VARNEY, HAVING EMBARKED UPON A CRIME, FINDS OUT THAT THERE IS A PRICE TO
PAY
There was a fine old hedge of box bordering the Carstairs lawn, old
rosebushes inside it and many flowering shrubs. Splendid oaks curtained
the big white house on either side, shading the expanse of close-clipped
turf. At the left, a fountain-sprayer now whirled a mist of water over
the trim grass, and far to the rear a man in rubber boots was hosing off
a phaeton before a carriage house. On the back porch, an elderly cook
was peeling potatoes and gently crooning some old ballad of Erin.
It was a serene and reassuring scene. Yet upon the spacious piazza,
which undeniably contributed to the pervading air of all's well, the
stunning information came to Varney that the lady of his quest was not
at home. Nor could the maid at the door say where her young mistress had
gone, or with whom, or when she would return. Possibly Mrs. Carstairs
knew, but Mrs. Carstairs was unwell and could not be disturbed. Miss
Carstairs would be sorry to miss him, the kind-hearted girl opined, and
would he please leave his name?
The young man descended the steps in a state of the flattest depression.
Disappointment, he reflected bitterly, crowded upon the heels of
disappointment on this anticlimactic afternoon which yet should have
been, in a bigger sense, so gloriously climactic. He had missed his
train, and with it his honorable confession to Mr. Carstairs; missed
Higginson; last and worst of all--it seemed to him now that this was all
that mattered in the least--he had missed Miss Carstairs. In sooth, the
world was all awry.
But at the gate, a thought came to him, radiant as a heavenly messenger.
Miss Carstairs was at her seamstress's on the Remsen road. Had she not
told him with her own lips that she was to be there at this hour?
He made a _Te Deum_ of the click of the gate, and turned northward a
face which bore record of an inner splendor.
He had set out to see Miss Carstairs in order to ask of her if she knew
the whereabouts, in Hunston or New York, of the fair-spoken yet elusive
Higginson. But with every step he found the force of this errand
weakening within him. The memory of that gentleman's villany, so burning
a moment since, grew steadily fainter and more inconsequential. Failing
to locate him, he would of course make a precautionary round of the
newspaper offices in New York that night. At the worst, he told himself
with the swift fading of his anger, there was only a remote risk of any
unpleasant aftermath. Why, the thing was over and done with--let
by-gones be by-gones. As for those other matters supposed to be upon his
mind--hints of approaching trouble for himself, and the knowledge of Mr.
Carstairs's bitter disappointment over the collapse of his all but
triumphant scheme--he could not for the life of him give them any
attention whatever.
A far nearer and more vital matter was pressing upon his mind and heart.
To tell her everything at the moment when the yacht had swung back and
he had thrown up his commission forever had been his first strong
impulse. He had crushed it down only because he saw that to speak then
was to take her at an ungenerous disadvantage. Now Fortune had sent him
this new meeting, to be untrammeled by any such restraints. No grim duty
governed his movements now; no consciousness of secret chicanery any
longer enfolded him like a pall. Already the thought of what he had
meant to do came back to him hazily, like the plot of a half-forgotten
play. The hobgoblins in a nightmare seemed not more unreal to him now.
His heart sang with the knowledge that he was to see her again, this
time with no shadow between.
Two nights' rain had left the road dustless: it was silent and empty.
All about him fell the pleasant evening noises of the wood, but he did
not hear them. As he walked, his mind was rehearsing the whole story of
his coming to Hunston, as he was now free to confess it to Uncle
Elbert's daughter. That she would forgive him he never entertained a
doubt. For he would throw himself wholly on her mercy--telling her
everything, painting himself as blackly as he could--and suing for
pardon only because he had failed.
But when suddenly he saw her, sooner than he had expected, his polished
and elaborate phrases dropped from his mind as cleanly as had the
recollection of the roguery of Higginson.
It was at that hour when the skies remember the set sun in a gold and
pink glow. A little kink in the road straightened out under his swift
feet, and a small cottage in a fair-sized lawn jumped out of the woods
into vision, almost upon him. On the small square porch, her back to the
road, stood Miss Carstairs, talking through the open window to some one
in the room beyond.
