The Redemption of David Corson Part 23

"Say whatcher mean."

"Who is this pure young man with whom the beautiful Pepeeta is so safe?

What is it you call him, David Crocker?"

"'Tain't his real name."

"What is his real name?"

"D'n I ever t-t-tell you?"

"No."

"Real name's C-C-Corson--David Corson."

"What?" cried the judge, springing to his feet.

"C-C-Corson--I tell you," stuttered the quack, too drunk to notice the peculiar effect of his announcement.

"What do you know about him?" the judge asked with ill-suppressed excitement.

"Keep still--wan' go sleep."

"Wake up and tell me what you know about him, I say."

"He' Squaker."

"A Quaker?"

"Yes, Squaker."

"Great heavens!" speaking under his breath and trembling visibly. "What else do you know?"

"Illegitimate child."

"What?" pa.s.sing around the table, seizing him by the collar and shaking him. "Say that again."

"'S true--s' help me! What you c-c-care?"

"How do you know he is an illegitimate child--I say?"

"I know--that's nuf! Sh'tup and lemme g-g-go sleep."

"Tell me, curse you!" shaking him until his teeth rattled.

He was too far gone to answer and fell under the table. The judge kicked him, and with a muttered curse took up a gla.s.s of whisky, and tossing it down his throat, hurriedly left the cabin, and began to pace the deck in violent agitation.

This man who had so ruthlessly set a pitfall for his neighbor had suddenly tumbled into one which retributive justice had dug deep for himself!

"It must be true," he was saying. "It accounts for the strange feeling I had toward him when he asked me to help him do that infernal deed. I could not understand it then, but it is plain enough now. He is my son!

And I have not only transmitted a tainted life to him, but helped to d.a.m.n him in its possession! G.o.d! what irony! Of course the quack never knew that I, too, am living under a false name! I wonder if it is too late to stop him? Yes--it's done, and he is miles away! It's almost daybreak now! Whewwwh! It's horrible!"

He dashed his clenched fist on the railing of the vessel. While he stood there, his mind ran back into the past. He lived over again those pa.s.sionate days when he had won and betrayed a young, beautiful, impressionable girl. His heart beat with a swifter stroke as he remembered the excitement of their hurried flight from her parents, and the wild joy of their adventurous lives, and then sank again to its steady, hopeless throb as he recalled her penitence and misery after the birth of the boy, his consenting to marry her, the ceremony, the respite from self-reproach, the few happy months, the relapse into old bad habits, the sobered mother becoming a devout and faithful member of a Quaker church, his disgust at this, his quarrels with her and finally his desertion of her. And then the whole subsequent series of adventures and disasters pa.s.sed before him--a moving panorama of dishonor and crime! He paced the deck again; then he paused and leaned over the gunwale, listening to the water lapping the sides of the vessel. Nothing could have been more astonis.h.i.+ng to him than the sudden activity of his conscience. It had been so long since he had experienced remorse that he believed himself incapable of it. But suddenly a fierce and unendurable pang seized him. To a man who had been long accustomed to feeling nothing in the contemplation of his deeds, but a dull consciousness of unworthiness, this sharp and terrible attack of shame and guilt was startling indeed. He could not understand it. The pain seemed disproportionate to the sin; but he could not resist the repugnance and horror with which it filled him! And this is an element in the moral life with which bad men forget to deal! Because conscience ceases to remonstrate and remorse to torment, they think the exemption permanent.

They do not know that at any moment, in some unforeseen emergency--this abused faculty of the soul may spring into renewed life. This elemental power, this primal endowment, can no more be permanently dissociated from the soul than heat from fire! It may smoulder un.o.bserved, but a breath will fan it into flame! Without it, the soul would cease to be a soul; its permanent eradication would be equivalent to annihilation! If conscience can be eliminated, man has nothing to brag of over a tadpole! We are no more safe from it than from memory! Who can be sure that what he has forgotten has ceased to survive? The sweet perfume of a violet may revive a bitter memory dormant for fifty years! At a word, a look, a glance, conscience--abused, suppressed, despised, inoperative--may rise in all her majesty and fill the heart with torment and despair!

