Mrs. Balfame Part 21

"Anna is ill," she articulated. "Anna! My one real friend--the only one that has meant anything to me. Life has gone pretty well with me. Now everything is changed. I know that terrible things are about to happen to me."

"Not while I am alive. I heard of Dr. Anna's illness on my way to New York. Lequeur was on the train. You--you must let me take her place. I am devoted to you heart and soul. You surely know that."

"But you are not a woman. It's a woman friend I want now, a strong one like Anna. Those other women--oh, yes, they're devoted to me--have been, but they've suddenly ceased to count, somehow. Besides, they'll soon believe me guilty. I hate them all. Only Anna would have understood--and believed."

Rush had been administering awkward little pats to the soft ma.s.ses of her hair. Suddenly he realised that his faith in her complete innocence was by no means as stable as it had been; she had confessed to him that she had been in the grove that night stalking the intruder. How absurd to believe that she had gone out unarmed. He had read the circ.u.mstantial details of the reporter's interviews with Frieda and young Kraus. While the writers were careful not to make the downright a.s.sertion that Mrs.

Balfame had fired the fatal shot, the public saw her in the act of levelling one of the pistols--so mighty is the power of the trained and ruthless pen.

As he stood looking down upon his unexpected surrender to emotional excitement, he asked himself deliberately: What more natural, if she had a pistol in her hand and that low-lived creature presented himself abruptly and alone, than that it should go off of its own accord, so to speak, whether hers had been the bullet to penetrate that loathsome target or not? If so, what had she done with the pistol?

He sat down and laid his hand firmly on her arm.

"There is something I must tell you. It is something Frieda forgot to tell the reporter, but she gave it to the Grand Jury. With the help of a couple of extra gin fizzes, I extracted it from Gore. It is this: she told the Grand Jury that several times when she did her weekly cleaning upstairs she saw a pistol in the drawer of a table beside your bed.

Will--won't you tell me?"

He felt the arm in his clasp grow rigid, but Mrs. Balfame answered without a trace of her recent agitation: "I told you before that I never had a pistol. It would be like her to be spying about among my things, but I wonder she would admit it."

"She is delighted with her new importance, and, I fancy, has been bribed to tell all she knows."

"In that case she wouldn't mind telling more. And no doubt she will think of other sensational items before the trial. She will have awakened in the night after the crime and heard me drop the pistol between the walls, or she will have seen me loading it on the afternoon of the shooting."

"Yes, there is no knowing when those low-grade imaginations, once started, will stop. Memory ceases to function in brains of that sort, and its place is taken by a confused jumble of induced or auto suggestions, which are carefully straightened out by the practised lawyer in rehearsals. But I almost wish that you had taken a pistol out that night and would tell me where to find it. I'd lose it somewhere out in the marsh."

"I had no pistol." Not yet could she take him into her confidence to that extent, although she knew that he was about to stake his professional reputation on her acquittal.

He dismissed the subject abruptly. "By the way, I gave the story of Frieda's attempt to blackmail you to Broderick and two other men just before I left town--laying emphasis on the fact that you always drank a gla.s.s of filtered water before going to bed. They made a wry face over that, but it is news and they must publish it. There are many things in your favour--particularly Frieda's a.s.sertion before the coroner that she knew nothing of the case. She is a confessed perjurer. Also, why didn't she answer when you called up to her, if she was on the back stairs?

There are things that satisfy a grand jury that will not go down with a trial jury. Now you must, you must trust me."

She looked up at him dully. But in a moment her eyes warmed and she smiled faintly. All the female in her responded to the traditional strength and power of the male. She also knew the sensitiveness of man's vanity and the danger either of starving it or dealing it a sudden blow.

She sometimes felt sorry for men. It was their self-appointed task to run the planet, and they must be reminded just so often how wonderful they were, lest they lose courage; one of the several obliging weaknesses of which women rarely scrupled to take advantage.

