you should wish to see me, Mr. Hartridge. You have been told that I am
still determined to exact an eye for an eye in the matter of bringing
certain criminals to justice, and you would like to forestall your
arrest as an accessory. Am I right?”
At this the quaint smile became quizzical. “Partly; but only partly.
Have you taken any steps as yet?”
“I have. After a good bit of trouble and expense I have at last
succeeded in tracing the man Morgan McNabb. He is under arrest in
Dallas, Texas, and I shall have him brought back as soon as the
necessary papers can be obtained.”
“And your object in bringing him back?”
“Is to make him give the name of the man who hired him to put
the dynamite under my drilling plant. That man is going to the
penitentiary, Mr. Hartridge, if any effort of mine can send him there.”
The schoolmaster removed his spectacles to polish them, and for a time
sat staring with unshielded eyes into the heart of the coal fire in the
grate.
“You have all the precedents on your side,” he admitted at length.
“It is your right to prosecute if you choose to do so. Yet I venture
to predict that you will be exceedingly sorry if you bring Morgan
McNabb to Tennessee and extort his confession--a confession which will
necessarily be made public. Besides, there is a much easier way in
which you can apprehend his principal.”
“Are you willing to indicate the way?” snapped Tregarvon.
“Not altogether willing; no. You are at heart a much flintier young
man than you appeared to be when we first met, Mr. Tregarvon. It is an
inheritance from some one of your Cornish forebears, I imagine. But I
have allowed myself to be overpersuaded. You have your car here?”
“Yes.”
“I shall ask you to drive me. Will you trust me that far?”
Tregarvon rose, smiling grimly. “I shall have you for my hostage. If
you are about to have me ambushed, I shall make you share my risk. Do
we go at once?”
Hartridge limped to a closet and found his overcoat, and Tregarvon
helped him to put it on. Then he gave the temporary cripple an arm
through the laboratory corridor and down the stair. At the steps he
lifted Hartridge bodily into the mechanician’s seat of the car. As yet
there had been no hint given of their destination, but when he took his
place behind the wheel Tregarvon asked for driving directions.
“Westward, on the cross-mountain road,” was the brief reply, and
no other word was exchanged until the swiftly driven machine was
approaching the intersection of the cross-road with the west-brow pike.
Then Hartridge said: “To your left,” and Tregarvon had a sudden sinking
of the heart. A mile away he could see the lights of Westwood House,
and a great fear rose up to unsteady his hand as he made the turn out
of the cross-road.
Tregarvon’s fear was realized in some measure when, at Hartridge’s
direction, the car made a second left-hand turn into the Westwood
grounds and was brought to a stand before the door of the old mansion.
“I have obeyed you blindly thus far,” he said, as he was lifting
Hartridge out of the car. “But now you must tell me. Is it Judge
Birrell?”
“Wait,” said the schoolmaster, and Tregarvon helped the lame man up
the steps and steadied him while he groped for the knocker. Before he
could knock, the door opened silently under the hand of the judge’s
daughter, and Tregarvon again gave Hartridge an arm to help him over
the threshold.
Though the hall was but dimly lighted he saw at once that there had
been a pitiful change in Richardia. There was the shadow of a deep
grief in her eyes when she greeted him, and the hand that she gave him
was nerveless and cold. He had never seen her in black before, and
that, and the chill of the great hall and the grave silence of his car
companion, made him feel as if he had entered a house of mourning.
Without a word in explanation the changed Richardia led him to the
stair and signed to him to precede her. Tregarvon hesitated only long
enough to see that the professor was hobbling away toward the lighted
library. Then he stood aside and slipped an arm under Richardia’s.
“They hadn’t told me you had been ill,” he said reproachfully; and as
they went up together the nearness of her set his blood afire and for
the moment he forgot the scene in the deep wood timing itself in the
Sunday afternoon of revealment.
At the stairhead a door stood ajar, with the flickering light of an
open fire in the room beyond shining through the narrow opening. With
a quick premonition that a tragedy was about to be revealed, Tregarvon
followed his guide into the room. It was a huge chamber, spacious
enough to belittle the few pieces of old-fashioned furnishings, and
in the great four-poster bed lay a young man with an arm in a sling
and his bandaged head propped high among the pillows. Though the face
of the sick man was haggard and emaciated, Tregarvon recognized it
instantly. It was the face of the handsome young fellow who had kept
the Sunday afternoon tryst with Richardia.
