THE WOMAN SPEAKS
"Ssssh!" said the woman under her breath, as she clutched Durkin's arm.
He shook her hand off, impatiently, although the act seemed at
cross-purposes with his own will.
"But you--here!" he still gasped.
"Oh, Jim!" she half-moaned, inadequately. Yet an _aura_ of calmness
seemed to surround her. So great was his own excitement that the words
burst from him of their own will, apparently, and sounded like the
utterance of a voice not his own.
"What's it mean! How'd you get here?"
He could hear her shuddering, indrawn sigh.
"What, in the name of heaven, do _you_ want in here? Why don't you
speak?"
There was a moment of unbroken silence. For the first time it seemed
to come home to him that this woman who confronted him was his own
wife, in the flesh and blood.
"What are _you_ doing here?" she demanded at last.
He responded, even in his mood of hot antagonism, to some note of
ever-sustained appeal about her. Even through the black gloom that
blanketed and blinded him some phantasmal and sub-conscious medium,
like the imaginary circuit of a multiplex telegraph system, seemed to
carry to his mind some secondary message, some thought that she herself
had not uttered. She, too, was suffering, but she had not shown it,
for such was her way, he remembered. A wave of sympathy obliterated
his resentment. He caught her in his arms, hungrily, and kissed her
abandonedly. He noticed that her skin was cold and moist.
"Oh, Jim," she murmured again, weakly.
"It's so long, isn't it?"
Then she added, with a little catch of the breath, as though even that
momentary embrace were a joy too costly to be countenanced, "Turn on
the lights, quick!"
"I can't," he told her. "I've cut the wires."
He felt at her blindly, through the muffling blackness. She was
shaking a little now, on his arm. It bewildered him to think how his
hunger for her could still obliterate all consciousness of time and
place.
"Why didn't you write?" she pleaded pitifully.
"I did write--a dozen times. Then I telegraphed!"
"Not a word came!" she cried.
"Then I wrote twice to London!"
"And _those_ never came. Oh, everything was against me!" she moaned.
"But how did you get here?" he still demanded.
She did not answer his question. Instead, she asked him: "Where did
you send the Paris letters?"
"To 11 bis avenue Beaucourt."
She groaned a little, impatiently.
"That was foolish--I wrote you that I was leaving there--that I _had_
to go!"
"Not a line reached me!"
He heard her little gasp of despair before she spoke.
"I was put out of there," she went on, hurriedly and evenly, yet with a
_vibrata_ of passion in her crowded utterance. "There wasn't a penny
left--the pupils I had gave up their lessons. What they had heard or
found out I don't know. Then I got a tiny room in the rue de Sèvres.
I sold my last thing, then our wedding ring, even, to get it."
"And then what?"
"I still waited--I thought you would know, or find out, and that in
some way or other I should still hear from you. I would have gone to
the police, or advertised, but I knew it wouldn't be safe."
Once more the embittering consciousness of some dark coalition of
forces against them swept over him. Fate, at every step, had
frustrated them.
"I advertised twice, in the Herald?"
"Where would I see the Herald?"
"But you must have known I was trying to find you--that I was doing
everything possible!"
"I knew nothing," she answered, in her poignantly emotionless voice.
And the thought swept through Durkin that something within her had
withered and died during those last grim weeks of suffering.
"But here--how did you get here--and what's this Lady Boxspur
business?" he still insisted.
"Yes, yes," she almost moaned, "if you'll only wait I'll tell you. But
is it safe to stay here? Have you thought where we are?"
"Yes; it's safe, quite safe, for an hour yet."
"Why didn't you send me money, or help me?" she asked, in her dead and
unhappy monotone.
"I did, eighty francs, all I had. I hadn't a penny left. I didn't
know the damned language. I prowled about like a cat in a strange
garret, but I tried everything, from the American consul at Nice to a
_Herald_ correspondent at San Remo. Then I got word of a consumptive
young writer from New York, at Mentone--but he died the day I was to
meet him. Then I heard of the new Marconi station up the coast, and
worked at wireless for two weeks, and made twenty dollars, before they
sacked me for not being able to send a message out to a Messina
fruit-steamer, in Italian. Then I chanced on the job of doctoring up a
generator on an American yacht down here in the bay."
"Yes, yes--I know how hard it is!"
"But listen! When I was on board at work I overheard a Supreme Court
judge and a special agent from the Central Office in New York and two
English detectives talking over the loss of certain securities. And
those securities belong to Richard Penfield!"
He knew that she had started, at the sound of that name.
"Penfield!" she gasped. "What of him?"
