The Long Lane's Turning Part 35

The crowds thinned, began to melt away; here and there the golden square of a window went black on the quieting street. Still the car made no move. At length a little knot of men issued from the hotel lobby, pausing in the lighted doorway to say good night to one another.

Craig leaned forward.

"The one in the centre," he said, in a low voice. "The one with the beard."

As he spoke, Harry Sevier's look crossed the pavement and met squarely Craig's envenomed gaze. He saw the heavy head thrust forward from the hood, with the white bandage across the temple and under it the smouldering, implacable eyes. For a s.p.a.ce that seemed interminable the eyes held each other. A ghastly expression crossed his face. Very slowly he turned and re-entered the lobby.

Brent, who was the last to leave him, looked at him anxiously.

"You're about all in," he said. "You look positively ill."

Harry tried to smile.

"It's nothing. I think I'll rest now." His voice had all at once lost its _timbre_, had become flat and expressionless. All the electric force, the fire and enthusiasm, had faded from it.

Brent held out his hand. "Thank heaven it's over--all but the voting!"

he said fervently. "It's the reaction, I suppose."

"Yes," replied Harry, dully. "No doubt it's the reaction."

He turned and went slowly to the elevator.

In the automobile at the curb Craig touched Paddy the Brick on the shoulder. "Well?" he asked. "Is he number 239?"

Paddy the Brick looked at him with a white fury distorting his features.

"I don't know whether he's 239 or not," he said, "but I'd swear to anything that would 'fix' him! That's the lawyer that let them send me up two years ago!"

CHAPTER XLV

THE CHASM

The elevator deposited Harry at the third floor, where was the suite of rooms that he had occupied while in town during the campaign, as being more accessible than his own apartment. The outer chamber of the suite was set with all the paraphernalia of a committee-room, with a huge writing-table and several small desks holding telegraph instruments installed to receive the returns. To-morrow would find it humming with excitement, but it was deserted now. He had given Suzuki, his valet, the evening off.

He shut the door and stood a moment leaning against it. His eyes were blank, his face set. He had not known of Cameron Craig's journey abroad, nor in the rush of the campaign had he seen the newspaper paragraph which told of the success of the operation in Buda-Pesth.

But in the single look across the pavement he had leaped to the truth.

Craig had recovered his faculties--there had been full knowledge and vengeful purpose in the haggard eyes. What he had dreaded, the possibility which he had of late locked in an inner chamber of his mind, had come to pa.s.s. All was finished! The Sword of Damocles was about to fall!

What remained? To creep away, like a dastard, he, the leader in the fight? To fly, like the discovered thief, as he had once thought of doing? Even that was impossible now. He knew his enemy too well to suppose that he would have left that way open! The other was but playing with him, like a cat with a mouse, till the moment came to publicly denounce him. For with a kind of prescience he guessed Craig's real purpose, to seize the climactic moment and abstract from his humiliation the last ounce of sensationalism.

All night, in the silent, empty apartment, under the brilliant lights, Harry strode up and down--up and down tirelessly, his face white, his hands clenched, confronting the blank wall that reared before him.

Temptation, in its most insidious form, fell upon him. Why should he not brazen it out? After all, the burden of proof was upon his accuser. He had destroyed the record-card which had held his physical measurements. Jubilee Jim could be depended upon to swear to his presence at the bungalow through the winter: wild horses would drag no other story from his faithful lips. Simple and G.o.d-fearing as the old negro was, love for his master was one of the prime articles of his emotional and uncomplex religion. For that love he would unquestioningly risk even the fires of the material h.e.l.l of which his Bible told him! Such an alibi would hold. What other proof could Craig bring forward, further than a fortuitous resemblance, materially weakened now by hair and beard, to a one-time convict in a penitentiary in another state?

Was he not doubly justified in this deception? He was really innocent.

If he foreswore himself a thousand times, it would be in the way both of justice and expediency. It would solve the problem. The new Cause needed him. Had he any right to fling himself away, merely in the interest of fict.i.tious truth, on the mawkish principle of "Thou shalt not do evil that good may come"?

Yet, to perjure himself! To know himself liar and hypocrite, even in the hour when he should kiss the holy volume in the vows of a high office? He who even in that past that had been clouded by egoistic eccentricity and marred by dissipation, had always counted an oath sacred! To bind that faithful servant on the mountain to a black perjury--which would shadow his imagination with the smoke of the eternal burning!

There came to him suddenly the memory of words that had woven with the fevered imaginings of his illness on the mountain--words of Jubilee Jim's prayer:

"Dey tek yo' darlin' son ... en put er crown o' tho'ns on he beautiful haid, en he ain' done nuthin' 'cep'n good. Ah don' keer what Ma.r.s.e Harry have on; Ah reck'n when he come lak dis, yo' gwine he'p me he'p him--kase dat what he done fo' me!"

The stumbling, broken accents seemed to strike across the void. What if, instead of the great machine of recompense that he had distinguished in that prison experience, there were indeed a personal G.o.d, as Jubilee Jim believed, throned in his vast white heaven of glory--a G.o.d pitiful for the agony of his human creatures. Would he look down now and hear his cry for help? Harry flung himself suddenly on his knees, and leaned his forehead against the dark wainscoting. He knew that he uttered no word, but all his being seemed to resolve itself into an inarticulate cry for aidance. It was the first appeal of his life to something outside of himself, the first cry of human weakness, groping in its utter hopelessness for the Infinite. It was the last step of the long way Harry had travelled--from self-abas.e.m.e.nt to remorse and awakening conscience, through struggle with appet.i.te to victory over himself, self-abnegation, acquiescence in the great law of retribution, and finally, in his despair, to prayer.

