Part 12

Jane, she took the box and she went round in front of Henry and she looked at him hard. She looked at him like she was thinking: “Fur God's sake, spunk up some, and take one if it _does_ kill you!” Then she says out loud: “Henry, if you die I will die, too!”

And Henry, he took one. His hand shook, but he took it out'n the box. If she had of looked like that at me mebby I would of took one myself. Fur Jane, she was a peach, she was. But I don't know whether I would of or not. When she makes that brag about dying, I looked at the perfessor. What she said never fazed him. And I thinks agin: “Mebby I better jump in now and stop this thing.” And then I thinks agin: “No, it is between them three and Providence.” Beside, I'm anxious to see who is going to get that pill with the science in it. I gets to feeling just like Providence hisself was in that there room picking out them pills with his own hands. And I was anxious to see what Providence's ideas of right and wrong was like. So fur as I could see they was all three in the wrong, but if I had of been in there running them pills in Providence's place I would of let them all off kind o' easy.

Henry, he ain't eat his pill yet. He is just looking at it and shaking.

The perfessor reaches for his watch, and don't find none. Then he reaches over and takes Henry's watch, and opens it, and lays it on the table. “A quarter past one,” he says. “Mr. Murray, are you going to make me shoot you after all? I didn't want any blood nor any scandal,” he says. “It's up to you,” he says, “whether you want to take that pill and get your even chance, or whether you want to get shot. The shooting way is sure, but looks bad in the papers. The pill way don't implicate any one,” he says. “Which?” And he pulls a gun.

Henry he looks at the gun.

Then he looks at the pill.

Then he swallows the pill.

The perfessor puts his'n into his mouth. But he don't swallow it. He looks at the watch, and he looks at Henry. “Sixteen minutes past one,” he says. “_Mr. Murray will be dead at exactly fourteen minutes to two_. I got the harmless one. I can tell by the taste of the chemicals.”

And he put the pieces out into his hand to show that he chewed his'n up, not being willing to wait fifteen minutes for a verdict from his digestive ornaments. Then he put 'em back into his mouth and chewed 'em and swallowed 'em down like it was coughdrops.

Henry has got sweat breaking out all over his face, and he tries to make fur the door, but he falls down on to a sofa.

“This is murder,” he says, weaklike. And he tries to get up agin, but this time he falls to the floor in a dead faint.

“It's a dern short fifteen minutes,” I thinks to myself. “That perfessor must of put more science into Henry's pill than he thought he did fur it to of knocked him out this quick. It ain't skeercly three minutes.”

When Henry falls the woman staggers and tries to throw herself on top of him. The corners of her mouth was all drawed down, and her eyes was turned up. But she don't yell none. She can't. She tries, but she just gurgles in her throat. The perfessor won't let her fall acrost Henry. He ketches her. “Sit up, Jane,” he says, with that Estelle look on to his face, “and let us have a talk.”

She looks at him with no more sense in her face than a piece of putty has got. But she can't look away from him.

And I'm kind o' paralyzed, too. If that feller laying on the floor had only jest kicked oncet, or grunted, or done something, I could of loosened up and yelled, and I would of. I just _needed_ to fetch a yell. But Henry ain't more'n dropped down there till I'm feeling just like he'd _always_ been there, and I'd _always_ been staring into that room, and the last word anyone spoke was said hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

“You're a murderer,” says Jane in a whisper, looking at the perfessor in that stare-eyed way. “You're a _murderer,_” she says, saying it like she was trying to make herself feel sure he really was one.

“Murder!” says the perfessor. “Did you think I was going to run any chances for a pup like him? He's scared, that's all. He's just fainted through fright. He's a coward. Those pills were both just bread and sugar. He'll be all right in a minute or two. I've just been showing you that the fellow hasn't got nerve enough nor brains enough for a fine woman like you, Jane,” he says.

