It nettled him angrily to find that the premonition of coming disaster was still with him when he crossed the Court House square and came into the main street a few doors from the Winnebago entrance. Attacking from a fresh vantage-ground it was warning him that the town hotel was the stopping-place of the man Broffin, and that he was taking an unnecessary hazard in passing it. Brushing the warning aside, he went on defiantly, and just before he came within identifying range of the loungers on the hotel porch an omnibus backed tothe curb to deliver its complement of passengers from the lately met northbound train.
Griswold walked on until he was stopped by the sidewalk-blocking group of freshly arrived travellers pausing to identify their luggage as it was handed down from the top of the omnibus. Alertly watchful, he quickly recognized Broffin among the porch loungers, and saw him leave his tilted chair to saunter toward the steps. Then the fateful thing happened. One of the luggage-sorters, a clean-limbed, handsome young fellow with boyish eyes and a good-natured grin, wheeled suddenly and gripped him.
"Why, Griswold, old man!—well, I'll be dogged! Who on the face of the earth would ever have thought of finding you here? So this is where you came up, after the long, deep, McGinty dive, is it?" Then to one of his fellow travellers: "Hold on a minute, Johnson; I want you to shake hands with an old newspaper pal of mine from New York, Mr. Kenneth Griswold. Kenneth, this is Mr. Beverly Johnson, of the Bayou State Security Bank, in New Orleans."
Thus Bainbridge, sometime star reporter for theLouisianian, turning up at the climaxing instant to prove the crowded condition of an over-narrow world, much as Matthew Broffin had once turned up on the after-deck of the coastwise steamerAdelantadoto prove it to him.
While Griswold, with every nerve on edge, was acknowledging the introduction which he could by no means avoid, Broffin drew nearer. From theporch steps he could both see and hear. Bainbridge, cheerfully loquacious, continued to do most of the talking. He was telling Griswold of the streak of good luck which had snatched him out of a reporter's berth in the South to make him night editor of one of the St. Paul dailies. Johnson was merely an onlooker. Broffin's eyes searched the teller's face. Thus far it was a blank—a rather bored blank.
"And you are on your way to St. Paul now?" Griswold said to the newspaper man. Broffin, whose ears were skilfully attuned to all the tone variations in the voice of evasion, thought he detected a quaver of anxious impatience in the half-absent query.
"Yes; I was going on through to-night, but Johnson, here, stumped me to stop over. He said I might be able to get a news story out of his sick president," Bainbridge rattled on. "Ever meet Mr. Galbraith? He is the bank president who was held up last spring, you remember; fine old Scotch gentleman of the Walter-Scott brand."
"When did you leave New Orleans?" Griswold asked; and now Broffin made sure he distinguished the note of anxiety.
"Two days back: missed a connection on account of high water in the Ohio. Might have stayed another twelve hours in the good old levee town if we'd only known, eh, Johnson?" And then again to Griswold: "Remember that supper we had at Chaudière's, the night I was leaving for the banana coast? By George! come to think of it, I believethat was the last time we forgathered in the—Say, Kenneth, what have you done with your beard?"
Something clicked in Broffin's brain; then the wheels of the present slipped into gear with those of the past and the entire train moved on smoothly. The final doubt was cleared away. Griswold was the man whose story Bainbridge had told under the after-deck awning of the outward-bound fruit steamer; and the story in all its essentials was the same that Miss Grierson had told on the veranda of the De Soto. Broffin knew now why there had always been a haunting suggestion of familiarity in Griswold's face for him. He had seen and marked the "bloody-minded nihilist" of Bainbridge's story when the two were saying good-by on the banquette in front of Chaudière's.
Broffin's right hand went swiftly to an inside pocket of his coat and when it was withdrawn a pair of handcuffs, oiled to noiselessness, came with it. Deftly the man-catcher worked them open, using only the fingers of one hand, and never taking his eyes from the trio on the sidewalk. One last step remained: if he could only manage to get speech with Johnson first——
During the trying interval Griswold had been fully alive to his peril. He had seen the swift hand-passing, and he knew what it was that Broffin was concealing in the hand which had made the quick pocket-dive. He knew that the crucial moment had come; and, as many times before, the savage fear-mania was gripping him. In the cold vise-nip ofit he had become once more the cornered wild beast.
After the introduction to Johnson his hand had gone mechanically to his coat pocket. The demon at his ear was whispering "kill! kill!" and his fingers sought and found the weapon. While he was listening with the outward ear to Bainbridge's cheerful reminiscences, the little minutiæ were arranging themselves: he saw where Broffin would step, and was careful to mark that none of the by-standers would be in range. He would wait until there could be no possibility of missing; then he would fire—from the pocket.
It was Johnson who broke the spell. While Bainbridge was insisting that Griswold should come in and make a social third at the hotel dinner-table, the teller picked up his hand-bag and mounted the steps. Griswold's brain fell into halves. With one of them he was making excuses to the newspaper man; with the other he saw Broffin stop Johnson and draw him aside.
