With that scream Harry's every nerve had become as tense as wire. In his mind's eye he saw her innocency tangled in this hideous web of burglary—perhaps of murder, her name on every lip, her face blazoned in every yellow extra, as the "woman in the case!" The crisis spellednowand he acted with swift instinct.
He snatched the black mask from the floor and adjusted it to his own face, then darted to the safe and jerked open its heavy door. While the retreating servant's alarm still echoed from the hallway of the empty wing, his fingers, with the swiftness of desperation, went searching the papers in the safe. He came almost instantly upon what he sought—a thin packet of letters, tied together with a small photographic plate, ticketed with the name "Beverly Allen."
Echo had shrunk back, was leaning now against the wall, thriving terror of him in her eyes. He came toward her.
"Here!" he said, his voice muffled by the mask. "The letters! Take them and go—go instantly!"
"He has—killed him!" she gasped. "Why do you—"
Harry was sick with apprehension. As in the instant of drowning the smothering intelligence sees pass in vivid review before it the innumerable mosaic of a busy life-time, so he saw, swiftly arrayed in the imminent climax, the perilous hazards by which she was surrounded. Suppose Craig was dead, and she were apprehended, the letters put in evidence, and she told the truth, word for word, as she knew it. If her own estimate of their significance was a correct one, might not the most sinister suspicion then rest upon her? And if, as seemed likely, she was wrong in that surmise—even were the presence of accidental burglars proven—what could explain her presence there, alone in Craig's midnight library? Would it not seem to the great sceptical, sophisticated world only a tale invented to cover the old hackneyed story of a woman's infatuation? Would it not ruin her? He thrust the packet into her shaking hands, seized her arm and dragged her to the hall.
"Quick!" he said, roughly. "The house is roused! Hurry—for heaven's sake!" He thrust her through the outer door. "Down the path to the gate! Go!"
She looked at him a breathless instant. On the floor above them a window was flung open and a shout rang out. Then, drawing a breath that was a sob, she caught the letters to her breast, turned, and fled in an anguish of speed through the misty shrubbery.
In the bluntness of the dilemma Harry's only thought had been to get her away and speedily—then to make his own escape. For he himself stood also in evil case. If Echo's presence there would be difficult to explain, what could be said of his own? To whom, save perhaps the occasional student of aberrant mental phenomena, would the true story of his blind and besotted adventuring seem credible? It came to him instantly now, however, that to insure her safe retreat, he must jeopardise, perhaps fatally, his own. The two house-breakers had no doubt planned their flitting—possibly a handy ladder in some hidden angle of the wall; but the open gate was the only route he knew, and he had sent Echo by this way. For him to follow in her footsteps would draw the damnable hue and cry and double the odds against her. She needed, perhaps, only minutes, but the stir of frightened awakening that sounded through the upper floor told him that for him even seconds might be fatal. Great beads of sweat broke on his forehead.
And what an alternative! He, Harry Sevier, of position and clean honour, to be arrested red-handed, in apparent comradeship with criminals, a partner in a desperate attempt at robbery under arms! To be haled to court, to sit as he had seen men sit so often, under a perilous judgment! For with the logic of the legal mind perilous indeed Harry knew it would be. If Craig lay dead in the room behind him, he would be charged with his murder! A chill ran over him.
As these thoughts rushed through his mind, Harry passed through a crucial episode of his mental life—its first vital and supreme moment. It was not of himself he thought now. It was only of Echo. What became of him mattered little. It was she who mattered most! At whatever risk to himself he must turn the pursuit from her!
A burly man-servant, bareheaded and coatless, came panting from the rear between the trees. Lest he take the path toward the gate, Harry blundered, in his view, across the lighted porch and dashed around the wing, the other giving instant cry. Harry led him on, doubling about the shrubbery. Near at hand the wall reared, hopelessly high and without a break. He skirted a huddle of servants' quarters, rounded the main building and came again to the front. And then, approaching at a double-quick across the lawn, he caught the flash of a bull's-eye. With a wave of thankfulness he realised that the helmeted figure who carried it was coming from the gate. Echo had passed through safely!
Unseen he slipped again into the shadow of the great open door from which he had come. Until that moment he had not realised that he still held in his hand the black mask. There was nothing to do now—his own escape was impossible, but he had saved her!