Then Jane begins to sob and laugh, both to oncet, kind o' wildlike, her voice clucking like a hen does, and she says:

“It's worse then, it's worse! It's worse for me than if it were a murder! Some farces can be more tragic than any tragedy ever was,” she says. Or they was words to that effect.

And if Henry had of been really dead she couldn't of took it no harder than she begun to take it now when she saw he was alive, but just wasn't no good. But I seen she was taking on fur herself now more'n fur Henry. Women is made unlike most other animals in many ways. When they is foolish about a man they can stand to have that man killed a good 'eal better than to have him showed up ridiculous right in front of them. They will still be crazy about the man that's killed, but they don't never forgive the lobster. I seen that work out before this. You can be most any thing else and get away with it, but if you're a lobster it's all off even if you can't help being a lobster. And when the perfessor kicks Henry in the ribs and he comes to and sneaks out, Jane she never even looks at him.

“Jane,” says the perfessor, when she quiets down some, “you got a lot to forgive me. But do you s'pose I learned enough sense so we can make a go of it if we start over again?”

But Jane never said nothing.

“Jane,” he says, “Estelle is going back to New England to stay there for good.”

She begins to take a little interest then. “Did Estelle tell you so?” she says.

“No,” says the perfessor, “Estelle don't know it yet. But she is. I'm going to tell her in the mornin'.”

But she still hates him. She's making herself. She wouldn't of been a female woman if she'd of been coaxed that easy. Pretty soon she says, “I'm going upstairs and go to bed. I'm tired.” And she went out looking like the perfessor was a perfect stranger.

After she left the perfessor set there quite a while and he was looking tired out, too; and there wasn't no mistake about me. I was asleep all through my legs, and I kept a wondering to myself, suppose them pills had one of them been loaded sure enough, which one would of got it? And when the perfessor leaves I says to myself, I reckon I better light a rag. So I goes to the front window and opens it easy; but I thinks about Henry's watch on the table, every one else having forgot it, and I thinks I better hunt him up and give it to him.

And then I thinks why should I give him pain, for that watch will always remind him of an unpleasant time he once had.

And if it hadn't been for me sitting in that window looking at that watch I wouldn't a-been writing this, for I wouldn't of been in jail now.

I tried to explain my intentions was all right, but the police says it ain't natural to be seen coming out of a front window at two in the morning in a striped sweater and a dinky dinner suit with a gold watch in your hand; if you are hunting the owner you are doing it peculiar.

One of them reporters he says to me to write the truth about how I got into jail; nobody else never done it and stuck to facts. But this is the truth so help me; it was all on account of that watch, which my intentions with regard to was perfectly honorable, and all that goes before leads up to that watch. There wasn't no larceny about it; it was just another mistake on the part of the police. If I'd of been stealing wouldn't I stole the silverware a week before that?

The more I travel around the more dumb people I see that can't understand how an honest and upright citizen can get into circumstantial evidence and still be a honest and upright citizen.

X.--The Penitent

|You, who are not married,” said the penitent, “cannot know--can never realize----”

He hesitated, his glance wandering over the evidences of luxury, the hints of Oriental artistry, the esthetic effectiveness of Dr. Eustace Beaulieu's studio.

“Proceed,” said Dr. Beaulieu, suavely. “What I may know is not the important thing. You do not address yourself to me, but through me to that principle of Harmony in the Cosmos which is Spirit--Ultimate Spirit--which we call God. All that I can do is assist you to get into Accord with the Infinite again, help you to vibrate in unison with the Cosmic All.”

“You are right; I do not look to you,” said the penitent, “for ease of mind or spirit.” And a fleeting half-smile showed in his eyes, as if some ulterior thought gave a certain gusto to the manner in which he stressed the pronoun _you_. But the rest of his scarred and twisted face was expressionless, beneath the thick mask of a heavy gray-streaked beard that grew almost to his eyes.

* Author's Note: “The Penitent” was suggested by two poems, “A Forgiveness,” by Browning, and “The Portrait,” by Owen Meredith.

