The Lash Part 20

Shaughnessy had been no stranger to either physical science or rough-and-tumble, in the days before ill-health a.s.sailed him; but older muscles, further handicapped by acquired weakness and long disuse, were not a match for those of the wiry young man, even in his present intoxicated condition. Shaughnessy, his breath coming in gasps and his face grown ghastly, tried by every recollected trick to trip O'Byrn, but the latter wriggled instinctively out of every snare. Now he forced Shaughnessy once more toward the fallen table, the boss resisting doggedly. But he was weakening, and Micky, with a sudden twist, threw him backward over one of the protruding legs of the table and fell heavily upon him.

The Irishman's breath, heavy with whisky, smote the fallen boss full in the face. Shaughnessy, gasping and nearly senseless, lay with his hand gripped hard at his left side. As though he had dreamed it in his agony, he felt his opponent's hand groping in a lower pocket of his coat. There was a faint jingle--the keys! O'Byrn rose with a tipsy laugh, swayed a moment and turned toward the door. Then, with a supreme effort, Shaughnessy threw himself to one side, reaching out a hand and catching Micky about the right ankle. A sharp wrench jerked him from his feet and he fell heavily, striking his head against the table leg which had previously served for the downfall of the boss.

After a few moments, Shaughnessy struggled weakly to his feet and stood grimly regarding the Irishman, who lay unconscious, with closed eyes, the freckles staring strangely from his pallid face. After a time Shaughnessy bent down and examined the reporter's hurt. "Nothing serious," he muttered, noting a crimson abrasion at the right side of the scalp. Then he thrust his hand confidently into the inner pocket of O'Byrn's coat. His look of complacency changed to concern. He made a thorough examination of the pockets, then rose with a bitter oath.

"Bluffed me!" he muttered furiously. "He hasn't got 'em." He felt strangely weak, as the result of the late encounter, and moved languidly over to the sofa whereon Micky had lately been. Shaughnessy sat down, with a heavy sigh, to think.

His moody eyes noted an object lying on the rug. Leaning over, he picked up Micky's watch. The back cover swung open in his hands, owing to the defective spring, which Micky had never had repaired.

Shaughnessy turned over the timepiece idly, noting on the inner cover a woman's picture. And in that moment the dead-white face, ordinarily an inscrutable mask, became startling to see. His black eyes, in which there grew a slow, consuming horror, stared at the picture as if hypnotized by it, and on his face was the look which the living might wear if confronted, without warning, by the resurrected dead.

After a time Shaughnessy withdrew his gaze, and, with a convulsive movement, snapped the watch shut. Slowly, fearfully, he approached the prostrate young fellow on the floor, afraid of what he should see. Now he bent on one knee over the senseless...o...b..rn, peering strangely into his face. He thrust the watch into the little Irishman's pocket, as if anxious to hide it from his own vision. Then, timidly, he raised the inert right arm of his victim and slipped the sleeve up from the wrist.

There was the scar.

A deep groan burst from Shaughnessy's lips; in his eyes gloomed, with added intensity, the horror that was the heritage of the past.

CHAPTER XXI

THE LASH

In the breadth and the depth of evil in the man whom the world had long known as John Shaughnessy there was one wicked act whose memory was torment. Unprincipled, ruthless, cruel as he was, this thing, perhaps in inevitable reprisal for outraged higher laws, had long haunted him; disturbing his sleep, embittering his waking hours. For it was only just that a man base enough to leave, in far worse case than the widow and the orphan, those he was morally and legally bound to protect, should be disturbed by ghosts. It was remorse, it had long been remorse, from which this calloused devil was suffering. His evil, white face was a mask to hide much that the masquerader would have given all at times to have forgotten.

For a long time Shaughnessy bent over the silent figure on the floor; crouching, motionless as if cut in stone. His eyes, unnaturally brilliant, repellent in their fixed glare, rested long on the reporter's unconscious face. That face--how freckled, how grotesquely homely! Why, he had been a handsome baby! Still, the same mop of red, curly hair; and, after all, did he but open his eyes Shaughnessy thought there would be a definite resemblance to another. Shaughnessy recollected having been vaguely troubled once or twice before by this half-sensed similitude of the young fellow to someone he had known. He knew now.

