As Echo stood once more in the dim light of her blue-and-white room, it seemed to her to belong to some blithe past life which she had lived long ago and discarded—as if she were suddenly an intruder into the peace and quiet it enfolded. For though her hands were like ice, her veins were beating hot and her mind was filled with the heat of a fiery furnace.
Cameron Craig held her father's name, his career, his whole happiness, and that of them all—her mother, Chilly, herself—in his hand. His was the power to crush and to ban. This man had professed to love her. She remembered what he had said to her that day in the garden—a year ago: "Since I met you the whole world has been changing for me.... You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done ... Echo, Echo!" The words seemed to wreathe about her, to return to her in pelted reverberations from the wall. She could save the situation. She could marry Cameron Craig.
The weird thought had rushed through her like a cold flame with the voicing of that name in the library. He would do it. More than the decision, more than any material ambition, he desired her. The letter—and the photographic plate—should be the price!
As she fought with herself through the long night hours, distraught yet tearless, it came to her with agonised reiteration that the resolve marked the end for her of all that makes life young. Up to a year ago she had been a girl; her deeper emotions had been unstirred, her soul unknown to herself. Only from the moment at the "Farm" when she had sent Harry Sevier from her to his battle with appetite, had she known the real meaning of life. Since then she had had the sweetness of learning love's unfolding in denial, and that very day it had come to fruition. Could it have been only that afternoon that the confession had trembled on his lips, when her heart had seemed to beat audibly, like little songs of joy? Now the cup was dashed from her lips. And he would never know—she could never tell him! That was the deep and piteous treason to which she must contribute!
She crept to the window and looked out over the garden, its elfish vapours dimly lighted by a thin, silver crescent-moon that seemed hanging like a gipsy ear-ring from a swarthy cloud. Below her the box-bordered paths showed in a sunken cross. The hemlock in its centre, with its triple spires, had been brought, a tiny seedling, by her great-great-grandmother from White Sulphur Springs, rooted in a gourd tied on the back of an old buff-coloured coach. The old lady's quaint portrait hung still in the dining-room, just above the diamond-leaded cabinet that held the tea-set of gold and lapiz lazuli blue, from which Jefferson and Randolph had drunk, and her garlanded silver basket whose inscription read, "From a lover of fifty years to his bride."
Echo felt a little shiver in her heart, as painful contrasting pictures thronged before her disordered fancy—pictures of herself as Craig's wife. She saw herself, young in years but with sere joys and blasted ideals, all youth's impulses dead in her, the wife of a man whose bodily presence she loathed and whose character, even before this, she had detested. A chill passed through her, and she dropped the curtain and shut out the moonlight. But what if her father stood ruined, the mark of public pity and covert sneers? She thought of the pearl-handled revolver. He would have given his life to checkmate fate, if that had but been possible to him. And she was his daughter!
But to giveherself, her body, her soul! To go to this man, to live with him, to bear his name—she shrank from the thought as at the touch of white-hot iron.
When the tiny ormolu clock on her dressing-table struck five she drew up the blind. Dawn, with its coral sandals, was tiptoeing over the garden, hanging dew-diamonds on the rose-bushes, swinging her censer of multifold perfume to the waking flute of the birds. She bathed her face and smoothed her hair, then put on a dark travelling dress and packed a small bag, putting into it only linen and a few toilet-accessories, with a closed silver frame, heart-shaped, whose twin sides held miniatures of her father and mother. Last she unlocked a tin box in her drawer, took some money which it contained and put it in her pocket. Then, bag in hand, she went downstairs.
In the dining-room Nelson held up his hands, pink-lined palms outward.
"Mah Goodness, honey!" he ejaculated. "Reck'n yo' didn' sleep 'tall las' night, what wid Marse Beve'ly took so yistidy. Yo' look jes' lak er ghos'. Now yo' set down en drink some hot coffee en eat plenty chick'n en waffles. Ain' gwine find nuthin'halfez good on dat ar' dinin'-cyah, nohow!"
The warmth of the coffee was grateful to her, and while the old man hovered about her she made a pretence of eating, answering his protestations with monosyllables, in fact scarcely knowing what she said, for her mind was busy with other things. 'Lige, the driver, would wait to put her on the train—she must take the up-train then, as he expected her to do. And it was an express: she could not leave it till it reached the junction, hours later. There, however, she could take the other road—the Southern. There must be an afternoon train, and that, though by a round-about way, would bring her finally to her destination.
When carriage-wheels sounded from the drive she went into the library and seated at her father's desk, wrote a note. It was to Harry Sevier. She sealed and addressed it with a hand that shook a little, and gave it to Nelson with instructions to send it during the morning. The old negro put her into the carriage, with her bag and tucked the cover about her with loving hands.
She caught a breath, uneven like a child's. "You'll—take good care of father, Nelson?"