Varney, having stopped short at the first sudden sight of her, walked on
very slowly. Her voice came to him distinctly, and now and then he
caught scattering words of what she was saying. She wore her blue dress
of the luncheon and the hat which Mrs. Marne, and others, had so
admired; and she gave him the odd impression of being somehow _older_
than she had ever seemed before.... Yet she was ten years his junior and
three days ago, at this very hour, he had never so much as laid eyes
upon her.
"I'll come Saturday morning, then," she was saying, "and you'll
certainly have them ready for me, won't you? Good-bye."
She turned from the window, came towards the steps. At the top of them,
she saw Varney standing at the gate, not twenty yards away, and stopped
dead. Then she came on down the stairs, down the graveled walk towards
him.
"I'm going away at eight o'clock," he began without greeting, striving
to make his voice casual. "I went to your house first--and--"
"You--followed me here?"
"Yes," he said, unsmiling. "I had to see you before I went--on matters
of business--and--"
She was nearer to him now: for the first time he could see her eyes. In
them lay a faint shadowiness like the memory of shed tears; but sweeping
over that and blotting it out he saw a look which struck him like a
blow.
"There is nothing for you to see me about, I think--any more," she said
with a little laugh. "The game is up--isn't that what they say in
melodrama? My mother has told me all about it."
"Your mother has _told you_!" he echoed stupidly, as one to whom the
words conveyed no meaning.
"She had not expected to see me so soon again, when I went off to lunch
on my father's yacht. The surprise was a little too much for her. You
must try to forgive her," said Mary, and punctuated the observation with
a small, final bow. "Will you open the gate for me?"
"No," said Varney, pulling himself sharply together. "Not like that."
The shock of her voice and look, even more than her words, had been
stunning in their first unexpectedness. But now he remembered, with
infinite relief, that of course she did not understand the matter at
all; of course she would speak and look very differently when he had
made his explanation.
"You think," Varney said, "that I _mind_ your knowing about our poor
little plot--that I am found out and my plans are all upset? How on
earth could you think that? Why, that's all like something in another
life. Don't you know what my being here at this moment means? The thing
is all over, Miss Carstairs--all past and done with an hour before you
ever saw your mother. I gave it up voluntarily. When the time came, just
now on the yacht, I found out that it was impossible--unthinkable--I
couldn't do it. The game was up then. That is one thing that your mother
could not tell you, and it was to tell you this, and all the rest of it,
that I followed you here."
She stood on the other side of the gate, hardly an arm's length from
him, looking at him; a figure so pretty, so dainty, so extremely
decorative that she seemed incapable of giving anything but pleasure.
But in the eyes that met his own so unwaveringly, he read at once the
contradiction of this.
"Yes, I suppose that would always be the way, wouldn't it?--that
whenever I found out, you were just going to tell me?"
If she had searched her mind for a way to strangle his headlong
self-defence, she could not possibly have done it more effectually.
There followed a horrible pause.
"You mean ... that you do not believe me?"
"In the little while that I have known you, have you given me much
reason to?"
"Can't you see that that is exactly the reason I wanted to tell you all
the truth now?"
"Why did you wait till _now_? Weren't there chances to tell me this
afternoon on my father's yacht? But--there's no use to speak of all
this. It is enough that I know it now."
He was aware that her voice had lost that hard and polished lightness
with which she had first struck at him; on this last sentence, he
thought that it trembled a little; and in a flash, he saw the whole
matter from her side of it, and for the moment ceased to think about
himself.
He leaned his arms upon the green panel of the gate and looked down at
her.
"Don't think that I blame you for not taking my word. Probably I
couldn't expect it. We can't very well argue about that.... And of
course I have known all along--how you would feel about me, when you
found out what I came here to do. I was ready for that--ready for you to
be angry. But I don't seem to have taken it in that you would be ...
hurt. That makes it a good deal worse."
