For the best part of an hour Stuart sat confusedly looking out across
the cove. Then with the wish for some stimulating fillip he stripped and
plunged into the sobering coolness of the water. Even after that he did
not return to the house, but struck out aimlessly across the hills with
little realization of direction and small selection of course. Once or
twice a blackberry trailer caught his foot and he lurched heavily,
recovering himself with difficulty.
Led by the fox-fire of restlessness, he must have tramped far, for the
moon went down and curtains of fog began to draw in, obscuring hills and
woods in a wet and blinding thickness. From the saturated foliage came a
steady dripping as though there had been heavy rain, and far away, from
the life-saving station, wailed the hoarse, Cassandra voices of the
sirens. At last physical fatigue began to assert itself with a clearing
of the brain and he turned his steps back toward his starting point. He
was trusting now to his instinctive sense of direction, because the
woods and thickets were fog-choked and his course was groping and
uncertain. A half mile from the house he set his foot on a treacherously
shelving rock, and found himself rolling down a sharp embankment, with
briars tearing his face and hands. Throwing out his right arm, in
defense of his eyes, he felt his hand bend back at the wrist with so
violent a pain that a wave of nausea swept over him and for a moment he
was content to lie where he had fallen, listening to the sobbing drip of
the pines. When he rose and started on again his right hand hung with
fingers that he could not move and the fever of swollen pain in its
wrist. But when he drew near the house he saw that there was still a
light in the window of Conscience's room and that she herself sat,
framed against, the yellow candle glow, in an almost trance-like
attitude of stress. She was silhouetted there, no longer self-confident
and defiant but a figure of wistful unhappiness. From the raw wetness,
her bare shoulders and arms were unprotected. Her hair fell in heavy
braids over the sheer silk of her night dress and her bosom was
undefended against the bite of the fog's chill.
At breakfast the next morning Eben Tollman, who was usually the least
talkative at table, found that the burden of conversation fell chiefly
upon himself.
Conscience was pale and under her eyes were dark smudges of
sleeplessness while Farquaharson kept his right hand in his lap and
developed an unaccustomed taciturnity. But Eben appeared to notice
nothing and stirred himself into an admirable and hospitable vivacity.
His concert of last night had borne fruit, he thought.
If his knowledge of actual occurrences was sketchy his imagination had
filled all the blank spaces with colorful substitutes for fact.
"Stuart," he demanded suddenly, "what's happened to you? You've hurt
your right hand and you're trying to conceal it."
"It's nothing much," explained Farquaharson lamely. "I went for a walk
last night and when the fog came up I strayed over an embankment--and
had a rather nasty fall."
"My dear boy!" exclaimed Eben Tollman in a tone of instant solicitude.
"We must call the doctor at once. But you must have been out all night.
The fog didn't gather until two o'clock this morning."
Farquaharson only nodded with an uncommunicative smile, and Conscience
spoke in quiet authority.
"If it's a sprain, I can do as much for it as a doctor could. Wait for
me on the terrace, Stuart, I'll be out in a few minutes with hot water
and bandages."
A half hour later, grumbling remonstrances which were silently
overruled, the Virginian found himself in efficient hands.
The fog had not lasted long and this morning the hills sparkled with a
renewed freshness. A row of hollyhocks along the stone wall nodded
brightly, and the sun's clarity was a wash of transparent gold.
Stuart Farquaharson studied the profile of the woman who was busying
herself with bandages and liniments.
The exquisite curve of her cheek and throat; the play of an escaped curl
over her pale temple and the sweet wistfulness of her lips: none of
these things escaped him.
"It's not necessary, after all, that you should go away, Stuart," she
announced with a calm abruptness to Farquaharson's complete
mystification. "Last night I was in the grip of something like hysteria,
I think. Perhaps I'm still young enough to be influenced by such things
as music and moonlight."
"And this morning?"
"This morning," she spoke in a matter-of-fact voice as she measured and
cut a strip of bandage, "I am heartily ashamed of my moment of panic.
This morning I'm not afraid of you. Whether you go or stay, I sha'n't
give way again."
