The Sign of the Spider Part 13

He sat down at the table, and, placing the weapon in front of him, pa.s.sed his fingers up and down the blue s.h.i.+ny metal in a strange, half-meditative way. Then, grasping the b.u.t.t, he placed the muzzle against his forehead.

The hard metal imprinted a cold ring just between the eyes. He did not flinch at the grisly contact. His hand was as firm as a rock. He must depress the muzzle just a trifle--it would make more certain. He began to press the trigger, ever so faintly, then a little more firmly, strangely wondering how much more imperceptible a degree of pressure would be required to produce the roaring, shattering shock which should whirl him into the dark night of Death.

Well, but--afterwards? Who knew? If it were as they taught, even then it could be no augmentation of the hopelessness of this life. Perhaps they might make a devil of him, he thought, with grim satisfaction, as a black wave of hatred towards humanity at large surged through his brain.

In that eventuality his role of tormentor as well as tormented would be a congenial one.

The dark night of death! What would it matter about money then, and all the sordid and pitiful wretchednesses entailed by the want of it? A leap in the dark! It held all the excitement of an unknown adventure to the man who sat there, pressing the muzzle of the deadly weapon hard against his forehead. The additional pressure of so much as a hair's weight upon that trigger now!

Could it be that the man's guardian angel was with him still, that a saving presence really hovered about him in the prosaic noonday? A strange chord seemed to thrill and vibrate within his brain, bringing before his vision the face of Lilith Ormskirk. There it was, as he had beheld it but a few days since; but now the sweet eyes were troubled, as though clouded with pain and bitter disappointment.

"You, whom I thought so strong, are weak after all! You, to whom I loved to listen as the very ideal of a well-balanced mind and judgment, are about to do what will stamp your memory forever as that of one who was insane! Have I been no more to you than that--I who thought to have brightened and strengthened your life all that within me lay? It cannot be! You shall not do it."

He could not. The voice thrilled to his hearing, as plainly, as articulately as it had ever done when she had stood before him. He laid down the weapon, and pa.s.sed his hand in a dazed sort of manner over his brows. Laurence Stanninghame was saved.

He stared around, somewhat unsteadily, as though more than half expecting to behold her there in the room. What did it all mean? At any rate she had saved him. Was it for good or for ill? Then the full irony of the position struck upon his satirical soul. His mind went back over his acquaintance with Lilith. What if his disillusioning had been a little less complete? What if he had fled the rich attractiveness of her presence, had shunned her with heroic scrupulousness, acting from some fiddle-faddle notion of so-called "honour"? Just this, he, Laurence Stanninghame, would at that moment be lying a lifeless thing, with brains scattered all over the room--a memory, a standing monument of commonplace weakness. But she had saved him from this--had saved him as surely and completely as though she had struck the weapon from his hand.

Was it for good or for ill?

He fell thinking again. Had he indeed played his last card, or did one more solitary trump yet lurk up his sleeve unknown to himself? No, it could not be; and his thoughts grew dark again. Yet he was safe now--safe from himself. Lilith had done it--her influence, her love!

He thought long and thought hard, but still hopelessly. And again, unconsciously, he broke out into soliloquy.

"Yes, I'd sell my soul to the devil himself!"

"Maybe the old man would be dead off the deal. Likely he reckons you a dead cert. already, Stanninghame."

Laurence did not start at the voice, which was that of Hazon, whose shadow darkened the door. The up-country man at that moment especially noticed that he did not.

"Dare say you're right, Hazon," was the reply. "That's it, come in,"

which the other had already done. "Talking out loud, was I? It's a d---- bad habit, and grows on one."

"It does. Say, though, what game were you up to with that plaything?"

glancing meaningly at the six-shooter lying on the table.

"This? Oh, I thought likely it wanted cleaning."

"So?" and the corners of Hazon's saturnine mouth drooped in ever so faint a grin as his keen eyes fixed themselves for a moment full upon the other's face. Laurence had forgotten the tell-tale imprint left in the centre of his forehead by the muzzle. "So? See here, Stanninghame, don't be at the trouble to invent any more sick old lies, but put the thing away. It might go off. Don't mind me; I've been through the same stage myself."