"Bress yo' li'l ha'at, ah'm sho' gwine watch Marse Beve'ly lak erhawk. He'll be all right, en yo' be back termorrer."
"Yes," she said faintly.
As the carriage whirled into the roadway, she turned her head to cast a straining gaze up the silent drive to the old house. Then the acacias shut it from her view.
In Harry Sevier's outer office his clerk glanced backward with a startled expression, his law-book dropping from his fingers. "That's queer," he muttered. "I never heard him laugh like that before. Doesn't sound like a joke, somehow."
He rose and tapped lightly on the inner door, which he had closed upon his employer a moment before. But there was no response and he went back to his seat—and the volume he was studying. "Wonder if it was that note I gave him," he speculated.
The tap had fallen on deaf ears. Harry was sitting in the other room, rigidly staring at the note in question. There was on him a feeling of actual physical sickness. He did not know that he had laughed. At last he rose, and crumpling the written sheet into a ball, laid it in the fire-place and struck a match. His fingers worked clumsily and he broke several short off before a flame showed and he stooped painfully and held the match to its edge. He remained in the crouching posture while the paper blazed merrily up. In the charring heat it crackled and opened, showing for a brief instant in the baleful, blackening, light two sentences it had contained: "Think as gently of me as you can. I can never marry you—never."
He stood up dazedly and groped his way to a chair. So this was the end! She, Echo, whom he had thought so true, she had been playing with him—and now the game was over. To her he had been only a puppet, a card in hand to be played off, discarded for the winning of the greater point. Poor, brainless, fool that he was! There was no longer a yesterday—no dear eyes holding his, no Eden wind blowing the rose-petals nor silver stars swinging the incense of the gods! He had been living in a fairy-tale, a castle in Spain, a fool's paradise, hugging a ridiculous dream, that had had no reality to her, had been but a chapter of coquetry, to which she now wrotefinis! "Think gently!" This was the epitaph of her flirtation with Harry Sevier—flung away, raked under, thrust from sight, a thing for the scare-crow and the scavenger!
He got up and going slowly to the window, stood many minutes with his forehead against the pane.
What remained for him? To sweep out of his life the shards of that beautiful thing that lay destroyed forever? To saunter on, with hypocritical smirk and affected nonchalance, down the empty declivity of professional habit, to an undesirable goal? To what end? Of what value had been his striving? A year ago he might have won her—no one else had had more than a slight hold upon her then. It had been that long denial that he had set himself that had undone him! What profit to him that he had won the mastery over himself, had cut the tentacle coils that were enwinding him? Of what had been the use?
There darted through his racked mind the sorry jingle that Chilly had once roared in his rooms:
"Money is dross,Loving is loss,There's never a crown that is worth its cross.Life is a toss,Dying is moss,But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"
Why not "cut it all," as Chilly had longed to do? Plunge out along the numb, reckless way whose well-remembered mile-stones suddenly beckoned him—anyhow, anywhere, only to muffle the pain that plucked at him—to sodden and sink himself in blessed oblivion, like a stone in a pool!
A thing that had lain torpid and dormant in the dregs of his being thrust up its head. It was as though a chain snapped in his brain, and what had been shackled there reared, savage and exultant. On the desk sat a photograph in a silver frame. Once he had been used to turn this face-down when that cabinet was opened a year ago! He picked this up and with a sudden wrench of his powerful fingers bent and broke it across again and again, crushing metal and board into a shapeless battered twist, and flung it into the fireplace. He snatched up a heavy paper-weight and with one blow smashed in the door of the little wall-cabinet. The glass fell in a shower of silvery tinkles to the floor. He seized the black bottle that sat there—with the rusty goblet—poured the latter to the brim and drank it off—once, twice, three times.
He went into the main office. Its occupant was on his feet in alarm at the crash of shattered glass in the next room. "How much money is there on the premises?"
The clerk looked in a drawer. "About sixty dollars. It's the last payment on—"
"Give it to me," said Sevier shortly. He pocketed the wad of bills the other handed him. "I'm going on a journey—abroad," he said. "I may be gone some time—in fact, I know I shall. Don't forward anything, and close up the office till I return. You will draw, as usual, of course." In another moment he was giving directions—over the complaisant wire—to his bank. He had always kept his leisure clear by putting the small details of daily routine book-keeping, as he expressed it "on the other fellow"; however long his desertion, rent and camp-followers should be paid with regularity.
Ten minutes later his valet, in a suit of spotless white linen, let him into his apartment.
"I'm off for a vacation, Suzuki," he said. "To-night, when Bob comes for orders, tell him to put the car up till I want it. You can go to night-school and rub up your 'Yingleesh.'"
The Japanese blinked. "A'right," he said. "When we see you some more?"
"When I get back." Sevier lifted a book from the table. "Take this to Mr. Treadwell's—his house, not his office—you understand. There's no message; it belongs to him. Don't wait; go at once."
