When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview
with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came
toward him. "Kenwick!" he cried, and held out his hand. "I thought you
never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity." It was Clinton
Morgan.
When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men
sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of
embarrassed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to
start the conversation, "I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long
time," the host apologized.
"You have," his caller agreed. "It's been more than a year, hasn't it?"
He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere
pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But
Kenwick was looking at him intently.
"You know--about it then?"
"Yes, we know all about it." Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his
hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. "And, by George,
Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my
heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's
a miracle!"
Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had
stopped short at that word "we." He reached down and picked a burnt
match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal
courtesy, "How is your sister?"
"Getting well, I believe. She has been----Well, this case of yours is a
most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but
particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with
great interest."
Kenwick looked at him incredulously. "How could you?"
The caller shifted his position uneasily. "Well, that's rather a long
story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And
that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house.
We've just got the old place fixed over, and,"--he glanced at his
watch,--"it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on
hand that----"
Kenwick cut in almost harshly. "Are you sure that your sister would care
to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be--well, afraid of me?"
Morgan laughed. "Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get
violent and begin throwing things around."
But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained
as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. "You don't
understand. Nobody can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this
experience." His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. "I
tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live
down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a
man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period
of----Well, I may as well out with the damned word--insanity."
"Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a
blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed
condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never
violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else."
"How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of hell,
wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that
restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've
spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you
think I'm a coward for not going at it more directly." He looked at his
companion with a defiant appeal in his eyes. "But there were reasons why
I didn't want to kick up a lot of notoriety about myself. For any harm
that ever came to man or woman through me, I'm eager to pay. No court
decision would have to make me do it; no court decision could keep me
from doing it. But I wanted to save my name if I could. I wanted to save
my name so that some time it might be fit----"
"I know." Clinton Morgan interrupted hastily. The memory of that
traitorous bit of paper which he had discovered in the gold and ivory
book came back to him and brought a guilty flush to his cheeks. Whether
he would or no, he seemed to hold in his own hands all the threads of
this tragic romance. A line of Marcreta's lyric drifted through his
brain:
Whence thy _uneasy_ spirit may depart?
How well that word had been chosen to describe and conceal the living
death which this man had suffered!
"You see," Kenwick went on, "I'm the spiritual counterpart of the Man
Without a Country. I don't belong anywhere. And, more than that, I'm a
charge on the public conscience. Everybody who knows about my period
of--of incompetency belongs to an unofficial vigilance committee, whose
duty it is to warn society against me."
Clinton groped for a reply, but words would not come. And the fact that
there was no bitterness in the other man's voice, but only the level
monotony which is achieved by long suppression, made it infinitely
pathetic.
"If it suited your whim to do so," Kenwick continued, "you might reverse
the usual order of dining; begin with pie and end with soup. And the
public would regard it either as a new cure for dyspepsia or an
eccentricity of genius. But if I should try it, somebody would
immediately suggest that I shouldn't be allowed at large. It's the irony
of fate that I, who have always had a contempt for the trivial
conventions of life (such a contempt that my sister-in-law never quite
trusted me in polite society), should now be in a cowering bondage to
them. I live all my days in a horror of doing something that might
appear erratic. And I spend the nights going back over every inch
of the road to see if I have. Why don't the adherents of the
fire-and-brimstone theory picture hell as a place where we can never act
on impulse? As a place which dooms us forever to a hideous
self-consciousness?"
Clinton Morgan spoke with a sort of angry championship. "You've had
tough luck, my boy, the toughest kind of luck. But you've come out of it
all right. By George, you can show the world now that you've come out on
top."
"I haven't come out; that's just the trouble. I'll never be out of the
woods until I've accounted for them. Did you read last night's paper,
Morgan?"
"Yes. That's one thing that brought me here. Let me tell you something,
Kenwick. Until about a week ago we thought you were dead. And we were
relieved, for we felt that it was a happy release for you; your only way
out. And then one day, not long ago, we got a clue." He still clung to
the plural pronoun. "We fell over a clue, you might say, which aroused
our suspicions--and we followed it down."
"You followed it down!" Kenwick cried. "You cared enough about it for
that?"
His friend's reply came through guarded lips. "You have suffered
horribly during these past months," he said. "But you are not the only
one who has suffered."
