The Other Side of the Door Part 13

But, as we went, I saw, suddenly emerging from behind the convent wall and coming out into the pool of light, the swinging serapes and great shadowy hats of the Mexicans. They were crossing Lombard, they were keeping straight on down Powell, probably for some of the North Beach resorts; but, as with voluble talk and laughter they pa.s.sed the opposite curb, I noticed a singular thing--one man who dropped out of the group silently as if un.o.bserved by his companions. He seemed to make one step from the lighted street into the shadow, and was swallowed up in it as completely as if he had plunged into a forest.

He had entered that very tract that I had entered!

I put my head out of the window and spoke softly to the driver. "Stop!

Keep perfectly still until he gets by."

The hackman seemed to understand what I wanted, and drew up the team, and we waited. I heard footsteps. They seemed to be coming straight toward the carriage. No, they were pa.s.sing to the left of it. It was probable that this person was quite unconscious of our presence, but my heart was beating so hard it seemed to me he surely must hear it.

The footsteps stopped. I hardly dared to breathe. Then I heard the rough sound of a match; there came a small blue spurt, and suddenly in the little upthrown illumination I saw the lips holding tightly the cigarette; a little higher the flame stretched, and I saw the eyes and the black bar of the brows. I almost screamed. At the same instant he looked up and saw me.

It was just for an instant we gazed at each other thus. Then the match went out, the light of the cigarette failed, and I saw it drop like a glow-worm to the ground. I was looking again into nothing but impenetrable dark. Could it have been real--that glimpse of him--or only a picture on the night?

I leaned forward through the window and called softly into the blackness: "Come here!" I had the scared, shamed, unreal feeling of a child playing at conjurer who hopes, yet knows no miracle can happen.

The shock was the greater then when, after a moment's interval, a formless bulk shadowed my window. I shrank back in the surprise and joy and fear of knowing him there.

"What can I do for you?" a voice asked, proceeding from the shadow, as courteously, as formally, as if it were speaking in the lighted ball-room I had just quitted.

"Oh, get in, get into the carriage!" I cried, for it seemed to me that all the city was spying on him, and the risk he ran was more than I could bear. He hesitated one more heart-breaking instant. Then, I thought, he drew back. I reached out blindly toward him and clasped his wrist.

My fingers were astonished at the great pulse that throbbed under them like a heart, sending a thrilling through my veins. Then I felt the downward sway of the carriage, and the sweeping of a serape over my feet; and I had released his wrist and knew he was sitting opposite me.

I leaned out of the still open door and spoke to the cabman. "Drive over to Was.h.i.+ngton Square, and then around the Square."

Extraordinary as this direction was, he made no demur, only a sort of grunt, deep in his coat-collar, and almost before I was in my seat again the wheels were turning, and I saw the arm of my otherwise indistinguishable companion move darkly against the paler square of gla.s.s as he closed the carriage door, and shut us up alone together in the dark. He himself was scarcely separable from it, but I seemed to know how hard he was looking at me.

"Where were you going?" I said.

"Nowhere that you may go. Tell me quickly what you want of me."

It was strange that he, who so long had been a speechless figure--our only communication by looks--now had become a disembodied voice, like himself, quick, strong and imperious. There were a dozen questions which, over and over in imaginary interviews, I had asked him, all my anxieties and wonders and terrors about him; why he had said those first words of his to me in the police station; why he had encouraged me so recklessly with my testimony, and then fled, and of all those other puzzling inconsistencies in his behavior. But now that my opportunity and he were both here there boiled up in my brain my latest, most bitter perplexity of all, the one that had been presented to me tonight, not a question but a confession. Before I realized what I was saying I was telling him, very incoherently, how terribly I felt about having had to give my evidence, and why it had seemed the only thing to do. "But I know you do not think so," I said. "You think it strange and cruel of me that I did not keep silent."

His voice sounded very calm, almost casual. "I think nothing of the sort. You did quite right, and I am glad there is one woman who can speak the truth."

This was utterly different from anything that I had ever expected!

"But," I stammered, "from the way you looked at me first when--when you ran out at the door, and then again when, I had to tell them who you were! I thought--"

I heard the sweep of his serape as he leaned forward toward me. "I hated, for your own sake, that you should see anything so hideous.

When I came out of that door and saw you there on the other side of the street, do you know what you seemed to me? You seemed to me like the reminder of everything good I had ever hoped for or believed in, looking at me across that distance, horrified at me. It was that I could not bear." His voice sounded harsh and uncertain, but it was better to hear than the even off-hand tone he had used at first.

"I hated to see you have to go through that sordid business in the police station," he said, "hated to have you dragged through the court, to think you had to touch such things, even to know that they exist. I could not forgive myself! But what are you doing here alone at this hour of the night?" He broke off suddenly. The half stern, half protecting note made my heart beat.

"I was at a ball," I stammered. "I came away suddenly because--because I couldn't bear it. I heard them talking behind the curtains. They said it was I who had convicted you."

A touch came on my hand as if it had been the point of a finger, "Believe me, that is nonsense. It was I who convicted myself."

I turned toward him. I would have given anything, in that moment, for a glimpse of his face.