When he had closed the outer door on the valet, Harry drew a long breath. He opened another door and listened. He could hear Aunt Judy rattling crockery in the kitchen, humming as she laboured. He would be undisturbed, the coast was clear. His veins were beating hot now with the brandy, and the sickness was gone. In the old days the reaction had been slow and grudging. But during the year his body had refreshed itself. The inured crust of usage was stripped away, and the physical side responded speedily.
He went into his dressing-room and threw open the huge walnut wardrobe that effaced one wall. It was hung from end to end with clothing. He selected a cheap dun-coloured suit which he had purchased abroad years before for a walking-tour, of whose strenuous occupations it showed some traces in wear, a flannel shirt and a slouch hat, companion of sundry long-ago fishing excursions. He took a nail-scissors and painstakingly cut from each article its maker's name. In the bath-room, first with shears and then with a razor, he cut off his crisp dark beard: never, since his college days abroad, had he seen his own face like that.
Finally arrayed, he regarded himself in the cheval-glass. The Harry Sevier of sumptuous apparel and perfect grooming, the familiar spirit of the place, was gone. In his stead there stood an unfamiliar presence, with smooth-shaven chin and knock-about clothing. And the stranger looked from the depths of the mirror with a gaze from which something tempered and remorseful had vanished, a gaze of avid recklessness and strange, irresponsible daring, the look of one standing on the sheer verge of any hazard, welcoming any throw of the dice, fearing nothing and caring nothing.
As he stood, his hand encountered a small hard object in his pocket. He drew it out. It was a ring, roughly made and holding an uncut emerald almost square in shape. He remembered that once, in the woods, he had bought it for a whim from some gipsy caravan—a luck ring. Much luck it had brought him! Well, it was the gipsy-road now for him. He drew off his seal ring and thrust the other on his finger in its place.
He went quickly out the front door and down to the entrance pulling his hat brim well over his eyes on issuing to the street. As he did so he grazed a lady leisurely passing. It was the plump and pretty Mrs. Spottiswoode. Her glance met his fairly, but there was no sign of recognition; she only drew her trim, modish skirt away from the contact as she passed on.
He walked more rapidly now. He could scarce keep from running—would have done so but for the thronging crowds. The brandy he had drunk in the office had roused the devil of craving; it was in his throat now like the rasp of hot sand-paper and he craved more alcohol with a desperate craving that would not be denied. At the edge of the open square which held the railroad station he plunged into a saloon and pushed through its groups of loungers to the bar.
"A flask of whisky—the best you have," he said.
The bar-tender wiped his hands on his duck jacket and took down a squat bottle. "O. and S.," he said, affably. "Just blown in to town?"
Harry stared him in the eye. "Wrap that thing up, and be quick about it!" was his answer.
The man in the duck jacket muttered something under his breath, banged the package on the bar and rang up the payment on the cash-register with an angry jingle.
Harry thrust his purchase under his arm, went out, crossed the square and climbed aboard a train that was drawing out. He went rapidly forward to the smoker; there he—and the bottle he carried—would be unnoticed. As he sat down in the rear seat, the conductor passed by. Harry had no ticket. He handed him a bill.
"Where to?" asked the other briefly.
"How far do you go?"
"Birmingham."
"To Birmingham, then," said Harry.
The afternoon wore on, station after station went by. The man in the rear seat sat with his eyes straight before him, moveless except as from time to time he lifted a bottle to his lips and drank thirstily, avidly. The frenzied pain was gone now, leaving only a dull ache, and gradually, very gradually, this too slipped away into the void. He was now once more the man who had fled in his motor from the face of a convict in a court-room, flying through the night in a jumbled dream, strung upon a headlong speed through vacuity.
Evening came, with the glamour of peach-blown valleys and honey-lipped hills, lying under pale stars against the sunset. Night fell, with its cooler breeze through the windows, its glimpses of quiet, watching woods, of white mists wreathing across the meadows, of yellow lights. But Harry took no heed. Only hours later, when the train rolled into a great rotunda did he turn his head. He did not know where he was. He did not even wonder. He rose, kicked the emptied bottle under the seat, and left the train.
He went out of the station. It sat on a ridge above a great river and on the lower level he had a glimpse of a sordid purlieus of rambling streets, red-paned windows and gleaming doorways, the soiled earmarks of the city's slums.
He crossed the street and plunged aimlessly down a narrow alley toward the water-front.
The potations in the smoking-car had had their first effect. Sevier had passed from the jumbled dream now—was safe enisled in that strange fourth-dimensional empire into which he had first wandered during that wild night-ride in his motor, that region of tense consciousness that was yet without rule, in which every sense was acute, his brain clear as ice, but where impressions recorded themselves without co-ordination. Eye and ear drank in avidly each sight and sound, and he sniffed the thick smells as a hound sniffs a haunting but forgotten trail.
