The painful suggestions that had come to Echo over the teacups possessed her next day, when she drove with Nancy in the morning and in the afternoon, alone, selected her final steamer purchases—for she had made her farewells at home and was to go next day directly to New York, meeting Mrs. Spottiswoode on board the steamer. She was restless and uneasy and the thought of the trial proceeding at the court-house that day obsessed her. Here she was, she, Echo Allen, save for the escaped marauders themselves, the only one who had witnessed the deed whose imagined details the law was now laboriously reconstructing only a block away.
The thought brought a burning self-consciousness which began to be threaded by a fearful curiosity. She was feeling the repellent fascination that the scene of a hazardous episode ever after possesses for the secret actor in it.
Instinctively the lode-stone had drawn her steps to Court House Square. She looked across at the broad, open doorway. Why not go in? She had attended trials at home. She could find a place in the rear where she would be unobserved. For an instant the thought crossed her mind that the prisoner might recognise her, but then she remembered that on that night at Craig's house she had worn a light veil.
She crossed the square quickly, and with sudden decision went up the steps and into the building. An usher sat on a stool by a door that stood ajar and before she knew it he had pushed it open and she found herself in the court-room.
In that room, unguessed by all who had watched and listened during the dragging trial that was now rushing swiftly to end, weird forces had been contending. In touch with the old, familiar things, but with a high-coloured unnaturalness, Harry Sevier had stood ceaseless guard over his secret, every sense and instinct on thequi viveto minimise the chances of recognition.
The night of his arrest, as he lay sleepless in his police-cell, he had thought out certain obvious details of the game he intended to play and had lost no time in putting them into practice. He had worn his waving hair, rather long; during his detention he reversed this habit and instead of its customary parting, brushed it straight back from his forehead. Later he took stock of personal mannerisms and altered by unrelaxing watchfulness and determination the natural register of his voice. Always his mind had retained the sense of fate that had come to him when he sat in the alcove with Paddy the Brick's pistol clapped to his temple. Drink had driven him to that strange journey that had ended in tragedy, but had it not been, nevertheless, some over-ruling design that had brought him to Craig's house, where the unbelievable accident of his presence had saved Echo? But for that, she would now be Craig's wife, or the centre of a wretched scandal. If he held his course, and played his cards as they fell, perhaps fate would guide him still! So far the gipsy ring had brought him luck, he thought whimsically, and he had kept it on his finger.
But withal, it had been a straining interval. There had been, first, the fear that Craig would die, casting its grisly shadow across the floor; and this had woven with the dread, that never lessened, of the moment when he should recover consciousness. The first morning's newspapers had made a feature of Craig's assertion that he did not know the woman who had awaited his coming in his library; but Harry held in his mind the certainty that his own recognition must inevitably result in Echo's involvement.
He had adopted his course of silence because it was the only one open to him at the moment, but the event had justified his choice. It was the unexpected that had happened. The time-limit of the law which bounds murder had passed, and Craig was still alive. Nor had he recovered consciousness. But even with these assurances, Harry had had hourly to fight with the dread of some accidental confrontation which should pierce the screen and this dread had infinitely increased with the opening of the trial, when he became perforce the cynosure of hundreds of curious eyes.
But here also fate had been kind. It was now the second day of the proceedings, for Harry's personal qualities, no less than his strange pertinacity, had roused a keen professional interest in the attorney who had been assigned to defend him, and the latter had made a fight which his client, whose legal experience judged the outcome certain, would gladly have exchanged for the inept blunderings of the veriest tyro.
However, no chance encounter had betrayed him and as the District Attorney rose for his final clinching of the nail of evidence, Harry had felt a great relief that the ordeal was so nearly finished.
Almost the great danger was past! With his conviction and the passing of sentence upon him, the Judicial arm of the law would have delivered him to the Executive. Danger of publicity would be over, and Echo might be told the truth, without danger of recoil upon herself. A thousand times in his cell he had wondered how he should accomplish this. In some way it could be brought about—some safe and secret way—just how he would have leisure to decide. No one, not even Mason, his counsel, need be trusted with the significant secret that had such power to blast. She must be well instructed so that no false step could mar his plan. She must take no one into her confidence—must tell her story privately to the Governor, who had known her from her childhood. He was a just and discreet man and Harry did not doubt the outcome. His own story could supplement hers, and after a sufficient interval, executive pardon would quietly release him. He could step back into his old niche, and all would be as before. Even if Craig recovered, he would be powerless, since an accusation could not lie against a pardoned man, and Craig would not bring a charge that was at once bootless and incredible. Nor would he wreak an empty revenge upon Echo. He had once declared that he had not known the woman in the library, and, since she was lost to him in any case, he would not hazard a public reversal of his testimony that all would unite to call dastardly. The one thing Craig valued which men in the mass could give him, aside from power and money, was his place in the social sun, and he would not risk this. In the publication of the letter, or letters, that would have involved her father, he doubtless would not have been publicly known; in this matter he would run the gauntlet of popular southern opinion and would be well aware that the act would damn him. So Harry told himself. The real story would be buried, and the world—his world and Echo's—would never know!
