THE IMPOSTOR
In the long hospital the air was cool and filtered, drab figures passed
with soft footfalls and voices were measured and hushed. But no sense of
coolness or repose had come to the man whose racked body had been
tenderly borne there in the snowy dawn which saw the blackened ruins of
Aniston's most perfect edifice.
Because of him tongues clacked on the street corner and bulletins were
posted in newspaper windows; carriages of tasteful equipment halted at
the hospital porte-cochere, messages flew back and forth, and the
telephone in the outer office whirred busily at unseasonable hours; but
from the clean screened room where he lay, all this was shut out. Only
the surgeons came and went, deftly refreshing the bandages which swathed
one side of his face, where the disfiguring flame had smitten--the other
side was untouched, save for a line across the brow, seemingly a thin,
red mark of excoriation.
Hugh had sunk into unconsciousness with the awestruck exclamation
ringing in his ears: "Good God! It's Harry Sanderson!" He had drifted
back to conscious knowledge with the same words racing in his brain.
They implied that, so far as capture went, the old, curious resemblance
would stand his friend till he betrayed himself, or till the existence
of the real Harry Sanderson at Smoky Mountain did so for him. The
delusion must hold till he could have himself moved to some place where
his secret would be safer--till he could get away!
This thought grew swiftly paramount; it overlapped the rigid agony of
his burns that made the bed on which he lay a fiery furnace; it gave
method to his every word and look. He took up the difficult part, and
after the superficial anguish dulled, complained no more and
successfully counterfeited cheerfulness and betterment. He said nothing
of the curiously recurrent and sickening stab of pain, searching and
deep-seated, that took his breath and left each time an increasing
giddiness. Whatever inner hurt this might betoken, he must hide it, the
sooner to leave the hospital, where each hour brought nearer the
inevitable disclosure.
He thanked fortune now for the chapel game; few enough in Aniston would
care to see the unfrocked, disgraced rector of St. James! He did not
know that the secret was Bishop Ludlow's own, until the hour when he
opened his eyes, after a fitful sleep, upon the latter's face.
The bishop was the first visitor and it was his first visit, for he had
been in a distant city at the time of the fire. Waiting the waking, he
had been mystified at the change a few months had wrought in the
countenance of the man whose disappearance had cost him so many
sleepless hours. The months of indulgence and rich living--on the money
he had won from Harry--had taken away Hugh's slightness, and his fuller
cheeks were now of the contour of Harry's own. But the bishop
distinguished new lines in the face on the pillow, an expression
unfamiliar and puzzling; the firmness and strength were gone, and in
their place was a haunting something that gave him a flitting suggestion
of the discarded that he could not shake off.
Waking, the unexpected sight of the bishop startled Hugh; to the good
man's pain he had turned his face away.
"My dear boy," the bishop had said, "they tell me you are stronger and
better. I thank God for it!"
He spoke gently and with deep feeling. How could he tell to what extent
he himself, in mistaken severity, had been responsible for that
unaccustomed look? When Hugh did not answer, the bishop misconstrued the
silence. He leaned over the bed; the big cool hand touched the fevered
one on the white coverlid, where the ruby ring glowed, a coal in snow.
"Harry," he said, "you have suffered--you are suffering now. But think
of me only as your friend. I ask no questions. We are going to begin
again where we left off."
The words and tone had shown Hugh the situation and given him his cue.
He could put himself fairly in Harry's place, and with the instinct of
the actor he did so now, meeting the other's friendliness with a
hesitant eagerness.
"I would like to do that," he said, "--to begin again. But the chapel is
gone."
"Never mind that," said the bishop cheerfully. "You are only to get
well. We are going to rebuild soon, and we want your judgment on the
plans. Aniston is hanging on your condition, Harry," he went on.
"There's a small cartload of visiting-cards down-stairs for you. But I
imagine you haven't begun to receive yet, eh?"
"I--I've seen nobody." Hugh spoke hurriedly and hoarsely. "Tell the
doctor to let no one come--no one but you. I--I'm not up to it!"
"Why, of course not," said the bishop quickly. "You need quiet, and the
people can wait."
