No catastrophe that was mental in its origin could oppress for long a man
so essentially physical as Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, he
wandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine his
depression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit of
a lifetime of activity reasserted itself. He felt the need of focusing
his resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparative
clarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendencies
of the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, the
revolt against final surrender, the forlorn claim for at least a fighting
chance. And with the thought of his official downfall came the thought of
Copeland and what Copeland had done to him.
Out of that ferment of futile protest arose one sudden decision. Even
before he articulated the decision he found it unconsciously swaying his
movements and directing his steps. He would go and see Copeland! He would
find that bloodless little shrimp and put him face to face with a few
plain truths. He would confront that anemic Deputy-Commissioner and at
least let him know what one honest man thought of him.
Even when Blake stood before Copeland’s brownstone-fronted house, the
house that seemed to wear a mask of staid discretion in every drawn blind
and gloomy story, no hesitation came to him. His naturally primitive mind
foresaw no difficulties in that possible encounter. He knew it was late,
that it was nearly midnight, but even that did not deter him. The
recklessness of utter desperation was on him. His purpose was something
that transcended the mere trivialities of every-day intercourse. And he
must see him. To confront Copeland became essential to his scheme of
things.
He went ponderously up the brownstone steps and rang the bell. He waited
patiently until his ring was answered. It was some time before the door
swung open. Inside that door Blake saw a solemn-eyed servant in a black
spiked-tailed service-coat and gray trousers.
“I want to see Mr. Copeland,” was Blake’s calmly assured announcement.
“Mr. Copeland is not at home,” answered the man in the service-coat. His
tone was politely impersonal. His face, too, was impassive. But one quick
glance seemed to have appraised the man on the doorstep, to have judged
him, and in some way to have found him undesirable.
“But this is important,” said Blake.
“I’m sorry, sir,” answered the impersonal-eyed servant. Blake made an
effort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkempt
figure had not won the good-will of that autocratic hireling.
“I’m from Police Headquarters,” the man on the doorstep explained, with
the easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days. He produced the
one official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared and
once water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner’s card which still remained in his
dog-eared wallet. “I’ve got to see him on business, Departmental
business!”
“Mr. and Mrs. Copeland are at the Metropolitan, sir,” explained the
servant. “At the Opera. And they are not back yet.”
“Then I’ll wait for him,” announced Blake, placated by the humbler note
in the voice of the man in the service-coat.
“Very good, sir,” announced the servant. And he led the way upstairs,
switching on the electrics as he went.
Blake found himself in what seemed to be a library. About this softly
hung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with an
indeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as being
feminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings and
polished wood. It stood for a phase of life with which he had no
patience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come by
honestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments to
the marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself had
some secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a row
of diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quick
contempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books,
mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets
of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world
which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of
book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and
children, but never meant for a man with a man’s work to do.
His stolidly contemptuous eyes were still peering about the room when the
door opened and closed again. There was something so characteristically
guarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copeland
even before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About the
entire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness,
that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had the
power to touch him into a quick irritation.
“Mr. Blake, I believe,” said Copeland, very quietly. He was in full
evening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung a
black top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfect
control, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost the
neutral-tinted gray of a battle-ship’s side-plates. And when he spoke it
was with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressed
an utter stranger.
“You wished to see me!” he said, as his gaze fastened itself on Blake’s
figure. The fact that he remained standing imparted a tentativeness to
the situation. Yet his eyes remained on Blake, studying him with the cold
and mildly abstracted curiosity with which he might view a mummy in its
case.
“I do!” said Blake, without rising from his chair.
“About what?” asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in his
voice which hinted that time might be a matter of importance to him.
“You know what it’s about, all right,” was Blake’s heavy retort.
“On the contrary,” said Copeland, putting down his hat and coat, “I’m
quite in the dark as to how I can be of service to you.”
Both his tone and his words angered Blake, angered him unreasonably. But
he kept warning himself to wait, to hold himself in until the proper
moment arrived.
