The Long Lane's Turning Part 24

"Why do you hate him so?"

Paddy the Brick hurled the Bible into the corner with an imprecation.

He rose to a sitting posture, his features working.

"Because he did it for me!" he said. "He might have cleared me ... and he didn't try. And I never took the money they said I stole--never, so help me! It was a put-up job. They 'planted' the stuff on me, when I was drunk. It was a pay-day and I knew they were up to something, for they'd sworn they'd drive me out of the logging-camp--and yet I hadn't sense enough to keep sober!" He gave a harsh and bitter laugh, and his voice rose. "But it was my lawyer friend that really did the business!

He was a dead swell--one of your la-de-das with money and automobiles--that played at lawyering. They told me he was a great man and I was fool enough to believe them. What did he care for my case--it was a little one to him! I was nothing but a lumberjack! Why should he soil his kid gloves with me?"

He turned to Harry's white face a livid countenance. "So now I'm here," he finished, "and I don't give a rip if I am, either!"

"_Woe unto you also, ye lawyers!_" Parallel with the wholesale indictment another text in that self-same book was flas.h.i.+ng through Harry's mind: "_For with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again._" Was that, after all, no trite generality applicable to a hypothetical hereafter, but a thing true in the minute and multinomial affairs of the present? Did chance, or fate--or whatever the human mind called the great _Deus ex Machina_--watch somewhere, with hand upon the lever, adjusting the nice balance to the subtle requirements of some occult law of retribution that, though hidden, was yet as certain as gravitation?

As Harry saw the reddened eyes glowing with hatred, the curving fingers, the crouching figure, he said to himself, "This is my work--mine and whisky's. He was a simple woodman who laboured six days of the week and on the seventh traded half his wages for 'moons.h.i.+ne'

from some illicit mountain still. Whisky set his feet in the toils, yet but for me he might have lived there forever in the timber, treading his narrow groove like a blind horse on a ferry, not one whit worse than his fellows, with no agonised conscience, a simple product of his environment. But I--and whisky--fastened the bonds upon him. I did it. I sent him here. I gave him hatred of society, the warfare that has already marked him with the mark of the beast. This is what I did. And now I am plucked up from my place and planted here beside him, as soiled in the eyes of the world as he! Is it because I was the instrument of his demoralisation that the tables have now been turned?--because he who takes the sword shall perish by the sword? And in the last great evening-up, is it written that I shall become even as he?--that bars and chains shall have their will of me and I emerge at last, like this incorrigible _ruine_, hard, debased, besotted, beyond hope or redemption in the world?" He shuddered. Better even that that shot in the library had gone home--that he now lay, innocent as he was, with the red mark on his throat, down in the horrible quick-lime!

He rose, and with his hands gripping the bars of the open door, drew a long breath. No! whatever this pent-house did to him, it should never drag him down! He would take his medicine. For what, in his egregious folly and egotism, he had done, he would pay--if fate demanded, to the uttermost farthing. But out of its prison his soul, sometime, should come unblanched, and unabashed!

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE GIPSY RING

The chill touch of autumn was in the air when the big steamer that brought Mrs. Spottiswoode and Echo home, crept up the bay to her wharf in the teeming North River. They arrived at daylight and the early morning found them safe aboard a Pullman rolling southward.

Looking out across the filmy glory of the October fields and the woods in their golden regalia epauletted in red, Echo thought of the day she had sailed away. She had been wretched then, and with all the tonic of fresh scenes and the savour of change, was she not as wretched now?

For no letter from home had chronicled Harry Sevier's return, and moreover the knowledge that Craig had been taken half around the world to test the greatest surgical skill the planet afforded, had made his recovery, with all it might imply for her, an imminent possibility.

As she followed Mrs. Spottiswoode into the dining-car for luncheon, a lank, familiar form sprang up from a table.

"Mr. Malcolm!" she cried, and found both her hands instantly swallowed in a pair of big palms.

He was an extraordinary man, this Thomas Malcolm, whom his intimates dubbed, affectionately, "Tom." His father had begun life brilliantly, had begun to make a name and place for himself in professional life, when he had yielded to the vice of drinking, had speedily sunk himself in poverty, and had died in some slum corner wretched and unredeemed, leaving behind him a widow and a boy of ten who, with grim determination, had set himself to earn a living for both. He had but just begun to succeed in this when disease, its seeds sown in privation, took his mother from him. By dint of night-work he had gained a common-school education and had tutored himself through a southern university. At twenty-five he had founded an obscure Mission in the city which had known his father's disgrace, where for thirty years he had devoted himself to work among the rum-sodden and depraved.

There was none so besotted as to be turned from his door; he was a familiar figure in the night-court and a welcome weekly visitor at the Penitentiary, few of whose inmates he did not know personally. At fifty-five no man was more beloved in the community in which he laboured, and most of all was he valued and respected by those who knew his history, and understood how the hatred of liquor had become to the boy a consuming fire that had driven him to this life of undeviating self-denial and strenuous conflict with the most sordid of vices.

Looking down at Echo from his great height, gaunt, raw-boned and with a saturnine twinkle in his cavernous eyes, his homely sallow face softened to a wonderful smile. "Why!" he said. "It's a monstrous time since we've met, my dear!" and to Mrs. Spottiswoode--"I saw your names on the pa.s.senger-list in the paper this morning, but I thought New York would have kept you at least a week."

"Not me!" she returned. "We took in all the new plays in London and spent all our money in Paris. I've no ambition now above my winter roses!" She extended her hand to Malcolm's companion.

"How do you do, Mr. Mason? I'm beginning to think you two men are desperate conspirators. Last year in New York I saw you both together."