Thus he was thinking as he listened dully to the prosecutor's scathingrésumé. His elbow was on the long table by which he sat, his brow in his hand, shielding his eyes from the sunlight that sent darting arrows across the cool, dim room as the windowshade waved in the light breeze. He could not see the door at the rear of the room swing open, nor the figure of the woman who entered—to pause, momentarily confused in the quick transition from the sunny Square to the shadow of the interior.
Echo's heart was beating hard as she slipped into a vacant seat next the aisle, conscious that the man who was speaking was Meredith, whom she had met at tea the day before, and that he was closing his final speech for the prosecution. She looked about her, at the jury who seemed apathetic and a trifle bored, at the Judge who was writing perfunctorily on the pad before him, and then her gaze slipped, half-stealthily, to the long table before the bar, where the prisoner should be sitting. But though she leaned forward to look, she could not see him for the intervening figures. Then, suddenly, the deliberate, judicial utterance of the District Attorney caught her attention. He was rounding to a final period and the meaning of what he was saying smote through her self-command to the last, inner corner of her shrinking consciousness and made the room whirl about her:
"The counsel for the defence has attempted to read a romantic meaning into the obduracy with which this thief and would-be murderer has held to his policy of silence. He has invited you to believe that this silence indicates a noble desire to shield a woman's reputation. The name of a woman who thrusts herself, unexpected and unattended, into a man's house at dead of night! The name of a woman the innocence of whose errand is effectually denied by her precipitate flight and her craven hiding!"
Echo sank back into her seat, breathless. She listened to the brief, conventional charge, saw the jurors file out, heard the stir and movement of relaxation sweep over the room, yet she was unconscious of the lapse of time. The public, open declaration had seemed to set the final flaming seal upon the incident, voicing, as if with a monster siren, the shameful meaning! She had cringed at Mrs. Moncure's smiling innuendo; now the scathing indictment was burning itself on her brain. "A woman who thrusts herself unexpected and unattended into a man's house at dead of night!"—the words seemed to stab her over and over like poisoned daggers. She was that—that woman! She imagined herself rising in that suffocating room and saying distinctly, "It is I he said that of—I, Echo Allen!" She saw herself on the witness-stand, heckled and badgered, faltering an unbelievable story to sceptical ears. There was rolling over her an overwhelming dread, and her hands had clenched till the nails struck purple crescents into her palms.
She became aware suddenly that the room had hushed, the jury was re-entering. She hardly heard the foreman's crisp "Guilty, your Honour!" She was trembling, there was a scent in her nostrils like the fumes of poppies, and the room seemed to be swaying to and fro. She turned away her head, daring to look no longer.
"Prisoner at the bar, stand up!"—the clerk's metallic admonition seemed to come from far away. She strove to look now, but a swimming dizziness was upon her and the shadows of the room were turning black. She had never fainted in her life, and the thought of fainting now filled her with terror. She rose to her feet, fighting back the sickness with all her strength, stepped into the aisle, and in a moment more the fresh outer air, sweet and reviving, struck her quivering face.
Her going had made no stir, had been unnoted, perhaps, by a dozen in the court-room. She could not guess that in the instant she had risen, with blank eyes and unsteady feet, the prisoner at the bar had half-turned and for a breath his gaze had fastened upon her face.
But for the iron control to which he had schooled himself, Sevier, in that second, must have made a panic movement of betrayal. He dragged his eyes away instantly, his heart beating as if it must burst, as the deliberate judicial accents struck across the courtroom:
"I have no desire to say anything to add to your anxiety of mind. The rulings of the court, if they have had any bias, have not leaned to the side of the Commonwealth. There is no legal right that has not been afforded you and if you have not chosen to meet the evidence with candour it is to be presumed that it is because candour could have lent no degree of mitigation to the circumstances. The jury has found you guilty as charged, and I should be doing less than my duty, if I allowed sympathy based upon imagined facts to subtract from the full legal penalty. The judgment of this court is, therefore, that you be imprisoned in the state's penitentiary during a period of twenty years."
