Neil turned into Post-office Square just on the stroke of four. The
square was as empty and strange to the eye as his mother's kitchen,
though this was the rush hour of the day in that business centre upon
ordinary days, when the fair had not emptied the town.
A solitary Ford of prehistoric make stood before the post-office, and
even that was just cranking up. It lurched dispiritedly off, leaving a
cloud of dust behind. A dejected-looking group of children hung about
the door of the ice-cream parlour, and appeared to lack the initiative
to enter in. Half the shops were shut. In the big show-window of the
central section of Ward's Emporium Luther Ward, usually on parade and
magnificently in charge of his shop and his staff of employees at this
time of day, stood in his shirt sleeves, embracing an abnormally slender
lady in a mauve velveteen tailored suit.
At first glance he seemed to be instructing her in the latest dance
steps, but on a nearer view the visible part of her proved to be wax,
and the suit was ticketed nineteen-fifty. He jerked her into place,
turned and saw Neil, and hailed him cheerfully, waving him round to the
main entrance door, where he joined him, still wiping his brow.
"If you want a thing well done, do it yourself," he said, explaining his
late exertions with the air of believing the explanation was original
with him and did credit to his intellect. "What are you here for,
brother? Isn't Madison good enough for you?"
"No," Neil said. "Not with the big race called off."
"Called off? How's that?"
"Because you weren't there, Luther."
Mr. Ward gave a gratified laugh at this graceful compliment, and
descended to facts.
"I'm too old for horse racing. It's my boy's turn. He went over with
Willard Nash's crowd to-day. Why didn't you?" Mr. Ward demanded
severely.
"Oh, Willard asked me all right. He's quite strong for me now." Mr. Ward
had doubted this, being on the watch for slights to Neil and resenting
them, though he never made an effort to prevent them. This was the usual
attitude of Neil's more influential friends.
"Willard's a shrimp," said Mr. Ward gruffly. "And I like you," he added
in a burst of frankness. "I always did like you, Neil. You've pulled
yourself up by your boot-straps, and I hope you hang on to them tight.
There's nobody better pleased than I am. Oh, I got a rig and sent all
the help from the store over to the fair to-day," he added, turning
quickly to impersonal subjects.
"You always do treat them right."
"Well, this wasn't my idea. I got it from the Colonel." A look of
harmless but plainly evident pride came into Mr. Ward's open and ruddy
countenance as he mentioned the great man's name. It was only the week
before that he had received his first dinner invitation from the
Everards. It came at the eleventh hour and did not include his wife, but
he was dazzled by it still. "You know what he's doing? Closing his
house, practically, for all three days of the fair, and sending all the
help on the place over there--two touring cars full. It's a fine thing
for them. They're high-class help and don't have it any too interesting
down here. Anybody that says he's not democratic don't know the Colonel.
This town don't half know him yet."
"You're right," Neil put in softly.
"Democratic," declaimed Mr. Ward, "and public spirited. Look at the
fountain he's going to put up in the square. Look at the old Grant house
going to be fitted up for a library. Look at him running for mayor, when
he's been turning down chances at bigger offices for years--willing to
stay here and serve for the good of the town. There's talk against him
more than ever this year. I know that. It amounts to an indignation
meeting when the boys get together at Halloran's. Well, failures hate a
successful man, and their talk don't count. It will die down. But I hate
to hear of it. For the Colonel's put this town on the map. He's not
perfect, but who is? And suppose he does have a good time his own way?
We've got a right to--all of us. It's a free country."
Mr. Ward delivered this last sentiment with touching faith in its force
and freshness, and waved a plump hand of invitation toward the little
private office back of the main section of his store, where he had
developed his unfailing eloquence of speech upon subjects of public
interest, and liked best to practise it. But Neil, himself listened to
with growing deference by the groups that forgathered there, was not to
be lured to that sanctum to-day. Speaking hastily and vaguely of work to
be done, he escaped from his good friend and across the street to Judge
Saxon's office.
He climbed the stairs heavily, and did not linger before the door to
picture the sign changed to "Saxon, Burr, and Donovan," as he had done
more times than he cared to admit. The office was not a thing to be
proud of as a step up in life for him to-day; it was a place to be alone
in, as men feel alone and safe in the place that is their own because
they have worked there.
Showing this in every move, Neil locked the door, threw off his cap, and
dropped into the broken-springed chair at the desk that was nominally
Theodore Burr's, but really his. He groped mechanically for the handle
of the drawer where he usually rested his feet, found it hard to open,
gave up the attempt and, leaning back without its support, stared at Mr.