Malcolm laughed. "A misguided philanthropist once left a part of his estate to my Mission, and Mason, here, is the legal executor. _Ferb.u.m sat_."

"I hope that is Latin for 'Do sit at our table.' The car is so full, and I never could ride backward! Thank you, so much!" She sat down and bent her smart lorgnette upon the menu-card. "What shall we order, Echo?"

"Anything but the 'fried Chicken, Virginia style,'" said Mason gloomily. "It's supposed to be what that waiter has on his tray there.

It's a crime and a swindle."

"Don't mind Mason," interposed Malcolm. "He's a dyspeptic. When I get to be his age--"

"You did," said the other viciously, "five years ago."

"--I'll be a vegetarian," finished the other. "Cheer up, Mason, and have a potato." He turned to Echo: "I know a girl in my town who's mighty keen to see you."

"Nancy Langham!"

He nodded. "She counts on having you down for Thanksgiving week. I hope she'll succeed. I'm giving a great 'spread' down at the Mission, and I want you girls to show me how to decorate the place. You will, then, eh? I haven't forgotten how you and Nancy helped me out last Christmas!" He reached over and patted her hand. "I do like to let it soak into Poverty Terrace that I really keep company with 'dee quality,' as the darkies say!"

Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at him curiously. "How frivolous and selfish we must all seem to you, who give up your life to such people!" she said. "I've heard so much about your work, Mr. Malcolm, especially in the prisons. I think you are wonderful. I should know how to talk to a Martian better than to a criminal. Don't you find it hard to get into sympathy with them?"

His smiling face turned serious. "'A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,'" he quoted. "You remember your Bunyan? I always say to myself, 'There, but for the lack of a sufficient temptation, goes Thomas Malcolm!' Dear Lady, there is many a man in the Penitentiary who would be a churchwarden to-day but for bad environment and good whisky."

"And the law's mistakes," added Mason, sardonically. He had been turning over on his finger a ring with a square green stone, and Echo had been wondering vaguely where she had seen such a ring before. "I know a man who's in for ten years, and I'd stake my life he's no more guilty than I am."

"How extraordinary!" exclaimed Mrs. Spottiswoode, and Malcolm observed with wicked innocence: "I wonder who could have defended him!"

The other smiled grimly at the thrust. "Oh, he was guilty enough according to the evidence. But he was innocent, for all of that. He is the man who was accused of shooting Cameron Craig."

The blood flew to Echo's face and she bent her head over her salad.

She felt as though she had strayed unwittingly into an ambush where all the old dread and terror from which she had fled had sprung again upon her.

"But," said Mrs. Spottiswoode, "I thought Craig himself identified him."

Mason sniffed. "Craig was in no condition to identify anybody. I saw the man and talked with him, day after day, for weeks. He was no criminal--why, his very look gave the theory the lie!"

A keen, thriving wonder crossed Echo's thought at the blunt a.s.sertion.

That livid face back of the spitting revolver hung before her mental sight with strange vividness--the surly, wicked lips, the low brow and narrow eyes. How was it possible that such a countenance could a.s.sume at wont a look of innocency that would deceive a lawyer, even against d.a.m.ning evidence, into a belief that he was a victim of circ.u.mstances?

"What is your theory of the shooting, then?" asked Mrs. Spottiswoode, interestedly.

The lawyer was silent a moment, drawing little circles on the cloth with his fork. "I haven't a wholly satisfactory one," he said at length, slowly. "But I don't believe he did it. Craig, it is certain, had a _rendezvous_ with a woman, and the woman saw the shooting. I believe her testimony would have proven that the man who was tried and convicted was not the man who did it. That fact disposed of, I believe he could have shown, if he had chosen to, that he had no connection with the burglars, and would have been acquitted."

"_Cherchez la femme!_" murmured the lady.

"Yes. She would not come forward."

Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at Malcolm. "Have you seen him?" she asked.

"No, I've been in New Orleans for three months. But I hope to begin my visits at the Penitentiary very soon, and I'm looking forward to meeting him."

"You'll agree with me, I'll bet a hat!" said Mason. "By the way"--he held up his hand--"he gave me this ring, the day he was sentenced."

Echo felt every nerve suddenly tighten. For it had come to her in a flash where she had seen that ring's counterpart: it had been on the finger of the masked burglar on that horrible midnight in Craig's library--when he had held out to her the letters from the safe! Her heart began to beat suffocatingly. "_Take them and go--go instantly!_"--she seemed to hear the tense command strike across the car. A thrill ran over her. Was the ring a kind of badge, a sign of their guilty calling? Or could it be that the man who was being tried was _not_ the man who had shot Craig--but the other, the one who had saved her?

She began to tremble, for another thought stabbed her. If this was so, how could she honourably keep silence? The instant question touched her conscience, her quick sense of justice and duty, with sudden insistence. But for the spoilers themselves, she was the only witness of that deed in the library. Craig--so narrow had been for him that instant of observation--might have been mistaken. But not she! The very fright and horror of the moment had indelibly fixed the shooter's face upon her mind. Suppose Mason's hypothesis were correct--suppose he had been no burglar, but an honourable man, caught, as she had been, in a web of circ.u.mstance. In the crisis he had acted as a gentleman, had thought of her before himself. Instead of flying with the others, he had lingered to do that generous deed for her. What if it were because of that he had been taken! If so, what a debt she owed him!

It came to her suddenly that she must be _certain_. Never again could she know peace of soul till she knew the truth. If the man in the Penitentiary was indeed the man who had shot Craig, well and good. If not...