"When the district-attorney's men raided Penfield's New York gambling
club, one of Penfield's new men got away with all his papers. They had
been withdrawn from the Fifth Avenue Safe Deposit Company, for they
were mostly cheques and negotiable securities, worth about two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars. But beyond all their face value, they
constituted _prima facie_ evidence against the gambler."
"But what's all this to us, now?"
"They were smuggled to New Jersey. There the Jersey City chief of
police took action, and this agent of Penfield's carried the documents
across the North River and up to Stamford. From there he got back to
New York again, by night, where he met a second agent, who had secured
passage on the _Slavonia_ for Naples. The first man is MacNutt."
"MacNutt!" ejaculated the listening woman.
"Yes, MacNutt! He compromised with Penfield and swung in with him when
the district-attorney started pounding at them both. The second man is
a lawyer named Keenan, who was disbarred for conspiracy in the Brayton
divorce case. Keenan and his papers are due at Genoa on Friday. I
found some of this out on board the yacht. I thought it over--and it
was the only way open for me. I couldn't stand out against it all, any
longer. I thought I could make the plunge, without your ever knowing
it--and perhaps get enough to keep you out of any more messes like
this!"
"You had given me up?" she cried, reprovingly.
"No--no--no--I'd only given up waiting for chances to _find you_. My
God, don't you suppose I knew you needed me!"
"It would have been too late!" she said, in her dead voice. "It's too
late, already!"
"Then you don't care?" he demanded, almost brokenly.
"I'll never complain, or whine, again!" she answered with dreary
listlessness.
"Then why _are_ you in this room?"
"_I mean that I've given up myself_. I'm in it, now, as deep as you!
I couldn't fight it back any longer--it _had_ to come!"
"But why, and how! Why don't you explain?"
He could feel her groping away from him in the darkness.
"Wait," she whispered.
"But why should I wait?" he demanded.
"Listen! That second room door is still unlocked, and there's danger
enough here, without inviting it."
He groped after her into the bedroom. He could hear the gentle scrape
of the key and the muffled sound of the lock as she turned it, followed
by the cautious slide of the brass bolt, lower on the door. He waited
for her, standing at the foot of the bed. He could hear her sigh of
weariness as she sat down on the edge of the disordered mattress.
Then, remembering that he had cut the wires of only the larger room, he
felt his way to the button at the head of the bed. He snapped the
current open and instantly the blinding white light flooded the chamber.
"_Is_ it safe here, any longer?" she asked restlessly, pausing a moment
to accustom her eyes to the light, and then gazing up at him with an
impersonal studiousness of stare that seemed to wall and bar her off
from him. Still again he was oppressed by some sense of alienation, of
looming tragedy between them. She, too, must have known some shadow of
that feeling, for he saw the look of troubled concern, of unspoken
pity, that crept over her face; and he turned away brusquely.
She spoke his name, quietly; and his gaze coasted round to her again.
She watched him with wide and hungry eyes.
Her breast heaved, at his silence, but all she said was: "Is it safe,
Jim?"
"Yes, it's perfectly safe. So tell me what you have to say. It
doesn't mean any greater risk. We would only have to come back
again--for I've work to do in this room yet!"
The return of the light seemed to give a new cast of practicality to
his thoughts.
"What sort of work?" his wife was asking him.
"Seventeen hundred napoleons in gold to find," he answered grimly.
"Oh, it's not that, not _that_!" she said, starting up. "It's the
papers, the Gibraltar papers!"
"Papers?" he repeated wonderingly.
"Yes, the imperial specifications. Pobloff's a paid agent in the
French secret service. They say he was the man who secured Kitchener's
Afghanistan frontier plans, and in some way or other had a good deal to
do with the Curzon resignation."
"Ah, I _thought_ there was something behind our _boyard_!"
"A year ago last March he was arrested in Jamaica, by the British
authorities, for securing secret photographs of the Port Royal
fortifications. They court-martialed one of the non-commissioned
officers for helping him get an admission to the fortress, but the
officer shot himself, and Pobloff had the plates spirited away, so the
case fell through. Now he's got duplicates of every Upper Gallery and
every new fortification of the Rock at Gibraltar."
"But why waste time over these things?"
"Pobloff got them through an English officer's wife. She was weak--and
worse--she lost her head over him. I can't tell you more now. But
there is an order for five hundred pounds waiting for me at the British
Embassy, in Rome, from the Foreign Office, if I secure those papers!"
"That's twenty-five hundred dollars?"
"Yes, almost."
