Durkin’s first feeling, incongruously enough, once he was out in the
open air, was a ravenous sense of hunger. Through all that busy day his
only meal had been a hasty and half-eaten breakfast.
His second thought was at once both to submerge and sustain himself in
one of those Broadway basement restaurants where men perch on seats and
gulp down meals over a seat-fringed counter.
Then he thought of Frances, of her anxiety, of her long waiting, and he
tried to tell himself, valiantly enough, that another hour would make
little difference, and that they would take their dinner in state and at
their ease, at the Beaux-Arts, or at the Ritz, or perhaps even at the
St. Regis.
The thought of her gave a sudden, warm glow to the gray flatness of
life, born of his hunger and weariness. He pictured her, framed in the
gloom of the open doorway, in answer to his knock, the slender oval of
her face touched with weariness, her shadowy, brooding, violet eyes
grown suddenly alert, even her two warm, woman’s arms open, like a very
nest, to receive and hold him, and her motherly young shoulder to shield
him. He laughed to himself as he remembered the time that he had
described her as the victim of an “ingrowing maternal instinct”—she had
always seemed so ready to nurture and guard and cherish. She was a
woman, he said to himself—with a sudden, strange foreboding of he knew
not what—who ought to have had children. She was one of those deeper
and richer natures, he knew, who would always love Love more than she
could love men.
“What is electricity?” he had asked her one quiet night, touched into
wonder for the familiar miracle, as they bent together over their relay,
while an operator five hundred miles away was talking through the
darkness. “We live and work and make life tenser with it, and do wonders
with it, but, after all, who knows what it is?”
He remembered how the great, shadowy eyes had looked into his face. “And
what is love?” she had sighed. “We live and die for it, we see it work
its terrible wonders; but who can ever tell us what it is?”
Durkin had forgotten both his hunger and his weariness as he mounted the
stairs to his up-town apartment, where, he knew, Frances was waiting for
him. He decided, in his playful reaction of mood, to take her by
surprise. So he slipped his pass-key silently into the door-lock and was
about to fling the door wide when the unexpected sound of voices held
him motionless, with his hand still on the knob.
It was Frank herself speaking.
“Oh, Mack, don’t come between him and me now! It’s all I’ve got to live
for—his love! I need it—I need him!”
“The devil you do!” said a muttered growl.
“Oh, I do! I always wanted the love of an honest man.”
“An honest man!” again scoffed the deep bass of the other’s voice, with
a short little laugh. It was MacNutt who spoke. “An honest man! Then
what were you hanging round Sunset Bryan for?”
“Yes, an honest man,” went on the woman’s voice impetuously; “he is
honest in his love for me, and that is all I care! Leave him to me, and
I’ll give you everything. If it’s money you want, I’ll get you
anything—anything in reason! I can still cheat and lie and steal for
you, if you like—it was you who _taught_ me how to do that!”
Durkin felt that he could stand no more of it; but still he listened,
spellbound, incapable of action or thought.
“I’ve got to have money!” agreed MacNutt quietly. “That’s true enough!”
Then he added insolently, “But I almost feel I’d rather have you!”
“No, no!” moaned the woman, seemingly in mingled horror and fear of him.
“Only wait and I’ll get you what money I have here—every cent of it!
It’s in my pocketbook, here, in the front room!”
Durkin could hear her short, hard breath, and the swish of her skirt as
she fluttered across the bare floor into the other room. He could hear
the other’s easy, half-deprecating, half-mocking laugh; and at the sound
of it all the long-banked, smoldering, self-consuming fires of jealous
rage that burned within him seemed to leap and burst into relieving
flame. An invisible cord seemed to snap before his eyes—it might have
been within his very brain, for all he knew.
“And now I kill him!” This one idea spun through his mind, the one
living wheel in all the deadened machinery of consciousness.
Darting back until he felt the plaster of the narrow hallway behind him,
he flung himself madly forward against the door again. He kicked with
the solid flat of his boot-sole as he came, against the light pine,
painted and grained to look like oak.
It crashed in like so much kindling, and a second later, white to the
very lips, he was in the room, facing MacNutt.
In his hand he held his revolver. It was of blue metal, with the barrel
sawed off short. It had once been carried by a Chinaman, and had figured
in a Mock Duck Street feud, and had been many times in pawnshops, and
had passed through many hands.
As he faced the man he was going to kill it flitted vaguely through
Durkin’s mind that somebody—he could not remember who—had said always
to shoot for the stomach—it was the easiest, and the surest. He also
remembered that his weapon had a rifled barrel, and that the long,
twisting bullet would rend and tear and lacerate as it went.
“Before I kill you,” he heard himself saying, and the quietness of his
voice surprised even his own ears, “before I kill you, I want to know,
once for all, just _what that woman is to you_.”
The other man looked vacantly down at the pistol barrel, within six
inches of his own gross stomach. Then he looked at his enemy’s face. A
twitching nerve trembled and fluttered on one side of his temple. Only
two claret-colored blotches of color remained on his otherwise ashen
face.
“For the love of God, Durkin, don’t be a fool!”
MacNutt’s fingers were working spasmodically, and his breath began to
come wheezily and heavily.
“I’m going to kill you!” repeated Durkin, in the same level monotone.
“_But what is that woman to you?_”
MacNutt was desperately measuring chance and distance. There was not the
shadow of escape through struggle.
“It’s murder!” he gasped, certain that there was no hope.
He could see Durkin’s preparatory jaw-clench.
