Except in his gust of primitive fury when he first knew that he had
been robbed, and in that last breaking down in the hall, David knew
what had happened to him only, if one may say so, with the outside of
his mind. Even while he was talking with comparative calmness to Mr.
Ferguson, his thoughts were whirling, and veering, in dizzying
circles--bewildered rage, pity, fright, revolt,--and then back again to
half-dazed fury. But each time he tried to realize exactly what had
happened, something in him seemed to swerve, like a shying horse; he
could not get near enough to the fact, to understand it. In a numb way
he must have recognized this, because in those moments by himself in
the library he deliberately shut a door upon the blasting truth. Later,
of course, he would have to open it and look in upon the ruin of his
life. Somewhere back in his thoughts he was aware that this moment of
opening the Door would come, and come soon. But while he talked to
Robert Ferguson, and tried, dully, to comfort Miss White, and even as
he went down the steps up which he had bounded not an hour before, he
was holding that moment off. His one clear feeling was a desire to be
by himself. Then, he promised himself, when he was alone, he would open
the Door, and face the Thing that lay behind it. But as he walked along
the street, the Door was closed, bolted, locked, and his back was
against it. "Elizabeth has married Blair," he said to himself, softly.
The words seemed to have no meaning. "Elizabeth has married Blair," he
insisted again; but was only cognizant that the blur of fog around a
street-lamp showed rainbow lines in a wonderful pattern. "They are all
at right angles," he said; "that's interesting," and looked ahead to
see if the next light repeated the phenomenon. Then automatically he
took out his watch: "Nine-thirty. Elizabeth has married Blair. The
train leaves at ten. I had better be going to the depot. _Elizabeth has
married Blair_." And he walked on, looking at the lamps burning in the
fog. Then suddenly, as if the closed Door showed a crack of light, he
decided that he would not go back on the express; an inarticulate
impulse pierced him to the quick,--the impulse to resist, to fight, to
save himself and her! But almost with the rending pang, the Door
slammed to again and the impulse blurred--like the street-lamps. Still,
the impetus of it was sufficient to keep him from turning toward the
railroad station.
"Hello!" some one said; Harry Knight was standing, grinning, directly
in front of him; "you needn't run down a friend of your youth, even if
you don't condescend to live in Mercer any more!"
"Oh, hello," David heard himself say.
"When did you come to town? I'd ask you to lunch with me, but I suppose
your lady-love would object. Wait till you get to be an old married man
like me; then she'll be glad to get rid of you!" David knew that he
gave the expected laugh, and that he said it was a foggy day, and
Philadelphia had a better climate than Mercer; ("he hasn't heard it
yet," he was saying to himself) "yes, dark old hole; I'm going back
to-night. Yes; awfully sorry I can't--good-by--good-by. (He'll know by
to-night.") He did not notice when Knight seemed to melt into the mist;
nor was he conscious that he had begun to walk again--on, and on, and
on. Suddenly he paused before the entrance of a saloon, which bore,
above "XXX Pale Ale," in gilt letters on the window, the sign "Landis'
Hotel."
He was aware of overpowering fatigue. Why not go in here and sit down?
He would not meet any one he knew in such a place. "Better take a room
for an hour or two," he thought. He knew that he must be alone to open
that Door, but he did not say so; instead his mind, repeating,
parrot-like, "Elizabeth has married Blair," made its arrangements for
privacy, as steadily as a surgeon might make arrangements for a mortal
operation.
As he entered the hotel, a woman on her hands and knees, slopping a wet
cloth over the black and white marble floor of the office, looked up at
him, and moved her bucket of dirty water to let him pass. "Huh! He's
got a head on him this morning," she thought knowingly. But the clerk
at the desk gave him an uneasy glance. Men with tragic faces and
bewildered eyes are not welcomed by hotel clerks.
"Say," he said, pleasantly enough, as he handed out a key, "don't you
want a pick-me-up? You're kind o' white round the gills."
David nodded. "Where's the bar?" he said thickly. He found his way to
it, and while he waited for his whisky he lifted a corkscrew from the
counter and looked at it closely. "That's something new, isn't it?" he
said to the man who was rinsing out a glass for him; "I never saw a
corkscrew (Elizabeth has married Blair) with that hook thing on the
side." He took his two fingers of whisky, and followed the bell-boy to
a room.
