The Long Lane's Turning Part 23

"To Hungary, I believe. There's a celebrated authority on brain-surgery in Buda-Pesth. The surgeons think it's pressure on some nerve-centre, and the case calls for the particular operation that is this chap's specialty. It's a forlorn hope, I imagine."

"I don't know," said the younger man, lighting a cigarette. "They do marvellous things nowadays. And anyway, if it fails, it can't be any worse for the patient. As it is, he has no mind at all--no speech, no memory, nothing!"

Echo turned her head; there was a fierce little smile on her lips. So here was another! Had he, too, like the one of whom she had been thinking, been overtaken by a righteous Nemesis in the moment of evil triumph? And somewhere, perhaps, was there a woman to whom his death would be a gladness and a relief?

The lady looked toward the wheeled-chair. "How was the injury caused?"

she asked interestedly.

"He was shot," said the elderly man. "Shot by a burglar. I remember reading of it in the newspapers at the time."

Echo started. A little tremor ran over her. The scarf she held slipped from her hand.

"It seems a pity sometimes," went on the voice, "that the law must graduate its penalties so nicely. Here is a man who, to all intents and purposes, was murdered. If he doesn't recover, his is a living death. Yet because he continues to breathe, the most that can be given to the scoundrel who shot him is a term of imprisonment. He ought to have been hanged!"

The girl beside her pushed back her chair petulantly. "Oh, let's _do_ something!" she cried. "I want to get him out of my mind. I sat where I had to look at him in the train all day. It's too horrible! Fancy having to be like that, not being able to walk or talk or even to feed one's self! I want to go to the Casino and see something _funny_!"

When the sound of their voices had died away in the corridor, Echo rose from her seat and walked along the terrace, quite to the end, where stood the wheeled-chair. On a bench near by an attendant was immersed in a newspaper.

Then she turned and looked at the pallid, vacuous face above the steamer-rug.

Yes--it was Cameron Craig.

CHAPTER XXIX

THE LONE BATTLE

During those months Harry's visible life had been turning in an endless cycle of new-gained habit that ruled with vicious and numbing precision the huge conglomerate of which he was but a single atom--a bitter, dragging treadmill in which he was constrained to tramp steadily round and round with the hands of the clock, marking time, as it were, in a painful void that changed with mocking reverberations.

The spectre that had smiled its cruel smile at him from the shadow in the little chamber back of the court-room had never left him. He had thrust it from him with all his strength, but it had come again and again to chuckle through the darkness.

"She!" it had sneered. "She for whom you risked and suffered so much!

She whose fine courage you counted on--who you dreamed would rush to your defence, at any cost to herself! You need not have been afraid.

She would have risked nothing. She cared for you--yes. But she cares a thousand times more for her place in the world's opinion. Why, she would have married Craig--_married_ him!--rather than face a reflected shame from a story affecting her father. So much reputation means to her! Here you are in your stripes, a convict, and _she knows it_! She knew all along! She doesn't guess you saw her in the court-room: she didn't mean you to, of course. How she must have suffered from fear that you would drag her into it! No doubt she is afraid you may repent and call on her now to help you. Perhaps that is why she has gone abroad. That is the real Echo Allen! That is the woman you have loved!"

Should he call to her now, when she had left him to this suffering, giving him no little word of trust or grat.i.tude? A painful fiery pride rose up in him. Not if his flesh was torn by red-hot pincers! Not in endless years, though every day were a separate h.e.l.l, till he died!

Never--never--never!

Seared by pride, tortured by despair, with the black agony of doubt clinging to him like a coat-of-mail, memory dragged him backward through infernos of suffering, thrusting its searching fingers into each cranny of his mind, mocking him with s.h.i.+fting pictures cruelly incongruous, that like a _camera obscura_ turned and turned about a single focus--a grey old porch with Echo's figure leaning against a pillar and he looking up into her face. As though he had been a separate ent.i.ty he saw himself moving through a thousand significant scenes of the flame-swept past--the long-gone, dead and buried yet living past--with her! And across these flitting outlines there stamped itself the forbidding legend that his ghostly guide showed Dante.... _Lasciate Ogni speranza_! By his own choice he had opened a bottomless chasm between the then and now, between the Harry Sevier he had been and the nameless convict branded by the righteous law, and this chasm was impa.s.sible and enduring. Ten years of oblivion, of loathsome existence under a number, of comrades.h.i.+p with felons, an interminable blank unlighted by one glimpse of joy! Years in which, at home, the mystery of his disappearance would pa.s.s from a nine-days'-wonder to a diminis.h.i.+ng speculation, a vague curiosity, and at length to forgetfulness. His life, with its multiple ambitions, its hopes and strivings--its love--had been spilled like water into sand; there remained only the useless vessel, empty and dishonoured.

Time and again he experienced abrupt lapses into the blackest pit of despair, when he grappled with an aching desire to be quit of the puzzle of life, and by any one of a dozen means which lay at his hand, to leap into freedom. But there was in him something deep-lying and adamantine which forbade this solution.

Meanwhile time, after a fas.h.i.+on, went on. He breathed, ate and slept; he saw the dawn look in at his narrow window and the silken blue dusk drawn across its bars; his hands automatically performed mechanical tasks, as did the hundreds of others about him; and gradually, out of the very iteration of these homely things grew a pa.s.sive equanimity, dest.i.tute of human comfort yet bringing with it a kind of numb acquiescence in which, though all unconsciously, his feet were feeling for new foot-hold on the submerged highway of life. And at length normal feeling, though dazed and bewildered, crept again to the surface; he was once more conscious of the sun and air, of the scent of green growing things that the breeze now and then wafted over the masonry, of the grey pigeons that pecked crumbs in the court-yard, and of the mult.i.tudinous human life that throbbed about him.