As she put out her hand and took his, she looked very feminine and sweet. Her face was flushed and tears had softened her large blue-grey eyes that could look so virginal and cold.

"I know you will get me off. Don't imagine for a moment I doubt that; it is a sustaining faith that will carry me through the trial itself. But it is this terrible ordeal in prison that I dread--and the publicity--my good name dragged in the dust."

"You can change that name for mine the day you are acquitted."

It suddenly occurred to her that this might be a very sensible thing to do, and simultaneously she appreciated the fact that he possessed what was called charm and magnetism. Moreover, the complete devotion of even a pa.s.sably attractive member of the over-s.e.x in alarming predicaments was a very precious thing. Possibly for the first time in her life she experienced a sensation of grat.i.tude, and she smiled at him so radiantly that he caught his breath.

"No one but you could have consoled me for the loss of Anna, but you are not to say one word of that sort to me until I am out of this dreadful place. I couldn't stand the contrast! Will you promise?"

"Very well."

"Now will you really do something for me--get me a sleeping powder from the druggist? To-morrow I shall be myself again, but I _must_ sleep to-night."

"I'll get it." His voice was matter of fact, for love made certain of his instincts keen if it blunted others. "That is, if you will promise to go to bed early and see none of these reporters, men or women. They are camped all over the Courthouse yard."

She gave an exclamation of disgust. "I'll never see another newspaper person as long as I live. They are responsible for this, and I hate them."

"Good! You shall have the powder in ten minutes. Oh, by the way, will you give me a written permit to pa.s.s the night in your house? I want to go through your husband's papers and see if I can find any clue to unknown enemies. He may have received threatening letters. I can obtain the official permission without any difficulty."

She wrote the permit unsuspiciously. At nine o'clock that night he let himself into the Balfame house determined to find the pistol before morning. He knew the police would get round to the inevitable search some time on the following day.

CHAPTER XXI

Alys Crumley entertained four of the newspaper women at a picnic lunch in her studio. She was grateful for the distraction from her own thoughts and diverted by their theories. None had seen Mrs. Balfame save through the medium of the staff artist, and they were inclined to accept the prima facie evidence of her guilt. When Alys fetched a photograph from the house, however, they immediately reversed their opinion, for the pictured face was that of a lovely cold and well-bred woman without a trace of hardness or predisposition to crime. They fell in love with it and vowed to defend her to the best of their ability, Miss Crumley promising to exert her influence with the accused to obtain an interview for the new devotees.

Before wrapping the photograph for its inevitable journey to New York, Alys gave it a moment of study herself, wondering if she may not have misinterpreted what she saw that morning. No one had wors.h.i.+pped at that shrine more devoutly than she, even during these later years of metropolitan concordance.

"What is your theory?" asked Miss Austin of _The Evening News_. "They say that a lot of those men at the Elks know, but never will come through. Do you think it was any of those girls? It might have been some woman he knew in New York who followed him here for the first time--who would not have been recognised if seen, and got away in a waiting automobile."

"As likely as not," said Miss Crumley indifferently. "I have heard so many theories advanced and rejected that I am almost as confused as the police. Jim Broderick says that the simplest explanation is generally the correct one, but while he believes Mrs. Balfame to be the natural solution, I happen to know her better than he does, and a good deal more of this community. Three or four men and one or two women would be still simpler explanations. Possibly--" She turned cold and almost lost her breath, but the impulse to put a maddening possibility into verbal form was irresistible. "Perhaps some man that is in love with Mrs. Balfame did it." And then she hated herself, for she felt as if she had thrown Dwight Rush to the lions.

"But who? Who?" the girls were demanding, more excited over this picturesque solution than they had been since "the story broke." Even Miss Austin, who disdained to write "sob stuff" and was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, was almost on her feet, while Miss Lauretta Lea, who wept vicariously for fifty thousand women three times a week, shrieked without shame.

"Oh, fine!" "How truly enchanting!" "Dear Miss Crumley--Alys--who, who is the man?"