As he went further the dwindling signs of respectability vanished. He was now below the city's "dead-line" where, in segregated wantonness, vice and license unrolled their audacities fearless of the complaisant police regulations.
A hundred yards from the greasy docks lining the sluggish current from which a plumy mist was lifting, a wide screened doorway showed a blaze of electric-light upon a patch of saw-dust floor. Through it poured the tinny blare of a gramophone hooting a comic song, mingled with rumbling laughter and raised voices. It was a low-roofed, shambling building, planned for the delectation of the barge-man and the roustabout and now throbbing with their daily—and nightly—pleasures. Harry halted before it.
"Tough joint, eh?" The voice fell suddenly at his elbow.
He turned. The speaker was red-cheeked and brisk, with dapper sophistication and inquisitiveness written all over him. His shining straw hat had a coloured band, there were white pearl buttons on his patent-leather shoes and a natty stick swung lightly from his gloved fingers. "I can see you don't belong with that crowd," he said, nodding sagely toward the entrance.
"No," said Sevier. He was staring at the speaker with a penetrating intensity, thinking that, but for colouring and costume, they two somewhat resembled each other—speculating as to the slanting scar on the other's right cheek, that might have been the memento of a rusty nail or of a pet panther—thinking of these things and of a thousand things beside that were only remotely connected with either of them.
"Neither do I, but I take a high dive into it now and then. Let's go in and have a drink."
In Harry's middle distance another more decorous swing-door vibrated to and fro, with a sharp smell of hops, a rattle of glasses, a voice reckless but good-humoured—proposing a like libation. Beyond this in endless succession were openings and re-openings of a locked cabinet that had hung somewhere on a wall, and further yet, myriads of goblets, cut with shining prisms, reflecting rainbow colours on spotless napery. A drink?
"Why not?" he said, and striking open the door, led the way into the noisy interior, reeking with stale odours, with strong tobacco-smoke, with carouse and profanity. He strode across the floor, shouldering his way unceremoniously through the press, and sat down at a small deal table that was unoccupied. His companion seated himself opposite. He was looking at Harry with critical admiration, noting his lithe athletic build and the certain, confident swing of his movements. His eye lighted.
"Gad!" he said, with a little laugh. "To tell the truth I wouldn't have cared to come in here alone, though I've been in a good many shady boozeries. Allow me to introduce myself. My name's John Stark—that's the name I play under, that is. I'm an actor. I'm trying out a new play, the 'Jail-bird.' Perhaps you've seen the bill-boards."
"Of course," said Harry. The title sprang instantly into his mind, blazoned on a gaudy bill-board against a maple-shaded street:
"Do not fail to see this Talented StarIn his Gripping Drama,The Jail-Bird."
It multiplied, stamping itself on a thousand walls, a chromatic procession tumbling into the distance. The other nodded in a self-satisfied way. "It's a great play. Got the real human dope in it. It'll go big, too. That's why I come to these places—to study 'business.' See that teamster with the pock-marked face and the tattoo on his arm? What a make-up that would be!"
The burly, half-drunken driver, in red-flannel shirt with a snake-whip in his armpit, his back to the bar, poured from a gurgling black bottle. "Hear what it says?" he hiccoughed—"'It's good—s'good—s'good—s'good—s'good!'"
John Stark withdrew his eyes from the fascinating study, as a waiter, in an apron that had in some remote epoch aspired to white, with a strip of soiled towelling thrown over one arm, set two thick glasses on the table, with a surly "well?"
"I'll take a silver fizz," said the actor.
"The same," said Sevier—"and be quick about it!"
The harsh admonition thrust across the noise. The phrase had no meaning to Sevier, it had been merely the echo of another bidding that he had given at some other time, in some other world, repeating itself now when the hidden spring of association was touched. But it brought a resentful glare from the waiter. The loungers standing nearest shuffled truculently, and the teamster by the bar turned an ugly look upon them. The man in the dingy apron thumped down a black demijohn on the table.
"Take it straight or not at all," he said in a surly tone.
Harry's companion poured both glasses. He leaned across the table with sparkling eyes. "I'm in the title-role," he confided. "The story is like this. I'm a business man, and the other chap—he has a grudge against me—has me in his power. He's the Great What Ho—a regular top-notcher, plenty of money, a winner with the women, horses, steam-yacht, everything. The house he lives in was mine, but he's got it by trickery and seized it while I was abroad. I come back and find him in possession. But in the house—he doesn't know this, you see—hidden behind a panel in the library, are papers that will show him up and put him behind the bars. I've got to have those papers, and the only way is to get into the place and take them."
