Part 14

And she kept trying to fool him. Shortly after his outburst over the furs, she began again a series of timid advances which would have struck him as pathetic had he not known that her whole nature was corroded and corrupted with deceit, with abominable deceit. She was trying to make him believe that she did not know why he was angry and estranged, was she? He would show her! He hated her now, with that restless, burning intensity of hatred known only to him who has injured another. A hatred that consumed his own vitality, and made him sick in soul and body. The little sleep he got was passed in uneasy dreams of his revenge; and his waking hours were devoted to plots and plans of the form which it should take. Oh, but she had been cunning to fool him for so long; but she should see! She should see! When the time for action came, she should see!

VI

|Something, one tense and feverish midnight, when he lay in his bed snarling and brooding and chuckling--a kind of snapping sense in some remote interior chamber of his brain, followed by a nervous shock that made him sit upright--warned him that the time for action was at hand. What is it that makes sinners, at provincial revival meetings, suddenly aware that the hours of dalliance are past and the great instant that shall send them to “the mourners' bench” is at hand? Somehow, they seem to know! And, somehow, Clarke felt an occult touch and knew that his time for action had arrived.

He did not care what came afterwards. Any jury in the world, so he told himself, ought to acquit him of his deed, when they once knew his story; when they once looked at the damning evidence of her guilt which she had hidden away for so long in the brass-bound box. But if they did not acquit him, that was all right, too. His work in the world would have been done; he would have punished a guilty woman. He would have shown that all men are not fools.

But he did not spend a great deal of thought on how other people would regard what he was about to do. As he crept down the hall with the knife in his hand, his chief sensation was a premonitory itch, a salty tang of pleasure in the doing of the deed itself. When hatred comes in where love has gone out, there may be a kind of voluptuary delight in the act of murder.

Very carefully he opened the door of her room. And then he smiled to himself, and entered noisily; for what was the need of being careful about waking up a woman who was already dead? He did not care whether he killed her in her sleep or not;--indeed, if she wakened and begged for her life, he thought it might add a certain zest to the business. He should enjoy hearing her plead. He would not mind prolonging things.

But things were not prolonged. His hand and the muscles of his forearm had tensed so often with the thought, with the idea, that the first blow went home. She never waked.

VII

|He got the box, and opened it.

Inside was a long envelope, and written on that were the words:

“To be opened by my husband only after my death.”

That time had come!

Within the envelope was a letter. It was dated on the day of his return from his western trip, a few months before. He read:

“Dick, I love you!

“Does it seem strange to you that I should write it down?

“Listen, Dickie dear--I _had_ to write it! I couldn't tell you when I was alive--but I just had to tell you, too. And now that I am dead, what I say will come to you with all of its sweetness increased; and all of its bitterness left out! It will, now that I am dead--or if you die first, you will never see this. This is from beyond the grave to you, Dickie dear, to make all your life good to you afterwards!

“Now, listen, dear, and don't be hard on me.

“When I married you, Dickie, I _didn't_ love you! You were wild about me. But I only _liked_ you very much. It wasn't really love. It wasn't what you _deserved_. But I was only a girl, and you were the first man, and I didn't know things; I didn't know what I _should have_ felt.

“Later, when I realized how very much you cared, I was ashamed of myself. I grew to see that I had done wrong in marrying you. Wrong to both of us. For no woman should marry a man she doesn't love. And I was ashamed, and worried about it. You were so good to me! So sweet--and you never suspected that I didn't care like I should. And because you were so good and sweet to me, I felt _worse_. And I made up my mind you should _never_ know! That I would be everything to you any woman could be. I tried to be a good wife. Wasn't I, Dickie, even then?

“But I prayed and prayed and prayed. 'O God,' I used to say, 'let me love him like he loves me!' It was five years, Dickie, and I _liked_ you more, and _admired_ you more, and saw more in you that was worth while, every week; but still, no miracle happened.

