For the first few minutes after Rainer had overtaken him, anxiety
for the lad had been Faxon's only thought. But as each laboring
step carried them nearer to the spot he had been fleeing, the
reasons for his flight grew more ominous and more insistent. No,
he was not ill; he was not distraught and deluded--he was the
instrument singled out to warn and save; and here he was,
irresistibly driven, dragging the victim back to his doom!
The intensity of the conviction had almost checked his steps. But
what could he do or say? At all costs he must get Rainer out of
the cold, into the house and into his bed. After that he would
act.
The snow-fall was thickening, and as they reached a stretch of the
road between open fields the wind took them at an angle, lashing
their faces with barbed thongs. Rainer stopped to take breath, and
Faxon felt the heavier pressure of his arm.
"When we get to the lodge, can't we telephone to the stable for a
sleigh?"
"If they're not all asleep at the lodge."
"Oh, I'll manage. Don't talk!" Faxon ordered; and they plodded on. ...
At length the lantern ray showed ruts that curved away from the
road under tree-darkness.
Faxon's spirits rose. "There's the gate! We'll be there in five
minutes."
As he spoke he caught, above the boundary hedge, the gleam of a
light at the farther end of the dark avenue. It was the same light
that had shone on the scene of which every detail was burnt into
his brain; and he felt again its overpowering reality. No--he
couldn't let the boy go back!
They were at the lodge at last, and Faxon was hammering on the
door. He said to himself: "I'll get him inside first, and make
them give him a hot drink. Then I'll see--I'll find an argument. ..."
There was no answer to his knocking, and after an interval Rainer
said: "Look here--we'd better go on."
"No!"
"I can, perfectly--"
"You sha'n't go to the house, I say!" Faxon furiously redoubled
his blows, and at length steps sounded on the stairs. Rainer was
leaning against the lintel, and as the door opened the light from
the hall flashed on his pale face and fixed eyes. Faxon caught him
by the arm and drew him in.
"It WAS cold out there," he sighed; and then, abruptly, as if
invisible shears at a single stroke had cut every muscle in his
body, he swerved, drooped on Faxon's arm, and seemed to sink into
nothing at his feet.
The lodge-keeper and Faxon bent over him, and somehow, between
them, lifted him into the kitchen and laid him on a sofa by the
stove.
The lodge-keeper, stammering: "I'll ring up the house," dashed out
of the room. But Faxon heard the words without heeding them: omens
mattered nothing now, beside this woe fulfilled. He knelt down to
undo the fur collar about Rainer's throat, and as he did so he
felt a warm moisture on his hands. He held them up, and they were
red. ...
V
The palms threaded their endless line along the yellow river. The
little steamer lay at the wharf, and George Faxon, sitting in the
veranda of the wooden hotel, idly watched the coolies carrying the
freight across the gang-plank.
He had been looking at such scenes for two months. Nearly five had
elapsed since he had descended from the train at Northridge and
strained his eyes for the sleigh that was to take him to Weymore:
Weymore, which he was never to behold! ... Part of the interval--
the first part--was still a great gray blur. Even now he could not
be quite sure how he had got back to Boston, reached the house of
a cousin, and been thence transferred to a quiet room looking out
on snow under bare trees. He looked out a long time at the same
scene, and finally one day a man he had known at Harvard came to
see him and invited him to go out on a business trip to the Malay
Peninsula.
"You've had a bad shake-up, and it'll do you no end of good to get
away from things."
When the doctor came the next day it turned out that he knew of
the plan and approved it. "You ought to be quiet for a year. Just
loaf and look at the landscape," he advised.
Faxon felt the first faint stirrings of curiosity.
"What's been the matter with me, anyhow?"
"Well, over-work, I suppose. You must have been bottling up for a
bad breakdown before you started for New Hampshire last December.
And the shock of that poor boy's death did the rest."
Ah, yes--Rainer had died. He remembered. ...
He started for the East, and gradually, by imperceptible degrees,
life crept back into his weary bones and leaden brain. His friend
was very considerate and forbearing, and they travelled slowly and
talked little. At first Faxon had felt a great shrinking from
whatever touched on familiar things. He seldom looked at a
newspaper, he never opened a letter without a moment's contraction
of the heart. It was not that he had any special cause for
apprehension, but merely that a great trail of darkness lay on
everything. He had looked too deep down into the abyss. ... But
little by little health and energy returned to him, and with them
the common promptings of curiosity. He was beginning to wonder how
the world was going, and when, presently, the hotel-keeper told
him there were no letters for him in the steamer's mail-bag, he
felt a distinct sense of disappointment. His friend had gone into
the jungle on a long excursion, and he was lonely, unoccupied, and
wholesomely bored. He got up and strolled into the stuffy reading-
room.
There he found a game of dominoes, a mutilated picture-puzzle,
some copies of Zion's Herald, and a pile of New York and London
newspapers.
He began to glance through the papers, and was disappointed to
find that they were less recent than he had hoped. Evidently the
last numbers had been carried off by luckier travellers. He
continued to turn them over, picking out the American ones first.
These, as it happened, were the oldest: they dated back to
December and January. To Faxon, however, they had all the flavor
of novelty, since they covered the precise period during which he
had virtually ceased to exist. It had never before occurred to him
to wonder what had happened in the world during that interval of
obliteration; but now he felt a sudden desire to know.
To prolong the pleasure, he began by sorting the papers
chronologically, and as he found and spread out the earliest
number, the date at the top of the page entered into his
consciousness like a key slipping into a lock. It was the
seventeenth of December: the date of the day after his arrival at
Northridge. He glanced at the first page and read in blazing
characters: "Reported Failure of Opal Cement Company. Lavington's
Name Involved. Gigantic Exposure of Corruption Shakes Wall Street
to Its Foundations."
He read on, and when he had finished the first paper he turned to
the next. There was a gap of three days, but the Opal Cement
"Investigation" still held the centre of the stage. From its
complex revelations of greed and ruin his eye wandered to the
death notices, and he read: "Rainer. Suddenly, at Northridge, New
Hampshire, Francis John, only son of the late. ..."
His eyes clouded, and he dropped the newspaper and sat for a long
time with his face in his hands. When he looked up again he
noticed that his gesture had pushed the other papers from the
table and scattered them on the floor at his feet. The uppermost
lay spread out before him, and heavily his eyes began their search
again. "John Lavington comes forward with plan for reconstructing
Company. Offers to put in ten millions of his own--The proposal
under consideration by the District Attorney."
Ten millions ... ten millions of his own. But if John Lavington
was ruined? ... Faxon stood up with a cry. That was it, then--that
was what the warning meant! And if he had not fled from it, dashed
wildly away from it into the night, he might have broken the spell
of iniquity, the powers of darkness might not have prevailed! He
caught up the pile of newspapers and began to glance through each
in turn for the headline: "Wills Admitted to Probate". In the last
of all he found the paragraph he sought, and it stared up at him
as if with Rainer's dying eyes.
That--THAT was what he had done! The powers of pity had singled
him out to warn and save, and he had closed his ears to their
call, had washed his hands of it, and fled. Washed his hands of
it! That was the word. It caught him back to the dreadful moment
in the lodge when, raising himself up from Rainer's side, he had
looked at his hands and seen that they were red. ...