“I expect no service from you,” was Blake’s curtly guttural response. He
croaked out his mirthless ghost of a laugh. “You’ve taught me better than
that!”
Copeland, for all his iciness, seemed to resent the thrust.
“We have always something to learn,” he retorted, meeting Blake’s stolid
stare of enmity.
“I guess I’ve learned enough!” said Blake.
“Then I hope it has brought you what you are looking for!” Copeland, as
he spoke, stepped over to a chair, but he still remained on his feet.
“No, it hasn’t brought me what I’m after,” said the other man. “Not yet!
But it’s going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I’m going to know the
reason why!”
He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking a
little as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. The
climactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel it
emerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that marks
his changing channel.
“Then might I ask what you are after?” inquired Copeland. He folded his
arms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of indifferency.
“You know what I’ve been after, just as I know what you’ve been after,”
cried Blake. “You set out to get my berth, and you got it. And I set out
to get Binhart, to get the man your whole push couldn’t round up—and I’m
going to get him!”
“Blake,” said Copeland, very quietly, “you are wrong in both instances.”
“Am I!”
“You are,” was Copeland’s answer, and he spoke with a studious patience
which his rival resented even more than his open enmity. “In the first
place, this Binhart case is a closed issue.”
“Not with me!” cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide that
had been tugging at him so long. “They may be able to buy off you
cuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down there,
until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a rope or two
and make you back down. But nothing this side o’ the gates o’ hell is
going to make _me_ back down. I began this man-hunt, and _I’m going to
end it_!”
He took on a dignity in his own eyes. He felt that in the face of every
obstacle he was still the instrument of an ineluctable and incorruptible
Justice. Uncouth and buffeted as his withered figure may have been, it
still represented the relentlessness of the Law.
“That man-hunt is out of our hands,” he heard Copeland saying.
“But it’s not out of _my_ hands!” reiterated the detective.
“Yes, it’s out of your hands, too,” answered Copeland. He spoke with a
calm authority, with a finality, that nettled the other man.
“What are you driving at?” he cried out.
“This Binhart hunt is ended,” repeated Copeland, and in the eyes looking
down at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in the gaze
of Elsie Verriner.
“By God, it’s not ended!” Blake thundered back at him.
“It _is_ ended,” quietly contended the other. “And precisely as you have
put it—Ended by God!”
“It’s what?” cried Blake.
“You don’t seem to be aware of the fact, Blake, that Binhart is dead—dead
and buried!”
Blake stared up at him.
“Is what?” his lips automatically inquired.
“Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out in
Arizona. He’s buried there.”
“That’s a lie!” cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair.
“We had the Phœnix authorities verify the report in every detail. There
is no shadow of doubt about it.”
Still Blake stared up at the other man.
“I don’t believe it,” he wheezed.
Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and with
his scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell button. Utter
silence reigned in the room until the servant answered his summons.
“Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the second
drawer.”
Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense of
unreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself seemed
to crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness of
space. Binhart was dead!
He could hear Copeland’s voice far away. He could see the returning
figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire
room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which
Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the
signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to his
brain. His dazed eyes wandered over the newspaper clippings which
Copeland thrust into his unsteady fingers. There, too, was the same
calamitous proclamation, as final as though he had been reading it on a
tombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the proofs of it; here was an
authentic copy of the death certificate, the reports of the police
verification; here in his hands were the final and indisputable proofs.
But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it was
only that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trick
which he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept home
to him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave sweeps
over a coast-shoal.
Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom been
desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried to
plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have no
line long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himself
as the thing that life had at last left him—a solitary and unsatisfied
man, a man without an aim, without a calling, without companionship.
“So this ends the music!” he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet. And
yet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to himself.
It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the last string.
It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself as final as the
stabbing thought of his own death itself.
He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a glass of sherry. Whether
he answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that Binhart
was dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the night, a
broken and desolate man.