“And then one morning _a miracle did happen!_

“It was when you were on that trip West. I had gone to bed thinking how kind and dear you were. I missed you, Dickie dear, and _needed_ you. And when I woke up, there was a change over the world. I felt so different, somehow. It had come! Wasn't it wonderful, Dickie?--it had come! And I sang all that day for joy. I could hardly wait for you to come home so that I could tell you. I loved you, loved you, loved you, Dickie, _as you deserved!_ My prayers had been answered, somehow--or maybe it was what any woman would do just living near you and being with you.

“And then I saw _I couldn't tell you, after all!_

“For if I told you I loved you now, that would be to tell you that for five years _I hadn't loved you_, Dickie!

“And how would _that_ make you feel? Wouldn't that have been like a knife, Dickie?

“Oh, I wanted you to know! _How_ I wanted you to know! But, you see, I couldn't tell you, could I, dear, without telling the other, too? I just _had_ to save you from that! And I just had to make you feel it, somehow or other. And I _will_ make you feel it, Dickie!

“But I can't tell you. Who knows what ideas you might get into your head about those five years, if I told you now? Men are so queer, and they can be so stupid sometimes! And I can't bear to think of losing one smallest bit of your love... not now! It would _kill_ me!

“But I want you to know, sometime. And so I'm writing you--it's my first love letter--the first real one, Dickie. If _you_ die first, I'll tell you in Heaven. And if _I_ die first, you'll understand!

“Agnes.”

XII.--Behind the Curtain

|It was as dark as the belly of the fish that swallowed Jonah. A drizzling rain blanketed the earth in chill discomfort. As I splashed and struggled along the country road, now in the beaten path, and now among the wet weeds by its side, I had never more heartily yearned for the dullness and comforts of respectability. Here was I with more talents in my quiver, it pleased me to think, than nine out of ten of the burghers I had left sleeping snug and smug in the town a few miles behind; with as much real love of humanity as the next man, too; and yet shivering and cursing my way into another situation that might well mean my death. And all for what? For fame or riches? No, for little more than a mere existence, albeit free from responsibility. Indeed, I was all but ready to become an honest man then and there, to turn back and give up the night's adventure, had but my imagination furnished me with the picture of some occupation whereby I might gain the same leisure and independence as by what your precisians call thieving.

With the thought I stumbled off the road again, and into a narrow gully that splashed me to the knees with muddy water. Out of that, I walked plump into a hedge, and when I sought to turn from it at right angles, I found myself still following its line. This circumstance showed me that I was come unaware upon the sharp turn of the road which marked the whereabouts of the house that was my object. Following the hedge, I found the entrance to the graveled driveway within a hundred yards of my last misstep, and entered the grounds. I groped about me for a space, not daring to show a light, until presently a blacker bulk, lifting itself out of the night's comprehensive blackness, indicated the house itself, to my left and a bit in front of me. I left the moist gravel--for there is nothing to be gained on an expedition of this sort by advertising the size and shape of your boots to a morbidly inquisitive public--and reached the shelter of the veranda by walking across the lawn.

There, being out of eyeshot from the upper windows, I risked a gleam from my pocket lantern, one of those little electric affairs that are occasionally useful to others than night watchmen. Two long French windows gave on the veranda; and, as I knew, both of them opened from the reception hall. A bit of a way with the women is not amiss in my profession; and the little grayeyed Irish maid, who had told me three weeks before of old man Rolfe's stinginess and brutality towards the young wife whom he had cooped up here for the past four years, had also given me, bit by bit, other information more valuable than she could guess. So, thanks to the maid, I was aware that the safe where the Rolfe jewels were kept--and often a substantial bit of money as well--was situated in the library; which was just beyond the hall and connected with it by a flight of four or five steps. This safe was my objective point.

The wooden window shutters were but the work of a moment; and the window fastenings themselves of only a few minutes more. (I flatter myself that I have a very coaxing way with window fasteners.) The safe itself would give me the devil's own trouble, I knew. It was really a job for two men, and I ached all over to be at it, to be safely through with it, and away, a good hour before sunrise.

