The Rest Hollow Mystery Part 17

There was a sound of a key grating in the lock. The dialogue ended abruptly and Kenwick turned from the window. On the threshold was a shabby, faded-looking little woman guarded by the relentless sentry.

Kenwick advanced to meet her, apologizing for the discomfort of the backless chair which he offered.

"No, I don't want to sit down, thanks," she told him hurriedly. "I'm not goin' to stay but a minute." She twisted her ungloved hands nervously together under a scrawny wool scarf. "It's just this, Mr. Kenwick; I asked them to let me come just to tell you this----"

The prisoner stood waiting. The realization came to him that she was afraid of him, and he tried to help her to begin. "You are Mrs. Fanwell, aren't you?"

"Yes. But--you don't know me, do you?"

"No, I just guessed at who you were." His eyes rested compa.s.sionately upon her thin, eager face, her poverty-stricken mourning. She was obviously relieved at his quiet composure. "I just wanted to tell you this; that it's not revenge that I'm after. I've had a hard life, any way you look at it. But I'm in Science now and I'm tryin' to tear hate out of my heart. I haven't got any hard feelin's against you, for I don't believe, I never will believe that you really meant to do it."

"Won't you sit down?" Kenwick suggested, and forced her gently into the chair. Then he stood beside her, one hand resting upon the paper-littered table. "You believe, do you, that I--am responsible for your brother's death?"

She was looking past him, through the narrow window where Dayton stood watching her curiously. "I don't know just what to think. But I wanted you to know that I'm not wis.h.i.+n' you--any violent end. I never dreamed there was anything so horrible connected with his death when I came out here. But I felt that I had to know about him; I had to find out."

"Of course you had to find out," Kenwick agreed earnestly. "This thing must be cleared up in your mind--in everybody's mind. May I ask you a personal question, Mrs. Fanwell, to help me clear up a part of it myself? Were you dependent upon your brother to any degree for your support?"

"Dependent on _Ralph_?" The astonishment in her tone was sufficient reply in itself. "Oh, no. I was tryin' to help Ralph out, as much as I could without lettin' my husband know. It was hard, havin' always to stand between them. But I couldn't blame my husband either. He was always hard-workin' himself and he hadn't any patience with poor Ralph.

He thought he ought to get a steady job at carpentry; that was his trade, and he made good at it till he got sick and began takin' that terrible stuff. It was the ruin of him."

"You mean that he took--drugs?"

She nodded. And Kenwick hastened to cover the pitiful little secret which he had laid bare.

"It was only for this reason that I asked, Mrs. Fanwell. If I am proved guilty of this crime, you shall receive whatever money recompense it is in my power to give. This is not an attempt to pay for it, but only to ease my own conscience."

The woman's eyes filled with tears. She leaned beseechingly across the table, clutching, with strange incongruity, one of the perfumed envelopes. "Then you _are_ guilty!" she cried. "Oh, Mr. Kenwick, why don't you confess? All the lawyers have told me that if you confess, they can't give you the death sentence. And you hadn't ought to be in--in a place like this. Now that I've seen you I know that what the others say isn't so. You did it when you was crazy. You never would have done it if you had been in your right mind."

She rose and moved slowly toward the door, her gaze still fixed upon him with a mixture of pleading and horror. He followed, and opened the door himself. "I'm glad you came, Mrs. Fanwell. It was very kind indeed of you to come."

She stopped with her hand upon the k.n.o.b. "I don't care what he says,"

she told him tremulously. "I don't care what anybody says; they can't none of them make me believe that you would have done it if you'd known what you was about."

When she had gone Kenwick drew a long sigh. The thing had come near to shattering his laboriously constructed mask. He spoke sharply to the man at the window. "What in the world did she mean by that, Dayton? They're certainly not trying to make her believe that I killed her brother when I was in my right mind?"

