The Long Lane's Turning Part 18

CRAIG'S WAY

A half-hour later a surgeon and a nurse had been hurriedly summoned from the hospital, the wounded man had been carried to an upper chamber, and Harry Sevier set in a room across the hall from the library, under guard, hand-cuffs on his wrists. A blue-coated policeman stood grimly at his side, another at the door, and from time to time the white, awed countenance of some servant appeared to stare at him from the threshold and disappear.

His own face, though haggard, was apparently unmoved by the strenuous excitement that hung about the place, yet behind the affected nonchalance his brain was in a turmoil of hope and of dread. In the swift and breathless decision that the event had forced upon him he had not had time to weigh all chances. It had seemed then that the vise must grip either him or Echo, and that the choice lay in his hands. In the moments that followed, however, as he sat moveless in the strident confusion, he had realised that the problem had been by no means so simple, and it had come to him with a pang that Echo's certain safety had lain only in his own escape.

She now believed that she had been extricated from danger by a common thief who, in his rifling of the safe, had seen the letters she pleaded with Craig for, and in the final tragic moment had taken pity on her plight. When she learned that one of those house-breakers had been Harry Sevier, what then? She would never believe him the vulgar criminal! Her imagination would rush to another explanation which would give his presence there a dismal significance. She would conclude that he had somehow discovered the strait in which she conceived her father stood, and in an attempt to retrieve the letters had met Craig's chicanery with technical crime--made use, which to him had seemed justifiable, of cracksmen, and with them had been caught in the emergency whose sudden panic had evoked that shot from the alcove!

Whichever way the tragedy turned, it would be infinitely darkened for her by the reflection that it had been her strait which had brought the trouble upon him.

And if murder had been done, and she learned with shrinking heart that he, Harry, stood accused by the law, what then? She knew that his hand had not pulled the trigger, for she had seen the face of the shooter.

Her gasping exclamation--"He has--killed him!"--had made that clear to Harry. She would rush to the rescue, forgetful of all else, and with her testimony, bring down the avalanche upon her!

On the heels of these reflections a thrill of hope had come to him.

Craig was not yet dead--there had been no sign from above-stairs since the hurried arrival of the surgeon. Also it was antic.i.p.ated that he would recover consciousness. Harry's knowledge of criminal procedure told him that this was the meaning of his long detention there. Should consciousness come, if merely for an appreciable interval, he would be brought face to face with the wounded man. It was this that all awaited now, and in it Harry discerned the sole possibility of saving the situation.

"Craig must have seen him when he fired!" he told himself. "For the fraction of a second they were face to face. If he is able to make a statement, it will clear me! He will be silent about Echo, too, for he will expect, if he lives, to make her his wife--it will be a long time, probably, before he misses the letters! And if I am disa.s.sociated, by Craig himself, from the attack on his life, there will no longer be any question of her involving herself to defend me!" His heart lightened and the great load seemed to lift from his soul. It was the implication of Echo that had made the situation impossible--the unbelievable coincidence of their joint presence--in d.a.m.nable propinquity with the shooting. With Echo eliminated and he himself free from that cowardly indictment, would not all yet be well? He was well enough known. He was no sordid house-breaker--in spite of the humiliating incident of his entrance there that night!

His thought broke, as a spruce young man, with the air of authority which is the perquisite and prerequisite of the private-secretary, entered and whispered with the guardian at the door.

Harry's heart seemed to stop beating. "Is he--dead?" he asked.

The young man looked at him coldly. "Not yet."

"Will he live?"

There was a longer pause before the other replied: "It's too soon to tell yet. It's up to you to hope so, I imagine."

He whispered again with the officer, then crossed the hall to the library, which he entered, closing the door behind him.

When the secretary reappeared he went quickly up the stair and along a hall. There he tapped on a door and opened it.

The room disclosed was the one in which Craig lay. At one side was a small table covered with a white cloth, with a _melee_ of nickelled instruments, rolls of absorbent bandaging and a basin of reddened liquid. The air was full of the sickish-sweet _halitus_ of some drug.

