Brainard, after leaving the office of the bank, had also taken, the
elevator, and before Ogden had reached McDowell's floor his chief stood
at the door of Freeze & Freeze; the firm did some legal business for
him now and then, under his own general designation of "odd jobs." But
their door was locked, as it usually was at that hour; and the old man
descended again, took the street-car, and went home to tea.
"I've got him, all the same," he muttered to himself. "He can have a
little leeway if he wants, but it won't carry him very far off--as
things are now."
He stamped and fumed through the parlor floor for the quarter of an
hour during which he attended the preparation of tea in the basement
dining-room. He sat down with Burt and Cornelia and his younger
daughter; Abbie had shut herself up in her room, and had sent down word
that she was too ill to appear.
The table was set with the plated ware of twenty years ago, hideous in
varied quirks and chasings. Just within the door of the room stood a
baby's high-chair; and Brainard, in passing to his place, contrived to
put a vicious foot heavily on one of its sprawling wicker legs.
He went through the meal with a great grinding of molars and a loud
smacking of lips. He said nothing; he handled his knife and fork and
his goblet with a heavy-handed clatter, while his eyes stared fixedly
at the table-cloth. The others watched him in silence; his teeth were
grinding something other than food, and the smacking of his lips
indicated a relish beyond that for any mere eating and drinking.
After his second cup of tea he arose and pushed back his chair, and
planted his feet with a ponderous stamp on the space over which the
chair had stood.
"Burt," he said, as he moved towards the door, "you can step down the
street when you get through, and tell Albert Freeze to come up here. I
shall be in my room."
He commanded the attendance of his attorneys as lightly as he commanded
that of his clerks. The Freezes happened to be youngish men, but it
would have been the same with older ones.
He withdrew to his den. He rearranged the coke-balls that he had had
spread on the top of his grate fire, and then he began to rummage among
the disordered papers on his desk.
A book was lying among them--a thin volume, with the place marked by a
paper-cutter.
"I wish. Abbie wouldn't leave her things around everywhere," he said,
grumblingly.
He tossed the book across to a table. The paper-cutter fell out of
it, but landed by its side, where it balanced on one corner of the
tabletop. It was a cumbrous implement, somewhat after the fashion of a
dagger, and it was smeared over with something that produced the effect
of green bronze.
He went to the window and looked out before pulling down its shade;
the window opened, after the manner of a door, on the side porch. A
misty rain was falling--slight, but deadly chill, and through it there
appeared the discolored flank of the stable, draped with the autumnal
stringiness of its wild cucumber vines.
The door of the room opened with a swift and sudden quiet, and a young
man stepped in. His shoulders were covered with a thousand shimmering
rain-globules, and his breath gave out a strong reek of brandy. It was
Marcus.
"I want to see Mr. Brainard," he had said, at the outer door, to the
strange servant-girl, and he had pushed straight by her without further
word.
He stood there pale and tremulous; his eyes glittered like two
knife-points.
"I'm out again," he said. "I've got another chance, and I don't mean to
lose this one."
His father turned on him with a fierce frown--a frown full of
malevolent intention.
"It's you, is it?" He was silent for a moment. "Well, you can stay.
I've been thinking about you, lately. I can 'tend to two as well as
one."
"You've been thinking about me lately, have you?" Marcus repeated. He
spoke with a hardihood that came from draughts of brandy more than once
indulged in. "You had better have thought of me before."
"I'm thinking to just as much purpose," his father declared grimly. "I
haven't been altogether in the dark," he went on, "about your goings
and your doings. I know what you've been living on, and how you got
it, and who put you up to it all. I know how you have been figuring on
my dying and preying on me before my dying; but I'm alive yet, and the
next time you see that singing Canadian scoundrel you can tell him so.
And I know all about your latest tactics, too. Do you see that?"
A pass-book was lying on his desk, and between its covers there was
a packet of checks, bound by a rubber strap. He drew out the top
check and extended it towards his son; he used his clumsy thumb and
forefinger to keep a strong hold on one end of the paper--the end that
bore the signature.
"You've seen it before, too, unless I'm mistaken," he went on, with a
glance in which indignation was overlaid by a cruel sense of power and
a cruel determination to use it. "You didn't expect it to get around to
me quite so quick, did you?"
"I see it, yes," said the young man. "And I've seen it before. What of
it?" He spoke like one who had nerved himself to this--and to more.
"What of it?" cried his father, in a sudden fit of rage. "There's this
of it! Do you think I'm going to stand being stripped by a thieving
scamp like you? Do you think I'm going to be bled drop by drop by a
couple of infernal scoundrels? Oh, that whining about your drawing,
and your not being allowed to go on with it! You can handle a pen all
right enough! You can draw cheeks for me, and you can draw yourself to
Joliet! That's the best place, all around, for both of us."
"I shouldn't mind meeting you there," said Marcus, with a contemptuous
sneer. "_There_ would be a 'couple,' sure enough--the only one _I_ know
anything about."
"Where is that wretch?" cried Brainard, seizing the youth by the arm.
"You know; you do, too--you see him every day! Tell me where I can find
him! He must be followed up. Let me get him, too, and put him where he
belongs!"
"Keep off!" called his son; "keep off, you fool! I haven't seen him for
a year, and I don't want to see him for another. It's you I want to
see; you and Burt--brother Burt."
His eyes glittered with a sharpened anger, and his dilated nostrils
quivered with the indignation that the thought of his elder brother
always aroused.
"I want to see the vice-president of the Underground National. I want
to see the bridegroom who got half a million on his wedding-day. And
I want him to see me. I want him to have a look at the poor devil who
has been knocking around from pillar to post for the last two years,
who has hidden in dives, and who has been dragged through the slums,
and who has been driven from the variety stage, and has served his time
more than once. Let him feel the difference; let me help him to feel
it!"
"Your own blame!" cried his father. "You had the same chances and threw
them all away. And you'll serve another term now--a longer one."
"I guess not," said Marcus. He looked about the room with a sharp and
wary eye. It might have been thought that he sought at once both means
of offence and means of escape.
There was a rap on the door; Burt's voice was heard outside.
"Here's Mr. Freeze, father. I suppose he can come right in."
Marcus reared his head suddenly.
"It's Burt!" he trumpeted. "He's here! he's here!" He sprang toward?
the threshold and clamped his long fingers about his brother's throat.
Burt's head struck with force against the wide jamb; he half fell, and
his legs and arms writhed in company with his brother's.
"Get them apart, Freeze! Get them apart!" cried Brainard, with a loud
roar. "Am I going to see Burt strangled before my very eyes?"
Marcus released his grip and staggered back into the room. He reared
himself pantingly against the table. His face was deadly pale, and the
perspiration was starting out in beads beneath the dark, disordered
locks that lay on his forehead. The screaming of women's voices was
heard in the corridor outside, and the light hastening of women's feet.
"Three to one!" panted Marcus. "It's a plot! it's a trap! I know you,
Freeze. I see through all of you. But three ain't enough. You can't do
it; no!"
Abbie Brainard came rushing through the hall. She reached the threshold
and paused there to see her brother catch up her paper-cutter from the
table, plunge it into her father's neck, and break through the window,
and to hear his nimble feet clatter escape down the stairs of the side
porch.
Brainard fell heavily against the marble slabs of the fire-place. Blood
soaked his high, old-fashioned collar and trickled down the plaits of
his shirt-front. He lay there stunned and bleeding, and lifeless--as it
seemed.
His huge bulk was gotten laboriously to bed--half dragged, half lifted.
He lay there for a fortnight, between life and death.
The doctor came, and with the chill gray of the first dawn came the
nurse. It was to be a hand-to-hand struggle, and all the forces were
engaged at once. The nurse spent the first halfhour of uncertain
daylight in bringing order out of the chaos that had established its
instant sway in the old man's room on the evening before. She raised
or lowered the shades, adjusted the transom, quieted the fire, and
arranged her bottles and bandages. She wore the dull uniform of a
public institution; and she was accustomed to carry this uniform at
a moment's notice into strange places and among strange people. She
accepted her assignment blindly, and took up its details afterwards.
She seemed of a rather rugged, stolid build, but her eyes were eloquent
with a haunting sorrow. It was as if time had redraped her figure with
the flesh that sorrow and suffering had once stripped from it, but
had been powerless to reclothe her spirit in its pristine hope and
cheerfulness.
[Illustration: "'Three to one,' panted Marcus."]
She stood at the window, endeavoring to get her bearings in the early
light of the dim morning. The lilacs and syringas in the yard
showed the crinkled brownness of latest autumn. A boy was crossing and
recrossing the street to put out its lamps; and in the second-story
window of the stable the flickering of a single gas-jet was helping the
coachman and hostler to make up his own bed.
Behind her she heard the heavy grunting breath of the sick man.
Presently another sound mingled with it--a creeping and rustling sound
that made its little track along the hall and across the threshold of
the half-open door. She turned; a baby was on the floor beside her--a
beautiful boy with dusky, liquid eyes, and the beginnings of a poll of
dark and curly hair. An inquiring pain plucked at her heart and set
its signal in her eyes; she saw a resemblance that it was impossible
to overlook. She cast a hungry and timorous glance about her, and
presently, with a great yearning and a steadying resolve, Jane Doane
was kissing Russell Vibert's child.
For this privilege she was indebted, in a sense, to Erastus Brainard.
She had never been indebted to him for anything else.
The old man lay in a kind of stupor; his head had been seriously
injured by his fall, and bloodpoisoning of the most virulent type
pointed to his inevitable end. He had occasional moments of recurring
consciousness, and at such times he attempted, with the help of Abbie
and of Freeze, to bring his affairs into order, and to dispose of his
belongings by will.
The Ogden affair, meanwhile, stood still. No formal steps had
been taken, and the young man had Fairchild's assurance that an
accommodation was sure to be brought about.
The situation became known to the Bradleys--in its general outlines,
at least. They caught at the end and ignored the means, as would have
been done by anybody else in their position. They considered that their
friendliness towards Ogden had been misplaced and that their confidence
had been betrayed. They preserved appearances with him through their
daughter's final illness; and by a great effort they even produced an
effect of a common suffering and a common sympathy at the funeral. But
after that they never saw him again. The difficulty with the bank did
not become public, but they considered themselves, all the same, no
less disgraced than deceived.
The desperate illness of Brainard dragged itself along, meanwhile, and
the house was saturated with gloom. Abbie assisted actively in the
nursing; she watched in alternation with the first nurse and with the
succeeding one. Cornelia was given an opportunity to put her hand to
the household helm. As she said to herself, she was soon to manage a
house of her own, and she might as well be brushing up her knowledge.
"And she has got to go with me," Cornelia said to herself for the
twentieth time; "she can't live here after_--this._"
Cornelia had fought out many a fight during her year in this grisly
old house; but she saw now that her intended campaign on behalf of
Marcus was an impossibility, and that all the forces might as well be
withdrawn from the field.
Nobody had seen the youth since that fatal night; nobody, that is, who
had cared to make the fact known. Neither did anybody know where he was
keeping himself, save the sister on whose night-watches he had once or
twice stolen by way of the window through which he had made his escape
from his brother and Freeze.
He came again--for a third and last time. It was one o'clock in the
morning when she heard his light touch on the window. She hastened to
him with her mouth set for a terrified whisper.
"Yes, I know it's dangerous, Abbie; I know I promised not to come
again. But I can't help it--I've got to hear. How is--how are things
going on to-night? Is there any improvement over yesterday?" He locked
his fingers in a convulsive strain. "I thought they had laid a trap for
me," he said chokingly. "Just tell me yourself how it is, and after
this you can send me word, as you have before. I won't come again, I
promise you."
She threw herself on his breast and burst into an agony of tears. "No,
you never will," she sobbed; "he is dying. There is no hope; he won't
live till morning."
The young man trembled like an aspen; tears rolled out of his dark and
hollow eyes. He tried to speak, but no word came. Then he clasped his
sister in his arms and withdrew as he had entered.
The night, laden with anxiety and fear, dragged out its weary length.
In the early morning the house resounded with a great cry. The dying
man, in a brief moment of consciousness, half raised himself and heard
the sound and the tidings thus conveyed. The word was passed from
man-servant to maid-servant, and came to their master through the voice
of a Swedish girl whose mind was capable of dealing with emotions only
in the most primitive way, and whose imperfect command of English made
her communication come with a horrible and harrowing directness. One
second before Erastus Brainard fell back dead he knew that his son had
hanged himself; the 'last picture that rose before his fleeting vision
was that of his boy pendulous from the rafters of the stable, his
slight body swinging to and fro and his tongue protruding uglily from
the purple-black of his face.