The Long Lane's Turning Part 20

She had read avidly, though with unspeakable dread and loathing, the newspaper accounts of the affair. The refusal of the arrested man to tell his name or where he came from, or to explain in the slightest detail--except brazenly to deny any part in it--the crime which had set the city in which it had occurred agog, had been duly chronicled; but the condition of the victim--since Cameron Craig was a power in the community--had absorbed a greater part of the popular interest, and the daily bulletins of his physicians had called forth far more comment than the unknown criminal whom he had identified as the man who had shot him. She had felt a great relief, also, in the knowledge that Craig had declared that he had not known his feminine visitor; and while the dread had inevitably lifted that when he discovered the loss of the letters he might betray her, it had faded at length in the certainty that, though he lived, the brain-injury had left him with clouded consciousness. Day after day he had lain voiceless, the outer injury gradually and surely yielding to the medicaments of healing, but the brain lapsed into a semblance of vacuity, inert and unresponsive, a mild phantom of the old Craig, the bodily functions become mere mechanism, the mind blank and fallow, its inner hurt waiting a diagnosis beyond the skill of local pract.i.tioners.

But though the secret Echo carried shut within her breast thus grew less painful with the pa.s.sage of time, another dread was slowly drawing out of her heart its warmth and glow. This was the deeper hurt of Harry Sevier's absence.

Going about her daily affairs she thought of him without ceasing. She never drove through the streets that her gaze did not search the busy pavements--never pa.s.sed the building that held his office that her eyes did not lift fearfully to its blank and blinded windows--never heard the postman's brisk step on the porch that her heart did not beat chokingly. Where had he gone? Chilly knew of no one who had received a letter from him. Aunt Judy, his cook, was as ignorant as she. She had even interviewed Suzuki, but it had been plain that the j.a.panese could tell nothing.

The recollection of the bottle and the overturned gla.s.s she had seen in his office recurred to her again and again, with all their bitter suggestions of surrender, relapse and demoralisation. Could it be that he had thrown away his hard-earned victory, hurled himself again into the pit from which he had so painfully climbed, which now might hold him forever? And coupled with this sickening thought came the reflection: what if Harry should die, far away somewhere, perhaps in some foreign country, without seeing her again, without ever knowing?

There were hours, too, when, woman-like, she wondered whether he had cared so much: whether he had not found comfort in absence and given his love elsewhere.

Her cheeks grew paler day by day, and in spite of herself her step lagged and la.s.situde grew upon her. Often she felt her father's anxious look and knew that her mother, in her stately and undemonstrative way was deeply disturbed. She took without protest the tonics Doctor Southall prescribed, but they brought little betterment, and, as physicians will, he at length began to talk of a sea-trip. In her growing apathy plans of this sort meant nothing to Echo, but she believed Harry had gone abroad, and the chance that they might meet, however slender it might be, called to her. When Mrs. Spottiswoode, therefore, announced her annual migration to Paris for her winter's wardrobe, it was arranged that Echo should make the voyage under her chaperonage.

Meanwhile the date had arrived for Echo's usual summer's visit to Nancy Langham in the neighbouring capital. Ordinarily a stay at the home of the girl of whom she was so fond, would have been something to look forward to with unmixed delight. Now, however, it had become a thing to shrink from. To walk those streets--perhaps to see again the house whose very memory had been such an anguish to her--she would gladly have evaded this. But when Nancy's letters promised to pa.s.s from pleading to epistolary tears, she at length yielded and late August found her the Langhams' guest for a final weekend.

As she dressed, on the afternoon of her arrival, there was a tap at the door and Nancy's voice said, "May I come in, dear? I want to see what you are going to wear."

"Yes, come in. I'm almost ready."

Echo had chosen a gown of black _tulle_ with a gold rose at the brocaded girdle and Nancy looked at her admiringly. "Gracious!" she exclaimed. "That black--it positively sets your hair on _fire_! It makes you so pale, though. Do put a little dab of pink on your cheeks, Echo; you make me look positively lurid beside you!"

There was some truth in the comparison, for the younger girl was like a wild-rose, quivering with life and colour. She took the hare's-foot and came to Echo coaxingly. "Just a little tinge ... like that.

There! Now you are just perfect."

"Who's coming to tea, Nancy?"

"Oh, only a handful--Mrs. Moncure. You met her last year--and Mr.

Meredith: he's the District Attorney--and the s.h.i.+rley boys: they're very young and College-y--and five or six others. I only asked a few."

