The Eye of Dread Part 51

"In two hours I'll be en route for the coast, and to-morrow I'll take pa.s.sage for home on the first boat." Robert closed and sealed the long letter he had been writing and tossed it on the table. "I want this mailed one week from to-day. Put it in your pocket so you won't lose it among the rubbish here. One week from to-day it must be mailed.

It's to my great aunt, Jean Craigmile, who gave me the money to set up here the first year. I've paid that up--last week--with my last sou--and with interest. By rights she should have whatever there is here of any value, for, if it were not for her help, there would not have been a thing here anyway, and I've no one else to whom to leave it--so see that this letter is mailed without fail, will you?"

The Englishman stood, now thoroughly awake, gazing at him, unable to make common sense out of Robert's remarks. "B--b--but--what's up? What are you leaving things to anybody for? You're not on your deathbed."

"I'm going home, don't you see?"

"But why don't you take the letter to her yourself--if you're going home?"

"Not there, man; not to Scotland."

"Your home's there."

"I have allowed you to think so." Robert forced himself to talk calmly. "In truth, I have no home, but the place I call home by courtesy is where I was brought up--in America."

"You--you--d--d--don't--"

"Yes--it's time you knew this. I've been leading a double life, and I'm done with it. I committed a crime, and I'm living under an a.s.sumed name. There is no such man as Robert Kater that I know of on earth, nor ever was. My name is--no matter--. I'm going back to the place where I killed my best friend--to give myself up--to imprisonment--I do not know to what--maybe death--but it will end my torture of mind. Now you know why I could not go to the Vernissage, to be treated--well, I could not go, that's all. Nor could I accept the honors given me under a name not my own. All the time I've lived in Paris I've been hiding--and this thing has been following me--although my occupation seems to have been the best cover I could have had--yet my soul has known no peace. Always--always--night and day--my own conscience has been watching and accusing me, an eye of dread steadily gazing down into my soul and seeing my sin deep, deep in my heart. I could not hide from it. And I would have given up before only that I wished to make good in something before I stepped down and out. I've done it." He put his hand heavily on Ben Howard's shoulder. "I've had a revelation this night. The lesson of my life is learned at last. It is, that there is but one road to freedom and life for me--and that road leads to a prison. It leads to a prison,--maybe worse,--but it leads me to freedom--from the thing that haunts me, that watches me and drives me. I may write you from that place which I will call home--Were you ever in love?"

The abruptness of the question set Ben Howard stammering again. He seized Robert's hand in both his own and held to it. "I--I--I--old chap--I--n--n--no--were you?"

"Yes; I've heard the call of her voice in my heart--and I'm gone. Now, Ben, stop your--well, I'll not preach to you, you of all men,--but--do something worth while. I've need of part of the money you got for me--to get back on--and pay a bill or two--and the rest I leave to you--there where you put it you'll find it. Will you live here and take care of these things for me until my good aunt, Jean Craigmile, writes you? She'll tell you what to do with them--and more than likely she'll take you under her wing--anyway, work, man, work. The place is yours for the present--perhaps for a good while, and you'll have a chance to make good. If I could live on that money for a year, as you yourself said, you can live on half of it for half a year, and in that time you can get ahead. Work."

He seized his portmanteau and was gone before Ben Howard could gather his scattered senses or make reply.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE PRISONER

Harry King did not at once consult an attorney, for Milton Hibbard, the only one he knew or cared to call upon for his defense, was an old friend of the Elder's and had been retained by him to a.s.sist the district attorney at the trial. The other two lawyers in Leauvite, one of whom was the district attorney himself, were strangers to him.

Twice he sent messages to the Elder after his return, begging him to come to him, never dreaming that they could be unheeded, but to the second only was any reply sent, and then it was but a cursory line.

"Legal steps will be taken to secure justice for you, whoever you are."

To his friends he sent no messages. Their sympathy could only mean sorrow for them if they believed in him, and hurt to his own soul if they distrusted him, and he suffered enough. So he lay there in the clean, bare cell, and was glad that it was clean and held no traces of former occupants. The walls smelled of lime in their freshly plastered surfaces, and the floor had the pleasant odor of new pine.

