WAITING
Harriet went into the house and toward her own rooms; a maid met and
stopped her on the stairs.
"Mr. Santoine sent word that he wishes to see you as soon as you came
in, Miss Santoine."
Harriet went on toward her father's room, without stopping at her
own--wet with the drive through the damp night and shivering now with
its chill. Her father's voice answered her knock with a summons to
come in. As she obeyed, pushing the doors open, he dismissed the
nurse; the girl, passing Harriet as she went out, returned Harriet's
questioning look with a reassuring nod; Basil Santoine had endured the
shock and excitement of the night better than could have been expected;
he was quite himself.
As Harriet went toward the bed, her father's blind eyes turned toward
her; he put out his hand and touched her, seeming startled to find her
still in the robe she had worn an hour before and to feel that the robe
was wet.
"Where have you been, Daughter?" he asked.
She hesitated, drawing the robe out of his hand. "I--I have been
driving Mr. Eaton in a motor," she said.
"Helping him to escape?" A spasm crossed the blind man's face.
"He said not; he--he was following the men who shot Cousin Wallace."
The blind man lay for an instant still. "Tell me," he commanded
finally.
She told him, beginning with her discovery of Eaton in the garage and
ending with his leaving her and with Donald Avery's finding her in the
motor; and now she held back one word only--his name which he had told
her, Hugh. Her father listened intently; when she had finished, he
made no move, no comment, no reproach. She had seated herself on the
chair beside his bed; she looked away, then back to him.
"That is not all," she said; and she told him of her expedition with
Eaton to the ravine before the attack in the house.
Again she waited.
"You and Mr. Eaton appear to have become rather well acquainted,
Harriet," he said. "Has he told you nothing about himself which you
have not told me? You have seen nothing concerning him, which you have
not told?"
Her mind went quickly back to the polo game; she felt a flush, which
his blind eyes could not see, dyeing her cheeks and forehead.
"No," she answered. She was aware that he did not accept the denial,
that he knew she was concealing something.
"Nothing?" he asked again.
She put her hands to her face; then she drew them quickly away.
"Nothing," she said steadily.
The blind man waited for a moment; he put out his hand and pressed the
bell which called the steward. Neither spoke until the steward had
come.
"Fairley," Santoine said then, quietly, "Miss Santoine and I have just
agreed that for the present all reports regarding the pursuit of the
men who entered the study last night are to be made direct to me, not
through Miss Santoine or Mr. Avery."
"Very well, sir."
She still sat silent after the steward had gone; she thought for an
instant her father had forgotten her presence; then he moved slightly.
"That is all, dear," he said quietly.
She got up and left him, and went to her own rooms; she did not pretend
to herself that she could rest. She bathed and dressed and went
downstairs. The library had windows facing to the west; she went in
there and stood looking out. Somewhere to the west was Eaton, alone,
wounded; she knew she need not think of him yet as actively hunted,
only watched; with daylight the hunt would begin. Would he be able to
avoid the watchers and escape before the actual hunt for him began?
She went out into the hall to the telephone. She could not get the use
of the 'phone at once; the steward was posted there; the calls upon the
'phone were continual--from neighbors who, awakened to learn the news
of Blatchford's death and the hunt for his murderer, called to offer
what help they could, and from the newspapers, which somehow had been
notified. The telephones in the bedrooms all were on this wire. There
was a private telephone in the library; somehow she could not bring
herself to enter that room, closed and to be left with everything in
its disorder until the arrival of the police. The only other telephone
was in her father's bedroom.
She took advantage of a momentary interruption in the calls to call up
the local police station. Hearing her name, the man at the other end
became deferential at once; he told her what was being done, confirming
what she already knew; the roads were being watched and men had been
posted at all near-by railway stations and at the stopping points of
the interurban line to prevent Eaton from escaping that way. The man
spoke only of Eaton; he showed the conviction--gathered, she felt sure,
by telephone conversation with Donald Avery--that Eaton was the
murderer.
"He ain't likely to get away, Miss Santoine," he assured her. "He's
got no shoes, I understand, and he has one or maybe two shots through
him."
She shrunk back and nearly dropped the 'phone at the vision which his
words called up; yet there was nothing new to her in that vision--it
was continually before her eyes; it was the only thing of which she
could think.
"You'll call me as soon as you know anything more," she requested;
"will you call me every hour?"
She hung up, on receiving assurance of this.
A servant brought a written paper. She took it before she recognized
that it was not for her but for the steward. It was a short statement
of the obvious physical circumstances of the murder, evidently dictated
by her father and intended for the newspapers. She gave it to Fairley,
who began reading it over the telephone to the newspapers. She
wandered again to the west windows. She was not consciously listening
to the telephone conversation in the hall; yet enough reached her to
make her know that reporters were rushing from the city by train and
automobile. The last city editions of the morning papers would have at
least the fact of the murder; there would be later extras; the
afternoon papers would have it all. There was a long list of relatives
and friends to whom it was due that telegraphic announcement of Wallace
Blatchford's death reach them before they read it as a sensation
publicly printed. Recollection of these people at least gave her
something to do.
