OUT OF THE DARK
For a moment there was dead silence in the room. In the hall the tall
clock struck ponderously, and a porch blind slammed beneath a
caretaker's hand. Harry's breath caught in his throat, and the old man's
eye again impaled his hapless son.
Hugh threw up his head with an attempt at jauntiness, but with furtive
apprehension in every muscle--for he could not solve the look he saw on
his father's face--and said:
"You act as if it were a cool million! I'm no worse than a lot who have
better luck than I. Suppose I did draw the five thousand?--you were
going to give me ten for a wedding present. I had to have the money
then, and you wouldn't have given it to me. You know that as well as I
do. Besides, I was going to take it up myself and you would never have
been the wiser. He promised to hold it--it's a low trick for him to
round on me like this. I'll pay him off for it sometime! I don't see
that it's anybody else's business but ours, anyway," he continued, with
a surly glance at Harry.
Harry had been staring at him, but with a vision turned curiously
backward--a vision that seemed to see Hugh standing at a carpeted dais
in a flower-hung room, while his own voice said out of a lurid shadow:
"_Wilt thou have this man to be thy wedded husband...._"
"Stay, Sanderson," said the old man; then turning to Hugh: "Who advanced
you money on this and promised to 'hold it'?"
"Doctor Moreau."
"He profited by it?"
"He got his margin," said Hugh sullenly.
"How much margin did he get?"
"A thousand."
"Where is the rest?" David Stires' voice was like a whip of steel.
Hugh hesitated a moment. He had still a few hundreds in pocket, but he
did not mention them.
"I used most of it. I--had a few debts."
"Debts of honor, I presume!"
Hugh's sensibility quivered at the fierce, grating irony of the inquiry.
"If you'd been more decent with spending-money," he said with a flare of
the old effrontery, "I'd have been all right! Ever since I came home
you've kept me strapped. I was ashamed to stick up any more of my
friends. And of course I couldn't borrow from Jessica."
"Ashamed!" exclaimed the old man with harsh sternness. "You are without
the decency of shame! If you were capable of feeling it, you would not
mention her name now!"
Hugh thought he saw a glimmer through the storm-cloud. Jessica was his
anchor to windward. What hurt him, would hurt her. He would pull
through!
"Well," he said, "it's done, and there's no good making such a row about
it. She's my wife and she'll stand by me, if nobody else does!"
No one had ever seen such a look on David Stires' face as came to it
now--a sudden blaze of fury and righteous scorn, that burned it like a
brand.
"You impudent blackguard! You drag my name in the gutter and then try to
trade on my self-respect and Jessica's affection. You thought you would
take it up yourself--and I would be none the wiser! And if I did find it
out, you counted on my love for the poor deluded girl you have married,
to make me condone your criminality--to perjure myself--to admit the
signature and shield you from the consequences. You imagine because you
are my son, that you can do this thing and all still go on as before!
Do you suppose I don't consider Jessica? Do you think because you have
fooled and cheated her--and me--and married her, that I will give her
now to a caught thief--a common jailbird?"
Hugh started. A sickly pallor came to his sallow cheek. That salient
chin, that mouth close-gripped--those words, vengeful, vindictive, the
utterance of a wrath so mighty in the feeble frame as to seem almost
uncouth--smote him with a mastering terror.
A jailbird! That was what his father called _him_! Did he mean to give
him up, then? To have him arrested--tried--put in prison? When he had
canvassed the risks of discovery, he had imagined a scene, bitter
anger--perhaps even disinheritance. His marriage to Jessica, he had
reckoned, would cover that extremity. But he had never thought of
something worse. Now, for the first time, he saw himself in the grip of
that impersonal thing known as the law--handcuffs on his wrists, riding
through the streets in the "Black-Maria"--standing at the dock an
outcast, gazed at with contempt by all the town--at length sitting in a
cell somewhere, no more pleasures or gaming, or fine linen, but dressed
in convict's dress, loose, ill-shapen, hanging on him like bags, with
broad black-and-white stripes. He had been through the penetentiary
once. He remembered the sullen, stolid faces, the rough, hobnailed
shoes, the cropped heads! His mind turned from the picture with fear and
loathing.