Harry hardly heard the pronouncement for the mental confusion that held him. Echo knew! All the time while he had been fighting back recognition, she had known! How had she guessed? Had his voice, perhaps, that night when he had saved her, betrayed him? He remembered her white and agonised look when he had thrust her from the door of Craig's house and bade her run. A doubt, coupled with his absence from home, would have driven her, somehow or other, to discover the truth. She had been near him often, perhaps, realising the situation, conscious of what he had been striving for, knowing that only silence for a time could save them both! In that instant's view he had seen the look of suffering and sickness in her face. In these long weeks—if, indeed, she had known it so long—what an anguish of anxiety she must have been enduring!
As the voice ceased and he sat down, through the warm wave that was coursing over him, Harry felt a chilling realisation of the risk she had run in coming there. An impulsive word, an indiscreet look, and suspicion might have been roused leading to discovery. Sitting before this bar he was only an unknown criminal, a submerged "John Doe" on whom the make-shift expediency of the law spent itself. But the veil once lifted, he would be Harry Sevier, club-man and lawyer whose pleading folk had once flocked to hear, now caught in the vise of the law and proven thief and degenerate.
In the emptying room he felt the cool hand of his counsel touch his own, and followed him—with a watchful deputy-sheriff now in hand-reach—to a side door that opened into a chamber at the rear of the court-room. On the threshold the lawyer turned to the sheriff.
"There's no hurry, Jerry," he said peevishly. "You wait out here a few minutes. The old man himself is coming. He wants to see him."
"Mr. Mason," said Sevier as the other closed the door. "I shall not pretend to thank you for your interest and kindness."
The man of briefs shrugged his shoulders. "There's nothing to thank me for," he answered briskly. "Now, if I had cleared you—"
Harry nodded. "Naturally, you couldn't do that. You were at a disadvantage."
"Thanks to you!"
"Yes, I didn't assist you much, I know."
"Didn't help me at all," came back in a growl.
"No doubt you think I might have," said Harry. "But please don't count me unresponsive. It is only that the logic of the situation appealed to me as unanswerable. But it is a privilege," he added, with the glimmer of a smile, "to have been associated with you."
Mason looked at him with a twist to his saturnine lips. "You have been my most remarkable client," he said. "It would have pleased me to have gotten you off. But unluckily for you, I'm no Harry Sevier."
It was fortunate that the face of the man beside him was turned away, or he might have seen it go white and startled. "I'm sure I lost no chance I might have had," said the other slowly, "even though you're not Harry Sevier, whoever he is."
The other laughed shortly. "He's a lawyer in the next state. I heard him plead once.Hedidn't bother with evidence! He'd clear Judas Iscariot with that silver tongue of his! Ah, well..." He shrugged his shoulders again, and turned to a closed door. "I'll see if the old man is ready."
"One moment." Harry had drawn the ring with the square uncut emerald from his finger, and now he held it out. "I should consider it a favour, if you would take this—it has no particular value, I am sorry to say—as a little remembrance."
Mason turned the ring over in his hands. Under the churlish pose a guilty flush stole up his lean, eccentric face that betrayed unmistakably the friendliness and liking he had learned for the man whose plight angered and whose attitude puzzled him. "Thank you!" he said, and a sudden smile made the grim demeanour all at once soft and human. He slipped it on his finger. "Thank you! I shall be proud to keep it."
He opened the door and Sevier followed him into the room adjoining.
There, looking out of the window, the fingers of one thin hand in his plenteous blue-grey beard, the other behind him, stood the Governor of the State. Harry felt a thrill run through him. He knew the older man by sight, for they had met once casually in the past. Had Echo already spoken? Did the other know?
"Governor," said the lawyer, "I beg to present my client, whose cause I have so poorly represented."
In the deep grey, kindly eyes that were studying him attentively, Harry saw instantly, however, that there was no hidden knowledge, and his heart, that had leaped quickly, dropped into measured beating. He bowed.
"My counsel did wonders," he said, "but the day of miracles is past."
The reply was simple enough, but the visitor unconsciously looked his surprise. He had been prepared for something in a way unusual, for Mason had employed his intimacy to inspire something of his own keen interest in his client. Face to face with the latter, the Governor understood the lawyer's puzzlement. Here was a man who had been arrested as a house-breaker and who, caught in the very act, had shot a man down. Yet he found it suddenly credible, as Mason had declared, that the man was no ordinary burglar, was indeed, or had been, a gentleman. But there were gentlemen-thieves! He met Harry's tone with noncommittal courtesy.
"You will not consider this an intrusion, I hope," he said. "My friend here was anxious that I should see you. He has been deeply concerned in your case."
"It is a pleasure," Harry replied simply. "He has been put to considerable pains, in which there is very little credit, I am afraid."
