"He's a--"
"What?" She could not forbear to ask, but she put the question with a little note of challenge that made Marriott turn his head.
"One of those young civilians."
"One of what young civilians?"
"That Emerson writes about."
"He's not so very young, is he?" Elizabeth tried to smile.
"The young civilians are often very old; I have known them to be octogenarians."
He looked at her and was suddenly struck by her pallor and the drawn expression about her eyes. She had met his gaze, and he realized instantly that he had made some mistake. They were standing there in the drawing-room, the canvas-covered floor was littered with rose-leaves. It was the moment when the guests had begun to feel the first traces of weariness, when the laughter had begun to lose its spirit and the talk its spontaneity, when the older people were beginning to say good night, leaving the younger behind to shower the bride and groom with rice and confetti. Perplexed, excited, self-conscious after Eades's declaration, feeling a little fear and some secret pride, suddenly Elizabeth saw the old, good-humored, friendly expression fade from Marriott's eyes, and there came a new look, one she had never seen before, an expression of sudden, illuminative intelligence, followed by a shade of pain and regret, perhaps a little reproach.
"Where does Emerson say--that?" she asked.
"You look it up and see," he said presently.
She looked at him steadily, though it was with a great effort, tried to smile, and the smile made her utterly sick at heart.
"I--must look up father," she said, "it's time--"
She left him abruptly, and he stood there, the smile gone from his face, his hands plunged deep in his pockets. A moment he bit his lips, then he turned and dashed up the stairs.
"I'm a fool," he said to himself.
Elizabeth had thought of love, she had imagined its coming to her in some poetic way, but this--somehow, this was not poetic. She recalled distinctly every word Eades had spoken, but even more vividly she recalled Marriott's glance. It meant that he thought she loved Eades!
It had all become irrevocable in a moment; she could not, of course, undertake to explain; it was all ridiculous, too ridiculous for anything but tears.
Looking back on her intimacy with Marriott, she realized now that what she would miss most was the good fellowship there had been between them.
With him, though without realizing it at the time, she had found expression easy, her thoughts had been clear, she could find words for them which he could understand and appreciate. Whenever she came across anything in a book or in a poem or in a situation there was always the satisfying sense that she could share it with Marriott; he would apprehend instantly. There was no one else who could do this; with her mother, with her father, with Dick, no such thing was possible; with them she spoke a different language, lived in another world. And so it was with her friends; she moved as an alien being in the conventional circle of that existence to which she had been born. One by one, her friends had ceased to be friends, they had begun to shrink away, not consciously, perhaps, but certainly, into the limbo of mere acquaintance. She thought of all this as she rode home that night, and after she had got home; and when it all seemed clear, she shrank from the clarity; she would not, after all, have it too clear; she must not push to any conclusion all these thoughts about Gordon Marriott. She chose to decide that he had been stupid, and his stupidity offended her; it was not pleasant to have him sneer at a man who had just told her he loved her, no matter who the man was, and she felt, with an inconsistency that she clung to out of a sense of self-preservation, that Marriott should have known this; he might have let her enjoy her triumph for a little, and then--but this was dangerous; was he to conclude that she loved him?
What was it, she wondered, that made her weak and impotent in the presence of Eades? She did not like to own a fear of him, yet she felt a fear; would she some day succumb? The fear crept on her and distressed her; she knew very well that he would pursue her, never waver or give up or lose sight of his purpose. In some way he typified for her all that was fixed, impersonal, irrefragable--society on its solid rocks. He had no doubts about anything, his opinions were all made, tested, tried and proved. Any uncertainty, any fluidity, any inconsistency was impossible. And she felt more and more inadequate herself; she felt that she had nothing to oppose to all this.
BOOK III
I
Four miles from town, where a white pike crosses a mud road, is Lulu Corners. There is little at this cross-roads to inspire a name less frivolous, nothing indeed but a weather-beaten store, where the people of the neighborhood wait for the big yellow trolley-cars that sweep across the country hourly, sounding their musical air-whistles over the fields. Half a mile from the Corners two unmarried sisters, Bridget and Margaret Flanagan, for twenty years had lived alone in a hovel that was invaded by pigs and chickens and geese. Together, these aged women, tall, bony and masculine, lived their graceless, squalid lives, untouched by romance or tragedy, working their few acres and selling their pork, and eggs and feathers in the city. The nearest dwelling was a quarter of a mile away, and the neighbors were still farther removed by prejudices, religious and social. Thus the old women were left to themselves. The report was that they were misers, and the miserable manner of their lives supported rather than belied this theory; there was a romantic impression in a country-side that knew so little romance, that a large amount of money was hidden somewhere about the ugly premises.
On an evening in late October, Bridget Flanagan was getting supper. The meal was meager, and when she had made it ready she placed a lamp on the table and waited for Margaret, who had gone out to fasten the shanty in which the barn-yard animals slept. Margaret came in presently, locked the door, and the sisters sat down to their supper. They had just crossed themselves and heaped their plates with potatoes, when they heard a knock at the door.
"Who can that be, sister?" said Bridget, looking up.
"I wonder now!" said Margaret in a surprise that was almost an alarm.
The knocking was repeated.
"Mary help us!" said Bridget, again making the sign of the cross. "No one ever came at this hour before."
The knocking sounded again, louder, more insistent.
"You go on to the door, sister," said Bridget, "and let them in,--whoever they may be, I dunno."
Margaret went to the door, shot back the bolt, and pulled on the knob.