Suddenly the hall light went up, and with it a brusque voice spoke from the stairway.
"Hands up! I'm covering you. He's here, lads—we've got him cornered. Tell that silly maid to quit screaming and ring up the police."
Harry had lifted his hands above his head. The black mask fell at his feet. "All right," he said.
A half-hour later a surgeon and a nurse had been hurriedly summoned from the hospital, the wounded man had been carried to an upper chamber, and Harry Sevier set in a room across the hall from the library, under guard, hand-cuffs on his wrists. A blue-coated policeman stood grimly at his side, another at the door, and from time to time the white, awed countenance of some servant appeared to stare at him from the threshold and disappear.
His own face, though haggard, was apparently unmoved by the strenuous excitement that hung about the place, yet behind the affected nonchalance his brain was in a turmoil of hope and of dread. In the swift and breathless decision that the event had forced upon him he had not had time to weigh all chances. It had seemed then that the vise must grip either him or Echo, and that the choice lay in his hands. In the moments that followed, however, as he sat moveless in the strident confusion, he had realised that the problem had been by no means so simple, and it had come to him with a pang that Echo's certain safety had lain only in his own escape.
She now believed that she had been extricated from danger by a common thief who, in his rifling of the safe, had seen the letters she pleaded with Craig for, and in the final tragic moment had taken pity on her plight. When she learned that one of those house-breakers had been Harry Sevier, what then? She would never believe him the vulgar criminal! Her imagination would rush to another explanation which would give his presence there a dismal significance. She would conclude that he had somehow discovered the strait in which she conceived her father stood, and in an attempt to retrieve the letters had met Craig's chicanery with technical crime—made use, which to him had seemed justifiable, of cracksmen, and with them had been caught in the emergency whose sudden panic had evoked that shot from the alcove! Whichever way the tragedy turned, it would be infinitely darkened for her by the reflection that it had been her strait which had brought the trouble upon him.
And if murder had been done, and she learned with shrinking heart that he, Harry, stood accused by the law, what then? She knew that his hand had not pulled the trigger, for she had seen the face of the shooter. Her gasping exclamation—"He has—killed him!"—had made that clear to Harry. She would rush to the rescue, forgetful of all else, and with her testimony, bring down the avalanche upon her!
On the heels of these reflections a thrill of hope had come to him. Craig was not yet dead—there had been no sign from above-stairs since the hurried arrival of the surgeon. Also it was anticipated that he would recover consciousness. Harry's knowledge of criminal procedure told him that this was the meaning of his long detention there. Should consciousness come, if merely for an appreciable interval, he would be brought face to face with the wounded man. It was this that all awaited now, and in it Harry discerned the sole possibility of saving the situation.
"Craig must have seen him when he fired!" he told himself. "For the fraction of a second they were face to face. If he is able to make a statement, it will clear me! He will be silent about Echo, too, for he will expect, if he lives, to make her his wife—it will be a long time, probably, before he misses the letters! And if I am disassociated, by Craig himself, from the attack on his life, there will no longer be any question of her involving herself to defend me!" His heart lightened and the great load seemed to lift from his soul. It was the implication of Echo that had made the situation impossible—the unbelievable coincidence of their joint presence—in damnable propinquity with the shooting. With Echo eliminated and he himself free from that cowardly indictment, would not all yet be well? He was well enough known. He was no sordid house-breaker—in spite of the humiliating incident of his entrance there that night!
His thought broke, as a spruce young man, with the air of authority which is the perquisite and prerequisite of the private-secretary, entered and whispered with the guardian at the door.
Harry's heart seemed to stop beating. "Is he—dead?" he asked.
The young man looked at him coldly. "Not yet."
"Will he live?"
There was a longer pause before the other replied: "It's too soon to tell yet. It's up to you to hope so, I imagine."
He whispered again with the officer, then crossed the hall to the library, which he entered, closing the door behind him.
When the secretary reappeared he went quickly up the stair and along a hall. There he tapped on a door and opened it.
The room disclosed was the one in which Craig lay. At one side was a small table covered with a white cloth, with amêléeof nickelled instruments, rolls of absorbent bandaging and a basin of reddened liquid. The air was full of the sickish-sweethalitusof some drug. Craig's head on the pillow was wound with the white swathing and the nurse stood beside the bed. The doctor came forward, and the secretary spoke to him in an undertone.