The window opened noiselessly enough, and I stepped within and set my little satchel full of necessary tools upon the floor. But the damp weather had swelled the woodwork, and as I closed the window again, though I pushed it ever so gently, it gave forth a noise something between a grunt and a squeak.

And as pat as the report of a pistol to the pressure of the trigger came the answer--a sound of a quickly-caught breath from the warm dimness of the room. I made no motion; though the blood drummed desperately through my brain and my scalp tingled with apprehension and excitement.

For ten, for twenty, for thirty seconds I stood so; and then the silence was broken by the unmistakable rustle of a woman's skirts. The sound came softly towards me through the darkness. It was my turn to let loose my held breath with a gasp, and in another moment I should have been through the window and running for it; when a woman's whisper halted me.

“Is that you, Charles? And why did you not rap upon the shutter?”

So some one called Charles was expected? Then, ticked off my thoughts almost automatically, the lady somewhere near me in the dark might have her own reasons for not caring to alarm the house just then! The thought steadied me to action.

“Shh,” I whispered, feeling behind me for the window, and gradually opening it again. “S-h-h! No, it is not Charles”--and I put one foot backward across the sill. “It is not Charles, but Charles has sent me to say----”

Click!--went something by the window, and the room was flooded with sudden brilliance from a dozen electric globes. And again, click!--and I looked with blinking eyes at the muzzle of a cocked pistol held by the most beautiful, the most be-jeweled, the most determined-looking young woman it has ever been my lot to meet.

“Who are you?” she asked in a voice that was at once hoarse and sweet. “Who are you? And what do you want? And where is Charles?”

As I stood there dripping moisture upon the oiled floor, with my hands in the air--they had gone up quite involuntarily--I must have been the very picture of idiocy and discomfiture. I wondered if Charles, whoever the devil Charles might be, was always welcomed with a cocked pistol. Probably not; but, I wondered, how did she happen to have a pistol with her? I wondered why neck, breast, hair, arms, and hands should be ablaze with the diamonds that accentuated her lithe and vivid loveliness. I wondered why, now that she saw I was not Charles, she did not alarm the house. I wondered everything; but nothing to the point. And as I stood wondering she repeated:

“Who are you? And what do you want?”

“Madame,” I stammered, my jarred brain fastening upon the sentence she had interrupted, “Charles sent me to--to say to you----”

“Charles who?” she asked. And as tense as was her face, a gleam of merriment shot through her eyes. “Charles who?” she repeated.

Charles was not one of the points upon which the Irish maid had given me information.

The lady with the pistol considered for a moment. “You are not very clever, are you?” she said.

“If you will pardon me,” I said, “I think I had better be going. I seem to have mistaken the house.”

“You at least seem to have mistaken the proper manner in which to enter it,” she returned.

“Why, as to the mode of entrance,” I said, “I might plead that the mistake appears to have been less in that than in the person who employed it.”

I could not resist the retort. A dull red crept slowly up her neck and face; a pallid, olive-tinted face, beautiful in itself, beautiful for its oval contour and broad brow, and frame of black hair; beautiful in itself, and yet dominated and outdone by the lustrous, restless beauty of the dark eyes wherewith she held me more surely captive than by virtue of the pistol.

“You will come in,” she said, “and sit there.” She indicated a seat beside a central table. “But first you will kindly let me have whatever weapons you may possess.” She took my revolver, examined it, and put her own in the breast of her gown. “Now you may put your hands down,” she said, “your arms must ache by now. Sit down.”

I sat. She stood and looked at me for a moment.

“I am wondering what you are going to do with me,” I ventured.