Dr. Eustace Beaulieu was the leader--nay, the founder--of one of the many, many cults that have sprung up in New York City and elsewhere in America during the past three or four decades. An extraordinary number of idle, well-to-do women gathered at his studio two or three times a week, and listened to his expositions of ethics _de luxe_, served with just the proper dash of Oriental mysticism and European pseudoscience. He was forty, he was handsome, with magnetic brown eyes and the long sensitive fingers of a musician; he was eloquent, he was persuasive, he was prosperous.

When he talked of the Zend-Avesta, when he spoke of the Vedantic writings, when he touched upon the Shinto worship of the Nipponese, when he descanted upon the likeness of the Christian teachings to the tenets of Buddhism, when he revealed the secrets of the Yogi philosophy, when he hinted his knowledge of the priestly craft of older Egypt and of later Eleusis, his feminine followers thrilled in their seats as a garden of flowers that is breathed upon by a Summer wind--they vibrated to his words and his manner and his restrained fervor with a faint rustling of silken garments and a delicate fragrance of perfume.

Men were not, as a rule, so enthusiastic concerning Dr. Eustace Beaulieu and his cult; there were few of them at his lectures, there were few of them enrolled in the classes where he inducted his followers into the more subtle phases of ethics, where he led them to the higher planes of occultism, for a monetary consideration; few of them submitted themselves to him for the psychic healing that was one of his major claims to fame. And this scarred and bearded stranger, who limped, was one of the very few men who had ever intimated a desire to bare his soul to Dr. Beaulieu, to tell his story and receive spiritual ministration, in the manner of the confessional. These confessionals, after the public lectures, had been recently introduced by Dr. Beaulieu, and they were giving him, he felt, a firmer grip upon his flock--his disciples, he did not hesitate to call them.

“I repeat,” said the penitent--if he was a repentant man, indeed--“no bachelor can know what love really is. He cannot conceive of what the daily habit of association with a woman who seems made for him, and for him alone, may mean to a man. My love for my wife was almost worship. She was my wife indeed, I told myself, and she it was for whom I worked.

“For I did work, worked well and unselfishly. Every man must have some work. Some do it from necessity, but I did it because I loved the work--and the woman--and thus I gained a double reward. I was a politician, and something more. I think I may say that I was a patriot, too. The inheritor of wealth and position, I undertook to clear the city in which I lived, and which my forefathers had helped to build, of the ring of grafters who were making the name of the town a byword throughout the nation. The details of that long and hard strife are not pertinent. I fought with something more than boldness and determination; I fought with a joy in every struggle, because I fought for something more than the world knew. The world could not see that my inspiration was in my home; that in the hours of battle my blood sang joyously with the thought of--her! Was it any wonder that I worked well?

“One day, as I sat in my office downtown, the thought of her drew me so strongly that I determined to surprise her by coming home unexpectedly early. It was summer, and we were living in our country home, an old-fashioned stone residence a couple of miles from the outskirts of the city. The house was situated at the edge of a park that was, indeed, almost virgin forest, for the whole estate had been in my family for nearly a hundred years.

“I determined to surprise my wife, and at the same time to take the rare relaxation of a suburban walk. I was soon outside the city limits, and through the zone where vacant lots broaden into fields; and then I left the road, cutting across the fields and finally plunging into the woods on my own place. Thus it was that I approached the house from the rear and came suddenly out of the timber into my own orchard. I seldom walked from town, and it was a good long hour before my usual time of arrival, although in that sheltered and woody place the dusk was already gathering in.

“As I entered the orchard a man made a hurried exit from a vine-wreathed pergola where my wife often sat to read, cast one look at me, cleared the orchard fence, and made off through the woods, disappearing at once among the boles of the trees.

“He had not turned his full face toward me at any time, but had shielded it with an upflung arm; from the moment he broke cover until his disappearance there had passed less time than it takes to tell it, and I was scarcely to be blamed if I was left guessing as to his identity, for the moment. For the moment, I say.