All at once Craig opened his eyes. He looked acutely at the faces so near him, the cloth-covered table with its instruments, the white-capped nurse.
"I—know," he said. He tried to lift a hand to his bandaged head. "How—bad?"
The doctor laid a professional hand on the one that strayed across the coverlet. "We want to pull you through, Mr. Craig," he said with soothing assurance, "and you must help us by wiping every anxiety from your mind. Only a dozen words with your secretary here, to help you stop even thinking, and then you are going to sleep."
The young man came to the bed-side. "It was an attempted burglary, as you probably realised, sir. Two men were hidden in the library and you were shot when they tried to get away. One of them has been caught. The servants say a lady was with you at the time and the police want to know who she was."
Craig did not reply immediately. Echo had slipped away in the confusion! Well, so much the better. Her presence could not have helped. It was no more to his interest than to hers—since she was to be his wife—that the story of her midnight call should be bruited abroad. "I—don't know—her," he said.
"I'll tell them so," said the secretary. "The safe had been opened, but its contents are practically intact. I have checked up all the papers on the list and there seems to be only one thing missing. Perhaps you took that out yourself. It is the last item on the list—a package of letters."
A quick gleam crossed the white face on the pillow. "Gone? No—no. Impossible. They were—of no—value to—any one but me."
"You may have put them in your desk," said the other. He turned to the surgeon. "The police want to bring up the man for identification."
The man of medicines frowned. "I suppose it has to be," he said. "Tell them to do so quickly. Only a word," he warned the wounded man.
A moment or two later the secretary tapped again at the door and it opened upon the two policemen. Harry walked between, the chain on his wrists clinking lightly as he stepped. One of them came forward to the foot of the great bed.
"You saw the man who shot you, Mr. Craig?"
"Yes."
He beckoned and Harry and his guardian moved forward into range of vision.
"You solemnly swear that what you shall say is the truth?"
"Yes."
"Is this the one?"
Craig stared—a look of negation that made Harry's heart leap. It was a look also that held no recognition, and in that instant, for the first time since that night's harrowing series of events had begun, Harry remembered that he stood in strange guise, in unaccustomed clothes and with smooth-shaven chin.
But into the eyes that gazed from the pillow recognition speedily came—recognition strangely commingled of incredulity, amaze, distempered suspicion, leaping swiftly to a slow, deadly certainty. A lurid sequence was running across the fevered mind that the man confronting him could not read:
Harry Sevier sculking there and disguised—one of the burglars! The missing letters—Echo had gone with them! It had been a cunning, hypocritical plot, then, with a hired safe-robber and thug—and they had tricked and baffled him. Craig gasped. His eyes suffused with blood. He had said that he had not known the woman. Yet he could still score! Living or dying, he could drag down Harry Sevier to a black depth from which he should never rise again!
He laughed, a harsh jarring laugh. His face became convulsed. He tried to lift himself on an elbow. The nurse thrust her strong arms beneath the pillow and raised him. He pointed his finger at Harry.
"Yes!" he said in a crackling whisper. "He is the man who—did it! He—shot me!"
"Do you know him?" The officer spoke clearly, leaning forward.
"Yes. I—he is—"
But that was all. With a final vain effort, his head fell back on the pillow. That last flare of rage, of revengeful hatred, had exhausted the sick vitality, and he was gone into unconsciousness.
The steel handcuff bit more hardly into Harry's wrist, but he did not feel it. His eyes were fixed and his face had grown grey. The accusation, with all its shuddering implications, had surged over him like the assurance of the unescapable end, the last engulfing wave of hopeless finality which, in its subsidence, left him cold and still. Malice and hatred had closed the door of hope.
His sacrifice had gone for nothing. He could not save Echo. The matter had been taken from his hands. She must be involved. If murder had been done, her passionate denial in his defence would no doubt suffice to save him—he knew his southern juries!—but at what a price to her would be his salvation! For though sufficient doubt would be insinuated to legally acquit him, in the eyes of their world harrowing suspicions must always cling to her. Collusion between her and himself, her lover, to secure compromising letters, a guilty understanding embracing possible murder! A midnightrendezvouswith one lover, converted into swift tragedy by the vengeful pursuit of the other! So the speculations would run, and the baleful whispers would follow her all her life. What matter though she married him? Would love make up for that?