He paused and sipped from the glass before him, then resumed:
"Curious thing, luck. I've had no end of trouble getting up the scenery, but to-day I saw exactly the lay-out I want to picture—a whacking big house in this very town. Right in the heart of the city too, not a mile from here, but shut in from the road. Belongs to about the richest man in the place. I kodaked it for my scene-painter. Look here."
He took a pencil from his pocket and sketched rapidly on the deal table-top as he went on.
"It's set in trees and there's a wide, oval porch along the front—like this—fine old southern effect, eh?—with Cape Jessamine bushes under the windows. A long wing runs down one side—here. In there is the library. I come on in a kind of prologue, no lines—shadows and moonlight, town-hall clock striking off one side—you know. I'm desperate. I try the doors. They're locked, of course. But there's a little window on the second floor that's open. I climb up a trellis and crawl in. There I am in the house."
He stopped and emptied his glass.
"There's a two-minute dark—no curtain, but a quick change, then lights up and the stage shows the Great What Ho's library, with me on the threshold, for the opening scene. I get the papers from the panel, and just then—"
"Yes, yes," said Harry. He had been staring steadily at the other—staring with his outer eyes, but with that curious inner vision, which was the gift of the intoxicant he had drunk, seeing himself, detached and moving through the significant scene that was being sketched before him, his alert but liquor-bound mind filling in strange, lurid detail which rushed forward to crowd the obscure spaces. He reached forward and gripped the actor by the arm with a force that made him wince—"and then—"
A stillness had struck the noisier babble and Harry's mental connection on a sudden broke. A young woman in the red Jersey and poke-bonnet of the Salvation Army had passed about the room and was now standing by the table. She stretched her tambourine. "If you please, gentlemen," she said.
Harry laid a silver half-dollar in her tambourine and his companion did the same, when the waiter who had served them spoke to her: "Clear out, you. You've got your money, now go."
"And be quick about it!" said Harry, distinctly.
The remark had not the excuse of proprietorship and it roused fury in the sluggish minds about them to whom the addition was extraneous and gratuitous, a smug insult of one who from his manner belonged to a class that despised them, offered to one whose daily habit proved that she did not. With an oath the drunken teamster of the pock-marked visage lurched forward, rolling a red-flannel sleeve along a hairy biceps.
The dingy Ganymede thrust him back. "Leave him to me!" he ground savagely, and turning, struck at Harry with envenomed force.
The fist, however, did not reach home. Harry's brain and eye were working with the deadly precision of the practised athlete. The suggestion of combat was complete, and with sober caution and reason dead, the bodily mechanism rushed to meet it. There was a lightning-like parry—a crisp, smashing return blow. Then suddenly the room turned a shambles, a red surging mass of hands that tore, of thrown missiles, of shattering glass, through which sounded a shrill whistle and the tattoo of a thorn-baton on the pavement outside.
Two minutes later Harry stood unhurt in the open air, and a blue-jacket held the door against a cursing pandemonium. "Run, you fool!" he panted. "I can't hold it but a minute.Run!"
And Harry ran. Not from fear or dread, but in instant response to that mental spur, without reason, or logic, or conscious thought. The new mental formula for the present moment superseded the old. The dingy saloon, the effervescent young Thespian, the fight—all fell away, were gone, and there was only the rigid empty calm through which he sped, and far above him the sound of a wind like a silken sea. It was close on midnight, the more decorous streets into which he presently emerged deserted, for intermittent clouds were now blotting the moonlight and a sprinkle of rain was falling. The sparse pedestrians stared or shrank away, but none followed, no patrolling guardian of the law forbade. He ran without direction or purpose, until suddenly—he halted.
He had come to the side of a great enclosure, the grounds of a mansion, surrounded by a high stone wall with tiled top, in which was set a gate with tall posts holding dim-lit yellow globes. It was not at these, however, that Harry was looking; his gaze went beyond, where, touched by the rainy moonlight, stretched the long façade of a Colonial house with a wide oval porch. At one side was a wing, with a lattice climbing over its doorway, and the damp air was full of the scent of jessamine.
He stiffened. The contours fell with fateful correspondence over another picture which had been etched on his brain that night with the sharp outlines of a photographic plate. The old spring had been touched, and the eerie mechanism was responding. It was his own house, but now it sheltered the Great What Ho, and in that wing was hidden the thing he must secure for his own salvation!
Harry entered the gate and crept across the lawn, warily, from bush to bush. In the curious dual-consciousness that seemed to divide his self into two independent yet identical entities, he had no sensation of strangeness that he should already have made that slinking journey once before, that each detail should possess the quality of predestination. In the shadow of the ivied walls he softly tried the front door. It was locked, but he had known it would be. He looked up; he had known what he should see—the small window in the wing, open, as he could see from the swaying of the light curtain in the air.
He crept to the lattice and deftly and softly drew himself up. No twig snapped, scarce a leaf rustled beneath his careful movements. In a moment he touched the sill of the open window and slid inside.
