THE WOMAN WHO KNEW
June came with its gold-born days, its passionate bird-songs and scents
of roses, its shimmer of willow and pine and burnished lustre of
down-bent holly-leaves and its evening mists wreathing the tall garden
shrubs like wedding-veils. But the beauty and passion of the throbbing
season came to Echo with a sense of mockery.
The night of her return she had carried out her plan as regarded the
letters and her father had believed the package had arrived with his
mail. When a little later he had told her that Cameron Craig had sent
him the letter whose publication had been threatened, years had seemed
fallen from his shoulders. She had been content that he should deem
the act significant of the other's better nature emerging from the
slough of an ignoble temptation--satisfied to know that in his mind the
fact that it should have been one of the last acts Craig had performed
before the tragedy, had invested it with a quality of the fateful and
foreordained. Her own thought was absorbed with other things.
She had read avidly, though with unspeakable dread and loathing, the
newspaper accounts of the affair. The refusal of the arrested man to
tell his name or where he came from, or to explain in the slightest
detail--except brazenly to deny any part in it--the crime which had set
the city in which it had occurred agog, had been duly chronicled; but
the condition of the victim--since Cameron Craig was a power in the
community--had absorbed a greater part of the popular interest, and the
daily bulletins of his physicians had called forth far more comment
than the unknown criminal whom he had identified as the man who had
shot him. She had felt a great relief, also, in the knowledge that
Craig had declared that he had not known his feminine visitor; and
while the dread had inevitably lifted that when he discovered the loss
of the letters he might betray her, it had faded at length in the
certainty that, though he lived, the brain-injury had left him with
clouded consciousness. Day after day he had lain voiceless, the outer
injury gradually and surely yielding to the medicaments of healing, but
the brain lapsed into a semblance of vacuity, inert and unresponsive, a
mild phantom of the old Craig, the bodily functions become mere
mechanism, the mind blank and fallow, its inner hurt waiting a
diagnosis beyond the skill of local practitioners.
But though the secret Echo carried shut within her breast thus grew
less painful with the passage of time, another dread was slowly drawing
out of her heart its warmth and glow. This was the deeper hurt of
Harry Sevier's absence.
Going about her daily affairs she thought of him without ceasing. She
never drove through the streets that her gaze did not search the busy
pavements--never passed the building that held his office that her eyes
did not lift fearfully to its blank and blinded windows--never heard
the postman's brisk step on the porch that her heart did not beat
chokingly. Where had he gone? Chilly knew of no one who had received
a letter from him. Aunt Judy, his cook, was as ignorant as she. She
had even interviewed Suzuki, but it had been plain that the Japanese
could tell nothing.
The recollection of the bottle and the overturned glass she had seen in
his office recurred to her again and again, with all their bitter
suggestions of surrender, relapse and demoralisation. Could it be that
he had thrown away his hard-earned victory, hurled himself again into
the pit from which he had so painfully climbed, which now might hold
him forever? And coupled with this sickening thought came the
reflection: what if Harry should die, far away somewhere, perhaps in
some foreign country, without seeing her again, without ever knowing?
There were hours, too, when, woman-like, she wondered whether he had
cared so much: whether he had not found comfort in absence and given
his love elsewhere.
Her cheeks grew paler day by day, and in spite of herself her step
lagged and lassitude grew upon her. Often she felt her father's
anxious look and knew that her mother, in her stately and
undemonstrative way was deeply disturbed. She took without protest the
tonics Doctor Southall prescribed, but they brought little betterment,
and, as physicians will, he at length began to talk of a sea-trip. In
her growing apathy plans of this sort meant nothing to Echo, but she
believed Harry had gone abroad, and the chance that they might meet,
however slender it might be, called to her. When Mrs. Spottiswoode,
therefore, announced her annual migration to Paris for her winter's
wardrobe, it was arranged that Echo should make the voyage under her
chaperonage.
Meanwhile the date had arrived for Echo's usual summer's visit to Nancy
Langham in the neighbouring capital. Ordinarily a stay at the home of
the girl of whom she was so fond, would have been something to look
forward to with unmixed delight. Now, however, it had become a thing
to shrink from. To walk those streets--perhaps to see again the house
whose very memory had been such an anguish to her--she would gladly
have evaded this. But when Nancy's letters promised to pass from
pleading to epistolary tears, she at length yielded and late August
found her the Langhams' guest for a final weekend.
As she dressed, on the afternoon of her arrival, there was a tap at the
door and Nancy's voice said, "May I come in, dear? I want to see what
you are going to wear."
"Yes, come in. I'm almost ready."
Echo had chosen a gown of black _tulle_ with a gold rose at the
brocaded girdle and Nancy looked at her admiringly. "Gracious!" she
exclaimed. "That black--it positively sets your hair on _fire_! It
makes you so pale, though. Do put a little dab of pink on your cheeks,
Echo; you make me look positively lurid beside you!"