And out of the deep to which he had called, calmness at length came to him, and with it a clear and steady purpose. As dawn took down the red draw-bars of the sky to let in the day, he threw open a shutter and stood looking down with aching eyes upon the drowsily-waking street.

There should be no lying denial, no cowardly evasion--nothing less than the naked truth. If fate, if G.o.d, demanded this last thing of him--if only so could he balance the account--he would not repine. He had fought the fight, and at the last, so far as he could, he would keep the faith!

Before the hotel had awakened, Harry was in his own apartment. He had left a note for Brent, who was to be in charge at the hotel suite, saying briefly that he should not appear that day, but would be with the Committee at eight o'clock. He had sent the same message also to Judge Allen. He told Suzuki to admit no one, disconnected his telephone, and thereafter remained at his desk writing, a plate of sandwiches at his elbow, bending himself to the final arrangement of the details of his personal affairs, as he might have done, he thought once, if by some clairvoyancy he foresaw that to-morrow he would die.

Death, indeed, would have been a welcome solution if by it he could have bought extrication. Was he not going, living, to a worse death than he should ever die?

As the mantel-clock struck seven, he laid the last written paper in the desk-drawer and rising, went into his dressing-room. He bathed and dressed, the last time in his life, he told himself, that he should don the evening habilaments of a gentleman--grave-clothes! For the blow would not be delayed. To-morrow, no doubt, the state would ring with his downfall. To-night--in the hour of his victory, if victory should be his--he would write _finis_ to the final chapter and surrender himself to the law.

It was just at the half-hour when Harry opened the outer door of his apartment. But he did not pa.s.s through. Three men had been waiting silently just across the threshold. One of them was Craig. They entered without a word, Craig shut the door and one of the others took his stand before it.

CHAPTER XLVI

CRAIG STRIKES

Sevier had stepped back as they entered. He had not been startled at the ambush; he had gone past surprises. He was conscious only of a cold preparedness and a kind of dull wonder as to the form of their errand. The purpose in Craig's face left no cause for any speculation as to their intent. He looked at the other's two companions, perfect types of the "heeler," burly and with brutally-cunning features, that wore now a gloze of satisfaction in the work that was forward. They were not in uniform--it was not an arrest, then. What did Craig intend to do? He turned, set his hat on the hall table and pa.s.sed into the sitting-room. Craig followed him. Harry now saw that he carried a compact bundle under his arm. He snapped the cord and disclosed a costume--jacket and trousers of black and yellow-grey stripes and a flat, peaked cap of dingy canvas. Around one arm of the jacket was a leathern band which bore a metal number--239!

"Put them on," commanded Craig shortly. "Over what you are wearing.

They'll be large enough."

A painful mist was before Harry's eyes. He understood. Craig meant to give him up stamped with the old felon character, clothed in the unmistakable livery of the convict! Well, if not to-night, to-morrow.

What did it matter?

As he drew on the loathsome garments, b.u.t.toning the jacket close up to his chin, their very touch seemed to cling insupportably to his flesh.

The smell of the coa.r.s.e fulled cloth in his nostrils gave him a qualm as of actual physical sickness, and the feel of the canvas cap across his forehead burned it like a brand.

Craig had taken from his pocket a black cloth mask. "Now this," he said. "I believe you wore one in your last burglary," he added with cold malevolence. "I am disposed to miss no realistic touch, believe me."

Harry put on the mask, whose lower hem fell below his beard. Through its eye-holes he looked evenly at the sneering, implacable face opposite. A peculiar apathy had come to him. The wide humiliation--even the cheap and ghastly sensationalism of the mask did not touch him. Like the hapless voyageur caught in the rapids above the great falls, he was watching the nearing brink with a kind of fascination and with the roar of the cataract in his ears.

One of the men had opened a window to peer down into the street. "All clear," he announced briefly, and Craig went to the hall and opened the door.

A monster limousine with curtains drawn waited at the curb, and on the front seat sat a figure at whose pallid face and red-rimmed eyes Harry gazed without a start but with a strange sensation of fitness. Here indeed was the real thief who had shot Craig, but leagued now with his enemy to his undoing!

Sitting in the dark interior, as the car sped along with its silent company, Harry remembered another ride of two years before, when he had flung through the night flying from his own conscience, incarnate in the figure that now rode beside the chauffeur. Was he never to lay that old ghost? He noted dully that the streets were jostling with eager throngs which made compact eddies here and there before some newspaper bulletin-board or flaring club-window which displayed the reports of the voting, as, towns.h.i.+p by towns.h.i.+p, county by county, the tally came in. On one the legend was being posted, "_Sevier Leads_,"

and a m.u.f.fled cheer was wafted after. He shut his eyes. Almost he could have thought himself in the grip of some _outre_, high-coloured dream--but he knew that it was no dream.

The limousine slowed and stopped. Harry turned his head as the door opened; they were at the gate of Midfields.

As they neared the upper end of the drive, a man rose from the steps and came toward them. It was Lawrence Treadwell. He started as if he had been stung at sight of the masked and striped figure between its stolid escort. He turned on Craig, his eyes blazing with amazement and anger.