In all these months Paddy the Brick had been his cell-mate. By day in the shop, that rumbled with the clacking din of the tireless shoe-machines, they were separated. But they marched shoulder to breast in the loathed lock-step, they sat side by side at dinner and supper, and the iron bunks on which they slept--Harry on the upper one--were but a few feet apart. During the first days, while they were together in the cell, the other had watched him glumly and suspiciously, speaking only when he must and then morosely, so that Harry had wondered dully whether that whirl of rage in which he had smashed the flask of whisky against the window-bars had not further embittered his lot by an irreparable enmity.

More than once, by the devious means known to such places, Paddy the Brick had procured whisky, and this--though he risked offering no more to his companion but drank it secretly in his bunk at night--had put Harry through other bitter tests of self-control. For the wilful license of the day on which he had ceased to be Harry Sevier had granted fresh and terrible power to the cringing thing that had been mastered and manacled, and the fight he had fought out in that long year Harry had had again to renew, and now without the zest of reward.

Again and again, as he sat in his cell, or fed the pungent leathern strips into the clacking shoe-machines in the shop, without warning the demon of thirst had swooped upon him, making his dry throat ache with uncontrollable longing, his palms tingle with itching desire: and at times, when he awoke gasping with the reeking fumes in his nostrils, and heard the gurgle of the liquor in the dark, he had fought with a strenuous desire to fling himself bodily upon his companion and s.n.a.t.c.h the drink to his own arid lips--fought till the struggle turned him faint with anger, disgust and self-contempt.

What lent him in these bitter months the strength for this unequal struggle? Most of all the knowledge that the appet.i.te which he now grappled with in himself, was the patron Genius of that house of Pain.

He had learned it from his fellows there, in whose faces alcohol had set its recognisable marks, its baleful brands of owners.h.i.+p. He knew it from a score of dismal histories related by his incorrigible cell-mate, daily allusions, the famished eagerness with which the surrept.i.tious flask was pa.s.sed from hand to hand. The Spirit of Drink had seemed to him at length to sprawl, a huge, lethargic incubus, over that tortured congeries of crime. Till slowly, very slowly--as human feeling had earlier come to him out of his blankness and torpor--there had dawned in him a mute consciousness of a victory over himself that was to be enduring. The conquest he had thought he had made in that first year of studied avoidance had been no true one. Under stress of anger, grief and resentment, it had fallen in shameful and utter defeat. The real victory that he knew now, had come to him in that prison garb, when black despair had sat by his side through long months--the fruit of a strength born of familiar hand-touch with evil temptation and a hatred of the tempter.

As time went on, the surly mood of his cell-mate had grown less difficult, had even softened to a sneering tolerance.

"You're improving!" he said one day with a smirk. "So you're making up to the Gospel-Sharp, eh?"

It was a Sunday, when the shops were empty and silent, and the long grey-black serpentine, with its. .h.i.tching lock-step, had wound to the Chapel for the weekly plat.i.tudes and then back to the clammy, wintry dormitory, to drop its human links at their numbered cells. That day for the first time, the plodding, oleaginous chaplain had noted the new figure in the stolid ranks and had stopped to speak to him--a commonplace to which Harry had responded with a mere word.

"You'd better make up to the Warden!" Paddy the Brick continued. "He's the c.o.c.k-of-the-walk here. I'd like to smash that oily face of his!"

"I've nothing against him," replied Harry evenly. "He does what he's here to do."

"He'd better keep his nose in his office," said the other darkly.

"He'll walk through the shops once too often! I know a man around the corner who'd give his neck to 'get' him--he's a lifer, and nothing makes much difference to him!"

He crossed the narrow cell as he spoke, and sitting on one of the three-legged stools that const.i.tuted the cell's only movable furniture, took a bent tin spoon from under his jacket and began to tap upon the wall. Harry had sometimes seen him at this occupation--a kind of crude signalling he had thought it. Now, however, some rhythm in the sound caught him, reminding him of the click of the keys in a telegraph office. "What is that you are doing?" he asked, as the other stopped.

"Doing?" Paddy the Brick turned his narrow eyes over his shoulder.

"I've been having a chat with an old pal of mine in the upper tier.

That's what."

"Talking?"

"Yes. It's the prison-wireless. Didn't you ever hear of that?"

"No."

The other rose and pulled away the blanket from the foot of his bunk.

There in the whitewashed wall was a double row of minute scratches.

"That's the alphabet," he said. "It's mighty handy--we work it by relay. I can call up any cell on this side in fifteen minutes. Better learn it," he added jeeringly. "You'll have plenty of time!"

Harry's gaze turned back to the little barred window with its meagre square of blue. The time he had been there was to be measured only by months, yet how century-long had dragged the leaden-footed procession!

His painful reverie was broken by Paddy the Brick's voice, jarring and malicious:

"Ever read the Bible?"

The other had taken the small dingy volume--the sole book the place afforded--from its shelf, and was lying on his back on his bunk, his eyes peering over its rim.

"Yes," answered Harry, slowly. "Why?"

"I've found one good thing in it: '_Woe unto you also, ye lawyers! for ye lade men with burdens grievous to be borne._' Ho-ho!" he chuckled.

"Reckon I'll ask old Coffin-Face to preach on it next Sunday in Chapel.

I'd sure enjoy it. I had a lawyer once--_d.a.m.n_ him!"

The flare of evil pa.s.sion in the closing epithet seemed to Harry like a wicked spurt of flame from some sudden crack in cooling lava, leaping out to sear him. His face was turned away--toward the little square of barred window--and his voice was hoa.r.s.er than usual, as he asked: