"Preston! What is it? He's done something----"
Hodder shook his head.
"He died--to-night. He is at Mr. Bentley's."
It was like her that she did not cry out, or even speak, but stood still,
her hands tightening on his, her breast heaving. She was not, he knew,
a woman who wept easily, and her eyes were dry. And he had it to be
thankful for that it was given him to be with her, in this sacred
relationship, at such a moment. But even now, such was the mystery that
ever veiled her soul, he could not read her feelings, nor know what these
might be towards the brother whose death he announced.
"I want to tell you, first, Alison, to prepare you," he said.
Her silence was eloquent. She looked up at him bravely, trustfully, in a
way that made him wince. Whatever the exact nature of her suffering, it
was too deep for speech. And yet she helped him, made it easier for him
by reason of her very trust, once given not to be withdrawn. It gave him
a paradoxical understanding of her which was beyond definition.
"You must know--you would have sometime to know that there was a woman he
loved, whom he intended to marry--but she was separated from him. She
was not what is called a bad woman, she was a working girl. I found her,
this summer, and she told me the story, and she has been under the care
of Mr. Bentley. She disappeared two or three days ago. Your brother met
her again, and he was stricken with apoplexy while with her this evening.
She brought him to Mr. Bentley's house."
"My father--bought her and sent her away."
"You knew?"
"I heard a little about it at the time, by accident. I have always
remembered it . . . . I have always felt that something like this
would happen."
Her sense of fatality, another impression she gave of living in the
deeper, instinctive currents of life, had never been stronger upon him
than now. . . . She released his hands.
"How strange," she said, "that the end should have come at Mr. Bentley's!
He loved my mother--she was the only woman he ever loved."
It came to Hodder as the completing touch of the revelation he had half
glimpsed by the bedside.
"Ah," he could not help exclaiming, "that explains much."
She had looked at him again, through sudden tears, as though divining his
reference to Mr. Bentley's grief, when a step make them turn. Eldon Parr
had entered the room. Never, not even in that last interview, had his
hardness seemed so concretely apparent as now. Again, pity seemed never
more out of place, yet pity was Hodder's dominant feeling as he met the
coldness, the relentlessness of the glance. The thing that struck him,
that momentarily kept closed his lips, was the awful, unconscious
timeliness of the man's entrance, and his unpreparedness to meet
the blow that was to crush him.
"May I ask, Mr. Hodder," he said, in an unemotional voice, "what you are
doing in this house?"
Still Hodder hesitated, an unwilling executioner.
"Father," said Alison, "Mr. Hodder has come with a message."
Never, perhaps, had Eldon Parr given such complete proof of his lack of
spiritual intuition. The atmosphere, charged with presage for him, gave
him nothing.
"Mr. Hodder takes a strange way of delivering it," was his comment.
Mercy took precedence over her natural directness. She laid her hand
gently on his arm. And she had, at that instant, no thought of the long
years he had neglected her for her brother.
"It's about--Preston," she said.
"Preston!" The name came sharply from Eldon Parr's lips. "What about
him? Speak, can't you?"
"He died this evening," said Alison, simply.
Hodder plainly heard the ticking of the clock on the mantel . . . .
And the drama that occurred was the more horrible because it was hidden;
played, as it were, behind closed doors. For the spectators, there was
only the black wall, and the silence. Eldon Parr literally did nothing,
--made no gesture, uttered no cry. The death, they knew, was taking place
in his soul, yet the man stood before them, naturally, for what seemed an
interminable time . . . .
"Where is he?" he asked.
"At Mr. Bentley's, in Dalton Street." It was Alison who replied again.
Even then he gave no sign that he read retribution in the coincidence,
betrayed no agitation at the mention of a name which, in such a
connection, might well have struck the terror of judgment into his heart.
They watched him while, with a firm step, he crossed the room and pressed
a button in the wall, and waited.
"I want the closed automobile, at once," he said, when the servant came.
"I beg pardon; sir, but I think Gratton has gone to bed. He had no
orders."
"Then wake him," said Eldon Parr, "instantly. And send for my
secretary."
With a glance which he perceived Alison comprehended, Hodder made his way
out of the room. He had from Eldon Parr, as he passed him, neither
question, acknowledgment, nor recognition. Whatever the banker might
have felt, or whether his body had now become a mere machine mechanically
carrying on a life-long habit of action, the impression was one of the
tremendousness of the man's consistency. A great effort was demanded to
summon up the now almost unimaginable experience of his confidence; of
the evening when, almost on that very spot, he had revealed to Hodder the
one weakness of his life. And yet the effort was not to be, presently,
without startling results. In the darkness of the street the picture
suddenly grew distinct on the screen of the rector's mind, the face of
the banker subtly drawn with pain as he had looked down on it in
compassion; the voice with its undercurrent of agony:
"He never knew how much I cared--that what I was doing was all for him,
building for him, that he might carry on my work."
V
So swift was the trolley that ten minutes had elapsed, after Hodder's
arrival, before the purr of an engine and the shriek of a brake broke the
stillness of upper Dalton Street and announced the stopping of a heavy
motor before the door. The rector had found Mr. Bentley in the library,
alone, seated with bent head in front of the fire, and had simply
announced the intention of Eldon Parr to come. From the chair Hodder had
unobtrusively chosen, near the window, his eyes rested on the noble
profile of his friend. What his thoughts were, Hodder could not surmise;
for he seemed again, marvellously, to have regained the outward peace
which was the symbol of banishment from the inner man of all thought of
self.
