As the men standing in the far aisle made way for the new witness,
Kenwick sat with averted eyes. Through the open window he stared out at
the court-house palms which grew to gigantic size and then diminished
under his blistering gaze. It was a monstrous thing, he told himself,
for Clinton Morgan to allow this; to permit his sister to subject
herself to such a strain. What could he be thinking about? But
underneath his miserable apprehension for her there was something else;
something else that sent the fiery blood rioting through his veins. For
she must have been willing. Over and over he repeated to himself this
assurance. She must have been willing to come to his defense, for had
she not been, they could have found a way to avoid it.
Marcreta Morgan, in long fur-trimmed motor-coat and dark veil, took the
place which Granville Jarvis had vacated. She had none of Madeleine
Marstan's calm self-assurance, but although she gave her testimony in a
low voice, it was distinctly audible throughout the court-room. She sat
with one gloved hand clasping the arm of the chair and her eyes resting
upon Dayton. Only once, at the very end of the examination, did she
raise them to meet the argus-eyed spectators. Dayton put his questions
in an easy conversational tone as though he and the witness were alone
in the room.
"Miss Morgan, how long have you known the prisoner?"
"About two years."
"Describe the occasion of your first meeting."
She did so in words that sounded carefully rehearsed.
"And after he left San Francisco to go East and visit his brother did
you ever hear from him?"
"Yes. He wrote frequently, telling me about his brother's recovery from
illness and other affairs, and then later that he had decided to enlist
in the army."
"At that time, Miss Morgan, had you ever known the State's witness here,
Richard Glover?"
"It was about that time that I first met him."
"Describe your first encounter with him."
Again the carefully prepared report. But she was gaining in
self-possession now, and the veil seemed to annoy her. With steady
fingers she reached up and removed it. Clinton Morgan, watching her
from the front row of seats, with a hawklike vigilance, was suddenly
reminded of that Sunday night in the old library when she had first
broken her long silence concerning Roger Kenwick, and had seemed all at
once to come into a belated heritage.
The jurymen were leaning slightly forward in their seats, their eyes
fixed upon the regal, fur-coated figure with delicately flushed profile
showing clear-cut as a cameo against the frosted window-pane. Dayton
thought that he caught an elusive fragrance that reminded him of
something growing in his mother's garden.
"And how many times," he proceeded, "how many times have you seen
Richard Glover during the past year?"
"I can't say exactly. For several months after our first meeting I
didn't see him at all. But during the last three months his calls have
been more and more frequent."
"Has your brother known of these visits?"
"My brother was in government service in Washington until about two
months ago. He didn't know of them until he returned."
"And has he approved of them?"
"No, I can't say that he has."
"Did he ever give any reason for his opposition?"
"He told me that he suspected Mr. Glover of being an adventurer who was
in need of----"
Here the district attorney interrupted. "We object. The suspicions of
another person are irrelevant, incompetent, and have nothing to do with
the case."
"Sustained," the judge decreed. "Stick to the facts, Mr. Dayton."
"During those three months, Miss Morgan, has Richard Glover made an
effort to induce you to marry him?"
Her reply was given in a very low voice, but Dayton was sure that the
jury caught it and he did not ask her to repeat. It was evident that the
audience heard it, too, for another murmur rose and trailed off into
silence before the lawyer went on. "Is it true that _you_ were the one
who discovered the clue which led you and your brother to seek the
services of Mr. Jarvis on this case?"
She acknowledged it with a single word.
"And what was that clue?"
The gloved fingers closed a little closer over the arm of the chair. And
then followed a story which caused Roger Kenwick to tear his gaze away
from the fantastic palm-trees and fix it upon Richard Glover's face.
There was no resentment in his eyes, but only the dawning of a great
light. Granville Jarvis, watching him as a physician might watch beside
the bedside of an unconscious patient, knew by the leaping flame in
those somber eyes that the last lap of the long journey had been
covered, and that Roger Kenwick's memory had come home to him. But if
that knowledge brought him a scientist's satisfaction, he gave no sign
of it. After that one intent moment, his eyes returned to the
witness-stand and fixed themselves upon Marcreta Morgan's face. Dayton
was proceeding relentlessly.
"If you knew from the first that Richard Glover had stolen this story
which he read to you as his own, why didn't you relate the circumstance
to Mr. Kenwick when you saw him on the night that he was arrested for
murder?"
The reply came haltingly, as though the witness were feeling her way
over uneven ground. "My brother and I had consulted Mr. Jarvis about
that and he had advised against it. He didn't wish to arouse any
suspicions in--in the prisoner's mind just then. And--well, you see, Mr.
