In Boston Eben would have been safely housed against the storm, but Eben
was not in Boston. He had driven to the village and put his horse and
buggy in the livery stable. At the station he had bought a ticket for
Boston, but when the express made its first stop he had dropped off to
buy a paper and had intentionally allowed his train to go on without
him.
To several acquaintances whom he met he confided the circumstance of his
clumsy mistake, and one of them remembered in the light of after events
that though he spoke with his ordinary reserve of manner his eyes had
held a "queer glitter." Tollman told these persons that he would take
the later train to his destination, but what he actually did was to
board the afternoon local going in the direction of his home. As chance
ordained, he paid his fare to a new conductor, who did not know him, and
sat in the day coach unaccosted and unrecognized.
He did not remain on the local until it reached his own town of Tanner,
but dropped off at West Tanner, one station short of the full distance,
from which point he had a walk of four miles by a road sandy and little
frequented, to his own house.
Even now Eben did not hurry, but when he had left the limits of the
village he walked slowly and even paused occasionally to rest and
reflect, consulting his watch on these halts as though his object was
not so much the saving of time, as its killing.
In short, the Eben Tollman of this evening was not the same man that he
had ever been before. To a superficial eye he was, as usual, sedately
quiet, yet there was a new quality in his mood. This was the sort of
quiet that might brood at the bottom of an ocean whose surface is being
lashed into the destructive turmoil of tempest. Only since Eben Tollman
was a madman--not a noisy and raving maniac but a homicidally dangerous
and crafty one--his situation was inverted. It was the surface that was
calm with him and the deeps that were frenzied.
To be sure, all these seeming vicissitudes of his journey were parts of
a plan symmetrically ordered from the crazed compulsion of suspicion and
jealousy and now ripe for its fruition, which was to be murder.
Of course the motive which actuated him, locked in its logic-proof
compartment, would not have been, by him, called murder but obedience to
a divine mandate. None-the-less it contemplated human sacrifice.
Just as the storm broke with its cannonading of winds and its
fulmination of lightning he stopped at the edge of a small lake where an
ice-house, now exhausted of supply, had been left accommodatingly
unlocked.
He felt no hesitancy to taking refuge there because the place belonged
to him. Quite recently he had foreclosed, the mortgage which gave him
title to the small farm upon which it stood.
Eben's plan contemplated neither a premature nor an over-tardy arrival
at his own house. The two malefactors who were, he felt absolutely
certain, using his roof for their lustful assignation, had the night
before them. They would avail themselves of it with that sybarite
deliberateness which had characterized their epicurean guile and deceit
from the beginning.
He consulted his watch. He judged that a quarter after nine, or perhaps
nine-thirty, would be about the psychological time for his entry upon
the scene, with his contribution of an unforeseen climax to the drama.
It was not yet seven, and it would be as well to wait here while the
storm, which made the old ice-house tremble about his head, rode out its
initial fury.
His judgment proved good for before it was necessary to start, the main
violence of wind and rain had abated into gusts and desultory showers.
Along the way he encountered evidences of its force, in fallen branches
and broken trees; and in one place, as he crossed a road, he ran into a
hanging strand of telephone wire pulled down by broken timber.
As he drew near his own house his wrath mounted to the cold and
inflexible bitterness of arctic destruction, but his mind seemed to
clarify into a preternatural alertness such as the absinthe-drinker
fancies gives a razor edge to his thought functions. Like the keenness
of absinthe it was hallucination. The tremendous thrill of a madness
that had been cumulative through months and had finally reached the
fulfillment of action, was vitalizing him.
When the walls of his house bulked at last before his eyes, he paused
and began to take an accounting. One detail somewhat dismayed him. The
entire lower floor was dark, and since it was yet early he had not
expected that to be the case. The sudden fear attacked him that he was
too late.
He made a complete and careful circuit of the grounds, noting with the
fancied shrewdness of his mood every circumstance upon which a meaning
might be placed.
The blankness of the first floor was merely indicative--but when he
noted also the dark sash of Farquaharson's window indicativeness assumed
a more sinister emphasis. It was reasonable to infer that unlighted
rooms were unoccupied rooms and conversely, it was ominously significant
that the wide window of his wife's bedroom gave the single frame of
illumination that broke the darkness of the four walls.
For a better survey, he retreated to a bit of high ground at the right
of the house which afforded a narrow glimpse into Conscience's room,
though at an unsatisfactory range.
From this natural watch-tower he could make out the seated figure of his
wife at her desk and from time co time she turned her head, as one
might, who speaks to, or listens to, a companion within the same walls,
though out of sight of a man who commands a circumscribed field of
vision. Shortly he left that position and lurked for a time among the
flowers and shrubbery that lined the stone wall of the yard.