What the detective was saying was only too plainly evident. Johnson wheeled short to face the sidewalk group, and Griswold could feel in every fibre of him the searching scrutiny to which he was being subjected. When he stole a glance at the pair on the porch, Johnson was shaking his head slowly; and he did it again after a second thoughtful stare. Griswold, missing completely now what Bainbridge was saying, overheard the teller's low-toned rejoinder to the detective's urgings: "It's no use, Mr.Broffin; I'd have to swear positively to it, you know, and I couldn't do that.... No, I don't want to hear your corroborative evidence; it might make me see a resemblance where there is none. Wait until Mr. Galbraith recovers: he's your man."
Griswold hardly knew how he made shift to get away from Bainbridge finally; but when it was done, and he was crossing the little triangular park which filled the angle between the business squares and the lake-fronting residence streets, he was sweating profusely, and the departing fear-mania was leaving him weak and tremulous.
Passing the stone-basined fountain in the middle of the park he stopped, jerked the pistol from his pocket, spilled the cartridges from its magazine, and stooped to grope for a loose stone in the walk-border. With the fountain base for an anvil and the loosened border stone for a hammer he beat the weapon into shapeless inutility and flung it away.
"God knows whom I shall be tempted to kill, next!" he groaned; and the trembling fit was still unnerving him when he went on to keep the appointment made by Charlotte Farnham.
A full moon, blood-red from the smoke of forest fires far to the eastward, was rising over the Wahaska Hills when Griswold unlatched the gate of the Farnham enclosure and passed quickly up the walk.
Since the summoning note had stressed the urgencies, he was not surprised to find the writer of it awaiting his coming on the vine-shadowed porch. In his welcoming there was a curious mingling of constraint and impatience, and he was moved to marvel. Miss Farnham's outlook upon life, the point of view of the ideally well-balanced, was uniformly poiseful and self-contained, and he was wondering if some fresh entanglement were threatening when she motioned him to a seat and placed her own chair so that the light from the sitting-room windows would leave her in the shadow.
"You had my note?" she began.
"Yes. It came while I was away from the hotel, and the regular trip of the Inn brake was the first conveyance I could catch. Am I late?"
Her reply was qualified. "That remains to be seen."
There was a hesitant pause, and then she went on: "Do you know why I sent for you to come."
"No, not definitely."
"I was hoping you would know; it would make it easier for me. You owe me something, Mr. Griswold."
"I owe you a great deal," he admitted, warmly. "It is hardly putting it too strong to say that you have made some part of my work possible which would otherwise have been impossible."
"I didn't mean that," she dissented, with a touch of cool scorn. "I have no especial ambition to figure as a character, however admirable, in a book. Your obligation doesn't lie in the literary field; it is real—and personal. You have done me a great injustice, and it seems to have been carefully premeditated."
The blow was so sudden and so calmly driven home that Griswold gasped.
"An injustice?—to you?" he protested; but she would not let him go on.
"Yes. At first, I thought it was only a coincidence—your coming to Wahaska—but now I know better. You came here, in goodness knows what spirit of reckless bravado, because it was my home; and you made the decision apparently without any consideration for me; without any thought of the embarrassments and difficulties in which it might involve me."
Truly, the heavens had fallen and the solid earth was reeling! Griswold lay back in the deep lounging-chair and fought manfully to retain some little hold upon the anchorings. Could this be his ideal; the woman whom he had set so high above allothers in the scale of heroic faultlessness and sublime devotion to principle? And was she so much a slave of the conventional as to be able to tell him coldly that she had recognized him again, and that her chief concern was the embarrassment it was causing her? Before he could gather the words for any adequate rejoinder, she was going on pointedly:
"You have done everything you could to make the involvement complete. You have made friends of my friends, and you came here as a friend of my father. You have drawn Edward Raymer into the entanglement and helped him with the stolen money. In every way you have sought to make it more and more impossible for me to give information against you—and you have succeeded. I can't do it now, without facing a scandal that would never die in a small place like this, and without bringing trouble and ruin upon a family of our nearest friends. And that is why I sent for you to-day; and why I say you owe me something."
Griswold was sitting up again, and he had recovered some small measure of self-possession.
"I certainly owe you many apologies, at least," he said, ironically. "I have really been doing you a great injustice, Miss Farnham—a very grave injustice, though not exactly of the kind you mention. I think I have been misapprehending you from the beginning. How long have you known me as the man who is wanted in New Orleans?"
"A long time; though I tried not to believe it at first. It seemed incredible that the man I hadspoken to on theBelle Juliewould come here and put me in such a false position."
"Good heavens!" he broke out; "is your position all you have been thinking of? Is that the only reason why you haven't set the dogs on me?"
"It is the chief reason why I couldn't afford to do anything more than I have done. Goodness knows, I have tried in every way to warn you, even to pointing out the man who is shadowing you. To do it, I have had to deceive my father. I have been hoping that you would understand and go away."
"Wait a minute," he commanded. "Let me get it straight; you still believe that the thing I did was a criminal thing?"
"We needn't go into that part of it again," she returned, with a sort of placid impatience. "Once I thought that there might be some way in which you had justified yourself to yourself, but now——"
"That isn't the point," he interrupted roughly. "What I want to know is this: Do you still believe it is a crime?"
