Part 51 (1/2)
”In two hours I'll be en route for the coast, and to-morrow I'll take pa.s.sage for home on the first boat.” Robert closed and sealed the long letter he had been writing and tossed it on the table. ”I want this mailed one week from to-day. Put it in your pocket so you won't lose it among the rubbish here. One week from to-day it must be mailed.
It's to my great aunt, Jean Craigmile, who gave me the money to set up here the first year. I've paid that up--last week--with my last sou--and with interest. By rights she should have whatever there is here of any value, for, if it were not for her help, there would not have been a thing here anyway, and I've no one else to whom to leave it--so see that this letter is mailed without fail, will you?”
The Englishman stood, now thoroughly awake, gazing at him, unable to make common sense out of Robert's remarks. ”B--b--but--what's up? What are you leaving things to anybody for? You're not on your deathbed.”
”I'm going home, don't you see?”
”But why don't you take the letter to her yourself--if you're going home?”
”Not there, man; not to Scotland.”
”Your home's there.”
”I have allowed you to think so.” Robert forced himself to talk calmly. ”In truth, I have no home, but the place I call home by courtesy is where I was brought up--in America.”
”You--you--d--d--don't--”
”Yes--it's time you knew this. I've been leading a double life, and I'm done with it. I committed a crime, and I'm living under an a.s.sumed name. There is no such man as Robert Kater that I know of on earth, nor ever was. My name is--no matter--. I'm going back to the place where I killed my best friend--to give myself up--to imprisonment--I do not know to what--maybe death--but it will end my torture of mind. Now you know why I could not go to the Vernissage, to be treated--well, I could not go, that's all. Nor could I accept the honors given me under a name not my own. All the time I've lived in Paris I've been hiding--and this thing has been following me--although my occupation seems to have been the best cover I could have had--yet my soul has known no peace. Always--always--night and day--my own conscience has been watching and accusing me, an eye of dread steadily gazing down into my soul and seeing my sin deep, deep in my heart. I could not hide from it. And I would have given up before only that I wished to make good in something before I stepped down and out. I've done it.” He put his hand heavily on Ben Howard's shoulder. ”I've had a revelation this night. The lesson of my life is learned at last. It is, that there is but one road to freedom and life for me--and that road leads to a prison. It leads to a prison,--maybe worse,--but it leads me to freedom--from the thing that haunts me, that watches me and drives me. I may write you from that place which I will call home--Were you ever in love?”
The abruptness of the question set Ben Howard stammering again. He seized Robert's hand in both his own and held to it. ”I--I--I--old chap--I--n--n--no--were you?”
”Yes; I've heard the call of her voice in my heart--and I'm gone. Now, Ben, stop your--well, I'll not preach to you, you of all men,--but--do something worth while. I've need of part of the money you got for me--to get back on--and pay a bill or two--and the rest I leave to you--there where you put it you'll find it. Will you live here and take care of these things for me until my good aunt, Jean Craigmile, writes you? She'll tell you what to do with them--and more than likely she'll take you under her wing--anyway, work, man, work. The place is yours for the present--perhaps for a good while, and you'll have a chance to make good. If I could live on that money for a year, as you yourself said, you can live on half of it for half a year, and in that time you can get ahead. Work.”
He seized his portmanteau and was gone before Ben Howard could gather his scattered senses or make reply.
CHAPTER x.x.xII
THE PRISONER
Harry King did not at once consult an attorney, for Milton Hibbard, the only one he knew or cared to call upon for his defense, was an old friend of the Elder's and had been retained by him to a.s.sist the district attorney at the trial. The other two lawyers in Leauvite, one of whom was the district attorney himself, were strangers to him.
Twice he sent messages to the Elder after his return, begging him to come to him, never dreaming that they could be unheeded, but to the second only was any reply sent, and then it was but a cursory line.
”Legal steps will be taken to secure justice for you, whoever you are.”