"I have prepared her for Mr. Parr's coming," he said to Hodder at length.
And yet he had left her there! Hodder recalled the words Mr. Bentley had
spoken, "It is her place." Her place, the fallen woman's, the place she
had earned by a great love and a great renunciation, of which no earthly
power might henceforth deprive her . . . .
Then came the motor, the ring at the door, the entrance of Eldon Parr
into the library. He paused, a perceptible moment, on the threshold as
his look fell upon the man whom he had deprived of home and fortune,--yes
and of the one woman in the world for them both. Mr. Bentley had risen,
and stood facing him. That shining, compassionate gaze should have been
indeed a difficult one to meet. Vengeance was the Lord's, in truth!
What ordeal that Horace Bentley in anger and retribution might have
devised could have equalled this!
And yet Eldon Parr did meet it--with an effort. Hodder, from his corner,
detected the effort, though it were barely discernible, and would have
passed a scrutiny less rigid,--the first outward and visible sign of the
lesion within. For a brief instant the banker's eyes encountered Mr.
Bentley's look with a flash of the old defiance, and fell, and then swept
the room.
"Will you come this way, Mr. Parr?" Mr. Bentley said, indicating the door
of the bedroom.
Alison followed. Her eyes, wet with unheeded tears, had never left Mr.
Bentley's face. She put out her hand to him . . . .
Eldon Parr had halted abruptly. He knew from Alison the circumstances in
which his son had died, and how he had been brought hither to this house,
but the sight of the woman beside the bed fanned into flame his fury
against a world which had cheated him, by such ignominious means, of his
dearest wish. He grew white with sudden passion.
"What is she doing here?" he demanded.
Kate Marcy, who had not seemed to hear his entrance, raised up to him a
face from which all fear had fled, a face which, by its suggestive power,
compelled him to realize the absolute despair clutching now at his own
soul, and against which he was fighting wildly, hopelessly. It was lying
in wait for him, With hideous patience, in the coming watches of the
night. Perhaps he read in the face of this woman whom he had condemned
to suffer all degradation, and over whom he was now powerless, something
which would ultimately save her from the hell now yawning for him; a
redeeming element in her grief of which she herself were not as yet
conscious, a light shining in the darkness of her soul which in eternity
would become luminous. And he saw no light for him--He thrashed in
darkness. He had nothing, now, to give, no power longer to deprive.
She had given all she possessed, the memorial of her kind which would
outlast monuments.
It was Alison who crossed the room swiftly. She laid her hand
protectingly on Kate Marcy's shoulder, and stooped, and kissed her.
She turned to her father.
"It is her right," she said. "He belonged to her, not to us. And we
must take her home with us.
"No," answered Kate Marcy' "I don't want to go. I wouldn't live," she
added with unexpected intensity, "with him."
"You would live with me," said Alison.
"I don't want to live!" Kate Marcy got up from the chair with an energy
they had not thought her to possess, a revival of the spirit which had
upheld her when she had contended, singly, with a remorseless world. She
addressed herself to Eldon Parr. "You took him from me, and I was a fool
to let you. He might have saved me and saved himself. I listened to you
when you told me lies as to how it would ruin him . . . . Well,--I had
him you never did."
The sudden, intolerable sense of wrong done to her love, the swift anger
which followed it, the justness of her claim of him who now lay in the
dignity of death clothed her--who in life had been crushed and blotted
out--with a dignity not to be gainsaid. In this moment of final
self-assertion she became the dominating person in the room, knew for
once the birthright of human worth. They watched her in silence as she
turned and gave one last, lingering look at the features of the dead;
stretched out her hand towards them, but did not touch them . . . and
then went slowly towards the door. Beside Alison she stopped.
"You are his sister?" she said.
"Yes."
She searched Alison's face, wistfully.
"I could have loved you."
"And can you not--still?"
Kate Mercy did not answer the question.
"It is because you understand," she said. "You're like those I've come
to know--here. And you're like him . . . . I don't mean in looks.
He, too, was good--and square." She spoke the words a little defiantly,
as though challenging the verdict of the world. "And he wouldn't have
been wild if he could have got going straight."
"I know," said Alison, in a low voice.
"Yes," said Kate Mercy, "you look as if you did. He thought a lot of
you, he said he was only beginning to find out what you was. I'd like
you to think as well of me as you can."
"I could not think better," Alison replied.
Kate Mercy shook her head.
"I got about as low as any woman ever got," she said
"Mr. Hodder will tell you. I want you to know that I wouldn't marry
--your brother," she hesitated over the name. "He wanted me to--he was mad
with me to night, because I wouldn't--when this happened."
She snatched her hand free from Alison's, and fled out of the room, into
the hallway.
Eldon Parr had moved towards the bed, seemingly unaware of the words they
had spoken. Perhaps, as he gazed upon the face, he remembered in his
agony the sunny, smiling child who need to come hurrying down the steps
in Ransome Street to meet him.
In the library Mr. Bentley and John Hodder, knowing nothing of her
flight, heard the front door close on Kate Marcy forever . . . .