moreau's hand didn't write that accusation?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think he lied?"
"I don't know what to think. But I am convinced Hugh Stires isn't lying. There's a mystery in the thing that I can't get hold of." He caught the physician's half-smile. "Oh, I know what you think," he said resentfully. "You think it is Miss Holme. I assure you I am defending Hugh Stires for his own sake!"
"She played you a close second to-day," observed the doctor shrewdly. "That carnation—I never saw a thing better done."
Felder drew his arm away. "Miss Holme," he said almost stiffly, "is as far from acting—"
"My dear fellow!" exclaimed the other. "Don't snap me up. She's a gentlewoman, and everything that is lovely. If she were the reason, I should honor you for it. I'm very deeply sorry for her. For my part, I'm sure I wish you might get him off. She loves him, and doesn't care who sees it, and if he were as bad as the worst, a woman like that could make a man of him. But I know juries. In towns like this they take themselves pathetically in earnest. On the evidence so far, they'll convict fast enough."
"I know it," said the lawyer despondently. "And yet he's innocent. I'd stake my life on it. It's worthless as evidence and I shan't introduce it, but he has as good as admitted to her that he knows who did it."
"Come, come! Putting his neck into the noose for mere Quixotic feeling? And who, pray, in this Godforsaken town, should he be sacrificing himself for?" the doctor asked satirically.
"That's the rub," said the lawyer. "Nobody. Yet I hang by my proposition."
"Well, he'll hang by something less tenuous, I'm afraid. But it won't be your fault. The crazy evangelist was only an incident. He merely served to jolt us back to the normal. By the way, did you hear him splutter after he got out?"
"No."
"You remember the story he told the other night of the minister who was caught gambling on his own communion table? Well, Hugh Stires is not only the Reverend Henry Something-or-other, but he is that man, too! The crack-brained old idiot would have told the tale all over again, only the crowd hustled him.
"There he is now," he said suddenly, as a light sprang up and voices broke out on the opposite corner. "The gang is standing by. I see your friend Barney McGinn," he added, with a grim enjoyment. "I doubt if there are many converts to-night."
Even as he spoke, there came a shout of laughter and warning. The spectators scattered in all directions, anda stream of water from a well-directed hose deluged the itinerant and his music-box.
Ten minutes later the street preacher, drenched and furious, was trundling his melodeon toward Funeral Hollow, on his way to the coast.
As Harry stood again in the obscure half-darkness of his cell, it came to him that the present had a far-reaching significance—that it was but the handiwork and resultant of forces in his own past. He himself had brewed the bitter wormwood he must drink. Jessica's quivering arraignment on that lurid wedding-day in the white house in the aspens—it had been engraven ever since on his buried memory!—rang in his mind:
You were strong and he was weak. You led and he followed. You were "Satan Sanderson," Abbot of the Saints, the set in which he learned gambling. You helped to make him what he has become!
They had made variant choice, and that choice had left Harry Sanderson in training for the gaiters of a bishop, and Hugh Stires treading the paths of dalliance and the gambler. But he himself had set Hugh's feet on the red path that had pointed him to the shameful terminus. He had gambled for Hugh's future, forgetting that his past remained, a thing that must becovered. He had won Hugh's counters, but his own right to be himself he had staked and lost long before that game on the communion table under the painted crucifixion.
The words he had once said to Hugh recurred to him with a kind of awe: "Put myself in your place? I wish to God I could!"
Fate—or was it God?—had taken him at his word. He had been hurled like a stone from a catapult into Hugh's place, to bear his knavery, to suffer his dishonor, and to redeem the baleful reputation he had made. He had been his brother's keeper and had failed in the trust; now the circle of retribution, noiseless and inexorable as the wheeling of that vast scorpion cluster in the sky, evened the score and brought him again to the test! And, in the supreme strait, was he, a poor poltroon, to step aside, to cry "enough," to yield ignobly? Even if to put aside the temptation might bring him face to face with the final shameful penalty?
This, then, was the meaning of the strange sequence of events through which he had been passing since the hour when he had awakened in the box-car! Living, he was not to betray Hugh; the Great Purpose behind all meant that he should go forward on the path he had chosen to the end!
A step outside the cell, the turning of the key. The door opened, and Jessica, pale and trembling, stood on the threshold.
"I can not help it," she said, as she came toward him, "though you told me not to come. I have trusted all the while, and waited, and—and prayed. But to-day I was afraid."
She paused, locking her hands before her, looking at him in an agony of entreaty. When she had fled from the court-room to the open air, she had walked straight away toward the mountain, struggling in the cool wind and motion against the feeling of physical sickness and anguish. But she had only partly regained her self-possession. Returning, the thinning groups about the dim-lit door had made it clear that the session was over. In her painful confusion of mind she had acted on a peremptory impulse that drove her to the jail, where her face had quickly gained her entrance.
"Surely, surely," she went on, "the man you are protecting has had time enough! Hasn't he? Won't you tell them the truth now?"