"His interest," the Governor went on, "as he has assured me, arises from a conviction that there is some hidden element in the affair that, if it had been brought out, might have put a different face upon it."
Harry bowed but did not answer.
"You have a good reason, I take it, for maintaining the silence as to yourself which my friend here finds so difficult?"
"The very best," said Harry grimly.
The Governor mused a moment. "You will pardon me, I am sure, if I ask you one other question. Have you ever been in prison?"
"No," said Harry.
"Have you committed crime—in the past?"
"As the law counts it, no."
He looked the Governor steadily in the eyes as he spoke and the other, a keen judge of men, with a knowledge, bred of long life and observation, of the workings of the human conscience, felt a strange inclination to believe. Yet for every criminal there must be a first crime. Given a good family name and the remnant of a conscience, the man's insistence could be accounted for! With a little sigh he turned to Mason.
"Shall I see you at the Castlemans to-night?" he asked as they shook hands.
"I'm dining at the Langhams," Mason replied. "It's a farewell dinner for Miss Allen."
"A charming girl, Echo!" said the Governor. "I've known her since she was a child. A farewell, did you say? Is her visit over?"
"Yes, she's off to Europe to-morrow."
The lawyer went with the Governor to the door and stood a moment looking after him as he crossed the lawn to his carriage. He did not see the look that had suddenly slipped to the face of the man standing behind him—a look mingled of sudden wonder and questioning disquiet.
To Europe! Echo? Was she going away now ... knowing it all ... knowing what he had passed through, what lay before him? Going without written word or secret sign to him?
Harry felt a strange sinking of the heart. It seemed to him as if a cold shadow had suddenly fallen across the room—a shadow in which lurked something vague and formless, something whose existence his faith denied, yet which stood silently staring at him with a cruel and terrifying smile.
Some miles beyond the skirt of the city, on the dusty highway, stood a vast wall of stone built four-square, along whose top, seen breast-high, men in dingykhakipatrolled back and forth with rifles on their shoulders. Fronting the road was a great barred gate, with an arched top, set in the wall. This opened on a narrow paved court at one side of which was a two storied frame building, whose door was marked with the word "warden."
Before this door the next afternoon Harry Sevier stood with a sheriff. The latter knocked and a heavy-featured man came out. "Well, Warden," said the sheriff, "I've brought you another boarder. Here's his papers."
The other examined the documents, took a fountain-pen from his pocket and signed one—a form of receipt—and handed it back. "All right," he said briefly, and rushing open the door, motioned the new arrival to enter.
When Harry emerged, an hour later, under the care of a uniformed turn-key, he wore trousers and jacket of coarse fulled cloth with horizontal stripes of black and yellowish-grey—the badge of the convict. Under his visored cap his crisp black hair had been clipped close to the skin. And in the upper office a trusty who acted as clerk was filling in on an indexed card the physical measurements which, with the number he wore on a leathern strap about his upper arm, constituted the formula by which hereafter was to be known the man who had once been Harry Sevier.
In the centre of the great walled space reared an ancient circular structure of brick. It was like a huge bee-hive. His conductor led Harry to a compartment on the lower tier and unlocked an iron door. "This is yours, 239," he said.
Harry entered. He heard the door clang behind him and the footsteps retire down the stone corridor. The light from a barred window struck full into his eyes and for a moment he did not see that another figure, in the same dingy stripes, sat on the edge of the narrow bunk, looking at him out of small, red-rimmed eyes.
The occupant rose slowly, thrusting a grimy hand through a shock of sand-coloured hair, and stared hard at the newcomer. Then he uttered a howl of evil mirth and recognition.
"Smoke of the devil!" he shouted. "If it ain't the youngster me and Towler had behind the portiary! Ho-ho! I saw by the papers they'd nabbed you. And to think the geezer swore it was you that plugged him! They didn't get me—not that time! I'd be out still if I hadn't tried to lift a reticule on a street-car. It was my record that did it for me then. Well, we're pals now, old horse, and we'll celebrate it right!"
He thrust his arm beneath the rough blanket, brought out a flask, and uncorked it with his teeth.
"It's the real stuff," he said. "Towler slips it to me—good old pal! He's got one of the guards 'fixed'! Here—drink hearty!" With a hoarse laugh he thrust it into Harry's face.
Harry's eyes had been fixed on his with a curious intensity. In that startling moment, as the fumes of the liquor penetrated his nostrils, a lurid sequence had flashed to him. This man he had once betrayed by a base surrender to appetite; now in antic irony, it was this man's crime that had betrayed him, Harry Sevier, to the same dilemma and a like shameful penalty. And here was dangled before him the hideous badge and symbol of his downfall!
