Dismissing the men who had assisted us in the capture of these two hardy
villains, we ranged our prisoners before us.
“Now,” said Mr. Gryce, “no fuss and no swearing; you are in for it, and
you might as well take it quietly as any other way.”
“Give me a clutch on that girl, that’s all,” said her father, “Where is
she? Let me see her; every father has a right to see his own daughter,”
“You shall see her,” returned my superior, “but not till her husband is
here to protect her.”
“Her husband? ah, you know about that do you?” growled the heavy voice
of the son. “A rich man they say he is and a proud one. Let him come
and look at us lying here like dogs and say how he will enjoy having his
wife’s father and brother grinding away their lives in prison.”
“Mr. Blake is coming,” quoth Mr. Gryce, who by some preconcerted signal
from the window had drawn that gentleman across the street. “He will
tell you himself that he considers prison the best place for you. Blast
you! but he--”
“But he, what?” inquired I, as the door opened and Mr. Blake with a pale
face and agitated mien entered the room.
The wretch did not answer. Rousing from the cowering position in which
they had both lain since their capture, the father and son struggled
up in some sort of measure to their feet, and with hot, anxious eyes
surveyed the countenance of the gentleman before them, as if they felt
their fate hung upon the expression of his pallid face. The son was the
first to speak.
“How do you do, brother-in-law,” were his sullen and insulting words.
Mr. Blake shuddered and cast a look around.
“My wife?” murmured he.
“She is well,” was the assurance given by Mr. Gryce, “and in a room not
far from this. I will send for her if you say so.”
“No, not yet,” came in a sort of gasp; “let me look at these wretches
first, and understand if I can what my wife has to suffer from her
connection with them.”
“Your wife,” broke in the father, “what’s that to do with it; the
question is how do you like it and what will you do to get us clear of
this thing.”
“I will do nothing,” returned Mr. Blake. “You amply merit your doom and
you shall suffer it to the end for all time.”
“It will read well in the papers,” exclaimed the son.
“The papers are to know nothing about it,” I broke in. “All knowledge
of your connection with Mr. or Mrs. Blake is to be buried in this spot
before we or you leave it. Not a word of her or him is to cross the lips
of either of you from this hour. I have set that down as a condition and
it has got to be kept.”
“You have, have you,” thundered in chorus from father and son. “And who
are you to make conditions, and what do you think we are that you expect
us to keep them? Can you do anymore than put us back from where we came
from?”
For reply I took from my pocket the ring I had fished out of the ashes
of their kitchen stove on that memorable visit to their house, and
holding it up before their faces, looked them steadily in the eye.
A sudden wild glare followed by a bluish palor that robbed their
countenances of their usual semblance of daring ferocity, answered me
beyond my fondest hopes.
“I got that out of the stove where you had burned your prison clothing,”
said I. “It is a cheap affair, but it will send you to the gallows if I
choose to use it against you. The pedlar--”
“Hush,” exclaimed the father in a low choked tone greatly in contrast to
any he had yet used in all our dealings with him. “Throw that ring out
of the window and I promise to hold my tongue about any matter you don’t
want spoke of. I’m not a fool--”
“Nor I,” was my quick reply, as I restored the ring to my pocket. “While
that remains in my possession together with certain facts concerning
your habits in that old house of yours which have lately been made known
to me, your life hangs by a thread I can any minute snip in two. Mr.
Blake here, has spent some portion of a night in your house and knows
how near it lies to a certain precipice, at foot of which--”
“Mein Gott, father, why don’t you say something!” leaped in cowed
accents from the son’s white lips. “If they want us to keep quiet, let
them say so and not go talking about things that--”
“Now look here,” interposed Mr. Gryce stepping before them with a look
that closed their mouths at once. “I will just tell you what we propose
to do. You are to go back to prison and serve your time out, there is
no help for that, but as long as you behave yourselves and continue
absolutely silent regarding your relationship to the wife of this
gentleman, you shall have paid into a certain bank that he will name,
a monthly sum that upon your dismissal from jail shall be paid you with
whatever interest it may have accumulated. You are ready to promise
that, are you not?” he inquired turning to Mr. Blake.