Burr's ornate, brass-mounted blotter with unseeing eyes.
Sitting there, he was no longer the boy who had the privilege of
intimate talk with prominent citizens like Mr. Ward and valued it; or
the boy who had laughed at his mother's anxiety so bravely. He was not
even the boy that he used to be, sullen, but rebellious, too. To-day for
the first time he was something worse, a defeated boy. The long minutes
dragged like hours, and he sat through them as he would have sat through
hours, silent and motionless, losing run of time and acknowledging
defeat.
For there was something that this boy wanted, and had always wanted, as
he could never want other things, even success or love, as a boy or a
man can want one thing only in one lifetime. It was a remote and
preposterous dream that he had, a dream that nobody else in Green River
was foolhardy enough to cherish long, but this boy belonged to the race
of poets and dreamers, the race that must sometimes dream true, because
it always dreams. His dream had taken different forms: sometimes he saw
himself doing desperate things, setting fire to a house that he knew and
hated, striking a blow in the dark for which nobody thanked him, but the
issue was always the same, and the dream never left him. He was to find
Green River a new master. He was to save the town. That was his dream.
It had never left him till now.
He was only a lean, tense boy, crouched over a battered desk and staring
out of the window at a country street with absent, beautiful eyes, but
he was living through a tragic hour; the terrible hour that poets and
dreamers know when they lose hold upon their dreams. Measured by
minutes, this hour was not long. Neil passed a hand across his forehead
and sat up, reaching for his cap in a dazed way, for he was not to be
permitted to hide longer from his trouble here. The plump and personable
figure of Mr. Theodore Burr was crossing the square and disappearing
into the door below. His unhurried step climbed the stairs. Neil opened
the door to him.
"Hello, stranger. Why aren't you at Madison?" Neil said.
"I didn't go," said Mr. Burr lucidly. "Where are you going? I don't want
to drive you away from here."
"Oh, just out. I was going anyway."
"You don't invite me. I don't blame you. I'm poor company, and I've got
business to attend to here."
"No!"
"Why shouldn't I have business here?" snapped Mr. Burr.
"You should, you should, Theodore. Say"--the question had been troubling
Neil subconsciously all the time he sat at the desk--"what's wrong with
that lower drawer? I can't open it."
"It's locked."
"What for?"
"That," said Mr. Burr with dignity, "is my private drawer--for private
papers."
"Papers!" Mr. Burr's private papers were known to consist chiefly of a
file of receipted bills and a larger file of unreceipted bills, both
kept with his usual fastidious neatness. "What papers?"
"That's my business. I've got some rights here, if I am a figurehead.
I've got some privileges."
"Sure. Don't you feel right to-day, Theodore?"
"That," said Mr. Burr, "is my business, too."
Neil stared at his friend. Mr. Burr was faultlessly groomed, as always,
his tie was of the vivid and unique blue that he affected so often, and
a very recent close shave had acted upon him as usual, giving him a pink
and new-born appearance, but his eyes looked old and tired, as if he had
not slept for weeks and had no immediate prospect of sleeping, and there
were lines of strain about his weak mouth. He was not himself. Even a
boy preoccupied with his own troubles could not ignore it.
"Don't you feel right?" Neil said. "Don't you want me to do something,
Theodore?"
"Yes. Get out of here. Leave me alone," Mr. Burr snapped angrily.
"Sure," said Neil soothingly.
Suddenly Mr. Burr gripped Neil's reluctant, shy, boy's hand, kept it in
his for a minute in silence, and then abruptly let it go, pushing Neil
toward the door.
"Don't begrudge me one locked drawer when you'll own the whole place
some day," he said, with all the dignity that his fretful burst of
irritation had lacked. "I'd like to see that day. You're a good boy,
Donovan."
"You're not right. You've got a grouch. Come with me and walk it off,"
Neil said uneasily, but he did not press the invitation, and his friend
had little more to say. His silence was perhaps the most unusual thing
about his behaviour, which was all out of key to-day. Neil remembered
afterward that just as he closed the door upon Mr. Burr and his
vagaries, shutting them at the same time out of his mind, Mr. Burr,
sitting rather heavily down in the broken-springed desk chair, was
bending and stretching out a faultlessly manicured, slightly unsteady
hand toward the locked drawer of the desk.
Neil stepped out into the street with a cautious eye upon the Emporium
across the way, but no portly form was in sight there now, and no hearty
voice hailed him. He crossed the square and turned north, walking
quickly, soon leaving the larger houses behind, and then the smaller
houses above the railroad track, always climbing gradually as he walked.