His life pa.s.sed in review before him from boyhood up. It had been a happy life until the tragedy brought into it by his own anger and violence, but since that time it had been one long nightmare of remorse, heightened by fear, until he had met Amalia, and after that it had been one unremitting strife between love and duty--delight in her mind, in her touch, in her every movement, and in his own soul despair unfathomable. Now at last it was to end in public exposure, imprisonment, disgrace. A peculiar apathy of peace seemed to envelop him. There was no longer hope to entice, no further struggle to be waged against the terror of fear, or the joy of love, or the horror of remorse; all seemed gone from him, even to the vague interest in things transpiring in the world.

He had only a puzzled feeling concerning his arrest. Things had not proceeded as he had planned. If the Elder would but come to him, all would be right. He tried to a.n.a.lyze his feelings, and the thought that possessed him most was wonder at the strange vacuity of the condition of emotionlessness. Was it that he had so suffered that he was no longer capable of feeling? What was feeling? What was emotion: and life without either emotion, or feeling, or caring to feel,--what would it be?

Valueless.--Empty s.p.a.ce. Nothing left but bodily hunger, bodily thirst, bodily weariness. A lifetime, for his years were not yet half spent,--a lifetime at Waupun, and work for the body, but vacuity for the mind--maybe--sometimes--memories. Even thinking thus he seemed to have lost the power to feel sadness.

Confusion reigned within him, and yet he found himself powerless to correlate his thoughts or suggest reasons for the strange happenings of the last few days. It seemed to him that he was in a dream wherein reason played no part. In the indictment he was arraigned for the murder of Peter Craigmile, Jr.,--as Richard Kildene,--and yet he had seen his cousin lying dead before him, during all the years that had pa.s.sed since he had fled from that sight. In battle he had seen men clubbed with the b.u.t.t end of a musket fall dead with wounded temples, even as he had seen his cousin--stark--inert--lifeless. He had felt the strange, insane rage to kill that he had seen in others and marveled at. And now, after he had felt and done it, he was arrested as the man he had slain.

All the morning he paced his cell and tried to force his thoughts to work out the solution, but none presented itself. Was he the victim of some strange form of insanity that caused him to lose his ident.i.ty and believe himself another man? Drunken men he had seen under the delusion that all the rest of the world were drunken and they alone sober. Oh, madness, madness! At least he was sane and knew himself, and this was a confusion brought about by those who had undertaken his arrest. He would wait for the Elder to come, and in the meantime live in his memories, thinking of Amalia, and so awaken in himself one living emotion, sacred and truly sane. In the sweetness of such thinking alone he seemed to live.

He drew the little ivory crucifix from his bosom and looked at it.

"The Christ who bore our sins and griefs"--and again Amalia's words came to him. "If they keep you forever in the prison, still forever are you free." In s.n.a.t.c.hes her words repeated themselves over in his mind as he gazed. "If you have the Christ in your heart--so are you high--lifted above the sin." "If I see you no more here, in Paradise yet will I see you, and there it will be joy--great--joy; for it is the love that is all of life, and all of eternity, and lives--lives."

Bertrand Ballard and his wife and daughter stood in the small room opening off from the corridor that led to the rear of the courthouse where was the jail, waiting for the jailer to bring his keys from his office, and, waiting thus, Betty turned her eyes beseechingly on her father, and for the first time since her talk with her mother in the studio, opened her lips to speak to him. She was very pale, but she did not tremble, and her voice had the quality of determination.

Bertrand had yielded the point and had taken her to the jail against his own judgment, taking Mary with him to forestall the chance of Betty's seeing the young man alone. "Surely," he thought, "she will not ask to have her mother excluded from the interview."

"I don't want any one--not even you--or--or--mother, to go in with me."

"My child, be wise--and be guided."

"Yes, father,--but I want to go in alone." She slipped her hand in her mother's, but still looked in her father's eyes. "I must go in alone, father. You don't understand--but mother does."

"This young man may be an impostor. It is almost unmaidenly for you to wish to go in there alone. Mary--"

But Mary hesitated and trusted to her daughter's intuition. "Betty, explain yourself," was all she said.

"Suppose it was father--or you thought it might be father--and a terrible thing were hanging over him and you had not seen him for all this time--and he were in there, and I were you--wouldn't you ask to see him first alone? Would you stop for one moment to think about being proper? What do I care! If he is an impostor, I shall know it.

