Mrs. Balfame was whirled to Dobton in ten minutes--herself, she fancied,
the very centre of a whirlwind. The automobile was pursued by three cars
containing members of the press, which shot past just before they
reached Dobton Courthouse, that the occupants might leap out and fix
their cameras. Other men and women of the press stood before the locked
gate of the jail yard, several holding cameras. But once more the
reading public was forced to be content with an appetising news-story
illustrated by a tall black mummy.
Mrs. Balfame walked past them holding her clenched hands under her veil,
but to all appearance composed and indifferent. The sob-sisters were
enthusiastic, and the men admired and disliked her more than ever. Your
true woman always weeps when in trouble, just as she blushes and
trembles when a man selects her to be his comforter through life.
The Warden and his wife, who but a few weeks since had moved into their
new quarters, had moved out again without a murmur and with an
unaccustomed thrill. What a blessed prospect after screaming drunks,
drug-fiends and tame commercial sinners!
The doors clanged shut; Mrs. Balfame mounted the stairs hastily, and was
still composed enough to exclaim with pleasure and to thank the Warden's
wife, Mrs. Larks, when she saw that flowers were on the table and even
on the window-sills.
"I guess you'll stand it all right," said Mrs. Larks proudly. "Just make
yourself at home and I'll have your lunch up in a jiffy."
Mrs. Cummack and Mrs. Gifning had come in the car with Mrs. Balfame, and
Cummack and several other men of standing arrived almost immediately to
assure her, with pale disturbed faces, that they were doing their best
to get her out on bail. While she was trying to eat her lunch, the
telephone bell rang, and her set face became more animated as she
recognised Rush's strong confident voice. He had read the news in the
early edition of the afternoon papers, in New York, telephoned to Dobton
and found that his immediate fear was realised and that she was in the
County Jail. He commanded her to keep up her spirits and promised to be
with her at four o'clock.
Then she begged her friends to go and let her rest and sleep if
possible; they knew just how serious that consultation with her lawyer
must be. When she was alone, however, she picked up the telephone, which
stood on a side table, and called up the office of Dr. Anna Steuer. Ever
since her arrest she had been dully conscious of her need of this oldest
and truest of her friends. It came to her with something of a shock as
she sat waiting for Central to connect, that she had leaned upon this
strong and unpretentious woman far more than her calm self-satisfied
mind had ever admitted.
Dr. Anna's assistant answered the call, and when she heard Mrs.
Balfame's voice broke down and wept loudly.
"Oh, do be quiet," said Mrs. Balfame impatiently. "I am in no danger
whatever. Connect me with the Doctor."
"Oh, it ain't only that. Poor--poor Doctor! She's been all in for days,
and this morning she just collapsed, and I sent for Dr. Lequeur, and he
pronounced it typhoid and sent for the ambulance and had her taken out
to Brabant Hospital. The last thing she said--whispered--was to be sure
not to bother you, that you would hear it soon enough--"
Mrs. Balfame hung up the receiver, which had almost fallen from her
shaking hand. She turned cold with terror. Anna ill! And when she most
wanted her! A little window in her brain opened reluctantly, and
superstition crept in. Beyond that open window she seemed to hear the
surge of a furious and irresistible tide. Had it been waiting all these
years to overleap the barriers about her well ordered life and sweep her
into chaos? She frowned and put her thoughts more colloquially. Had her
luck changed? Was Fate against her? When she thought of Dwight Rush, it
was only to shrink again. If anything happened to him--and why not? Men
were killed every day by automobiles, and he had an absentminded way of
walking--
She sprang to her feet and paced up and down the two rooms of the suite,
determined upon composure, and angry with herself. She recovered her
mental balance (so rarely disturbed by imaginative flights), but her
spirits were at zero; and she was sitting with her elbows on her knees,
her hands pressed to her face when Rush entered promptly at four
o'clock. He was startled at the face she lifted. It looked older but
indefinably more attractive. Her inviolable serenity had irritated even
him at times, although she was his innocent ideal of a great lady.
The Warden, who had unlocked the door, left them alone, and Rush sat
down and took both her hands in his warm reassuring grasp.