He seized the wrist of the outstretched hand with a grasp like steel, and the flask smashed against the bars of the window. Then he hurled the other from him across the narrow cell.
His cell-mate clung to the bunk across which he had fallen, and stared at Harry with a look of slow malevolence. He licked his lips.
"I'll fix you for that!" he said.
Echo sat under the Botticelli blue of a perfect afternoon on the terrace of the Hotel Splendid in Nice. Through the hot, bright air, set in the purple creases of the hazeless hills, she could see tinted villas drowsing in golden gardens aflame with flowers, and below under the dizzying sunlight beyond the long esplanade, tiny swells spilled over the pearly beech like molten sapphire.
The past months had been packed with new sights and sounds. There had been the ocean passage, with all the gaiety that mill-pond weather and a total absence ofmal de merevokes, a leisurely motor trip through the northern counties of England, shopping and theatre-going in Paris, and then a final fortnight on the Riviera. From the first day at sea, when the dimming shores of home had slipped away into the vaporous distance across the swinging, grey-green heave, Echo had thrown herself eagerly into the new experiences. It had seemed to her at first as though she was leaving behind all her pain and problem and flying whither the dogging ghosts could not follow. From time to time she felt a wave of that shame that had overwhelmed her as she sat in the court-room. When she reflected, she felt astonishment at her own temerity—at the morbid curiosity which had impelled her to witness the rehearsal of an episode whose very memory thrilled her with pain and dread. But at length this, too, had faded. She had told herself that Harry would have returned before her and that all would again be well between them. With all her power she had striven to thrust the pain and apprehension from the mind and amid new and varying scenes she had partially succeeded.
But though the acute strain and distress, the piteous terror had dulled, her heart ached always with its burden, and there were many times when all of Mrs. Spottiswoode's effervescent moods could not call forth response. Across the fairest scenes the ghosts, uncalled, would thrust themselves, and in her brain a mocking voice would whisper—
"You will never tell him! You will never dare! There will always be a secret between you! You will be deceiving him—all your life. For if you told him the truth—the whole truth—would he believe you? The letters for which you made that visit, even if you could show them, are ashes now. And even if he believed in the necessity that drove you to win them from Craig, what might he imagine had been the price! You know what the world would think: you heard it in the court-room. He would think the same thing! You were in Craig's house, alone, that midnight—and you will never dare tell him! Can you say to him, 'It wasIwho was in Cameron Craig's library!Iwas the mysterious woman the police were searching for—Iwhom you love!'?"
The sneering voices were whispering in her ear to-night, as she sat looking out across the blended harmonies of sky and sea, her wistful face bent beneath the soft halo of her hair.
There welled up in her with fresh force the aching resentment, the sick anger and rebellion against the sardonic fate that had so enmeshed her. Why should Craig have ever seen and desired her? Why should his fancy not have fallen upon some other woman? Yet, had that been so, her father's name would have been ruined! That, at least, had not befallen. If only she had not written that note to Harry! So she reflected, not knowing that that fateful note itself had been the key to another series of incidents which had in fact wrought for her salvation—so curiously interwoven is the mystic fabric that man calls chance. By that note, she told herself, she had thrust his love from her. Would anything less than the whole truth bring it back? And in any case, if she did not tell him the whole, would she ever be safe in that love? For Craig could betray her if he regained his faculties. A single word could overwhelm her. There was that lost night when she had been believed to be at her aunt's—a dropped stitch in time's weave which might unravel the whole! If he recovered Craig would hold her happiness in his grasp as surely as he had once held her father's honour.
The cogent reasons that had influenced Harry in his speculation on the same subject had been based on his keen masculine observation and familiarity with Craig's type; Echo had only her knowledge of his relentless passion and lack of scruple, and her instinct was clouded by long anxiety and fear. She had lately striven to banish from her mind the idea that he might recover, but to-night it was upon her with strange force. A baleful thought thrust itself into her mind, an incarnate temptation:If Craig would only die! As it came to her she felt her face blush, and she shrank, feeling that a wicked thing had found lodgment in her soul; but it came again and again.
A little group of people who had arrived that morning had issued from the dining-room and now were seated about one of the small tables on the terrace drinking their coffee—two men, one elderly, one younger, a handsome woman and a girl. They continued the conversation begun inside—evidently a discussion of some one who had been on the train. All at once the lady touched the speaker beside her on the arm.
"Hush!" she cautioned. "There he is now!"
The voices stilled. Glancing around Echo saw that a wheeled-chair was being pushed onto the far end of the terrace. A man sat in it, huddled in a steamer-rug.
"Is he married?" asked the lady, after a pause.
"No," replied the elderly man. "He has no family or near relatives. The men with him are a nurse and a secretary. They say he is very rich."