He knew not how to meet the piteous reproach and terror of that look. She had not heard the street preacher's declaration, he knew, but even if she had, it would have been to her only an echo of the old mootedlikeness. He had given her comfort once—but this was no more to be. No matter what it meant to him, or to her!
"Jessica," he said steadily, "when you came to me here that first day, and I told you not to fear for me, I did not mean to deceive you. I thought then that it would all come right. But something has happened since then—something that makes a difference. I can not tell who was the murderer of Moreau. I can not tell you or any one else, either now or at any time."
She gazed at him startled. She had a sudden conception of some element hitherto unguessed in his make-up, something inveterate and adamant. Could it be that he did not intend to tell at all? The very idea was monstrous! Yet that clearly was his meaning. She looked at him with flashing eyes.
"You mean you will not?" she exclaimed bitterly. "You are bent on sacrificing yourself, then! You are going to take this risk because you think it brave and noble, because somehow it fits your man's gospel! Can't you see how wicked and selfish it is? You are thinking only of him, and of yourself, not of me!"
"Jessica, Jessica!" he protested with a groan. But in the self-torture of her questionings she paid no heed.
"Don't you think I suffer? Haven't I borne enough in the months since I married you, for you to want tosave me this? Do you owe me nothing, me whom you so wronged, whose—"
She stopped suddenly at the look on his face of mortal pain, for she had struck harder than she knew. It pierced through the fierce resentment to her deepest heart, and all her love and pity gushed back upon her in a torrent. She threw herself on her knees by the bare cot, crying passionately:
"Oh, forgive me! Forget what I said! I did not mean it. I have forgiven you a thousand times over. I never ceased to love you. I love you now, more than all the world."
"It is true," he said, hoarse misery in his tone. "I have wronged you. If I could coin my blood drop by drop, to pay for the past, I could not set that right. If giving my life over and over again would save you pain, I would give it gladly. But what you ask now is the one thing I can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward. I did not kill Moreau. That is all I can say to you or to those who try me."
"Your life!" she said with dry lips. "It will mean that. That counts so fearfully much to me—more than my own life a hundred times. Yet there is something that counts more than all that to you!"
His face was that of a man who holds his hand inthe fire. "Jessica," he said, "it is like this with me. When you found me here—the day I saw you on the balcony—I was a man whose soul had lost its compass and its bearings. My conscience was asleep. You woke it, and it is fiercely alive now. And now with my memory has come back a debt of my past that I never paid. Whatever the outcome, for my soul's sake I must settle it now and wipe it from the score for ever. Nothing counts—nothing can count—more than you! But I must sail by the needle; I must be truthful to the best that is in me."
She rose slowly to her feet with a despairing gesture.
"'He saved others,'" she quoted in a hard voice, "'himself he could not save!' I once heard a minister preach from that text at home; it was your friend, the Reverend Henry Sanderson. I thought it a very spiritual sermon then—that was before I knew what his companionship had been to you!"
In the exclamation was the old bitterness that had had its spring in that far-away evening at the white house in the aspens, when Harry Sanderson had lifted the curtain from his college career. In spite of David Stires' predilection, since that day she had distrusted and disliked, at moments actively hated him. His mannerisms had seemed a pose and his pretensions hypocrisy.On her wedding-day, when she lashed him with the blame of Hugh's ruin, this had become an ingrained prejudice, impregnable because rooted deeper than reason, in the heritage of her sex, the eternal proclivity, which saw Harry Sanderson, his motley covered with the sober domino of the Church, standing self-righteously in surplice and stole, while Hugh slid downward to disgrace.
"If there were any justice in the universe," she added, "it should be he immolating himself now, not you!"
His face was not toward her and she could not see it go deadly white. The sudden shift she had given the conversation had startled him. He turned to the tiny barred window that looked out across the court-yard square—where such a little time since he had found his lost self.
"I think," he said, "that in my place, he would do the same."
"You always admired him," she went on, the hard ring of misery in her tone. "You admire him yet. Oh, men like him have such strange and wicked power! Satan Sanderson!—it was a fit name. What right has he to be rector of St. James, while you—"
He put out a hand in flinching protest. "Jessica! Don't!" he begged.
"Why should I not say it?" she retorted, with quivering lips. "But for him you would never be here! He ruined your life and mine, and I hate and despise him for a selfish hypocrite!"
That was what he himself had seemed to her in those old days! The edge of a flush touched his forehead as he said slowly, almost appealingly:
"He was not a hypocrite, Jessica. Whatever he was it was not that. At college he did what he did too openly. That was his failing—not caring what others thought. He despised weakness in others; he thought it none of his affair. So others were influenced. But after he came to see things differently, from another standpoint—when he went into the ministry—he would have given the world to undo it."
"That may have been the Harry Sanderson you knew," she said stonily. "The one I knew drove an imported motor-car and had a dozen fads that people were always imitating. You are still loyal to the old college worship. As men go, you count him still your friend!"
"As men go," he echoed grimly, "the very closest!"
"Men's likings are strange," she said. "Because he never had temptations like yours, and has never done what the law calls wrong, you think he is as noble asyou—noble enough to shield a murderer to his own danger."
