Part 7 (1/2)
”What?” His tone was incredulous.
”Oh; don't take me so seriously,” said the girl, impatiently. ”It's only that I can't sympathize with your multimillionaire, who loses a little of his heaps of money, against some poor soul to whom that little may mean life or death--life or death, maybe, for his nearest and dearest.
Mr. Litterny has had a small loss, which he won't feel in a year from now. The thief, the rascal, the scoundrel, as you call him so fluently, has escaped for now, perhaps, with his ill-gotten gains, but he is a hunted thing, living with a black terror of being found out--a terror which clutches him when he prays and when he dances. It's the thief I'm sorry for--I'm sorry for him--I'm sorry for him.” Her voice was agitated and uneven beyond what seemed reasonable.
”'The way of the transgressor is hard,'” Norman North said, slowly, and looked across the s.h.i.+fting sand-stretch to the inevitable sea, and spoke the words pitilessly, as if an inevitable law spoke through him.
They cut into the girl's soul. A quick gasp of pain broke from her, and the man turned and saw her face and sprang to his feet.
”Come,” he said,--”come home,” and held out his hands.
She let him take hers, and he lifted her lightly, and did not let her hands go. For a second they stood, and into the silence a deep boom of the water against the beach thundered and died away. He drew the hands slowly toward him till he held them against him. There seemed not to be any need for words.
Half an hour later, as they walked back through the sweet loneliness of Springfield Avenue, North said: ”You've forgotten something. You've forgotten that this is the day you were to tell me why you had the bad manners to laugh at me before you knew me. Now that we are engaged it's your duty to tell me if I'm ridiculous.”
There was none of the responsive, soft laughter he expected. ”We're not engaged--we can't be engaged,” she threw back, impetuously, and as he looked at her there was suffering in her face.
”What do you mean? You told me you loved me.” His voice was full of its curious mixture of gentleness and sternness, and she shrank visibly from the sternness.
”Don't be hard on me,” she begged, like a frightened child, and he caught her hand with a quick exclamation. ”I'll tell you--everything.
Not only that little thing about my laughing, but--but more--everything.
Why I cannot be engaged to you. I must tell you--I know it--but, oh! not to-day--not for a little while! Let me have this little time to be happy. You sail a week from to-day. I'll write it all for you, and you can read it on the way to New York. That will do--won't that do?” she pleaded.
North took both her hands in a hard grasp and searched her face and her eyes--eyes clear and sweet, though filled with misery. ”Yes, that will do,” he said. ”It's all nonsense that you can't be engaged to me. You are engaged to me, and you are going to marry me. If you love me--and you say you do,--there's nothing I'll let interfere. Nothing--absolutely nothing.” There was little of the saint in his look now; it was filled with human love and masterful determination, and in his eyes smouldered a recklessness, a will to have his way, that was no angel, but all man.
A week later Norman North sailed to New York, and in his pocket was a letter which was not to be read till Bermuda was out of sight. When the coral reef was pa.s.sed, when the fairy blue of the island waters had changed to the dark swell of the Atlantic, he slipped the bolt in the door of his cabin and took out the letter.
”I laughed because you were so wonderfully two men in one,” it began, ”I was in the church at St. George's the day when you sent the verger away and went into the pulpit and said parts of the service. I could not tell you this before because it came so close to the other thing which I must tell you now; because I sat trembling before you that day, hidden in the shadow of a gallery, knowing myself a criminal, while you stood above me like a pitiless judge and rolled out sentences that were bolts of fire emptied on my soul. The next morning I heard you reciting Limericks. Are you surprised that I laughed when the contrast struck me? Even then I wondered which was the real of you, the saint or the man,--which would win if it came to a desperate fight. The fight is coming, Norman.
”That's all a preamble. Here is what you must know: I am the thief who stole Mr. Litterny's diamonds.”
The letter fell, and the man caught at it as it fell. His hand shook, but he laughed aloud.
”It is a joke,” he said, in a queer, dry voice. ”A wretched joke. How can she?” And he read on:
”You won't believe this at first; you will think I am making a poor joke; but you will have to believe it in the end. I will try to put the case before you as an outside person would put it, without softening or condoning. My mother was very ill; the specialist, to pay whom we had sold her last jewel, said that she would die if she were not taken south; we had no money to take her south. That night my brother lost his self-control and raved about breaking into a shop and stealing diamonds, to get money to save her life. That put the thought into my mind, and I made a plan. Randolph, my brother, is a clever amateur actor, and the rich Burr Claflin is our distant cousin. We both know him fairly well, and it was easy enough for Randolph to copy his mannerisms.
We knew also, of course, more or less, his way of living, and that it would not be out of drawing that he should send up diamonds to his wife unexpectedly. I planned it all, and I made Randolph do it. I have always been able to influence him to what I pleased. The sin is all mine, not his. We had been selling my mother's jewels little by little for several years, so we had no difficulty in getting rid of the stones, which Randolph took from their settings and sold to different dealers. My mother knows nothing of where the money came from. We are living in Bermuda now, in comfort and luxury, I as well as she, on the profits of my thievery. I am not sorry. It has wrecked life, perhaps eternity, for me, but I would do it again to save my mother.
”I put this confession into your hands to do with, as far as I am concerned, what you like. If the saint in you believes that I ought to be sent to jail, take this to Mr. Litterny and have him send me to jail. But you shan't touch Randolph--you are not free there. It was I who did it--he was my tool,--any one will tell you I have the stronger will. You shall not hurt Randolph--that is barred.
”You see now why I couldn't be engaged to you--you wouldn't want to marry a thief, would you, Norman? I can never make rest.i.tution, you know, for the money will be mostly gone before we get home, and there is no more to come. You could not, either, for you said that you had little beyond your salary. We could never make it good to Mr. Litterny, even if you wanted to marry me after this. Mr. Litterny is your best friend; you are bound to him by a thousand ties of grat.i.tude and affection. You can't marry a thief who has robbed him of five thousand dollars, and never tell him, and go on taking his gifts. That is the way the saint will look at it--the saint who thundered awful warnings at me in the little church at St. George's. But even that day there was something gentler than the dreadful holiness of you. Do you remember how you pleaded, begged as if of your father, for your brothers and sisters?
'Deal not with us according to our sins, neither reward us according to our iniquities,' you said. Do you remember? As you said that to G.o.d, I say it to you, I love you. I leave my fate at your mercy. But don't forget that you yourself begged that, with your hands stretched out to heaven, as I stretch my hands to you, Norman, Norman--'Deal not with me according to my sins, neither reward me according to my iniquities.'”
The noises of a s.h.i.+p moving across a quiet ocean went on steadily. Many feet tramped back and forth on the deck, and cheerful voices and laughter floated through the skylight, and down below a man knelt in a narrow cabin with his head buried in his arms, motionless.
CROWNED WITH GLORY AND HONOR
Mists blew about the mountains across the river, and over West Point hung a raw fog. Some of the officers who stood with bared heads by the heap of earth and the hole in the ground s.h.i.+vered a little. The young Chaplain read, solemnly, the solemn and grand words of the service, and the evenness of his voice was unnatural enough to show deep feeling. He remembered how, a year before, he had seen the hero of this scene playing football on just such a day, tumbling about and shouting, his hair wild and matted and his face filled with fresh color. Such a mere boy he was, concerned over the question as to where he could hide his contraband dress boots, excited by an invitation to dine out Sat.u.r.day night. The dear young chap! There were tears in the Chaplain's eyes as he thought of little courtesies to himself, of little generosities to other cadets, of a manly and honest heart shown everywhere that character may show in the guarded life of the nation's schoolboys.