"Poor fellow!" she exclaimed. "What a dreadful thing! Death is immensely preferable, of course, to life under such conditions. Where are they taking him?"
"To Hungary, I believe. There's a celebrated authority on brain-surgery in Buda-Pesth. The surgeons think it's pressure on some nerve-centre, and the case calls for the particular operation that is this chap's specialty. It's a forlorn hope, I imagine."
"I don't know," said the younger man, lighting a cigarette. "They do marvellous things nowadays. And anyway, if it fails, it can't be any worse for the patient. As it is, he has no mind at all—no speech, no memory, nothing!"
Echo turned her head; there was a fierce little smile on her lips. So here was another! Had he, too, like the one of whom she had been thinking, been overtaken by a righteous Nemesis in the moment of evil triumph? And somewhere, perhaps, was there a woman to whom his death would be a gladness and a relief?
The lady looked toward the wheeled-chair. "How was the injury caused?" she asked interestedly.
"He was shot," said the elderly man. "Shot by a burglar. I remember reading of it in the newspapers at the time."
Echo started. A little tremor ran over her. The scarf she held slipped from her hand.
"It seems a pity sometimes," went on the voice, "that the law must graduate its penalties so nicely. Here is a man who, to all intents and purposes, was murdered. If he doesn't recover, his is a living death. Yet because he continues to breathe, the most that can be given to the scoundrel who shot him is a term of imprisonment. He ought to have been hanged!"
The girl beside her pushed back her chair petulantly. "Oh, let'sdosomething!" she cried. "I want to get him out of my mind. I sat where I had to look at him in the train all day. It's too horrible! Fancy having to be like that, not being able to walk or talk or even to feed one's self! I want to go to the Casino and see somethingfunny!"
When the sound of their voices had died away in the corridor, Echo rose from her seat and walked along the terrace, quite to the end, where stood the wheeled-chair. On a bench near by an attendant was immersed in a newspaper.
Then she turned and looked at the pallid, vacuous face above the steamer-rug.
Yes—it was Cameron Craig.
During those months Harry's visible life had been turning in an endless cycle of new-gained habit that ruled with vicious and numbing precision the huge conglomerate of which he was but a single atom—a bitter, dragging treadmill in which he was constrained to tramp steadily round and round with the hands of the clock, marking time, as it were, in a painful void that changed with mocking reverberations.
The spectre that had smiled its cruel smile at him from the shadow in the little chamber back of the court-room had never left him. He had thrust it from him with all his strength, but it had come again and again to chuckle through the darkness.
"She!" it had sneered. "She for whom you risked and suffered so much! She whose fine courage you counted on—who you dreamed would rush to your defence, at any cost to herself! You need not have been afraid. She would have risked nothing. She cared for you—yes. But she cares a thousand times more for her place in the world's opinion. Why, she would have married Craig—marriedhim!—rather than face a reflected shame from a story affecting her father. So much reputation means to her! Here you are in your stripes, a convict, andshe knows it! She knew all along! She doesn't guess you saw her in the court-room: she didn't mean you to, of course. How she must have suffered from fear that you would drag her into it! No doubt she is afraid you may repent and call on her now to help you. Perhaps that is why she has gone abroad. That is the real Echo Allen! That is the woman you have loved!"
Should he call to her now, when she had left him to this suffering, giving him no little word of trust or gratitude? A painful fiery pride rose up in him. Not if his flesh was torn by red-hot pincers! Not in endless years, though every day were a separate hell, till he died! Never—never—never!
Seared by pride, tortured by despair, with the black agony of doubt clinging to him like a coat-of-mail, memory dragged him backward through infernos of suffering, thrusting its searching fingers into each cranny of his mind, mocking him with shifting pictures cruelly incongruous, that like acamera obscuraturned and turned about a single focus—a grey old porch with Echo's figure leaning against a pillar and he looking up into her face. As though he had been a separate entity he saw himself moving through a thousand significant scenes of the flame-swept past—the long-gone, dead and buried yet living past—with her! And across these flitting outlines there stamped itself the forbidding legend that his ghostly guide showed Dante....Lasciate Ogni speranza! By his own choice he had opened a bottomless chasm between the then and now, between the Harry Sevier he had been and the nameless convict branded by the righteous law, and this chasm was impassible and enduring. Ten years of oblivion, of loathsome existence under a number, of comradeship with felons, an interminable blank unlighted by one glimpse of joy! Years in which, at home, the mystery of his disappearance would pass from a nine-days'-wonder to a diminishing speculation, a vague curiosity, and at length to forgetfulness. His life, with its multiple ambitions, its hopes and strivings—its love—had been spilled like water into sand; there remained only the useless vessel, empty and dishonoured.