In all of her quick actions, and in the tones of her voice, there was evident a most unnatural sort of strain. She may well have been excited; that was only to be expected in the circumstances. But the repressed excitement in this woman's manner was not that of a woman who is forcing herself to keep her courage up; not that of a woman who would like to scream; but a steadier nervous energy which seemed to burn in her like a fire, to escape from her finger tips, and almost to crackle in her hair; an intensity that was vibrant. I marveled. Most women would have screamed at the advent of a man in the dead of night; screamed and fainted. Or the ones who would not, and who were armed as she, would ordinarily have been inclined to shoot, and at once; or immediately to have given the alarm. She had done none of these things. She had merely taken me captive. She had set me down in a chair at the center of the room. She had not roused the house. And now she stood looking at me with a trace of abstraction in her manner; looking at me, for the moment, less as if I were a human being than as if I were a factor in some mathematical problem which it was the immediate task of that active, high-keyed brain of hers to solve. And there was a measure of irony in her glance, as if she alone tasted and enjoyed some ulterior jest.

“I am wondering,” I repeated, “what you are going to do with me.”

She sat down at the opposite side of the table before she replied.

“I believe,” she said slowly, “that I have nearly made up my mind what to do with you.”

“Well?” I asked.

But she said nothing, and continued to say nothing. I looked at her and her diamonds--the diamonds I had come after!--and wondered again why she was wearing them; wondered why she had tricked herself out as for some grand entertainment. And as the ignominious result of my night's expedition pressed more sharply against my pride I could have strangled her through sheer disappointment and mortification. The pistol she held was the answer to that impulse. But what was the answer to her hesitancy in alarming the house? Why did she not give me up and be done with me?

At the farther end of the room was a long red curtain, which covered the entrance to a sitting-room or parlor, as I guessed; and by the side of the curtain hung an old-fashioned bell cord, also of red, which I supposed to communicate with the servants' quarters. It were easy enough, now that she had taken the whip hand of me so cleverly, to pull that rope, to set the bell jangling, to rouse the house. Why did she not do so?

Was she a mad woman? There was that in her inexplicable conduct, and in her highly-wrought, yet governed, mood, as she sat in brooding silence across the table from me, to make the theory plausible. Brooding she was, and studying me, I thought; yet watchful, too. For at any least motion of mine her hand tightened slightly upon the pistol. We sat thus while the slow seconds lengthened into intolerable minutes; and I steamed with sweat, and fidgeted. Nor was I set more at my ease by her long searching glances. In fact, my overthrow had been so instant and so complete that my scattered wits had never drawn themselves together again; I continued as one in a haze; as a person half under the power of the hypnotist; as a mouse must feel after the first blow of the cat's paw. And yet one idea began to loom clearly out of that haze and possess me--the idea that she desired the alarm to be given as little as I did myself.

But there was no light in that. It was easy to understand why she did not wish the house aroused while she still believed me to be Charles--whoever Charles might be. But now?--it was too much for me. I could not find a justification in reason for my belief; and yet the conviction grew.

She broke the silence with a question that might have been put with full knowledge of my thought.

“You are still wondering why I do not give you up?” she said.

I nodded. She leaned towards me across the table, and if ever the demons of mockery danced through a woman's eyes it was then; and her lips parted in a kind of silent laughter.

She touched the diamonds about her throat.

“It was these you came after?”

I nodded again. Evidently speech was of no avail with this lady. She asked questions at her will, and reserved the right of answering none.

“Tell me,” she said, “Why are you a thief? Why do you steal?”

“'Convey, the wise it call,'” I quoted. “Accident, or fate, or destiny, I suppose,” I went on, wondering more than ever at the question, but with a fluttering hope. Perhaps the lady (in spite of Charles--such things have been!) was an amateur sociologist, a crank reformer, or something of that sort. There had been no mockery in her tone when she asked the question; instead, I thought, a kind of pity. “Fate, or destiny,” I went on, “or what you please, 'There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,'” I quoted again, in my best actor manner.