Kenwick glanced at him sharply. Then he seemed to sense the delicacy of
the other man's position. "It's just this," Kenwick explained after a
moment of silence. "Since this--this thing fell on me, I instinctively
divide all people into two classes; those who knew me before it
happened, and those who have only known me since. With the second group
I'm always wondering if they are still unsuspecting: with the first, I'm
wondering if they will ever be convinced. But go on with your story.
What did you do about the clue?"
"I'll tell you about that later. It's enough to say right now that
Richard Glover----"
"Glover!" The word seemed to explode from Kenwick's lips. He leaped to
his feet. "That's the name!" he cried. "That's the name that I've been
groping after for two days. Sometimes I almost had it and then it would
escape me. I had an idea fixed in my mind somehow that it began with a
'B.' Why, I saw that fellow at the theater the other night, Morgan. It
was a most curious thing, for as soon as my eyes lighted on him the
vacuum in my mind was suddenly filled. I remember traveling across the
continent with him. I remember my brother Everett introducing me to him
one day at home before I came West this last time. That's all I do
remember about him, but it sort of connects things in my brain. I wanted
to talk to him the other night and see if he couldn't help me clear
things up, but when I got down to his seat, he was gone. I don't know
whether he had recognized me too or not. But even so, I can't account
for his wanting to avoid me. I haven't got anything against him. I might
have thought the whole thing was a hallucination (for I never quite
trust my own senses now), but I had a reliable witness. Now what I want
to know is, why should Glover be afraid to meet me?"
"If you'll come up to the house," Morgan suggested again, "we may be
able to straighten out some of these things."
When they arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pine Street home, Clinton
lingered outside fussing with the engine of his car, and Roger Kenwick
went alone to meet Marcreta. He found her in the fire-lighted
living-room where he had parted from her, and she came to greet him with
that slow grace that he knew so well, and that seemed now to stop the
beating of his heart. But if either of them had expected the first
moments of reunion to melt away the shadows that lay between them, they
were disappointed. For the fires of memory burn deep. And the ghastly
suffering with which the two years of separation had been freighted had
left marks that were not to be obliterated by those words of carefully
casual welcome. In spite of their efforts at commonplace dialogue, they
spoke to each other in the subdued voices of those who converse in the
presence of death. By tacit consent they avoided, during the first
half-hour, all mention of the tragedy which had separated them.
"We've just had the house done over," Marcreta was saying as her brother
entered. "During the war it was a sanitarium, and although it has all
been retinted and there are new hangings everywhere, Clinton says it
still smells of anesthetics. I tell him it's only his imagination. Do
you get any odor of ether?"
"No," Kenwick answered.
He found talking horribly difficult. This woman, for whom his soul had
yearned, seemed now to be looking at him from across a deep chasm.
Between them stretched the bramble-bush; a tangle of underbrush; stark
sycamore-trees that rattled hideously in the winter wind; uprooted
madrone bushes stretching distorted claws heavenward in a mute appeal
for vengeance. And insistently now the question beat against his
brain--had he ever succeeded in crossing that ravine? Would he ever
really succeed in crossing it? With the clutch of desperation he clung
to the verdict of Dr. Gregson Bennet, as he had once clung for support
to those grim, high-backed chairs at Rest Hollow. He recalled having
once read the story of an ex-convict coming home after his release from
the penitentiary to meet that most crucial of all punishments; the eyes
of the woman that he loved. To his supersensitive soul, the stigma
attached to him was something that was worse than crime; a thing that
branded deeper and more indelibly. That it had come to him in the
discharge of duty weighed not a jot on his account-sheet. He told
himself that it had been a judgment. He had always been a worshiper of
intellect. It had seemed to him the one enduring possession. And now it
had proved itself even more ephemeral than physical health. As his eyes
rested upon her, unconscious of their own sadness, he knew all at once
that Marcreta understood and was trying to make it easy for him.
"The only way to make this easy for me," he heard himself saying
suddenly, "is to drag it out into the light. As long as the past lies
shrouded between us, we will never be able to forget it."
* * * * *
It was eleven o'clock when Kenwick went down the steps of the Morgan
home. He refused Clinton's invitation to ride back in the car. For he
wanted to walk, to walk on and on forever in the glorious starlight.
