The Rest Hollow Mystery Part 24

"I don't see that you owed me anything," he objected. "As the affair has developed, we were both the victims of an ugly plot. It certainly was not your fault. And once out of that accursed house, _you_ were free."

"Not my fault--no," she repeated, "but my responsibility afterward." She gazed past him out of the window where, at the curb, Arnold Rogers was a.s.sisting a fur-coated figure into the Paddington limousine. "You see, Edward Marstan was my husband and----Well, some day you may come to realize, Mr. Kenwick, that when a woman has loved, there is no such word as 'free.'"

At the foot of the stairway Kenwick spoke with an almost curt suppression to Granville Jarvis. "I'm going over to the hotel with Morgan. Come over there."

The other man made no reply save a slight inclination of his head, and there was in his eyes an expression which haunted and mystified the released prisoner.

"Jarvis is a wizard," he said to Clinton Morgan as they walked the few short blocks to Mont-Mer's leading hostelry. "If they ever let down the bars of the court-room to men like that, they'll revolutionize legal procedure. He seems to have seen this case from every angle."

"From more angles than you imagine," his friend replied. "And he had let me in on some of the most interesting of his findings that were not revealed in court. For instance, he examined that gardener this morning, just for his own satisfaction. The boy was willing, even flattered by the attention. Jarvis told me afterward that a witness like that ought to be ruled out of court. And he is typical of the ma.s.s of men and women who a.s.sist in acquitting the guilty and sending the innocent to the gallows. The average physician examining him would p.r.o.nounce him normal.

He can hear a sound distinctly, for instance, but he is afflicted with that common defect, the equivalent, Jarvis says, of color-blindness in the visual realm, which makes it impossible for him to tell whether the sound comes from behind or in front of him. And he lacks completely a visual memory. He could recall the exact words that Gifford said to him on the night of the suicide but he couldn't remember whether the body was covered or uncovered when he saw it. And as for the tests with Glover----By the way, what are you going to do with Glover?"

"I don't know yet. I haven't got that far. I think I can forgive him everything except that infamous story about Everett being close with me while I was under age. Why, I had too much money while I was in college, Morgan. That's the chief reason why I didn't push my literary work with greater zeal. The creative temperament is naturally indolent. It requires a spur, not necessarily a financial one, but so much the better if it is. Of course Glover and I will have to have a financial reckoning. I can see now why my frantic messages to our family lawyer were never answered. I suppose he's had dozens of communications from people purporting to be connected by blood or marriage with the Kenwick estate. Yes, Glover has got some things to answer to me for, but----"

His mind flew back to that last evening that he had spent in the fire-lit living-room on Pine Street. "He brought h.e.l.l into my life for a time," he ended slowly. "But he brought--something else into it, too."

It was half an hour later, after Kenwick had bathed and dressed for dinner, that Granville Jarvis came up to his room. Kenwick admitted him with an inarticulate word of greeting. Then while with fumbling fingers he put on a fresh collar, he made an attempt at normal conversation.

"Been expecting you," he said. "Morgan is down in the lobby. We'll all have dinner here first and then----"

"Can't do it," Jarvis cut in. "I have another engagement for dinner, and I'm leaving town on the eight-forty northbound. I just ran up to say good-by and--good luck."

"Where are you going?"

Jarvis smiled. "To Argentina, so far as you are concerned. But you can call it Columbia if you like. I'm returning to my work there. You see, I've been away on leave."

"You've got to stay long enough for me to tell you something," Kenwick's voice cut in authoritatively. "But you couldn't stay long enough, Jarvis, for me to thank you for what you've done."

His caller held up a hand. "Please don't. Not that--please."

"But," Kenwick went on, "you've got to hear an apology. I was just about on the verge of a collapse over there, and when you got up in court as the representative of Glover----Well, I didn't know the game, you see and I thought----"

"I know; Brutus." It was Jarvis who finished the sentence. "And in a sense, you were right," he went on slowly. "For what I did, I did--not for you."