From here he saw Conscience move into the zone of light framed by the
window. Her hair had been loosened from its coils and fell in a heavy
cascade of darkness over shoulders that were bare.
She seemed to wear a dainty negligée of ribboned silk, and as he watched
she began slowly braiding her hair into two dusky ropes. After a little
time she disappeared again from view.
The lunatic, now thoroughly frenzied, and imbued with the phantasy of
suspicion, went back again to the higher ground and, after a time, saw
her open the door of her room and disappear into the hall. That hall was
the road that led to Stuart Farquaharson's room--and perdition!
Once more he, too, went to the rear of the house. There lay the best
chance of viewing the next and most ominous scene of this drama of
infamy and unfaithfulness.
But the hall at that angle was dark and told him nothing. Something else
however told him everything--at least he so believed. The window of
Stuart Farquaharson's room was no longer black but a frame of light.
Eben stood for a space with breath that came in hurried and panting
excitement while the madness mounted in his veins and burned fiercely in
his eyes.
Then, against the illuminated background he saw Stuart, the man whom
God meant him to kill.
He was wrapped in a bathrobe and was calmly raising a match to his
pipe-bowl.
The averted face was looking, Eben bitterly told himself, at the door
which he could not see; was watching it open to admit Conscience
Tollman.
Now was the appointed time! Now were the judgments loosened! Hastening
his steps into an awkward trot, Tollman went around to the front door,
his fingers trembling so that he had to stop and make an effort at
calming himself before he could manage the key in the lock.
When at last it was fitted and stealthily turned with an attempt at
noiselessness, the door refused to yield. That, he told himself
furiously, he might have expected. For all their seeming sense of
security they had reënforced it by shooting the bolt on the inside so
that no one could enter without sending an alarm ahead of his coming. It
was only one proof more of guilty concealment within. But it was far
past time for needing such corroboration. He had seen enough and the
problem raised by the present discovery was quite another. He went about
the place trying side doors and windows, but everywhere his house was
closed against him--and that meant a complete revision of plan, and the
relinquishment of the tremendous force of climax to be gained by
slipping in unannounced and holding over confounded evil-doers the
irrefutable proof of demonstration.
He must knock on his door, and give them time to slip back into their
disguise of hypocrisy. It meant that, in the principal feature, his
whole carefully laid plan had failed, but at least now he knew the truth
and was ready to let the avenging bolt fall. They would meet him with
smiles of innocence: they with sinful kisses yet warm on their lips.
They, fresh from their interrupted love, would talk casually. Very
well, for a little while yet he could smile and be casual, too, meeting
their guile with counter dissembling--until he was ready.
* * * * *
If Stuart Farquaharson had been sitting most of that evening in a
darkened room, it was because his misery was so great that the light
seemed to make clearer the wretchedness of his future. For a time he had
tried to read; even to write, but that was before Eben had come. In all
those efforts he had failed and now for more than an hour he had been
gazing dejectedly out of the window, listening to the wind as it
buffeted itself out and died in an exhausted moaning among the pines. He
had heard the wailing of the harbor sirens but his eyes had been
unseeing--at least unrecognizing.
And Conscience had been writing the letter which she meant to leave
under the door of Stuart's room. He would find it there in the morning,
and when he said good-by, he would understand the things which she had
left unsaid before they parted in the hall.
She _had_ gone and left the letter at the door: had even listened there
a moment, unknown to the room's occupant, and it was that crossing of
her threshold which her husband saw.
Then Stuart had switched on his light, and thrown off his clothes. If he
seemed calm as he lighted his pipe, it was a calm of spent emotion, and
not the complacency of a man who awaits a tryst.
Through the stillness of the house the hammering of the brass knocker
sounded loudly. Stuart Farquaharson in his room and Conscience in hers,
both heard it, with a sense of astonishment. The man opened his door and
hurried to the stairhead, where he found Conscience, arrived in advance
of him.
But as he had crossed his threshold Farquaharson had seen an envelope
lying in the light that flooded through, and he recognized Conscience's
hand in the address as he picked it up. Remembering what she had said
about writing to him he was not surprised, and wishing to save the
missive until he should be alone again, he thrust it into the pocket of
his bath robe.
"I wonder who it can be--on such a night?" murmured the woman, and the
man suggested:
"Perhaps you had better let me investigate. I imagine some motorist has
come to grief in the storm."
When he threw open the door, Eben Tollman stepped in.
The elder man stood for a moment glancing from his guest to his wife,
and in that instant of scrutiny whatever of the inquisitorial might have
lurked in his eyes left them for a bland suavity. Conscience had
hastened forward and her lips were smiling. Farquaharson's eyes dared to
meet his own with a level straightforwardness.
