Part 13

“Then I dropped it suddenly. I remembered a locket which she had formerly worn that had always had my picture in it, in the early days of our married life; a locket that had never left her neck, waking or sleeping. And I wondered----

“I wondered something about women which no one has ever been able to tell me; not even a woman. I wondered if any light o' love had ever been able to make her feel anything like _real_ love, after all! I wondered if she had ever hugged the thought of her sin to her bosom, even as she had at first hugged the thought of our real love--hers and mine. I wondered if she had ever carried about with her a sentimental reminder of her lover, of any lover, as she had once done of her husband--and how long ago! I wondered how important a thing it had seemed to her, after all! She had reconciled herself to herself, with her death, and made me love her again. And I wondered to how great an extent she had ever fooled a lover into thinking she loved him! There are depths and contradictions and cross-currents in the souls of women that even women do not know, far less men--I wondered whose picture was in that locket!

“I thrust my hand through the curtains of the bed again, and then jumped back.

“I had felt something warm there.

“Did she live, after all?

“At the same instant I heard a movement on the other side of the bed. I went around.

“My best friend was removing his hand from the curtains on the other side, and in his hand was the locket. It was his hand that I had felt.

“We stared at each other. I spoke first, and in a whisper, so that the others in the next room, who had come to watch, should not hear.

“'I came for that,' I said.

“'The locket? So did I,” he said. And then added quite simply, 'My picture is in it.'

“'You lie!' I whispered, shaken by a wind of fury. And yet I knew that perhaps he did not lie, that what he said might well be true. Perhaps that was the cause of my fury.

“His face was lined with a grief and weariness terrible to behold. To look at him you would have thought that there was nothing else in the world for him except grief. It was a great grief that made him careless of everything else.

“'It is my picture,' he said. 'She loved me.'

“'I say that you lie,' I repeated. 'She may have played with you--but she never loved any one but me--in her heart she never did!'

“'You!' And because he whispered, hissing out the words, they seemed to gain in intensity of scorn. 'You! She hated you! You who neglected her, you with your damned eternal politics, you who could never understand her--love? You who could never give her the things a woman needs and must have--the warmth--the color--the romance--the poetry of life! You!--with your cold-blooded humanitarianism! I tell you, she loved _me!_ Why should I hesitate to avow it to you? It is the sweetest thing on earth to me, that she loved me! She turned from you to me because----'

“'Don't go into all that,' I said. 'I heard all about that last night--from her! Open the locket, and let us see whose face is there!'

“He opened it, and dropped the locket. He reeled against the wall, with his hands over his face, as if he had been struck a physical blow.

“I picked the toy up and looked at it.

“The face in the locket was neither his face nor mine. It was the face of--of the man who ran from the pergola and vaulted over the orchard wall into the woods that summer night a year earlier; the man whom I had not, for the moment, recognized.

“We stood there, this man who had been my best friend and I, with the locket between us, and I debated whether to strike him down----”

The narrator paused. And then he said, fixing Dr. Beaulieu with an intent gaze:

“Should I have struck him down? You, who are a teacher of ethics, who set yourself up to be, after a fashion, a preacher, a priest, a spiritual director, tell me, would I have been justified if I had killed him?”

Dr. Beaulieu seemed to shrink, seemed to contract and grow smaller, physically, under the other man's look. He opened his mouth as if to articulate, but for a second or two no word came. And then, regaining something of his usual poise, he said, although his voice was a bit husky:

“No! It is for the Creator of life to take life, and no other. Hatred and strife are disharmony, and bring their own punishment by throwing the soul out of unity with the spirit of love which rules the universe.”

It sounded stereotyped and emotionless, even in Dr. Beaulieu's own ears, as he said it; there was a mocking gleam in the eyes of the other man that spoke of a far more vital and genuine emotion. Dr. Beaulieu licked his lips and there came a knot in his forehead; beads of perspiration stood out upon his brow.

“You were right,” said Dr. Beaulieu, “in not striking him down. You were right in sparing him.”

The bearded man laughed. “I did not say that I spared him,” he said.

Dr. Beaulieu looked a question; a question that, perhaps, he dared not utter; or at least that he did not care to utter. He had dropped completely his rôle of spiritual counselor; he regarded his visitor with an emotion that might have been horror and might have been terror, or might have been a mixture of the two. The visitor replied to the unspoken interrogation in the healer's manner.

“I did not strike him down. Neither did I spare him. I waited and I--I used him. I know how to wait; I am of the nature that can wait. It was years before fate drew all things together for my purpose, and gave him into my hands--fate, assisted by myself.

“I waited, and I used him. The details are not pertinent for it is not his story that I am telling. I piloted him to the brink of destruction, and then--then, I saved him.”