"If you did anything at all toward that end," he went on steadily, "remember you only helped me toward what I really wanted to do."

I kept my eyes fixed on that s.p.a.ce of darkness from which his voice came. "If you wanted to convict yourself then why did you try to escape?"

There was quite an interval while I waited, trembling on the brink of the mystery. When at last he spoke his voice sounded a note of reserve. The unconscious intimateness was gone.

"Whatever my motive in convicting myself has been, let me a.s.sure you it has put me so far away from you that I am hardly worthy even to speak to you. But I feared you had been troubled about giving your evidence, and I am glad of this one chance to tell you that you have helped rather than hurt me. But now it is all over; you will not have to worry or think about it any more, for what I am going to do now will put me quite out of your sight."

He said it with such a sad, reckless gaiety, and it sounded so final that it seemed to me the world had come to an end with it; and, without any understanding of how or why it happened, I found myself crying, with my face in my hands. My ears were filled with the sound of my own sobs, but through them I could hear him begging me to stop, and, though he did not touch me, I could feel him now close beside me on the same seat and bending above me.

"The thing isn't worth it," I heard him say, "I deserve it all--everything! You are too good to waste any pity on me! But I love you for it. I have loved you since the moment I saw you staring at me as if I were the devil. I loved you when you came to the prison and pointed me out for what I was, the man with the pistol. I will never forget you."

At that I cried all the harder, but now there was a curious feeling of comfort in it. All the misery I had kept shut up in my thoughts for so many weeks seemed to be running out with my tears.

"What can I do to make you feel differently about it?" He was pleading.

"Don't do what you are going to do," I whispered, m.u.f.fled up in my handkerchief.

He made a queer little sound in his throat--amus.e.m.e.nt or despair, I couldn't tell which. "Don't you know I can't stay here? Whether I shot the man or not I am forfeit. I have to go. But before I do I want to tell you one thing. You won't believe it, but here it is--I didn't shoot Rood!"

A great weight seemed to slip from my heart. I dropped my hands and looked up, and instead of darkness, there was his face above me, great, shadowy hollows for the eyes, and a soft, gray shadow for the mouth.

His hat was thrown aside and I could see a faint light on his forehead.

It seemed like a miracle in the first, wondering moment. The next I understood what had happened. The quarter moon was rising, and everything was filmed with her dim silver. For a little I looked up at him quite contentedly, with a feeling of peace at my heart that I had not felt since I had first seen him. "Of course I believe you," I said. "I was only so frightened because in the court you wouldn't speak, and no one would speak for you and explain how it happened. It made it seem as if you were the one. That was why every one thought so."

He smiled rather grimly. "Yes, that is what I supposed."

"But now you will go back, you will tell them how it really happened, you will be proved innocent?"

"I can't be proved innocent," he answered harshly. "There is nothing here for me." Yet all the while he looked at me so wistfully that it was hard to understand.

"But there is I," I said. "Doesn't it matter to you that I care?"

He did not move or speak, only kept looking down at me with those dark hollows of his eyes, not a glimmer of light moved in them that I could see, and, listening to the deep come-and-go of his breathing I felt frightened.

"No, I never thought, I never dreamed such a thing was possible," he said at last, in a queer, shocked, half-awed voice. "You don't know what you are talking about, child," and he leaned forward, resting his elbow on his knee and his forehead in his hand.

"But I do know! I care terribly. All these days when I haven't known what had become of you I have been understanding it, and I am glad I said it," I put my hand on his, which rested on the seat beside me.

He shook it off, pushed it away from him. "No, don't do that," he said quickly. "Don't tell me that it is so. You are too good for it!"

Then he said slowly, measuring every word as if he meant I should clearly understand: "This comes too late for me. I have gone too far in the wrong direction, and now I am going away with the Spanish Woman."

"No, no, no!" I cried vehemently. "You must not! You are too good for that!"

"No, that is all I am good for now. And she has done everything for me. The sortie at the court house was hers. She has kept me hidden in her house all these days; and, when that was searched, in the convent garden. She has chartered a lugger to take us to Mexico. It is lying out in the bay, now, on the other side of Chestnut Street Hill. She has slipped me out of her house with a group of her peons for a screen.

I am going aboard now. She is coming out at dawn." He lifted his head and looked at me again, smiling a little, "And if your conscience can keep you from reporting this before eight o'clock this morning we shall be safe."

He said it in a monotonous, dull tone, as if there were no longer any question about it, as if for some reason the thing were irrevocable!

And yet I couldn't understand why. There was no reason in it at all that one could see. I had the dreadful sense of fighting something invisible.

"But all that she has done for you," I insisted, "hasn't made any one happy. It has only kept making things worse and worse for you and every one else, and finally it has made you a coward."

How that made him wince! "That's not quite the fact, that's too ugly,"

he said quickly. "I can't let you think that; it isn't all my weakness. It is partly that I owe it to her. I am bound to do this, just as you were bound to speak the truth in court. You won't understand it I know, for to you the world is black and white, and each incident stands by itself. But as a man lives these incidents are interwoven like the links of a chain, each one depending on the others, so that sometimes what appears to be a bad thing is really the only decent thing if one knows the circ.u.mstances."