Dayton took a few slow steps toward him. "I was trying to lead up to that when she came in. But it's just as well to have had you get it from her. Now maybe you'll take more stock in it. That is exactly what they're trying to make her think; what they'll try to make the court think. Glover is going to try to prove (and he'll come within an ace of doing it, too) that when you were in your right mind you deliberately plotted to kill that man. He has the witnesses and the motive, and the thing that he's going to attempt to saddle upon you, Mr. Kenwick is--murder in the first degree."

CHAPTER XVI

On the day set for the trial of the Regan murder case the court-room at Mont-Mer was crowded. Long before ten o'clock men and women were flocking into the building, eager for the most desirable seats.

Residents from some of the country districts brought their lunches and prepared to spend the day.

The court-house was an antique structure heated only by wood stoves, but the fur-coated and the threadbare rubbed elbows and were oblivious of drafts. For it is in the audience chamber of a criminal court that those who seek will find the true democracy. One touch of sensation makes the whole world kin.

A few hours before the trial Clinton Morgan arrived in town and was permitted to see the prisoner. The vigilance of the Mont-Mer officials did not preclude visitors, rather welcomed them as a possible means of gaining valuable information from the suspected murderer when he was off his guard. Dayton, who was in conference with his client when Clinton entered, was immensely relieved by the appearance of this new actor in the drama. "This thing seems to me to be a little too one-sided, professor," he remarked when introductions were over. "The court-room over there is jammed with people who expect to see us done to death.

It's good to have an ally loom up in the offing."

He left them alone for a few moments while they waited for the sheriff, and Clinton measured his friend with an anxious eye. "I don't know what you could have thought of me for not coming sooner," he said, "but I couldn't possibly get away. You look all in, man. Haven't they been giving you anything to eat?"

"As much as I wanted." As he returned the grip of his hand, Kenwick was wondering if Clinton Morgan suspected that this encounter, in a prison cell, between himself and the brother of Marcreta filled his cup of humiliation to the brim. Her name was not mentioned by either of them.

Clinton's whole attention was centered upon the developments in the case.

"You're not going to take the stand yourself, are you, Kenwick?" he questioned, standing with one foot upon the backless chair.

"I was, but Dayton has advised against it."

"Absolutely. You'd be at an immense disadvantage."

"I suppose so. I can furnish proof from Dr. Gregson Bennet, in the city, that I'm perfectly normal now. But after all, that doesn't really count for much with anybody but myself. It was such an immense comfort to me when he made the examination. I came away from his office feeling that it was going to clear up everything. But no matter what science says, I'll always be at a disadvantage."

Clinton laid a hand upon his shoulder. Ever since his first sight of him he had been trying to conceal the fact that Kenwick's altered appearance was a shock to him. And like the attempts of most straightforward men, the effort had been a failure. "Why, buck up, man," he admonished now.

"They can't convict you, you know; not under--the circ.u.mstances. You haven't been thinking that?"

"I've been thinking a good many things since I came back to Mont-Mer,"

Kenwick answered slowly. "You see, Morgan, I know more now than I did when I was trying to ferret this thing out up in the city. For one thing, I know a little more about my adversary. As I've figured out this story now, it goes something like this.

"After that adventure out at Rest Hollow, Glover found himself in a hole. But there were three ways out of it for him. If he wanted to retain the grip that I think he has upon my estate, he had to choose between these. The first one was to make it appear that I was dead. This seems, at first thought, to be a hazardous venture, but it was not so difficult in my case as it would have been under normal circ.u.mstances.

And when he first decided to take it I think he supposed that I was dead. He had every reason to think so. The man to whom he had entrusted me had mysteriously disappeared, and he had some strange woman come down and identify as himself a stranger who had been killed in an automobile tragedy; a very easy thing, in reality, you see. When Glover discovered, upon inquiry around town, that there had been such an accident, he concluded that I had been killed and that the man who was responsible for it was afraid to let him know and had made his escape after having himself declared dead. I haven't a doubt that Glover thought I was the man who was s.h.i.+pped up to San Francisco in a casket. And believing this, the whole thing seemed to play right into his hands. He knew, of course, that he couldn't keep his hold on my fortune forever, but he wanted to play the game until he got as much as he could out of it.