“You saved him?” Dr. Beaulieu was puzzled; but his fear, if fear it was, had not abated. There was a frank menace, now, in his visitor's air. And the healer seemed to be struggling, as he listened to the tale, to force some reluctant brain-cell to unlock and give its stored memories to his conscious mind.

“I saved him. I saved him to be my creature. I broke him, and I saved him. I made him my slave, my dog, my--my anything I choose to have him. I have work for him to do.”

Again the man paused, looking about the rich profusion of Dr. Beaulieu's studio. There was a table in the room which contained a number of curios from Eastern lands. The visitor suddenly rose from his chair and picked from among them a thin, keen-bladed dagger. It was a beautiful weapon, of some Oriental make; beautiful in its lines; beautiful with the sullen fire of many jewels blazing in its hilt--an evil levin that got into the mind and led the thoughts astray even as the dainty deadliness of the whole tool seduced the hand to grasp and strike. As his visitor, strangely breaking the flow of his narrative, examined and handled the thing, Dr. Beaulieu shuddered.

“The man is as much my tool,” said the visitor slowly, “as this dagger would be your tool, Dr. Beaulieu, if you chose to thrust it into my breast--or into your own.”

He laid the dagger down on the table, and resumed his seat. Dr. Beaulieu said nothing, but he found it difficult to withdraw his eyes from his visitor's steady stare. Slumped and sagged within his chair, he said nothing. Presently the visitor went on.

“I had a fancy, Dr. Beaulieu; I had a fancy! It suited me to make my revenge a less obvious thing than striking down the old friend who had betrayed my love and confidence, a less obvious thing than striking down the other man--the man whose face was in the locket.”

As he spoke he took from his pocket a locket. He opened it, and gazed upon the face. The healer half rose from his chair, and then sank back, with a hoarse, inarticulate murmur. His face had turned livid, and he trembled in every limb. It was evident that the missing scene which he had sought before had suddenly been flashed upon the cinema screen of his recollection. He remembered, now----

“It was my fancy, Dr. Beaulieu, to make one of them take revenge upon the other, that I might thus be revenged upon them both.”

He suddenly rose, and forced the locket into the healer's nerveless grasp.

“That face--look at it!” he cried, towering over the collapsed figure before him.

Compelled by a will stronger than his own, Dr. Beaulieu looked. It was the counterfeit presentment of himself within. It fell from his trembling fingers and rolled upon the floor. The cultist buried his face in his hands.

The other man stepped back and regarded him sardonically for a moment or two.

“I should not wonder,” he said, “if the man who used to be my best friend would pay you a visit before long--perhaps in an hour, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month.”

He picked up the dagger again, and toyed with it.

“This thing,” he said, impersonally, trying the point upon his finger, “is sharp. It would give a quick death, a sure death, an almost painless death, if one used it against another man--or against one's self.”

And without another word he turned and left the room.

Dr. Beaulieu sat and listened to his retreating footsteps. And, long after they had ceased to sound, Dr. Beaulieu still sat and listened. Perhaps he was listening for some one to come, now that the bearded man had left. He sat and listened, and presently he reached over to the table and picked up the dagger that the visitor had laid down with its handle toward him. He pressed its point against his finger, as the other man had done. It was sharp. It would give, as the fellow had said, “a quick death, a sure death, an almost painless death.”

And as he whispered these words he was still listening--listening--waiting for some one to come----

XI.--The Locked Box

I

|It was a small, oblong affair, not more than three inches wide or deep, by twice that much in length, made of some dark, hard wood; brass bound and with brass lock and brass hinges; altogether such a box as a woman might choose to keep about her room for any one of a half dozen possible uses.

Clarke did not remember that he had ever seen it prior to his unexpectedly early return from a western trip of a month's duration. He thought he would give his wife a pleasant surprise, so he did not telephone the news of his arrival to the house, but went home and entered her room unannounced. As he came in his wife hastily slipped something into the box, locked it, and put it into one of the drawers of her desk. Then she came to meet him, and he would not have thought of the matter at all had it not been for just the slightest trace of confusion in her manner.

She was glad to see him. She always was after his absences, but it seemed to him that she was exceptionally so this time. She had never been a demonstrative woman; but it seemed to Clarke that she came nearer that description on the occasion of this home-coming than ever before. They had a deal to say to each other, and it was not until after dinner that the picture of his wife hurriedly disposing of the box crossed Clarke's consciousness again. Even then he mentioned it casually because they were talked out of more important topics rather than because of any very sharp curiosity. He asked her what it was; what was in it.

“Oh, nothing!--nothing of any importance--nothing at all,” she said; and moved over to the piano and began one of his favorite airs. And he forgot the box again in an instant. She had always been able to make Clarke forget things, when she wanted to. But the next day it suddenly came to him, out of that nowhere-in-particular from which thoughts come to mortals, that she had been almost as much confused at his sudden question as she had at his previous sudden entrance.

