A shambling step along the floor of my hall one evening, long past nine
o'clock, aroused me from thoughts of Hosley, the man whose image filled
my home hours with a creeping shame and dread. A knock on my door, the
first since I had been living there, startled me.
Before I could advance, Jim Hosley stumbled in and braced his worn body
against the wall. He reached for my hand and I took it, and forgave him
everything I had suspected he had done, and every crime he might have
committed. The look on Jim Hosley's face that night would have won the
pardon of a cannibal chief; it would have halted a Spanish inquisition,
stayed the commune of Paris and wrung unadulterated, anonymous pity from
the heart of an Irish landlord or a monopolist. A minute before I was
for hanging Jim Hosley (provided my connection with the case was not
revealed). Now, when I saw him and felt his hand once more in the grasp
of comradeship, I was with him heart and soul, and scoundrel though he
might be, a lineal descendant of old Bluebeard, perhaps, I stood ready
to sharpen and pass his knives to him and assist in any humble way a
willing and obliging servant could to make the business a success.
"Ben, I have searched for you for three hours. Thank Heaven, I am near
you at last! I lay in the next room at the hospital, but Gabrielle would
not let me see you," were his first words.
"In the hospital? With me in the next room? And Gabrielle--"
"Yes, Ben; we can talk all night, and then we shan't understand. How did
those letters written to the girl--"
He flung himself into a chair. He was exhausted and ten years older.
Pain in his leg prompted him to ask me to remove his shoe. I helped him
into my dressing-gown, gave him a pipe, plenty of pillows in an easy
chair and fondled him like a prodigal son. I was never so glad to see a
mortal since I peeped into the world. The fatted calf's substitute, a
dish of pork and beans, was put to heat in a pan of water on the gas
stove. The coffee-pot was "rastled" under the tap to remove the early
morning aroma which clung to the grounds always left to await my
attention the following morning. The egg poacher, the toaster, the slab
of bacon, and a mince pie, bought an hour before to produce sleep, were
brought out and displayed to make a scene like the old days when joy was
unconfined, when women were mere theories and courtship a pastime.
Jim in his despair warmed up and actually smiled. That heart-ache which
had overwhelmed him and made life so unbearable when he entered, gave
way, and hope, with the smell of bacon and fried eggs, mounted higher.
Grief, powerful dynamo though it be, may be tickled by a smaller one--a
square meal often brings its victim into line.
"Jim, we'll take the night to talk this thing over. It will take all
that time for me to tell you that I am so mighty glad to see you again,
and besides, it will take time to eat as well, for you look to me as if
food was the one supply you had failed to connect with since that fire.
Tell me, Jim, how Gabrielle could keep you away? How could you allow a
woman to separate you from your old pal? Does it seem reasonable? And
yet you always were so innocently plausible I could never doubt you. How
did that happen? Tell me now, before I give you anything to eat. I
would like to feel a little more sure on that point."
I whistled and rattled on, perfectly charmed to be again under the
influence of that wife-slayer's magic smile or his potent frown--it was
all the same to me.
"I simply don't know," answered Jim. "I can't tell you. I don't know,
Ben. I am easily led by Gabrielle. I was weak. Had I insisted upon
seeing you from the first, no matter what happened--but there, let it
pass. I asked your help with her father. There I made a bad mistake. You
did something--I don't know what it was exactly, but you put your foot
'way down in--you upset me from the first. But let it pass. I'll take
all you can give me to eat and then we'll go at the thing again; not
where we left off the night we parted at the flat, but where we stand
now. Gabrielle, too, has forsaken me, Ben." He looked at me with his
mouth drawn down, his pinched face betraying surrender, his heavy eyes
burdened with care.
"Forsaken you! How so? Was she not with you at the hospital?"
"Those letters to the Brown girl, in Thirty-eighth Street, are at the
bottom of it, Ben. I told you they would come back, if you wrote so
much. Those letters have ruined me--ruined me with the one woman I have
loved. The other women--those to whom you wrote, you induced me to fool.
Don't you see you did, Ben? Those letters you signed my name to, and
gushed your poetry into like a stream from a fire-hose, swept me off;
all the women you wrote to thought they were crazy letters, Ben. I never
dared tell you that; but they all put me down for a fool, and as I had
no particular interest in them I took the blame, Ben. I never supposed
the letters could reach Gabrielle. I had them all in my bureau drawer
when the fire started. I forgot to burn them--just chucked them in there
when I got them back from Miss Brown. There must have been over a
hundred. And, blowed if you didn't work in a lot of my hair! Egad, you
must have clipped it when I fell asleep listening to you read them. I
have heard them read since, too, at the hospital. Our nurse read one
very prettily, and then I thought my hour had come--"
"Our nurse read them! My nurse in your room, too?"
"Yes. We had the same nurse."
"Sit up and have some pork and beans and a cup of coffee, Jim," said I.