"And I was on the point of crawling away with a few napoleons!" said
Durkin in a whisper. He began to succumb to the intoxication of this
rapidity of movement which life was once more taking on. He was
speed-mad, like a motorist on a white and lonely road. Yet an
ever-recurring dismay and distrust of the end kept coming to him.
"But how did you come to find all this out? What happened after the
rue de Sèvres?"
"Oh, it was all easy and natural enough, if I could only put it into
words. After a few days, when I was hungry and sick, I went to one of
the English hotels. I would have taken anything, even a servant's
work, I believe."
He cursed himself to think that it was through him that she had come to
such things.
"But I was lucky," she went on, hurriedly. "One afternoon I stumbled
on a weeping lady's maid, on the verge of hysterics, who found enough
confidence in me, in time, to tell me that her mistress had gone mad in
her room and was clawing down the wallpaper and talking about killing
herself. It was true enough, in a way, I soon found out, for it was an
English noblewoman who had fought with her husband two weeks before in
London, and had run away to Paris. What she had dipped into, and gone
through, and suffered, I could only guess; but I know this: that that
afternoon she had drunk half a pint of raw alcohol when the frightened
maid had locked her in the bath-room. So I pushed in and took charge.
First I wired to the woman's husband, Lord Boxspur, who sent me money,
at once, and an order to bring her home as quietly as possible. He met
us at Calais. It was a terrible ordeal for me, all through, for she
tried to jump overboard, in the Channel, and was so insane, so
hopelessly insane, that a week after we reached London she was
committed to some sort of private asylum."
"And then?" asked Durkin.
"Then Boxspur thought that possibly I knew too much for his personal
comfort. I rather think he looked on me as dangerous. He put me off
and put me off, until I was glad to snatch at a position in a
next-of-kin agency. But in a fortnight or two I was even more glad to
leave it. Then I went back to Lord Boxspur, who this time sent me
helter-skelter back to Paris, to bribe a blackmailing newspaper woman
from giving the details of his wife's misfortunes to the Continental
correspondent of a London weekly. But even when that was done, and I
had been duly paid for my work, I was only secure for a few weeks, at
the outside. All along I kept writing for you, frantically. So, when
things began to get hopeless again, I went to the British Embassy. I
had to lie, terribly, I'm afraid, before I could get an audience, first
with an under secretary, and then with the ambassador himself. He said
that he regretted he could do nothing for me, at least, officially. He
looked at my clothes, and laughed a little, and said that of course, in
cases of absolute destitution he sometimes felt compelled to come to
the help of his fellow-countrymen. I told him that I knew the world,
and was willing to undertake work of any sort. He answered that such
cases were usually looked after at the consulate, and advised me to go
there. But I didn't give him up, at once. I told him I was
resourceful, and experienced, and might undertake even minor official
tasks for him, until I had heard from my husband. Then he hesitated a
little, and asked me if I knew the Continent well, and if I was averse
to traveling alone. Then he called somebody up on his telephone, and
in a few minutes came out and shook his head doubtfully, and advised me
to apply at the consulate. Instead of that, I went not to the English,
but to the American consul first. He told me that in five weeks a
sea-captain friend of his was sailing from Havre to New York, and that
it might not be impossible to have me carried along."
"That's what they always say!"
"It was the best he could do. Then I went to the British consul. He
spoke about references, which left me blank; and tried to pump me,
which left me frightened. But he could do nothing, he told me, except
in the way of a personal donation, and that, he assumed, was out of the
question. So I went back to the Embassy once more. I don't know why,
but this time, for some reason or other, the ambassador believed in me.
He gave me a week's trial as a sort of second deputy private secretary,
indexing three-year-old correspondence and copying Roumanian
agricultural reports. Then he put me on ordinance-report work. Then
something happened--I can't go into details now--to arouse my
suspicions. I rummaged through the storage closet in my temporary
office and looped his telephone wire with twenty feet of number twelve
wire from a broken electric fan, and an unused transmitter. Then,
scrap by scrap, I picked up my first inklings of what was at that
moment worrying the Foreign Office and the people at the Embassy as
well. It was the capture of the Gibraltar specifications by Prince
Slevenski Pobloff. When a Foreign Office secret agent telephoned in
that Pobloff had been seen in Nice, I fought against the temptation for
half a day, then I went straight to the ambassador and told him what I
knew, but not how I came to know it. He gave me two hundred francs and
a ticket to Monte Carlo, with a letter to deliver in Rome, if by any
chance I should succeed."
"That would give us the show we want! _That_ would give us a chance!"
She did not understand him. "A chance for what?"