Why, the boy looked like his mother, of course; though there was only a pathetic hint of it, for his mother had been very pretty. This Shaughnessy could vouch for. Poor unfortunate, had she not been his wife?

And his son, lying on the floor; the son Shaughnessy had thought dead; was it not a joyful reunion? Shaughnessy groaned aloud, for he had long writhed under the lash of conscience for this one thing. The rest of his ill-doing did not trouble him; it was for the blackest crime of all, alone, that he paid the penalty. And a bitter penalty he paid, for, whatever the seeming, outraged nature generally exacts her due. This man had heartlessly deserted a wife who had been devoted to him, despite his deviltry, and his helpless baby; deserted them more indifferently than most men would leave a dog. It was slow in coming, the time of reckoning, but the day came when the black heart and soul of Shaughnessy quivered under the lash. And the lash bit the deeper because of the need for repression, for the man writhed in secret. It was Shaughnessy who lived; the other man was dead; yet his foul ghost, with the memory of the foul deed he wrought, would not be laid.

Shaughnessy, with a haggard glance at the motionless form on the floor, rose and walked uncertainly to an easy chair. He sat limply, a thin, white hand shading his eyes. He was oblivious to his surroundings, for the tumult of the past pounded in his brain.

The tumult of the past! What a record had been his, this white-faced man with hunted eyes that now stared with a weird, fixed horror back into the past. They saw again another man than the Shaughnessy of vile political power; a younger man, in whom was no repression; the slave of wayward pa.s.sions which marred lives other than his own. But what were wife and child? Merely inc.u.mbrances then, and, toward the last, hardly to be borne.

And at the beginning? Why, the young man had once been respectable, and of the type to be pointed out as one destined to make his mark. Starting at the lowest round of a big business house, in a far-off city, it had not taken him long to prove his rare mettle, and at twenty-five he had reached a point further than most men attain in a lifetime. He had married a girl who believed in him as she believed in G.o.d--and she had been his dupe almost from the first.

Supremely selfish, treacherous by nature and with a stealthy leaning toward the fleshpots, he began early to betray her trust in cold blood.

She did not know of this; she knew only of his indulgence in liquor, increasing alarmingly, and his growing taste for cards. He had drammed moderately from a very early age; now he had a fiend's appet.i.te, while his pa.s.sion for the gaming table grew accordingly. She used to plead pitifully with him to eschew the practices. At first he laughed; later he sneered. Meanwhile his dissipation had not affected his business prospects as yet. Often rioting through a sleepless night, he was invariably at his desk in the morning, and his house was glad to command his services, for he was a veritable business genius.

His wife, poor soul, hoped that the baby's coming would influence him to better things. It grew worse. His appet.i.te for liquor, which was evidently inherited from some bibulous ancestor, grew tyrannous, and he was a willing slave. Lucky at cards, ordinary gambling became too tame for him. He fell to speculating, cannily at first, but with success and increasing indulgence in liquor came recklessness. The man's naturally cool business judgment was clouded, for he was never wholly sober now.

Yet his business prospects were still of the best, for he succeeded marvellously in retaining his strong hold on affairs. The dawn was more than likely to find him reeling, but the opening of the day's business invariably found him at his desk, alert, coldly inscrutable, his wits more than a match for the sharpest ones that might oppose him.

Dissipated as he was in those days, he engineered some brilliant _coups_ which benefited his concern and increased his own prestige, to his material advantage. He was already pointed out as a man of power. He could have figured as a Napoleon of honorable business, as he later figured as a Napoleon of graft. Of splendid intellectual endowment, he chose to mar himself.

Their home-life, because of his course, had grown unspeakably wretched.

They lived simply; the bulk of the man's income was expended away from home. The wife did not reproach him and she had ceased to plead, but she was pale and silent and sad-eyed. She knew all now, and she lived only for her baby.