It was the Harry Sevier of remorseless logic, of clear thinking and rigid analysis, who reasoned now.
A tall old clock stood at the turn of the echoing stair and as he descended between his two uniformed attendants, grimly watchful of his every movement, he noted mechanically that it was two o'clock. It came to him with a chill and awed amazement how much might happen within one round of the clock. When those hands had last pointed to two o'clock he had stood in his office, a man of reputation and newly-ordered life, with all his heart beating to love; now he was disgraced, the woman he loved about to know the shame and hideous notoriety of scandal, both of them to be pilloried together as principals in another of those horrifying revelations of double-life which at periodic intervals shock a community's decorum!
It was not for himself he was thinking first. His pain for Echo swallowed up his own. As he sat in the cab between his guardians, bound for the station-house and the police interrogatory that should fling abroad its sensation in the morning's papers, his composure crumbled. He bent and put his cold face in his colder hands. His lips moved voicelessly.
"Echo ... Echo!" he whispered. "You have had my love, you have it now. You could have my life, if I could give it—every day, every drop of my blood, would not be enough to pay the price of what you must bear! But it is out of my power. I thought I could save you, my darling! But I can't.... I can't.... If I might only suffer alone, and you never know!"
He lifted his head with a start. A thought had darted to his mind like an impinging ray of light. Whyshouldshe ever know? Why should any one know—if Craig died? Only Craig who had known him in the past, had recognised him as Harry Sevier. Perhaps that was the greatest risk he should have to run. He could take refuge in silence, tell nothing, explain nothing. She would not know that the real shooter had not been taken. Could he maintain under the searching purview of the law that anonymity which he had sought to insure during the debauch into which he had so avidly plunged yesterday afternoon? Why not? He had so adjusted his home affairs, luckily, that a long time—perhaps many months—would elapse before his absence would be narrowly questioned. He was now in a city where he was not known: hundreds of miles of steel rails lay between him and the crowds to whom he was a familiar figure. His dark beard—so distinguishing a feature—was gone. He had discarded the characteristic gold-rimmed eye-glasses. Not an article of clothing he wore bore his name. His present face might be flung on printed pages to the four winds, and who, even of those who had seen him day in and day out, would say, "It is Harry Sevier!"
There were but two contingencies. If Craig recovered sufficient consciousness to speak the name that had fainted on his lips when they two had been face to face in that room of hurried surgery—then his incognito would fall and fate must have its way. If Craig died without recovering consciousness—this, provided his own identity was not discovered, was the one way out for Echo.
For him it meant, probably, the last risk. He had now to meet no mere assumption of guilt, but an accusation, direct and unqualified, made under oath, in what might well be the hour of death. He could not offer in rebuttal evidence of character, reputation and standing. He was deliberately refusing to call his only witness to the fact. Yet he did not waver. The Harry Sevier who under the stress of impulse had acted so swiftly to save the woman he loved, elected the same choice now.
He would do it. Whatever the risk, whatever the ultimate cost to him, he would do it!
"Hyuh yo' is, honey, smack-dab on time!" called 'Lige's cheery voice, as he took Echo's bag. "Yo' fo'got ter say which train yo' comin' back on yistiddy, so ah ben waitin' wid dee cya'age fo dee las' fo'. Ah was figuratin' on yo' gittin' hyuh fo' dinnah, sho'."
As they bowled along toward home Echo wondered if she could really be the same girl who had driven away the day before along those self-same streets! The strenuous events through which she had passed seemed the terrifying creation of a dream, a nightmarish panorama of the sick imagination, so wild and incredible all appeared in the serene light of this day: The painful scene in Craig's library that had ended in swift tragedy, with the apparition between the portières of that baleful face—with its narrow eyes and upthrust of nondescript hair it had stamped itself ineffacably upon her memory!—the deafening shot and the after confusion—those breathless moments when she had run along the wet path, with a sense of flashing lights and alarm behind her—her safe emergence into the demure street, where she dared not run, compelling herself to walk albeit ready to faint with fear at sight of a patrolling policeman—the ghastly delay in the stuffy waiting-room of the station where she had checked her bag on arrival—the suffocating relief when at last the express pulled out, bearing her away unchallenged.