It was only natural that he should be checked by a sudden feeling of
antagonism, but before it could find expression it was swallowed up in
an astoundment too great to be measured. Richardia had led him to the
bedside and she was saying quietly: “Mr. Tregarvon has come, brother.
Shall I leave him alone with you?”
The sick man roused himself with an effort that was plainly
distressful. “Yes,” he said shortly. And after Richardia had gone:
“I’m the man you’re looking for.”
Tregarvon dragged a chair to the bedside and sat down. In the rush of
conflicting emotions one exultant fact was hammering itself into his
brain and dominating all others: Richardia’s secret had not been her
lover’s secret; it was her _brother’s_. In the turmoil of readjustment,
it was inevitable that the generous impulses of former days--the days
before the _débâcle_--should come swiftly to the surface.
“I’m glad to be here, Mr. Birrell; and that is entirely apart from
anything you may be going to tell me,” he said quickly. “Are you quite
sure you are able to talk?”
“I’ve got to talk; it’s up to me now. Sister told me a little while
ago that you had caught Morgan McNabb; that you’re going to have him
brought back here so that you can give him the third degree. I’m the
man you want. Morgan did only what I made him do.”
Tregarvon was beginning to understand a little. “Perhaps you’d better
tell it all, if you feel equal to it,” he suggested soberly. Then he
added: “I’m not going to be your judge, Mr. Birrell.”
The sick man rocked his head on the pillows.
“You won’t understand; I couldn’t make anybody understand. But it’s got
to be told. Do you know what that crook Parker did to my father?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“Yes; all of it.”
“Well, it made a devil of me. I was only a kid then, but it seemed as
if I grew to be a man between two days. I tried to kill Parker. Maybe
you know that, too.”
“Yes; I have heard about it.”
“He didn’t die; and he spent his money like water until he got me
indicted. Then I broke my father’s heart by showing the yellow
streak--running away. I’ve been hid out down in Arizona ever since, but
I always meant to come back and stand the gaff some day.”
“Go on,” said Tregarvon gravely.
“I didn’t come back by the railroad. The yellow streak showed up again,
and I dodged the sheriff by walking in over the mountain from Piketown.
The McNabbs hid me out in the ‘Pocket.’ They told me you were Parker’s
man, and that you had come to finish what he’d begun. Afterward they
told me you were making love to my sister, and that settled it.”
“I see,” said Tregarvon. Then: “Why didn’t you come out in the open
like a man and find out a few things for yourself?”
“I couldn’t. The indictment was still hanging over me; as it is yet.
And I was crazy mad. I swore I’d run you out of the country or kill you
if you didn’t go. I made Morgan McNabb help me. He’d been mixed up in a
feud years ago and had ambushed a man, and I was the only one who knew
it. I told him I’d give him away if he didn’t help me run you off.”
“Your sister knew you had come back?”
“Yes; but she didn’t know anything else. She thought I was afraid to
show myself on account of the old trouble--as I was. She was trying to
fix things so that I could come back here to my father and Westwood
House. I did come, but they brought me on a stretcher. Somebody set
the leaves afire that night in the old negro burying-ground, and the
dynamite went off and caught me while I was trying to stamp the fire
out. The jig’s up now. All you’ve got to do is to send for the sheriff.”
Tregarvon saw that it was time to intervene. The sick man’s breath was
coming in gasps and his face was livid.
“You mustn’t try to talk any more now,” he said, rising and taking the
thin hand that was so much like Richardia’s in his own. “For a good
many reasons you have nothing to fear from me. Of course, you know now
that I am in no sense Parker’s representative. So far from it, the
papers are already drawn which will restore to your father and his
friends the property that Parker stole from them. I meant to do that
from the first, if I should be lucky enough to find the coal.”
The grip of the thin fingers tightened upon the hand of reassurance.
“My God!” breathed the prodigal, “and I’ve been trying to kill you!
Mr. Tregarvon, can you go one step farther and--and turn Morgan McNabb
loose? That’s what made me frame it up with sister and Hartridge and
Mr. Carfax to bring you here to-night.”
“McNabb will not be brought back; I promise you that. Shall I send your
sister up to you?”
“Not--not right now; tell her to play something; something low and soft
that’ll make the devil let me alone. I want to think. I--I reckon I’m
willing to go to the convict camps now for trying to square up with
Parker; I reckon I _ought_ to go!”