The bishop chatted a while of the parish, Hugh replying only when he
must, and went away heartened. Before he left Hugh saw his way to hasten
his own going. On the next visit the seed was dropped in the bishop's
mind so cleverly that he thought the idea his own. That day he said to
the surgeon in charge:
"He is gaining so rapidly, I have been wondering if he couldn't be taken
away where the climate will benefit him. Will he be able to travel
soon?"
"I think so," answered the surgeon. "We suspected internal injury at
first, but I imagine the worst he has to fear is the disfigurement.
Mountain or sea air would do him good," he added reflectively; "what he
will need is tonic and building up."
The bishop had revolved this in his mind. He knew a place on the coast,
tucked away in the cypresses, which would be admirable for
convalescence. He could arrange a special car and he himself could make
the journey with him. He proposed this to the surgeon and with his
approval put his plan in motion. In two days more Hugh found his going
fully settled.
The idea admirably fitted his necessity. The spot the bishop had
selected was quiet and retired, and more, was near the port at which he
could most readily take ship for South America. Only one reflection made
him shiver: the route lay through the town of Smoky Mountain. Yet who
would dream of looking for a fugitive from the law in the secluded car
that carried a sick man? The risk would be small enough, and it was the
one way open!
On the last afternoon before the departure, Hugh asked for the clothes
he had worn when he was brought to the hospital, found the gold-pieces
he had snatched in the burning chapel and tied them in a handkerchief
about his neck. They would suffice to buy his sea-passage. The one red
counter he had kept--it was from henceforth to be a reminder of the good
resolutions he had made so long ago--he slipped into a pocket of the
clothes he was to wear away, a suit of loose, comfortable tweed.
Waiting restlessly for the hour of his going, Hugh asked for the
newspapers. Since the first he had had them read to him each day,
listening fearfully for the hue and cry. But to-day the surgeon put his
request aside.
"After you are there," he said, "if Bishop Ludlow will let you. Not now.
You are almost out of my clutches, and I must tyrannize while I can."
A quick look passed from him to his assistant as he spoke, for the
newspapers that afternoon had worn startling head-lines. The sordid
affairs of a mining town across the ranges had little interest for
Aniston, but the names of Stires and Moreau on the clicking wire had
waked it, thus late, to the sensation. The professional caution of the
tinker of human bodies wished, however, that no excitement should be
added to the unavoidable fatigue of his patient's departure.
This fatigue was near to spelling defeat, after all, for the exertion
brought again the dreadful, stabbing pain, and this time it carried Hugh
into a region where feeling ceased, consciousness passed, and from which
he struggled back finally to find the surgeon bending anxiously over
him.
"I don't like that sinking spell," the latter confided to his assistant
an hour later as they stood looking through the window after the
receding carriage. "It was too pronounced. Yet he has complained of no
pain. He will be in good hands at any rate." He tapped the glass
musingly with his forefinger. "It's curious," he said after a pause; "I
always liked Sanderson--in the pulpit. Somehow he doesn't appeal to me
at close range."
The special car which the bishop had ready had been made a pleasant
interior; fern-boxes were in the corners, a caged canary swung from a
bracket, and a softly cushioned couch had been prepared for the sick
man. A moment before the start, as it was being coupled to the rear of
the resting train, while the bishop chatted with the conductor, a
flustered messenger boy handed him a telegram. It read:
I arrive Aniston to-morrow five. Confidential. Must see
you. Urgent. JESSICA.
The bishop read it in some perplexity. It was the first word he had
received from her since her marriage, but, aware of Hugh's forgery and
disgrace, he had not wondered at this. Since the news of David Stires'
death, he had looked for her return, for she was the old man's heir and
mistress now of the white house in the aspens. But he realized that it
would need all her courage to come back to this town whence she had fled
with her trouble--to lay bare an unsuspected and shameful secret, to
meet old friends, and answer questions that must be asked. The
newspapers to-day pictured a still worse shame for her, in the position
of the man who, in name still, was her husband--who had trod so swiftly
the downward path from thievery to the worst of crimes. Could Jessica's
coming have to do with that? He must see her, yet his departure could
not now be delayed. He consulted with the conductor and the latter pored
over his tablets.
As a result, his answering message flashed along the wires to Jessica's
far-away train:
Sanderson injured. Taking him to coast train forty-eight due Twin
Peaks two to-morrow afternoon.
And thus the fateful moment approached when the great appeal should be
made.