The s.h.i.+rleys were first to appear and were followed by Mrs. Moncure, a mellow, winy woman with a white gown that smacked of the _Rue de la Paix_, and a complexion exquisitely made up. She greeted Nancy with a smiling graciousness, nodded to the gentlemen, and sat down on the sofa beside Echo.

"It was so sweet of Nancy to ask me to come," she said. "I've never had half a chance to chat with you before, though we met last year at a particularly stupid reception or something. This is so much more home-y, isn't it?" She dropped into smalltalk, rippling and charming, while Nancy poured the tea, and when Mr. Meredith presently arrived she presented him.

"Our District Attorney," she announced. "The Terror of the Lawless!"

"Now don't tell me I look a terror!" said he, beseechingly to Echo.

"I'm a most mild-mannered man in private life, am I not, Mrs. Moncure?"

"I'm not sure yet whether I can give you a character," she answered.

"I haven't seen this year's subscription-list to my pet charity."

"Blackmail!" the other a.s.serted indignantly. "I'll subpoena you all as witnesses. And this is how I am treated for protecting you from criminality!"

"I like _that_!" exclaimed Nancy wickedly. "When burglars hide in our alcoves and jump out and shoot us when we're not looking! Poor Mr.

Craig! _I_ think you ought to be impeached, or impounded, or whatever they call it."

He laughed. "You know of the Craig affair, of course, Miss Allen," he said, turning.

Echo was glad for the touch of rouge on her cheeks. "Yes," she answered. "Oh, yes." Her gaze was on the basket of tulips on the tea-table, but she was really seeing Craig's smouldering black eyes--the lowering brows--the ruthless clamped lips--as she had seen his face in that moment of revealment in his study.

"The trial of the man who shot him opened to-day," continued Meredith.

He looked again at Nancy. "It's up to the police to prevent burglaries, you see. My part comes after the burglars are caught. I point the moral--as a deterrent to others still at large."

"I hope, then," said Mrs. Moncure, "that the moral will be well pointed in this case. I didn't sleep for a week after it happened."

"I shall certainly try to get him the limit," declared the attorney.

"It'll be a long time before you need fear another midnight call from him, Miss Langham. While you are at the matinee to-morrow, please remember that I am vociferating frantically at the jury in your behalf.

I surely deserve a cup of tea for that, don't I?"

"Well, on consideration, perhaps you do," a.s.serted Nancy judicially, as she poured. "I'll relent."

She sat smiling, her dainty hand on the old silver urn, not observing how the smile had been stricken from Echo's face. Meredith noted the latter's strained look, however, and said, as he seated himself, "You mustn't think we are p.r.o.ne to such melodramatics. We don't have them often. This case is somewhat peculiar from the fact that the police can't identify the man we are trying. We don't know who he is or what is his record. For of course he has one."

"But," interposed Mrs. Moncure, "I thought criminals were always photographed--don't they call it the 'Rogues' Gallery'?--and measured, so they _could_ be identified."

"My dear lady," he replied, "for two years I've been trying to bring this city up to date in that very thing. The state has the Bertillon system, but it's in use only in the penitentiary, as a permanent record. The data, however, should be taken when a criminal is arrested, and there ought to be a system of exchange of these records with all penal inst.i.tutions. There would be no temptation then to turn a bare-faced burglary, coupled with felonious a.s.sault, into a romantic mystery, as this man's counsel, my friend, Mason, judging from the line he took to-day, will try to do."

There was a pause, as he possessed himself of another scone.

"I wonder," said Mrs. Moncure, presently, "if we shall ever know who she was--the woman who was with Craig when he was shot."

Meredith laughed a little. "I imagine it's not likely," he returned.

"He has declared once that he didn't know her, and we can all understand her own pa.s.sionate reticence on the subject!"

Mrs. Moncure smiled as she rose.

"Oh Sin! Oh Sorrow! and Oh Womankind! (she quoted) How can you do such things and keep your fame, Unless this world, and t'other too, be blind?

Nothing so dear as an unfilched good name!"

For Echo the smiling words were barbed and winged with a painful significance. Again and again, as she chatted mechanically over the tea-cups, they came back to her, coupled with the memory of the stories she had heard of Craig--the whispered allusions made with shrugs and lifted eye-brows.

As she lay in bed that night, she felt her hot cheeks flush through the darkness. Could the world think that of her--if it knew?

CHAPTER XXV

ON TRIAL

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 un.o.bserved. 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.