There were no stars. A gray fog had rolled in from the bay and spread
itself like a huge blotter across the heavens. But he was unaware of it.
Even the street lights, shining dimly as through frosted glass, seemed
to shed across his path a supernatural radiance. For although no word of
love had passed between him and Marcreta Morgan, he had come away from
that visit with a wild happiness surging in his heart. There had been no
effort to reëstablish life upon its old basis. Marcreta, with what
seemed to him an almost superhuman tact, had divined the ghastly
futility of such an endeavor. And instead she had conveyed to him, by
some indescribable method of her own, the assurance that she would
welcome, with unquestioning faith, the opening of a new and happier era.
As he had sat there in the comfort of that living-room, where on a
night, not long ago, he had caught a glint of a departed glory, desire
and something finer had struggled for supremacy in his soul. But
courageous self-analysis had driven home to him the realization that he
had Marcreta Morgan at a cruel disadvantage. Whether he would or no, he
had come back to her clothed in the appealing garments of tragedy. He
was a pensioner on her sympathy, and in her eagerness to restore to him
his lost heritage, she had unconsciously disarmed herself. The
temptation to cherish and set a jealous guard upon such an advantage has
overpowered men and women innumerable. Kenwick sensed the treacherous
sweetness of it flooding his heart like the seductive fragrance of some
rare perfume, and then in a sudden fury he tore himself free of it.
"By God! I haven't got as deep in as that!" he muttered, and was
unconscious that he said the words aloud. "I haven't sunk so deep that
I'd pull myself up that way!" He buttoned his overcoat about him
conscious for the first time of the chill breeze. Not yet, he reminded
himself sharply, not yet did he have the right to conquer.
As he took the intersecting street to cut the steep down-hill slope to
the hotel, he heard the echo of footsteps behind him. He quickened his
gait, impatient of any distracting element, and was instantly aware
that the other footsteps had quickened theirs. For half a block he
walked at a round pace. Then he stopped short and waited for the other
pedestrian to overtake him. A thick-set man in a black overcoat passed
him, slowed down to a creeping walk, and under the feeble light of the
corner street-lamp came to a halt. Kenwick glanced at him sharply, but
the man was a stranger to him. He passed on unaccosted, but as he was
stepping from the curb the stranger loomed up suddenly behind him.
"Stop!" he commanded.
Kenwick turned. A heavy hand was laid upon his arm. He stood waiting,
under the gleam of the bleary light, detained more by curiosity than by
the grip upon his arm. From the burly figure came a burly voice. "You
are Roger Kenwick."
It was not a question, but the other man gave it sharp-voiced response.
"Yes. What is it to you?"
"A good deal to me. I've been waiting for you. Some people wouldn't have
waited, but I'm a gentleman and I let you have your visit out with the
lady. We'll take, the rest of the walk together. Beastly night, isn't
it?"
Kenwick did not move, and his voice was more astonished than resentful.
"I think you've made a mistake in your man. You say you have been
waiting for me?"
The burly man began to walk slowly away and Kenwick fell into step
beside him. "Ye-a, I've been waiting for you. And even if I hadn't been,
I might have got suspicious a minute or so ago. Let me give you a tip
for your own good; don't talk to yourself in public. It's a bad habit
for anybody in your line of trade."
Kenwick stopped short. "What do you mean?"
"I mean, Mr. Kenwick, that you are under arrest."
The slanting pavement seemed suddenly to be moving of its own accord and
Kenwick felt it carrying him along as though he were on an escalator.
Then he heard himself ask dully, "What for?"
The officer looked bored. But he stood there waiting in grim patience
for his companion to regain the power of locomotion. "I asked you what
for?" Kenwick repeated sharply. "You've made a mistake, but you've got
to answer that question. If I'm going to be hauled into jail, the law
gives me the right to know why."
"Oh, cut it out!" the other admonished. "You're surprised all right;
they always are. But I'll say this for you, Mr. Kenwick, there's nothing
amateurish about your work. Plans all laid to make a quiet getaway East,
but no dodging around cheap lodging-houses for yours. Business as usual,
and friends kept happy and unsuspecting; everything strictly on the
level. You know as well as I do why I'm on your track. You're wanted for
murder--for the murder of Ralph Regan."