"Of course, it is a crime; I know it, you know it, all the world knows it."
Again he sat back and took time to gather up a few of the scattered shards and fragments. When he spoke it was to say: "I think the debt is on the other side, Miss Charlotte; I think you owe me something. You probably won't understand when I say that you have robbed me of a very precious thing—my faith in the ultimate goodness of a good woman. You believe—you have always believed—that I am acriminal; and yet you have been weak enough to let expediency seal your lips. I am truer to my code than you are to yours, as you shall see if the day ever comes when I shall be convinced that I did wrong. But that is neither here nor there. You sent for me: what is it that you want me to do?"
"I want to give you one more chance to disappoint the Wahaska gossips," she replied, entirely unmoved, as it seemed, by his harsh arraignment. "Do you know why this man Broffin is still waiting?"
"I can guess. He is taking a long chance on the chapter of accidents."
"Not altogether. Three days ago, Mr. Galbraith had Miss Grierson telegraph to New Orleans for some one of the bank officials. Yesterday I learned that the man who is coming is the teller who waited on me and who gave you the money. As soon as I heard that, I began to try to find you."
Griswold did not tell her that the danger she feared was a danger past.
"Go on," he prompted.
"You are no longer safe in Wahaska," she asserted. "The teller can identify you, and the detective will give him the opportunity. That is doubtless what he is waiting for."
"And you would suggest that I make a run for it? Is that why you sent for me?"
"It is. You are tempting fate by staying; and, notwithstanding what you have said, I still insist that you owe me something. There is a fast train west at ten o'clock. If you need ready money——"
Griswold laughed. It had gone beyond the tragic and was fast lapsing into comedy, farce.
"We are each of us appearing in a new rôle to-night, Miss Farnham," he said, with sardonic humor; "I as the hunted criminal, and you as the equally culpable accessory after the fact. If I run away, what shall be done with the—the 'swag,' the bulk of which, as you know, is tied up in Raymer's business?"
"I have thought of that," she returned calmly, "and that is another reason why you shouldn't let them take you. Right or wrong, you have incurred a fresh responsibility in your dealings with Mr. Raymer; and Edward, who is perfectly innocent, must be protected in some way."
It was not in human nature to resist the temptation to strike back.
"I have told Raymer how he can most successfully underwrite his financial risk," he said, with malice intentional.
"How?"
"By marrying Miss Grierson."
He had touched the springs of anger at last.
"That woman!" she broke out. And then: "If you have said that to Edward Raymer, I shall never forgive you as long as I live! It is your affair to secure Edward against loss in the money matter—your own individual responsibility, Mr. Griswold. He accepted the money in good faith, and——"
Again Griswold gave place to the caustic humor and finished for her.
"—And, though it is stolen money, it must not be taken away from him. Once, when I was even more foolish than I am now, I said of you that you would be a fitting heroine in a story in which the hero should be a man who might need to borrow a conscience. It's quite the other way around."
"We needn't quarrel," she said, retreating again behind the barrier of cold reserve. "I suppose I have given you the right to say disagreeable things to me, if you choose to assert it. But we are wasting time which may be very precious. Will you go away, as I have suggested?"
He found his hat and got upon his feet rather unsteadily.
"I don't know; possibly I shall. But in any event, you needn't borrow any more trouble, either on your own account, or on Raymer's. By the merest chance, I met Johnson, the teller you speak of, a few minutes ago at the Winnebago House and was introduced to him. He didn't know me, then, or later, when Broffin was telling him that he ought to know me. Hence, the matter rests as it did before—between you and Mr. Galbraith."
"Mr. Galbraith?"
"Yes. That was a danger past, too, a short time ago. I met him, socially, and he didn't recognize me. Afterward, Broffin pointed me out to him, and again he failed to identify me. But the other day, after I had pulled him out of the lake, he remembered. I've been waiting to see what he will do."
"He will do nothing. You saved his life."
Griswold shook his head.
"I am still man enough to hope that he won't let the bit of personal service make him compound a felony."
"Why do you call it that?" she demanded.
"Because, from his point of view, and yours, that is precisely what it is; and it is what you are doing, Miss Farnham. I, the criminal, say this to you. You should have given me up the moment you recognized me. That is your creed, and you should have lived up to it. Since you haven't, you have wronged yourself and have made me the poorer by a thing that——"
"Stop!" she cried, standing up to face him. "Do you mean to tell me that you are ungrateful enough to——"
"No; ingratitude isn't quite the word. I'm just sorry; with the sorrow you have when you look for something that you have a right to expect, and find that it isn't there; that it has never been there; that it isn't anywhere. You have hurt me, and you have hurt yourself; but there is still a chance for you. When I am gone, go to the telephone and call Broffin at the Winnebago House. You can tell him that he will find me at my rooms. Good-by."
He was half-way to the foot of Lakeview Avenue, striding along moodily with his head down and his hands behind him, when he collided violently with Raymer going in the opposite direction. The shock was so unexpected that Griswold would have been knocked down if the muscular young iron-founderhad not caught him promptly. At the saving instant came mutual recognition.