Through the long night she had tossed feverishly in her berth, without undressing, at intervals feeling the meaning of the catastrophe in which she had figured surge over her in a flood. That catastrophe itself had saved her from one horror: but for it she would now be the wife of Cameron Craig—a thought that made her shiver. Now she was safe! In all that trip, fortunately, she had encountered no one she knew. She had seen but one servant at the house and in his presence had worn a light veil. Only Craig had known who she was! What if she had been taken—held as a witness? How could she have explained her presence except by the letters for whose suppression she had been ready to give her life's happiness? As in imagination she saw her father and herself pictured in the yellow press, the centre of gossip and humiliating notoriety, she hugged the letters to her breast with intensest gratitude toward the desperado who had extricated her from the instant crisis. With what swift self-possession he had acted for her safety! That in that lightning-like emergency he should have even thought of the letters filled her with astonishment. Over and over again she tried to picture his face behind the mask, as his hand had held out the packet to her. Her senses had been shocked keenly alive at the moment: she had even noted—as in tense crises one notes inconsequent trifles—the ring on his finger with its curious, square green stone. A thousand times she lost herself in wonder that a man capable of such a deed to an unknown woman could yet be a common burglar, one of the desperate gang whose leader was now awaiting trial, and whose malignant face and levelled pistol haunted her. Then the shuddering thought would roll over her that she, Echo Allen, had witnessed the awful act of murder, and she would hide her face in her pillow, trembling and spent. Dawn had long been whitening the windows when the strained nerves relaxed and the body, fatigued by two sleepless nights, found fitful rest.
The sun had been high when she awoke and by the time she had made her toilette and drunk a cup of coffee she had reached the little station for which she had ostensibly started the preceding day. A rambling hack had taken her to the home of her aunt—a recluse who had for a dozen years regarded the outer world through the blurred medium of semi-invalidism, absorbed in her languid reading and her flowers. On arrival Echo had found the frail figure lying out among her roses, with white, wild butterflies flaunting about her, stronger than she had been for months past, and free from the querulous humours which generally held her. So keen was her delight in her betterment that Echo had found it easy to accomplish her own departure after luncheon, though she generally stayed the night. There was for the present, therefore, no added absence to be accounted for, and the lapse of time might never have to be explained.
As she drove now from the station through the bustling, down-town streets toward Midfields, the knowledge that her father's secret was safe overshadowed all the pain through which she had passed. The dreadful memory dulled in the sunshine and the sense of security buoyed her. She would never have to tell her part in that terrible night to any one. Not even to Harry: she could tell him that she had never loved any one but him: that it had been misunderstanding that had driven her to send him that unhappy note. Her father himself need never be made aware that she knew his secret. It would be forever dead and buried!
She bade 'Lige stop at the post-office. At her aunt's she had wrapped the letters in thick wrapping-paper and sealed and tied the packet, and this she now addressed to her father, printing the words in a large, round hand. Then she bought some stamps, affixed them at one of the desks that lined the corridor and smudged them with ink to simulate a postmark. Once at home it would be easy to slip the parcel among his evening mail. He would believe that Craig had relented of his purpose, would destroy the letters, and the danger would be gone forever!
Lastly, standing in the thronging thoroughfare, at the same dusty little desk, on a sheet of paper which she bought at the stamp-window, she wrote to Harry Sevier:
Forget the note I sent you yesterday. Count that it was never written, that everything—everything!—is as it was when we sat on the porch together the day before. I can't write the rest—but come to me to-night, and I will tell you.ECHO.
She sealed and addressed this—as an afterthought, marking iturgent—and went out to the carriage. A few minutes later the horses drew up again, this time before the populous office-building that held Harry's offices.
She climbed the stair slowly, her heart hammering. She intended to hand the note to his clerk. If Harry had gone home, it would be sent to him there. On the landing she stopped, her breath coming quickly. The mahogany door was open and she could see a little way into the outer office. If she came face to face with him, what should she say?