"Ah, no, Jessica," he interposed gently. "I only said that in my place, he would do the same."
"Butyouare shielding a murderer," she insisted fiercely. "You will not admit it, but I know! There can be no justice or right in that! If Harry Sanderson is all you think him—if he stood here now and knew the whole—he would say it was wicked. Not brave and noble but wicked and cruel!"
He shook his head, and the sad shadow of a bitter smile touched his lips. "He would not say so," he said.
A dry sob answered him. He turned and leaned his elbows on the narrow window-sill, every nerve aching, but powerless to comfort. He heard her step—the door closed sharply.
Then he faced into the empty cell, sat down on the cot and threw out his arms with a hopeless cry:
"Jessica, Jessica!"
Jessica left the jail with despair in her heart. The hope on which she had fed these past days had failed her. What was there left for her to do? Like a swift wind she went up the street to Felder's office.
A block beyond the court-house a crowd was enjoying the watery discomfiture of Hallelujah Jones, and shrinking from recognition even in the darkness—for the arc lights were still black—she crossed the roadway and ran on to the unpretentious building where the lawyer had his sanctum. She groped her way up the unlighted stair and tapped on the door. There was no answer. She pushed it open and entered the empty outer room, where a study lamp burned on the desk.
A pile of legal looking papers had been set beside it and with them lay a torn page of a newspaper whose familiar caption gave her a stab of pain. Perhaps the news of the trial had found its way across the ranges, to where the names of Stires and Moreau had been known. Perhaps every one at Aniston already knew ofit, was reading about it, pitying her! She picked it up and scanned it hastily. There was no hint of the trial, but her eye caught the news which had played its rôle in the court-room, and she read it to the end.
Even in her own trouble she read it with a shiver. Yet, awful as the fate which Harry Sanderson had so narrowly missed, it was not to be compared with that which awaited Hugh, for, awful as it was, it held no shame!
In a gust of feeling she slipped to her knees by the one sofa the room contained and prayed passionately. As she drew out her handkerchief to stanch the tears that came, something fell with a musical tinkle at her feet. It was the little cross she had found in front of the hillside cabin, that had lain forgotten in her pocket during the past anxious days. She picked it up now and held it tightly in her hand, as if the tangible symbol brought her closer to the Infinite Sympathy to which she turned in her misery. As she pressed it, the ring at the top turned and the cross parted in halves. Words were engraved on the inside of the arms—a date and the nameHenry Sanderson.
The recurrence of the name jarred and surprised her. Hugh had dropped it—an old keepsake of the friend who had been hisbeau idéal, his exemplar, and whoseancient influence was still dominant. He had clung loyally to the memento, blind in his constant liking, to the wrong that friend had done him. She looked at the date—it was May 28th. She shuddered, for that was the month and day on which Doctor Moreau had been killed—the point had been clearly established to-day by the prosecution. To the original owner of that cross, perhaps, the date that had come into Hugh's life with such a sinister meaning, was a glad anniversary!
Suddenly she caught her hand to her cheek. A weird idea had rushed through her brain. The religious symbol had stood for Harry Sanderson and the chance coincidence of date had irresistibly pointed to the murder. To her excited senses the juxtaposition held a bizarre, uncanny suggestion. This cross—the very emblem of vicarious sacrifice!—suppose Harry Sanderson had never given it to Hugh! Suppose he had lost it on the hillside himself!
She snatched up the paper again: "Who has been for some months on a prolonged vacation"—the phrase stared sardonically at her. That might carry far back—she said it under her breath, fearfully—beyond the murder of Doctor Moreau! Her face burned, and her breath came sharp and fast. Why, when she brought her warning to the cabin, had Hugh been so anxious to get heraway, unless to prevent her sight of the man who was there—to whom he had taken her horse? Who was there in Smoky Mountain whom he would protect at hazard of his own life? Yet in this crisis, even, her appeal to his love had been fruitless. He had called Harry Sanderson his closest friend, had said that in his place Harry would do the same. She remembered his cry: "What you ask is the one thing I can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward!" She had asked only that he tell the truth. To protect a vulgar murderer was not courageous. But what if they were bound by ties of old friendship and collegecamaraderie? Men had their standards.
Jessica's veins were all afire. A rector-murderer? A double career? Was it beyond possibility? At the sanatorium she had re-readThe Mystery of Edwin Drood; now she thought of John Jasper, the choir-master, stealing away from the cathedral to the London opium den to plan the murder of his nephew. The mad thought gripped her imagination. Harry Sanderson had been wild and lawless in his university days, a gamester, a skeptic—the Abbot of the Saints! To her his pretensions had never seemed more than a graceful sham, the generalities of religion he spread for the delectation of fashionable St. James only "as sounding brass and atinkling cymbal." He had been a hard drinker in those days. What if the old desire had run on beneath the fair exterior, denied and repressed till it had burst control—till he had fled from those who knew him, to Hugh, in whose loyalty he trusted, to give it rein in a debauch? Say that this had happened, and that in the midst of it Moreau, whom he had known in Aniston, had come upon him. Anticipating recognition, to cover his own shame and save his career, in drunken frenzy perhaps, he might have fired the shot on the hillside—that Moreau, taken unawares, had thought was Hugh's!