She made no reply. She had lowered her heavy-fringed eyes; her slim,
gloved hands were busily furling and unfurling her white parasol.
"There is nothing in this that need hurt you. Believe me in this, at any
rate. Only three people are concerned in it. You will have no doubt of
your mother. That she told you shows how impossible it was to her, even
with Uncle Elbert wanting you so much. You will not mind about your
father--not in any personal way. He is a stranger to you. That leaves
only me."
Still she said nothing. It seemed to him that he had never looked at so
still a face.
"For me, I might make you angry as any--acquaintance might--any
stranger. But that is all. It is not ... as if we had been friends."
She raised her eyes, and the look in them seemed to give the lie to
every word he had said.
"What do you call a friend? Did I not trust you--put myself in your
power--fall confidingly in with your hateful plot--after I had been
plainly warned not to? Oh, if I had only listened to Mr. Higginson, I
should not have the humiliation of remembering that--hour on the yacht!"
The name stung him into instant recollection. He stood staring at her,
and his face darkened.
In the first staggering revelation of her look, his sub-conscious mind
had leapt instantly to the conclusion that his cunning enemy, having
found out his secret, had betrayed it to Miss. Carstairs. Her first
words had disposed of that. It was the tortured mother, not the
professional sneak, who had been before him with his explanation. But
now it rushed over him that he had an infinitely deeper grudge against
the vanished spy. For it was Higginson, with his bribe-money, who had
broken down the yacht; Higginson who would, in any case, have forced the
return to Hunston; Higginson who had given this girl the right to think,
as she did think, that she owed her escape wholly to an "accident" to
the machinery.
He had thought that he had saved Uncle Elbert's daughter from himself,
and lo, his enemy had plucked the honor from him. The world should not
be big enough for this man to elude his vengeance.
"You mention Mr. Higginson. Where is he?"
She glanced at him, impersonally, struck by the unconscious sternness of
his voice.
"I do not know, but I am most anxious to see him--to thank him--"
"I am told that he left town at four o'clock. Perhaps you know his
address in New York?"
"I do not," she answered coldly. "No doubt he went away hurriedly ...
frightened of you because of his kindness to me."
She came a step forward to the gate. Instantly his thought veered back
to her and his tense face softened.
"How can I blame you," he said hurriedly, "for thinking the worst of me?
I've been thinking badly enough of myself, God knows. But don't you
know, can't you imagine, that nothing could have held me to the
miserable business a single moment after I saw you, had I not been bound
by a solemn promise to your poor father?"
"My father! Oh, if he is the sort of man to plot a thing like this, and
to bludgeon my mother into it, how could you endure to _promise_ to do
it for him?"
"Because he is breaking his heart for you, and you didn't know it. It
seemed right that he should see you, since he wants to so much."
All her sense of the wrong he had done her flared up in anger at that.
"How do _you_--_dare_ say what seems right between my father and me? He
is breaking his heart for me, he told you? Did he mention to you that
she had _broken_ hers for him? Don't you suppose that I have had
time--and reasons--to decide which of them I belong to?"
"All this," he said, "was before I knew you."
About them hung the stillness of the country and the long empty road.
The woods stirred; a bird called; a portly hare poked his nose through
the brush over the way, and suddenly scuttled off, his white flag up. In
Mrs, Thurston's yard, the quiet was profound.
"All his life," said Mary Carstairs, "my father has thought about
nothing but himself. I am sorry for him--but he must take the
consequences of that now. If he is lonely, it is his own making. If my
mother has been lonely till it has almost killed her, that is his doing,
too. For you--there was never any place in this. As for me, I owe him
nothing. He must beg my mother's forgiveness before he shall ever get
mine."
She came forward another half-step and laid her hand upon the gate-latch
with a movement whose definiteness did not escape him.
"You may take back that answer from me if you wish. And so, good-bye."
"Not good-bye," said Varney, instantly. "You must not say that."
"I am quite sure that I have nothing else left to say."