He was in an upper hall and soft, luxurious carpet was under his feet. By the dim light from the window he crept noiselessly down the stair. There before him stood the door behind which lay the thing he must have. He put his hand on the knob, turned it softly and opened the door.
The mental picture which he had been tracing suddenly frayed and vanished like a dissolving view. The room was brightly lighted. At one side sat a great safe, beside whose steel door stood two men, one tall and thin, whose eyes glittered through the holes of a black cambric mask, the other short and stocky with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.
They stood like setters at point, crouching tensely forward, and the latter held a pistol levelled at him.
With the sudden disintegration of the mental picture he had been tracing, and the instant stoppage of the tense action of mind and body, Harry Sevier came to himself. He awoke as he had done on the night of the trial, with the abrupt halt of his motor at the railroad-crossing—awoke instantly to knowledge of himself, but dazed and shaken, grasping at phantasmagoric fragments that were swiftly dissolving in his brain, in a bewilderment in which he could only stare voicelessly at the black mask that confronted him, at the round muzzle that spelled danger.
The man of the sand-coloured hair spoke: "It ain't him," he said in a low voice. "Not one of the servants, either." He stepped forward. "How did you get in?"
"I don't—know," said Harry. "Yes, I—I fancy it was through a window."
"What did you come for?"
"I wanted to—get something."
There was an instant's pause. Then his questioner came forward with a cat-like tread. His free hand busied itself in deft exploration. "No gun on him," he said.
Something like a chuckle came from behind the mask. "I reckon he's telling the truth, but he's a new one and we scared about all out of his head there ever was in it!"
The other turned one side to where a heavy portière screened an alcove, parted the curtains and set a chair in the hidden space. He pointed to it. "Sit there," he gruffly commanded, and to the man in the mask he added, "Get on with your part of the job. We won't take no risks—I'll take care ofhim!"
Harry sat down. The dream-like fragments at which he had been grasping were gone now into thin air, and out of the misty limbo the past was growing back: the note he had received, the smashed wall-cabinet, the fiery drink that scorched his throat, his mad masquerade, the boarding of the train at the station, the friendly, stupifying flash, then flight, on and on—and then, this lighted room, the safe, the levelled weapons! Into what sordid drama of the under-world had he wandered?
He flinched at the pressure of a cold steel ring against his temple—the man with the sand-coloured hair was "taking care" of him. The latter leaned forward and peered searchingly into his face. "Haven't I seen you before, somewheres?" he asked.
"Who knows?" said Harry. He had answered that look by one that, even as he spoke, had opened to strange intelligence. The stocky frame, the small red-rimmed eyes, the up-thrust, wiry hair belonged to his client of that far away trial, the man whom he had sent to a convict's cell and who now, by route of ball and stripe, had fled to the dismal demesne of habitual criminality! "Who knows!" Paddy the Brick had not now the piteous, shrinking look that had been turned to his counsel in the courtroom! The manhood was gone from the mottled features, which now wore the furtive look of the hunted, the sign-manual of cunning, incorrigibility and debauch.
Paddy the Brick withdrew his eyes. The involuntary question had passed. There was, after all, little in the smooth-shaven countenance of the man he guarded to suggest a bearded face that his memory searched for.
"Quiet!" warned the man in the mask, and kneeling by the safe door, resumed the delicate manipulation which had been so startlingly interrupted. He turned the combination swiftly and deftly, his side-face pressed against the unyielding steel, his ear listening intently to the fall of the tumblers that chattered like elfin castenets.
Harry sat silent and moveless, sharply conscious of the cold ring against his temple. Whither had his besotted flight carried him? To some distant city, into another state perhaps, where he now figured in a coarse and desperate adventure that might end anywhere, in some shameful expose which he could not foresee. In whose house was he? Whose money was it these nightly prowlers intended? And what ironic demon had beckoned him here to play this passive part in the despoiling?
There was suddenly a sharp click, a turn of the nickelled handle, and on mute hinges the safe-door opened. "So!" said the man in the mask, complacently. He began to pull open drawers and ransack pigeon-holes, his fingers passing deftly through the papers they contained.
On the instant there was a muffled sound in the hall outside—a door swinging to, and voices.
"S-s-s!" The low hiss was an incarnate menace. The man by the safe swung the steel door to, but without closing its lock, and snapped off the lights. The room fell into thick darkness. Harry felt, rather than heard, that the other had swiftly entered the alcove, and drawn the portière into place. His companion had made no sound, but the aching circlet bit hard again into Harry's temple, with a warning as sharp as it was silent.
The door opened, there was a groping footstep, then the lights went up, and a woman's voice, clear and imperious, mingled with the lower answers of the obsequious servant who had shown her in—a familiar voice at which Harry's blood seemed to grow still in his veins:
"No matter how late he is, I will wait. You say he is at his office—is it so near as that? Yes, I think you may send for him—no, wait—that telephone on the desk! Could I speak with him? No—I think after all I would rather wait. What number did you say? 'Seven-thirty-two Sumner?' Thank you. Then if he does not come soon, I will call him up. Thank you—no, I want nothing."