"Hello, there!" said Raymer. "You are the very man I've been looking for. Charlotte wants to see you."
"Not now she doesn't," was the rather grim contradiction. "I have just left her."
"Oh."
There was a pause, and then Griswold cut in morosely.
"So you did take my way out of the labor trouble, after all, didn't you?"
Raymer looked away.
"I don't know just how you'd like to have me answer that, Kenneth. How much or how little do you know of what happened?"
"Nothing at all"—shortly.
"Well, it was Margery who wrought the miracle, of course. I don't know, yet, just how she did it; but it was done, and done right."
"And you have asked her to marry you?"
"Suffering Scott! how you do come at a man! Yes, I asked her, if you've got to know."
"Well?" snapped Griswold.
"She—she turned me down, Kenneth; got up and walked all over me. That's a horrible thing to make me say, but it's the truth."
"I don't understand it, Raymer. Was it the No that means No?"
"I don't understand it either," returned the iron-founder, with grave naïveté. "And, yes, I guessshe meant it. But that reminds me. She knew I was looking for you and she gave me a note—let me see, I've got it here somewhere; oh, yes, here it is—gilt monogram and all."
Griswold took the note and pocketed it without comment and without looking at it.
"Were you going to Doctor Bertie's?" he asked.
"I was. Have you any objection?"
"Not the least in the world. It's a good place for you to go just now, and I guess you are the right man for the place. Good-night."
At the next corner where there was an electric light, Griswold stopped and opened the monogrammed envelope. The enclosure was a single sheet of perfumed note-paper upon which, without date, address or signature was written the line:
"Mr. Galbraith is better—and he is grateful."
The swinging arc-light suspended above the street-crossing sputtered and died down to a dull red dot of incandescence as Griswold returned Margery's note to his pocket and walked on.
There are crises in which the chief contention looms so large as to leave no room for the ordinary mental processes. Griswold saw no significance in the broken line of Margery's message. The one tremendous revelation—the knowledge that the dross-creating curse had finally fallen upon the woman whose convictions should have saved her—was blotting out all the subtler perceptive faculties; and for the time the struggle with the submerging wave of disappointment and disheartenment was bitter.
He was two squares beyond the crossing of the broken-circuited arc-light, and was still following the curve of the lakeside boulevard, when he came to the surface of the submerging wave long enough to realize that he had entered Jasper Grierson's portion of the water-front drive. The great house, dark as to its westward gables save for the lighted upper windows marking the sick-room and its antechamber, loomed in massive solidity among its sheltering oaks; and the moon, which had nowtopped the hills and the crimsoning smoke haze, was bathing land- and lake-scape in a flood of silver light, whitening the pale yellow sands of the beach and etching fantastic leaf-traceries on the gravel of the boulevarded driveway.
There was no enclosing fence on the Mereside border of the boulevard, and under the nearest of the lawn oaks there were rustic park seats, Jasper Grierson's single concession to the public when he had fought for and secured his property right-of-way through to the lake's margin. Griswold turned aside and sat down on one of the benches. The disappointment was growing less keen. He was beginning to understand that he had made no allowance for the eternal feminine in the idealizedFidelia—for the feminine and the straitly human. But the disheartenment remained. Should he stay and fight it out? Or should he take pity upon the poor prisoner of the conventions and seek to postpone the day of reckoning by flight?
He had not fitted the answer to either of these sharp-pointed queries when a pair of light-fingered hands came from behind to clap themselves upon his eyes, and a well-known voice said, "Guess."
"Margery!" he said; and she laughed with the joyous unconstraint of a happy child and came around to sit by him.
"I was doing time out on the veranda, and I saw you down here in the moonlight, looking as if you had lost something," she explained, adding: "Have you?"
"I don't know; can you lose that which you've never had?" he returned musingly. And then: "Yes; perhaps I did lose something. Don't ask me what it is. I hardly know, myself."
"You have just come from Doctor Bertie's?" she inquired.
"Yes."
"And Charlotte doesn't want to marry you?"
"Heavens and earth!" he exploded. "Who put the idea into your head that I wanted to marry her?"
"You did"—calmly.
"Then, for pity's sake, let me take it out, quick. If I were the last man on earth, Miss Farnham wouldn't marry me; and if she were the last woman, I think I'd go drown myself in the lake!"
The young woman of the many metamorphoses was laughing again, and this time the laugh was a letter-perfect imitation of a school-girl giggle.
"My!" she said. "How dreadfully hard she must have sat on you!"
"Please don't laugh," he pleaded; "unless you are the heartless kind of person who would laugh at a funeral. I'm down under the hoofs of the horses, at last, Margery, girl. Before you came, I was wondering if the game were at all worth the candle."
Her mood changed in the twinkling of an eye. "The battle is over, and won," she said, speaking softly. "Didn't you know that?" And then: "Oh, boy, boy! but it has been a desperate fight! Time and again I have thought you were gone, in spite of all I could do!"
"You thought—I was gone? Then you know?"
"Of course I know; I have known ever since the first night; the night when I found the money in your suit-case. What a silly, silly thing it was for you to do—to leave the Bayou State Security slips on the packages!"