But no sound of voices, no rustle of paper or scratch of pen, came to her. She went nearer—the place was empty. She took a hesitant step or two into the room. The door of the inner office was open—that was empty too, and its big desk closed. Harry was not there, but the clerk, at least, should not be far off, as the door had stood wide. She went closer and peered into the inner office. Facing her from the wall was a small cabinet, its door, from which splinters of opaque glass were scattered about the rugs, smashed through as if by a heavy blow. Beneath it, on the desk-top, was a black bottle and a stained glass, tipped on its side.
All at once she started. She had caught sight of something that lay in the fire-place. She went and picked it up: it was a picture of herself—one she had never known Harry possessed—a photograph of her portrait that had been hung in a certain spring salon in Paris. It had been framed in silver, but frame and picture had been broken across, savagely torn and twisted into a remnant of metal and cardboard.
She dropped the defaced thing with a little cry and caught a hand to her breast. What must he have been thinking in that moment of ruthless destruction? It had been after he had read her note to him! Her cheeks flamed. Did he now despise her for what he had thought her flippancy, or hate her for having taken his love only to throw it away like an old glove? As she looked again at the riven cabinet and the bottle on the desk, a shiver of dread seized her. From the silent symbols there stood forth outlines that frightened her.
She went slowly out to the hall, the letter she had intended to leave crushed up in her hand. At the top of the stair stood a tall window and she halted in its embrasure and leaned against the sill, hearing dully the muffled clack of the street and trying to see a mental way through the confusing conjectures that were leaping, like lurking beasts of prey, upon her. As she stood there voices sounded behind her, coming from the other end of the hall—the clerk was returning with a comrade:
"'No,' says he. 'Don't knowwhenI'll come back.' Thought he looked a bit off coloured, too. Told me to close up the office till I heard from him, and not to forward anything. Rum go, eh?"
"Seems like mighty poor business," ventured the other.
The clerk sniffed. "Business!" he exclaimed. "Much Sevier cares about that! A man with a brain like his and a silver tongue to boot doesn't need business! But after that speech of his the other day I should think he'd sit tight as wax to those Civic Club people. They're going to make a real campaign of it and he could get on the ticket sure. It'd be acinch! Why he wants to light out abroad somewhere beatsme! Well,Idon't care how long he stays. I'm going to shut up the shebang to-night and put in some good licks for my law-examination."
They entered the office and the door closed upon their voices.
Echo stood motionless, looking down into the street. Harry had gone away! He had gone with despair and anger, or worse than anger, against her in his heart leaving behind him only that mangled portrait and that ominous bottle on the desk! Where had he gone, and when should she see him again?
Just across the way a knot of people was gathering in front of a newspaper bulletin-board whereon a great white sheet was being pasted, and her gaze—first mechanically, then with a start of shrinking comprehension—read the staring headlines that had been roughly lettered upon it:
CAMERON CRAIG SHOT DOWN BY BURGLAR
DESPERATE MIDNIGHT ENCOUNTER IN FINANCIER'S LIBRARY
WOUNDED MAN UNCONSCIOUS BUT STILL ALIVE
MYSTERIOUS WOMAN INVOLVED
Cameron Craig was not dead! If he lived, he must one day learn that the letters were gone from the safe. Would he not then connect her with their disappearance? What would he do? She was aware, unhappily, to what lengths he was capable of going! Even though the letters were not his, would he accuse her of stealing them—her?
As she drove away the last two lines seemed to imprint themselves on her eyeballs in monstrous symbols of flame.
June came with its gold-born days, its passionate bird-songs and scents of roses, its shimmer of willow and pine and burnished lustre of down-bent holly-leaves and its evening mists wreathing the tall garden shrubs like wedding-veils. But the beauty and passion of the throbbing season came to Echo with a sense of mockery.
The night of her return she had carried out her plan as regarded the letters and her father had believed the package had arrived with his mail. When a little later he had told her that Cameron Craig had sent him the letter whose publication had been threatened, years had seemed fallen from his shoulders. She had been content that he should deem the act significant of the other's better nature emerging from the slough of an ignoble temptation—satisfied to know that in his mind the fact that it should have been one of the last acts Craig had performed before the tragedy, had invested it with a quality of the fateful and foreordained. Her own thought was absorbed with other things.