Tregarvon went out softly, closing the door behind him and groping his
way down the stair. Richardia was waiting for him in the hall below,
as he hoped she would be, and she led him across to the drawing-room
where there were lights and a wood-fire purring and crackling in the
big stone fireplace.
“Tell me,” she entreated.
“There is nothing to tell--nothing that you haven’t already guessed.
I am completely disarmed, as you knew I would be. I have assured your
brother that he has nothing to fear from me.”
“It has been very dreadful,” she said, moving aside to hold her hands
out to the fire.
“How badly was he hurt in the explosion?”
“So badly that it is only within the past few days that we have dared
to hope. Mr. Carfax hasn’t told you?”
“Not a word. Your secret has been guarded very carefully.”
“But now it is a secret no longer. If he gets well it will only be to
face a trial for the attempt upon Mr. Parker’s life.”
“Nothing will come of that,” Tregarvon predicted confidently. “Parker
is dead; he died suddenly in his New York office a few days ago. And no
twelve Tennesseeans could ever be found who would convict your brother
for trying to avenge his father’s wrongs.”
“We are your poor debtors--all of us,” she went on. “You are heaping
coals of fire on our heads, and--and they _burn_! Of course, you know
now that I was my brother’s accomplice?”
“I know nothing of the sort; of course, you were not!”
“But I was--in a way. All along, I feared that it was he who was
making, or at least planning, all the trouble you were having. He was
_so_ bitter!”
Tregarvon nodded complete comprehension. “I knew you were anxious about
somebody; I thought, at first, that it was Hartridge, and later that it
was your father. You have had a heavy burden to carry; and I have been
doing what I could to make it heavier.”
“You have,” she said quite frankly.
He did not affect to misunderstand.
“You knew all the time that Poictiers and Elizabeth were held apart
only by Elizabeth’s engagement to me?”
“I guessed it. But that didn’t excuse you for--for----”
“For making love to you? I know it didn’t. But I had my punishment
the Sunday afternoon when you met your brother in the wood above the
‘Pocket.’ I had gone out to meet Hartridge, and I saw you two together.
I took it for granted that the man was your lover who, for some
reason, couldn’t come here to Westwood House to meet you.”
“Others took it for granted, too, and I did not deny it--for Richard’s
sake.”
“Is his name Richard?”
“Yes; Richard and Richardia. My father named us so, after a brother and
sister of his own who were twins.”
Tregarvon glanced at his watch. There were other things to be
said--many of them, but a suddenly recrudescent sense of the fitness of
things told him that the moment was unauspicious.
“I suppose I’ll have to consider Hartridge and take him back to
Highmount,” he offered. Then he added quite irrelevantly: “He’s in love
with you, too. Speaking of accomplices, how much or how little did he
have to do with the bushwhacking?”
“Nothing at all. It was only on the day of the explosion that he
learned that Richard had come back, and was hiding with the McNabbs in
the ‘Pocket,’ and heard, through Sill McNabb, that something was going
to happen that night at your drilling plant. He suspected Richard at
once, and went over to try to prevent the happening. Then your men
caught Morgan McNabb, and Professor Billy hardly knew what to do. He
guessed that Tryon had come over here after you and Mr. Carfax, and
when you took father back with you he was afraid Morgan would be made
to confess, and so make a bad matter infinitely worse. His idea in
lighting the leaf fire was to give Morgan McNabb a chance to escape. Of
course, he supposed the dynamite had been removed.”
“It has been a tragedy of errors from the beginning,” said Tregarvon
soberly. “But I am going to expiate my part of it. Has Poictiers told
you anything about my plans?”
“No.”
“I made them while I was lying in bed in the old office-building at
Coalville, trying to get well enough to crawl out and take hold with my
hands. It came to me then what an egregious ass I had made of myself,
all the way round. I had blundered in ahead of Poictiers and didn’t
have sense enough even to suspect it; and I had deliberately killed any
little regard you might have had for me by showing myself up as a man
who would make love to one woman while he was engaged to another. I was
eaten up with shame, Richardia, and I am yet.”
“It hurt me; I think you will never know how much it hurt,” she said
slowly. “A man asks utter and absolute loyalty of the woman he loves.”
