Chapter 7

XXIII. DORIS

“A young girl named Doris Scott?”

The station-master looked somewhat sharply at the man he was addressing, and decided to give the direction asked.

“There is but one young girl in town of that name,” he declared, “and she lives in that little house you see just beyond the works. But let me tell you, stranger,” he went on with some precipitation--

But here he was called off, and Sweetwater lost the conclusion of his warning, if warning it was meant to be. This did not trouble the detective. He stood a moment, taking in the prospect; decided that the Works and the Works alone made the town, and started for the house which had been pointed out to him. His way lay through the chief business street, and greatly preoccupied by his errand, he gave but a passing glance to the rows on rows of workmen’s dwellings stretching away to the left in seemingly endless perspective. Yet in that glance he certainly took in the fact that the sidewalks were blocked with people and wondered if it were a holiday. If so, it must be an enforced one, for the faces showed little joy. Possibly a strike was on. The anxiety he everywhere saw pictured on young faces and old, argued some trouble; but if the trouble was that, why were all heads turned indifferently from the Works, and why were the Works themselves in full blast?

These questions he may have asked himself and he may not. His attention was entirely centred on the house he saw before him and on the possible developments awaiting him there. Nothing else mattered. Briskly he stepped out along the sandy road, and after a turn or two which led him quite away from the Works and its surrounding buildings, he came out upon the highway and this house.

It was a low and unpretentious one, and had but one distinguishing feature. The porch which hung well over the doorstep was unique in shape and gave an air of picturesqueness to an otherwise simple exterior; a picturesqueness which was much enhanced in its effect by the background of illimitable forest, which united the foreground of this pleasing picture with the great chain of hills which held the Works and town in its ample basin.

As he approached the doorstep, his mind involuntarily formed an anticipatory image of the child whose first stitches in embroidery were like a fairy’s weaving to the strong man who worked in ore and possibly figured out bridges. That she would prove to be of the anemic type, common among working girls gifted with an imagination they have but scant opportunity to exercise, he had little doubt.

He was therefore greatly taken aback, when at his first step upon the porch, the door before him flew open and he beheld in the dark recess beyond a young woman of such bright and blooming beauty that he hardly noticed her expression of extreme anxiety, till she lifted her hand and laid an admonitory finger softly on her lip:

“Hush!” she whispered, with an earnestness which roused him from his absorption and restored him to the full meaning of this encounter. “There is sickness in the house and we are very anxious. Is your errand an important one? If not--” The faltering break in the fresh, young voice, the look she cast behind her into the darkened interior, were eloquent with the hope that he would recognise her impatience and pass on.

And so he might have done,--so he would have done under all ordinary circumstances. But if this was Doris--and he did not doubt the fact after the first moment of startled surprise--how dare he forego this opportunity of settling the question which had brought him here.

With a slight stammer but otherwise giving no evidence of the effect made upon him by the passionate intensity with which she had urged this plea, he assured her that his errand was important, but one so quickly told that it would delay her but a moment. “But first,” said he, with very natural caution, “let me make sure that it is to Miss Doris Scott I am speaking. My errand is to her and her only.”

Without showing any surprise, perhaps too engrossed in her own thoughts to feel any, she answered with simple directness, “Yes, I am Doris Scott.” Whereupon he became his most persuasive self, and pulling out a folded paper from his pocket, opened it and held it before her, with these words:

“Then will you be so good as to glance at this letter and tell me if the person whose initials you will find at the bottom happens to be in town at the present moment?”

In some astonishment now, she glanced down at the sheet thus boldly thrust before her, and recognising the O and the B of a well-known signature, she flashed a look back at Sweetwater in which he read a confusion of emotions for which he was hardly prepared.

“Ah,” thought he, “it’s coming. In another moment I shall hear what will repay me for the trials and disappointments of all these months.”

But the moment passed and he had heard nothing. Instead, she dropped her hands from the door-jamb and gave such unmistakable evidences of intended flight, that but one alternative remained to him; he became abrupt.

Thrusting the paper still nearer, he said, with an emphasis which could not fail of making an impression, “Read it. Read the whole letter. You will find your name there. This communication was addressed to Miss Challoner, but--”

Oh, now she found words! With a low cry, she put out her hand in quick entreaty, begging him to desist and not speak that name on any pretext or for any purpose. “He may rouse and hear,” she explained, with another quick look behind her. “The doctor says that this is the critical day. He may become conscious any minute. If he should and were to hear that name, it might kill him.”

“He!” Sweetwater perked up his ears. “Who do you mean by he?”

“Mr. Brotherson, my patient, he whose letter--” But here her impatience rose above every other consideration. Without attempting to finish her sentence, or yielding in the least to her curiosity or interest in this man’s errand, she cried out with smothered intensity, “Go! go! I cannot stay another moment from his bedside.”

But a thunderbolt could not have moved Sweetwater after the hearing of that name. “Mr. Brotherson!” he echoed. “Brotherson! Not Orlando?”

“No, no; his name is Oswald. He’s the manager of these Works. He’s sick with typhoid. We are caring for him. If you belonged here you would know that much. There! that’s his voice you hear. Go, if you have any mercy.” And she began to push to the door.

But Sweetwater was impervious to all hint. With eager eyes straining into the shadowy depths just visible over her shoulder, he listened eagerly for the disjointed words now plainly to be heard in some near-by but unseen chamber.

“The second O. B.!” he inwardly declared. “And he’s a Brotherson also, and--sick! Miss Scott,” he whisperingly entreated as her hand fell in manifest despair from the door, “don’t send me away yet. I’ve a question of the greatest importance to put you, and one minute more cannot make any difference to him. Listen! those cries are the cries of delirium; he cannot miss you; he’s not even conscious.”

“He’s calling out in his sleep. He’s calling her, just as he has called for the last two weeks. But he will wake conscious--or he will not wake at all.”

The anguish trembling in that latter phrase would have attracted Sweetwater’s earnest, if not pitiful, attention at any other time, but now he had ears only for the cry which at that moment came ringing shrilly from within--

“Edith! Edith!”

The living shouting for the dead! A heart still warm sending forth its longing to the pierced and pulseless one, hidden in a far-off tomb! To Sweetwater, who had seen Miss Challoner buried, this summons of distracted love came with weird force.

Then the present regained its sway. He heard her name again, and this time it sounded less like a call and more like the welcoming cry of meeting spirits. Was death to end this separation? Had he found the true O. B., only to behold another and final seal fall upon this closely folded mystery? In his fear of this possibility, he caught at Doris’ hand as she was about to bound away, and eagerly asked:

“When was Mr. Brotherson taken ill? Tell me, I entreat you; the exact day and, if you can, the exact hour. More depends upon this than you can readily realise.”

She wrenched her hand from his, panting with impatience and a vague alarm. But she answered him distinctly:

“On the Twenty-fifth of last month, just an hour after he was made manager. He fell in a faint at the Works.”

The day--the very day of Miss Challoner’s death!

“Had he heard--did you tell him then or afterwards what happened in New York on that very date?”

“No, no, we have not told him. It would have killed him--and may yet.”

“Edith! Edith!” came again through the hush, a hush so deep that Sweetwater received the impression that the house was empty save for patient and nurse.

This discovery had its effects upon him. Why should he subject this young and loving girl to further pain? He had already learned more than he had expected to. The rest would come with time. But at the first intimation he gave of leaving, she lost her abstracted air and turned with absolute eagerness towards him.

“One moment,” said she. “You are a stranger and I do not know your name or your purpose here. But I cannot let you go without begging you not to mention to any one in this town that Mr. Brotherson has any interest in the lady whose name we must not speak. Do not repeat that delirious cry you have heard or betray in any way our intense and fearful interest in this young lady’s strange death. You have shown me a letter. Do not speak of that letter, I entreat you. Help us to retain our secret a little longer. Only the doctor and myself know what awaits Mr. Brotherson if he lives. I had to tell the doctor, but a doctor reveals nothing. Promise that you will not either, at least till this crisis is passed. It will help my father and it will help me; and we need all the help we can get.”

Sweetwater allowed himself one minute of thought, then he earnestly replied:

“I will keep your secret for to-day, and longer, if possible.”

“Thank you,” she cried; “thank you. I thought I saw kindness in your face.” And she again prepared to close the door.

But Sweetwater had one more question to ask. “Pardon me,” said he, as he stepped down on the walk, “you say that this is a critical day with your patient. Is that why every one whom I have seen so far wears such a look of anxiety?”

