THE RECKONING
As Harry stood again in the obscure half-darkness of his cell, it came
to him that the present had a far-reaching significance--that it was but
the handiwork and resultant of forces in his own past. He himself had
brewed the bitter wormwood he must drink. Jessica's quivering
arraignment on that lurid wedding-day in the white house in the
aspens--it had been engraven ever since on his buried memory!--rang in
his mind:
_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. You helped to make him what he has become!_
They had made variant choice, and that choice had left Harry Sanderson
in training for the gaiters of a bishop, and Hugh Stires treading the
paths of dalliance and the gambler. But he himself had set Hugh's feet
on the red path that had pointed him to the shameful terminus. He had
gambled for Hugh's future, forgetting that his past remained, a thing
that must be covered. He had won Hugh's counters, but his own right to
be himself he had staked and lost long before that game on the communion
table under the painted crucifixion.
The words he had once said to Hugh recurred to him with a kind of awe:
"Put myself in your place? I wish to God I could!"
Fate--or was it God?--had taken him at his word. He had been hurled like
a stone from a catapult into Hugh's place, to bear his knavery, to
suffer his dishonor, and to redeem the baleful reputation he had made.
He had been his brother's keeper and had failed in the trust; now the
circle of retribution, noiseless and inexorable as the wheeling of that
vast scorpion cluster in the sky, evened the score and brought him again
to the test! And, in the supreme strait, was he, a poor poltroon, to
step aside, to cry "enough," to yield ignobly? Even if to put aside the
temptation might bring him face to face with the final shameful penalty?
This, then, was the meaning of the strange sequence of events through
which he had been passing since the hour when he had awakened in the
box-car! Living, he was not to betray Hugh; the Great Purpose behind all
meant that he should go forward on the path he had chosen to the end!
A step outside the cell, the turning of the key. The door opened, and
Jessica, pale and trembling, stood on the threshold.
"I can not help it," she said, as she came toward him, "though you told
me not to come. I have trusted all the while, and waited, and--and
prayed. But to-day I was afraid."
She paused, locking her hands before her, looking at him in an agony of
entreaty. When she had fled from the court-room to the open air, she had
walked straight away toward the mountain, struggling in the cool wind
and motion against the feeling of physical sickness and anguish. But she
had only partly regained her self-possession. Returning, the thinning
groups about the dim-lit door had made it clear that the session was
over. In her painful confusion of mind she had acted on a peremptory
impulse that drove her to the jail, where her face had quickly gained
her entrance.
"Surely, surely," she went on, "the man you are protecting has had time
enough! Hasn't he? Won't you tell them the truth now?"
He knew not how to meet the piteous reproach and terror of that look.
She had not heard the street preacher's declaration, he knew, but even
if she had, it would have been to her only an echo of the old mooted
likeness. He had given her comfort once--but this was no more to be. No
matter what it meant to him, or to her!
"Jessica," he said steadily, "when you came to me here that first day,
and I told you not to fear for me, I did not mean to deceive you. I
thought then that it would all come right. But something has happened
since then--something that makes a difference. I can not tell who was
the murderer of Moreau. I can not tell you or any one else, either now
or at any time."
She gazed at him startled. She had a sudden conception of some element
hitherto unguessed in his make-up, something inveterate and adamant.
Could it be that he did not intend to tell at all? The very idea was
monstrous! Yet that clearly was his meaning. She looked at him with
flashing eyes.
"You mean you will not?" she exclaimed bitterly. "You are bent on
sacrificing yourself, then! You are going to take this risk because you
think it brave and noble, because somehow it fits your man's gospel!
Can't you see how wicked and selfish it is? You are thinking only of
him, and of yourself, not of me!"
"Jessica, Jessica!" he protested with a groan. But in the self-torture
of her questionings she paid no heed.
"Don't you think I suffer? Haven't I borne enough in the months since I
married you, for you to want to save me this? Do you owe me nothing, me
whom you so wronged, whose--"
She stopped suddenly at the look on his face of mortal pain, for she had
struck harder than she knew. It pierced through the fierce resentment to
her deepest heart, and all her love and pity gushed back upon her in a
torrent. She threw herself on her knees by the bare cot, crying
passionately:
"Oh, forgive me! Forget what I said! I did not mean it. I have forgiven
you a thousand times over. I never ceased to love you. I love you now,
more than all the world."