To his friends he sent no messages. Their sympathy could only mean sorrow for them if they believed in him, and hurt to his own soul if they distrusted him, and he suffered enough. So he lay there in the clean, bare cell, and was glad that it was clean and held no traces of former occupants. The walls smelled of lime in their freshly plastered surfaces, and the floor had the pleasant odor of new pine.
His life pa.s.sed in review before him from boyhood up. It had been a happy life until the tragedy brought into it by his own anger and violence, but since that time it had been one long nightmare of remorse, heightened by fear, until he had met Amalia, and after that it had been one unremitting strife between love and duty--delight in her mind, in her touch, in her every movement, and in his own soul despair unfathomable. Now at last it was to end in public exposure, imprisonment, disgrace. A peculiar apathy of peace seemed to envelop him. There was no longer hope to entice, no further struggle to be waged against the terror of fear, or the joy of love, or the horror of remorse; all seemed gone from him, even to the vague interest in things transpiring in the world.
He had only a puzzled feeling concerning his arrest. Things had not proceeded as he had planned. If the Elder would but come to him, all would be right. He tried to a.n.a.lyze his feelings, and the thought that possessed him most was wonder at the strange vacuity of the condition of emotionlessness. Was it that he had so suffered that he was no longer capable of feeling? What was feeling? What was emotion: and life without either emotion, or feeling, or caring to feel,--what would it be?
Valueless.--Empty s.p.a.ce. Nothing left but bodily hunger, bodily thirst, bodily weariness. A lifetime, for his years were not yet half spent,--a lifetime at Waupun, and work for the body, but vacuity for the mind--maybe--sometimes--memories. Even thinking thus he seemed to have lost the power to feel sadness.
Confusion reigned within him, and yet he found himself powerless to correlate his thoughts or suggest reasons for the strange happenings of the last few days. It seemed to him that he was in a dream wherein reason played no part. In the indictment he was arraigned for the murder of Peter Craigmile, Jr.,--as Richard Kildene,--and yet he had seen his cousin lying dead before him, during all the years that had pa.s.sed since he had fled from that sight. In battle he had seen men clubbed with the b.u.t.t end of a musket fall dead with wounded temples, even as he had seen his cousin--stark--inert--lifeless. He had felt the strange, insane rage to kill that he had seen in others and marveled at. And now, after he had felt and done it, he was arrested as the man he had slain.
All the morning he paced his cell and tried to force his thoughts to work out the solution, but none presented itself. Was he the victim of some strange form of insanity that caused him to lose his ident.i.ty and believe himself another man? Drunken men he had seen under the delusion that all the rest of the world were drunken and they alone sober. Oh, madness, madness! At least he was sane and knew himself, and this was a confusion brought about by those who had undertaken his arrest. He would wait for the Elder to come, and in the meantime live in his memories, thinking of Amalia, and so awaken in himself one living emotion, sacred and truly sane. In the sweetness of such thinking alone he seemed to live.
He drew the little ivory crucifix from his bosom and looked at it.
”The Christ who bore our sins and griefs”--and again Amalia's words came to him. ”If they keep you forever in the prison, still forever are you free.” In s.n.a.t.c.hes her words repeated themselves over in his mind as he gazed. ”If you have the Christ in your heart--so are you high--lifted above the sin.” ”If I see you no more here, in Paradise yet will I see you, and there it will be joy--great--joy; for it is the love that is all of life, and all of eternity, and lives--lives.”
Bertrand Ballard and his wife and daughter stood in the small room opening off from the corridor that led to the rear of the courthouse where was the jail, waiting for the jailer to bring his keys from his office, and, waiting thus, Betty turned her eyes beseechingly on her father, and for the first time since her talk with her mother in the studio, opened her lips to speak to him. She was very pale, but she did not tremble, and her voice had the quality of determination.
Bertrand had yielded the point and had taken her to the jail against his own judgment, taking Mary with him to forestall the chance of Betty's seeing the young man alone. ”Surely,” he thought, ”she will not ask to have her mother excluded from the interview.”