“Yes, yes,” she cried, giving him one other glimpse of her lovely, agitated face. “There’s but one feeling in town to-day, but one hope, and, as I believe, but one prayer. That the man whom every one loves and every one trusts may live to run these Works.”

“Edith! Edith!” rose in ceaseless reiteration from within.

But it rang but faintly now in the ears of our detective. The door had fallen to, and Sweetwater’s share in the anxieties of that household was over.

Slowly he moved away. He was in a confused yet elated condition of mind. Here was food for a thousand new thoughts and conjectures. An Orlando Brotherson and an Oswald Brotherson--relatives possibly, strangers possibly; but whether relatives or strangers, both given to signing their letters with their initials simply; and both the acknowledged admirers of the deceased Miss Challoner. But she had loved only one, and that one, Oswald. It not difficult to recognise the object of this high hearted woman’s affections in this man whose struggle with the master-destroyer had awakened the solicitude of a whole town.

XXIV. SUSPENSE

Ten minutes after Sweetwater’s arrival in the village streets, he was at home with the people he found there. His conversation with Doris in the doorway of her home had been observed by the curious and far-sighted, and the questions asked and answered had made him friends at once. Of course, he could tell them nothing, but that did not matter, he had seen and talked with Doris and their idolised young manager was no worse and might possibly soon be better.

Of his own affairs--of his business with Doris and the manager, they asked nothing. All ordinary interests were lost in the stress of their great suspense.

It was the same in the bar-room of the one hotel. Without resorting to more than a question or two, he readily learned all that was generally known of Oswald Brotherson. Every one was talking about him, and each had some story to tell illustrative of his kindness, his courage and his quick mind. The Works had never produced a man of such varied capabilities and all round sympathies. To have him for manager meant the greatest good which could befall this little community.

His rise had been rapid. He had come from the east three years before, new to the work. Now, he was the one man there. Of his relationships east, family or otherwise, nothing was said. For them his life began and ended in Derby, and Sweetwater could see, though no actual expression was given to the feeling, that there was but one expectation in regard to him and Doris, to whose uncommon beauty and sweetness they all seemed fully alive. And Sweetwater wondered, as many of us have wondered, at the gulf frequently existing between fancy and fact.

Later there came a small excitement. The doctor was seen riding by on his way to the sick man. From the window where he sat, Sweetwater watched him pass up the street and take the road he had himself so lately traversed. It was so straight a one and led so directly northward that he could follow with his eye the doctor’s whole course, and even get a glimpse of his figure as he stepped from the buggy and proceeded to tie up the horse. There was an energy about him pleasing to Sweetwater. He might have much to do with this doctor. If Oswald Brotherson died--but he was not willing to consider this possibility--yet. His personal sympathies, to say nothing of his professional interest in the mystery to which this man--and this man only--possibly held the key, alike forbade. He would hope, as these others were hoping, and if he did not count the minutes, he at least saw every move of the old horse waiting with drooping head and the resignation of long custom for the re-appearance of his master with his news of life or death.

And so an hour--two hours passed. Others were watching the old horse now. The street showed many an eager figure with head turned northward. From the open door-ways women stepped, looked in the direction of their anxiety and retreated to their work again. Suspense was everywhere; the moments dragged like hours; it became so keen at last that some impatient hearts could no longer stand it. A woman put her baby into another woman’s arms and hurried up the road; another followed, then another; then an old man, bowed with years and of tottering steps, began to go that way, halting a dozen times before he reached the group now collected in the dusty highway, near but not too near that house. As Sweetwater’s own enthusiasm swelled at this sight, he thought of the other Brotherson with his theories and active advocacy for reform, and wondered if men and women would forego their meals and stand for hours in the keen spring wind just to be the first to hear if he were to live or die. He knew that he himself would not. But he had suffered much both in his pride and his purse at the hands of the Brooklyn inventor; and such despoliation is not a reliable basis for sympathy. He was questioning his own judgment in this matter and losing himself in the mazes of past doubts and conjectures when a sudden change took place in the aspect of the street; he saw people running, and in another moment saw why. The doctor had shown himself on the porch which all were watching. Was he coming out? No, he stands quite still, runs his eye over the people waiting quietly in the road, and beckons to one of the smaller boys. The child, with upturned face, stands listening to what he has to say, then starts on a run for the village. He is stopped, pulled about, questioned, and allowed to run on. Many rush forth to meet him. He is panting, but gleeful. Mr. Brotherson has waked up conscious, and the doctor says, HE WILL LIVE.

XXV. THE OVAL HUT

That night Dr. Fenton had a visitor. We know that visitor and we almost know what his questions were, if not the answers of the good doctor. Nevertheless, it may be better to listen to a part at least of their conversation. Sweetwater, who knew when to be frank and open, as well as when to be reserved and ambiguous, made no effort to disguise the nature of his business or his chief cause of interest in Oswald Brotherson. The eye which met his was too penetrating not to detect the smallest attempt at subterfuge; besides, Sweetwater had no need to hide his errand; it was one of peace, and it threatened nobody--“the more’s the pity,” thought he in uneasy comment to himself, as he realised the hopelessness of the whole situation.

His first word, therefore, was a plain announcement.

“Dr. Fenton, my name is Sweetwater. I am from New York, and represent for the nonce, Mr. Challoner, whose name I have simply to mention, for you to understand that my business is with Mr. Brotherson whom I am sorry to find seriously, if not dangerously, ill. Will you tell me how long you think it will be before I can have a talk with him on a subject which I will not disguise from you may prove a very exciting one?”

“Weeks, weeks,” returned the doctor. “Mr. Brotherson has been a very sick man and the only hope I have of his recovery is the fact that he is ignorant of his trouble or that he has any cause for doubt or dread. Were this happy condition of things to be disturbed,--were the faintest rumour of sorrow or disaster to reach him in his present weakened state, I should fear a relapse, with all its attendant dangers. What then, if any intimation should be given him of the horrible tragedy suggested by the name you have mentioned? The man would die before your eyes. Mr. Challoner’s business will have to wait.”

“That I see; but if I knew when I might speak--”

“I can give you no date. Typhoid is a treacherous complaint; he has the best of nurses and the chances are in favour of a quick recovery; but we never can be sure. You had better return to New York. Later, you can write me if you wish, or Mr. Challoner can. You may have confidence in my reply; it will not mislead you.”

Sweetwater muttered his thanks and rose. Then he slowly sat down again.

“Dr. Fenton,” he began, “you are a man to be trusted. I’m in a devil of a fix, and there is just a possibility that you may be able to help me out. It is the general opinion in New York, as you may know, that Miss Challoner committed suicide. But the circumstances do not fully bear out this theory, nor can Mr. Challoner be made to accept it. Indeed, he is so convinced of its falsehood, that he stands ready to do anything, pay anything, suffer anything, to have this distressing blight removed from his daughter’s good name. Mr. Brotherson was her dearest friend, and as such may have the clew to this mystery, but Mr. Brotherson may not be in a condition to speak for several weeks. Meanwhile, Mr. Challoner must suffer from great suspense unless--” a pause during which he searched the doctor’s face with a perfectly frank and inquiring expression--“unless some one else can help us out. Dr. Fenton, can you?”

The doctor did not need to speak; his expression conveyed his answer.

“No more than another,” said he. “Except for what Doris felt compelled to tell me, I know as little as yourself. Mr. Brotherson’s delirium took the form of calling continually upon one name. I did not know this name, but Doris did, also the danger lurking in the fact that he had yet to hear of the tragedy which had robbed him of this woman to whom he was so deeply attached. So she told me just this much. That the Edith whose name rung so continuously in our ears was no other than the Miss Challoner of New York of whose death and its tragic circumstances the papers have been full; that their engagement was a secret one unshared so far as she knew by any one but herself. That she begged me to preserve this secret and to give her all the help I could when the time came for him to ask questions. Especially did she entreat me to be with her at the crisis. I was, but his waking was quite natural. He did not ask for Miss Challoner; he only inquired how long he had been ill and whether Doris had received a letter during that time. She had not received one, a fact which seemed to disappoint him; but she carried it off so gaily (she is a wonderful girl, Mr. Sweetwater--the darling of all our hearts), saying that he must not be so egotistical as to think that the news of his illness had gone beyond Derby, that he soon recovered his spirits and became a very promising convalescent. That is all I know about the matter; little more, I take it, than you know yourself.”