Kenwick and I had not seen each other since his--illness and during
that first meeting we both avoided everything connected with--with the
tragedy as much as possible. Of course if we had known that this charge
of--of crime was to be preferred against him, I suppose we would have
acted differently."
This was no carefully rehearsed response, but nothing that she could
have said would have disclosed more clearly the inside workings of the
opposition's conspiracy. The web that had been woven around the prisoner
had enmeshed with him every one who had ever been intimately associated
with his past.
And now that romance had entered upon the sordid scene the whole aspect
of the case was changed. The air became charged all at once with an
electric current of sympathy. To every man and woman in the room Richard
Glover now appeared in the guise of a baffled adventurer, and Roger
Kenwick as a man who had loved, and because of cruel circumstance had
lost. But had he really lost? The crux of public interest shifted with
the abruptness of a weathercock, from mystery to romance.
"You assert, Miss Morgan, that you knew this story, 'A Brother of
Bluebeard,' to be the one which the prisoner had read to you before he
left for the East almost two years ago. What proof could you furnish of
this?"
"At the time that Mr. Glover read the story to me I had in my possession
the sequel to it, which Mr. Kenwick had sent me in manuscript for my
criticism, just before he left for training-camp. It used many of the
same characters and was rooted in the same plot."
"Could you produce that manuscript?"
"Mr. Jarvis can produce it. I turned it over to him."
The former witness leaned forward and laid a heap of pencil-written
manuscript upon the table. But Dayton scarcely glanced at it. With one
hand he pushed it aside, and then shifted the current of his interest
into another channel. "When, and by what means, Miss Morgan, did you
discover that Roger Kenwick had returned from France mentally disabled?"
Her reply to this question came in a voice that was struggling against
heavy odds for composure. "It was exactly one year ago to-day that I
received that news. Several letters of mine to--the prisoner were
returned to me unopened. And with them came a communication from Mr.
Everett Kenwick telling me that--that it had become necessary for them
to send his brother to a private asylum."
"Did you know where that asylum was?"
"Not then. He told me that he was debating over several different places
but that he had almost decided upon a friend's home in southern
California. He didn't tell me where this home was. I think he realized
that--that I would rather not know."
"And when did you discover that that place was Mont-Mer?"
"On the night that Mr. Kenwick was reported dead."
A murmur that was distinctly a wave of sympathy filled the chamber. But
eagerness to catch the next question quieted it.
"After that first letter telling you about the prisoner's misfortune,
did you ever hear from Mr. Everett Kenwick again?"
"Only once. Just a week before he died, he wrote again. He had just lost
his wife and he seemed to have a premonition that he was not going to
live very long."
She was feeling for her handkerchief in the pocket of the fur-trimmed
coat. Some of the men in the court-room averted their eyes. The face of
more than one woman softened. Clinton Morgan sat regarding his sister
with a curious composure. In his eyes was that mixture of compassion and
awe that he had worn on the night when the gold and ivory book had
betrayed to him her secret.
"Yes?" Dayton went on gently, but with the same relentless persistence.
"He wrote to you again? And what did he say?"
"He said that he wanted me to have something that had belonged--to his
brother. He told me that he felt that Roger Kenwick would have wished me
to have it. And with the letter there came a box in which I found----"
She had finished her search in the pocket of the motor-coat, and now she
held something between her gloved fingers. "Mr. Everett Kenwick himself
had only received it a short time before. There had been some delay and
confusion about it, owing I suppose to his brother having been sent
home--in just the way that he was. He himself never knew that he had won
it. But it was such a wonderful display of courage----And the French
officer whose life he had saved sent a letter, too, saying that France
was grateful and wanted to express her appreciation in some way so----"
And then she held it up before them; before the lawyers and the jury
and the crowd of spectators--a bit of metal on its patch of ribbon.
Holding it out before them, she sat there like a sovereign waiting to
confer a peerage. And not the judge's gavel nor the commanding voice of
the district attorney could still the tumult that rose and swelled into
tumultuous applause.
* * * * *
On the day following the notorious Kenwick murder trial, the Mont-Mer
papers carried little other news. A special representative from the "San
Francisco Clarion" and several Los Angeles journalists fed their copy
over the wires and had extras out in both cities by eight o'clock.