But Tollman read into both the smile and the straight-gazing eyes a
hypocrisy which superlatively embittered the blood in his veins.
Conscience was standing before him with the exquisite clarity of her
complexion unclouded; with the dark pools of her eyes unvexed by the
weight of hideous perfidy that should be stifling her heart.
This capping off of infamy with an angelic pretext of innocence was the
supreme insult not only to Eben Tollman, outraged husband and man, but
to the Righteousness he served, the Righteousness which he now seemed to
hear calling trumpet-tongued for the reprisal which was at hand.
"What in the world has happened to you?" he heard his wife exclaiming in
an astonished voice, and he laughed as he responded:
"I came back. Haven't you a kiss for me, my dear?" Then when she raised
her lips to his an inner voice, which spoke only madness, whispered
viciously, "The Judas woman! The unspeakable infamy!"
He explained that he had missed his train, and that when he telephoned
to Boston, he learned that the matter could after all be deferred. A man
from Chicago had also failed to arrive.
"But the train has been in for hours," Farquaharson reminded him with a
puzzled tinge in his voice. "It can't have taken you this long to drive
from Tanner."
"No, I didn't drive. The idea struck me of getting off at West Tanner
and walking over. The old mare went lame and I didn't want to give her
any more work to-night.... Then the storm broke and I took refuge in an
empty ice-house."
Conscience said suddenly: "But, Eben, you are soaked--and if you've been
wandering about like that, you can't have had any supper."
"No," he shook his head. "I haven't and I'm starving."
Including them both, he suggested with a frank seeming of pleasure.
"However, I'm glad to be back. Did I wake you both up? You seem to have
made a short evening of it."
"I haven't been asleep," answered Stuart, and Conscience added: "Nor I."
"I noticed," went on the husband evenly, "that the lower floor was dark,
as I came up ... your window, too, Stuart, when I first saw it."
"You must have come very slowly," replied the younger man with a
calmness that struck the other as the acme of effrontery. "My light has
been burning for ten minutes ... but I don't make out how you saw my
window if you came from the front of the house."
Eben winced a little, but his smile only became more urbane.
"Quite true, my boy. You see I tried my latch key first, and finding the
house dark, I sought to avoid disturbing the sleepers. I went to the
back door and the side door. Finally I knocked. Since neither of you was
asleep it's all right."
"Perhaps after being in the fog so long," Conscience suggested, "a
little brandy might be advisable," but Eben Tollman laughed.
"My dear, for some unaccountable reason, I feel as if I'd been away from
home as long as Enoch Arden--and I'm much happier to be back. I am in
the mood for celebration. There's a bottle of old Madeira in the pantry.
I don't think a little of it will harm any of us ... and I'm going to
dissipate even farther. I'm going to smoke a cigar." Smoking a cigar was
with Eben a rite which occurred with the frequency of a Christmas or a
Thanksgiving dinner.
Something youthful had come into his manner, and Farquaharson, in spite
of his misery, laughed.
"I'm afraid I'm hardly dressed for a party," he demurred, but Eben
answered in a tone of aggrieved hospitality.
"My dear fellow, you are much more fully dressed than when you go
bathing; both of you--and how can I celebrate alone?" So Stuart
smilingly asserted:
"All right. We'll have a toast in your excellent Madeira to the return
of Enoch Arden."
Possibly his voice held a meaning less light than his words. Perhaps he
was thinking of it as a toast to his own departure into exile, but to
Eben it had the ring of a sneer, as though the words "too late" had been
added.
Conscience disappeared to return shortly with a tray containing cold
meat and bread, and to her husband she said: "Eben, I can't find the
famous Madeira. Where is it?"
He rose, and announced that he would bring it at once, disappearing
beyond the swinging door of the pantry.
While he was absent, Conscience turned to the man in the bath robe. A
smile half of amusement and half of self-accusation tilted the corners
of her lips.
"You see," she said thoughtfully, "I've just let myself think of him as
elderly until, to me, he's become elderly. Yet to-night he's younger
than either of us, isn't he?"
"To-night neither one of us is very young, dear," he replied with a wry
smile.
In the pantry Eben Tollman poured three glasses of Madeira, and placed
them on a tray carefully noting their relative positions. With fingers
that trembled violently for a moment Eben grew as abruptly steady; he
drew from his waistcoat pocket a small envelope such as druggists use,
and into two of the glasses he divided its supply of small tablets.
"Ebbett said they were tasteless and readily soluble," he reminded
himself. "And that the amount should be enough for a dog or a man."
Then he patted his breast pocket, where lay an envelope yellowed with
age, bearing the legend "S. F. & C. W."
Of that he meant also to make use later.