This corrupted judge, this faithless lover, this dishonorable parent, had become accustomed to dull misery; but this fierce onslaught of an avenging sense of personal unworthiness and dread of divine justice was more than he could bear. Life had long since lost its charms and he had more than once seriously contemplated suicide.

"There seems to be no use in trying to beat nature in any other way, and so I will try the dernier resort," he said aloud. Opening his pocket knife, he cut a piece of rope from the flagstaff, looked around, found a heavy bar of iron, and fastened rope and weight together. In one end of the rope he made a noose, slipped it over his neck, approached the railing and leaned upon it to reflect. His mind now went back into the still more remote past; he was a boy again, and at his mother's knee.

Half audibly and half unconsciously, he began murmuring, "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray--no--I'll be consistent," he added, with a sigh.

"I have lived without the mummery of prayer, and I will die without it."

And then by one of those strange freaks of the mind that make people do the most absurd things at the most sacred times--mourners laugh at funerals, and soldiers in the thick of battles long for puddings--he began to say over that old doggerel which he used to repeat when s.h.i.+vering on the spring-board over the cold waters of the Hudson river:

"One, two, three, the b.u.mble bee, The rooster crows and away she goes!"

The absurdity of so trivial a memory at such a serious moment excited his sense of humor, and he smiled.

By this time the violence of his remorse had begun to subside and proved to be only a fitful, fleeting protest of that abused and neglected moral sense. Something more terrible than even this discovery of the wrong done to his own son would have to come. There was plenty of time! Nature was in no haste! This was only a warning, a little danger signal.

By a short, swift revulsion, his feelings changed from horror to indifference. "After all, why should I care?" he said. "The boy is nothing to me, and at any rate he would have gained his end in some other way. Let him have his fling; I have had mine. If he didn't break that old impostor's heart, he would probably break a better one! And as for the gypsy--it's only a question of who and when. What a fool I have made of myself! Who would believe that such a trifle could give me such a shock? There is something to live for yet. I must see what sort of a face the quack makes when he takes his medicine to-morrow."

He threw the iron weight into the water, entered the cabin, took another drink, smiled contemptuously at the drunken wretches under the table, crossed the deck, descended the gang-plank and climbed the steep path to the city.

Against his inheritance from such a nature as this, the young mystic had to make his life struggle.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE SHADOW OF DEATH

"There are moral as well as physical a.s.sa.s.sinations."--Voltaire.

When he awoke the next morning, the poor bedeviled doctor crawled back to the hotel as best he could, his head throbbing with pain, his wits dull and his temper wild. Stumbling up the long flight of stairs which seemed to him to reach the sky, he burst open his door and entered the room. It was empty. The bed had not been occupied. Pepeeta was nowhere to be seen.

It took him some moments to comprehend that he did not comprehend. Then he called, "Pepeeta! Pepeeta!"

The silence at first bewildered, then aroused hims and crossing the corridor he entered David's room. It, too, was empty. He was now thoroughly astonished and awake. Recrossing the hall he once more entered his room and began in earnest to seek an explanation of this mystery. It did not take him long, for on the table were lying the jewels in which he had invested his profits and which he had confided to Pepeeta--and beside them a piece of paper on which he slowly spelled out these startling words:

"I have discovered your treachery and fled."

"PEPEETA."

He drew his hand across his eyes, took a piece of his cheek between his thumb and first finger and pinched it to see if he were awake, then read the words again, this time aloud: "I have discovered your treachery and fled. Pepeeta." "Treachery?" he said. "What t-t-treachery? Whose t-t-treachery? Fled? Fled with whom, fled where? I wonder if I am still d-d-drunk?"

Laying the paper down, he went to the wash-stand, filled the bowl with water, plunged his head into it and expected to find that he had been suffering some sort of hallucination. But when he returned to the table and again took up the missive, the same words stared him in the face.