"Kenwick Acquitted" was the head-line which his own paper ran, with his
picture and one of Richard Glover sharing prominence upon the front
page. And because of Kenwick's previous connection with this daily and
the fact that the two star witnesses for the defense were well known in
the Bay region, the "Clarion's" story was the most comprehensive and
colorful.
It opened with a report of Dayton's speech which, it appeared, had
electrified every one in the court-room, including the prisoner himself.
But it had been unnecessary for the attorney to make a plea for his
client, after the quietly dramatic testimony of the last witness for
the defense. In thrilling terms the "Clarion" described Kenwick's final
service at the front, when he had made his way alone across
No-Man's-Land and saved for France one of her most gallant officers, and
had given in exchange that thing which is more precious than life
itself. Only through an accident, which had killed the man who had meant
to batten upon his misery, had he been released from a pitiable bondage.
Having thus sketched in his "human interest," the reporter proceeded to
tell the story which had proved so overwhelmingly convincing to the jury
and audience. How, in his skilfully planned narrative, Richard Glover
had transposed the identities of the two dead men. How, upon receiving
his commission from Everett Kenwick, he had first turned over his charge
to Ralph Regan, admitted by his own sister to be an addict to drugs and
a ne'er-do-well whom she was helping, in a surreptitious way, to
support. How the accounts, forwarded from the Kenwick lawyer in New
York, showed that Regan must have received out of the arrangement only
his living and enough of the drug to keep him satisfied but not wholly
irresponsible. How, upon his own infrequent visits to the patient (whom
he himself had conducted across the continent instead of the mythical
Bailey) Glover had foreseen two months before the tragedy that Regan
could no longer be relied upon and had told him that he was about to be
dismissed.
How he had then secured the services of one Edward Marstan, whom he
believed to be without family, and who represented himself as a
physician in good standing but heavily in debt. How the arrangement had
been made that he assume charge of the patient at the Mont-Mer depot,
whither Kenwick was to be brought up from a day's sojourn in Los Angeles
by Regan. How the physician, accompanied by his wife, had arrived from
San Francisco that very day; how Marstan had quarreled with his wife,
and leaving her unconscious in a room at Rest Hollow, had gone into town
to get his charge. How, on the way out from town he had been killed in
an accident while driving his own car, and how, by a curious fate,
Kenwick had been restored to sanity and had found his way back alone to
his former asylum.
The story then went on to relate how Ralph Regan, evidently desperate
over his loss of a home and drug supplies, had returned to Rest Hollow
by stealth the following night, either to make a plea to the new
caretaker or to search for drugs, and of how, finding the house dark and
apparently deserted, he had forsaken all hope of reinstatement and had
ended his life with the revolver which he had brought either for murder
of Marstan or for suicide. The shot which he fired, the paper stated,
had evidently been used to test his own nerve or the cartridges; and it
had done its work. Letters written to his sister a few weeks before the
tragedy, and produced by her in court, indicated a depression amounting
to acute melancholia.
Recalled to the witness-stand and subjected to crucial
cross-examination, the gardener at Rest Hollow had broken down in his
testimony, admitted that he was afraid of Glover, and that although he
had been in too dazed a condition on the fatal night to examine the body
of the dead man, he knew Ralph Regan to have been the former attendant
and had frequently talked to him about the patient's symptoms, about
which Regan appeared to know little and care less.
The narrative then went on to tell how Richard Glover had discovered
among the possessions of his charge certain manuscripts which he deemed
suitable for publication, and how he had, after the death of the elder
Kenwick, sold one of them under the name of Ralph Regan, choosing a
real rather than a fictitious name in order that he might shift the
theft to helpless shoulders if it were ever discovered. How he had, with
the Kenwick capital entrusted to him, invested in large realty holdings
which had completely absorbed his attention. How he had padded his
accounts in order to wring extra money from Everett Kenwick under the
guise of "special treatments" for the patient and so on. How on the
night of the fatality he had driven to Rest Hollow from Los Angeles to
give some final instructions to the new employee, and how, stumbling
upon the dead body of Regan, he had been shocked to find himself
involved in a tragedy. How he had then cold-bloodedly decided to have
the body identified as Kenwick, partly to save himself from the charge
of criminal neglect and partly because he knew that Everett Kenwick had
left in his will a bequest that was to come to him "for faithful
service" upon the death or recovery of his brother. How, not dreaming
that his charge would ever recover, he had thus used his death as a
means of gaining extra funds which he badly needed just at that time.
How he had accordingly selected certain of the patient's personal
possessions with which he had been entrusted, to deceive the coroner.