It came to her like an impinging ray of light—the old curious likeness that had sometimes been made a jest of at the white house in the aspens. Moreau and Prendergast had believed it to be Hugh! So had the town, for the body had been found on his ground! But on the night when the real murderer came again to the cabin—perhaps it was his coming that had brought back the lost memory!—Hugh had known the truth. In the light of this supposition his strained manner then, his present determination not to speak, all stood plain.
What had he meant by a debt of his past that he had never paid? He could owe no debt to Harry Sanderson. If he owed any debt, it was to his dead father, a thousand times more than the draft he had repaid. Could he bethinking in his remorse that his father had cast him off—counting himself nothing, remembering only that Harry Sanderson had been David Stires' favorite, and St. James, which must be smirched by the odium of its rector, the apple of his eye?
Jessica had snatched at a straw, because it was the only buoyant thing afloat in the dragging tide; now with a blind fatuousness she hugged it tighter to her bosom. The joints of her reasoning seemed to dovetail with fateful accuracy. She was swayed by instinct, and apparent fallacies were glozed by old mistrust and terror of the outcome which was driving her to any desperate expedient. Beside Hugh's salvation the whole universe counted as nothing. She was in the grip of that fierce passion of love's defense which feeds the romance of the world. One purpose possessed her: to confront Harry Sanderson. What matter though she missed the remainder of the trial? She could do nothing—her hands were tied. If the truth lay at Aniston she would find it. She thought no further than this. Once in Harry Sanderson's presence, what she should say or do she scarcely imagined. The horrifying question filled her thought to the exclusion of all that must follow its answer. It was surety and self-conviction she craved—only to read in his eyes the truth about the murder of Moreau.
She suddenly began to tremble. Would the doctors let her see him? What excuse could she give? If he was the man who had been in Hugh's cabin that night, he had heard her speak, had known she was there. He must not know beforehand of her coming, lest he have suspicion of her errand. Bishop Ludlow—he could gain her access to him. Injured, dying perhaps, maybe he did not guess that Hugh was in jeopardy for his crime. Guilty and dying, if he knew this, he would surely tell the truth. But if he died before she could reach him? The paper was some days old; he might be dead already. She took heart, however, from the statement of his improved condition.
She sprang to her feet and looked at her chatelaine watch. The east-bound express was overdue. There was no time to lose—minutes might count. She examined her purse—she had money enough with her.
Five minutes later she was at the station, a scribbled note was on its way to Mrs. Halloran, and before a swinging red lantern, the long incoming train was shuddering to a stop.
In the long hospital the air was cool and filtered, drab figures passed with soft footfalls and voices were measured and hushed. But no sense of coolness or repose had come to the man whose racked body had been tenderly borne there in the snowy dawn which saw the blackened ruins of Aniston's most perfect edifice.
Because of him tongues clacked on the street corner and bulletins were posted in newspaper windows; carriages of tasteful equipment halted at the hospital porte-cochère, messages flew back and forth, and the telephone in the outer office whirred busily at unseasonable hours; but from the clean screened room where he lay, all this was shut out. Only the surgeons came and went, deftly refreshing the bandages which swathed one side of his face, where the disfiguring flame had smitten—the other side was untouched, save for a line across the brow, seemingly a thin, red mark of excoriation.
Hugh had sunk into unconsciousness with the awestruck exclamation ringing in his ears: "Good God!It's Harry Sanderson!" He had drifted back to conscious knowledge with the same words racing in his brain. They implied that, so far as capture went, the old, curious resemblance would stand his friend till he betrayed himself, or till the existence of the real Harry Sanderson at Smoky Mountain did so for him. The delusion must hold till he could have himself moved to some place where his secret would be safer—till he could get away!
This thought grew swiftly paramount; it overlapped the rigid agony of his burns that made the bed on which he lay a fiery furnace; it gave method to his every word and look. He took up the difficult part, and after the superficial anguish dulled, complained no more and successfully counterfeited cheerfulness and betterment. He said nothing of the curiously recurrent and sickening stab of pain, searching and deep-seated, that took his breath and left each time an increasing giddiness. Whatever inner hurt this might betoken, he must hide it, the sooner to leave the hospital, where each hour brought nearer the inevitable disclosure.
He thanked fortune now for the chapel game; few enough in Aniston would care to see the unfrocked, disgraced rector of St. James! He did not know that the secret was Bishop Ludlow's own, until the hour whenhe opened his eyes, after a fitful sleep, upon the latter's face.
The bishop was the first visitor and it was his first visit, for he had been in a distant city at the time of the fire. Waiting the waking, he had been mystified at the change a few months had wrought in the countenance of the man whose disappearance had cost him so many sleepless hours. The months of indulgence and rich living—on the money he had won from Harry—had taken away Hugh's slightness, and his fuller cheeks were now of the contour of Harry's own. But the bishop distinguished new lines in the face on the pillow, an expression unfamiliar and puzzling; the firmness and strength were gone, and in their place was a haunting something that gave him a flitting suggestion of the discarded that he could not shake off.