"Conscience," protested the man with an earnestness that drew his brow
into furrows of concentration, "last night I said many things that were
pure excitement. After years of struggling to put you out of my life and
years of failure to do it, after believing absolutely that it had become
a one-sided love, I learned suddenly that you loved me, too. The
summed-up spell of all those hungry times was on me last night. Can't
you make allowances for me?"
"I have made allowances," she assured him steadily. "I've made so
many--that I'm no longer angry with you. You see I spent most of last
night thinking of it. We were both moon mad. Only now--we can't go on
pretending to be Platonic friends any more. When war has been declared
comradeships between enemies have to end."
"You are both very fair and very unfair, Conscience," suggested Stuart
Farquaharson thoughtfully. "I said some wild things--out there in the
moonlight--with my senses all electrified by the discovery of your
love--and yet--"
He broke off, and Conscience, rising from her finished task, stood
gazing out with musing eyes over the slopes of the hills. Suddenly she
said:
"I realize now that if you'd gone away just because I asked it, we would
always have felt that nothing was settled; that instead of winning my
battle I'd just begged off from facing it."
"Among all the unconsidered things I said last night, Conscience,"
Stuart began again, "there were some that I must still say. It was like
the illogical thread of a dream which is only the distortion of a waking
thought-flow. The essence of my contention was sound."
"A soundness which advises me to divorce my husband and marry you," she
demurred with no more anger than she might have felt for a misguided
child, "though he and I both made vows--and he has broken none of
them."
"You made those vows," he reminded her, "under the coercion of fears for
your father. You distorted your life under what you yourself once called
a tyranny of weakness."
"And to remedy all that you counsel an anarchy of passion." She seemed
to be speaking from a distance and to be looking through rather than at
the horizon.
"I believe that even now my father knows--and that he's no more
willing to have me surrender my convictions--than when he was on earth."
"And I believe," the response came reverently but promptly, "that where
he is now his eyes are no longer blinded by any scales of mistake. If he
looks down on us from the Beyond, he must see life with a universal
breadth of wisdom."
For an instant tears misted her eyes and then she asked in a rather
bewildered voice, "Stuart, stripped of all its casuistry, what is your
argument except a plea for infidelity?"
"Revolt against that most powerful and vicious of all autocracies," he
confidently declared, "the tyranny of weakness over strength!"
But Conscience Tollman only shook her head and smiled her unconverted
scepticism.
"Was it being true to such an ideal as that which made a certain king in
Israel send a certain captain into the front of the battle, because he
loved that captain's wife? I have listened to all this argument, because
I wanted you to feel sure that I wasn't afraid to hear it. But it can
never persuade me. And what have you to say of the trust of a husband
who accepts you in his house as a member of his family--without
suspicion?"
"I say that he has had his chance in all fairness and has failed. I say
that during the years of this ill-starred experiment you have fought
valiantly to make him win. I have, at least, not interfered by act or a
word. If he had not arranged this meeting I should never have done
so--and since he is responsible for our being brought together now he
must face the consequences."
"Then your attitude of last night was not just moon madness, after all?"
"I mean to penetrate your life as far as I can and to recognize no
inner sanctum from which I am barred. He is the usurper and my love is
not tame enough to submit. I am your lover because, though your words
deny me, your heart invites me. I'm coming to stay."
This time the woman's eyes did not kindle into furious or contemptuous
fires, but her voice was so calmly resolute that Stuart felt his own had
been a blustering thing.
"Then, Stuart, I'm still the puritan woman. I'm asking no quarter--and I
have no fears. Attack as soon and as often and as furiously as you wish.
I'm ready."
* * * * *
Eben Tollman noted that under the steady normality and evenness of his
wife's demeanor there stirred an indefinable current of nervousness,
since the evening of the tryst at the float and that the whole manner of
the visitor toward himself was tinctured with a new brusqueness, as
though the requirement of maintaining a cordial pretense were becoming
over tedious.
These were mere bits of chaff in a light breeze and he flattered himself
that it had taken his own perspicacity to detect them. A less capable
diagnostician might have passed them by unobserved. But to him they
marked a boundary.