In the thoughts that were darting through Hugh's mind, there was none
now of regret or of pity for Jessica. His fear was the fear of the
trapped spoiler, who discerns capture and its consequent penalties in
the patrolling bull's-eye flashed upon him. He studied his father with
hunted, calculating eyes, as the old man turned to Harry Sanderson.
"Sanderson," said David Stires, once more in his even, deadly voice,
"Jessica is waiting in the room above this. She will not understand the
delay. Will you go to her? Make some excuse--any you can think of--till
I come."
Harry nodded and left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him,
carrying with him the cowering helpless look with which Hugh saw himself
left alone with his implacable judge. What to say to her? How to say it?
As he passed the hall, the haste of demolition had already begun.
Florists' assistants were carrying the plants from the east room, and
through the open door a man was rolling up the red carpet. The cluttered
emptiness struck him with a sense of fateful symbolism--as though it
shadowed forth the shattering of Jessica's ordered dream of happiness.
He mounted the stair as if a pack swung from his shoulders. He paused a
moment at the door, then knocked, turned the knob, and entered.
[Illustration]
There, in the middle of the blue-hung room, in her wedding-dress, with
her bandaged eyes, and her bridal bouquet on the table, stood Jessica.
Twilight was near, but even so, all the shutters were drawn save one,
through which a last glow of refracted sunlight sifted to fall upon his
face. Her hands were clasped before her, he could hear her
breathing--the full hurried respiration of expectancy.
Then, while his hand closed the door behind him, a thing unexpected,
anomalous, happened--a thing that took him as utterly by surprise as if
the solid floor had yawned before him. Slim fingers tore away the broad
encircling bandage. She started forward. Her arms were flung about his
neck.
"Hugh!... Hugh!" she cried. "My husband!"
The paleness was stricken suddenly from Harry's face. An odd, dazed
color--a flush of mortification, of self-reproach, flooded it from chin
to brow. Despite himself, he had felt his lips molding to an answering
kiss beneath her own. He drew a gasping breath, his hand nervously
caught the bandage, replaced it over the eyes, and tied it tightly,
putting down her protesting hands.
"Oh, Hugh," she pleaded, "not for a moment--not when I am so happy! Your
face is what I dreamed it must be! Why did you make me wait so long? And
I can see, Hugh! I can really see! Let it stay off, just for one little
moment more!"
He held her hands by force. "Jessica--wait!" he said in a broken
whisper. "You must not take it off again--not now!"
An incredible confusion enveloped him--his tongue cleaved to the roof of
his mouth. Not only had the painful _contretemps_ nonplussed and
dismayed him; not only had it heightened and horrified the realization
of what she must presently be told. It had laid a careless hand upon his
own secret, touching it with an almost vulgar mockery. It had overthrown
in an instant the barricades he had been piling. The pressure of those
lips on his had sent coursing to the furthest recesses of his nature a
great wave which dikes nor locks might ever again forbid.
Her look, leaping to his face, had not noted the ministerial dress, nor
in the ecstasy of the moment did she catch the agitation in his voice;
or if she did, she attributed it to a feeling like her own. She was
laughing happily, while he stood, trembling slightly, holding himself
with an effort.
"What a dear goose you are!" she said. "The light didn't hurt
them--indeed, indeed! Only to think, Hugh! Your wife will have her
sight! Do go and tell your father! He will be waiting to know!"
Harry made some incoherent reply. He was desperately anxious to get
away--his thought was a snarl of tatters, threaded by one lucid purpose:
to spare her coming self-abasement this sardonic humiliation. He did not
think of a time in the future, when her error must naturally disclose
itself. The tangle spelled _Now_. Not to tell her--not to let her know!
He almost ran from the room and down the stair.