“Why,” she said, “you are a man with some air of better things about you. You quote Shakespeare as if he were an old friend. And yet, you are a thief! Tell me,” she continued, “tell me--I dare say there were many struggles against that destiny?” There was a note almost of eagerness in her voice, as if she were a leniently-inclined judge who would fain search out and put in the mouth of a condemned man some plausible plea for the exercise of clemency. “Come--were there not?--I dare say there were--circumstances of uncommon bitterness that forced you to become what I see you? And even now you hate the thing you are?”

“Why, as to that,” I said, possessed of the sudden whim to be honest with myself for once, “I am afraid that I can complain of no bitterer usage at the hands of the world than can the majority of those who reap where they have not sowed. When I think of it all, I am used to putting it to myself that my life is devoted to a kind of private warfare against the unjust conditions of a hypocritical social order.”

“Warfare!” she flouted, hard and brilliant as one of her own diamonds again. “And you could justify it, too, could you not?”

And then she asked me: “Have you ever killed a man?”

“Why, no,” said I, “but I have tried to.”

“He lived?--and you were sorry that he lived?”

“No,” I said, quite out of my depths in all this moral quibbling, “I was glad he lived.”

“And yet you hated him?”

“I would have taken his life in a rage,” I said. “He had wronged me as greatly as one man can wrong another.”

“And yet you were glad he lived? My dear thief----”

“Higgins is the name,” said I. “You may call me Higgins.”

“My dear Higgins,” she went on, “you are inconsistent. You attempt to slay a man in what I should judge to have been a not ignoble passion. It may have been an anger that did you credit. And yet you are not bold enough to face the thought of killing him. You are glib with justifications of your thievery; and perhaps that is also because you are too much of a coward to look steadily at it. You creep along a mean and despicable path in life, contentedly, it seems to me, with a dead soul. You are what you are because there is nothing positive in you for either good or evil. You are negative; you were better dead. Yes, better dead!”

Why should I have felt as if she were seeking self-justification in advance for some death she planned for me? Certainly, my life, or death, was not hers to give or take; she might give me up, and probably would. But just as certainly she had made me feel, as she passed her judgment upon me, that she was likely to turn executioner as well as judge. My doubts as to her sanity returned.

“Still,” I said, for the sake of saying something, “if I killed a man, I should not like to think about it, even if he deserved death.”

“Even if he deserved death?” she repeated, and sprang up, as if the phrase had touched her. “You make yourself the judge, you do, of when a man 'deserves' to lose his wealth. Come, what is your idea of when he deserves to die?”

Up and down the room she swept; yet still watchful. And the emotion which she had so long suppressed burst out into a poisonous lovely bloom that suffused her being with an awful beauty.

“When does he deserve to die?” she repeated. “Listen to me. I knew a woman once--no matter where--no matter when--who was sold--sold! I say--by the sordid devil she called her father, to the veriest beast that ever trod this earth. Her beauty--for she had beauty--her wit--for wit she had--became this husband's chattels before she turned her twentieth year. She would never have loved him, but she would have been faithful to him--she was faithful to him, in fact, in spite of all his drunkenness and bestiality--and abuse! It was not neglect alone that she had to complain of--she had never looked for understanding or sympathy. But she had not looked for abuse. Abuse, I say, and worse than abuse. Before she had been married a year she knew what it was, not only to feel the weight of a heavy hand and to hide the bruises from her maid, but to see other women brought into her very house. Pah!--hate? She hated him? Hate is not the word. She became a live coal. But she never cried out; she found strength to smile at him even when he beat her; she was proud enough for that. It pleased him, in his hellish humor, and because she was made to shine, to cage her in a country house, and there to taunt her that although she was sold to him she got little of what money may buy. And still she smiled at him, and still her hatred grew through all the weeks and months until it filled her whole being. And then--love came. For God has ordained that love may enter even Hell. Love, I say; and she loved this lover of hers with a passion that was measured only by the degree in which she hated her husband. And she would have left with him; but on the very night they would have flown together her lord and master-----”