Craig's head on the pillow was wound with the white swathing and the nurse stood beside the bed. The doctor came forward, and the secretary spoke to him in an undertone.

All at once Craig opened his eyes. He looked acutely at the faces so near him, the cloth-covered table with its instruments, the white-capped nurse.

"I--know," he said. He tried to lift a hand to his bandaged head.

"How--bad?"

The doctor laid a professional hand on the one that strayed across the coverlet. "We want to pull you through, Mr. Craig," he said with soothing a.s.surance, "and you must help us by wiping every anxiety from your mind. Only a dozen words with your secretary here, to help you stop even thinking, and then you are going to sleep."

The young man came to the bed-side. "It was an attempted burglary, as you probably realised, sir. Two men were hidden in the library and you were shot when they tried to get away. One of them has been caught.

The servants say a lady was with you at the time and the police want to know who she was."

Craig did not reply immediately. Echo had slipped away in the confusion! Well, so much the better. Her presence could not have helped. It was no more to his interest than to hers--since she was to be his wife--that the story of her midnight call should be bruited abroad. "I--don't know--her," he said.

"I'll tell them so," said the secretary. "The safe had been opened, but its contents are practically intact. I have checked up all the papers on the list and there seems to be only one thing missing.

Perhaps you took that out yourself. It is the last item on the list--a package of letters."

A quick gleam crossed the white face on the pillow. "Gone? No--no.

Impossible. They were--of no--value to--any one but me."

"You may have put them in your desk," said the other. He turned to the surgeon. "The police want to bring up the man for identification."

The man of medicines frowned. "I suppose it has to be," he said.

"Tell them to do so quickly. Only a word," he warned the wounded man.

A moment or two later the secretary tapped again at the door and it opened upon the two policemen. Harry walked between, the chain on his wrists clinking lightly as he stepped. One of them came forward to the foot of the great bed.

"You saw the man who shot you, Mr. Craig?"

"Yes."

He beckoned and Harry and his guardian moved forward into range of vision.

"You solemnly swear that what you shall say is the truth?"

"Yes."

"Is this the one?"

Craig stared--a look of negation that made Harry's heart leap. It was a look also that held no recognition, and in that instant, for the first time since that night's harrowing series of events had begun, Harry remembered that he stood in strange guise, in unaccustomed clothes and with smooth-shaven chin.

But into the eyes that gazed from the pillow recognition speedily came--recognition strangely commingled of incredulity, amaze, distempered suspicion, leaping swiftly to a slow, deadly certainty. A lurid sequence was running across the fevered mind that the man confronting him could not read:

Harry Sevier sculking there and disguised--one of the burglars! The missing letters--Echo had gone with them! It had been a cunning, hypocritical plot, then, with a hired safe-robber and thug--and they had tricked and baffled him. Craig gasped. His eyes suffused with blood. He had said that he had not known the woman. Yet he could still score! Living or dying, he could drag down Harry Sevier to a black depth from which he should never rise again!

He laughed, a harsh jarring laugh. His face became convulsed. He tried to lift himself on an elbow. The nurse thrust her strong arms beneath the pillow and raised him. He pointed his finger at Harry.

"Yes!" he said in a crackling whisper. "He is the man who--did it!

He--shot me!"

"Do you know him?" The officer spoke clearly, leaning forward.

"Yes. I--he is--"

But that was all. With a final vain effort, his head fell back on the pillow. That last flare of rage, of revengeful hatred, had exhausted the sick vitality, and he was gone into unconsciousness.

CHAPTER XXII

HARRY DECIDES

The steel handcuff bit more hardly into Harry's wrist, but he did not feel it. His eyes were fixed and his face had grown grey. The accusation, with all its shuddering implications, had surged over him like the a.s.surance of the unescapable end, the last engulfing wave of hopeless finality which, in its subsidence, left him cold and still.

Malice and hatred had closed the door of hope.