THE SEVERED KNOT
It was in the gray of the early morning, as the _Slavonia_ steamed from
the Upper Bay into the North River and the serrated skyline of
Manhattan bit into the thin rind of sunrise to the east, that Durkin
and Frank came suddenly together in a deserted companionway. She had
been praying for one hour more, and then all would be set right.
"I want to see you!" he said sharply.
She looked about to make sure they were unobserved.
"I know it--but I daren't run the risk--now!"
"Why not now? What has changed?" he demanded.
"I tell you we can't, Jim! We might be seen here, any minute!"
"What difference should that make?"
"It makes every difference!"
"By heaven, I've _got_ to see you!" For the first time she realized
the force of the dull rage that burned within him. "I want to know
what's before us, and how we're going to act!"
"I tell you, Jim, I can't talk to you here!"
"You mean you don't care to!" he flashed out.
"Can't you trust me?" she pleaded.
"Trust you? What has trust to do in a business like ours?"
"It is _your_ business--until you put an end to it!" And her voice
shook with the repressed bitterness of her spirit. "I tried to see you
quietly, last night, but you had gone to your cabin. I have a feeling
that we're under the eye of every steward on this ship--I _know_ we are
being watched, all the time. And if you were seen here with me, it
would only drag you in, and make it harder to straighten out, in the
end. Can't you see what's going on?"
"Yes, I _have_ been seeing what's going on--and I'm sick of it!"
"Oh, not _that_, Jim!" she cried, in a little muffled wail. "You know
it would never be that!"
His one dominating feeling was that which grew out of the stinging
consciousness that she wanted to escape him, that the moment had come
when she could make an effort to evade him. But he was only paying the
penalty! He had sowed, he told himself, and it was only natural that
in time he should reap! Already he was losing her! Already, it might
be, he had lost her!
"Won't you be reasonable?" she was saying, and her voice sounded faint
and far away. "I've got to see this through now, and one little false
move would spoil everything! I must land by myself. I'll write you,
at the Bartholdi, when and where to meet me!"
The noise of approaching footsteps sounded down the carpeted
passageway. He had caught her by the arm, but now he released his grip
and turned away.
"Quick," she whispered, "here's somebody coming!"
She was struggling with the ends of her veil, and Durkin was aimlessly
pacing away from her, when the hurrying steward brushed by them. A
moment later he returned, followed by a second steward, but by this
time Durkin had made his way to the upper deck, and was looking with
quiescent rage at the quays and walls and skyscrapers of New York.
Before the steamer wore into the wharf Frank had seen Keenan and a last
few words had passed between them. She sternly schooled herself to
calmness, for she felt her great moment had come.
At his request that her first mission be to deliver a sealed packet at
the office of Richard Penfield, in the lower West Side, she evinced
neither surprise nor displeasure. It was all in the day's work, she
protested, as Keenan talked on, giving her more definite instructions
and still again impressing on her the need for secrecy.
She took the sealed package without emotion--the little package for
which she had worked so hard and lost so much and waited so long--and
as apathetically secreted it. Equally without emotion she passed
Durkin, standing at the foot of the gangway. Something in his face,
however, warned her of the grim mood that burned within him. She
pitied him, not for his suffering, but for his blindness.
"Don't follow me!" she muttered, between her teeth, as she swept
unbetrayingly by him, and hurriedly made her way out past the customs
barrier. It was not until she had reached the closed carriage Keenan's
steward had already ordered for her that she realized how apparently
cursory and precipitate had been that hurried word of warning. But
there was time for neither explanation nor display of emotion. It
could all be made clear and put right, later.
She heard the nervous trample of hoofs on the wooden flooring, the
battle of truck-wheels, the muffled sound of calling voices, and she
leaned back in the gloomy cab and closed her eyes with a great sense of
escape, with a sense of relief tinged with triumph.
As she did so the door of her turning cab was opened, and the sudden
square of light was blocked by a massive form. She gave a startled
little cry as the figure swung itself up into the seat beside her.
Then the curtained door swung shut, with a slam. It seemed like the
snap of a steel trap.
"Hello, there, Frank!--I've been looking out for you!" said the
intruder, with a taunt of mockery in his easy laugh.
_It was MacNutt_. She gaped at him stupidly, with an inarticulate
throaty gasp, half of protest, half of bewilderment.
"You see, I know you, Frank, and Keenan doesn't!" And again she felt
the sting of his scoffing laughter.