Alone in his study, the husband ruminated upon these topics. Here he had
sanctuary and the necessity of a hateful dissimulation was relaxed. He
could then throw aside that mantle of urbanity which he must yet endure
for a while before other eyes. He formed the habit of gazing up at the
portrait of the ancestor who had died in the revolution and almost
fancied that between his own eyes and those painted on the canvas there
was an interchange of understanding.
He was in truth a man who had already parted company with reason while
still invested in its perfect masquerade. His bitter and unfounded
suspicions, denied all outer expression, had undermined his sanity--and
any one who had seen him in these moments of sequestered brooding would
have recognized the mad glitter in his eyes.
"The pair of them are as guilty as perdition," he murmured to himself,
"and I am God's instrument to punish." Punish--but how? That was a
detail which he had never quite thought out, but at the proper time the
Providence which commanded him would also show him a way. But before
punishment there must be an overt act--an episode which clinched,
beyond peradventure, the sin of these two hypocrites before his hand
could fall in vengeance.
These reflections were interrupted one afternoon by a rap on the study
door to which, for the space of several seconds, Eben Tollman did not
respond.
He was meanwhile doing what an actor does before his dressing-room
mirror. Eben Tollman alone with his monomania and Eben Tollman in the
company of others were separate personalities and to pass from one to
the other called for making up; for schooling of expression and the
recovery of a suave exterior. In this process, however, he had from
habit acquired celerity, so the delay was not a marked one before, with
a decorous face, unstamped of either passion or brooding, he opened the
door, to find Conscience waiting at the threshold.
"Come in, my dear," he invited. "I must have inadvertently snapped the
catch. I didn't know it was locked."
"There's a man named Hagan here who wants to see you, Eben," announced
Conscience. "He didn't seem inclined to tell me his business beyond
saying that it was important."
"Hagan, Hagan?" repeated the master of the house with brows drawn in
well-simulated perplexity. "I don't seem to recognize the name. Do you
know him?"
"I never saw him before. Shall I send him in?"
"I suppose it might be as well. Some business promoter, I fancy."
But as Conscience left, Tollman's scowl returned.
"Hagan," he repeated with a soft but wrathful voice to himself. "The
blackmailer!"
His face bore a somewhat frigid welcome, when almost immediately the
manager of the Searchlight Investigation Bureau presented himself.
Mr. Hagan had the appearance of one into whose lap the horn of plenty
has not been recently or generously tilted, and the clothes he wore,
though sprucely tailored, were of another season's fashion.
But his manner had lost none of its pristine assurance and he began his
interview by laying a hand on the door-knob and suggesting: "The
business I want to take up with you, Mr. Tollman, had best be discussed
out of hearing of others."
Tollman remained unhospitably rigid and his eyes narrowed into an
immediate hostility.
"Whatever business we may have had, Mr. Hagan," he suggested, "has for
some time been concluded, I think."
But on this point the visitor seemed to hold a variant opinion.
Momentarily his face abandoned its suavity and the lower jaw thrust
itself forward with a marked hint of belligerency.
"So?" he questioned. "Nonetheless there is business that can be done at
the present time in this house. It's for you to say whether I do it with
you--or others."
Tollman's scowl deepened and the thought presented itself that he had
been unwise in ever giving such a dishonest fellow the hold upon him of
a prior employment. But he controlled himself and invited curtly, "Very
well. Sit down."
Mr. Hagan did so, and this time it was Mr. Tollman himself who somewhat
hastily closed and latched the door which protected their privacy of
interview, while the guest broached his topic.
"The best way to start is with the recital of a brief story. You may
already have read some of it in the newspapers but the portion that
concerns us most directly wasn't published. It's what is technically
called the 'inside story.'"
"The best way to start, Mr. Hagan," amended Tollman with some severity
of manner, "is that which will most quickly bring you to the point and
the conclusion. I'm a very busy man and can spare you only a short
time."
But despite that warning the detective sat for a moment with his legs
crossed and gave his attention to the deliberate kindling of a cigar.
That rite being accomplished to his satisfaction, he settled back and
sent a cloud of wreathed smoke toward the ceiling before he picked up
again his thread of conversation.