Sweetwater nodded; he had expected nothing from the doctor, and was not disappointed at his failure. There were two strings to his bow, and the one proving valueless, he proceeded to test the other.

“You have mentioned Miss Scott, as the confidante--and only confidante of this unhappy pair,” said he. “Would it be possible--can you make it possible for me to see her?”

It was a daring proposition; he understood this at once from the doctor’s expression; and, fearing a hasty rebuff, he proceeded to supplement his request with a few added arguments, urged with such unexpected address and show of reason that Dr. Fenton’s aspect visibly softened and in the end he found himself ready to promise that he would do what he could to secure his visitor the interview he desired if he would come to the house the next day at the time of his own morning visit.

This was as much as the young detective could expect, and having expressed his thanks, he took his leave in anything but a discontented frame of mind. With so powerful an advocate as the doctor, he felt confident that he should soon be able to conquer this young girl’s reticence and learn all that was to be learned from any one but Mr. Brotherson himself. In the time which must elapse between that happy hour and the present, he would circulate and learn what he could about the prospective manager. But he soon found that he could not enter the Works without a permit, and this he was hardly in a position to demand; so he strolled about the village instead, and later wandered away into the forest.

Struck by the inviting aspect of a narrow and little used road opening from the highway shortly above the house where his interests were just then centred, he strolled into the heart of the spring woods till he came to a depression where a surprise awaited him, in the shape of a peculiar structure rising from its midst where it just fitted, or so nearly fitted that one could hardly walk about it without brushing the surrounding tree trunks. Of an oval shape, with its door facing the approach, it nestled there, a wonder to the eye and the occasion of considerable speculation to his inquiring mind. It had not been long built, as was shown very plainly by the fresh appearance of the unpainted boards of which it was constructed; and while it boasted of a door, as I’ve already said, there were no evidences visible of any other break in the smooth, neatly finished walls. A wooden ellipse with a roof but no windows; such it appeared and such it proved to be. A mystery to Sweetwater’s eyes, and like all mysteries, interesting. For what purpose had it been built and why this isolation? It was too flimsy for a reservoir and too expensive for the wild freak of a crank.

A nearer view increased his curiosity. In the projection of the roof over the curving sides he found fresh food for inquiry. As he examined it in the walk he made around the whole structure, he came to a place where something like a hinge became visible and further on another. The roof was not simply a roof; it was also a lid capable of being raised for the air and light which the lack of windows necessitated. This was an odd discovery indeed, giving to the uncanny structure the appearance of a huge box, the cover of which could be raised or lowered at pleasure. And again he asked himself for what it could be intended? What enterprise, even of the great Works, could demand a secrecy so absolute that such pains as these should be taken to shut out all possibility of a prying eye. Nothing in his experience supplied him with an answer.

He was still looking up at these hinges, with a glance which took in at the same time the nearness and extreme height of the trees by which this sylvan mystery was surrounded, when a sound from the road on the opposite side of the hollow brought his conjectures to a standstill and sent him hurrying on to the nearest point from which that road became visible.

A team was approaching. He could hear the heavy tread of horses working their laborious way through trees whose obstructing branches swished before and behind them. They were bringing in a load for this shed, whose uses he would consequently soon understand. Grateful for his good luck--for his was a curiosity which could not stand defeat--he took a few steps into the wood, and from the vantage point of a concealing cluster of bushes, fixed his eyes upon the spot where the road opened into the hollow.

Something blue moved there, and in another moment, to his great amazement, there stepped into view the spirited form of Doris Scott, who if he had given the matter a thought he would have supposed to be sitting just then by the bedside of her patient, a half mile back on the road.

She was dressed for the woods in a blue skirt and jacket and moved like a leader in front of a heavily laden wagon now coming to a standstill before the closely shut shed--if such we may call it.

“I have a key,” so she called out to the driver who had paused for orders. “When I swing the doors wide, drive straight in.”

Sweetwater took a look at the wagon. It was piled high with large wooden boxes on more than one of which he could see scrawled the words: O. Brotherson, Derby, Pa.

This explained her presence, but the boxes told nothing. They were of all sizes and shapes, and some of them so large that the assistance of another man was needed to handle them. Sweetwater was about to offer his services when a second man appeared from somewhere in the rear, and the detective’s attention being thus released from the load out of which he could make nothing, he allowed it to concentrate upon the young girl who had it in charge and who, for many reasons, was the one person of supreme importance to him.

She had swung open the two wide doors, and now stood waiting for horse and wagon to enter. With locks flying free--she wore no bonnet--she presented a picture of ever increasing interest to Sweetwater. Truly she was a very beautiful girl, buoyant, healthy and sweet; as unlike as possible his preconceived notions of Miss Challoner’s humble little protegee. Her brown hair of a rich chestnut hue, was in itself a wonder. On no head, even in the great city he had just left, had he seen such abundance, held in such modest restraint. Nature had been partial to this little working girl and given her the chevelure of a queen.

But this was nothing. No one saw this aureole when once the eye had rested on her features and caught the full nobility of their expression and the lurking sweetness underlying her every look. She herself made the charm and whether placed high or placed low, must ever attract the eye and afterwards lure the heart, by an individuality which hardly needed perfect features in which to express itself.

Young yet, but gifted, as girls of her class often are, with the nicest instincts and purest aspirations, she showed the elevation of her thoughts both in her glance and the poise with which she awaited events. Sweetwater watched her with admiration as she superintended the unloading of the wagon and the disposal of the various boxes on the floor within; but as nothing she said during the process was calculated to afford the least enlightenment in regard to their contents, he presently wearied of his inaction and turned back towards the highway, comforting himself with the reflection that in a few short hours he would have her to himself when nothing but a blunder on his part should hinder him from sounding her young mind and getting such answers to his questions as the affair in which he was so deeply interested, demanded.

XXVI. SWEETWATER RETURNS

“You see me again, Miss Scott. I hope that yesterday’s intrusion has not prejudiced you against me.”

“I have no prejudices,” was her simple but firm reply. “I am only hurried and very anxious. The doctor is with Mr. Brotherson just now; but he has several other equally sick patients to visit and I dare not keep him here too long.”

“Then you will welcome my abruptness. Miss Scott, here is a letter from Mr. Challoner. It will explain my position. As you will see, his only desire is to establish the fact that his daughter did not commit suicide. She was all he had in the world, and the thought that she could, for any reason, take her own life is unbearable to him. Indeed, he will not believe she did so, evidence or no evidence. May I ask if you agree with him? You have seen Miss Challoner, I believe. Do you think she was the woman to plunge a dagger in her heart in a place as public as a hotel reception room?”

“No, Mr. Sweetwater. I’m a poor working girl, with very little education and almost no knowledge of the world and such ladies as she. But something tells me for all that, that she was too nice to do this. I saw her once and it made me want to be quiet and kind and beautiful like her. I never shall think she did anything so horrible. Nor will Mr. Brotherson ever believe it. He could not and live. You see, I am talking to you as if you knew him,--the kind of man he is and just how he feels towards Miss Challoner. He is--” Her voice trailed off and a look, uncommon and almost elevated, illumined her face. “I will not tell you what he is; you will know, if you ever see him.”

“If the favourable opinion of a whole town makes a good fellow, he ought to be of the best,” returned Sweetwater, with his most honest smile. “I hear but one story of him wherever I turn.”

“There is but one story to tell,” she smiled, and her head drooped softly, but with no air of self-consciousness.

Sweetwater watched her for a moment, and then remarked: “I’m going to take one thing for granted; that you are as anxious as we are to clear Miss Challoner’s memory.”

“O yes, O yes.”

“More than that, that you are ready and eager to help us. Your very looks show that.”

“You are right; I would do anything to help you. But what can a girl like me do? Nothing; nothing. I know too little. Mr. Challoner must see that when you tell him I’m only the daughter of a foreman.”

“And a friend of Mr. Brotherson,” supplemented Sweetwater.

“Yes,” she smiled, “he would want me to say so. But that’s his goodness. I don’t deserve the honour.”

“His friend and therefore his confidante,” Sweetwater continued. “He has talked to you about Miss Challoner?”

“He had to. There was nobody else to whom he could talk; and then, I had seen her and could understand.”

“Where did you see her?”

“In New York. I was there once with father, who took me to see her. I think she had asked Mr. Brotherson to send his little friend to her hotel if ever we came to New York.”

“That was some time ago?”

“We were there in June.”

“And you have corresponded ever since with Miss Challoner?”