"But you said——"
"No, I didn't say; I merely let you believe that I didn't see them. After that, I knew it would be only a question of time until they would trace you here, and I hurried; oh, Ihurried! I made up my mind that before the struggle came, all Wahaska should know you, not as a bank robber, but as you are, and I made it come out just that way. Then Mr. Broffin turned up, and the fight was on. He shadowed you, and I shadowed him—or had Johnnie Fergus do it for me. I knew he'd try Miss Farnham first, and there was only one hope there—that she might fall in love with you and so refuse to give you away. She did, didn't she?"
"Most emphatically, she did not," he denied. "You have greatly misjudged Miss Farnham. The reason—the only reason—why she did not tell Broffin what he wanted to know was a purely conventional one. She did not want to be the most-talked-of woman in Wahaska."
His companion's laugh was not pleasant.
"I'd rather be a spiteful little cat, which is what she once called me, than to be moth-eaten on the inside, like that!" she commented. Then she went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it—and I knewshe must be out of it, since Broffin didn't strike—there was still Mr. Galbraith. You didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him, but you know now. And it worked. When Broffin asked him to identify you, he couldn't—or wouldn't. Then came that unlucky drowning accident."
Griswold nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Galbraith knows me now."
"He doesn't!" she exulted. "He is a dear old saint, and he will never know you again as the man who held him up. Listen: he sent for Broffin this afternoon, and gave him a new commission—something about bonds in California. And he told him he must go on the first train!"
Once more the castaway was running the gamut of the fiercely varying emotions.
"Let me understand," he said. "You knew I had taken the money, and yet you did all these things to pull me out and make the hold-up a success. Where was your moral sense, all this time, little girl?"
She made a charming little mouth at him.
"I amJoan, and theJoansdon't have any moral senses—to speak of—do they? That's the way you are writing it down in your book, isn't it?" Then, with a low laugh that sounded some unfathomed depth of loving abandonment: "It was a game; and I played it—played it for all I was worth, and won. You are free; free as the air, Kenneth, boy. If Broffin should come here this minute and puthis hand on your shoulder, you could look up and laugh in his face. Are you glad—or sorry?"
His answer was the answer of the man who was, for the time being, neither the moralist nor the criminal. With a swift out-reaching he drew her to him, crushed her in his arms, covered her face with kisses.
"I am glad—glad that I am your lover," he whispered, passionately. "God, girl! but you are a woman to die for! No, not yet"—when she would have slipped out of his arms—"Believe me, Margery; there has never been any one else—not for a moment. But I thought it was Raymer, and for your sake and his I could have stepped aside; I did try to step aside. That is the one decent thing I have done in all this devilish business. Are you listening?"
She had stopped struggling, and was hiding her face on his shoulder. He felt her quick little nod and went on.
"Since you know the one decent thing, you must know all the horrible things, too. A dozen times I have been a murderer in heart, and once ... you know: I meant to let Galbraith die, that night."
She looked up quickly.
"No, boy, I'll never believe that—never! If you had stayed awake until the time came, you couldn't have done it. And, besides, I am to blame. I planned it—planned it purposely: I didn't even hope to find a nurse when we were supposed to be looking for one. I knew how you felt, and I wantedto make you show yourself that you didn't really hate him bad enough to let him die. But I don't care; it doesn't matter—nothing matters, now."
"Wait," he said. "There was murder in my heart that night, and it was there again this evening—just a little while ago. Miss Farnham and Galbraith were not the only ones I had to fear; there was another; the teller who got here from New Orleans on the seven-forty-five train. You didn't know about him, did you? He came, and an old newspaper friend of mine was with him. I stumbled upon them on the sidewalk in front of the Winnebago House; and Broffin was there, too. We were introduced, the teller and I, and Broffin was so sure he had me that he got his handcuffs out and was opening them."
Margery shuddered and hid her face again. "And I—I didn't know!" she gasped.
"Luck was with me again," he continued. "Johnson didn't remember me; refused to do so even when Broffin stopped him and tried to tell him who I was. I had a pistol in my pocket, and it was aimed at Broffin. If he had made a move to take me, I should certainly have killed him."
She sat up suddenly.
"Give me that pistol, Kenneth—give it to menow!"
"I can't," he confessed, shamefacedly. "When it was all over, I smashed the pistol with a stone and threw it away."
She drew a long breath, "Is that all?" she asked.
"All but one thing; the worst of them all ... that day in the bank vault——"
The daughter of men buried her face on his shoulder again at that. "Don't!" she begged. "You couldn't help it, boy; I made you do it—meaning to. There! and I said that wild horses should never drag it out of me!"
Again he said, "Wait," and covered the shining head on his shoulder with a caressing hand. "It wasn't love, then, little girl; that's what it breaks my heart to tell you: it was just madness. And it wasn't clean; you've got to know that, too."
She nodded her head violently. "I know," she murmured; "I knew it at the time, and that was what made me cry. But now it's—it's different, isn't it, boy? now you—are——"
"You have heard it all, Margery. You know what I thought I was, and what I have turned out to be. I'm afraid I am just a common crook, after all; there doesn't seem to be standing-room anywhere else for me. But every living fibre of me, the good and the bad, loves you—loves you!"
