Part 15 (1/2)

CHAPTER XIV

When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came toward him. ”Kenwick!” he cried, and held out his hand. ”I thought you never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity.” It was Clinton Morgan.

When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of embarra.s.sed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to start the conversation, ”I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long time,” the host apologized.

”You have,” his caller agreed. ”It's been more than a year, hasn't it?”

He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But Kenwick was looking at him intently.

”You know--about it then?”

”Yes, we know all about it.” Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. ”And, by George, Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's a miracle!”

Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had stopped short at that word ”we.” He reached down and picked a burnt match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal courtesy, ”How is your sister?”

”Getting well, I believe. She has been----Well, this case of yours is a most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with great interest.”

Kenwick looked at him incredulously. ”How could you?”

The caller s.h.i.+fted his position uneasily. ”Well, that's rather a long story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house.

We've just got the old place fixed over, and,”--he glanced at his watch,--”it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on hand that----”

Kenwick cut in almost harshly. ”Are you sure that your sister would care to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be--well, afraid of me?”

Morgan laughed. ”Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get violent and begin throwing things around.”

But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. ”You don't understand. n.o.body can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this experience.” His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. ”I tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period of----Well, I may as well out with the d.a.m.ned word--insanity.”

”Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else.”

”How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of h.e.l.l, wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you think I'm a coward for not going at it more directly.” He looked at his companion with a defiant appeal in his eyes. ”But there were reasons why I didn't want to kick up a lot of notoriety about myself. For any harm that ever came to man or woman through me, I'm eager to pay. No court decision would have to make me do it; no court decision could keep me from doing it. But I wanted to save my name if I could. I wanted to save my name so that some time it might be fit----”

”I know.” Clinton Morgan interrupted hastily. The memory of that traitorous bit of paper which he had discovered in the gold and ivory book came back to him and brought a guilty flush to his cheeks. Whether he would or no, he seemed to hold in his own hands all the threads of this tragic romance. A line of Marcreta's lyric drifted through his brain:

Whence thy _uneasy_ spirit may depart?

How well that word had been chosen to describe and conceal the living death which this man had suffered!

”You see,” Kenwick went on, ”I'm the spiritual counterpart of the Man Without a Country. I don't belong anywhere. And, more than that, I'm a charge on the public conscience. Everybody who knows about my period of--of incompetency belongs to an unofficial vigilance committee, whose duty it is to warn society against me.”

Clinton groped for a reply, but words would not come. And the fact that there was no bitterness in the other man's voice, but only the level monotony which is achieved by long suppression, made it infinitely pathetic.

”If it suited your whim to do so,” Kenwick continued, ”you might reverse the usual order of dining; begin with pie and end with soup. And the public would regard it either as a new cure for dyspepsia or an eccentricity of genius. But if I should try it, somebody would immediately suggest that I shouldn't be allowed at large. It's the irony of fate that I, who have always had a contempt for the trivial conventions of life (such a contempt that my sister-in-law never quite trusted me in polite society), should now be in a cowering bondage to them. I live all my days in a horror of doing something that might appear erratic. And I spend the nights going back over every inch of the road to see if I have. Why don't the adherents of the fire-and-brimstone theory picture h.e.l.l as a place where we can never act on impulse? As a place which dooms us forever to a hideous self-consciousness?”

Clinton Morgan spoke with a sort of angry champions.h.i.+p. ”You've had tough luck, my boy, the toughest kind of luck. But you've come out of it all right. By George, you can show the world now that you've come out on top.”

”I haven't come out; that's just the trouble. I'll never be out of the woods until I've accounted for them. Did you read last night's paper, Morgan?”

”Yes. That's one thing that brought me here. Let me tell you something, Kenwick. Until about a week ago we thought you were dead. And we were relieved, for we felt that it was a happy release for you; your only way out. And then one day, not long ago, we got a clue.” He still clung to the plural p.r.o.noun. ”We fell over a clue, you might say, which aroused our suspicions--and we followed it down.”

”You followed it down!” Kenwick cried. ”You cared enough about it for that?”