How all the subsequent action had seemed to play into his hands: the
coroner's easy acquiescence in the suicide theory and the identity of
the body; the chance discovery, through Arnold Rogers, that the story of
Kenwick's self-destruction had already been accepted by the community.
How, preceding the coroner's inquest, Glover had spent the morning
tracing the antecedent action of the tragedy and had heard of the
accident which had killed Marstan. How he had erred in suspecting that
the real victim of the tragedy was Kenwick and that the attendant had
had the body identified as his own and then made his escape, fearing to
communicate the news of the disaster to his employer. How he, Glover,
had been startled to discover later that Kenwick was not only alive but
had apparently recovered his mental health.
The remainder of the story was given as the testimony of Madeleine
Marstan, well-known favorite in the former Alcazar stock company, and
Granville Jarvis, expert psychologist, whose skilful work was a strong
plea for the admission of that newest of the sciences into court-room
procedure.
During this latter testimony, the "Clarion" asserted, interest had been
divided between the ultimate fate of the accused and the valuable
contributions which the laboratory experiments of the witness had given
the case. The word-tests which he had provided to the medium were, he
had explained, one of the surest means of discovering the train of
associations which lodge in the guilty mind. He had never been convinced
that Glover himself had committed a murder, but suspected that his crime
lay in trying to fasten it upon a man whom he knew to be both innocent
and helpless. The cards, containing a mixture of irrelevant and relevant
words, had been shown him and then he had been instructed to turn his
head in the opposite direction. These instructions he had carefully
observed except in the cases of terms which held evil associations. In
such cases his eyes almost invariably turned back to the card with the
printed word. Such terms as "gravel" and "oleander" had produced this
attraction. But they had also aroused his suspicions. And from the day
of his first call upon "Madame Rosalie" the situation between them had
been a succession of clever manoeuvers. Neither one of them had dared
to let the other go. But in this encounter Mrs. Marstan had had the
advantage. What he was able to find out about her was little compared
with what she had discovered concerning him.
That she possessed unmistakable psychic powers could not be disputed. By
a means of communication, which she could not herself explain, she had
received at the time of Roger Kenwick's interview with her a message
from the spirit of Isabel Kenwick, confessing that it was she who had
unwittingly brought Richard Glover into his life, and entreating his
forgiveness.
As to the concluding story of the actress, it was concerned with her
description of how she had identified the body of her husband at the
morgue on the evening of her flight from Rest Hollow; of how she had
turned all arrangements for its shipment and burial over to the Mont-Mer
and San Francisco undertakers, desiring to figure as little as possible
in connection with the death of the man who had ruined her life. Of how
she had succeeded in paying the debts against his name and had recently
signed a stage contract with an eastern theatrical company.
When the trial was ended the crowd that jammed the room rose and surged
toward the man in the prisoner's box, like a human tidal wave. "Keep
them back, Dayton," Kenwick implored. "I don't want to talk to them."
Somehow his attorney managed to check the onrush, and the throng of
congratulatory spectators was headed toward the exits. The room was
almost empty when some one touched the prisoner's arm.
"Can you give me a few words?" It was one of the local reporters.
"You're a newspaper man yourself, Mr. Kenwick, and you know how it is
about these things."
Kenwick shook him off. "Come around later, to the hotel, if you like,"
he said, and turned to take a hand that was timidly held out to him.
"I didn't know whether you'd be willing to speak to me or not, Mr.
Kenwick. But I just wanted to tell you that I'm satisfied, more than
satisfied with--the way it has all come out."
"I am glad to hear that, Mrs. Fanwell," Kenwick told her gravely. "I
would never have been quite satisfied myself unless I had heard you say
that. I wish you would leave your address with Dayton, for, you see, I
feel a little bit responsible for you, and I would like to put you in
the way of getting a new hold on life."
The only other person in the room with whom he stopped to talk was
Madeleine Marstan, who stood in conversation with Dayton near the door.
To her his words of thanks were the more eloquent perhaps because they
came haltingly, impeded by an emotion which he could not master.
"It was nothing," she told him. "Nothing that I didn't owe you, Mr.
Kenwick."
"I don't see that you owed me anything," he objected. "As the affair has
developed, we were both the victims of an ugly plot. It certainly was
not your fault. And once out of that accursed house, _you_ were free."
"Not my fault--no," she repeated, "but my responsibility afterward." She
gazed past him out of the window where, at the curb, Arnold Rogers was
assisting a fur-coated figure into the Paddington limousine. "You see,
Edward Marstan was my husband and----Well, some day you may come to
realize, Mr. Kenwick, that when a woman has loved, there is no such word
as 'free.'"