Like many an infinitely better man, the husband's worst side was reserved for his family. The inevitable reaction of tippling, in a nature like his, rendered him fairly diabolic at times in his home; and the cruel spirit was the fiercer by reason of the need for its repression elsewhere. He remembered one morning when he stood shaving before his mirror, shaking from the effect of a debauch. It was several months after his son was born. His wife, in pitiful appeal to his better side, of whose existence she still dreamed, had softly entered the room, carrying the baby. She thoughtlessly approached from the side, and he neither heard nor saw her. A soft little hand, the baby's, crept into his neck. Shaken as he was, it startled him; his razor slipped and the blood spurted from a gash in his cheek. Blind with swift, unreasoning rage, he whirled with a curse and a murderous, involuntary swoop of his razor. She had sprung back with a sharp cry, but just too late. He heard again the sudden, shrill cry of the baby; saw the swift blood r.i.m.m.i.n.g an ugly gash above its little wrist; saw himself shriveling, before the horror in his wife's eyes, into a loathsome thing.

"My G.o.d!" he had stammered, "I--I didn't mean--"

She had recoiled, the flame in her eyes repelling him. Ever afterward her burning eyes, accusing him in memory, had caused his own to close spasmodically in swift desire to escape her gaze; had caused him to dig his nails into his palms in temporary agonized abas.e.m.e.nt. The grim mills of the G.o.ds, indeed!

The poor woman annoyed him no more after that, but she grew like a voiceless, accusing ghost. She was thin and pale now and her beauty was fading pathetically. As for him, his course grew madder, he plunged into dissipation as it had been an enveloping sea. By and by things began to go wrong with him; wild speculations turned out poorly, his resources began seriously to dwindle. With his old, clear head he could have repaired his fortunes, but now he saw things through a red haze, and in endeavoring to right himself with one reckless stroke, he lost everything.

Well, it was time to leave. But he would not go alone, he sullenly decided. There was a siren to whom he had long been devoted, a creature of sensuous mould designed to hold enmeshed such evil souls as his. Nor, he fiercely told himself, would they go empty-handed. And he fortified his nerve with more whisky.

The newspapers accordingly had a sensation. One of the city's most brilliant and most trusted young business men was a defaulter to the extent of thousands of dollars, and he was gone. This startling fact, coupled with the simultaneous departure of the siren and the revelations of the defaulter's double life, made an attractive t.i.t-bit. The wife and child, being of minor importance in this sensational tale, were quickly forgotten. The memory of the defaulter remained, and men confidently believed at first that one day they would welcome his return, shackled to an officer of the law. But it was not to be, though once the man, driven by the lash of belated remorse, had ventured to cross a continent and steal furtively into the scene of his early crime, on a bootless quest.

It seemed to him later that, following his flight with his siren, he had been drunk for years. The furtive sting was at work; he drank to deaden it. At times he would s.h.i.+ver and the cold perspiration would bead his forehead, for he saw again the horror in her eyes as she sought to stanch the blood that flowed from her baby's arm. More, he saw himself again, with hideous humor, repeatedly when he was in his cups, tearing her baby from her arms and plying it with toddy. The boy would take it like milk, he remembered; and the father was wont to laugh, with all the sardonic mirth of a hyena, at the anguish in the mother's eyes, and finally to hand back the infant with ironical courtesy and the observation "that he was a chip off the old block."

Yes, pleasant memories had the fugitive, while drifting from place to place with his paramour. The money was soon gone and he had recourse to the gaming table, with fluctuating luck. Quarrels were frequent now, and finally, after an exceptionally fierce one, in which two calloused, coa.r.s.ened natures revealed themselves in all their hideousness, the precious pair parted. That particular weakness disturbed the current of the man's life no more, for Shaughnessy was done with sirens and their influence. With a revival of his old calculation, shrewd and cold, he decided that it didn't pay.

At the same time, too, he decided that whisky didn't pay. He had a will like iron, whether toward evil or against it. Returning reason bade him to be against anything that marred his self-interest, so Shaughnessy--which name he adopted after his flight of years before--said one day, "I'm done," and suffered ensuing torments of thirst like an imperturbable Indian. It was years before he again tasted liquor, though he never lost the craving for it; and even then, he severely confined himself to its use as a medicine, necessitated by his failing health.