Clarke was not a suspicious person; not even a very curious one, as a rule. But it was so evident to him that there was something in that box which his wife did not wish him to see that he could not help but wonder. Always frank with her, and always accustomed to an equal candor on her part, it occurred to him that he would ask her again, in something more than a casual way, and that she would certainly tell him, at the same time clearing up her former hesitation. But no!--why should he ask her? That would be to make something out of nothing; this was a trifle, and not worth thinking about. But he continued thinking about it, nevertheless....

Ah, he had it! What a chump he had been, not to guess it sooner! His birthday was only ten days off, and his wife had been planning to surprise him with a remembrance of some sort. Of course! That accounted for the whole thing.

With this idea in his head, he said nothing more about the box, but waited. And when dinner was over and they sat before the fire together, on the evening of the anniversary, he still forbore to mention it, expecting every moment that the next she would present him with the token. But as the evening wore away, with no sign on her part, he finally broke an interval of silence with the remark:

“Well, dear, don't keep me guessing any longer! Bring it to me!”

“Guessing? Bring you--what?” And he could see that she was genuinely puzzled.

“Why, my birthday present.”

“Why, my dear boy! And did you expect one? And I had forgotten! Positively forgotten--it _is_ your birthday, isn't it, Dickie! If I had only known you _wanted_ one--------” And she came up and kissed him, with something like contrition, although his birthday had never been one of the sentimental anniversaries which she felt bound to observe with gifts.

“Don't feel bad about it--I don't care, you know--really,” he said. “Only, I thought you had something of the sort in that brass-bound box--that was the only reason I mentioned it.”

“Brass-bound box--why, no, I--I forgot it. I'm ashamed of myself, but I forgot the date entirely!”

But she volunteered no explanation of what the box contained, although the opportunity was so good a one.

And Clarke wondered more than ever.

What could it be? The letters of some former sweetheart? Well, all girls had sweethearts before they married, he supposed; at least all men did. He had had several himself. There was nothing in that. And he would not make an ass of himself by saying any more about it.

Only... he could not remember any old sweethearts that he wouldn't have told Agnes all about, if she had asked him. He had no secrets from her. But she had a secret from him... innocent enough, of course. But still, a secret. There was none of those old sweethearts of his whose letters he cared to keep after five years of marriage. And there was no... But, steady! Where were his reflections leading him? Into something very like suspicion? Positively, yes; to the verge of it. Until Agnes got ready to tell him all about it, he would forget that damned box!

And if she never got ready, why, that was all right, too. She was his wife, and he loved her... and that settled it.

Perhaps that should have settled it, but it did not. Certain healthy-looking, fleshy specimens of humanity are said to succumb the quickest to pneumonia, and it may be that the most ingenuous natures suffer the most intensely with suspicion, when once thoroughly inoculated.

II

|Clarke fought against it, cursing his own baseness. But the very effort necessary to the fight showed him the persistence of the thing itself. He loved his wife, and trusted her, he told himself over and over again, and in all their relations hitherto there had never been the slightest deviation from mutual confidence and understanding. What did he suspect? He could not have told himself. He went over their life together in his mind. In the five years of their married life, he could not have helped but notice that men were attracted to her. Of course they were. That was natural. She was a charming woman. He quite approved of it; it reflected credit upon him, in a way. He was not a Bluebeard of a husband, to lock a wife up and deny her the society proper to her years. And her very catholicity of taste, the perfect frankness of her enjoyment of masculine attention, had but served to make his confidence all the more complete. True, he had never thought she loved him as much as he loved her... but now that he came to think of it, was there not a warmer quality to her affection since his return from this last trip west? Was there not a kind of thoughtfulness, was there not a watchful increase in attentiveness, that he had always missed before? Was she not making love to him every day now; just as he had always made love to her before? Were not the parts which they had played for the five years of their married life suddenly reversed? They were! Indeed they were! And what did that mean? What did that portend? Did the brass-bound box have aught to do with that? What was the explanation of this change?

The subtle imp of suspicion turned this matter of the exchanged rôles into capital. Clarke, still ashamed of himself for doing it, began covertly to watch his wife; to set traps of various kinds for her. He said nothing more about the box, but within six months after the first day upon which he had seen it, it became the constant companion of his thoughts.

_What_ did he suspect? Not even now could he have said. He suspected nothing definite; vaguely, he suspected anything and everything. If his wife noticed his changed manner towards her, she made no sign. If anything, her efforts to please him, her attentiveness, her thoughtfulness in small things, increased.

III

|There came a day when he could stand this self-torture no longer, he thought. He came home from his office--Clarke was a partner in a prosperous real-estate concern--at an hour when he thought his wife not yet returned from an afternoon of call making, determined to end the matter once for all.