"You are not to be the least bit frightened," he said. "The great thing
for you to remember is that your husband's political crowd rules, and
simply laughs at your arrest. They are more positive than ever that some
political enemy did it. Balfame's temper was growing shorter and
shorter, and he had many enemies, even in his own party. But the crowd
will pull every wire to get you off, and they can pull wires, all
right--"
"But on what evidence am I arrested? What did those abominable people
say to the Grand Jury? Am I never to know?"
"Well, rather. It's all in the afternoon papers, for one of the
reporters got the evidence before the Grand Jury did."
He had taken off his overcoat, and he crossed the room and took from a
pocket a copy of _The Evening News_. She glanced over it with her lips
drawn back from her teeth. It contained not only the story the
enterprising Mr. Bruce had managed to obtain from Frieda and Conrad Jr.,
but a corroboration of the maid's assertion that, warned by the family
friend and lawyer, Mr. Dwight Rush, to disappear, she had gone to Papa
Kraus for advice. Not a word, however, of blackmail.
"So the public believes already that I am a murderess! No doubt I should
be convinced as readily myself. It is all so adroit!" Mrs. Balfame
spoke quietly but with intense bitterness. "I suppose I must be
tried--more and still more publicity. No one will ever forget it. Do you
suppose it is true young Kraus saw me that night?"
"God knows!"
He got up again and moved nervously about the room. "I wish I could be
sure. That is the point to which I must give the deepest
consideration--whether you are to admit or not that you went out. The
Grand Jury and Gore believe it. Young Kraus has a very good name. Frieda
has always been well behaved. There are six Germans on the Grand Jury,
moreover. We must see that none get on the trial jury. Gore wants to
believe--"
"But he was a friend of Dave's."
"Exactly. He is making much of that point. Affects to be filled with
righteous wrath because you killed his dear old friend. Trust a district
attorney. All they care for is to win out, and he has his spurs to win,
in the bargain. I met him a few moments ago; he was about equally full
of gin fizzes and the 'indisputable fact' that you are the only person
in sight with a motive. Oh, don't! Don't!"
Mrs. Balfame had broken down. She flung her arms over the table and her
head upon them. More than once in her life she had shed tears both
diplomatic and spontaneous, but for the first time since she was a child
she sobbed heavily. She felt forlorn, deserted, in awful straits.
"Anna is ill," she articulated. "Anna! My one real friend--the only one
that has meant anything to me. Life has gone pretty well with me. Now
everything is changed. I know that terrible things are about to happen
to me."
"Not while I am alive. I heard of Dr. Anna's illness on my way to New
York. Lequeur was on the train. You--you must let me take her place. I
am devoted to you heart and soul. You surely know that."
"But you are not a woman. It's a woman friend I want now, a strong one
like Anna. Those other women--oh, yes, they're devoted to me--have been,
but they've suddenly ceased to count, somehow. Besides, they'll soon
believe me guilty. I hate them all. Only Anna would have understood--and
believed."
Rush had been administering awkward little pats to the soft masses of
her hair. Suddenly he realised that his faith in her complete innocence
was by no means as stable as it had been; she had confessed to him that
she had been in the grove that night stalking the intruder. How absurd
to believe that she had gone out unarmed. He had read the circumstantial
details of the reporter's interviews with Frieda and young Kraus. While
the writers were careful not to make the downright assertion that Mrs.
Balfame had fired the fatal shot, the public saw her in the act of
levelling one of the pistols--so mighty is the power of the trained and
ruthless pen.
As he stood looking down upon his unexpected surrender to emotional
excitement, he asked himself deliberately: What more natural, if she had
a pistol in her hand and that low-lived creature presented himself
abruptly and alone, than that it should go off of its own accord, so to
speak, whether hers had been the bullet to penetrate that loathsome
target or not? If so, what had she done with the pistol?
He sat down and laid his hand firmly on her arm.
"There is something I must tell you. It is something Frieda forgot to
tell the reporter, but she gave it to the Grand Jury. With the help of a
couple of extra gin fizzes, I extracted it from Gore. It is this: she
told the Grand Jury that several times when she did her weekly cleaning
upstairs she saw a pistol in the drawer of a table beside your bed.