“She has been good enough to write, and I have ventured at times to answer her.”

The suspicion which might have come to some men found no harbour in Sweetwater’s mind. This young girl was beautiful, there was no denying that, beautiful in a somewhat startling and quite unusual way; but there was nothing in her bearing, nothing in Miss Challoner’s letters to indicate that she had been a cause for jealousy in the New York lady’s mind. He, therefore, ignored this possibility, pursuing his inquiry along the direct lines he had already laid out for himself. Smiling a little, but in a very earnest fashion, he pointed to the letter she still held and quietly said:

“Remember that I’m not speaking for myself, Miss Scott, when I seem a little too persistent and inquiring. You have corresponded with Miss Challoner; you have been told the fact of her secret engagement to Mr. Brotherson and you have been witness to his conduct and manner for the whole time he has been separated from her. Do you, when you think of it carefully, recall anything in the whole story of this romance which would throw light upon the cruel tragedy which has so unexpectedly ended it? Anything, Miss Scott? Straws show which way the stream flows.”

She was vehement, instantly vehement, in her disclaimer.

“I can answer at once,” said she, “because I have thought of nothing else for all these weeks. Here all was well. Mr. Brotherson was hopeful and happy and believed in her happiness and willingness to wait for his success. And this success was coming so fast! Oh, how can we ever tell him! How can we ever answer his questions even, or keep him satisfied and calm until he is strong enough to hear the truth. I’ve had to acknowledge already that I have had no letter from her for weeks. She never wrote to him directly, you know, and she never sent him messages, but he knew that a letter to me, was also a letter to him and I can see that he is troubled by this long silence, though he says I was right not to let her know of his illness and that I must continue to keep her in ignorance of it till he is quite well again and can write to her himself. It is hard to hear him talk like this and not look sad or frightened.”

Sweetwater remembered Miss Challoner’s last letter, and wished he had it here to give her. In default of this, he said:

“Perhaps this not hearing may act in the way of a preparation for the shock which must come to him sooner or later. Let us hope so, Miss Scott.”

Her eyes filled.

“Nothing can prepare him,” said she. Then added, with a yearning accent, “I wish I were older or had more experience. I should not feel so helpless. But the gratitude I owe him will give me strength when I need it most. Only I wish the suffering might be mine rather than his.”

Unconscious of any self-betrayal, she lifted her eyes, startling Sweetwater by the beauty of her look. “I don’t think I’m so sorry for Oswald Brotherson,” he murmured to himself as he left her. “He’s a more fortunate man than he knows, however deeply he may feel the loss of his first sweetheart.”

That evening the disappointed Sweetwater took the train for New York. He had failed to advance the case in hand one whit, yet the countenance he showed Mr. Gryce at their first interview was not a wholly gloomy one.

“Fifty dollars to the bad!” was his first laconic greeting. “All I have learned is comprised in these two statements. The second O. B. is a fine fellow; and not intentionally the cause of our tragedy. He does not even know about it. He’s down with the fever at present and they haven’t told him. When he’s better we may hear something; but I doubt even that.”

“Tell me about it.”

Sweetwater complied; and such is the unconsciousness with which we often encounter the pivotal circumstance upon which our future or the future of our most cherished undertaking hangs, he omitted from his story, the sole discovery which was of any real importance in the unravelling of the mystery in which they were so deeply concerned. He said nothing of his walk in the woods or of what he saw there.

“A meagre haul,” he remarked at the close.

“But that’s as it should be, if you and I are right in our impressions and the clew to this mystery lies here in the character and daring of Orlando Brotherson. That’s why I’m not down in the mouth. Which goes to show what a grip my prejudices have on me.”

“As prejudiced as a bulldog.”

“Exactly. By the way, what news of the gentleman I’ve just mentioned? Is he as serene in my absence as when under my eye?”

“More so; he looks like a man on the verge of triumph. But I fear the triumph he anticipates has nothing to do with our affairs. All his time and thought is taken up with his invention.”

“You discourage me, sir. And now to see Mr. Challoner. Small comfort can I carry him.”

XXVII. THE IMAGE OF DREAD

In the comfortable little sitting-room of the Scott cottage Doris stood, looking eagerly from the window which gave upon the road. Behind her on the other side of the room, could be seen through a partly opened door, a neatly spread bed, with a hand lying quietly on the patched coverlet. It was a strong looking hand which, even when quiescent, conveyed the idea of purpose and vitality. As Doris said, the fingers never curled up languidly, but always with the hint of a clench. Several weeks had passed since the departure of Sweetwater and the invalid was fast gaining strength. To-morrow, he would be up.

Was Doris thinking of him? Undoubtedly, for her eyes often flashed his way; but her main attention was fixed upon the road, though no one was in sight at the moment. Some one had passed for whose return she looked; some one whom, if she had been asked to describe, she would have called a tall, fine-looking man of middle age, of a cultivated appearance seldom seen in this small manufacturing town; seldom seen, possibly, in any town. He had glanced up at the window as he went by, in a manner too marked not to excite her curiosity. Would he look up again when he came back? She was waiting there to see. Why, she did not know. She was not used to indulging in petty suppositions of this kind; her life was too busy, her anxieties too keen. The great dread looming ever before her,--the dread of that hour when she must speak,--left her very little heart for anything dissociated with this coming event. For a girl of seventeen she was unusually thoughtful. Life had been hard in this little cottage since her mother died, or rather she had felt its responsibilities keenly.

Life itself could not be hard where Oswald Brotherson lived; neither to man, nor woman. The cheer of some natures possesses a divine faculty. If it can help no other way, it does so by the aid of its own light. Such was the character of this man’s temperament. The cottage was a happy place; only--she never fathomed the depths of that only. If in these days she essayed at times to do so, she gave full credit to the Dread which rose ever before her--rose like a ghost! She, Doris, led by inscrutable Fate, was waiting to hurt him who hurt nobody; whose mere presence was a blessing.

But her interest had been caught to-day, caught by this stranger, and when during her eager watch the small messenger from the Works came to the door with the usual daily supply of books and magazines for the patient, she stepped out on the porch to speak to him and to point out the gentleman who was now rapidly returning from his stroll up the road.

“Who is that, Johnny?” she asked. “You know everybody who comes to town. What is the name of the gentleman you see coming?”

The boy looked, searched his memory, not without some show of misgiving.

“A queer name,” he admitted at last. “I never heard the likes of it here before. Shally something. Shally--Shally--”

“Challoner?”

“Yes, that’s it. How could you guess? He’s from New York. Nobody knows why he’s here. Don’t seem to have no business.”

“Well, never mind. Run on, Johnny. And don’t forget to come earlier to-morrow; Mr. Brotherson gets tired waiting.”

“Does he? I’ll come quick then; quick as I can run.” And he sped off at a pace which promised well for the morrow.

Challoner! There was but one Challoner in the world for Doris Scott,--Edith’s father. Was this he? It must be, or why this haunting sense of something half remembered as she caught a glimpse of his face. Edith’s father! and he was approaching, approaching rapidly, on his way back to town. Would he stop this time? As the possibility struck her, she trembled and drew back, entering the house, but pausing in the hall with her ear turned to the road. She had not closed the door; something within--a hope or a dread--had prevented that. Would he take it as an invitation to come in? No, no; she was not ready for such an encounter yet. He might speak Edith’s name; Oswald might hear and--with a gasp she recognised the closeness of his step; heard it lag, almost halt just where the path to the house ran into the roadside. But it passed on. He was not going to force an interview yet. She could hear him retreating further and further away. The event was not for this day, thank God! She would have one night at least in which to prepare herself.

With a sense of relief so great that she realised, for one shocked moment, the full extent of her fears, she hastened back into the sitting-room, with her collection of books and pamphlets. A low voice greeted her. It came from the adjoining room.

“Doris, come here, sweet child. I want you.”

How she would have bounded joyously at the summons, had not that Dread raised its bony finger in every call from that dearly loved voice. As it was, her feet moved slowly, lingering at the sound. But they carried her to his side at last, and once there, she smiled.

“See what an armful,” she cried in joyous greeting, as she held out the bundle she had brought. “You will be amused all day. Only, do not tire yourself.”

“I do not want the papers, Doris; not yet. There’s something else which must come first. Doris, I have decided to let you write to her. I’m so much better now, she will not feel alarmed. I must--must get a word from her. I’m starving for it. I lie here and can think of nothing else. A message--one little message of six short words would set me on my feet again. So get your paper and pen, dear child, and write her one of your prettiest letters.”