"Have you? How did it feel, eh?" said Laurence, with a sort of weary imperturbability, filling his pipe and pus.h.i.+ng the pouch across the table to his friend.

"Bad. Ah, that's right! Instead of fooling about 'cleaning' guns at such times, fill your pipe. That's the right lay, depend upon it."

Laurence made no reply, but lighting up, puffed away in silence. His thoughts were wandering from Hazon.

"Broke, eh?" queried the latter sententiously.

"Stony."

"So? Ah, I knew it'd come; I knew it'd come."

This remark, redolent as it was of that sort of cheap prophecy which consists of being wise after the event, Laurence did not deem worthy of answer.

"And I was waiting for it to come," pursued Hazon. "Say, now, why not make a trip up country with me?"

"That sounds likely, doesn't it? Didn't I just tell you I was stony broke?"

"You did. The very reason why I made my proposal."

"Don't see it. If I were to sell out every rag of my scrip now, I couldn't raise enough to pay my shot towards the outfit. And I couldn't even render service in kind, for I've had no experience of waggons and all that sort of thing. So where does it come in?"

"It does come in. You can render service in kind--darned much so. I don't want you to pay any shot towards the outfit. See here, Stanninghame, if you go up country with me now, you'll come back a fairly rich man, or----"

"Or what?"

"You'll never come back at all."

In spite of his normal imperturbability, Laurence was conscious of a quickening of the pulses. The suggestion of adventure--of an adventure on a magnificent scale, and with magnificent results if successful, as conveyed in the other's reply, caused the blood to surge hotly through his frame. He had been strangely drawn towards this dark, reticent, solitary individual, beneath whose quiet demeanour lurked such a suggestion of force and power, who shunned the friends.h.i.+p of all even as all shunned his, who had been moderately intimate even with none but himself. This wonderful land--the dim, mysterious recesses of its interior--what possibilities did it not hold? And in groping into such possibilities this, above all others, was the comrade he would have chosen to have at his side. Not that he had forgotten the words of dark warning spoken by Rainsford and others, but at such he laughed.

"Are you taking it on any?" queried Hazon, after a pause of silence on the part of both.

"I am. I don't mind telling you, Hazon, that life, so far as I am concerned, was no great thing before."

"I guessed as much," a.s.sented the other, with a nod of the head.

"Quite. Now, I'm broke, stony broke, and it's more than ever a case of stealing away to hang one's self in a well. I tell you squarely, I'd walk into the jaws of the devil himself to effect the capture of the oof-bird."

"Yes? How are your nerves, Stanninghame?"

"Hard--hard as nails now. That's not to say they have been always."

"Quite so. Ever seen a man's head cut off?"

"Two."

"So? Where was that?" said Hazon, ever so faintly surprised at receiving an affirmative reply.

"In Paris. A press friend of mine had to go and see two fellows guillotined, and managed to work me in with him. We were as close to the machine, too, as it was possible to get."

"Did it make you feel sick at all?"

"Not any. The other Johnny took it pretty badly, though. I had to fill him up with c.o.c.ktails before he could eat any breakfast."

"That's a very good test. I never expected you to say you had stood it.

Well, you may see a little more in that line before we come through.

Can't make omelettes without breaking eggs though, as the French say.

Well now, Stanninghame, I've had my eye on you ever since you came up here. I'm pretty good at reading people, and I read you. 'That's the man for me,' I said to myself. 'He's come to the end of his tether. He's just at that stage of life when it's kill or cure, and he means kill or cure.'"

"Well, we had talked enough together to let you into that much, eh, Hazon?" said Laurence, with a laugh which was not altogether free from a dash of scepticism.

"We have. Still, I'm not ga.s.sing when I tell you I knew all about it before. How? you want to ask. Because I've been through it all myself. I thought, 'That chap is throwing his last card; if he loses, he's my man.' And you have lost."