THROUGH THE MILL
Deane stood at last on the other side of those long, dragging months of
unspeakable weariness. Day after day, in the close atmosphere of the
Courts, week after week of what seemed to him unnecessary repetitions
and delays,--so the great machine of the law moved on its slow and
stately way, and the case of Sinclair _v._ The Incorporated Gold-Mines
Association crept on toward the end. One thing at least Deane had
gained. His examination and cross-examination--and he was in the witness
box altogether for nearly two days--failed to reveal a single weak joint
in the armor of his truthfulness. His story was consistent and honorable
throughout. He was able to prove the payment to Sinclair, to prove
Sinclair's suggestion that he should have a try at the mine. At the end
of the case, one thing remained certain, and that was that morally
speaking the mine was Deane's when he had sold it to the Corporation.
Yet behind it all there were those title-deeds, with which Sinclair had
never parted, and which now formed the backbone of this present suit.
The more sensational part of the case, too, concerning which there had
been endless rumors, collapsed immediately.
"Is it not true that Sinclair paid you a visit at your offices a few
days before his murder?" counsel asked.
"Certainly!" Deane answered.
"Will you tell us what transpired at that interview?"
"Well, it scarcely amounted to an interview," Deane answered composedly.
"The man was drunk, and I found him offensive. He brandished the
document at me on which the present case is founded, and I suspected him
of an attempt at blackmail. I had him thrown out."
"Yet a few days afterwards you commissioned Rowan--the man who murdered
Sinclair--to obtain that document from him," counsel said, amidst some
sensation.
"Scarcely that," Deane answered. "Rowan, who had been a friend of mine
in South Africa, and was a man of an altogether different stamp than
Sinclair, called upon me a few days later. I told him the
circumstances."
"You incited him to procure that document from Sinclair," counsel
declared.
"I cannot admit that," Deane answered. "I told him that I had declined
to be blackmailed by Sinclair, but that after all I would prefer to pay
a reasonable sum of money for the document in question. Rowan had been
on more friendly terms with Sinclair than any of us, and I thought that
he might induce him to listen to reason."
"If the document was valueless, why should you bother about it?"
"I'm afraid that you don't know much about the mining world," Deane
replied amiably. "Any prejudicial report, however malicious, however
false, affects the market, and one must always consider one's
stockholders."
"Very well, then," counsel said, "we come to this. You deputed Rowan to
see what he could do with Sinclair. Do you realize your responsibility
in this matter? You are aware of what happened?"
"Certainly," Deane answered. "I shall never cease to regret it. Sinclair
was mad drunk and the two men quarrelled. The blow which killed him was
struck in self-defence."
"The law did not take that view."
"I stood by Rowan when he died," Deane said, with a sudden note of
solemnity in his tone. "He told me the truth then, and the truth is what
I have told you."
"Nevertheless, he stole the document," counsel continued. "It was
discovered afterwards in the possession of Miss Rowan."
"So I have heard," Deane answered calmly. "It was a pity that she did
not hand it over to me."
"You would have destroyed it, I suppose?"
"Most certainly!" Deane answered. "The mine belonged to me. Sinclair had
declared before witnesses that there were no papers, that the claim had
not been worked for the requisite time; and, therefore, by the mining
laws of the country my purchase was good."
The case lasted well over the Christmas recess. During the holidays,
Deane spent a good part of his time seeking for some trace of Winifred
Rowan. He went himself to her old employers, but they were able to tell
him nothing. They could only show him the testimonial which they had
written at her request, and which she had taken away with her a few days
after her departure from the hotel. There was no one who seemed able to
help him in the least. Very regretfully, he called in the services of a
private detective, who, however, was equally unsuccessful. The holidays
passed, the case was reopened, and Deane was once more immersed in the
struggle....