Had he loved her, he would have perceived the chill which shook her whole body, as he spoke. But his first thought, his penetrating thought, was not for her and he saw only the answering glance, the patient smile. She had not expected him to see more. She knew that she was quite safe from the divining look; otherwise, he would have known her secret long ago.

“I’m ready,” said she. But she did not lay down her bundle. She was not ready for her task, poor child. She quailed before it. She quailed so much that she feared to stir lest he should see that she had no command over her movements.

The man who watched without seeing wondered that she stood so still and spoke so briefly. But only for a moment. He thought he understood her hesitation, and a look of great earnestness replaced his former one of grave decision.

“I know that in doing this I am going beyond my sacred compact with Miss Challoner,” he said. “I never thought of illness,--at least, of illness on my part. I never dreamt that I, always so well, always so full of life, could know such feebleness as this, feebleness which is all of the body, Doris, leaving the mind free to dream and long. Talk of her, child. Tell me all over again just how she looked and spoke that day you saw her in New York.”

“Would it not be better for me to write my letter first? Papa will be coming soon and Truda can never cook your bird as you like it.”

Surprised now by something not quite natural in her manner, he caught at her hand and held her as she was moving away.

“You are tired,” said he. “I’ve wearied you with my commission and complaints. Forgive me, dear child, and--”

“You are mistaken,” she interrupted softly. “I am not tired; I only wished to do the important thing first. Shall I get my desk? Do you really wish me to write?”

“Yes,” said he, softly dropping her hand. “I wish you to write. It will ensure me good sleep, and sleep will make me strong. A few words, Doris; just a few words.”

She nodded; turning quickly away to hide her tears. His smile had gone to her very soul. It was always a beautiful one, his chief personal attraction, but at this moment it seemed to concentrate within it the unspoken fervours and the boundless expectations of a great love, and she who was the aim and cause of all this sweetness lay in unresponsive silence in a distant tomb!

But Doris’ own smile was not lacking in encouragement and beauty when she came back a few minutes later and sat down by his side to write. His melted before it, leaving his eyes very earnest as he watched her bending figure and the hard-worked little hand at its unaccustomed task.

“I must give her daily exercises,” he decided within himself. “That look of pain shows how difficult this work is for her. It must be made easy at any cost to my time. Such beauty calls for accomplishment. I must not neglect so plain a duty.”

Meantime, she was struggling to find words in face of that great Dread. She had written Dear Miss Challoner and was staring in horror at the soulless words. Only her sense of duty upheld her. Gladly would she have torn the sheet in two and rushed away. How could she add sentences to this hollow phrase, the mere employment of which seemed a sacrilege. Dear Miss Challoner. Oh, she was dear, but--

Unconsciously the young head drooped, and the pen slid from her hand.

“I cannot,” she murmured, “I cannot think what to say.”

“Shall I help you?” came softly from the bed. “I’ll try and not forget that it is Doris writing.”

“If you will be so good,” she answered, with renewed courage. “I can put the words down if you will only find them for me.”

“Write then. ‘Dear Miss Challoner!”

“I have already written that.”

“Why do you shudder?”

“I’m cold. I’ve been cold all day. But never mind that, Mr. Brotherson. Tell me how to begin my letter.”

“This way. ‘I’ve not been able to answer your kind letter, because I have had to play nurse for some three or four weeks to a very fretful and exacting patient.’ Have you written that?”

“No,” said Doris, bending over her desk till her curls fell in a tangle over her white cheeks. “I do not like to,” she protested at last, with an attempt at naivete which seemed real enough to him.

“Well, leave out the fretful if you must, but keep in the exacting. I have been exacting, you know.”

Silence, broken only by the scratching of the stubborn, illy-directed pen.

“It’s down,” she whispered. She said, afterward, that it was like writing with a ghost looking over one’s shoulder.

“Then add, ‘Mr. Brotherson has had a slight attack of fever, but he is getting well fast, and will soon--, Do I run on too quickly?”

“No, no, I can follow.”

“But not without losing breath; eh, Doris?”

As he laughed, she smiled. There was a heroism in that smile, Oswald Brotherson, of which you knew nothing.

“You might speak a little more slowly,” she admitted.

Quietly he repeated the last phrase. “‘But he is getting well fast and will soon be ready to take up the management of the Works which was given him just before he was taken ill.’ That will show her that I am working up,” he brightly remarked as Doris carefully penned the last word. “Of myself you need say nothing more, unless--” he paused and his face took on a wistful look which Doris dared not meet; “unless--but no, no, she must think it has been only a passing indisposition. If she knew I had been really ill, she would suffer, and perhaps act imprudently or suffer and not dare to act at all, which might be sadder for her still. Leave it where it is and begin about yourself. Write a good deal about yourself, so that she will see that you are not worried and that all is well with us here. Cannot you do that without assistance? Surely you can tell her about that last piece of embroidery you showed me. She will be glad to hear--why, Doris!”

“Oh, Mr. Brotherson,” the poor child burst out, “you must let me cry! I’m so glad to see you better and interested in all sorts of things. These are not tears of grief. I--I--but I’m forgetting what the doctor told me. You are growing excited, and I was to see that you were calm, always calm. I will take my desk away. I will write the rest in the other room, while you look at the magazines.”

“But bring your letter back for me to seal. I want to see it in its envelope. Oh, Doris, you are a good little girl!”

She shook her head, and hastened to hide herself from him in the other room; and it was a long time before she came back with the letter folded and in its envelope. When she did, her face was composed and her manner natural. She had quite made up her mind what her duty was and how she was going to perform it.

“Here is the letter,” said she, laying it in his outstretched hand. Then she turned her back. She knew, with a woman’s unerring instinct why he wished to handle it before it went. She felt that kiss he folded away in it, in every fibre of her aroused and sympathetic heart, but the hardest part of the ordeal was over and her eyes beamed softly when she turned again to take it from his hand and affix the stamp.

“You will mail it yourself?” he asked. “I should like to have you put it into the box with your own hand.”

“I will put it in to-night, after supper,” she promised him.

His smile of contentment assured her that this trial of her courage and self-control was not without one blessed result. He would rest for several days in the pleasure of what he had done or thought he had done. She need not cringe before that image of Dread for two, three days at least. Meanwhile, he would grow strong in body, and she, perhaps, in spirit. Only one precaution she must take. No hint of Mr. Challoner’s presence in town must reach him. He must be guarded from a knowledge of that fact as certainly as from the more serious one which lay behind it.

XXVIII. I HOPE NEVER TO SEE THAT MAN

That this would be a difficult thing to do, Doris was soon to realise. Mr. Challoner continued to pass the house twice a day and the time finally came when he ventured up the walk.

Doris was in the window and saw him coming. She slipped softly out and intercepted him before he had stepped upon the porch. She had caught up her hat as she passed through the hall, and was fitting it to her head as he looked up and saw her.

“Miss Scott?” he asked.

“Yes, Mr. Challoner.”

“You know me?” he went on, one foot on the step and one still on the walk.

Before replying she closed the door behind her. Then as she noted his surprise she carefully explained:

“Mr. Brotherson, our boarder, is just recovering from typhoid. He is still weak and acutely susceptible to the least noise. I was afraid that our voices might disturb him. Do you mind walking a little way up the road? That is, if your visit was intended for me.”

Her flush, the beauty which must have struck even him, but more than all else her youth, seemed to reconcile him to this unconventional request. Bowing, he took his foot from the step, saying, as she joined him:

“Yes, you are the one I wanted to see; that is, to-day. Later, I hope to have the privilege of a conversation with Mr. Brotherson.”

She gave him one quick look, trembling so that he offered her his arm with a fatherly air.

“I see that you understand my errand here,” he proceeded, with a grave smile, meant as she knew for her encouragement. “I am glad, because we can go at once to the point. Miss Scott,” he continued in a voice from which he no longer strove to keep back the evidences of deep feeling, “I have the strongest interest in your patient that one man can have in another, where there is no personal acquaintanceship. You who have every reason to understand my reasons for this, will accept the statement, I hope, as frankly as it is made.”

She nodded. Her eyes were full of tears, but she did not hesitate to raise them. She had the greatest desire to see the face of the man who could speak like this to-day, and yet of whose pride and sense of superiority his daughter had stood in such awe, that she had laid a seal upon the impulses of her heart, and imposed such tasks and weary waiting upon her lover. Doris forgot, in meeting his softened glance and tender, almost wistful, expression, the changes which can be made by a great grief, and only wondered why her sweet benefactress had not taken him into her confidence and thus, possibly, averted the doom which Doris felt had in some way grown out of this secrecy.