Waking, the unexpected sight of the bishop startled Hugh; to the good man's pain he had turned his face away.
"My dear boy," the bishop had said, "they tell me you are stronger and better. I thank God for it!"
He spoke gently and with deep feeling. How could he tell to what extent he himself, in mistaken severity, had been responsible for that unaccustomed look? When Hugh did not answer, the bishop misconstrued thesilence. He leaned over the bed; the big cool hand touched the fevered one on the white coverlid, where the ruby ring glowed, a coal in snow.
"Harry," he said, "you have suffered—you are suffering now. But think of me only as your friend. I ask no questions. We are going to begin again where we left off."
The words and tone had shown Hugh the situation and given him his cue. He could put himself fairly in Harry's place, and with the instinct of the actor he did so now, meeting the other's friendliness with a hesitant eagerness.
"I would like to do that," he said, "—to begin again. But the chapel is gone."
"Never mind that," said the bishop cheerfully. "You are only to get well. We are going to rebuild soon, and we want your judgment on the plans. Aniston is hanging on your condition, Harry," he went on. "There's a small cartload of visiting-cards down-stairs for you. But I imagine you haven't begun to receive yet, eh?"
"I—I've seen nobody." Hugh spoke hurriedly and hoarsely. "Tell the doctor to let no one come—no one but you. I—I'm not up to it!"
"Why, of course not," said the bishop quickly. "You need quiet, and the people can wait."
The bishop chatted a while of the parish, Hugh replying only when he must, and went away heartened. Before he left Hugh saw his way to hasten his own going. On the next visit the seed was dropped in the bishop's mind so cleverly that he thought the idea his own. That day he said to the surgeon in charge:
"He is gaining so rapidly, I have been wondering if he couldn't be taken away where the climate will benefit him. Will he be able to travel soon?"
"I think so," answered the surgeon. "We suspected internal injury at first, but I imagine the worst he has to fear is the disfigurement. Mountain or sea air would do him good," he added reflectively; "what he will need is tonic and building up."
The bishop had revolved this in his mind. He knew a place on the coast, tucked away in the cypresses, which would be admirable for convalescence. He could arrange a special car and he himself could make the journey with him. He proposed this to the surgeon and with his approval put his plan in motion. In two days more Hugh found his going fully settled.
The idea admirably fitted his necessity. The spot the bishop had selected was quiet and retired, and more, was near the port at which he could most readily take ship for South America. Only one reflection made himshiver: the route lay through the town of Smoky Mountain. Yet who would dream of looking for a fugitive from the law in the secluded car that carried a sick man? The risk would be small enough, and it was the one way open!
On the last afternoon before the departure, Hugh asked for the clothes he had worn when he was brought to the hospital, found the gold-pieces he had snatched in the burning chapel and tied them in a handkerchief about his neck. They would suffice to buy his sea-passage. The one red counter he had kept—it was from henceforth to be a reminder of the good resolutions he had made so long ago—he slipped into a pocket of the clothes he was to wear away, a suit of loose, comfortable tweed.
Waiting restlessly for the hour of his going, Hugh asked for the newspapers. Since the first he had had them read to him each day, listening fearfully for the hue and cry. But to-day the surgeon put his request aside.
"After you are there," he said, "if Bishop Ludlow will let you. Not now. You are almost out of my clutches, and I must tyrannize while I can."
A quick look passed from him to his assistant as he spoke, for the newspapers that afternoon had wornstartling head-lines. The sordid affairs of a mining town across the ranges had little interest for Aniston, but the names of Stires and Moreau on the clicking wire had waked it, thus late, to the sensation. The professional caution of the tinker of human bodies wished, however, that no excitement should be added to the unavoidable fatigue of his patient's departure.
This fatigue was near to spelling defeat, after all, for the exertion brought again the dreadful, stabbing pain, and this time it carried Hugh into a region where feeling ceased, consciousness passed, and from which he struggled back finally to find the surgeon bending anxiously over him.
"I don't like that sinking spell," the latter confided to his assistant an hour later as they stood looking through the window after the receding carriage. "It was too pronounced. Yet he has complained of no pain. He will be in good hands at any rate." He tapped the glass musingly with his forefinger. "It's curious," he said after a pause; "I always liked Sanderson—in the pulpit. Somehow he doesn't appeal to me at close range."
The special car which the bishop had ready had been made a pleasant interior; fern-boxes were in the corners, a caged canary swung from a bracket, and a softly cushioned couch had been prepared for the sick man. Amoment before the start, as it was being coupled to the rear of the resting train, while the bishop chatted with the conductor, a flustered messenger boy handed him a telegram. It read:
I arrive Aniston to-morrow five. Confidential. Must see you. Urgent.Jessica.
I arrive Aniston to-morrow five. Confidential. Must see you. Urgent.Jessica.