Harry repressed an impulse to cry aloud. A thin streak of light showed between the edges of the silken hanging, through which the man in the mask was peering, and for a slender instant, under the crook's elbow, he could see into the room. The slender figure standing there under the chandelier was Echo Allen!
She was in a dark travelling dress and wore a light veil through which her profile looked strained and white. The unexpected sight of her intensified the haggard pain of heart which had come back to Harry with his awakening, and this was staggered by the knowledge that they two were together in this unknown dwelling.
The door closed upon the servant. Behind the portière the red-rimmed eyes peered questioningly into the eyelet holes of the black mask. They said as plainly as speech, "There is only the woman. Why not make for the open—now?" But the other was an older hand. The room had but the single door and the servant might be standing on the other side. Grim danger lurked in hue and cry, and there was always the chance that the woman might weary of waiting and go. He had a liking for the long chance. He shook his head.
Harry's straining ears caught now the dragging rustle of a skirt. Echo was moving slowly across the floor, and in a moment he saw her again through the slender opening. She was standing tense and straight, her hands wrung together, finger twisting against finger, before the desk telephone. He saw her hand go out to the instrument, then draw back as though it had been a poisonous snake. Then suddenly he saw her seize the transmitter and put it to her ear. The bell whirred.
"Madison, seven-thirty-two."
There was a pause, in which she repeated the number, and in it Harry felt that her face had hardened and set, like some cooling plastic beneath an invisible mould.
"Is that—is it ... Mr. Cameron Craig?"
In spite of his iron control, Harry could not repress a start. He knew now where he was! The house behind whose curtain he perforce skulked with a brace of thieves, was Cameron Craig's! And she, on this very day, had journeyed here too. A sense of an overfate, sardonic and unescapable, rushed upon him. What a topsy-turveydom of chance, what a dove-tailing of accident, had wrought for this strangecontretemps! In the instant she waited a harrowing question stabbed him. What was she doing here, to-night, at midnight—in this environment which had bred unseemly stories—to enter which, under such circumstances, a woman must be unmindful of what should be most dear?
"... Do you know my voice? Yes, you are right.... Unbelievable, yes. Many things are unbelievable that—happen. Listen. I am at your house, in your library.... No! Wait. I have something to say to you,now. You shall answer it first. Once you asked me to marry you. I will do so, on one condition.... The—the letters written by my father. You will not use them, publish them. You will give them into my hands.... Yes.... One has been photographed—yes, the plate. You swear to do so, when I am your wife? ... Yes, to-night—if you—wish.... What? In—in five minutes? ..."
The receiver clattered down upon the desk, as she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands. To her the broken sentences had knelled hope gone, the passing of youth and love, the coming of a night in which was no star; but to the man sitting in such assiduous stillness behind the curtains, they had told a story that sent the warm blood coursing through his veins. Instead of being false to him, Echo was really sacrificing herself on the altar of name and family. She did not love the man with whom she had just spoken! It was constraint that had sent her there at that dubious hour, to make a bitter bargain. Letters written by her father? What they were—in what way compromising—Harry could not guess. Some indiscreet correspondence perhaps, which, twisted out of context, might be made ground of malicious political criticism. He knew her love for her father. In some way she had learned of these letters, had scented danger to him, and now would ward the harm from him at any cost to herself! "Think as gently of me as you can"—the words of her note passed through Harry's mind. When she wrote that she had known that she should give herself to Craig! He felt a whirl of rage. The cowardly, contemptible cad, who would have his desire at the cost of all that was decent and clean-handed! It should never be, never, never! Why else had fate dropped him there, like a stone from a sling? And yet for the moment he was as helpless as a rat in a trap. There, only a half-dozen steps away lay those letters, the safe door unlocked. Yet the steely pressure on his temple told him that a single word, a move, and he would be ingloriously past rendering aid to anybody, with a bullet in his skull.
Harry was conscious that the two men beside him exchanged glances—they were going to make a dash for it. His every nerve tightened. But at that instant the door opened upon the obsequious servant. "Did you ring, Madame?" he asked.
"I rang the telephone," she replied dully. "I called up Mr. Craig. He is coming."
"Very good, madame." This time he did not leave, but moved about the room, setting straight a book upon the table, adjusting a vase, glancing furtively at her the while. The moment for flight had passed.
Endless minutes ensued. Then in the strained silence there fell a sharp step outside, and the servant went quickly from the room. Harry felt a little tremor run over him. There was the sound of a key grating in a lock. The outer door opened and clanged shut.