Her eyes went past him over the gate, out into the wood beyond. Dusk was
falling about them; it shaded her face, intangibly altered it, made it
for the moment almost as he had known it before. She looked very young,
and tired. This was the picture of her, and he knew it then as he looked
at her, that he would carry with him to the longest day he lived.
"Is it nothing to you," he cried in a rush, "that when the time came I
couldn't do it? The yacht's breaking down had nothing in the world to do
with it. I had already decided to turn back, to break my promise. That
the--accident happened just then was only a wretched chance. I was going
to put about at that moment."
She hesitated almost imperceptibly, seemed for a brief second to waver.
But perhaps she dared not let herself believe him now: perhaps the
strongest wish of her heart was to hurt him as deeply as she could.
"To say the least," she said with a little deliberate movement of
distaste, "your coincidences are unfortunate. You--won't mind if I go on
being grateful to the--_gear_?"
Under that crowning taunt, his self-restraint snapped like an
overstretched bow-string.
"You shall not say that. You shall not. Miss Carstairs, you _know_ I
could have kept you on the yacht if I had wanted to. You _know_ how I
gave the order to put about and bring you back to Hunston. Did I look in
the least then like a man whose hopes and plans had been ruined? You
know I did not. You know I said to you that I--I was the happiest man in
America. Will you tell me what on earth that could mean--except that I
had decided to give up a thing that has been a millstone around my neck
ever since--I met you?"
She made no reply, did not look at him. The dusk shadowed her eyes; and
whether her silence meant good or ill he could not tell.
"You cannot answer, you see. We both know why. You will not be fair to
me, Miss Carstairs. It is that night in the Academy box-office over
again. Because I _had_ to deceive you once--not for my own sake--you
will not look at the plain facts. But in your heart--just like that
other night--_I know you believe me."_
Of course she could not let that pass now. "I do not!" she said. "I do
not. I must ask you, please, not to keep me here any longer."
Varney's face went a shade paler. Arguing about his own veracity was
even less bearable than he had thought; his manner all at once became
singularly quiet.
"The merest moment, if you will. I can prove what I say," he answered
slowly, "but of course I won't do that. You must believe what _I_ say,
believe _me_. Nothing else matters but that.... Don't you know that it
took a very strong reason to make me break faith with my old friend,
your father--to make me stand here begging to be believed, like this?
You have only to look at me, I think. Don't you know that I couldn't
possibly deceive you now ... after what has happened to me?"
"I don't know what you mean. I don't understand. Don't tell me. Nothing
has happened ..."
"Everything has happened," he said still more quietly. "I've fallen
crazily in love with you."
She did not lift her eyes; neither moved nor spoke; gave no sign that
she had heard. He went on slowly:
"This--might be hard to believe, except that it must be so easy to see.
I've known you less than three days, and I never wanted to--even like
you. My one idea was to think of you as my enemy. That was what Maginnis
and I agreed--plotting together like a pair of nihilists. It all seems
so preposterous now. Everything was against me from the beginning. I
wouldn't face it till to-day, this afternoon. Then it all came over me
in a rush, and, of course, your happiness became a great deal more to me
than your father's. So we turned around, and it was then that I told you
how happy I was. Didn't you know then what I meant? Of course it was
because I had just found out ... how you were the one person in the
world who mattered to me."
There was a long silence. It deepened, grew harder to break. Little
Jenny Thurston, watching these two through an upstairs shutter, marveled
what adults found to say to each other in these interminable colloquies.
A young cock-sparrow, piqued by their stillness, alighted on the fence
near by and studied them, eye cocked inquisitively.
"Of course, I'm not--asking anything," said Varney. "About this, I mean.
I am answered, and over-answered, already. But ... do you believe now
that I--voluntarily gave it up?"
"Oh," said Mary, "you--you must not ask me that. You must not talk to me
like this. I did trust you once--fully--when you were almost a stranger;
last night--and then this afternoon--"
"Do you believe me," said Varney, "or do you not?"