"But suddenly he discovered, by some means, that his whole hypothesis was wrong. He discovered that I was alive, and what was infinitely more appalling, that I was apparently restored to competency. He had been willing to risk my possible reappearance, you see, for if I were ever discovered wandering about deranged somewhere, I would have no means of identifying myself and, after a medical examination, would simply be committed to some inst.i.tution. He would not have to connect himself with that at all. But since I had come to life mentally as well as physically, he had to take the second course--prove me irresponsible and have me sent to an asylum. How he went about this I don't know, but I'm sure that he must have attempted it. And I don't know either why he failed, for as I look back now upon some of my moves I can see that they might have appeared--erratic."

"I think," Clinton told him dryly, "that any of us could furnish convincing proof that we have been, at certain periods of our lives, dangerous to the public safety."

But Kenwick went on, unheeding this attempted solace.

"At any rate, Glover apparently failed in this attempt. So in order to get himself out of this mess, there is only one thing now for him to do." He broke off, eying his visitor with somber eyes. "You know what that is, Morgan. In order to save himself, he must prove me to be a cold-blooded murderer. Can he do it? Why shouldn't he? I'm certainly not in a position to offer any convincing opposition. A contemptuous pity is what I have read in the eyes of every person whom I've seen since this thing came to light. I don't suppose there is a person in this town who thinks I am innocent. I don't know whether Dayton himself does."

"But what motive could you have had for murder, Kenwick? You say that you never saw this Regan in your life."

"_I_ say so, but what does my testimony amount to? And especially what does it amount to when I am trying to save my own skin? I told you once, Morgan, and I tell you again that it's impossible for a man to live down my sort of a past. He may get his eyes back out of the bramble-bush, but he'll never be able to make the world believe that he can really see with them. I feel sorry for Dayton. He's working day and night on this case, and he's a nice fellow. But he hasn't got any chance to make good on it. I feel sorry for him."

"I have been thinking," Clinton mused, "that there might be something out at Rest Hollow that would furnish a clue to help solve the question to the satisfaction of the jury, as to just when you arrived at that house, how long you stayed, and so on."

"The place is full of clues, of course," Kenwick admitted. "But by this time they have all been carefully arranged. Dayton went out there, and he told me that the public are not being admitted to the grounds at all.

The place is under guard night and day. There may be danger there for Glover; I don't know anything about that, of course, but he knows. And whatever else you may say about him, you can't say that he has been asleep on this job."

The door opened to admit the sheriff. He shook hands with Clinton Morgan and nodded to Kenwick. In absolute silence the trio walked through the semitropical grounds to the court-house. As they entered the packed audience chamber the buzz of conversation stopped, and in deathly silence Roger Kenwick took his place.

The barrage of eyes leveled upon him was only partly visible through the haze that for the first few moments blurred his vision. He told himself that it was like that last charge, through blinding smoke, that he had made across No-Man's-Land. Then the scene cleared and individual faces emerged from the mist. There were the weather-beaten faces of ranch workers, the smug, complacent faces of those whom life has petted, the resolute faces of those who have come to see grim justice administered.

Among them, here and there, was a scattering of veiled faces; women eager to see, but ashamed of being seen. Kenwick wondered contemptuously if some of the writers of the perfumed notes were among these.

During his dispa.s.sionate survey of the spectators he was acutely conscious of the presence of a man sitting at the far end of the table around which the lawyers were a.s.sembled. He had felt this personality when he first entered, but had reserved his attention until the blur of his surroundings should clear. Now he turned slowly in his chair and looked straight into the "tiger eyes" of Richard Glover. There was neither anger nor appeal in his own face; only a curious, questioning expression. An anthropologist who has stumbled upon some strange human relic unknown to his research might wear such an expression. Any physiognomist could have read in Kenwick's gaze the question, "What is this all about?"

And here again his adversary had him at a disadvantage. For his was not the mobile temperament which gives visible response to its emotional experiences. Life played upon Kenwick as upon a highly strung instrument, and drew from him whatever notes she needed in the universal symphony. But Richard Glover permitted no hand but his own to manipulate the keys of his life-board.