"You did it for science, of course; because to you I was an interesting case. But what can I ever do to repay you? How can----"

"I have been paid." The same haunting, baffling expression was in the scientist's eyes, and he was not looking at the man whom his testimony had freed.

"Oh, I don't mean money!" Kenwick cried hotly. "I know you have that!"

"I don't mean money, either." He forced his gaze back to his host. And then that sixth sense which is in the soul of every creative artist awoke in Kenwick's being and made his eyes luminous with understanding.

Jarvis picked up his hat from the chair into which it had dropped. "I'm going out to the Paddingtons' for dinner," he said casually. "I'll have about----" He snapped open the cover of his watch, then closed it again.

"The most devilish thing about life on this planet, Kenwick, is that we can't do very much for each other. The game is largely solitaire. But for any good that I ever did I've been well repaid. Any man ought to be satisfied, I think, when the G.o.ds allow him two full hours--in Utopia."

CHAPTER XX

It was the morning after his acquittal that Kenwick and Marcreta Morgan drove out of the Paddington gateway in one of the Utopia machines. They turned to the left and took the stretch of perfect asphalt road that led to the old Raeburn house.

The mystery of its destruction had never been explained. Richard Glover, and every one else who was connected with the case of Ralph Regan, had proved a satisfactory alibi. The owner of Rest Hollow had been notified by wire of its destruction and he had replied with orders that the grounds were to be kept locked and admission denied to all callers. It had undoubtedly been one of the handsomest homes in a community of handsome homes, but since the first days of its existence fate had destined it for tragedy. And perhaps its owner was relieved to know that only a pile of whitening ashes marked the grave of his own romance and the prison of another man's hope. At all events, the mystery of its pa.s.sing never has been solved, and conjecture concerning it is still a favorite topic around the tea-tables of Mont-Mer's fas.h.i.+onable suburban district.

"But I want to _see_ it in ruins," Kenwick had told Marcreta after their first radiant hour together. "I want to know that it is really gone off the face of the earth, so that when it comes to me in memory I can a.s.sure myself that it is only a dream."

They turned the last corner and came suddenly in sight of the tall iron gate. Across it a sinister chain swung ominously, warning the world away from communication with that most dreadful affliction that can befall a human soul. The ruins of Rest Hollow loomed somber and shapeless before them, and Roger Kenwick brought his car to a stop in the very spot where Arnold Rogers had once halted, hesitated, and then gone on his way.

Guarding the pile like a battered but relentless sentinel was the tall, charred chimney of the dining-room. As he looked at it, Kenwick's hand sought instinctively for that of the woman beside him, as though to a.s.sure himself of her reality. And then he heard himself ask the question that for so long had beaten against his brain.

"How could you do it? How could you send me away that night, dear, into the horrors of war and--this, without hope?"

"I couldn't know," she told him desperately. "I couldn't foresee what was coming. And I wanted you to win a place in the world. I wanted you to win, as I knew you could if you were unhampered by----"

"Unhampered!" He echoed the word incredulously, as though it were quite new and its meaning not clear. "Is any one ever hampered by love and inspiration and all that----"

"You don't understand," she said. "n.o.body can understand physical disability except those who have suffered it. My mother had a sister who was a bed-ridden invalid. She helped her husband to find his place in the world and keep it. But he never seemed to realize that she had helped him. He always thought, though I suppose he never said, that his marriage had held him back. And she died at last of a broken heart.

Through all my youth I had her tragedy before me."

There was a moment of silence between them. And then Kenwick spoke slowly. "You hadn't much faith in me, Marcreta. You admit now that you loved me, yet you hadn't much faith--in my character or my----"

"But love comes a long time before faith, Roger. It always does. And I was younger then. I didn't know so much about life and--and character.

But, oh, when they wrote me about this! I would have given anything on earth to have lived over again our last night together!"

"I know! I know!" His voice was vibrant with self-reproach.