Finally, at the entrance to an overgrown road that led off to his left,
and at the highest point of his long and slow ascent, he turned and
looked back at the town.
The town that Colonel Everard had put on the map hardly deserved the
honour, seen so in a glitter of afternoon light, with the long, sloping
hill leading down to it, and the white tower of the church pointing high
above it, a cozy huddle of houses at the foot of the hill. It looked
unassuming and sheltered and safe, only a group of homes to make a
simple and sheltered home in. The boy looked long at it, then turned
abruptly and plunged into the road before him.
It led straight across a shallow belt of fields and deep into the woods.
Only a cart-track at first, it soon lost itself here in a path, and the
path in turn grew fainter and became a brown, alluring ghost of a path.
It was hard to trace, but this was ground that Neil knew, a favourite
haunt of his, though few other boys ventured to trespass here. The woods
were part of the Everard estate.
Neil had found his first May flowers here on the first spring that he
was privileged to give them to Judith. Last year she had helped him look
for them here. His errand here was not so pleasant to-day. The brown
path did not really lead to the heart of the woods as it seemed to. It
was not so long as it looked. It was a fairly direct short cut to the
Everard house.
The boy followed it quickly, with no eyes for the dim lure of the woods
to-day.
"You've beat me," he muttered once to himself; "I'll have a look at
you."
Soon the woods were not so thick. They fell away around him, carelessly
thinned at first, littered with fallen trees and stumps, but nearer the
house combed out accurately by the relentless processes of landscape
gardening, and looking orderly and empty. The little path vanished
entirely here. Ahead of Neil, through a thin fringe of trees, was the
Colonel's rose garden; beyond it, the broad stretch of lawn and the
house, bulky and towered and tall.
Neil broke through the trees and stood and looked at it, straight ahead,
seen through the frame of the trellised entrance to the garden,
upstanding and ugly and arrogant.
"You've beat me," he said to the Colonel's house. "You've beat me; you
and him. I hate you!"
His voice had a hollow sound in the empty garden. Garden and lawn and
house had the same look that the whole deserted town had caught to-day;
the look of suddenly empty rooms where much life has been, a breathless
strangeness that holds echoes of what has happened there, and even hints
of what is to happen; haunted rooms. It is not best to linger there.
Neil turned uneasily toward the path again.
He turned, then he turned back, stood for a tense minute listening, then
broke through the rose garden and began to run across the lawn. Very
faint and small, so that he could not tell whether it was in a man's
voice or a woman's, but echoing clearly across the deserted garden, he
had heard a scream from the house.
It came from the house somewhere, though as Neil ran toward it the house
still looked tenantless. The veranda was without its usual gay litter of
cushions and books and serving trays. At the long windows that opened on
it all the curtains were close drawn--or at all but one.
As Neil reached the house he saw that the middle window was thrown high
and the long, pale-coloured curtain was dragged from its rod and
dangling over the sill. Just then he heard a second scream from the
house. It was so choked and faint that he barely heard it. Neil ran up
the steps and slipped through the open window into the Everards'
library.
Little light came through the curtained windows. The green room,
sparsely scattered with furniture in summer covers of light chintz that
glimmered pale and forbidding, looked twice its unfriendly length in the
gloom. There was a heavy, dead scent of too many flowers in the air. On
a table across the room a bowl of hothouse hyacinths, just overturned,
crushed the flowers with its weight and dripped water into the sodden
rug.
Neil, at the window looking uncertainly into the half-dark room, saw the
bowl and the white mass of crushed flowers, and then something else,
something that shifted and stirred in a far corner of the room. He saw
it dimly at first, a dark, struggling group. There were two men in it.
One was a man who had screamed, but he was not screaming now. It would
hardly have been convenient for him to scream, for the other, the
smaller and slighter man of the two, was clutching him by the throat,
gripping it with a hand that he could not shake off as the two figures
swayed back and forth.
"Who's there?" Neil cried.
Nobody answered him. Nobody needed to, for just then the two men who
seemed to be fighting swung into the narrow strip of light before the
uncurtained window and he could see their faces. He could see, too, that
they were not fighting now, though they had seemed to be. The bigger man
was choked into submission already. No sound came from him and he hung
limp and still in the little man's hold. Just in the centre of the strip
of light the little man relaxed his grip, and let him fall. He dropped
to the floor in a limp, untidy looking heap, and lay still there, with
the light full on his face, closed eyes and grinning mouth. The man was
Colonel Everard, the man who stood over him was Charlie Brady.