He went to her room, found the key to her desk, and opened the drawer. He found the box, but It was locked, and he began rummaging through the drawers, and among the papers and letters therein, for the key.

Perhaps she carried it with her. Very well, then, he would break it open! With the thing in his hand he began to look around for something with which to force the fastenings, and was about deciding that he would take it down to the basement, and use the hatchet, when he heard a step. He turned, just as his wife entered the room.

Her glance traveled from the box in his hand to the ransacked desk, and rested there inquiringly for a moment. Strangely enough, in view of the fact that he felt himself an injured husband and well within his rights, it was Clarke who became confused, apologetic, and evasive under her gaze. He essayed a clumsy lie:

“Agnes,” he began, indicating the desk, “I--I got a bill to-day from Meigs and Horner, for those furs, you know--I was sure that the account had been settled--that you had paid them, and had shown me the receipt--that you had paid them from your allowance, you know--and I thought I would come home and look up the receipt.”

It was very lame; and very lamely done, at that, as he felt even while he was doing it. But it gave him an opportunity of setting the box down on the desk almost in a casual manner, as if he had picked it up quite casually, while he began to tumble the papers again with his hands.

“The receipt is here,” she said; and got it for him.

The box lay between them, but they did not look at it, nor at each other, and they both trembled with agitation.

Each knew that the thoughts of the other were on nothing except that little locked receptacle of wood and brass, yet neither one referred to it; and for a full half minute they stood with averted faces, and fumbling hands, and played out the deception.

Finally she looked full at him, and drew a long breath, as if the story were coming now; and there was in her manner a quality of softness--almost of sentimentality, Clarke felt. She was getting ready to try and melt him into a kind of sympathy for her frailty, was she! Well, that would not work with him! And with the receipted bill waving in his hand, he made it the text of a lecture on extravagance, into which he plunged with vehemence.

Why did he not let her speak? He would not admit the real reason to himself, just then. But in his heart he was afraid to have her go on. Afraid, either way it turned. If she were innocent of any wrong, he would have made an ass of himself--and much worse than an ass. If she were guilty, she might melt him into a weak forgiveness in spite of her guilt! No, she must not speak... not now! If she were innocent, how could he confess his suspicions to her and acknowledge his baseness? And besides... women were so damned clever... whatever was in that box, she might fool him about it, somehow!

And then, “Good God!” he thought, “I have got to the place where I hug my suspicion to me as a dearer thing than my love, have I? Have I got so low as that?”

While these thoughts raced and rioted through his mind, his lips were feverishly pouring out torrents in denunciation of feminine extravagance. Even as he spoke he felt the black injustice of his speech, for he had always encouraged his wife, rather than otherwise, in the expenditure of money; his income was a good one; and the very furs which formed the text of his harangue he had helped her select and even urged upon her.

It was their first quarrel, if that can be called a quarrel which has only one side to it. For she listened in silence, with white lips and hurt eyes, and a face that was soon set into a semblance of hard indifference. He stormed out of the room, ashamed of himself, and feeling that he had disgraced the name of civilization.

IV

|Ashamed of himself, indeed; but before the angel of contrition could take full possession of his nature, the devil of suspicion, the imp of the box, regained its place.

For why had she not answered him? She knew he cared nothing about the trivial bill, the matter of the furs, he told himself. Why had she not insisted on a hearing, and told him about the box? She knew as well as he that that was what he had broken into her desk to get!

Justice whispered that she had been about to speak, and that he had denied her the chance. But the imp of the box said that an honest woman would have _demanded_ the chance--would have persisted until she got it! And thus, his very shame, and anger at himself, were cunningly turned and twisted by the genius of the brass-bound box into a confirmation of his suspicions.

V

|Suspicions? Nay, convictions! Beliefs. Certainties!

They were certainties, now! Certainties to Clarke's mind, at least. For in a month after this episode he had become a silent monomaniac on the subject of the brass-bound box. He felt shame no longer. She was guilty. Of just what, he did not know. But guilty. Guilty as Hell itself, he told himself, rhetorically, in one of the dumb rages which now became so frequent with him.

_Guilty--guilty--guilty_--the clock on the mantelpiece ticked off many dragging hours of intolerable minutes to that tune, while Clarke lay awake and listened. _Guilty--guilty--guilty_--repeat any word often enough, and it will hypnotize you. _Guilty--guilty--guilty_--so he and the clock would talk to each other, back and forth, the whole night through. If any suggestions of his former, more normal habits of thought came to him now it was they that were laughed out of court; it was they that were flung away and scorned as traitors.

She was guilty. But he would be crafty! He would be cunning. He would make no mistake. He would allow her no subterfuge. He would give her no chance to snare him back into a condition of half belief. There should be no juggling explanations. They were clever as the devil, women were! But this one should have no chance to fool him again. She had fooled him too long already.