And then she turned and cast a look of terror at her sister. Some one was holding the door on the other side. The strange resistance of this late and unknown visitor, who but a moment before had wanted to come in, appalled her. She pressed her knee against the door, and tried to lock it again. But now the door held against her; she strained and pushed, then turned and beckoned her sister with frightened eyes. Bridget came, and the two women, throwing their weight against the door, tried to close it; but the unknown, silent and determined one was holding it on the other side. This strange conflict continued. Presently the two old women glanced up; in the crack, between the door and the jamb, they saw a club. Slowly, slowly, it made way against them, twisting, turning, pushing, forcing its way into the room. They looked in awful fascination. The club grew, presently a foot of it was in the room; then a hand appeared, a man's hand, gripping the club. They watched; presently a wrist with a leather strap around it; then slowly and by degrees, a forearm, bare, enormous, hard as the club, corded with heavy muscles and covered with a thick fell of black hair, came after it. Then there was a final push, an oath, the door flew open, and two masked men burst into the room.
Three hours later, Perkins, a farmer who lived a quarter of a mile away, hearing an unusual sound in his front yard, took a lantern and went out.
In the grass heavy with dew, just inside his gate, he saw a woman's body, and going to it, he shed the rays of his lantern into the face of Bridget Flanagan. Her gray hair was matted, and her face was stained with blood; her clothes were torn and covered with the mud through which she had dragged herself along the roadside from her home. Perkins called and his wife came to the door, holding a lamp above her head, shading her eyes with her hand, afraid to go out. When he had borne Bridget indoors, Perkins took his two sons, his lantern and his shot-gun, and went across the fields to the Flanagans'. In the kitchen, bound and gagged, Margaret lay quite dead, her head beaten in by a club.
The two old women must have fought desperately for their lives. The robbers, for all their work, as Perkins learned when Bridget almost miraculously recovered, had secured twenty-three silver dollars, which the sisters had kept hidden in a tin can--the fatal fortune which rumor had swelled to such a size.
Perkins roused the neighborhood, and all night long men were riding to and fro between Lulu Corners and the city. A calm Sunday morning followed, and then came the coroner, the reporters and the crowds.
While the bell of the little Methodist church a mile away on the Gilboa Pike was ringing, Mark Bentley, the sheriff, dashed up behind a team of lean horses, sweating and splashed with mud from their mad gallop.
Behind him came his deputies and the special deputies he had sworn in, and, sitting in his buggy, holding his whip in a gloved hand, waving and flourishing it like a baton, Bentley divided into posses the farmers who had gathered with shot-guns, rifles, pitchforks, axes, clubs, anything, placed a deputy at the head of each posse and sent them forth.
Detectives and policemen came, and all that Sunday mobs of angry men were beating up the whole country for miles. Some were mounted, and these flew down the roads, spreading the alarm, leaving women standing horror-stricken in doorways with children whimpering in their skirts; others went in buggies, others plodded on foot. And all day long crowds of women and children pressed about the little house, peering into the kitchen with morbid curiosity. The crowd swelled, then shrank, then swelled again. The newspapers made the most of the tragedy, and under head-lines of bold type, in black ink and in red, they told the story of the crime with all the details the boyish imaginations of their reporters could invent; they printed pictures of the shanty, and diagrams of the kitchen, with crosses to indicate where Margaret had fallen, where Bridget had been left for dead, where the table and the stove had stood, where the door was; and by the time the world had begun a new week, the whole city was in the same state of horror and fear, and breathed the same rage and lust of vengeance that had fallen on Lulu Corners.
II
Four days before the Sunday of the tragedy Archie Koerner finished his year's imprisonment and passed from the prison within the walls to the larger prison that awaited him in the world outside. The same day was released another convict, a man aged at fifty, who had entered the prison twenty years before. The judge who had sentenced him was a young man, just elevated to the bench, and, intoxicated by the power that had come to him so early in life, had read the words, "twenty years," in the statute book, and, assuming as axiomatic that the words were the atonement for the crime the man had committed, without thinking, had pronounced these words aloud, and then written them in a large book.
From there a clerk copied them on to a blank form, sealed it with a gilt seal, and, like the young judge, forgot the incident. The day the man was released he could no longer remember what crime he had committed.
He was old and shattered, and had looked forward to freedom with terror.
Time and again he had asked his guard to report him, so that he might be deprived of his good time and have the day of release postponed. The guard, however, knowing that the man's mind was gone, had refused to do this, and the man was forced out into the world. Having no family, no friends and no home, he clung to Archie as to the last tie that bound him to the only life he knew. Archie, of course, considered him an incubus, but he pitied him, and when they had sold their railroad tickets to a scalper, they beat their way back to the city on a freight-train, Archie showing the old man how it was done.
At eleven o'clock on Friday morning they entered Danny Gibbs's saloon.
Archie was glad to find the place unchanged--the same whisky barrels along the wall, the opium pipe above the bar, the old gray cat sleeping in the sun. All was familiar, save the bartender, who, in fresh white jacket, leaned against the bar, a newspaper spread before him, and studied the form sheets that were published daily to instruct men how to gamble on the races.
"Where's Dan?" asked Archie.
The bartender looked at him superciliously, and then concluded to say:
"He's not here."
"Not down yet, heh?" said Archie. "Do you know a certain party called--" Archie glanced about cautiously and leaned over the bar, "--called Curly?"
The bartender looked at him blankly.