It was over at last. The strain remained,--the great judge who had heard
it declined to pronounce judgment immediately on the conclusion of the
pleadings. It might be three days or it might be even a week before his
decision was known. Deane turned away from the court with a strong and
instinctive desire for solitude. The suspense long drawn out through the
weeks and through the months, had become unbearable. He felt himself no
longer able calmly to discuss the pros and the cons of the case with his
fellow directors and friends. He was sick to heart of it all. He escaped
from one or two passers-by, and a reporter or so who tried to buttonhole
him, and ignoring his brougham, around which several others were
waiting, he sprang into a hansom and drove to the garage where he kept
his touring car. A few brief orders, a pencilled note to his servant,
and Deane, leaving the garage by the other entrance, took the Tube to
its terminus, walked out into the country, and was caught up within an
hour by the car, in which his servant was sitting on the front seat by
the side of the chauffeur.
The evening passed swiftly into night as they thundered up the great
north road into the darkness. Deane, wrapped in his thick coat and rugs,
leaned back in his seat, with both windows down, feeling an
inexpressible relief in the sharp sting of the night air, the flakes of
snow and little clouds of rain blown every now and then through the open
windows. He was free at last from the hateful environment of the last
few months. No longer was there anyone to point him out as the man who
had sold for a million pounds a mine which had never belonged to him.
Save for the two motionless figures in front, he was alone. There was no
one to ask him wearisome questions, no one to offer him sympathy or wish
him good-fortune. On they sped through the night, till the villages were
like dead haunts, without a light in the windows, and only an occasional
lamp-post to mark the place where men slumbered. They passed through a
town, which was like a city of the dead, and on again to the wilder
country, where the rabbits rushed, terrified, before the streaming
lights of the car, and the wind alone, of all Nature's voices, seemed
left to remind him that this was not a world of ghosts through which he
rushed.
Presently he saw the man at the wheel swerve a little in his seat, and
he lifted the speaking-tube to his lips. "Can we get through to Rakney,
Murray," he asked him, "or shall we stop at King's Lynn?"
"We can get through, sir," the man replied, "if we can rest for
half-an-hour somewhere."
They knocked up an inn-keeper in King's Lynn, and the two men ate and
drank. Deane himself drank a long whiskey and soda, and lit a cigar.
Then they rushed onward into the darkness, already lightening a little
in the east. Dawn was breaking as they climbed their last hill and ran
down toward the marshlands. A red light loomed over the gray, sullen
sea. The marshes themselves seemed heavy and undistinguishable--patches
of land and dark creeks of salt-water running into one another. Out in
the bay the foam-topped breakers came rolling sullenly in. When at last
they turned through the gate, and went slowly up the rough road--marked
out with white stakes--which led up to the tower, the dawn had actually
come, the night was a thing of the past, although its shadow seemed to
hang low over the gray land. The sea had been lately over the rough
road, and progress was difficult. At last, though, they reached the
little bank of shingle on which the tower was built, and Deane, with a
little sigh of relief, stepped wearily down. While his servant unlocked
the front door and busied himself arranging a bed and lighting a fire,
Deane walked down to the edge of the sea, whose white-topped waves were
dragging back the shingle as they fell and broke, with a dull, grinding
noise. Never, it seemed to him, had the beauty of loneliness appealed to
him more strongly than at this hour of dawn. The birds were silent, the
wind had fallen, there was no sound whatever from the sleeping land.
Only the eternal breaking of the waves continued--a sound which was more
like the background for stillness, grim and mysterious, inevitable as
existence itself. Far away now seemed that crowded court, with its eager
faces, its rapt issues,--far away seemed the importance of wealth, the
great question whether he should remain amongst the millionaires--the
world buyers, or take his place amongst the poor men of the earth. What
did it matter, after all, this kingship of the cities, with their lack
of perspective, their crowded hours, their strange, artificial
atmosphere? The value of these things was, grotesque, for a
moment,--distorted. He had been wise to come here, he told himself, as a
breath of the morning wind stole, faint and fresh, across the salt sea.
Perhaps he would be wiser still if he defied fortune and stayed here
always.
His servant summoned him, and he went reluctantly indoors. He ate some
biscuits and drank some milk. Then, as the real dawn broke over the sea,
a fiery red, and with many suggestions of troubled weather in its angry
glow, he opened the window and threw himself upon the little iron
bedstead with its lavender-scented sheets.