“Why should she have feared the disapproval of this man?” she inwardly queried, as she cast him a confiding look which pleased him greatly, as his tone now showed.

“When I lost my daughter, I lost everything,” he declared, as they walked slowly up the road. “Nothing excites my interest, save that which once excited hers. I am told that the deepest interest of her life lay here. I am also told that it was an interest quite worthy of her. I expect to find it so. I hope with all my heart to find it so, and that is why I have come to this town and expect to linger till Mr. Brotherson has recovered sufficiently to see me. I hope that this will be agreeable to him. I hope that I am not presuming too much in cherishing these expectations.”

Doris turned her candid eyes upon him.

“I cannot tell; I do not know,” said she. “Nobody knows, not even the doctor, what effect the news we so dread to give him will have upon Mr. Brotherson. You will have to wait--we all shall have to wait the results of that revelation. It cannot be kept from him much longer. When I return, I shall shrink from his first look, in the fear of seeing it betray this dreadful knowledge. Yet I have a faithful woman there to keep every one out of his room.”

“You have had much to carry for one so young,” was Mr. Challoner’s sympathetic remark. “You must let me help you when that awful moment comes. I am at the hotel and shall stay there till Mr. Brotherson is pronounced quite well. I have no other duty now in life but to sustain him through his trouble and then, with what aid he can give, search out and find the cause of my daughter’s death which I will never admit without the fullest proof, to have been one of suicide.”

Doris trembled.

“It was not suicide,” she declared, vehemently. “I have always felt sure that it was not; but to-day I KNOW.”

Her hand fell clenched on her breast and her eyes gleamed strangely. Mr. Challoner was himself greatly startled. What had happened--what could have happened since yesterday that she should emphasise that now?

“I’ve not told any one,” she went on, as he stopped short in the road, in his anxiety to understand her. “But I will tell you. Only, not here, not with all these people driving past; most of whom know me. Come to the house later--this evening, after Mr. Brotherson’s room is closed for the night. I have a little sitting-room on the other side of the hall where we can talk without being heard. Would you object to doing that? Am I asking too much of you?”

“No, not at all,” he assured her. “Expect me at eight. Will that be too early?”

“No, no. Oh, how those people stared! Let us hasten back or they may connect your name with what we want kept secret.”

He smiled at her fears, but gave in to her humour; he would see her soon again and possibly learn something which would amply repay him, both for his trouble and his patience.

But when evening came and she turned to face him in that little sitting-room where he had quietly followed her, he was conscious of a change in her manner which forbade these high hopes. The gleam was gone from her eyes; the tremulous eagerness from her mobile and sensitive mouth. She had been thinking in the hours which had passed, and had lost the confidence of that one impetuous moment. Her greeting betrayed embarrassment and she hesitated painfully before she spoke.

“I don’t know what you will think of me,” she ventured at last, motioning to a chair but not sitting herself. “You have had time to think over what I said and probably expect something real,--something you could tell people. But it isn’t like that. It’s a feeling--a belief. I’m so sure--”

“Sure of what, Miss Scott?”

She gave a glance at the door before stepping up nearer. He had not taken the chair she preferred.

“Sure that I have seen the face of the man who murdered her. It was in a dream,” she whisperingly completed, her great eyes misty with awe.

“A dream, Miss Scott?” He tried to hide his disappointment.

“Yes; I knew that it would sound foolish to you; it sounds foolish to me. But listen, sir. Listen to what I have to tell and then you can judge. I was very much agitated yesterday. I had to write a letter at Mr. Brotherson’s dictation--a letter to her. You can understand my horror and the effort I made to hide my emotion. I was quite unnerved. I could not sleep till morning, and then--and then--I saw--I hope I can describe it.”

Grasping at a near-by chair, she leaned on it for support, closing her eyes to all but that inner vision. A breathless moment followed, then she murmured in strained monotonous tones:

“I see it again--just as I saw it in the early morning--but even more plainly, if that is possible. A hall--(I should call it a hall, though I don’t remember seeing any place like it before), with a little staircase at the side, up which there comes a man, who stops just at the top and looks intently my way. There is fierceness in his face--a look which means no good to anybody--and as his hand goes to his overcoat pocket, drawing out something which I cannot describe, but which he handles as if it were a pistol, I feel a horrible fear, and--and--” The child was staggering, and the hand which was free had sought her heart where it lay clenched, the knuckles showing white in the dim light.

Mr. Challoner watched her with dilated eyes, the spell under which she spoke falling in some degree upon him. Had she finished? Was this all? No; she is speaking again, but very low, almost in a whisper.

“There is music--a crash--but I plainly see his other hand approach the object he is holding. He takes something from the end--the object is pointed my way--I am looking into--into--what? I do not know. I cannot even see him now. The space where he stood is empty. Everything fades, and I wake with a loud cry in my ears and a sense of death here.” She had lifted her hand and struck at her heart, opening her eyes as she did so. “Yet it was not I who had been shot,” she added softly.

Mr. Challoner shuddered. This was like the reopening of his daughter’s grave. But he had entered upon the scene with a full appreciation of the ordeal awaiting him and he did not lose his calmness, or the control of his judgment.

“Be seated, Miss Scott,” he entreated, taking a chair himself. “You have described the spot and some of the circumstances of my daughter’s death as accurately as if you had been there. But you have doubtless read a full account of those details in the papers; possibly seen pictures which would make the place quite real to you. The mind is a strange storehouse. We do not always know what lies hidden within it.”

“That’s true,” she admitted. “But the man! I had never seen the man, or any picture of him, and his face was clearest of all. I should know it if I saw it anywhere. It is imprinted on my memory as plainly as yours. Oh, I hope never to see that man!”

Mr. Challoner sighed; he had really anticipated something from the interview. The disappointment was keen. A moment of expectation; the thrill which comes to us all under the shadow of the supernatural, and then--this! a young and imaginative girl’s dream, convincing to herself but supplying nothing which had not already been supplied both by the facts and his own imagination! A man had stood at the staircase, and this man had raised his arm. She said that she had seen something like a pistol in his hand, but his daughter had not been shot. This he thought it well to point out to her.

Leaning toward her that he might get her full attention, he waited till her eyes met his, then quietly asked:

“Have you ever named this man to yourself?”

She started and dropped her eyes.

“I do not dare to,” said she.

“Why?”

“Because I’ve read in the papers that the man who stood there had the same name as--”

“Tell me, Miss Scott.”

“As Mr. Brotherson’s brother.”

“But you do not think it was his brother?”

“I do not know.”

“You’ve never seen his brother?”

“Never.”

“Nor his picture?”

“No, Mr. Brotherson has none.”

“Aren’t they friends? Does he never mention Orlando?”

“Very, very rarely. But I’ve no reason to think they are not on good terms. I know they correspond.”

“Miss Scott?”

“Yes, Mr. Challoner.”

“You must not rely too much upon your dream.”

Her eyes flashed to his and then fell again.

“Dreams are not revelations; they are the reproduction of what already lies hidden in the mind. I can prove that your dream is such.”

“How?” She looked startled.

“You speak of seeing something being leveled at you which made you think of a pistol.”

“Yes, I was looking directly into it.”

“But my daughter was not shot. She died from a stab.”

Doris’ lovely face, with its tender lines and girlish curves, took on a strange look of conviction which deepened, rather than melted under his indulgent, but penetrating gaze.

“I know that you think so;--but my dream says no. I saw this object. It was pointed directly towards me--above all, I saw his face. It was the face of one whose finger is on the trigger and who means death; and I believe my dream.”

Well, it was useless to reason further. Gentle in all else, she was immovable so far as this idea was concerned and, seeing this, he let the matter go and prepared to take his leave.

She seemed to be quite ready for this. Anxiety about her patient had regained its place in her mind and her glance sped constantly toward the door. Taking her hand in his, he said some kind words, then crossed to the door and opened it. Instantly her finger flew to her lips and, obedient to its silent injunction, he took up his hat in silence, and was proceeding down the hall, when the bell rang, startling them both and causing him to step quickly back.

“Who is it?” she asked. “Father’s in and visitors seldom come so late.”

“Shall I see?”

She nodded, looking strangely troubled as the door swung open, revealing the tall, strong figure of a man facing them from the porch.