The bishop read it in some perplexity. It was the first word he had received from her since her marriage, but, aware of Hugh's forgery and disgrace, he had not wondered at this. Since the news of David Stires' death, he had looked for her return, for she was the old man's heir and mistress now of the white house in the aspens. But he realized that it would need all her courage to come back to this town whence she had fled with her trouble—to lay bare an unsuspected and shameful secret, to meet old friends, and answer questions that must be asked. The newspapers to-day pictured a still worse shame for her, in the position of the man who, in name still, was her husband—who had trod so swiftly the downward path from thievery to the worst of crimes. Could Jessica's coming have to do with that? He must see her, yet his departure could not now be delayed. He consulted with the conductor and the latter pored over his tablets.
As a result, his answering message flashed along the wires to Jessica's far-away train:
Sanderson injured. Taking him to coast train forty-eight due Twin Peaks two to-morrow afternoon.
Sanderson injured. Taking him to coast train forty-eight due Twin Peaks two to-morrow afternoon.
And thus the fateful moment approached when the great appeal should be made.
The evidence of the first day's trial of the case of the People against Hugh Stires was the all-engrossing topic that night in Smoky Mountain. In the "Amen Corner" of the Mountain Valley House it held sway. Among the sedate group there gathered, there seemed but one belief: that the accused man was guilty—but one feeling: that of regret. Gravity lay so heavily upon the atmosphere there that when Mrs. Halloran momentarily entered the discussion to declare fiercely that "if Hugh Stires was a murderer, then they were all thieves and she a cannibal" she aroused no smile. Barney McGinn perhaps aptly expressed the consensus of opinion when he said: "I allow we all know he's guilty, but nobody believes it."
Late as Smoky Mountain sat up that night, however, it was on hand next morning, rank and file, when the court convened.
All the previous evening, save for a short visit to the cell of his client, Felder had remained shut in his office, thinking of the morrow. In his talk with Harry he hadnot concealed his deep anxiety, but to his questions there was no new answer, and he had returned from the interview more nonplussed than ever. He had wondered that Jessica, on this last night, did not come to his office, but had been rather relieved than otherwise that she did not. He had gone to bed heavy with discouragement and had waked in the morning with foreboding.
As he shook hands with the prisoner in the packed court-room, Felder felt a keen admiration that his sense of painful impotence could not overlay. He read in the composed face the same prescience that possessed him, but it held no fear or shadow of turning. He was facing the scaffold; facing it—if the woman he loved was right in her conclusions—in obedience to a set idea of self-martyrdom and with indomitable spirit. It was inconceivable that a sane man would do this for a sneaking assassin. It was either aberration or a relentless purpose so extraordinary that it lay far removed from the ordinary courses of reasoning. Felder's own conviction had no bolstering of fact, no logical premise; indeed, as he had admitted to Doctor Brent, it was thoroughly unprofessional. Even to cite the circumstances on which Jessica based her belief that Hugh knew the real murderer would weaken his case. The suggestion would seem a mere bungling expedient to inject the tantalizingfillip of mystery and unbelievable Quixotic motive, and, lacking evidence to support it, would touch the whole fabric with the taint of the meretricious. The sense of painful responsibility and hopelessness oppressed him, for, so far as real evidence went, he had entered on this second day of the struggle without a tangible theory of defense.
As he turned from greeting his client, Felder noted with surprise that Jessica was not in her place. Not that he needed her further testimony, for he had drawn from her the day before all he intended to utilize, but her absence disturbed him, and instinctively he turned and looked across the sea of faces toward the door.
Harry's glance followed his, and a deeper pain beleaguered it as his eyes returned to the empty chair. He saw Mrs. Halloran whisper eagerly with the lawyer, who turned away with a puzzled look. In his bitterness the thought came to him that the testimony had sapped her conviction of his innocence—that his refusal to answer her entreaties had been the last straw to the load under which it had gone down—that she believed him indeed the murderer of Moreau. To seem the cringing criminal, the pitiful liar and actor in her eyes! The thought stung him. Her faith had meant so much!
The ominous feeling weighed heavily on Felder whenhe rose to continue the testimony for the prisoner, so rudely disturbed the evening before. In such a community pettifogging was of no avail. Throwing expert dust in jurors' eyes would be worse than useless. In his opening words he made no attempt to conceal the weakness of the defense, evidentially considered. Stripped of all husk, his was to be an appeal to Cæsar.
Through a cloud of witnesses, concisely, consistently—yet with a winning tactfulness that disarmed the objections of the prosecution—he began to lead them through the series of events that had followed the arrival of the self-forgotten man. Out of the mouths of their own neighbors—Devlin, Barney McGinn, Mrs. Halloran, who came down weeping—they were made to see, as in a cyclorama, the struggle for rehabilitation against hatred and suspicion, the courage that had dared for a child's life, the honesty of purpose that showed in self-surrender. The prisoner, he said, had recovered his memory before the accusation and asserted his absolute innocence. Those who believed him guilty of the murder of Doctor Moreau must believe him also a vulgar liar andposeur. He left the inference clear: If the prisoner had fired that cowardly shot, he knew it now; if he lied now he had lied all along, and the later life he had lived at Smoky Mountain—eloquent of fair-dealing,straightforwardness of purpose, kindliness and courage—had been but hypocrisy, the bootless artifice of a shallow buffoon.