"What do I care for anything else?" she flashed back. "You are you, Kenneth, dear; that is all I know, and all I care for. If you had stolen all the money in the world, and had killed a dozen men to make your get-away, it would be just the same. Only——"
"Only what?" he demanded jealously.
"It would be just the same to me; but—but.... Oh, boy, dear! it will never,neverbe the same to you!"
"I—I don't understand," he stammered.
"Some day you will. You call yourself a crook: man, man! there isn't a crooked drop of blood in you! Don't I know? You persuaded yourself that you had a right to take this money; perhaps you did have;Idon't say you didn't. When I see anything I want, I reach out and take it, if I can—and I guess most people would, if they dared. But you are different; you aregood. Some day all these dreadful things that have come tagging along after the fact will rise up and gnash their teeth at you and tell you that it was asin, acrime. And then—oh, boy, dear! then I shall lose you!"
Very gently he took her in his arms again; and for a time all things sensible and tangible, the deserted driveway, and the plashing of the little waves on the sands, the staring moonlight and the stencilled shadows of the oaks, were forgotten in the great soul-healing silence that wrapped them about and enveloped them.
"Margery," he began, when the interval of thoughtful heart-searching had done its illuminative work, "what would you say if I should tell you that your 'some day' has already come?"
She started as if he had thrust a knife into her. Then she slipped out of his arms and caught up his hand to press it against her cheek.
"I should say, 'Whatsoever seemeth good in the eyes of my dear lord, so let it be.'"
"But think a moment, girl; if one has done wrong, there must be atonement. That is the higher law—thehighest law—and no man may evade it. Do you know what that would mean for me?"
"It is the Price, boy, dear; I don't ask you to pay it. Listen: my father and I have agreed to disagree, and he has turned over to me a lot of money that he took from—that was once my mother's brother's share in the Colorado gold claims. What is mine is yours. We can pay back the money. Will that do?"
He was shaking his head slowly. "No," he said, "I think it wouldn't do."
"I was afraid it wouldn't," she sighed, "but I had to try. Are they still gnashing their teeth at you?—the dreadful things, I mean?"
He did not answer in words, but she knew, and held her peace. At the end of the ends he sprang up suddenly and drew her to her feet.
"I can't do it, Margery, girl! I can't ask you to wait—and afterward to marry a convict! Think of it—even if Galbraith were willing to withdraw, the law wouldn't let him, and I'd get the limit; anything from seven years to fifteen or more. Oh, my God, no! I can't pay the price! I can't give you up!"
She put her arms around his neck and drew his head down and kissed him on the lips. "I'll wait ... oh, boy, boy! I'll wait! But I can neither push you over the edge nor hold you back. Only don't think of me; please,pleasedon't think of me!—'Whatsoever seemeth good'—that is what you must think of; that is my last word: 'Whatsoever seemeth good.'" And she pushed him from her and fled.
Through streets in which the village quiet of the summer night was undisturbed save by the spattering tinkle of the lawn sprinklers in the front yards, and the low voices of the out-door people taking the air and the moonlight on the porches, Griswold fared homeward, the blood pounding in his veins and the fine wine of life mounting headily to his brain.
After all the dubious stumblings he had come to the end of the road, to find awaiting him the great accusation and the great reward. By the unanswerable logic of results, in its effect upon others and upon himself, his deed had proved itself a crime. Right or wrong in the highest of the ethical fields, the accepted social order had proved itself strong enough to make its own laws and to prescribe the far-reaching penalties for their infraction. Under these laws he stood convicted. Never again, save through the gate of atonement, could he be reinstated as a soldier in the ranks of the conventionally righteous. True, the devotion of a loving woman, aided by a train of circumstances strikingly fortuitous and little short of miraculous, had averted the final price-payingin penal retribution. But the fact remained. He was a felon.
Into this gaping wound which might otherwise have slain him had been poured the wine and oil of a great love; a love so clean and pure in its own well-springs that it could perceive no wrong in its object; could measure no act of loyal devotion by any standard save that of its own greatness. This love asked nothing but what he chose to give. It would accept him either as he was, or as he ought to be. The place he should elect to occupy would be its place; his standards its standards.
Just here the reasoning angel opened a door and thrust him out upon the edge of a precipice and left him to look down into the abyss of the betrayers—the pit of those whose gift and curse it is to be the pace-setters. In a flash of revealment it was shown him that with the great love had come a great responsibility. Where he should lead, Margery would follow, unshrinkingly, unquestioningly; never asking whether the path led up or down; asking only that his path might be hers. Instantly he was face to face with a fanged choice which threatened to tear his heart out and trample upon it; and again he recorded his decision, confirming it with an oath. The price was too great; the upward path too steep; the self-denial it entailed too sacrificial.
"We have but one life to live, and we'll live it together, Margery, girl, for better or for worse," was his apostrophic declaration, made while he was turning into Shawnee Street a few doors from hislodgings; and a minute later he was opening the Widow Holcomb's gate.
