"I came here again, thinking perhaps you might wish to explain your
action." The words came from Mrs. Challoner, who, unattended, had found
her way into the prosecutor's office.
Murgatroyd quickly laid down his cigar. Doubtless he was annoyed, but in
spite of himself he could not help admiring the pluck which she showed
in coming directly to him; and as he came forward to meet her, he saw
that it was with difficulty that she kept on her feet. For a moment they
faced each other in silence, yet in the eyes of each there was a look of
fearful misunderstanding. Again the woman spoke.
"What have you to say to me?"
Murgatroyd frowned, his bearing slipped off some of its deference when
he retorted in a voice full of emotion:--
"What have _you_ to say to _me_?..."
The prosecutor's perfect self-possession and earnestness unnerved her
for an instant.
"I--" she faltered and stopped before his scornful glance.
"Yes, you, Mrs. Challoner. Do you recall our compact? Your silence was
the essence of it. Why did you break it?"
Miriam Challoner checked a wild desire to laugh hysterically.
"But you broke it first!"
Murgatroyd smiled.
"How?"
The woman looked steadily at him.
"By this conviction!"
"What was our compact?" he asked sternly.
Miriam's courage was returning; it was with an indignant tone that she
replied:--
"That you should set my husband free!"
Murgatroyd tapped the table with his hand.
"And have I failed as yet?"
"Yes," she answered fiercely. "You have convicted him."
Murgatroyd drew his head slightly to one side; pursed up his lips; drew
his brows together; and narrowed his eyes before he spoke:--
"Did you assume for an instant, Mrs. Challoner, that I was such a
bungler as to release your husband at the first trial--for all the world
to know--to suspect? When I said to you that I would set your husband
free, did I say--_when_?"
Of the scene that followed Miriam Challoner never retained a very clear
impression. She remembered that at first, as if in a trance, she kept
repeating his last word, while by degrees its meaning stole in upon her;
then of a sensation of being about to faint through mere excess of joy.
Suddenly the thought of her temerity flashed through her brain--the
enormity of the thing she had done; and she would have gone on her knees
at his feet had he not caught her in time. Quickly recovering, she
looked up at him. Somehow his face seemed to hold little resentment
now--too little, in fact, to suit her surprising desire to humble
herself in his sight.
"After all, she's rather a fool of a woman," his expression had plainly
said to her overwrought senses, "and I will spare her." And yet she
craved so to hear words of pardon from his lips, that she broke out
almost breathlessly:--
"You will forgive me--you must.... I have done you an unutterable
injury, I know." She stopped, and then with a sudden lapse to her old
air of fear: "Oh, but what will happen now--what will happen to Laurie?
I have failed you; you have the right to ..."
Once more cold and indifferent, Murgatroyd looked out of the window,
though he interrupted her last words by saying frigidly:--
"When I make agreements, Mrs. Challoner, I keep them. You may be sure
that I shall keep this one."
Still awed in a measure by his masterful personality, but with joy in
her heart, Miriam Challoner started to leave the office.
With a gesture Murgatroyd checked her quickly.
"Mrs. Challoner," he said with reproof still lingering in his voice,
"there is no necessity henceforth for personal interviews. In the future
if you have anything to say to me, kindly let it come through your
counsel, Mr. Thorne. It is much better so--much safer. I prefer to deal
with him only."
Miriam bowed acquiescence.
Directly on leaving him Miriam Challoner went to Thorne's office. It was
in accordance with her promise to aid him in formulating the charges
which he was preparing against the prosecutor on her behalf. These
charges were for the legislature and the Grand Jury: on the one hand,
impeachment; on the other, indictment. Now whether the accusation had
been true or false mattered little to Thorne. On the whole, perhaps, he
was inclined to disbelief; but Broderick, his colleague in the
organisation, was by no means of that opinion. In any event, since it
came from such an authoritative source--the lips of Mrs. Challoner--it
was a charge that possessed merit, inasmuch as it would injure
Murgatroyd--and Thorne was not slow to recognise that. In consequence,
then, there was, unmistakably, a note of gratification in the words with
which he greeted Mrs. Challoner that afternoon in his office.
"Here it is--in the form of an affidavit--just what you told me, Mrs.
Challoner. Please read it."
Trembling slightly while searching her mind for some clever way in which
she might express her change of plan, Miriam Challoner slowly read the
document. Nothing was left out, nothing exaggerated, and without a word
she returned it.
"Will you sign here, please?"
There was no time to arrange any idea she may have had for new tactics:
it was Thorne's voice that was insisting; it was Thorne who was holding
a pen for her and indicating the correct place for her signature. And
with a violent effort, Mrs. Challoner braced herself for the first lie
in her life.
"It's not true. I cannot sign it."
Thorne started back. Instantly he was spluttering his annoyance at what
he considered merely a woman's whim.
"Not true! Why only a short time ago you declared it was true."
"So it was--but only in a way," she said laboriously. Her face burned
and paled. "I tried to bribe him, but----"
"Bribe him! How?..."
"With the money--the money I had left," she replied cautiously.
"What have you left?" he ventured.
Curiously enough, Mrs. Challoner found herself taking a certain amount
of satisfaction in telling her lawyer what now was unquestionably true.
"My home--only."