“A stranger,” formed itself upon her lips, and she was moving forward, when the man suddenly stepped into the glare of the light, and she stopped, with a murmur of dismay which pierced Mr. Challoner’s heart and prepared him for the words which now fell shudderingly from her lips:

“It is he! it is he! I said that I should know him wherever I saw him.” Then with a quiet turn towards the intruder, “Oh, why, why, did you come here!”

XXIX. DO YOU KNOW MY BROTHER

Her hands were thrust out to repel, her features were fixed; her beauty something wonderful. Orlando Brotherson, thus met, stared for a moment at the vision before him, then slowly and with effort withdrawing his gaze, he sought the face of Mr. Challoner with the first sign of open disturbance that gentleman had ever seen in him.

“Ah,” said he, “my welcome is readily understood. I see you far from home, sir.” And with an ironical bow he turned again to Doris, who had dropped her hands, but in whose cheeks the pallor still lingered in a way to check the easy flow of words with which he might have sought to carry off the situation. “Am I in Oswald Brotherson’s house?” he asked. “I was directed here. But possibly there may be some mistake.”

“It is here he lives,” said she; moving back automatically till she stood again by the threshold of the small room in which she had received Mr. Challoner. “Do you wish to see him to-night? If so, I fear it is impossible. He has been very ill and is not allowed to receive visits from strangers.”

“I am not a stranger,” announced the newcomer, with a smile few could see unmoved, it offered such a contrast to his stern and dominating figure. “I thought I heard some words of recognition which would prove your knowledge of that fact.”

She did not answer. Her lips had parted, but her thought or at least the expression of her thought hung suspended in the terror of this meeting for which she was not at all prepared. He seemed to note this terror, whether or not he understood its cause, and smiled again, as he added:

“Mr. Brotherson must have spoken of his brother Orlando. I am he, Miss Scott. Will you let me come in now?”

Her eyes sought those of Mr. Challoner, who quietly nodded. Immediately she stepped from before the door which her figure had guarded and, motioning him to enter, she begged Mr. Challoner, with an imploring look, to sustain her in the interview she saw before her. He had no desire for this encounter, especially as Mr. Brotherson’s glance in his direction had been anything but conciliatory. He was quite convinced that nothing was to be gained by it, but he could not resist her appeal, and followed them into the little room whose limited dimensions made the tall Orlando look bigger and stronger and more lordly in his self-confidence than ever.

“I am sorry it is so late,” she began, contemplating his intrusive figure with forced composure. “We have to be very quiet in the evenings so as not to disturb your brother’s first sleep which is of great importance to him.”

“Then I’m not to see him to-night?”

“I pray you to wait. He’s--he’s been a very sick man.”

“Dangerously so?”

“Yes.”

Orlando continued to regard her with a peculiar awakening gaze, showing, Mr. Challoner thought, more interest in her than in his brother, and when he spoke it was mechanically and as if in sole obedience to the proprieties of the occasion.

“I did not know he was ill till very lately. His last letter was a cheerful one, and I supposed that all was right till chance revealed the truth. I came on at once. I was intending to come anyway. I have business here, as you probably know, Miss Scott.”

She shook her head. “I know very little about business,” said she.

“My brother has not told you why he expected me?”

“He has not even told me that he expected you.”

“No?” The word was highly expressive; there was surprise in it and a touch of wonder, but more than all, satisfaction. “Oswald was always close-mouthed,” he declared. “It’s a good fault; I’m obliged to the boy.”

These last words were uttered with a lightness which imposed upon his two highly agitated hearers, causing Mr. Challoner to frown and Doris to shrink back in indignation at the man who could indulge in a sportive suggestion in presence of such fears, if not of such memories, as the situation evoked. But to one who knew the strong and self-contained man--to Sweetwater possibly, had he been present,--there was in this very attempt--in his quiet manner and in the strange and fitful flash of his ordinarily quick eye, that which showed he was labouring--and had been labouring almost from his first entrance, under an excitement of thought and feeling which in one of his powerfully organised nature must end and that soon in an outburst of mysterious passion which would carry everything before it. But he did not mean that it should happen here. He was too accustomed to self-command to forget himself in this presence. He would hold these rampant dogs in leash till the hour of solitude; then--a glittering smile twisted his lips as he continued to gaze, first at the girl who had just entered his life, and then at the man he had every reason to distrust, and with that firm restraint upon himself still in full force, remarked, with a courteous inclination:

“The hour is late for further conversation. I have a room at the hotel and will return to it at once. In the morning I hope to see my brother.”

He was going, Doris not knowing what to say, Mr. Challoner not desirous of detaining him, when there came the sound of a little tinkle from the other side of the hall, blanching the young girl’s cheeks and causing Orlando Brotherson’s brows to rise in peculiar satisfaction.

“My brother?” he asked.

“Yes,” came in faltering reply. “He has heard our voices; I must go to him.”

“Say that Orlando wishes him a good night,” smiled her heart’s enemy, with a bow of infinite grace.

She shuddered, and was hastening from the room when her glance fell on Mr. Challoner. He was pale and looked greatly disturbed. The prospect of being left alone with a man whom she had herself denounced to him as his daughter’s murderer, might prove a tax to his strength to which she had no right to subject him. Pausing with an appealing air, she made him a slight gesture which he at once understood.

“I will accompany you into the hall,” said he. “Then if anything is wrong, you have but to speak my name.”

But Orlando Brotherson, displeased by this move, took a step which brought him between the two.

“You can hear her from here if she chooses to speak. There’s a point to be settled between us before either of us leaves this house, and this opportunity is as good as another. Go to my brother, Miss Scott; we will await your return.”

A flash from the proud banker’s eye; but no demur, rather a gesture of consent. Doris, with a look of deep anxiety, sped away, and the two men stood face to face.

It was one of those moments which men recognise as memorable. What had the one to say or the other to hear, worthy of this preamble and the more than doubtful relation in which they stood each to each? Mr. Challoner had more time than he expected in which to wonder and gird himself for whatever suffering or shock awaited him. For, Orlando Brotherson, unlike his usual self, kept him waiting while he collected his own wits, which, strange to say, seemed to have vanished with the girl.

But the question finally came.

“Mr. Challoner, do you know my brother?”

“I have never seen him.”

“Do you know him? Does he know you?”

“Not at all. We are strangers.”

It was said honestly. They did not know each other. Mr. Challoner was quite correct in his statement.

But the other had his doubts. Why shouldn’t he have? The coincidence of finding this mourner if not avenger of Edith Challoner, in his own direct radius again, at a spot so distant, so obscure and so disconnected with any apparent business reason, was certainly startling enough unless the tie could be found in his brother’s name and close relationship to himself.

He, therefore, allowed himself to press the question:

“Men sometimes correspond who do not know each other. You knew that a Brotherson lived here?”

“Yes.”

“And hoped to learn something about me?”

“No; my interest was solely with your brother.”

“With my brother? With Oswald? What interest can you have in him apart from me? Oswald is--”

Suddenly a thought came--an unimaginable one; one with power to blanch even his hardy cheek and shake a soul unassailable by all small emotions.

“Oswald Brotherson!” he repeated; adding in unintelligible tones to himself--“O. B. The same initials! They are following up these initials. Poor Oswald.” Then aloud: “It hardly becomes me, perhaps, to question your motives in this attempt at making my brother’s acquaintance. I think I can guess them; but your labour will be wasted. Oswald’s interests do not extend beyond this town; they hardly extend to me. We are strangers, almost. You will learn nothing from him on the subject which naturally engrosses you.”

Mr. Challoner simply bowed. “I do not feel called upon,” said he, “to explain my reasons for wishing to know your brother. I will simply satisfy you upon a point which may well rouse your curiosity. You remember that--that my daughter’s last act was the writing of a letter to a little protegee of hers. Miss Scott was that protegee. In seeking her, I came upon him. Do you require me to say more on this subject? Wait till I have seen Mr. Oswald Brotherson and then perhaps I can do so.”

Receiving no answer to this, Mr. Challoner turned again to the man who was the object of his deepest suspicions, to find him still in the daze of that unimaginable thought, battling with it, scoffing at it, succumbing to it and all without a word. Mr. Challoner was without clew to this struggle, but the might of it and the mystery of it, drove him in extreme agitation from the room. Though proof was lacking, though proof might never come, nothing could ever alter his belief from this moment on that Doris was right in her estimate of this man’s guilt, however unsubstantial her reasoning might appear.