The house was dark and apparently deserted as to its street-fronting half when he let himself in at the gate and ran quickly up the steps. The front door was open, and he remembered afterward that he had wondered how the careful widow had come to leave it so, and why the hall lamp was not lighted. From the turn at the stair-head he felt his way to the door of his study. Like the one below, it was wide open; but some one had drawn the window shades and the interior of the room was as dark as a cavern.
Once, in the novel-writing, following the lead of many worthy predecessors, Griswold had made much of the "sixth" sense; the subtle and indefinable prescience which warns its possessor of invisible danger. No such warning was vouchsafed him when he leaned across the end of the writing-table, turned on the gas, and held a lighted match over the chimney of the working-lamp. It was while he was still bending over the table, with both hands occupied, that he looked aside. In his own pivot-chair, covering him with the mate to the weapon he had smashed and thrown away, sat the man who had opened the two doors and drawn the window shades and otherwise prepared the trap.
"You bought a couple o' these little playthings, Mr. Griswold," said the man, quietly. "Keep your hands right where they are, and tell me in which pocket you've got the other one."
Griswold laughed, and there was a sudden snapping of invisible bonds. He dismissed instantly the thought that Charlotte Farnham had taken him at his word; and if she had not, there was nothing to fear.
"I threw the other one away a little while ago," he said. "Reach your free hand over and feel my pockets."
Broffin acted upon the suggestion promptly.
"You ain't got it on you, anyway," he conceded; and when Griswold had dropped into the chair at the table's end: "I reckon you know what I'm here for."
"I know that you are holding that gun of mine at an exceedingly uncomfortable angle—for me," was the cool rejoinder. "I've always had a squeamish horror of being shot in the stomach."
The detective's grin was appreciative.
"You've got a good cold nerve, anyway," he commented. "I've been puttin' it up that when the time came, you'd throw a fit o' some sort—what? Since you're clothed in your right mind, we'll get down to business. First, I'll ask you to hand over the key to that safety-deposit box you've got in Mr. Grierson's bank."
Griswold took his bunch of keys from his pocket, slipped the one that was asked for from the ring, and gave it to his captor.
"Of course, I'm surrendering it under protest," he said. "You haven't yet told me who you are, or what you are holding me up for."
Broffin waved the formalities aside with a pistol-pointedgesture. "We can skip all that. I've got you dead to rights, after so long a time, and I'm goin' to take you back to New Orleans with me. The only question is: do you go easy, or hard?"
"I don't go either way until you show your authority."
"I don't need any authority. You're the parlor-anarchist that held up the president of the Bayou State Security Bank last spring and made a get-away with a hundred thousand—what?"
"All right; you say so—prove it." Griswold had taken a cigar from the open box on the writing-table and was calmly lighting it. There was nothing to be nervous about. "I'm waiting," he went on, placidly, when the cigar was going. "If you are an officer, you probably have a warrant, or a requisition, or something of that sort. Show it up."
"I don't need any papers to take you," was the barked-out retort. Broffin had more than once found himself confronting similar dead walls, and he knew the worth of a bold play.
"Oh, yes, you do. You accuse me of a crime: did you see me commit the crime?"
"No."
"Well, somebody did, I suppose. Bring on your witnesses. If anybody can identify me as the man you are after, I'll go with you—without the requisition. That's fair, isn't it?"
"I know you're the man, and you know it, too, damned well!" snapped Broffin, angered into bandying words with his obstinate capture.
"That is neither here nor there; I am not affirming or denying. It is for you to prove your case, if you can. And, listen, Mr. Broffin: perhaps it will save your time and mine if I add that I happen to know that you can't prove your case."
"Why can't I?"
"Just because you can't," Griswold went on, argumentatively. "I know the facts of this robbery you speak of; a great many people know them. The newspaper accounts said at the time that there were three persons who could certainly identify the robber: the president, the paying teller, and a young woman. It so happens that all three of these people are at present in Wahaska. At different times you have appealed to each of them, and in each instance you have been turned down. Isn't that true?"
Broffin glanced up, scowling.
"It's true enough that you—you and the little black-eyed girl between you—have hoodooed the whole bunch!" he rasped. "But when I get you into court, you'll find out that there are others."
Griswold smiled good-naturedly. "That is a bold, bad bluff, Mr. Broffin, and nobody knows it any better than you do," he countered. "You haven't a leg to stand on. This is America, and you can't arrest me without a warrant. And if you could, what would you do with me without the support of at least one of your three witnesses? Nothing—nothing at all."
Broffin laid the pistol on the table, and put the keyof the safety-box beside it. Then he sat in grim silence for a full minute, toying idly with a pair of handcuffs which he had taken from his pocket.
"By the eternal grapples!" he said, at length, half to himself, "I've a good mind to do it anyway—and take the chances."
As quick as a flash Griswold thrust out his hands.
"Put them on!" he snapped. "There are a hundred lawyers in New Orleans who wouldn't ask for anything better than the chance to defend me—at your expense!"
Broffin dropped the manacles into his pocket and sat back in the swing-chair. "You win," he said shortly; and the battle was over.