She had read avidly, though with unspeakable dread and loathing, the newspaper accounts of the affair. The refusal of the arrested man to tell his name or where he came from, or to explain in the slightest detail—except brazenly to deny any part in it—the crime which had set the city in which it had occurred agog, had been duly chronicled; but the condition of the victim—since Cameron Craig was a power in the community—had absorbed a greater part of the popular interest, and the daily bulletins of his physicians had called forth far more comment than the unknown criminal whom he had identified as the man who had shot him. She had felt a great relief, also, in the knowledge that Craig had declared that he had not known his feminine visitor; and while the dread had inevitably lifted that when he discovered the loss of the letters he might betray her, it had faded at length in the certainty that, though he lived, the brain-injury had left him with clouded consciousness. Day after day he had lain voiceless, the outer injury gradually and surely yielding to the medicaments of healing, but the brain lapsed into a semblance of vacuity, inert and unresponsive, a mild phantom of the old Craig, the bodily functions become mere mechanism, the mind blank and fallow, its inner hurt waiting a diagnosis beyond the skill of local practitioners.
But though the secret Echo carried shut within her breast thus grew less painful with the passage of time, another dread was slowly drawing out of her heart its warmth and glow. This was the deeper hurt of Harry Sevier's absence.
Going about her daily affairs she thought of him without ceasing. She never drove through the streets that her gaze did not search the busy pavements—never passed the building that held his office that her eyes did not lift fearfully to its blank and blinded windows—never heard the postman's brisk step on the porch that her heart did not beat chokingly. Where had he gone? Chilly knew of no one who had received a letter from him. Aunt Judy, his cook, was as ignorant as she. She had even interviewed Suzuki, but it had been plain that the Japanese could tell nothing.
The recollection of the bottle and the overturned glass she had seen in his office recurred to her again and again, with all their bitter suggestions of surrender, relapse and demoralisation. Could it be that he had thrown away his hard-earned victory, hurled himself again into the pit from which he had so painfully climbed, which now might hold him forever? And coupled with this sickening thought came the reflection: what if Harry should die, far away somewhere, perhaps in some foreign country, without seeing her again, without ever knowing? There were hours, too, when, woman-like, she wondered whether he had cared so much: whether he had not found comfort in absence and given his love elsewhere.
Her cheeks grew paler day by day, and in spite of herself her step lagged and lassitude grew upon her. Often she felt her father's anxious look and knew that her mother, in her stately and undemonstrative way was deeply disturbed. She took without protest the tonics Doctor Southall prescribed, but they brought little betterment, and, as physicians will, he at length began to talk of a sea-trip. In her growing apathy plans of this sort meant nothing to Echo, but she believed Harry had gone abroad, and the chance that they might meet, however slender it might be, called to her. When Mrs. Spottiswoode, therefore, announced her annual migration to Paris for her winter's wardrobe, it was arranged that Echo should make the voyage under her chaperonage.
Meanwhile the date had arrived for Echo's usual summer's visit to Nancy Langham in the neighbouring capital. Ordinarily a stay at the home of the girl of whom she was so fond, would have been something to look forward to with unmixed delight. Now, however, it had become a thing to shrink from. To walk those streets—perhaps to see again the house whose very memory had been such an anguish to her—she would gladly have evaded this. But when Nancy's letters promised to pass from pleading to epistolary tears, she at length yielded and late August found her the Langhams' guest for a final weekend.
As she dressed, on the afternoon of her arrival, there was a tap at the door and Nancy's voice said, "May I come in, dear? I want to see what you are going to wear."
"Yes, come in. I'm almost ready."
Echo had chosen a gown of blacktullewith a gold rose at the brocaded girdle and Nancy looked at her admiringly. "Gracious!" she exclaimed. "That black—it positively sets your hair onfire! It makes you so pale, though. Do put a little dab of pink on your cheeks, Echo; you make me look positively lurid beside you!"
There was some truth in the comparison, for the younger girl was like a wild-rose, quivering with life and colour. She took the hare's-foot and came to Echo coaxingly. "Just a little tinge ... like that. There! Now you are just perfect."
"Who's coming to tea, Nancy?"
"Oh, only a handful—Mrs. Moncure. You met her last year—and Mr. Meredith: he's the District Attorney—and the Shirley boys: they're very young and College-y—and five or six others. I only asked a few."