At the foot of the stairway Kenwick spoke with an almost curt
suppression to Granville Jarvis. "I'm going over to the hotel with
Morgan. Come over there."
The other man made no reply save a slight inclination of his head, and
there was in his eyes an expression which haunted and mystified the
released prisoner.
"Jarvis is a wizard," he said to Clinton Morgan as they walked the few
short blocks to Mont-Mer's leading hostelry. "If they ever let down the
bars of the court-room to men like that, they'll revolutionize legal
procedure. He seems to have seen this case from every angle."
"From more angles than you imagine," his friend replied. "And he had let
me in on some of the most interesting of his findings that were not
revealed in court. For instance, he examined that gardener this morning,
just for his own satisfaction. The boy was willing, even flattered by
the attention. Jarvis told me afterward that a witness like that ought
to be ruled out of court. And he is typical of the mass of men and women
who assist in acquitting the guilty and sending the innocent to the
gallows. The average physician examining him would pronounce him normal.
He can hear a sound distinctly, for instance, but he is afflicted with
that common defect, the equivalent, Jarvis says, of color-blindness in
the visual realm, which makes it impossible for him to tell whether the
sound comes from behind or in front of him. And he lacks completely a
visual memory. He could recall the exact words that Gifford said to him
on the night of the suicide but he couldn't remember whether the body
was covered or uncovered when he saw it. And as for the tests with
Glover----By the way, what are you going to do with Glover?"
"I don't know yet. I haven't got that far. I think I can forgive him
everything except that infamous story about Everett being close with me
while I was under age. Why, I had too much money while I was in college,
Morgan. That's the chief reason why I didn't push my literary work with
greater zeal. The creative temperament is naturally indolent. It
requires a spur, not necessarily a financial one, but so much the better
if it is. Of course Glover and I will have to have a financial
reckoning. I can see now why my frantic messages to our family lawyer
were never answered. I suppose he's had dozens of communications from
people purporting to be connected by blood or marriage with the Kenwick
estate. Yes, Glover has got some things to answer to me for, but----"
His mind flew back to that last evening that he had spent in the
fire-lit living-room on Pine Street. "He brought hell into my life for a
time," he ended slowly. "But he brought--something else into it, too."
It was half an hour later, after Kenwick had bathed and dressed for
dinner, that Granville Jarvis came up to his room. Kenwick admitted him
with an inarticulate word of greeting. Then while with fumbling fingers
he put on a fresh collar, he made an attempt at normal conversation.
"Been expecting you," he said. "Morgan is down in the lobby. We'll all
have dinner here first and then----"
"Can't do it," Jarvis cut in. "I have another engagement for dinner, and
I'm leaving town on the eight-forty northbound. I just ran up to say
good-by and--good luck."
"Where are you going?"
Jarvis smiled. "To Argentina, so far as you are concerned. But you can
call it Columbia if you like. I'm returning to my work there. You see,
I've been away on leave."
"You've got to stay long enough for me to tell you something," Kenwick's
voice cut in authoritatively. "But you couldn't stay long enough,
Jarvis, for me to thank you for what you've done."
His caller held up a hand. "Please don't. Not that--please."
"But," Kenwick went on, "you've got to hear an apology. I was just about
on the verge of a collapse over there, and when you got up in court as
the representative of Glover----Well, I didn't know the game, you see
and I thought----"
"I know; Brutus." It was Jarvis who finished the sentence. "And in a
sense, you were right," he went on slowly. "For what I did, I did--not
for you."
"You did it for science, of course; because to you I was an interesting
case. But what can I ever do to repay you? How can----"
"I have been paid." The same haunting, baffling expression was in the
scientist's eyes, and he was not looking at the man whom his testimony
had freed.
"Oh, I don't mean money!" Kenwick cried hotly. "I know you have that!"
"I don't mean money, either." He forced his gaze back to his host. And
then that sixth sense which is in the soul of every creative artist
awoke in Kenwick's being and made his eyes luminous with understanding.
Jarvis picked up his hat from the chair into which it had dropped. "I'm
going out to the Paddingtons' for dinner," he said casually. "I'll have
about----" He snapped open the cover of his watch, then closed it again.
"The most devilish thing about life on this planet, Kenwick, is that we
can't do very much for each other. The game is largely solitaire. But
for any good that I ever did I've been well repaid. Any man ought to be
satisfied, I think, when the gods allow him two full hours--in Utopia."