She looked at the subdolous, pale-green eyes, with their predatory
restlessness, at the square-blocked, flaccid jaw, and the beefy,
animal-like massiveness of the strong neck, at the huge form odorous of
gin and cigar smoke, and the great, hairy hands marked with their
purplish veinings. It seemed like a ghost out of some long-past and
only half-remembered life. It came back to her with all the
hideousness of a momentarily forgotten nightmare, made newly hideous by
the sanities of ordered design and open daylight in which it intruded.
And her heart sank and hope burned out of her.
"You! How dare _you_ come here?" she demanded, with a show of hot
defiance.
He looked at her collectedly and studiously, with an approving little
side-shake of the bull-dog, pugnacious-looking head.
"You're the same fine looker!" was all he said, with an appreciative
clucking of the throat. Oh, how she hated him, and everything for
which he stood!
By this time they had threaded their way out of the tangled traffic of
West street, and were rumbling cityward through the narrower streets of
Greenwich village.
Frank's first intelligible feeling was one of gratitude at the thought
that Durkin had escaped the trap into which she herself had fallen.
That did not leave the situation quite so hopeless. Her second feeling
was one of fear that he might be following her, then one that he might
not, that he would not be near her in the coming moment of need--for
she knew that now of all times MacNutt held her in the hollow of his
hand--that now, as never before, he would frustrate and crush and
obliterate her. There were old transgressions to be paid for; there
were old scores to be wiped out. Keenan and his Penfield wealth were
nothing to her now--she was no longer plotting for the future, but
shrinking away from her dark and toppling present, that seemed about to
buckle like a falling wall and crush her as it fell. Month after
month, in Europe, she had known visions of some such meeting as this,
through nightmare and troubled sleep. And now it was upon her.
MacNutt seemed to follow her line of flashing thought, for he emitted a
short bark of a laugh and said: "It's pretty small, this world, isn't
it? I guessed that we'd be meetin' again before I'd swung round the
circle!"
"Where are we going?" she demanded, trying to lash her disordered and
straggling thoughts into coherence.
"We're goin' to the neatest and completest poolroom in all Manhattan!"
"Poolroom?" she cried.
"Yes, my dear; I mean that we're drivin' to Penfield's brand-new
downtown house, where, as somewhat of a hiker in the past, you'll see
things done in a mighty whole-souled and princely fashion!"
"But why should I go there? And why with you?"
"Oh, I'm on Penfield's list, just at present, kind o' helpin' to soothe
some of the city police out o' their reform tantrums. And you've got
about a quarter of a million of Penfield's securities on you--so I
thought I'd kind o' keep an eye on you--this time!"
Her first impulse was to throw herself headlong from the cab door. But
this, she warned herself, would be both useless and dangerous. Through
the curtained window she could see that they were now in the more
populous districts of the city, and that the speed at which they were
careering down the empty car-tracks was causing early morning
foot-passengers to stop and turn and gaze after them in wonder. It was
now, or never, she told herself, with a sudden deeper breath of
determination.
With a quick motion of her hand she flung open the door, and leaning
out, called shrilly for the driver to stop. He went on unheeding, as
though he had not heard her cry.
She felt MacNutt's fierce pull at her leaning shoulder, but she
struggled away from him, and repeated her cry. A street boy or two ran
after the carriage, adding to the din. She was tearing and fighting in
MacNutt's futile grasp by this time, calling desperately as she fought
him back. As the cab swerved about an obstructing delivery-wagon a
patrolman sprang at the horses' heads, was jerked from his feet, and
was carried along with the careering horse. But in the end he brought
them to a stop. Before he could reach the cab door a crowd had
collected.
A hansom dashed up as the now infuriated officer brushed and elbowed
the crowd aside. Above the surging heads, in that hansom, Frank could
see the familiar figure, as it leaped to the ground and dove through
the closing gap of humanity, after the officer.
It was Durkin; and now, in a sudden passion of blind fear for him she
sprang from the cab-step and tried to beat him back with her naked
hands, foolishly, uselessly, for she knew that if once together MacNutt
and he would fall on one another and fight it out to the end.
The patrolman caught her back, roughly, and held her.
"What's all this, anyway?" It surprised him a little, as he held her,
to find that the woman was not inebriate.
"I want this woman!" cried Durkin, and at the sound of his voice
MacNutt leaned forward from the shadows of the half-closed carriage,
and the eyes of the two men met, in one pregnant and contending stare.
