"AM I MY BROTHER'S KEEPER?"
At the foot of the landing he paused, drawing a deep breath as if to
lift a weight of air. He needed to get his bearings--to win back a
measure of calmness.
As he stood there, Hugh came from the library. His head was down and he
went furtively and slinkingly, as though dreading even a casual regard.
He snatched his hat from the rack, passed out of the house, and was
swallowed up in the dusk. David Stires had followed his son into the
hall. He answered the gloomy question in Harry's eyes:
"He is gone," he said, "and I hope to Heaven I may never see his face
again!" Then, slowly and feebly, he ascended the stair.
The library windows were shadowed by shrubbery, and the sunset
splintered against the wall in a broad stripe, like cloth of crimson
silk. Harry leaned his hot forehead against the chill marble of the
mantelpiece and gazed frowningly at the dark Korean desk--an antique
gift of his own to David Stires--where the slip of paper still lay that
had spelled such ruin and shame. From the rear of the house came the
pert, tittering laugh of a maid bantering an expressman, and the heavy,
rattling thump of rolled trunks. There was something ghastly in the
incomprehension of all the house save the four chief actors of the
melodrama. The travesty was over, the curtain rung down to clapping of
hands, the scene-shifters clearing away--and behind all, in the wings,
unseen by any spectator, the last act of a living tragedy was rushing to
completion.
Ten, fifteen minutes passed, and old David Stires reentered the room,
went feebly to his wheel-chair, and sat down. He sat a moment in
silence, looking at a portrait of Jessica--a painting by Altsheler that
hung above the mantel--in a light fleecy gown, with one white rose in
the bronze hair. When he spoke the body's infirmity had become all at
once pitifully apparent. The fiery wrath seemed suddenly to have burned
itself out, leaving only dead ashes behind. His eyes had shrunk away
into almost empty sockets. The authority had faded from his face. He was
all at once a feeble, gentle-looking, ill, old man, with white mustaches
and uncertain hands, dressed in ceremonial broadcloth.
"I have told her," he said presently, in a broken voice. "You are kind,
Sanderson, very kind. God help us!"
"What has God to do with it?" fell a voice behind them. Harry faced
about. It was Jessica, as he had first seen her in the upper room, with
the bandage across her eyes.
"What has God to do with it?" she repeated, in a hard tone. "Perhaps Mr.
Sanderson can tell us. It is in his line!"
"Please--" said Harry.
He could not have told what he would have asked, though the accent was
almost one of entreaty. The harsh satire touched his sacred calling;
coming from her lips it affronted at once his religious instinct and his
awakened love. It was all he said, for he stopped suddenly at sight of
her face, pain-frosted, white as the folded cloth.
"Oh," she said, turning toward the voice, "I remember what you said that
night, right here in this very room--that you sowed your wild oats at
college with Hugh--that they were 'a tidy crop'! You were strong, and he
was weak. You led, and he followed. You were 'Satan Sanderson,' Abbot of
The Saints, the set in which he learned gambling. Why, it was in your
rooms that he played his first game of poker--he told me so himself! And
now he has gone to be an outcast, and you stand in the pulpit in a
cassock, you, the 'Reverend Henry Sanderson'! You helped to make him
what he has become! Can you undo it?"
Harry was looking at her with a stricken countenance. He had no answer
ready. The wave of confusion that had submerged him when he had restored
the bandage to her eyes had again welled over him. He stood shocked and
confounded. His hand fumbled at his lapel, and the white carnation,
crushed by his fingers, dropped at his feet.
"I am not excusing Hugh now," she went on wildly. "He has gone beyond
excuse or forgiveness. He is as dead to me as though I had never known
him, though the word you spoke an hour ago made me his wife. I shall
have that to remember all my life--that, and the one moment I had waited
for so long, for my first sight of his face, and my bride's kiss! I must
carry it with me always. I can never wipe that face from my brain, or
the sting of that kiss from my lips--the kiss of a forger--of my
husband!"
The old man groaned. "I didn't know he had seen her!" he said
helplessly. "Jessica, Hugh's sin is not Sanderson's fault!"
In her bitter words was an injustice as passionate as her pain, but for
her life she could not help it. She was a woman wrenched and torn,
tortured beyond control, numb with anguish. Every quivering tendril of
feeling was a live protest, every voice of her soul was crying out
against the fact. In those dreadful minutes when her mind took in the
full extent of her calamity, Hugh's past intimacy and present grim
contrast with Harry Sanderson had mercilessly thrust themselves upon
her, and her agony had seared the swift antithesis on her brain.
To Harry Sanderson, however, her words fell with a wholly
disproportionate violence. It had never occurred to him that he himself
had been individually and actively the cause of Hugh's downfall. The
accusation pierced through the armor of self-esteem that he had linked
and riveted with habit. The same pain of mind that had spurred him, on
that long-ago night, to the admission she had heard, had started to new
life a bared, a scathed, a rekindling sin.
"It is all true," he said. It was the inveterate voice of conscience
that spoke. "I have been deceiving myself. I was my brother's keeper! I
see it now."
She did not catch the deep compunction in the judicial utterance. In her
agony the very composure and restraint cut more deeply than silence. She
stood an instant quivering, then turned, and feeling blindly for the
door, swept from their sight.
White and breathless, Jessica climbed the stair. In her room, she took
a key from a drawer and ran swiftly to the attic-studio. She unlocked
the door with hurried fingers, tore the wrappings from the tall white
figure of the Prodigal Son, and found a heavy mallet. She lifted this
with all her strength, and showered blow upon blow on the hard clay, her
face and hair and shimmering train powdered with the white dust, till
the statue lay on the floor, a heap of tumbled fragments.
Fateful and passionate as the scene in the library had been, her going
left a pall of silence in the room. Harry Sanderson looked at David
Stires with pale intentness.
"Yet I would have given my life," he said in a low voice, "to save her
this!"
Something in the tone caught the old man. He glanced up.
"I never guessed!" he said slowly. "I never guessed that you loved her,
too."
But Harry had not heard. He did not even know that he had spoken aloud.
David Stires turned his wheel-chair to the Korean desk, touching the
bell as he did so. He took up the draft and put it into his pocket. He
pressed a spring, a panel dropped, and disclosed a hidden drawer, from
which he took a crackling parchment. It was the will against whose
signing Harry had pleaded months before in that same room. The butler
entered.
"Witness my signature, Blake," he said, and wrote his name on the last
page. "Mr. Sanderson will sign with you."
An hour later the fast express that bore Jessica and David Stires was
shrieking across the long skeleton railroad bridge, a dotted trail of
fire against the deepening night. The sound crossed the still miles. It
called to Harry Sanderson, where he sat in his study with the evening
paper before him. It called his eyes from a paragraph he was reading
through a painful mist--a paragraph under heavy leads, on its front
page:
This city has seldom seen so brilliant a gathering as that
witnessed, late this afternoon, at the residence of the groom, the
marriage of Mr. Hugh Stires and Miss Jessica Holme, both of this
place.
The ceremony was performed by the Reverend Henry Sanderson, rector
of St. James.
The groom is the son of one of our leading citizens, and the beauty
and talent of the bride have long made her noted. The happy couple,
accompanied by the groom's father, left on an early train, carrying
with them the congratulations and good wishes of the entire
community.
A full account of the wedding will be given in to-morrow morning's
issue.