"It is true," he said, hoarse misery in his tone. "I have wronged you.
If I could coin my blood drop by drop, to pay for the past, I could not
set that right. If giving my life over and over again would save you
pain, I would give it gladly. But what you ask now is the one thing I
can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward. I did not kill Moreau.
That is all I can say to you or to those who try me."
"Your life!" she said with dry lips. "It will mean that. That counts so
fearfully much to me--more than my own life a hundred times. Yet there
is something that counts more than all that to you!"
His face was that of a man who holds his hand in the fire. "Jessica,"
he said, "it is like this with me. When you found me here--the day I saw
you on the balcony--I was a man whose soul had lost its compass and its
bearings. My conscience was asleep. You woke it, and it is fiercely
alive now. And now with my memory has come back a debt of my past that I
never paid. Whatever the outcome, for my soul's sake I must settle it
now and wipe it from the score for ever. Nothing counts--nothing can
count--more than you! But I must sail by the needle; I must be truthful
to the best that is in me."
She rose slowly to her feet with a despairing gesture.
"'_He saved others_,'" she quoted in a hard voice, "'_himself he could
not save!_' I once heard a minister preach from that text at home; it
was your friend, the Reverend Henry Sanderson. I thought it a very
spiritual sermon then--that was before I knew what his companionship had
been to you!"
In the exclamation was the old bitterness that had had its spring in
that far-away evening at the white house in the aspens, when Harry
Sanderson had lifted the curtain from his college career. In spite of
David Stires' predilection, since that day she had distrusted and
disliked, at moments actively hated him. His mannerisms had seemed a
pose and his pretensions hypocrisy. On her wedding-day, when she lashed
him with the blame of Hugh's ruin, this had become an ingrained
prejudice, impregnable because rooted deeper than reason, in the
heritage of her sex, the eternal proclivity, which saw Harry Sanderson,
his motley covered with the sober domino of the Church, standing
self-righteously in surplice and stole, while Hugh slid downward to
disgrace.
"If there were any justice in the universe," she added, "it should be he
immolating himself now, not you!"
His face was not toward her and she could not see it go deadly white.
The sudden shift she had given the conversation had startled him. He
turned to the tiny barred window that looked out across the court-yard
square--where such a little time since he had found his lost self.
"I think," he said, "that in my place, he would do the same."
"You always admired him," she went on, the hard ring of misery in her
tone. "You admire him yet. Oh, men like him have such strange and wicked
power! Satan Sanderson!--it was a fit name. What right has he to be
rector of St. James, while you--"
He put out a hand in flinching protest. "Jessica! Don't!" he begged.
"Why should I not say it?" she retorted, with quivering lips. "But for
him you would never be here! He ruined your life and mine, and I hate
and despise him for a selfish hypocrite!"
That was what he himself had seemed to her in those old days! The edge
of a flush touched his forehead as he said slowly, almost appealingly:
"He was not a hypocrite, Jessica. Whatever he was it was not that. At
college he did what he did too openly. That was his failing--not caring
what others thought. He despised weakness in others; he thought it none
of his affair. So others were influenced. But after he came to see
things differently, from another standpoint--when he went into the
ministry--he would have given the world to undo it."
"That may have been the Harry Sanderson you knew," she said stonily.
"The one I knew drove an imported motor-car and had a dozen fads that
people were always imitating. You are still loyal to the old college
worship. As men go, you count him still your friend!"
"As men go," he echoed grimly, "the very closest!"
"Men's likings are strange," she said. "Because he never had temptations
like yours, and has never done what the law calls wrong, you think he is
as noble as you--noble enough to shield a murderer to his own danger."
"Ah, no, Jessica," he interposed gently. "I only said that in my place,
he would do the same."
"But _you_ are shielding a murderer," she insisted fiercely. "You will
not admit it, but I know! There can be no justice or right in that! If
Harry Sanderson is all you think him--if he stood here now and knew the
whole--he would say it was wicked. Not brave and noble but wicked and
cruel!"
He shook his head, and the sad shadow of a bitter smile touched his
lips. "He would not say so," he said.
A dry sob answered him. He turned and leaned his elbows on the narrow
window-sill, every nerve aching, but powerless to comfort. He heard her
step--the door closed sharply.
Then he faced into the empty cell, sat down on the cot and threw out his
arms with a hopeless cry:
"Jessica, Jessica!"