A flash of inspiration came to the trembling woman.
"I will give everything up to him, officer, if he'll only not make a
scene!" She was fumbling at a package in the bosom of her dress.
"He can have his stuff, every bit of it--if he'll let it go at that!"
Durkin caught his cue as he saw the color of one corner of the sealed
yellow manila envelope.
"Stand back there!" howled the officer to the crowding circle. "And
you, shut up!" he added to MacNutt, now horrible to look upon with
suppressed rage.
"This woman lifted a package of mine, officer," said Durkin quickly.
"If it's intact, why, let her go!"
His fingers closed, talon-like, on the manila envelope. He flashed the
unbroken red seal at the officer, with a little laugh of triumph. That
laugh seemed to madden MacNutt, as he made a second ineffectual effort
to break into that tense and rapid cross-fire of talk.
"And you don't want to lay a charge?" the policeman demanded, as he
angrily elbowed back the ever intruding circle.
"Let 'em go!" said Durkin, backing toward his cab.
"But what's the papers, and what t'ell does _she_ want with 'em?"
interrogated the officer.
"Correspondence!" said Durkin easily, almost lightheartedly. "Kind of
personal stuff. They're--_he's_ drunk, anyway!" For stumbling angrily
out of the cab, MacNutt was crying that it was all a pack of lies, that
they were a quarter of a million in money and that the officer should
arrest Durkin on the spot, or he'd have him "broke."
"And then you'll chew me up an' spit me out, won't you, you blue-gilled
Irish bull-dog?" jeered the irate officer, already out of temper with
the unruly crowd jostling about him.
"I say arrest that man!" screamed the claret-faced MacNutt.
"And I say I'll run _you_ in, and run you in mighty quick, if you don't
get rid o' them jim-jams pretty soon!"
"By God, I'll take it out of _you_ for this, when my turn comes!" raved
MacNutt, turning, purplish gray of face, on the deprecating Durkin.
"I'll take it out of you, by God!"
"There--there! He's simply drunk, officer; and the woman has squared
herself. I don't want to press any charge. But you'd better take his
name!"
"Drunk, am I? You'll be drunk when I finish with you. You won't have
a name, you'll have a number, when I'm through with you!" repeated the
infuriated MacNutt.
"Look here, the two o' you!" suddenly exclaimed the outraged arm of the
law, "you climb into that hack and clear out o' here, as quick as you
can, or I'll run you both in!"
MacNutt still expostulated, still begged for a private audience in the
street-corner saloon, still threatened and pleaded and protested.
The exasperated officer turned to the cab-driver, as he slung the
street loafers from him to right and left.
"Here, you get these fares o' yours out o' this--get them away mighty
quick, or I'll have you soaked for breakin' the speed ord'nance!"
Then he turned quickly, for the frightened woman had emitted a sharp
scream, as her bull-necked companion, with the vigor of a new and
desperate resolution, bodily caught her up and thrust her into the
gloom of the half-curtained carriage.
"Oh, Jim, Jim, don't let him take me!" she cried mysteriously to the
man she had just robbed. But the man she had just robbed looked at her
with what seemed indifferent eyes, and said nothing.
"Don't you know where he's taking me? Can't you see? It's to
Penfield's!" she cried, through her weakening struggles.
A new and strange paralysis of all his emotions seemed to have crept
over Durkin, as he watched the cab door slammed shut and the horses go
plunging and curveting out through the crowd.
"You'd better get away as quiet as you can!" said the policeman, in an
undertone, for Durkin had slipped a ten-dollar bill into his
unprotesting fingers. "You'd better slide, for if the colonel happens
along I can't do much to help you out!"
Then, with his hand on Durkin's cab door he said, with unfeigned
bewilderment: "Say, what's the game of your actress friend, anyway?"
Durkin turned away in disgust, without answering. She was no longer
his friend; she was his enemy, his betrayer! He had lived by the
sword, and by the sword he should die! He had triumphed through crime,
and through crime he was being undone! He had led her into the paths
of duplicity; he had taught her wrong-doing and dishonor; and with the
very tools he had put in her hand she had cut her way out to liberty,
and turned and defeated him!
Then he remembered the scene on the _Slavonia_, and her passionate cry
for him, for his love. In the wake of this came the memory of still
earlier scenes and still more passionate cries for what he had so
scantily given her.
Then suddenly he smote his knees with his clenched fists, and said
aloud:
"It can't be true! It can't be true!"