"I don't like that young feller's looks," the clerk told the
scrub-woman; "we don't want any more free reading notices in the papers
of this hotel being a roadhouse on the way to heaven." And when the
bell-boy who had shown the unwelcome guest to his room came back to his
bench in the office, he interrogated him, with a grin that was not
altogether facetious: "Any revolvers lyin' round up in No. 20, or any
of those knobby blue bottles?"
"Naw," said the bell-boy, disgustedly, "ner no dimes, neither."
David, in the small, unfriendly hotel bedroom that looked out upon
squalid back yards and smelled as if its one window had not been opened
for a year, was at last alone. Down in the alley, a hand-organ was
shrilling monotonously: Kafoozleum--Kafoozleum.
He looked about him for a minute, then tried to open the window, but
the sash stuck; he shook it violently, then shoved it up with such
force that a cracked pane of glass clattered out; a gust of raw air
came into the stagnant mustiness of the narrow room. After that he sat
down and drew a long breath. Then he opened the Door....
Down-stairs the clerk was sharing his uneasiness with the barkeeper.
"He came in looking like death. Wild-eyed he was. Mrs. Maloney there
will tell you. She came up to me and remarked on it. No, sir, men, like
that ain't healthy for this hotel."
"That's so," the barkeeper agreed. "Why didn't you tell him you were
full up?"
"Well, he seemed the gentleman," the clerk said. "I didn't just see my
way--"
"Huh!" the other flung back at him resentfully. "'Tain't only a poor
man that puts his hand in the till, and then hires a room in a
hotel"--he made a significant gesture and rolled up his eyes.
"He didn't register," the clerk said. "Only wanted the room for a
couple of hours."
"A couple of hours is long enough to--" said the barkeeper.
"Good idea to send a boy up to ask if he rung?"
"_I'd_ have sent him ten minutes ago," the barkeeper said scornfully.
So it was that David, staring in at his ruin, was interrupted more than
once that morning: "No, I didn't ring. Clear out." And again: "No; I'm
not waiting for anybody. Shut that door." But the third time he was
frantic: "Damn it, if you knock on my door again I'll kick you
down-stairs! Do you understand?" And at that the office subsided.
"They don't do it when they're swearing mad," the barkeeper said. "I
guess his girl has given him the mitten. You ladies are always making
trouble for us, Mrs. Maloney. You drive us to suicide for love of you!"
Mrs. Maloney simperingly admitted her baleful influence. "As for you,"
he jeered at the clerk, "you're fresh, I guess. That little affair in
18 got on your nerves."
"Well, if you'd found him as I did, I guess it would 'a' got on your
nerves," the clerk said, affrontedly; he added under his breath that
they could kill themselves all over the house, and he wouldn't lift a
finger to stop 'em. "You don't get no thanks," he told himself
gloomily. But after that, No. 20 was not disturbed.
At first, when David opened his closed Door and looked in, there had
been the shock again. He was stunned with incredulous astonishment.
Then his mind cleared. With the clearing came once more that organic
anger of the robbed man; an anger that has in it the uncontrollable
impulse to regain his property. It could not be--this thing that had
happened. It should not be!
He would see her; he would take her. As for _him_--David's sinewy
fingers closed as talons might close into the living flesh of a man's
neck. He knew the lust of murder, and he exulted in it. Yet even as he
exulted, the baseness of what Blair had done was so astounding, that,
sitting there in the dreary room, his hands clenched in his pockets,
his legs stretched out in front of him, David Richie actually felt a
sort of impersonal amazement that had nothing to do with anger. For one
instant the unbelievableness of Blair's dishonor threw him back into
that clamoring confusion from which he had escaped since he opened the
Door. Blair must have been in love with her! Had Elizabeth suspected
it? She certainly had never hinted it to him; why not? Some girlish
delicacy? But Blair--Blair, a dishonorable man? In the confounding
turmoil of this uprooting of old admirations, he was conscious of the
hand-organ down in the alley, pounding out its imbecile refrain. He
even found himself repeating the meaningless words:
"In ancient days there lived a Turk,
A horrid beast within the East, ......
Oh, Kafoozleum, Kafoozleum"--
His mind righted itself; he came back to facts, and to the simple
incisive question: what must he do? It was not until the afternoon
that, by one tortuous and torturing line of reasoning after another, he
came to know that, as her uncle had said, for the present he could do
nothing.