"Your brother must have been splendid," she went on. "He wrote me such a wonderful letter. But he couldn't soften it; n.o.body can ever dilute the big tragedies of life. We must drink them unstrained. I knew that you were somewhere in this county, and when I came down here, just that one time, I liked to feel that I was near you. I couldn't have endured to see you, but I wanted to be near you for a little while before--I did anything else. And then that night when you came back, I couldn't be sure----Everything was so changed. You were so different from the carefree boy who had gone away. I knew, of course, that you would be; in a sense, I wanted you to be. But I didn't want you to feel bound by anything that had gone before. I was afraid you might feel that way. Oh, a woman is at such a disadvantage, Roger. She is always at a disadvantage if the man she loves is honorable and chivalrous."

"I had work to do," he reminded her gently. "I had to quiet the t.i.tle to my name. For when a woman marries a man, Marcreta, she marries his past, every bit of it. Before I could offer my life to you again, I had to be certain that every minute of it was clean and decent and above reproach.

I was not willing to let any of it go on the grounds of irresponsibility. I never would have been satisfied. And you never would have been satisfied. There would always have been for both of us terrible moments of doubt. The bramble-bush lay between us. I had to tear it away first; I had to tear it away and look bravely at whatever lay underneath."

A shaft of golden sunlight suddenly broke through the January clouds and slanted across the road. Roger Kenwick's eyes followed it as though seeking for the treasure that might lie revealed at last at the end of a rainbow. A sharp exclamation escaped him. And he felt the quick response of the hand that still lay in his.

Drawing the heavy motor-cloak closer about her, he helped Marcreta Morgan out of the car and guided her to a spot about a hundred yards on the other side of the iron gate. "I remember now!" His words came in the low, awed voice of one who suddenly encounters in broad daylight some object that has played conspicuous part in an evil and oft-recurring dream.

"At last!" he said, and stood rooted to the roadside gazing at the thing for which, during the last two months, he had been so desperately groping. "This one thing," he went on, "this one thing about those impenetrable months here I do remember. I believe that if I had chanced to see it on that afternoon of my recovery, if I had only chanced to come this way instead of around by the other road, it might have restored to me some memory of this place."

They stood now on the edge of the strip of pavement, where dead leaves spread a spongy carpet between the asphalt and the barbed-wire fence that bordered the opposite estate. And what they looked upon was a huge boulder, half embedded in the earth. By some mighty and persistent force it had been rent asunder, and now, up through the cleft which tore its surface with a long jagged scar, a sapling eucalyptus-tree, perfectly shaped and beautifully proportioned, had pushed its way. A zephyr or perhaps a bird had sown the seed in this rock-bound prison. And with a vitality that appeared incredible it had taken root and grown there, stretching vigorous, red-tipped leaves heavenward. In some miraculous manner its tap-root had found the sustaining soil, and its flame-colored crown the sunlight. There it stood, on the lonely road to Rest Hollow, a living torch of liberty, flaunting its heroic triumph above the shattered body of its foe.

"On the day that Glover first brought me here, I saw that tree."

Kenwick's voice was scarcely more than a whisper. "I remember looking out at it from an opening in the fence. I didn't know just why I was here, but I had a sense of--I can't describe it to you--but it was a sense of _imprisonment_. I knew that if I wanted to get out of that place I couldn't do it, and there's no feeling on earth like that. And then I saw--this, and it thrilled me. In a curious, unexplainable way it gave me hope. I don't recall anything else about the place, and I don't remember whether I ever saw this again. But during these last two months I have been looking for something that I knew I had lost out of my life, and here it is."

Marcreta Morgan reached over and touched the sapling's damp bark with reverent fingers. From a cleft in the conquered boulder came the pungent odor of the crushed leaves that were sustaining this new life. She turned to the man beside her with s.h.i.+ning eyes.

"The resurrection!" she cried.

He drew her close to him beneath the tender branches of the valiant little sapling.

"An imprisoned soul," he whispered, "liberated at last--by the miracle of love."