Time and again he experienced abrupt lapses into the blackest pit of despair, when he grappled with an aching desire to be quit of the puzzle of life, and by any one of a dozen means which lay at his hand, to leap into freedom. But there was in him something deep-lying and adamantine which forbade this solution.
Meanwhile time, after a fashion, went on. He breathed, ate and slept; he saw the dawn look in at his narrow window and the silken blue dusk drawn across its bars; his hands automatically performed mechanical tasks, as did the hundreds of others about him; and gradually, out of the very iteration of these homely things grew a passive equanimity, destitute of human comfort yet bringing with it a kind of numb acquiescence in which, though all unconsciously, his feet were feeling for new foot-hold on the submerged highway of life. And at length normal feeling, though dazed and bewildered, crept again to the surface; he was once more conscious of the sun and air, of the scent of green growing things that the breeze now and then wafted over the masonry, of the grey pigeons that pecked crumbs in the court-yard, and of the multitudinous human life that throbbed about him.
In all these months Paddy the Brick had been his cell-mate. By day in the shop, that rumbled with the clacking din of the tireless shoe-machines, they were separated. But they marched shoulder to breast in the loathed lock-step, they sat side by side at dinner and supper, and the iron bunks on which they slept—Harry on the upper one—were but a few feet apart. During the first days, while they were together in the cell, the other had watched him glumly and suspiciously, speaking only when he must and then morosely, so that Harry had wondered dully whether that whirl of rage in which he had smashed the flask of whisky against the window-bars had not further embittered his lot by an irreparable enmity.
More than once, by the devious means known to such places, Paddy the Brick had procured whisky, and this—though he risked offering no more to his companion but drank it secretly in his bunk at night—had put Harry through other bitter tests of self-control. For the wilful license of the day on which he had ceased to be Harry Sevier had granted fresh and terrible power to the cringing thing that had been mastered and manacled, and the fight he had fought out in that long year Harry had had again to renew, and now without the zest of reward. Again and again, as he sat in his cell, or fed the pungent leathern strips into the clacking shoe-machines in the shop, without warning the demon of thirst had swooped upon him, making his dry throat ache with uncontrollable longing, his palms tingle with itching desire: and at times, when he awoke gasping with the reeking fumes in his nostrils, and heard the gurgle of the liquor in the dark, he had fought with a strenuous desire to fling himself bodily upon his companion and snatch the drink to his own arid lips—fought till the struggle turned him faint with anger, disgust and self-contempt.
What lent him in these bitter months the strength for this unequal struggle? Most of all the knowledge that the appetite which he now grappled with in himself, was the patron Genius of that house of Pain. He had learned it from his fellows there, in whose faces alcohol had set its recognisable marks, its baleful brands of ownership. He knew it from a score of dismal histories related by his incorrigible cell-mate, daily allusions, the famished eagerness with which the surreptitious flask was passed from hand to hand. The Spirit of Drink had seemed to him at length to sprawl, a huge, lethargic incubus, over that tortured congeries of crime. Till slowly, very slowly—as human feeling had earlier come to him out of his blankness and torpor—there had dawned in him a mute consciousness of a victory over himself that was to be enduring. The conquest he had thought he had made in that first year of studied avoidance had been no true one. Under stress of anger, grief and resentment, it had fallen in shameful and utter defeat. The real victory that he knew now, had come to him in that prison garb, when black despair had sat by his side through long months—the fruit of a strength born of familiar hand-touch with evil temptation and a hatred of the tempter.
As time went on, the surly mood of his cell-mate had grown less difficult, had even softened to a sneering tolerance.
"You're improving!" he said one day with a smirk. "So you're making up to the Gospel-Sharp, eh?"
It was a Sunday, when the shops were empty and silent, and the long grey-black serpentine, with its hitching lock-step, had wound to the Chapel for the weekly platitudes and then back to the clammy, wintry dormitory, to drop its human links at their numbered cells. That day for the first time, the plodding, oleaginous chaplain had noted the new figure in the stolid ranks and had stopped to speak to him—a commonplace to which Harry had responded with a mere word.
"You'd better make up to the Warden!" Paddy the Brick continued. "He's the cock-of-the-walk here. I'd like to smash that oily face of his!"
"I've nothing against him," replied Harry evenly. "He does what he's here to do."
"He'd better keep his nose in his office," said the other darkly. "He'll walk through the shops once too often! I know a man around the corner who'd give his neck to 'get' him—he's a lifer, and nothing makes much difference to him!"