In one moment I shall know it. I--I--just want to see him alone. It is because he has suffered so long--that is why he has come like this--if--they aren't accusing him wrongfully, and I--he will tell me the truth. If he is Richard, I would know it if I came in and stood beside him blindfolded. I will call you in a moment. Stand by the door, and let me see him alone."

The jailer returned, alert and important, shaking the keys in his hand. "This way, please."

In the moment's pause of unlocking, Betty again turned upon her father, her eyes glowing in the dim light of the corridor with wide, sorrowful gaze, large and irresistibly earnest. Bertrand glanced from her to his wife, who slightly nodded her head. Then he said to the surprised jailer: "We will wait here. My daughter may be able to recognize him. Call us quickly, dear, if you have reason to change your mind." The heavy door was closed behind her, and the key turned in the lock.

Harry King loomed large and tall in the small room, standing with his back to the door and his face lifted to the small window, where he could see a patch of the blue sky and white, scudding clouds. For the moment his spirit was not in that cell. It was free and on top of a mountain, looking into the clear eyes of a woman who loved him. He was so rapt in his vision that he did not hear the grating of the key in the lock, and Betty stood abashed, with her back to the door, feeling that she was gazing on a stranger. Relieved against the square of light, his hair looked darker than she remembered Peter's ever to have been,--as dark as Richard's, but that rough, neglected beard,--also dark,--and the tanned skin, did not bring either young man to her mind.

The pause was but for a moment, when he became aware that he was not alone and turned and saw her there.

"Betty! oh, Betty! You have come to help me." He walked toward her slowly, hardly believing his eyes, and held out both hands.

"If--I--can. Who are you?" She took his hands in hers and walked around him, turning his face to the light. Her breath came and went quickly, and a round red spot now burned on one of her cheeks, and her face seemed to be only two great, pathetic eyes.

"Do I need to tell you, Betty? Once we thought we loved each other.

Did we, Betty?"

"I don't--don't--know--Peter! Oh, Peter! Oh, you are alive! Peter!

Richard didn't kill you!" She did not cry out, but spoke the words with a low intensity that thrilled him, and then she threw her arms about his neck and burst into tears. "He didn't do it! You are alive!

Peter, he didn't kill you! I knew he didn't do it. They all thought he did, and--and--your father--he has almost broken his bank just--just--hunting for Richard--to--to--have him hung--and oh!

Peter, I have lived in horror,--for--fear he w--w--w--would, and--"

"He never could, Betty. I have come home to atone. I have come home to give myself up. I killed Richard--my cousin--my best friend. I struck him in hate and saw him lying dead: all the time they were hunting him it was I they should have hunted. I can't understand it. Did they take his dead body for mine--or--how was it they did not know he was struck down and murdered? They must have taken his body for mine--or--he must have fallen over--but he didn't, for I saw him lying dead as I had struck him. All these years the eye of vengeance has been upon me, and my crime has haunted me. I have seen him lying so--dead. G.o.d!

G.o.d!"

Betty still clung to him and sobbed incoherently. "No, no, Peter, it was you who were drowned--they found all your things and saw where you had been pushed over, and--but you weren't drowned! They only thought it--they believed it--"

He put his hand to his head as if to brush away the confusion which staggered him. "Yes, Richard lay dead--and they found him,--but why did they hunt for him? And I--I--living--why didn't they hunt me,--and he, dead and lying there--why did they hunt him? But my father would believe the worst of him rather than to see himself disgraced in his son. Don't cry, little Betty, don't cry. You've had too much to bear.

Sit here beside me and I'll tell you all about it. That's why I came back."

"B--b--ut if you weren't drowned, why--why didn't you come home and say so? Didn't you ever see the papers and how they were hunting Richard all over the world? I knew you were dead, because I knew you never would be so cruel as to leave every one in doubt and your father in sorrow--just because he had quarreled with you. It might have killed your mother--if the Elder had let her know."

"I can't tell you all my reasons, Betty; mostly they were coward's reasons. I did my best to leave evidence that I had been pushed over the bluff, because it seemed the only way to hide myself. I did my best to make them think me dead, and never thought any one could be harmed by it, because I knew him to be dead; so I just thought we would both be dead so far as the world would know,--and as for you, dear,--I learned on that fatal night that you did not love me--and that was another coward's reason why I wished to be dead to you all."