The Shirleys were first to appear and were followed by Mrs. Moncure, a mellow, winy woman with a white gown that smacked of theRue de la Paix, and a complexion exquisitely made up. She greeted Nancy with a smiling graciousness, nodded to the gentlemen, and sat down on the sofa beside Echo.
"It was so sweet of Nancy to ask me to come," she said. "I've never had half a chance to chat with you before, though we met last year at a particularly stupid reception or something. This is so much more home-y, isn't it?" She dropped into smalltalk, rippling and charming, while Nancy poured the tea, and when Mr. Meredith presently arrived she presented him.
"Our District Attorney," she announced. "The Terror of the Lawless!"
"Now don't tell me I look a terror!" said he, beseechingly to Echo. "I'm a most mild-mannered man in private life, am I not, Mrs. Moncure?"
"I'm not sure yet whether I can give you a character," she answered. "I haven't seen this year's subscription-list to my pet charity."
"Blackmail!" the other asserted indignantly. "I'll subpoena you all as witnesses. And this is how I am treated for protecting you from criminality!"
"I likethat!" exclaimed Nancy wickedly. "When burglars hide in our alcoves and jump out and shoot us when we're not looking! Poor Mr. Craig!Ithink you ought to be impeached, or impounded, or whatever they call it."
He laughed. "You know of the Craig affair, of course, Miss Allen," he said, turning.
Echo was glad for the touch of rouge on her cheeks. "Yes," she answered. "Oh, yes." Her gaze was on the basket of tulips on the tea-table, but she was really seeing Craig's smouldering black eyes—the lowering brows—the ruthless clamped lips—as she had seen his face in that moment of revealment in his study.
"The trial of the man who shot him opened to-day," continued Meredith. He looked again at Nancy. "It's up to the police to prevent burglaries, you see. My part comes after the burglars are caught. I point the moral—as a deterrent to others still at large."
"I hope, then," said Mrs. Moncure, "that the moral will be well pointed in this case. I didn't sleep for a week after it happened."
"I shall certainly try to get him the limit," declared the attorney. "It'll be a long time before you need fear another midnight call from him, Miss Langham. While you are at the matinée to-morrow, please remember that I am vociferating frantically at the jury in your behalf. I surely deserve a cup of tea for that, don't I?"
"Well, on consideration, perhaps you do," asserted Nancy judicially, as she poured. "I'll relent."
She sat smiling, her dainty hand on the old silver urn, not observing how the smile had been stricken from Echo's face. Meredith noted the latter's strained look, however, and said, as he seated himself, "You mustn't think we are prone to such melodramatics. We don't have them often. This case is somewhat peculiar from the fact that the police can't identify the man we are trying. We don't know who he is or what is his record. For of course he has one."
"But," interposed Mrs. Moncure, "I thought criminals were always photographed—don't they call it the 'Rogues' Gallery'?—and measured, so theycouldbe identified."
"My dear lady," he replied, "for two years I've been trying to bring this city up to date in that very thing. The state has the Bertillon system, but it's in use only in the penitentiary, as a permanent record. The data, however, should be taken when a criminal is arrested, and there ought to be a system of exchange of these records with all penal institutions. There would be no temptation then to turn a bare-faced burglary, coupled with felonious assault, into a romantic mystery, as this man's counsel, my friend, Mason, judging from the line he took to-day, will try to do."
There was a pause, as he possessed himself of another scone.
"I wonder," said Mrs. Moncure, presently, "if we shall ever know who she was—the woman who was with Craig when he was shot."
Meredith laughed a little. "I imagine it's not likely," he returned. "He has declared once that he didn't know her, and we can all understand her own passionate reticence on the subject!"
Mrs. Moncure smiled as she rose.
"Oh Sin! Oh Sorrow! and Oh Womankind! (she quoted)How can you do such things and keep your fame,Unless this world, and t'other too, be blind?Nothing so dear as an unfilched good name!"
For Echo the smiling words were barbed and winged with a painful significance. Again and again, as she chatted mechanically over the tea-cups, they came back to her, coupled with the memory of the stories she had heard of Craig—the whispered allusions made with shrugs and lifted eye-brows.
As she lay in bed that night, she felt her hot cheeks flush through the darkness. Could the world think that of her—if it knew?