"But that's mortgaged, I understand?" There was more than idle curiosity
in the speaker's eyes.
"Yes. But there's an equity of about twenty or twenty-five thousand,"
she explained.
"And you tried to bribe Murgatroyd with twenty thousand dollars?"
There was no answer; and interpreting her silence as assent, he went on
persistently:--
"And he refused?"
Miriam was very white now.
"He did."
"I should think so," returned Thorne. "Two hundred and fifty would be
more like Murgatroyd's price--if he can be bought."
"No, he cannot be bought," Miriam ventured with perhaps a trifle more
confidence in her tone than Mr. Thorne liked; and then she added, in a
changed voice: "I want you, please, to retract this story. I want to
take it all back. I was unstrung, I----"
"I will retract nothing," he cut in rudely. "Not a thing. Leave it as it
is. If you begin to retract you'll get yourself in trouble. If
Murgatroyd desires to make a move, let him...."
And with a promise to that effect, a hurried acknowledgment with an
inclination of the head that she accepted his words as ending her
interview, she left the office, leaving him far from certain that Peter
Broderick's appraisement of Murgatroyd's character was not a correct
one.
That night when the papers came out, people read them in anger and
dismay; by the next morning they merely laughed; likewise the Court.
"If he were bribed," said public comment, "it was a bribe that didn't
work."
And Murgatroyd, submitting to interview after interview, reiterated over
and over again to the reporters:--
"I point with pride, gentlemen, to the conviction of Lawrence Challoner.
That's all I have to say."
The fiasco had helped Murgatroyd infinitely more than it had hurt him,
Thorne felt in his inmost soul. For once the masses refused to believe
what on its face appeared to be true.
* * * * *
One evening a few weeks later, while Murgatroyd was dressing to dine at
his club, as was his custom nearly every night, his servant handed him a
note which the bearer had said was to be delivered immediately. It was
but seldom that a square white envelope came at this time, and with a
pardonable look of surprise and curiosity on his face Murgatroyd opened
it and read:
"I must see you. Will you come to the house to-night?
"S. H. B."
An hour more, and he was in Mrs. Bloodgood's drawing-room, waiting more
nervously than he would have cared to acknowledge to himself for the
daughter of the house to appear. It was the first time that she had ever
sent for him to go to her, and he was conscious of some degree of
anxiety as to her motive. Clever lawyer though he was, he dreaded her
catechising, particularly so, because he knew that whether she
acknowledged it to herself or not, that it was at her instigation that
he had adopted the role which, with or without her approval, he was now
determined to play through to the end. The sound of a light step on the
threshold of the room checked his disturbing speculations, and he looked
up to see Shirley Bloodgood entering the room. As usual she did not
permit him to open the conversation after the preliminary courtesies of
greeting between them.
"Something very urgent made me send for you, Mr. Murgatroyd," she began,
but her lips trembled so that she stopped abruptly after adding: "I want
to talk with you."
An instinct told Murgatroyd that it would be a grievous mistake not to
accept without a protesting word the note of aloofness, the desire to
avoid any suggestion of former intimacy that was in her tone. Rightly he
told himself that the slightest advances on his part would result in
adding to her distress; that however much he would like to break down
the barrier that had arisen between them, he must bide his time and
trust to her emotional nature to accomplish that. And he was not
mistaken, for presently an impulse to speak her mind at any cost took
possession of her, and she burst forth:--
"Billy, why did you take this money? Why?..."
Carried away by the tender accents with which she pronounced his name,
Murgatroyd essayed to speak, but she interrupted him.
"Don't"--covering her ears with her hands--"don't tell me! I know you
did it--because I--I--oh, why did you listen to me! I thought I knew
what I was talking about," she went on, while he sought control of
himself by looking away from her; "but I knew nothing of conditions; of
men. I thought that a man--that you could accomplish anything you really
wanted to do. But you were right. There are impossibilities. I
understand now--now that it's too late. I have had my lesson. Only a few
months ago you were honest, and now you are corrupt, and I alone am
responsible!"
By the time she had finished speaking Murgatroyd had become as
imperturbable as he had been at the trial, and there was only a hint of
tenderness in the reassuring words that he now uttered.
"You must not blame yourself--" he was neither admitting nor denying the
impeachment--"for anything I may have done."
"But I do, I do," she cried bitterly. "And you must blame me. I always
thought Adam was a coward to cast the blame on Eve. But now my
sympathies are with him--the woman was to blame then--I am to blame now.
I gave you of the apple, and you--Oh, there would have been no
apple--nothing but Eden if I had only listened to you and you had closed
your ears to me."
"Eden," he said wistfully. "Yes, but hardly the Eden you cared for."
Abruptly her mood changed. She lost all semblance of calm, and her voice
rang with a scorn that, before she ceased, seemed to include him as well
as herself.
"What do I care for success or failure! I could cut my tongue out for
telling you that my father was a failure. A failure! Why, I know that
not only was he not a failure, but that he was really great! A man in
the highest sense of the word--and that's all I want you to be. I don't
care an iota that you should be a senator--I don't want you to be a
senator. I have sent for you to-night to tell you so--to stop for good
and all the thing I set in motion." She was silent for an instant; and
then suddenly with a quick return to gentleness, and with appeal in her
eyes, she murmured: "I want you to come back--come back."