“There had been so much fright in his manner that I stood and looked after him. The thought came to me that perhaps here was a man who had had an affair with one of my servants. I turned toward the pergola and met--my wife!

“She was a beautiful woman, always more beautiful in her moments of excitement. She confronted me now with a manner which I could not help but admire. I trusted her so that she might readily have passed off a much more anomalous situation with an easy explanation. But in her face I read a deliberate wish to make me feel the truth.

“I looked at her long, and she returned the gaze unflinchingly. And I recognized her look for what it was. She had cast off the chains of deceit. Her glance was a sword of hatred, and the first open thrust of the blade was an intense pleasure to her. We both knew all without a word.

“I might have killed her then. But I did not. I turned and walked toward the house; she followed me, and I opened the door; she preceded me inside. She paused again, as if gathering all her forces for a struggle; but I passed her in silence, and went upstairs to my own room.

“And then began a strange period in my life. Shortly after this episode came a partial triumph of the reform element in my city; the grafters were ousted, and I found myself with more than a local reputation, and thrust into an office. My life was now even more of a public matter than before. We entertained largely. We were always in the public eye. Before our guests and in public we were always all that should be. But when the occasion was past, we would drop the mask, turn from each other with dumb faces, and go each our severed ways.

“For a year this sort of life kept up. I still worked; but now I worked to forget. When I allowed myself to think of her at all, it was always as of some one who was dead. Or so I told myself, over and over again, until I believed it.

“One day there was a close election. I was the successful candidate. I was to go to Congress. All evening and far into the night my wife and I played our parts well. But when the last congratulation had been received, and the last speech made, and the last friend had gone, and we were alone with each other once more, she turned to me with a look something like the one she had met me with on that summer evening a year before.

“'I want to speak with you,' she said.

“'Yes?'

“They were the first words we had exchanged in that year, when not compelled by the necessities.

“'What do you wish to speak about?' I asked her.

“'You know,' she said, briefly. And I did know. There was little use trying to deny it.

“'Why have you asked me no questions?' she said.

“I would have made another attempt to pass the situation over without going into it, but I saw that that would be impossible. She had reached the place where she must speak. I read all this in her face. And looking at her closely with the first candid glance I had given her in that year, I saw that she had changed greatly, but she was still beautiful.

“'I did not choose to open the subject with you,' I said; 'I thought that you would explain when you could stand it no longer. Evidently that time has come. You were to me like a dead person. If the dead have any messages for me, they must bring them to me unsolicited. It was not my place to hunt among the tombs.'

“'No,' she said, 'let us be honest, since it is the last talk we may ever have together. Let us be frank with each other, and with ourselves. I was not like a dead person to you. The dead are dead, and I am not. You asked me no questions because you disdained me so. You despised me so--and it was sweet to you to make me feel the full weight of your scorn through this silence. It was better than killing me. Is that not the real reason?'

“'Yes,' I admitted, 'that is it. That is the truth.' “'Listen,' she said, 'it would surprise you--would it not--to learn that I still love you--that I have loved you all along--that you are the only man I have ever really loved--that I love you now? All that is incredible to you, is it not?'

“'Yes,' I said, 'it is. You must pardon me, but--it is incredible to me.'

“'Well, it is true,' she said, and paused a moment. 'And I can tell you why it is true, and why--why--the--the other was true, too. You--you do not understand women,' she said. 'Sometimes I think if you were a smaller man, in some ways, you would understand them better. Sometimes I think that you are too--too big, somehow--ever to make a woman happy. Not too self-centered; you are not consciously selfish; you never mean to be. But you give, give, give the riches of your nature to people--to the world at large--instead of to those who should share them.

“'Oh, I know--the fault is all mine! Another kind of woman--the right kind for you--the kind you thought I was--would not have asked for all that was a necessity for me; would have been big enough to have done without it; would have lost herself in your love for all humanity. That is the kind of woman you thought I was. And I tried to be. But I wasn't. I wasn't that big.