That gentleman bowed and named the sum, which was liberal enough, and
the bank.
“But,” continued the detective, ignoring the sudden flash of eye that
passed between the father and son, “let me or any of us hear of a word
having been uttered by you, which in the remotest way shall suggest that
you have in the world such a connection as Mrs. Blake, and the money not
only stops going into the bank, but old scores shall be raked up against
you with a zeal which if it does not stop your mouth in one way, will in
another, and that with a suddenness you will not altogether relish.”
The men with a dogged air from which the bravado had however fled,
turned and looked from one to the other of us in a fearful, inquiring
way that duly confessed to the force of the impression made by these
words upon their slow but not unimaginative minds.
“Do you three promise to keep our secret if we keep yours?” muttered the
father with an uneasy glance at my pocket.
“We certainly do,” was our solemn return.
“Very well; call in the girl and let me just look at her, then, before
we go. We won’t say nothing,” continued he, seeing Mr. Blake shrink,
“only she is my daughter and if I cannot bid her good-bye--”
“Let him see his child,” cried Mr. Blake turning with a shudder to the
window. “I--I wish it,” added he.
Straightway with hasty foot I left the room. Going to the little closet
where I had ordered his wife to remain concealed, I knocked and entered.
She was crouched in an attitude of prayer on the floor, her face buried
in her hands, and her whole person breathing that agony of suspense that
is a torture to the sensitive soul.
“Mrs. Blake,” said I, dismissing the landlady who stood in helpless
distress beside her, “the arrest has been satisfactorily made and your
father calls for you to say good-bye before going away with us. Will you
come?”
“But my--my--Mr. Blake?” exclaimed she leaping to her feet. “I am sure I
heard his footstep in the hall?”
“He is with your father and brother. It was at his command I came for
you.”
A gleam hard to interpret flashed for an instant over her face. With
her eye on the door she towered in her womanly dignity, while thoughts
innumerable seemed to rush in wild succession through her mind.
“Will you not come?” I urged.
“I--,” she paused. “I will go see my father,” she murmured, “but--”
Suddenly she trembled and drew back; a step was in the hall, on the
threshold, at her side; Mr. Blake had come to reclaim his bride.
“Mr. Blake!”
The word came from her in a low tone shaken with the concentrated
anguish of many a month of longing and despair, but there was no
invitation in its sound, and he who had held out his arms, stopped and
surveying her with a certain deprecatory glance in his proud eye, said,
“You are right; I have first my acknowledgments to make and your
forgiveness to ask before I can hope--”
“No, no,” she broke in, “your coming here is enough, I request no more.
If you felt unkindly toward me--”
“Unkindly?” A world of love thrilled in that word. “Luttra, I am your
husband and rejoice that I am so; it is to lay the devotion of my heart
and life at your feet that I seek your presence this hour. The year has
taught me--ah, what has not the year taught me of the worth of her I so
recklessly threw from me on my wedding day. Luttra,”--he held out his
hand--“will you crown all your other acts of devotion with a pardon
that will restore me to my manhood and that place in your esteem which I
covet above every other earthly good?”
Her face which had been raised to his with that earnest look we knew so
well, softened with an ineffable smile, but still she did not lay her
hand in his.
“And you say this to me in the very hour of my father’s and brother’s
arrest! With the remembrance in your mind of their bound and abject
forms lying before you guarded by police; knowing too, that they deserve
their ignominy and the long imprisonment that awaits them?”
“No, I say it on the day of the discovery and the restoration of that
wife for whom I have long searched, and to whom when found I have no
word to give but welcome, welcome, welcome.”
With the same deep smile she bowed her head, “Now let come what will,
I can never again be unhappy,” were the words I caught, uttered in the
lowest of undertones. But in another moment her head had regained its
steady poise and a great change had passed over her manner.
“Mr. Blake,” said she, “you are good; how good, I alone can know and
duly appreciate who have lived in your house this last year and seen
with eyes that missed nothing, just what your surroundings are and have
been from the earliest years of your proud life. But goodness must not
lead you into the committal of an act you must and will repent to your
dying day; or if it does, I who have learned my duty in the school of
adversity, must show the courage of two and forbid what every secret
instinct of my soul declares to be only provocative of shame and sorrow.