After the siren had gone her way, and Shaughnessy took occasion to survey the situation with something of his old-time critical a.n.a.lysis, he resolved upon his future campaign. His honest name he had forfeited; it could not be resumed. Moreover, his natural cynicism had deepened with the years. It was the dishonest who prospered most, thought he. He had the brains, so let him scheme to prosper. Politics attracted him. He studied it for the science that it is, and he also studied men. He chose an excellent field in which to operate; he established his small liquor store, which was destined to grow larger; he made his modest entry into the political arena which he was to dominate. With infinite subtlety, by the power of a remarkable brain, he had grown into the sinister force he was today; nor did his evil success trouble him. It was the memory of his wife and child that haunted him; a memory that bit deep as a sword.

It was years before he risked detection by a visit to his old city to ascertain regarding them, for of course he dared not write. Time was generous and changed him much, however, in appearance, so finally he traversed the continent and furtively, fearfully, entered his old haunts. He did not stay long; there was no need. His wife was dead; he found her humble grave in an old cemetery. The boy had been entirely lost sight of; he had drifted away and might be dead for all that anybody knew or apparently cared. We poor worldlings might perchance be more sympathetic, more solicitous one of the other, if we had more time.

But self-interest in the grim old world demands and receives the initial consideration of self. Shaughnessy turned back with a heart none the lighter because of the fruitlessness of his quest; back to the old search in dark places for pelf and power. There was nothing else left, and, as his ideals had never been high, his course suited him and satisfied his ambition.

The boss rose, swaying, from his chair; a strange weakness was upon him.

He made his way toward the spot where his unconscious son lay p.r.o.ne on the floor, and he tottered like an old man. He stood looking down upon the boy, and for his most monstrous sin of all there was grim reprisal visible in his eyes. The boy was as he had made him--as he himself had been--a drunkard. Of brilliant mental endowment, as the father knew to his cost, the son's career was clouded by this bitter heritage; would be clouded to the end, for he lacked his father's iron will. And the agency through which the boss' black course had been menaced; that menaced it still; the son against the sire, unknowing and till now unknown! What a h.e.l.l-born irony it was, matter for mirth of gibbering fiends. Truly, at last Shaughnessy drank the bitter lees.

He stood there, swaying slightly, his gaunt face bloodless, his eyes horrible. Mechanically he pulled out his watch, starting violently. Why, it could be no more than five minutes since the struggle. Five minutes--and in them Shaughnessy had lived long and bitter years! And now--

"_For G.o.d's sake! For--G.o.d's--sake!_"

The old, old prayer of agony, of deadly fear, wrung at the last from lips which perhaps had long ceased to frame that Awful Name except in blasphemy; the cry of the ages; the wail of the wicked as it is the hope of the blessed; the cry of despair which rends the throat of the pariah when face to face with Death.

What was it? Ah! Shaughnessy knew; while his face went gray, while he gasped for breath, while his hands sought and pressed convulsively his breast, through which throbbed swift, keen stabs of exquisite pain. The mists swam before his staring eyes as he reeled blindly, now with outstretched hands, toward the door of his den. It was the ancient enemy returned--and this time not to be denied.

Shaughnessy lurched through the door, and with groping hands, grasped the bottle. The fiery draught of brandy seared his throat; he strangled and the bottle fell from his nerveless fingers and broke upon the floor.

The strong smell of the spilled contents oppressed the heated air.

No use--no use! Shaughnessy collapsed in the chair before his desk, his breast afire with suffocating pain. The gray pallor deepened; the eyes glazed. For a moment he lay inert, his form twitching. Then a sudden torturing thought brought him instinctively erect in his chair. It was like a dead man rising from his grave.

The money--the property! Why, who would get it? How had _he_ gotten it?

Never mind, it was his; they could not take it away. It should be his son's--who had tried to destroy him. Would he take it? Perhaps not, he might be that kind of a fool. Well, if not, why he could give it to charity. Charity! Shaughnessy laughed horribly, deep in his throat.

There might--there might yet be time. He made as if to brush away the mists that deepened before his eyes. He groped for paper--a pen, and drew them toward him. He plunged the pen into the ink well, overturning it, but he did not heed. He was going blind; there was a strange, rhythmic thudding in his ears.

"I--"

The single letter, grotesquely lonely, sprawled crazily, black and ugly, upon the sheet. The world would remember Shaughnessy as--Shaughnessy.

O'Byrn stirred uneasily, for the noise of resounding blows was in his ears. He struggled to a sitting posture, and as he did so the door crashed in. d.i.c.k and Slade bounded into the room.