Part 51 (1/2)

”I am intruding?” he suggested gravely, with a slight turn as if offering to withdraw.

”No.”

The word faltering on the lips of Mary Whitaker was lost in an emphatic iteration by Whitaker.

”Sit down!” he insisted. ”As if we'd let you escape, now, after you'd kept us here in suspense!”

He offered a chair, but Ember first advanced to take the hand held out to him by the woman on the chaise-longue.

”You are feeling--more composed?” he inquired.

Her gaze met his bravely. ”I am--troubled, perhaps--but happy,” she said.

”Then I am very glad,” he said, smiling at the delicate colour that enhanced her exquisite beauty as she made the confession. ”I had hoped as much.” He looked from the one to the other. ”You ... have made up your minds?”

The wife answered for both: ”It is settled, dear friend: I can struggle no longer. I thought myself a strong woman; I have tried to believe myself a genius bound upon the wheel of an ill-starred destiny; but I find I am”--the glorious voice trembled slightly--”only a woman in love and no stronger than her love.”

”I am very glad,” Ember repeated, ”for both your sakes. It's a happy consummation of my dearest wishes.”

”We owe you everything,” Whitaker said with feeling, dropping an awkward hand on the other's shoulder. ”It was you who threw us together, down there on the Great West Bay, so that we learned to know one another....”

”I plead guilty to that little plot--yes,” Ember laughed. ”But, best of all, this comes at just the right time--the rightest time, when there can no longer be any doubts or questions or misunderstandings, no ground for further fears and apprehensions, when 'the destroying angel' of your 'ill-starred destiny,' my dear”--he turned to the woman--”is exorcised--banished--proscribed--”

”Max--!” Whitaker struck in explosively.

”--is on his way to the police-station, well guarded,” Ember affirmed with a nod and a grim smile. ”I have his confession, roughly jotted down but signed, and attested by several witnesses.... I'm glad you were out of the way; it was rather a painful scene, and disorderly; it wouldn't have been pleasant for Mrs. Whitaker.... We had the deuce of a time clearing the theatre: human curiosity is a tremendously persistent and resistant force. And then I had some trouble dealing with the misplaced loyalty of the staff of the house.... However, eventually I got Max to myself--alone, that is, with several men I could depend on. And then I heartlessly put him through the third degree--forestalling my friends, the police. By dint of a.s.serting as truths and personal discoveries what I merely suspected, I broke down his denials. He owned up, doggedly enough, and yet with that singular pride which I have learned to a.s.sociate with some phases of homicidal mania.... I won't distress you with details: the truth is that Max was quite mad on the subject of his luck; he considered it, as I suspected, indissolubly a.s.sociated with Sara Law. When poor Custer committed suicide, he saved Max from ruin and innocently showed him the way to save himself thereafter, when he felt in peril, by a.s.sa.s.sinating Hamilton and, later, Thurston. Drummond only cheated a like fate, and you”--turning to Whitaker--”escaped by the narrowest shave. Max hadn't meant to run the risk of putting you out of the way unless he thought it absolutely necessary, but the failure of his silly play in rehearsal to-night, coupled with the discovery that you were in the theatre, drove him temporarily insane with hate, chagrin and jealousy.”

Concluding, Ember rose. ”I must follow him now to the police-station....

I shall see you both soon again--?”

The woman gave him both her hands. ”There's no way to thank you,” she said--”our dear, dear friend!”