Her lower lip was trembling very slightly, and she set her white teeth
upon it. The sudden knowledge that she was near to tears terrified her,
goaded her to lengths. She gathered all her pride of opinion and young
sense of wrong and frightened feminine instinct, for a final desperate
stand; and so flung at him more passionately than she knew: "How many
times must I tell you? _I do not! I do not_!"
Varney gave her a last look, stamping her face upon his mind, and took a
step backward from the gate.
"Then," said he ... "this is good-bye, indeed."
Presently Mary raised her eyes. He had turned southward, toward the
town, but at a pace so swift that he was already far down the road. A
jutting curve came soon, and he vanished behind it, out of her sight.
Dusk was falling fast on the wood now. The green of the trees deepened
and blackened, turning into a crooked smudge upon the sky-line. The road
fell between them like a long gray ribbon. Nothing was to be seen upon
it; nothing was to be heard but the rustle of the early night wind and
the pleasant sounds of the open road.
Varney's mind as he walked, was a blank white wall. He had forgotten
Elbert Carstairs, forgotten the train he was to take, forgotten even the
unendurable injury that Higginson had put upon him. His one blind
instinct had been to get away as quickly and completely as possible. But
now, slowly, it was borne in upon him that he knew this road, that he
had walked it once before like this, at the end of the day. His first
night in Hunston--he remembered it all very well. It must have been
just here--or here--that the rain had caught him, and he had gone on to
meet _her_.
The cottage which had sheltered them that night must be close at hand.
His eyes, which had been upon the ground, lifted and went off down the
road. They fell upon the dark figure of a man, shuffling slowly along in
the gloom, not twenty yards ahead of him.
He was an old man, shambling and gray-whiskered, and stooped as he
walked. If he was aware that another wayfarer followed close behind, he
gave no sign. Suddenly he stopped short with a feeble exclamation, and
began peering about the ground at his feet. The young man was up with
him directly, and his vague impression of recognition suddenly became
fitted to a name.
"Orrick?"
The bowed form straightened and turned. Through the thickening twilight
the two men looked at each other.
"You were not by any chance waiting for me?"
The darkness hid old Orrick's eyes; he shook his head slowly a number of
times. "I passed you when you was at Miz Thurston's, sir. I can' walk
fas' like you can." And he bent down over the road again.
"What's the matter with you?" asked Varney. "Have you lost something?"
"Los' my luck-piece," said the other, slowly, not looking up. "I was
carryin' it in my hand 's I come along an' it jounced out. A 1812 penny
it was an' vallyble."
He cut rather a pitiful figure, squatting down in the dirt and
squinting about with short-sighted old eyes; and Varney felt
unaccountably sorry for him.
"I wouldn' los' my luck-piece for nothin'," he added, dropping to his
knees. "I'm a kind of a stoop'sitious man, an' I allus was."
"Perhaps I can help you; my eyes are good."
He went back a step or two, bending down and scrutinizing the brown
earth. Orrick, presently announcing that the coin might have rolled,
made a slow way across the road on his knees, patting the ground with
his hand as he moved. Near the edge of it, half in the woods, lay a
thick piece of split firewood, long as a man's arm and stouter. The
knotted old fingers stealthily closed on it.
"It could n't have rolled far on this soft road," said Varney presently.
"Just where do you think you dropped it?"
Sam Orrick rose behind his stooping figure with upraised club, a blaze
of triumph in his sodden old eyes.
"There!" he cried with a senseless laugh. "It's _there_, Stanhope!"
The club fell with a thud; and Varney, meeting it as he straightened up,
toppled over like a log, face downward.
Old Orrick stared down at the prostrate figure, and presently touched it
with his tattered foot. It did not stir. His fierce joy died. He looked
about him apprehensively, and his eye fell at once upon a dim-lit
cottage off the road just back of him. _His_ cottage--how had he
forgotten that? Was that dark thing--a man--standing there at the gate?
Suddenly a great terror seized the old man. He threw his stick into the
woods and slunk away, toward the town. A loud yell from behind brought
his heart to his throat, and he broke into a wild, lumbering run.