“'I did sympathize with your work; I could understand it; I loved to hear you tell about it. But I loved it because it was you that told me about it. You didn't see that! You thought I was a goddess. It was enough for your nature to worship me; to set me upon a pedestal and to call me your inspiration; oh, you treated me well--you were faithful to me--you were generous! But you neglected me in a way that men do not understand; that some men will never understand. While you were giving your days and your nights, and every fiber of your brain and body, to what you called the cause of the people, you more and more forgot you had a wife. Again and again and again I tried to win you back to what you were when I married you--to the time when your cause was not all--but you wouldn't see; I couldn't make you feel.

“'Then I thought I would show you that other men were not such fools as to overlook what was wasted on you. But you never noticed; you trusted me too much; you were too much engrossed. And then I began to hate you. I loved you more than I ever did before, and at the same time I hated you. Can you understand that? Do you see how women can hate and love at the same time? Well, they can.

“'At last--for I was a fool--I took a lover!”

“'What was his name?' I broke in.

“'His name?' she cried; 'that does not matter! What matter if there was one of them, or two of them. That is nothing!--the name is nothing--they were nothing--nothing but tools; the symbols of my rage, of my hatred for you; whether I loved or hated you, you were all--always.'

“'They were merely convenient clubs with which to murder my honor in the dark--is that it?' I said.

“'Yes,' she said, 'that is it, if you choose to put it so.' And she spoke with a humility foreign to her nature.

“'And what now?' I asked.

“'Now,' she said, 'now that I have spoken; now that I have told you everything; now that I have told you that I have gone on loving you more and more and more--now--I am going to die.'

“'You have not asked me to forgive you,' I said.

“'No,' she replied. 'For what is forgiveness? I do not know exactly what that word means. It is supposed to wipe out something that has happened, is it not?--to make things the same as they were before! But it does not do that. That which has happened, has happened; and you and I know it.'

“'You had better live,' I said; 'I no longer consider you worthless. I feel that you are worthy of my anger now.'

“Her face cleared almost into something like joy.

“'I have told the truth, and I raise myself from the depths of your scorn to the place where you can feel a hot rage against me?' she asked.

“'Yes,' I said. And the light on her face was like that of which some women are capable when they are told that they are beloved.

“'And if I die?' she asked.

“'Who knows but that you might climb by it?' I said. 'Who knows but what your death might turn my anger to love again?' And with that I turned and left her there.

“That night I sat all night in my study, and in the morning they brought me the news that she was dead. She must have used some poison. What, I do not know; and the physicians called it heart-failure. But what is the matter, Doctor?”

“Nothing, nothing!” said Dr. Beaulieu. And he motioned for the narrator to proceed. But there were beads of perspiration upon the healer's forehead, and a pallor overspread his face.

“I had condemned her to death,” the penitent went on, “and she had been her own executioner. She had loved me; she had sinned against me; but she had always loved me; she had hated the flesh that sinned, and scorned it as much as I; her life was intolerable and she had been her own executioner.

“The revulsion of feeling came. I loved her again; now that I had lost her. All that day I shut myself up, seeing no one; refusing to look at the dozens of telegrams that came pouring in from friends and acquaintances, thinking--thinking--thinking----

“Night came again; and with it the word that the best friend I had was in the house; a friend of my college days, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me in many a fight, then and since. He had come to be under the same roof with me in the hour of my bitterest bereavement, was the word he sent--how bitter now, he did not know. But he did not intrude upon the privacy of my grief. And I sat thinking--thinking--thinking--

“Suddenly the idea came to me that I would go upstairs to the chamber where she was, and look at her once more. Quietly I stole up the stairs, and through the hushed, dim house, on into the gloomy room, lighted only by the candles at the head and foot of the curtained couch on which she lay.

“In the room beyond, the watchers sat. I stole softly across the floor so as not to attract their attention; there was no one in the room with the body. I approached the couch, and with my hand put by the curtain----