For a little time no word was spoken. Griswold smoked on placidly, seemingly forgetful of the detective's presence. Yet he was the one who was the first to break the straitened silence.
"You are a game fighter, Mr. Broffin," he said, "and I'm enough of a scrapper myself to be sorry for you. Try one of these smokes—you'll find them fairly good—and excuse me for a few minutes. I want to write a letter which, if you are going down-town, perhaps you'll be good enough to mail for me."
He pushed the open box of cigars across to the detective, and dragged the lounging-chair around to the other side of the table. There was stationery at hand, and he wrote rapidly for a few minutes, covering three pages of the manuscript sheets before he stopped. When the letter was enclosed, addressed, and stamped, he tossed it across to Broffin,face up. The detective saw the address, "Miss Margery Grierson," and, putting the letter into his pocket, got up to go.
"Just one minute more, if you please," said Griswold, and, relighting the cigar which had been suffered to go out, he went into the adjoining bedroom. When he came back, he had put on a light top-coat and a soft hat, and was carrying a small hand-bag.
"I'm your man, Mr. Broffin," he said quietly. "I'll go with you—and plead guilty as charged."
Wahaska, the village-conscious, had its nine-days' wonder displayed for it in inch-type head-lines when theDaily Wahaskan, rehearsing the story of the New Orleans bank robbery, told of the voluntary surrender of the robber, and of his deportation to the southern city to stand trial for his offence.
Some few there were who took exceptions to Editor Randolph's editorial in the same issue, commenting on the surrender, and pleading for a suspension of judgment on the ground that much might still be hoped for from a man who had retraced a broad step in the downward path by voluntarily accepting the penalty. Those who objected to the editorial were of the perverse minority. The intimation was made that the plea had been inspired—a hint basing itself upon the fact that Miss Grierson had been seen visiting the office of theWahaskanafter the departure of the detective, Matthew Broffin, with his prisoner.
The sensational incident, however, had been forgotten long before a certain evening, three weeks later, when the Grierson carriage conveyed the convalescent president of the Bayou State Security from the Grierson mansion to the southbound train. Andrew Galbraith was not alone in the carriage, and possibly there were those in the sleeping-car who mistook the dark-eyed and strikingly beautiful young woman, who took leave of him only after he was comfortably settled in his section, for his daughter. But the whispered words of leave-taking were rather those of a confidante than a kinswoman.
"I'll arrange the Raymer matter as you suggest," she said, "and if I had even a speaking acquaintance with God, I'd pray for you the longest day I live, Uncle Andrew. And about the trial: I'm going to leave it all with you; I've g-got to leave it with you! Just remember that I shall bleed little drops of blood for every day the judge gives him, and that the only way he can be helped is by a short sentence. He wouldn't take a pardon: he—he wants to pay, you know. Good-night, and good-by!" And she put her strong young arms around Andrew Galbraith's neck and kissed him, thereby convincing the family party in Lower Seven that she was not only the old man's daughter, but a very affectionate one, at that.
The little-changing seasons of central Louisiana had measured two complete rounds on the yearly dial of Time's unremitting and unhasting clockwhen the best hired carriage that Baton Rouge could afford drew up before the entrance to the State's Prison and waited. Precisely on the stroke of twelve, a man for whom the prison rules had lately been relaxed sufficiently to allow his hair to grow, came out, looked about him as one dazed, and assaulted the closed door of the carriage as if he meant to tear it from its hinges.
"Oh, boy, boy!" came from the one who had waited; and then the carriage door yielded, opened, closed with a crash, and the negro driver clucked to his horses.
They were half-way to the railroad station, and she was trying to persuade him that there would be months and years in which to make up for the loveless blank, before sane speech found its opportunity. And even then there were interruptions.
"I knew you'd be here; no, they didn't tell me, but I knew it—I would have staked my life on it, Margery, girl," he said, in the first lucid interval.
"And you—you've paid the Price, haven't you, Kenneth? but, oh, boy, dear! I've paid it, too! Don't you believe me?"
There was another interruption, and because the carriage windows were open, the negro driver grinned and confided a remark to his horses. Then the transgressor began again.
"Where are you taking me, Margery?—not that it makes any manner of difference."
"We are going by train to New Orleans, and this—this—very—evening we are to be married, inMr. Galbraith's house. And Uncle Andrew is going to give the bride away. It's all arranged."
"And after?"
"Afterward, we are going away—I don't know where. I just told dear old Saint Andrew to buy the tickets to anywhere he thought would be nice, and we'd go. I don't care where it is—do you? And when we get there, I'll buy you a pen and some ink and paper, and you'll go on writing the book, just as if nothing had happened. Say you will, boy, dear;pleasesay you will! And then I'll know that—the price—wasn't—too great."
He was looking out of the carriage window when he answered her, across to the levee and beyond it to the farther shore of the great river, and his eyes were the eyes of a man who has seen of the travail of his soul and is satisfied.
"I shall never write that book, little girl. That story, and all the mistakes that were going to the making of it, lie on the other side of—the Price. But one day, please God, there shall be another and a worthier one."
"Yes—please God," she said; and the dark eyes were shining softly.