"Oh, as to that, I've not an idea. Mrs. Balfame always has rather disdained men, and even if she were susceptible is far too straight-laced to permit any man to pay her compromising attentions, or to meet him secretly. But of course she is very pretty, still young to look at, so there is the possibility--"

"But just run over all the marriageable men in the community--"

"Oh, he might be married, you know." Alys struggled to keep the alarm out of her voice.

"But in that case there would still be the wife to dispose of, and now, at least, he'd never dare kill her, or even divorce her. No, I don't hold to that theory. It's more like the reckless act of the unchastened bachelor still young enough for illusions. You must have a theory, Alys.

Stand and deliver." Miss Austin spoke with quick insistence. She had detected her hostess' suppressed excitement and was convinced that the hint had not been thrown out at random. She also had been conscious of an indefinable change in her old a.s.sociate, and now she noticed it in detail. She might be too self-respecting to dip her pen in bathos, but she was nevertheless young, and her imagination began playing about possibilities like lightning over a wire fence.

The heat which confused Alys Crumley's brain was expressed by a dull glow in her strange olive-colored eyes, but she made a desperate effort to look impersonal and rather bored.

"No, I have no theory: certainly it could not be any of the men hereabouts. Mrs. Balfame has known all of them from infancy up. Perhaps she met some one in New York; I don't know that she ever went to any of the tea-tango places--she doesn't dance; but she might have gone with Mrs. Gifning or Mrs. Frew, and just met some one that fell in love with her--Oh, you mustn't take a mere idea of mine too seriously."

"Hm!" said Miss Austin. "It doesn't sound plausible. A man she met now and then at a tea-room! She's not the sort to drive men to distraction in the casual meeting--not the type. And I can't see the men that frequent afternoon tea-rooms working themselves up to the point of murder. No, if there is a man in the case, he is here; if not in Elsinore, then in the county; and it is some man who has known her long enough and seen her often enough to descend from mere admiration for her rather chilling type of beauty into the most desperate desire for possession--"

Alys burst into a ringing peal of laughter. "Really, Sarah, I wonder you are not already famous as a fiction-story writer. How much longer do you propose to stick to prosaic journalism?"

"I've had two stories accepted by leading magazines this month, I'd have you know; but your memory is short if you think journalism prosaic. It germinates pretty nearly all the fiction microbes that later ravage the popular magazines. That was what was the matter with the old magazines--no modern symptoms, let alone fevers--only antidotes that somehow didn't work. But if you won't tell, Alys, I'll find out for myself. If I don't find out, Jim Broderick will, and I'd give my eyes to get ahead of him. But we've got to catch our train, girls."

They took the short cut through the hall of the dwelling, and as they pa.s.sed the open door of the living-room, Miss Lauretta Lea exclaimed with pleasure at its conceit of a cool green wood. Alys could do no less than invite them in. While the three other reporters were walking about observing the charming room in detail and envying its owner, Miss Sarah Austin walked directly over to a framed photograph of Dwight Rush that stood on a side-table. He had given it to Mrs. Crumley; and Alys, who spared her mother all unnecessary anxiety, had not yet conceived a logical excuse for its removal.

"Whom have we here?" demanded the searching young realist. "Don't tell me, Alys, that here is the secret of your desertion of the New York press. I'd forgive you, though, for he is precisely the type I most admire. The modern Samson before Delilah cuts off what little hair his barber leaves. But the same old Samson looking round for the same old Delilah--"

"Really, Sarah, are you insinuating that I am a Delilah? That is too much!" Alys put her arm round Miss Austin's waist and smiled teasingly.

"No wonder your newspaper stories are so bitingly realistic; the restraints you force upon your imagination must put it quite out of commission for the time being. That is Mr. Dwight Rush, quite a well known lawyer in Brabant already, although he has only been here about two years."

"I thought you said all your young men had grown up in the community."