You would take me to your heart as your wife; do you realize what that
means?”
“I think I do,” was his earnest reply. “Relief from heart-ache, Luttra.”
Her smooth brow wrinkled with a sudden spasm of pain but her firm lips
did not quiver.
“It means,” said she, drawing nearer but not with that approach which
indicates yielding, “it means, shame to the proudest family that lives
in the land. It means silence as regards a past blotted by suggestions
of crime; and apprehension concerning a future across which the shadow
of prison walls must for so many years lie. It means, the hushing of
certain words upon beloved lips; the turning of cherished eyes from
visions where fathers and daughters ay, brothers and sisters are
seen joined together in tender companionship or loving embrace. It
means,--God help me to speak out--a home without the sanctity of
memories; a husband without the honors he has been accustomed to enjoy;
a wife with a fear gnawing like a serpent into her breast; and children,
yes, perhaps children from whose innocent lips the sacred word of
grandfather can never fall without wakening a blush on the cheeks of
their parents, which all their lovesome prattle will be helpless to
chase away.”
“Luttra, your father and your brother have given their consent to go
their dark way alone and trouble you no more. The shadow you speak of
may lie on your heart, dear wife, for these men are of your own blood,
but it need never invade the hearthstone beside which I ask you to sit.
The world will never know, whether you come with me or not, that
Luttra Blake was ever Luttra Schoenmaker. Will you not then give me the
happiness of striving to make such amends for the past, that you too,
will forget you ever bore any other name than the one you now honor so
truly?”
“O do not,” she began but paused with a sudden control of her emotion
that lifted her into an atmosphere almost holy in its significance. “Mr.
Blake,” said she, “I am a woman and therefore weak to the voice of love
pleading in my ear. But in one thing I am strong, and that is in my
sense of what is due to the man I have sworn to honor. Eleven months ago
I left you because your pleasure and my own dignity demanded it; to-day
I put by all the joy and exaltation you offer, because your position as
a gentleman, and your happiness as a man equally requires it.”
“My happiness as a man!” he broke in. “Ah, Luttra if you love me as I do
you--”
“I might perhaps yield,” she allowed with a faint smile. “But I love
you as a girl brought up amid surroundings from which her whole being
recoiled, must love the one who first brought light into her darkness
and opened up to her longing feet the way to a life of culture, purity
and honor. I were the basest of women could I consent to repay such a
boundless favor--”
“But Luttra,” he again broke in, “you married me knowing what your
father and brother were capable of committing.”
“Yes, yes; I was blinded by passion, a girl’s passion, Mr. Blake, born
of glamour and gratitude; not the self-forgetting devotion of a woman
who has tasted the bitterness of life and so learned its lesson of
sacrifice. I may not have thought, certainly I did not realize, what I
was doing. Besides, my father and brother were not convicted criminals
at that time, however weak they had proved themselves under temptation.
And then I believed I had left them behind me on the road of life; that
we were sundered, irrevocably cut loose from all possible connection.
But such ties are not to be snapped so easily. They found me, you see,
and they will find me again--”
“Never!” exclaimed her husband. “They are as dead to you as if the grave
had swallowed them. I have taken care of that.”
“But the shame! you have not taken care of that. That exists and must,
and while it does I remain where I can meet it alone. I love you; God’s
sun is not dearer to my eyes; but I will never cross your threshold as
your wife till the opprobrium can be cut loose from my skirts, and the
shadow uplifted from my brow. A queen with high thoughts in her eyes and
brave hopes in her heart were not too good to enter that door with you.
Shall a girl who has lived three weeks in an atmosphere of such crime
and despair, that these rooms have often seemed to me the gateway to
hell, carry there, even in secrecy, the effects of that atmosphere? I
will cherish your goodness in my heart but do not ask me to bury that
heart in any more exalted spot, than some humble country home, where
my life may be spent in good deeds and my love in prayers for the man I
hold dear, and because I hold dear, leave to his own high path among the
straight and unshadowed courses of the world.”
And with a gesture that inexorably shut him off while it expressed the
most touching appeal, she glided by him and took her way to the room
where her father and brother awaited her presence.