“You—you wouldn’t get mixed up in cold murder like this!” MacNutt half
pleaded, hurriedly and huskily, with his eyes now on the other man’s.
“Why, you’d swing for it, Durkin! You’d go to the chair!”
Durkin uttered a foul name, impatiently, and closed out the picture with
his shut eyelids as he thrust his right hand forward and down.
He wondered, with lightning-like rapidity of thought, if the blood would
stain his hand.
Then he felt a quick bark, and a sudden great spit of pain shot through
him.
The gun had exploded, he told himself dreamily, as he staggered to the
wall and leaned there weakly, swaying back and forth. But why didn’t
MacNutt go down? he asked himself unconcernedly, as he watched with dull
eyes where a jet of red blood spurted and pumped regularly from
somewhere in his benumbed forearm.
Then he had a thin and far-away vision of Frances, with a smoking
revolver in her hand, drifting out from the other room. He seemed to see
her floating out, like a bird on the wing almost, to where his own
weapon lay, and catch it up, as MacNutt or some vague shadow of him,
leaped to put a heavy foot on it.
A hundred miles away, seemingly, he heard her voice in a thin and high
treble telling MacNutt to go, or she would shoot him there herself, like
a dog.
Succeeding this came a sense of falling, and he found something bound
tightly round his arm, and a new dull and throbbing pain as this
something twisted and twisted and grew still tighter on the benumbed
flesh. Then he felt the weight of a body leaning on his own, where he
lay there, and a hand trying to fondle his face and hair.
“Oh, Jim, Jim!” the thin and far-away voice seemed to be wailing, “oh,
Jim, I had to do it! I had to—to save you from yourself! You would have
killed him. . . . You would have shot him dead. . . . And that would be
the end of everything. . . . Don’t you understand, my beloved own?”
Some heavy gray veil seemed to lift away, and the wounded man opened his
eyes, and moved uneasily.
“It’s only the arm, poor boy . . . but I know it hurts!”
“What is it?” he asked vacantly.
“It’s only the arm, and not a bone broken! See, I’ve stopped the
bleeding, and a week or two of quiet somewhere, and it’ll be all better!
Then—then you’ll sit up and thank God for it!”
He could hear her voice more distinctly now, and could feel her hands
feverishly caressing his face and hair.
“Speak to me, Jim,” she pleaded, passionately. “You’re all I’ve
got—you’re all that’s left to me in the whole wide world!”
He opened his eyes again, and smiled at her; but it was such a wan and
broken smile that a tempest of weeping swept over the woman bending
above him. He could feel her hot tears scalding his face.
Then she suddenly drew herself up, rigid and tense, for the sound of
heavy footsteps smote on her ear. Durkin heard them, too, in his languid
and uncomprehending way; he also heard the authoritative knock that came
from the hall door.
He surmised that Frank had opened the splintered door, for in the dim
sidelight of the hall he could see the flash of metal buttons on the
dark blue uniform, and the outline of a patrolman’s cap.
“Anything wrong up here, lady?” the officer was demanding, a little out
of breath.
“Dear me, no,” answered her voice in meek and plaintive alarm. Then she
laughed a little.
“She is lying—lying—lying,” thought the wounded man, languidly, as he
lay there, bleeding in the darkened room, not twelve paces away from
her, where the room was stained and blotched and pooled with blood.
“H’m! Folks downstairs said they heard a pistol-shot up here somewhere!”
“Yes, I know; that was the transom blew shut,” she answered glibly. “It
nearly frightened the wits out of me, too!” She opened the door wide.
“But won’t you come in, and make sure?”
The officer looked up at the transom, wagged his head three times
sagely, glanced at the lines of the girl’s figure with open and
undisguised admiration, and said it wasn’t worth while. Then he tried to
pierce the veil that still hung from her hat and about her smiling face.
Then he turned and sauntered off down the stairs, tapping the baluster
with his night-stick as he went. Then Durkin tried to struggle to his
feet, was stung with a second fierce stab of pain, fell back drowsily,
and remembered no more.
Frances waited, pantingly, against the doorpost. She listened there for
a second or two, and then crept inside and closed the door after her.
“Thank God!” she gasped fervently, as she tore off her hat and veil once
more. “Thank God!”
Then, being only a woman, and weak and hungry and tired, and tried
beyond her endurance, she took three evading, half-staggering steps
toward Durkin, and fell in a faint over his feet.
The door opened and closed softly; and a figure with an ashen face,
blotched with claret-color, slunk into the silent room. Night had closed
in by this time, so having listened for a reassuring second or two, he
groped slowly across the bare floor. His trembling hand felt a woman’s
skirt. Exploring carefully upward, he felt her limp arm, and her face
and hair.
Then he came to the figure he was in search of. He ripped open the wet
and soggy coat with a deft little pull at the buttons, and thrust a
great hungry hand down into the inside breast pocket. The exploring fat
fingers found what they were in search of, and held the carefully banded
packet up to the uncertain light of the window.
There he tested the edges of the crisp parchment of the bank-notes, and
apparently satisfied, hurriedly thrust them down into his own capacious
hip-pocket.
Then he crept to the broken door and listened for a minute or two. He
opened it cautiously, at last, tip-toed slowly over to the
stair-balustrade, and finally turned back and closed the door.
As the latch of the shattered lock fell rattling on the floor a sigh
quavered through the room. It was a woman’s sigh, wavering and weak and
freighted with weariness, but one of returning consciousness. For, a
minute later, a voice was asking, plaintively and emptily, “Where am I?”