Behind the portière Harry sat motionless, the muzzle of the weapon at his temple, his hair stirring to the suppressed breathing above his head, and the man in the mask shifted his felt-shod feet, restlessly but without sound.
"I could not believe your voice." The heavy tones jarred across the quiet. "I could not believe that it was actually true!"
"Do you accept my offer?" Echo's voice was without a tremor; it held the same hard quality that controlled her features.
"Accept!" He came toward her—would have taken her hands, but that she drew back. "Do you remember what I told you that day in your garden, a year ago—that nothing counted, nothing but you? For you I would barter every ambition I have ever known. I would sell the world, if I had it!"
"When you told me that," she said steadily, "I answered that I did not love you. I have not changed in that regard, nor shall I ever change. I can bring you no love, but I can—can marry you."
He laughed harshly. "Very well; I would not have it different, after all. I am not made on the pattern of other men: I would rather take you against your will—you will be all the more mine! I love even that fine disdain of yours! For it shall not last—I swear that! You shall love me in the end, as I have loved you!"
"Loved!" she repeated, with an accent of chill and wondering scorn.
"Yes, loved!" The words were almost a cry: they held fierce protest, even anger, yet there was in them a kind of appeal that lent them a sombre and tragic dignity. "But you despised me! You had stood first of all things. But if you could be nothing to me, then the game I played stood second. I played, as always, to win. The cards fell oddly—your father's letters, no matter how, came into my hands. They were to my purpose, and I would have used them. Why should I hold back? Out of regard for him? I regard no man!"
"Yet he is my father. And you profess—ah, if this is love, I had rather you hated me! I know nothing of a love that is neither brave nor compassionate, that strikes at the aged and defenceless and that is without—honour!"
He had not taken his eyes from her face, and now there grew in them a strange, haggard fire. Relentless and unscrupulous as was that love of his, Harry could have pitied him at that moment. "Honour?" he said. "It is an empty word to me! What is honour, what is anything, to me without you—Echo, Echo!"
"If you love me so—and now, indeed, I will believe it—give me the letters!" She took a step toward him, her hands clasped together. "Be as chivalrous as you are strong! Do not do this ignoble thing to break my life! I may be your friend, if not—that other. Surely you cannot want to take me at such a price! Do this and all my life long I will be grateful! Oh, I would ask you on my knees! Give me the letters!"
He looked at her where she stood breathlessly, with arms extended, her face bent and pleading, and the sight opened wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with evil passions. The gentler purpose that for a heart-beat had fluttered white wings above the chasm dropped plummet-like into the depths. Give her up? Now, when she came to him with her offer? Resign her—to that tipplingdilettante, that flamboyant fop and fool who had drowned his success in a bottle? Not he! A savage elation sprang up in him.
"When you are my wife!" he said.
She straightened, withdrawing her arms with a little gesture of despair and relinquishment. "Where are the letters?"
He pointed to the safe. "They are there."
"When will you give them to me?"
"To-night—the same hour you marry me. You shall burn them if you like, here—in this very room—with your own hands."
"You swear?"
"I do. And whatever else men may say of me, there is no man living who can say I have ever lied."
There was an instant's silence and when Craig spoke again all feeling had vanished from his voice. He was once more the deliberate and incisive man of action. He snapped the lid of his watch.
"It is very late," he said, "but it can be managed. It shall be at the hotel—you can rest there while I make the necessary arrangements. My chauffeur is off-duty to-night, but it is only a block away, fortunately. Shall you mind walking?"
"No," she said, apathetically.
Harry was holding himself hard. They were going. He saw clearly his course of action. His two partners in that sorry escapade might have what they had come for—he could compound with them, could take the letters to the hotel and put them into Echo's hands. She would never need to know how he had gained them—that drunken episode, whose very memory must bring a shaming flush to his cheek, should be buried forever! The letters would not have come to her from Craig, and she would stand absolved of her promise. But even as this ran through his mind, fate thrust its hidden hand from the cloud.
"One moment," said Craig. "When I came in, it was beginning to rain. You will need a cloak of some sort." He turned abruptly to the curtained alcove.
The pressure on Harry's temple relaxed. The black mask thrust forward, the man with the sand-coloured hair parted the hangings—his outstretched arm shot out toward the advancing figure. Harry's gaze saw something red leap up from Craig's temple, even before the terrifying concussion rocked the room—a sound threaded by Echo's scream.
There was a rush, a curse and a scramble, flying feet and a dismayed shout from the hall—then a shocked quiet in which he stood disconcerted and appalled, staring between the shielding curtains, through pungent smoke-wreaths, at a girl, her hand over her eyes, who shrank in overmastering terror from a massive form that lay collapsed on the rug before her—Cameron Craig, inert and still, blind and deaf now to sight and sound, the brain empty of scheming, the full cup of his ambition dashed from his lips by the crashing bullet of a slinking house-breaker.