The Keeper of the Door Part 102

"Olga!" Briefly and sternly he checked her. "You are getting hysterical.

Don't you think there has been enough of this? If you go any further, you will regret it."

"But I must know!" she said. "Max, was it so? Did she take her own life?"

"She did not!"

Quietly he answered her, so quietly that for a moment she could hardly believe that he had given a definite reply. She stared at him incredulously.

"You are telling me the truth?" she said piteously at length. "You won't try to deceive me any more?"

"I have told you the truth," he said.

"Then--then--" She still gazed at him with wide eyes, eyes in which a certain horror gradually dawned and spread. "I am sure she did not die a natural death," she said with conviction.

Max was silent, grimly, inexorably silent.

She disengaged herself slowly from him. Her forehead drew itself into the old painful lines. She pa.s.sed an uncertain hand across it.

As if in answer to the gesture he spoke, bluntly, almost brutally. "If you will have it, you shall; but remember, it is final. Miss Campion was suffering from a hideous and absolutely incurable disease of the brain which had developed into homicidal madness. She might have lived for years--a blinded soul fettered to a brain of raving insanity. What her life would have been, only those who have seen can picture. But, mercifully for her--rightly or wrongly is not for me to say--her torment was brought to an early end. In fact, almost before it had begun, a friend gave her deliverance. She died--as you know--suddenly."

"Ah!" With a cry she broke in upon him. "It was--the pain-killer!"

"It was." He scarcely opened his lips to reply, and instantly closed them in a single unyielding line. His eyes never left her face.

As for Olga, she stood a moment, as one stunned past all feeling; then turned from him and moved away. "So it was--your doing," she said, in a curious, stifled voice as if she were scarcely conscious of speaking at all.

He did not answer her. The words scarcely demanded an answer.

She reached the table unsteadily, and sat down, leaning her elbow upon it, her chin on her hand. Her eyes gazed right away down far vistas unbounded by time or s.p.a.ce.

"It isn't the first time, is it?" she said. "You did it once before. I suppose--" her voice dropped still lower; she seemed to be speaking to herself--"as a Keeper of the Door, you think you have the right."

"Will you tell me what you mean?" he said.

She did not turn her head. She still gazed upon invisible things. "Do you remember poor old Mrs. Stubbs? You helped her, didn't you, in the same way?"

"I?" said Max.

The utter astonishment of his voice reached her. She turned and looked at him. "She died in the same way," she said.

"But--great heavens above--not with my connivance!" he exclaimed.

She continued to look at him, but with that same far look, as though she saw many things besides. "Yet--you knew!" she said.

He made a curt gesture of repudiation. "I suspected--perhaps. I actually knew--nothing."

"I see," she said, with a faint smile. "She just slipped through--and you looked the other way."

"Nothing of the sort!" he said sternly. "I did my utmost--as I have always done my utmost--to prolong life. It is my duty--the first principle of my profession; and I hold it--I always have held it--as sacred."

"And yet--you let Violet's go," she said.

He swung round almost violently and turned his back. "I will not discuss that point any further," he said.

She looked at him with an odd dispa.s.sionateness. She still seemed to be searching the distant past. "You never liked her," she said at last slowly. "And she was horribly afraid of you--afraid of you!" A sudden tremor of awakening life ran through the words. The stunned look began to pa.s.s. Again the horror looked out of her eyes. "She was so afraid of you that--when she went mad--she tried to kill you. Ah, I see now!" She caught her breath sharply--"You--you were afraid too!"

He remained with his back turned upon her, motionless as a statue.

"And so--and so--" Her eyes came swiftly back to the present and saw him only. The horror in them had become vivid, anguished. She rose and stretched an accusing finger towards him. "That was why you ended her life!" she said. "It was--to save--your own!"

He wheeled round at that and faced her with that in his eyes which she had never before seen there--a look that sent the blood to her heart.

"By Heaven, Olga," he said, "you go--rather far!"

He came towards her slowly. There was something terrible about him at that moment, something that held her fettered and dumb before him, though--so great was her horror--she would have given all she had to turn and flee.

He halted before her, looking down into her face with a curious intentness. "You really believe that?" he said. "You can't conceive such a thing as this--utterly and inexcusably wrong as I admit it to be--you can't conceive it to have been done from a motive of mercy?"

She shrank away from him as from a thing unclean. The impulse to escape was still strong upon her, urging her to a wild resistance. She met the pitiless eyes that watched her like a creature at bay. "You never did anything in mercy yet!" she said. "There is no mercy in you!"

"Indeed!" he said, and uttered a brief, grating laugh that made her shudder. "In that case, I'm afraid I can't help you any further. I'm at the end of my resources."

Olga drew herself together with a supreme effort, mustering all her strength. "It is the end of everything," she said. "I can never marry you now. I never want to see you again."

He met her look implacably, with eyes that seemed to beat down her own.

"I have told you that I won't submit to that," he said.

She caught her breath with a convulsive movement of protest. Perhaps never before had she so clearly realized the ruthlessness of the man and his strength.

"I can't help it," she said. "I can never marry you. Even if--if we had been married, I could not have stayed with you--after this."

She saw his mouth harden to cruelty at her words, and instinctively she drew back from him; but in the same instant his hands closed upon her wrists and she was a captive.

"Doesn't it occur to you," he said, "that you are bound to me in honour--unless I set you free?"

He spoke with the utmost calmness, but her heart misgave her. She saw herself at his mercy, an impotent prisoner striving against him, vainly beating out her will against the iron of his. In that moment she realized fully that not by strength could she prevail, and desperately she began to plead.

"But you will set me free, Max! You wouldn't--you couldn't--hold me against my will!"

"Couldn't I?" said Max, and grimly smiled. "There is nothing whatever that I couldn't do with you, Olga,--with--or without--your will."

She s.h.i.+vered sharply and uncontrollably, not attempting to contradict him.

"And that being so," he said, "it is not my intention to set you free.

There is no earthly reason why you should not marry me, and therefore I hold you to your engagement. That is quite understood, is it?"

His hold tightened upon her. She saw that he meant every word, and her heart died within her. Her strength was running out swiftly, swiftly.

Very soon it would be utterly gone. She cast a desperate glance upwards, and made one last supreme effort. "But, Max," she pleaded, "I thought you loved me."

His face was set in iron lines, but she thought it softened ever so slightly at her words. Had she pierced the one vulnerable point in his armour at last? She wondered, scarcely daring to hope.