I could see then that there was no need to go into too many
particulars. I did not care to go much further till I had collected
some definite thoughts and arranged to conceal the amount of cash my
wisdom had seen fit to call forth from my bank account for a lot of old
junk that had been stored in Jim Hosley's bureau, and had fallen down to
the next floor when the fire took place--just the spot the detectives
wanted it to land precisely, in order to connect me with the case. It
would not have surprised me to learn that Smith and Obreeon, his partner
(for I could plainly see he was), had started that fire with full
knowledge of the location of those letters and the exact spot they would
fall if a match were touched to our abode at the proper time. My
handwriting in the Tescheron messages had given me away.
"What do you think of those beans, Jim?"
"I think they taste more like home than anything I have met since I took
that bath."
"There, don't say another word, Jim. I won't accuse you of anything. You
had your bath, and both of us have enjoyed the sweat it produced. When
we come out of this thing we'll be the purest mortals that ever took a
course in practical morality over a hot stove as a starter. I told you
about that quilt. So, that is the way it was, eh? Well, Jim, you
certainly do know how to set a house afire, although I never believed
you would set the world afire. I take it you will clip the ends pretty
short when you start in to make quilts again for that purpose. But never
mind, old boy, try another cup of this coffee."
"Why is it they can't make coffee in a hospital?" asked Jim.
"They do make it," I answered; "but the doctors and nurses never let any
of it get away from them. They find it too strong for boarders. It's bad
for their nerves. The only thing that's good for a sick man is something
you can sterilize, and then they may charge double prices for it. Jim,
did you ever feel so hungry before when you settled down there?"
I was trying to divert his attention from the trouble I had put him
through, for I realized there was no hope for his case unless I yet took
a hand in and patched up the chasm which separated him from an imagined
paradise.
It is surprising what a relation there is between the digestion and
heart.
"We were to have been married a week from to-day, Ben," said Jim.
My knife and fork clattered to the floor!
"That's so; and now we are parted forever."
I was struck dumb--only one week to make good, to save the wreck from
total loss! Something must be done quickly. In the past everything I had
undertaken had been a failure, but I must persist. It was close to ten
o'clock--a bad time to begin, for my midnight correspondence had never
been correctly construed.
"When did you leave Gabrielle?" I asked, with an idea ranging in my
fancy. It was an intangible idea, but I thought it promised relief.
"About five o'clock to-day; we separated at the Gibsons'."
"You stay here till I come back, and go on eating, Jim," I directed, and
grabbing my hat I rushed for the door.
"Stop, Ben! Don't you do a thing to-night," commanded Jim. "What can you
do now? Don't you know you made a bad break the last time?"
But I kept right on and sent one more message from the nearest messenger
office. It was directed to Miss Tescheron at her home and read:
"Don't recall those wedding invitations till you see me to-morrow.
"BENJAMIN HOPKINS."
There was just enough of the indefinite in that, I imagined, to suspend
operations; it would be a straw for the woman to clutch. She would not
risk the unpleasant notoriety of a wedding postponement, if there could
be a chance that she had acted impulsively at least, and had been misled
by circumstantial evidence she had ignored till there came into the case
the other-woman element. I did not fear the wound in her heart, unless
the gangrene of jealousy entered to prevent the successful issue of my
hastily arranged plan.
When I returned to the house, Jim was greatly disturbed.
"Ben, you have rushed out and sent another message; I can see it in your
face," he said. "What can you be thinking of? Why did you not wait till
to-morrow and talk this thing over?"
"You leave this matter to me," said I.
"Yes--I did that before."
"But you took a bath contrary to my advice." Tinkering middlemen and
ferrets can squeeze through small holes.
I determined to stop proceedings in Ninety-sixth Street, if such a thing
were possible. It seemed nervy for me to interfere now, but it was a
long shot and I determined to take it. What I would do to cement the
break I really knew not, but trusted to luck.
Jim did not yet know about the Browning woman and the interest he was
supposed to have in her. I tapped him gently and so indirectly on the
subject that I could see he knew nothing about her. The undertaker's
card he had found in the hall and brought in and laid on the table,
where I chanced to pick it up, little thinking I would take it as
corroborative of anything that might be said against him. He declared he
had not left the house that night. Smith's men had simply lied when they
said he left with the undertaker. I had a plan for testing his
statement, however.
When he told me how I had driven the Tescheron family to Hoboken for six
weeks, and hinted his suspicions gathered from Gabrielle that the old
gentleman had been forced to settle with some official before returning,
I was almost struck dumb. As he gave me the details of his wretched
experience of that afternoon at the Gibsons', I became desperate.
"Jim, if that wedding comes off next Wednesday, will you forgive me?" I
asked.
"It's impossible."
"What--to forgive me?"
"For me to ever achieve such happiness." From the depths of his despair,
he looked at me entreatingly as he spoke.