Will--won't you tell me?"
He felt the arm in his clasp grow rigid, but Mrs. Balfame answered
without a trace of her recent agitation: "I told you before that I never
had a pistol. It would be like her to be spying about among my things,
but I wonder she would admit it."
"She is delighted with her new importance, and, I fancy, has been bribed
to tell all she knows."
"In that case she wouldn't mind telling more. And no doubt she will
think of other sensational items before the trial. She will have
awakened in the night after the crime and heard me drop the pistol
between the walls, or she will have seen me loading it on the afternoon
of the shooting."
"Yes, there is no knowing when those low-grade imaginations, once
started, will stop. Memory ceases to function in brains of that sort,
and its place is taken by a confused jumble of induced or auto
suggestions, which are carefully straightened out by the practised
lawyer in rehearsals. But I almost wish that you had taken a pistol out
that night and would tell me where to find it. I'd lose it somewhere out
in the marsh."
"I had no pistol." Not yet could she take him into her confidence to
that extent, although she knew that he was about to stake his
professional reputation on her acquittal.
He dismissed the subject abruptly. "By the way, I gave the story of
Frieda's attempt to blackmail you to Broderick and two other men just
before I left town--laying emphasis on the fact that you always drank a
glass of filtered water before going to bed. They made a wry face over
that, but it is news and they must publish it. There are many things in
your favour--particularly Frieda's assertion before the coroner that she
knew nothing of the case. She is a confessed perjurer. Also, why didn't
she answer when you called up to her, if she was on the back stairs?
There are things that satisfy a grand jury that will not go down with a
trial jury. Now you must, you must trust me."
She looked up at him dully. But in a moment her eyes warmed and she
smiled faintly. All the female in her responded to the traditional
strength and power of the male. She also knew the sensitiveness of man's
vanity and the danger either of starving it or dealing it a sudden blow.
She sometimes felt sorry for men. It was their self-appointed task to
run the planet, and they must be reminded just so often how wonderful
they were, lest they lose courage; one of the several obliging
weaknesses of which women rarely scrupled to take advantage.
As she put out her hand and took his, she looked very feminine and
sweet. Her face was flushed and tears had softened her large blue-grey
eyes that could look so virginal and cold.
"I know you will get me off. Don't imagine for a moment I doubt that; it
is a sustaining faith that will carry me through the trial itself. But
it is this terrible ordeal in prison that I dread--and the publicity--my
good name dragged in the dust."
"You can change that name for mine the day you are acquitted."
It suddenly occurred to her that this might be a very sensible thing to
do, and simultaneously she appreciated the fact that he possessed what
was called charm and magnetism. Moreover, the complete devotion of even
a passably attractive member of the over-sex in alarming predicaments
was a very precious thing. Possibly for the first time in her life she
experienced a sensation of gratitude, and she smiled at him so radiantly
that he caught his breath.
"No one but you could have consoled me for the loss of Anna, but you are
not to say one word of that sort to me until I am out of this dreadful
place. I couldn't stand the contrast! Will you promise?"
"Very well."
"Now will you really do something for me--get me a sleeping powder from
the druggist? To-morrow I shall be myself again, but I _must_ sleep
to-night."
"I'll get it." His voice was matter of fact, for love made certain of
his instincts keen if it blunted others. "That is, if you will promise
to go to bed early and see none of these reporters, men or women. They
are camped all over the Courthouse yard."
She gave an exclamation of disgust. "I'll never see another newspaper
person as long as I live. They are responsible for this, and I hate
them."
"Good! You shall have the powder in ten minutes. Oh, by the way, will
you give me a written permit to pass the night in your house? I want to
go through your husband's papers and see if I can find any clue to
unknown enemies. He may have received threatening letters. I can obtain
the official permission without any difficulty."
She wrote the permit unsuspiciously. At nine o'clock that night he let
himself into the Balfame house determined to find the pistol before
morning. He knew the police would get round to the inevitable search
some time on the following day.