“And the woman can ask no less of the man, you would say. That
is true. I am no defender of the double standard; still less an
apologist for my sex. I have only one excuse, Richardia; it wasn’t
merely propinquity--as you and Poictiers seemed to think. I had never
known what love was until I met you. Elizabeth is going to marry
Poictiers, and you must believe me when I say that I think just as
much of her--and in the same way--as I did before. But let that pass.
I had found my coal mine, and had lost pretty nearly everything else,
including my own self-respect. You were lost to me; doubly lost, as I
thought then; so it seemed that the only thing for me to do was to set
the Ocoee house in order, and after that was done to go away and try to
forget.”
“You are still meaning to go away?”
“Yes. I meant to stay long enough to make somebody suffer for the
bushwhackings, but that is past. I have sent for Peters, our family
lawyer, and when he comes we shall settle the property affair.
Three-fifths of the stock in the mine will go to my mother and sister,
and the remainder will be turned over to your father to be distributed
among the Parker victims. This is what I have been meaning to do all
along, if I should be fortunate enough to discover the coal.”
She shook her head. “You are reckoning without my father. He won’t take
the money.”
“He must be made to take it. It is only just and fair. When it comes to
that, you must help me, Richardia; for his sake and for your brother’s.”
“Poor Dick!” she murmured. “He needs a friend much more than he needs
the money; some one who would care enough for him to stand by and hold
him up to the best there is in him. There _is_ good in him; you may not
believe it now, but there is, really--lots of it.”
“I can very readily believe it, since he is your brother and the son of
your father. And he has proved it to-night by climbing into the breach
for McNabb. He will have his chance on the Ocoee, and Wilmerding will
be his friend.”
“Then you are determined to go away?”
“Yes. I owe it to you and to everybody else, not less than to myself.
But some day, Richardia, after I have done penance for the sin of
loving you before I had a right to I am coming back. But I had
forgotten; your brother wished me to ask you to play for him; something
that would drive the devil away. He said he wanted to think.”
She went to the piano at once. Alone among the old-fashioned house
furnishings it was modern; an artist’s instrument, full-toned and
responsive. Tregarvon sank into an armchair before the blazing logs and
gave himself up to the quiet ecstasies of the music-lover. From the
first her playing had stirred him as no other chamber-music ever had.
For a time he knew that she was improvising; then there were gentle
themes from Mendelssohn, shading one into another so deftly that he
could never mark the changes. And at the last there was the Chopin
nocturne.
While the closing chords of the night-song were still lingering in the
air she came to sit in a chair at the opposite corner of the hearth.
“You played the Chopin for me; was that your way of telling me that I
might come back some day, Richardia?” he asked quite humbly.
Her hands were clasped over one knee and her gaze was fixed upon the
blue and yellow flames in the great fireplace, when she said softly:
“You are very human--and very blind; so blind that you haven’t seen
that I have had to fight for two--for myself no less than for you. And
there have been times when--when I almost _hated_ Elizabeth!”
The Tregarvon blood was not sluggish; at least, he had never found it
so before; but for the moment he was like a man stricken suddenly dumb.
Then the gift of speech came back, laboring as it could in the turmoil
of new ecstasies.
“_You had to fight for two_; God help me, Richardia--if I had known
that----”
She rose quickly and came to stand beside his chair.
“If you had known it, you would have been the strong one, Vance, dear.
I know it; I knew it all the time; but I--was afraid--to trust--myself.
You are not going away, now, are you?”
There was the sound of an opening and closing door and the stumping of
the professor’s crutch on the bare floor of the hall. Tregarvon sprang
up and took the small black-gowned figure in his arms.
“Going away?” he broke out passionately; “you couldn’t drive me away
with an axe! I’m going to stay forever, and let you make a complete man
of me. We’ll _marry_ your father’s share of the Ocoee back to him, and
together we’ll make a man of your brother. There are a million other
things to say, but Hartridge is coming to look for his chauffeur and I
must take him back to Highmount. Richardia--sweetheart!... If I don’t
wreck the car on the way it will be a miracle.”
Very gently she disengaged herself. “You--you needn’t smother a
person,” she protested, with the quaint little grimace that he loved.
And then: “That is father, calling me to go to brother. Please heap
some more coals of fire and be good to Professor Billy--for the sake of
his loyalty to me and mine.... Yes, daddy, dear; I’m coming.”
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been corrected.