It was an appeal sustained and moving, addressed to folk who, untrammelled by a complex and variform convention, felt simply and deeply the simplest and deepest passions of human kind. Often, as the morning grew, Felder's glance turned toward the empty chair near-by, and more than once, though his active thought never wavered from the serious business in hand, his subconscious mind wondered. Mrs. Halloran had told him of the note from Jessica—it had said only that she would return at the earliest possible moment. The wonder in Felder's mind was general throughout the court-room, for none who had listened to Jessica's testimony—and the whole town had heard it—could doubt the strength of her love. The eyes that saw the empty chair were full of pity. Only the knot of serious faces in the jury-box was seldom turned that way.
The session was prolonged past the noon hour, and when Felder rested his case it seemed that all that was possible had been said. He had done his utmost. He had drawn from the people of Smoky Mountain a dramatic story, and had filled in its outlines with color, force and feeling. And yet, as he closed, the lawyer felt a sick sense of failure.
Court adjourned for an hour, and in the interim Felder remained in a little room in the building, whither Doctor Brent was to send him sandwiches and coffee from the hotel.
"You made a fine effort, Tom," the latter said, as they stood for a moment in the emptying court-room. "You're doing wonders with no case, and the town ought to send you to Congress on the strength of it! I declare, some of your evidence made me feel as mean as a dog about the rascal, though I knew all the time he was as guilty as the devil."
The lawyer shook his head. "I don't blame you, Brent," he said, "for you don't know him as I do. I have seen much of him lately, been often with him, watched him under stress—for he doesn't deceive himself, he has no thought of acquittal! We none of us knew Hugh Stires. We put him down for a shallow, vulgar blackleg, without redeeming qualities. But the man we are trying is a gentleman, a refined and cultivated man of taste and feeling. I have learned his true character during these days."
"Well," said the other, "if you believe in him, so much the better. You'll make the better speech for it. Tell me one thing—where was Miss Holme?"
"I don't know."
The doctor raised his eyebrows. "Good-by," he said. "I'll send over the coffee and sandwiches," he added as he turned away.
"She thinks he is guilty!" he said to himself as he walked up the street. "She thinks he is guilty, too!"
To stand face to face with Harry Sanderson—that had been Jessica's sole thought. The news that the bishop, with the man she suspected, was speeding toward her—to pass the very town wherein Hugh stood for his life—seemed a prearrangement of eternal justice. When the telegram reached her, she had already gone by Twin Peaks. To proceed would be to pass the coming train. At a farther station, however, she was able to take a night train back, arriving again at Twin Peaks in the gray dawn of the next morning. At the dingy station hotel there she undressed and lay down, but her nerves were quivering and she could not close her eyes. Toward noon she dressed and forced herself to breakfast, realizing the need of strength. She spent the rest of the time of waiting walking up and down in the crisp air, which steadied her nerves and gave her a measure of control.
When the train for which she waited came in, the curtained car at its end, she did not wait for the bishop tofind her on the platform, but stepped aboard and made her way slowly back. It started again as she threaded the last Pullman, to find the bishop on its rear platform peering out anxiously at the receding station.
He took both her hands and drew her into the empty drawing-room. He was startled at her pallor. "I know," he said pityingly. "I have heard."
She winced. "Does Aniston know?"
"Yes," he answered. "Yesterday's newspapers told it."
She put her hand on his arm. "Can you guess why I was coming home?" she asked. "It was to tell Harry Sanderson! I know of the fire," she went on quickly, "and of his injury. I can guess you want to spare him strain or excitement, but I must tell him!"
"It is a matter of physical strength, Jessica," he said. "He has been a sick man. Forgive my saying it, child, but—what good could it do?"
"Believe, oh, you must believe," she pleaded, "that I do not ask this lightly, that I have a purpose that makes it necessary. It means so much—more than my life to me! Why, I have waited here at Twin Peaks all through the night, till now, when this very day and hour they are trying him there at Smoky Mountain! You must let me tell him!"
He reflected a moment. He thought he guessed whatwas in her mind. If there was any one who had ever had an influence over Hugh for good, it was Harry Sanderson. He himself, he thought, had none. Perhaps, remembering their old comradeship, she was longing now to have this influence exerted, to bring Hugh to a better mind—thinking of his eternal welfare, of his making his peace with his Maker. Beneath his prosy churchmanship and somewhat elaborate piety, the bishop had a spirituality almost medieval in its simplicity. Perhaps this was God's way. His eyes lighted.
"Very well," he said. "Come," and led the way into the car.
Jessica followed, her hands clenched tightly. She saw the couch, the profile on its cushions turned toward the window where forest and stream slipped past—a face curiously like Hugh's! Yet it was different, lacking the other's strength, even its refinement. And this man had molded Hugh! These vague thoughts lost themselves instantly in the momentous surmise that filled her imagination. The bishop put out his hand and touched the relaxed arm.