There was some truth in the comparison, for the younger girl was like a
wild-rose, quivering with life and colour. She took the hare's-foot
and came to Echo coaxingly. "Just a little tinge ... like that.
There! Now you are just perfect."
"Who's coming to tea, Nancy?"
"Oh, only a handful--Mrs. Moncure. You met her last year--and Mr.
Meredith: he's the District Attorney--and the Shirley boys: they're
very young and College-y--and five or six others. I only asked a few."
The Shirleys were first to appear and were followed by Mrs. Moncure, a
mellow, winy woman with a white gown that smacked of the _Rue de la
Paix_, and a complexion exquisitely made up. She greeted Nancy with a
smiling graciousness, nodded to the gentlemen, and sat down on the sofa
beside Echo.
"It was so sweet of Nancy to ask me to come," she said. "I've never
had half a chance to chat with you before, though we met last year at a
particularly stupid reception or something. This is so much more
home-y, isn't it?" She dropped into smalltalk, rippling and charming,
while Nancy poured the tea, and when Mr. Meredith presently arrived she
presented him.
"Our District Attorney," she announced. "The Terror of the Lawless!"
"Now don't tell me I look a terror!" said he, beseechingly to Echo.
"I'm a most mild-mannered man in private life, am I not, Mrs. Moncure?"
"I'm not sure yet whether I can give you a character," she answered.
"I haven't seen this year's subscription-list to my pet charity."
"Blackmail!" the other asserted indignantly. "I'll subpoena you all as
witnesses. And this is how I am treated for protecting you from
criminality!"
"I like _that_!" exclaimed Nancy wickedly. "When burglars hide in our
alcoves and jump out and shoot us when we're not looking! Poor Mr.
Craig! _I_ think you ought to be impeached, or impounded, or whatever
they call it."
He laughed. "You know of the Craig affair, of course, Miss Allen," he
said, turning.
Echo was glad for the touch of rouge on her cheeks. "Yes," she
answered. "Oh, yes." Her gaze was on the basket of tulips on the
tea-table, but she was really seeing Craig's smouldering black
eyes--the lowering brows--the ruthless clamped lips--as she had seen
his face in that moment of revealment in his study.
"The trial of the man who shot him opened to-day," continued Meredith.
He looked again at Nancy. "It's up to the police to prevent
burglaries, you see. My part comes after the burglars are caught. I
point the moral--as a deterrent to others still at large."
"I hope, then," said Mrs. Moncure, "that the moral will be well pointed
in this case. I didn't sleep for a week after it happened."
"I shall certainly try to get him the limit," declared the attorney.
"It'll be a long time before you need fear another midnight call from
him, Miss Langham. While you are at the matinee to-morrow, please
remember that I am vociferating frantically at the jury in your behalf.
I surely deserve a cup of tea for that, don't I?"
"Well, on consideration, perhaps you do," asserted Nancy judicially, as
she poured. "I'll relent."
She sat smiling, her dainty hand on the old silver urn, not observing
how the smile had been stricken from Echo's face. Meredith noted the
latter's strained look, however, and said, as he seated himself, "You
mustn't think we are prone to such melodramatics. We don't have them
often. This case is somewhat peculiar from the fact that the police
can't identify the man we are trying. We don't know who he is or what
is his record. For of course he has one."
"But," interposed Mrs. Moncure, "I thought criminals were always
photographed--don't they call it the 'Rogues' Gallery'?--and measured,
so they _could_ be identified."
"My dear lady," he replied, "for two years I've been trying to bring
this city up to date in that very thing. The state has the Bertillon
system, but it's in use only in the penitentiary, as a permanent
record. The data, however, should be taken when a criminal is
arrested, and there ought to be a system of exchange of these records
with all penal institutions. There would be no temptation then to turn
a bare-faced burglary, coupled with felonious assault, into a romantic
mystery, as this man's counsel, my friend, Mason, judging from the line
he took to-day, will try to do."
There was a pause, as he possessed himself of another scone.
"I wonder," said Mrs. Moncure, presently, "if we shall ever know who
she was--the woman who was with Craig when he was shot."
Meredith laughed a little. "I imagine it's not likely," he returned.
"He has declared once that he didn't know her, and we can all
understand her own passionate reticence on the subject!"
Mrs. Moncure smiled as she rose.
"Oh Sin! Oh Sorrow! and Oh Womankind! (she quoted)
How can you do such things and keep your fame,
Unless this world, and t'other too, be blind?
Nothing so dear as an unfilched good name!"
For Echo the smiling words were barbed and winged with a painful
significance. Again and again, as she chatted mechanically over the
tea-cups, they came back to her, coupled with the memory of the stories
she had heard of Craig--the whispered allusions made with shrugs and
lifted eye-brows.
As she lay in bed that night, she felt her hot cheeks flush through the
darkness. Could the world think that of her--if it knew?