He crossed the narrow cell as he spoke, and sitting on one of the three-legged stools that constituted the cell's only movable furniture, took a bent tin spoon from under his jacket and began to tap upon the wall. Harry had sometimes seen him at this occupation—a kind of crude signalling he had thought it. Now, however, some rhythm in the sound caught him, reminding him of the click of the keys in a telegraph office. "What is that you are doing?" he asked, as the other stopped.
"Doing?" Paddy the Brick turned his narrow eyes over his shoulder. "I've been having a chat with an old pal of mine in the upper tier. That's what."
"Talking?"
"Yes. It's the prison-wireless. Didn't you ever hear of that?"
"No."
The other rose and pulled away the blanket from the foot of his bunk. There in the whitewashed wall was a double row of minute scratches. "That's the alphabet," he said. "It's mighty handy—we work it by relay. I can call up any cell on this side in fifteen minutes. Better learn it," he added jeeringly. "You'll have plenty of time!"
Harry's gaze turned back to the little barred window with its meagre square of blue. The time he had been there was to be measured only by months, yet how century-long had dragged the leaden-footed procession! His painful reverie was broken by Paddy the Brick's voice, jarring and malicious:
"Ever read the Bible?"
The other had taken the small dingy volume—the sole book the place afforded—from its shelf, and was lying on his back on his bunk, his eyes peering over its rim.
"Yes," answered Harry, slowly. "Why?"
"I've found one good thing in it: 'Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne.' Ho-ho!" he chuckled. "Reckon I'll ask old Coffin-Face to preach on it next Sunday in Chapel. I'd sure enjoy it. I had a lawyer once—damnhim!"
The flare of evil passion in the closing epithet seemed to Harry like a wicked spurt of flame from some sudden crack in cooling lava, leaping out to sear him. His face was turned away—toward the little square of barred window—and his voice was hoarser than usual, as he asked:
"Why do you hate him so?"
Paddy the Brick hurled the Bible into the corner with an imprecation. He rose to a sitting posture, his features working.
"Because he did it for me!" he said. "He might have cleared me ... and he didn't try. And I never took the money they said I stole—never, so help me! It was a put-up job. They 'planted' the stuff on me, when I was drunk. It was a pay-day and I knew they were up to something, for they'd sworn they'd drive me out of the logging-camp—and yet I hadn't sense enough to keep sober!" He gave a harsh and bitter laugh, and his voice rose. "But it was my lawyer friend that really did the business! He was a dead swell—one of your la-de-das with money and automobiles—that played at lawyering. They told me he was a great man and I was fool enough to believe them. What did he care for my case—it was a little one to him! I was nothing but a lumberjack! Why should he soil his kid gloves with me?"
He turned to Harry's white face a livid countenance. "So now I'm here," he finished, "and I don't give a rip if I am, either!"
"Woe unto you also, ye lawyers!" Parallel with the wholesale indictment another text in that self-same book was flashing through Harry's mind: "For with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again." Was that, after all, no trite generality applicable to a hypothetical hereafter, but a thing true in the minute and multinomial affairs of the present? Did chance, or fate—or whatever the human mind called the greatDeus ex Machinâ—watch somewhere, with hand upon the lever, adjusting the nice balance to the subtle requirements of some occult law of retribution that, though hidden, was yet as certain as gravitation?
As Harry saw the reddened eyes glowing with hatred, the curving fingers, the crouching figure, he said to himself, "This is my work—mine and whisky's. He was a simple woodman who laboured six days of the week and on the seventh traded half his wages for 'moonshine' from some illicit mountain still. Whisky set his feet in the toils, yet but for me he might have lived there forever in the timber, treading his narrow groove like a blind horse on a ferry, not one whit worse than his fellows, with no agonised conscience, a simple product of his environment. But I—and whisky—fastened the bonds upon him. I did it. I sent him here. I gave him hatred of society, the warfare that has already marked him with the mark of the beast. This is what I did. And now I am plucked up from my place and planted here beside him, as soiled in the eyes of the world as he! Is it because I was the instrument of his demoralisation that the tables have now been turned?—because he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword? And in the last great evening-up, is it written that I shall become even as he?—that bars and chains shall have their will of me and I emerge at last, like this incorrigibleruiné, hard, debased, besotted, beyond hope or redemption in the world?" He shuddered. Better even that that shot in the library had gone home—that he now lay, innocent as he was, with the red mark on his throat, down in the horrible quick-lime!
He rose, and with his hands gripping the bars of the open door, drew a long breath. No! whatever this pent-house did to him, it should never drag him down! He would take his medicine. For what, in his egregious folly and egotism, he had done, he would pay—if fate demanded, to the uttermost farthing. But out of its prison his soul, sometime, should come unblanched, and unabashed!