"Nothing?" At first, David had laughed savagely; he would turn the
world upside down before he would leave her in her misery! For that she
was in misery he never doubted; nor did he stop to ask himself whether
she had repented her madness, he only groaned. He saw, or thought he
saw, the whole thing. There was not one doubt, not one poisonous
suspicion of Elizabeth herself. That she was disloyal to him never
entered his head. To David she was only in a terrible trap, from which,
at any cost, she must be rescued. That her own mad temper had brought
her to such a pass was neither here nor there; it had nothing to do
with the matter in hand, namely her rescue--and then the killing of the
man who had trapped her! It came into David's head--like a lamp moving
toward him through a mist--that perhaps she had written to him? He had
not really grasped the idea when Robert Ferguson suggested it; but now
he was suddenly certain that a letter must be awaiting him in
Philadelphia! Perhaps in it she called on him to come and help her? The
thought was like a whip. He forgot his desire to kill Blair; he leaped
to his feet, fumbling in his pocket for a time-table; then realized
that there was no train across the mountains until night. Should he
telegraph his mother to open any letter from Elizabeth, and wire him
where she was? No; even in the whirl of his perplexity, he knew he
could not let any other eyes than his own see what, in her abasement,
Elizabeth must have written. He began to pace frantically up and down;
then stood and looked out of the window, beating his mind back to
calmness,--for he must be calm. He must think what could be done. He
would get the letter as soon as he reached home; until he got it and
learned where she was, the only thing to do was to decide how she
should be saved.
And so it was that, not allowing himself to dip down into that
elemental rage of the wronged man, not even daring to think of his own
incredible blunder which had kindled her crazy anger, still less
venturing to let his thought rest on the suffering that had come to
her, he kept his mind steadily on that one imperative question: _what
was to be done?_ At first the situation seemed almost simple: she must
leave Blair instantly. "To-day!" he said to himself, striking the
rickety table before him with his fist; "to-day!" Next, the marriage
must be annulled. That was all; annulled! These were the premises from
which he started. All that long, dark morning, well into the afternoon,
he followed blind alleys of thought, ending always in the same
_impasse_--there was nothing he could do. He did not even know where
she was, until the letter in Philadelphia should tell him,--at that
thought he looked at his watch again. Oh, how many endless hours before
he could go and get that letter! And after all, she was Blair
Maitland's wife. Suppose she did leave him, would the swine give her
her freedom? Not without long, involved processes of law; he knew his
man well enough to know that. Yes, there would have to be dreadful
publicity, heart-breaking humiliation for his poor, mad darling. She
would have to face those things. Oh, if he only knew where she was, so
that he could go that moment and help her to take that first step of
flight. She must go at once to his mother. Yes, his mother would
shelter her from the beast. If he could only get word to her, to go,
_instantly_, to his mother. But he did not know where she was! He
cursed himself for not having taken the ten o'clock express! He could
have been at home that night, had her letter, and started out again to
go to her. As it was, nothing could be done until to-morrow morning.
Then he would know what to do, because then he would know where she
was. But meantime--meantime...
There is no doubt that when the frantic man realized his befogging
ignorance, and found himself involved in this dreadful delay, the hotel
clerk's apprehensions were, at least for wild moments, justified. But
only for moments--Elizabeth was to be rescued! David could not consider
escape from his own misery until that task had been accomplished. Yet
consider: his girl, his woman--another man's; and he helpless! And
suppose he did rescue her; suppose he did drag her from the arms of the
thief who had been his friend--could it ever be the same? Never. Never.
Never. His Elizabeth was dead. The woman whom he meant to have
yet--somehow, sometime, somewhere; the woman whom Blair Maitland had
filched from him, was not his Elizabeth. The rose, trampled in the
mire, may be lifted, it may be revived, it may be fragrant--but it has
known the mire!
There were, in the early darkening afternoon, crazy moments for David
Richie. Moments of murderous hate of Blair, moments of unbearable
consciousness of his own responsibility, moments of almost repulsion
for the tragic, marred creature he loved; and at this last appalling
revelation to himself of his own possibilities--moments of absolute
despair. And when one of those despairing moments came, he put his head
down on the table, on his folded arms, and cried for his mother. He
cried hard, like a child: "Materna!"
And so it was that he arose and went to his mother.