The trepidation that darted into the bandaged face as it turned upon the girlish figure, the frosty fear that blanched the haggard countenance, spoke Hugh's surprise and dread. It was she, and she knew the realHarry Sanderson was in Smoky Mountain. Had she heard of the chapel fire, guessed the imposture, and come to denounce him, the guilty husband she had such reason to hate? The twitching limbs stiffened. "Jessica!" he said in a hoarse whisper.
For an instant a fierce sense of triumph flamed through her every nerve. But a cold doubt chilled it. Her suspicion might be the veriest chimera. It seemed suddenly too wild for belief. She sat down abruptly and for a fleeting moment hid her face. The bishop touched the bowed, brown head.
"Harry," he said, "Jessica is in great trouble. She has come with sad news. Hugh, her husband, your old college mate, is in a terrible position. He is accused of murder. I kept the newspapers from you to-day because they told of it."
She had caught the meaning of the pity in his tone—for her, not for Hugh! "Ah," she cried passionately, lifting her head, "but they did not tell it all! Did they tell you that he is unjustly, wickedly accused by an enemy? That, though they may convict him, he is innocent—innocent?"
The bishop looked at her in surprise. In spite of all the past—the shameful, conscienceless past and her own wrong—she loved and believed in her husband!
Hugh's hand lifted, wavered an instant before his brow. Did she say he was innocent? "I don't—understand," he said hoarsely.
Jessica's wide eyes fastened on his as though to search his secret soul. "I will tell it all," she said, "then you will understand." The bishop drew a chair close, but her gaze did not waver from the face on the cushions—the face which she must read!
As she told the broken tale the car was still, save for the labored, irregular breathing of the prostrate man, and the muffled roar that penetrated the walls, a multitudinous, elfin din. Once the swinging canary broke forth into liquid warbling, as though in all the world were no throe of body or dolor of mind. In that telling Jessica's mind traversed wastes of alternate certainty and doubt, as she hung upon the look of the man who listened—a look that merged slowly into a fearful understanding. Hugh understood now!
Jessica had believed him to be her husband, and she believed so still. And Harry did not intend to tell. He was safe ... safe! In the reaction from his fear, Hugh felt sick and faint.
The bishop had been listening in some anxiety, both for her and for his charge. There was a strained intensity in her manner now that betokened almostunbalance—so it seemed to him. The side-lights he had had of Hugh's career led him to believe him incapable of such a self-sacrifice as her tale recited. A strange power there was in woman's love!
"You see," she ended, "that is why I know he is innocent.Youcan not"—her eyes held Hugh's—"youcan not doubt it, can you?"
Hugh's tongue wet his parched lips. A tremor ran through him. He did not answer.
Jessica started to her feet. Self-possession was falling from her; she was fighting to seize the vital knowledge that evaded her. She held out her hand—in the palm lay a small emblem of gold.
"By this cross," she cried with desperate earnestness, "I ask you for the truth. It is his life or death—Hugh's life or death! He did not kill Doctor Moreau.Who did?"
Hugh had shrunk back on the couch, his face ghastly. "I know nothing—nothing!" he stammered. "Do not ask me!"
The bishop had risen in alarm; he thought her hysterical. "Jessica! Jessica!" he exclaimed. He threw his arm about her and led her from the couch. "You don't know what you are saying. You are beside yourself." He forced her into the drawing-room and made her sitdown. She was tense and quivering. The cross fell from her hand and he stooped and picked it up.
"Try to calm yourself," he said, "to think of other things for a few moments. This little cross—I wonder how you come to have it? I gave it to Sanderson last May to commemorate his ordination." He twisted it open. "See, here is the date, May twenty-eighth—that was the day I gave it to him."
She gave a quick gasp and the last vestige of color faded from her cheek. She looked at him in a stricken way. "LastMay!" she said faintly. Harry Sanderson had been in Aniston, then, on the day Doctor Moreau had been murdered. Her house of cards fell. She had been mistaken! She leaned her head back against the cushion and closed her eyes.
Presently she felt a cold glass touch her lips. "Here is some water," the bishop's voice said. "You are better, are you not? Poor child! You have been through a terrible strain. I would give the world to help you if I could!"
He left her, and she sat dully trying to think. The regular jar of the trucks had set itself to a rhythm—no hope, no hope, no hope! She knew now that there was none. When the bishop reëntered she did not turn her head. He sat beside her a while and she was awareagain of his voice, speaking soothingly. At moments thereafter he was there, at others she knew that she was alone, but she was unconscious of the flight of time. She knew only that the day was fading. On the chilly whirling landscape she saw only a crowded room, a jury-box, a judge's bench, and Hugh before it, listening to the sentence that would take him from her for ever. The bright sunlight was mercilessly, satanically cruel, and God a sneering monster turning a crank.
Into her conscious view grew distant snowy ranges, hills unrolling at their feet, a straggling town, a staring white court-house and a grim low building beside it. She rose stumblingly, the train quivering to the brakes, as the bishop entered.
"This is Smoky Mountain," she said with numb lips. "That is the building where he is being tried. I am going there now."
The bishop opened the door. "We stop here twenty minutes," he said. "I will walk a little way with you."