As Neil looked Brady dropped on his knees beside the Colonel, felt for
his heart, and found it. He knelt there, motionless, holding his hand
pressed over it and peering intently into his face. Presently he got to
his feet deliberately, gave a deep sigh of entire content with himself,
and looked about him. Then and not until then he saw Neil. He saw him
without surprise, if without much pleasure, it appeared.
"You're late," he remarked.
"You drunken fool," Neil began furiously, then stopped, staring at his
cousin. Whatever the meaning of this exhibition was, Charlie was not
drunk. The excitement that possessed him was excitement of some other
kind. It possessed him entirely, though it was under control for the
moment. His muscles twitched with it. His shoulders shifted restlessly.
His hands closed and unclosed. His eyes were strangely lit, and there
was an absent, exalted look about them. Whatever the excitement, it was
strong--stronger than Charlie. Neil, his eyes now used to the
half-light, could see no weapon in the room, dropped on the floor or
discarded. Mr. Brady, normally a coward in his cups and out of them, had
attacked his enemy with his bare hands.
"Charlie, what's got you?" Neil said. "What's come to you?"
"What's come to him, there?" Charlie said, in a voice that was changed,
too, and was as remote and as strange as his eyes, a low voice, with the
deceptive, terrible calm of gathering hysteria about it.
"Look what's come to him," the voice went on. "Don't he deserve it, and
worse? How did I find him to-day when I broke in through the window
there? At his old tricks again. There was a woman with him in the
library there, when he came out to me. He locked the door. She's there
now. Neil, you'd better get away from here. I don't know what you're
doing here, but you'd better go, and go quick."
He had given this advice indifferently. He made his next observation
indifferently, too, with his furtive, absent eyes on the library door.
"I've killed him."
"What's got you? Are you crazy?"
"No--not now. You'd better go. I want to take a look in there first. The
key's in the door."
"Charlie, come back here."
The note of command that he was used to responding to in his young
cousin's voice reached and controlled Mr. Brady even now; he obeyed and
swung round and stood still, looking at Neil. Neil's dark eyes, just
above the level of his own, and so like them, were unrecognizable now.
They were dull with anger, and they were angry with him.
"What's the matter?" he quavered. "What's the matter, Neil?"
Between the two cousins, as they stood facing each other, the Colonel
lay ominously still. The cruel eyes did not open, and the distorted
mouth did not change.
"Look! You can see for yourself. Feel his heart," Mr. Brady offered, but
his cousin's dark, disconcerting eyes did not leave his face. "What's
the matter, Neil? What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to make you talk out to me," Neil said. "You'll tell me
what's got you, and why you did this, which will be the ruin of you and
me, too, but first you'll tell me something else. You'll tell me what
you've hid from me for a year, you who can tell me the truth when you're
drunk and lie out of it when you're sober, till you've worn me out and
I'm sick of trying to get the truth from you. I'll be getting it now too
late, but I'll get it. Have you or have you not been living on this
man's money?"
"Yes."
"Was it hush money?"
"Yes," Mr. Brady said. "Neil, I'll tell you everything. You've guessed
most of it, but I'll tell you the rest. I can prove it. I can prove
everything I know. I did take hush money. It was dirty money, but I
didn't care. I didn't care what happened. I didn't care till to-day."
"To-day?"
"I got--a letter."
"Go on," Neil said.
As he spoke Mr. Brady's face began suddenly to change, lighting again
with that strange excitement which had gripped him, revived, and burning
through its thin veneer of control. His eyes blazed with it, and his
voice shook with it. He waved a trembling hand toward the library door.
A sound had come from the library, the faintest of sounds, a low,
frightened cry. It was like the ghost of a cry, but he heard. Neil heard
it, too, and was at the door before him, trying to unlock it, fumbling
with the key.
"She's there yet," Mr. Brady cried; "whoever she is. Well, she'll be the
last of them. I had a letter, I tell you, a letter from Maggie. She's
coming home, what's left of her--what he's left of her--Everard. I never
thought he was to blame. I said he was, but I was talked out of it. If
I'd thought so, if I'd suspected it, would I have touched a penny of his
dirty money? But she's coming home. Maggie's coming home."
For the moment Neil was not concerned with the fact. Graver revelations
might have passed over him unheeded. The key had turned at last. Then
Neil felt the door being pushed open from inside. He stepped back and
waited. The door opened cautiously for an inch or two, then swung
suddenly wide. Standing motionless, framed in the library door, was
Judith.