She went up to her own room, listed the names and prepared the
telegrams for them; she came down again and gave the telegrams to
Fairley to transmit by telephone. As she descended the stairs, the
great clock in the lower hall struck once; it was a quarter past three.
There was a stir in these lower rooms now; the officers of the local
police had arrived. She went with them to the study, where they
assumed charge nervously and uncertainly. She could not bear to be in
that room; nevertheless she remained and answered their questions. She
took them to Eaton's rooms on the floor above, where they searched
through and took charge of all his things. She left them and came down
again and went out to the front of the house.
The night was sharp with the chill preceding the day; it had cleared;
the stars were shining. As she stood looking to the west, the lights
of a motor turned into the grounds. She ran toward it, thinking it
must be bringing word of some sort; but the men who leaped from it were
strangers to her--they were the first of the reporters to arrive. They
tried to question her, but she ran from them into the house. She
watched from the windows and saw other reporters arriving. To Harriet
there seemed to be scores of them. Every morning paper in Chicago,
immediately upon receipt of the first flash, had sent at least three
men; every evening paper seemed to have aroused half its staff from
their beds and sent them racing to the blind millionaire's home on the
north shore. Even men from Milwaukee papers arrived at four o'clock.
Forbidden the house, they surrounded it and captured servants. They
took flashlights till, driven from the lawn, they went away--many of
them--to see and take part in the search through the woods for
Blatchford's murderer. The murder of Santoine's cousin--the man,
moreover, who had blinded Santoine--in the presence of the blind man
was enough of itself to furnish a newspaper sensation; but, following
so closely Santoine's visit to the Coast because of the murder of
Gabriel Warden, the newspaper men sensed instantly in it the
possibility of some greater sensation not yet bared.
Harriet was again summoned. A man--a stranger--was awaiting her in the
hall; he was the precursor of those who would sit that day upon Wallace
Blatchford's death and try to determine, formally, whose was the hand
that had done it--the coroner's man. He too, she saw, was already
convinced what hand it had been--Eaton's. She took him to the study,
then to the room above where Wallace Blatchford lay dead. She stood by
while he made his brief, conventional examination. She looked down at
the dead man's face. Poor Cousin Wallace! he had destroyed his own
life long before, when he had destroyed her father's sight; from that
time on he had lived only to recompense her father for his blindness.
Cousin Wallace's life had been a pitiable, hopeless, loving
perpetuation of his penance; he had let himself hold nothing of his own
in life; he had died, as she knew he would have wished to die, giving
his life in service to his cousin; she was not unduly grieving over him.
She answered the man's questions, calmly and collectedly; but her mind
was not upon what she was saying. Her mind was upon only one
thing--even of that she could not think connectedly. Some years ago,
something--she did not know what--had happened to Hugh; to-night, in
some strange way unknown to her, it had culminated in her father's
study. He had fought some one; he had rushed away to follow some one.
Whom? Had he heard that some one in the study and gone down? Had he
been fighting their battle--her father's and hers? She knew that was
not so. Hugh had been fully dressed. What did it mean that he had
said to her that these events would either destroy him or would send
him back to her as--as something different? Her thought supplied no
answer.
But whatever he had done, whatever he might be, she knew his fate was
hers now; for she had given herself to him utterly. She had told that
to herself as she fled and pursued with him that night; she had told it
to him; she later had told it--though she had not meant to yet--to her
father. She could only pray now that out of the events of this night
might not come a grief to her too great for her to bear.
She went to the rooms that had been Eaton's. The police, in stripping
them of his possessions, had overlooked his cap; she found the bit of
gray cloth and hugged it to her. She whispered his name to
herself--Hugh--that secret of his name which she had kept; she gloried
that she had that secret with him which she could keep from them all.
What wouldn't they give just to share that with her--his name, Hugh!
She started suddenly, looking through the window. The east, above the
lake, was beginning to grow gray. The dawn was coming! It was
beginning to be day!
She hurried to the other side of the house, looking toward the west.
How could she have left him, hurt and bleeding and alone in the night!
She could not have done that but that his asking her to go had told
that it was for his safety as well as hers; she could not help him any
more then; she would only have been in the way. But now-- She started
to rush out, but controlled herself; she had to stay in the house; that
was where the first word would come if they caught him; and then he
would need her, how much more! The reporters on the lawn below her,
seeing her at the window, called up to her to know further particulars
of what had happened and what the murder meant; she could see them
plainly in the increasing light. She could see the lawn and the road
before the house.
Day had come.
And with the coming of day, the uncertainty and disorder within and
about the house seemed to increase.... But in the south wing, with its
sound-proof doors and its windows closed against the noises from the
lawn, there was silence; and in this silence, an exact, compelling,
methodic machine was working; the mind of Basil Santoine was striving,
vainly as yet, but with growing chances of success, to fit together
into the order in which they belonged and make clear the events of the
night and all that had gone before--arranging, ordering, testing,
discarding, picking up again and reordering all that had happened since
that other murder, of Gabriel Warden.