How far he might have been carried by this new conviction; whether he would have left the house without seeing Doris again or exchanging another word with the man whose very presence stifled him, he had no opportunity to show, for before he had taken another step, he encountered the hurrying figure of Doris, who was returning to her guests with an air of marked relief.

“He does not know that you are here,” she whispered to Mr. Challoner, as she passed him. Then, as she again confronted Orlando who hastened to dismiss his trouble at her approach, she said quite gaily, “Mr. Brotherson heard your voice, and is glad to know that you’re here. He bade me give you this key and say that you would have found things in better shape if he had been in condition to superintend the removal of the boxes to the place he had prepared for you before he became ill. I was the one to do that,” she added, controlling her aversion with manifest effort. “When Mr. Brotherson came to himself he asked if I had heard about any large boxes having arrived at the station shipped to his name. I said that several notices of such had come to the house. At which he requested me to see that they were carried at once to the strange looking shed he had had put up for him in the woods. I thought that they were for him, and I saw to the thing myself. Two or three others have come since and been taken to the same place. I think you will find nothing broken or disturbed; Mr. Brotherson’s wishes are usually respected.”

“That is fortunate for me,” was the courteous reply.

But Orlando Brotherson was not himself, not at all himself as he bowed a formal adieu and withdrew past the drawn-up sentinel-like figure of Mr. Challoner, without a motion on his part or on the part of that gentleman to lighten an exit which had something in it of doom and dread presage.

XXX. CHAOS

It is not difficult to understand Mr. Challoner’s feelings or even those of Doris at the moment of Mr. Brotherson’s departure. But why this change in Brotherson himself? Why this sense of something new and terrible rising between him and the suddenly beclouded future? Let us follow him to his lonely hotel-room and see if we can solve the puzzle.

But first, does he understand his own trouble? He does not seem to. For when, his hat thrown aside, he stops, erect and frowning under the flaring gas-jet he had no recollection of lighting, his first act was to lift his hand to his head in a gesture of surprising helplessness for him, while snatches of broken sentences fell from his lips among which could be heard:

“What has come to me? Undone in an hour! Doubly undone! First by a face and then by this thought which surely the devils have whispered to me. Mr. Challoner and Oswald! What is the link between them? Great God! what is the link? Not myself? Who then or what?”

Flinging himself into a chair, he buried his face in his hands. There were two demons to fight--the first in the guise of an angel. Doris! Unknown yesterday, unknown an hour ago; but now! Had there ever been a day--an hour--when she had not been as the very throb of his heart, the light of his eyes, and the crown of all imaginable blisses?

He was startled at his own emotion as he contemplated her image in his fancy and listened for the lost echo of the few words she had spoken--words so full of music when they referred to his brother, so hard and cold when she simply addressed himself.

This was no passing admiration of youth for a captivating woman. This was not even the love he had given to Edith Challoner. This was something springing full-born out of nothing! a force which, for the first time in his life, made him complaisant to the natural weaknesses of man! a dream and yet a reality strong enough to blot out the past, remake the present, change the aspect of all his hopes, and outline a new fate. He did not know himself. There was nothing in his whole history to give him an understanding of such feelings as these.

Can a man be seized as it were by the hair, and swung up on the slopes of paradise or down the steeps of hell--without a forewarning, without the chance even to say whether he wished such a cataclysm in his life or no?

He, Orlando Brotherson, had never thought much of love. Science had been his mistress; ambition his lode-star. Such feeling as he had acknowledged to had been for men--struggling men, men who were down-trodden and gasping in the narrow bounds of poverty and helplessness. Miss Challoner had roused--well, his pride. He could see that now. The might of this new emotion made plain many things he had passed by as useless, puerile, unworthy of a man of mental calibre and might. He had never loved Edith Challoner at any moment of their acquaintanceship, though he had been sincere in thinking that he did. Doris’ beauty, the hour he had just passed with her, had undeceived him.

Did he hail the experience? It was not likely to bring him joy. This young girl whose image floated in light before his eyes, would never love him. She loved his brother. He had heard their names mentioned together before he had been in town an hour. Oswald, the cleverest man, Doris, the most beautiful girl in Western Pennsylvania.

He had accepted the gossip then; he had not seen her and it all seemed very natural;--hardly worth a moment’s thought. But now!

And here, the other Demon sprang erect and grappled with him before the first one had let go his hold. Oswald and Challoner! The secret, unknown something which had softened that hard man’s eye when his brother’s name was mentioned! He had noted it and realised the mystery; a mystery before which sleep and rest must fly; a mystery to which he must now give his thought, whatever the cost, whatever the loss to those heavenly dreams the magic of which was so new it seemed to envelope him in the balm of Paradise. Away, then, image of light! Let the faculties thou hast dazed, act again. There is more than Fate’s caprice in Challoner’s interest in a man he never saw. Ghosts of old memories rise and demand a hearing. Facts, trivial and commonplace enough to have been lost in oblivion with the day which gave them birth, throng again from the past, proving that nought dies without a possibility of resurrection. Their power over this brooding man is shown by the force with which his fingers crush against his bowed forehead. Oswald and Challoner! Had he found the connecting link? Had it been--could it have been Edith? The preposterous is sometimes true; could it be true in this case?

He recalled the letters read to him as hers in that room of his in Brooklyn. He had hardly noted them then, he was so sure of their being forgeries, gotten up by the police to mislead him. Could they have been real, the effusions of her mind, the breathings of her heart, directed to an actual O. B., and that O. B., his brother? They had not been meant for him. He had read enough of the mawkish lines to be sure of that. None of the allusions fitted in with the facts of their mutual intercourse. But they might with those of another man; they might with the possible acts and affections of Oswald whose temperament was wholly different from his and who might have loved her, should it ever be shown that they had met and known each other. And this was not an impossibility. Oswald had been east, Oswald had even been in the Berkshires before himself. Oswald--Why it was Oswald who had suggested that he should go there--go where she still was. Why this second coincidence, if there were no tie--if the Challoners and Oswald were as far apart as they seemed and as conventionalities would naturally place them. Oswald was a sentimentalist, but very reserved about his sentimentalities. If these suppositions were true, he had had a sentimentalist’s motive for what he did. As Orlando realised this, he rose from his seat, aghast at the possibilities confronting him from this line of thought. Should he contemplate them? Risk his reason by dwelling on a supposition which might have no foundation in fact? No. His brain was too full--his purposes too important for any unnecessary strain to be put upon his faculties. No thinking! investigation first. Mr. Challoner should be able to settle this question. He would see him. Even at this late hour he ought to be able to find him in one of the rooms below; and, by the force of an irresistible demand, learn in a moment whether he had to do with a mere chimera of his own overwrought fancy, or with a fact which would call into play all the resources of an hitherto unconquered and undaunted nature.

There was a wood-fire burning in the sitting-room that night, and around it was grouped a number of men with their papers and pipes. Mr. Brotherson, entering, naturally looked that way for the man he was in search of, and was disappointed not to find him there; but on casting his glances elsewhere, he was relieved to see him standing in one of the windows overlooking the street. His back was to the room and he seemed to be lost in a fit of abstraction.

As Orlando crossed to him, he had time to observe how much whiter was this man’s head than in the last interview he had held with him in the coroner’s office in New York. But this evidence of grief in one with whom he had little, if anything, in common, neither touched his feelings nor deterred his step. The awakening of his heart to new and profound emotions had not softened him towards the sufferings of others if those others stood without the pale he had previously raised as the legitimate boundary of a just man’s sympathies.

He was, as I have said, an extraordinary specimen of manly vigour in body and in mind, and his presence in any company always attracted attention and roused, if it never satisfied, curiosity. Conversation accordingly ceased as he strode up to Mr. Challoner’s side, so that his words were quite audible as he addressed that gentleman with a somewhat curt:

“You see me again, Mr. Challoner. May I beg of you a few minutes’ further conversation? I will not detain you long.”

The grey head turned, and the many eyes watching showed surprise at the expression of dislike and repulsion with which this New York gentleman met the request thus emphatically urged. But his answer was courteous enough. If Mr. Brotherson knew a place where they would be left undisturbed, he would listen to him if he would be very brief.

For reply, the other pointed to a small room quite unoccupied which opened out of the one in which they then stood. Mr. Challoner bowed and in an other moment the door closed upon them, to the infinite disappointment of the men about the hearth.

“What do you wish to ask?” was Mr. Challoner’s immediate inquiry.

“This; I make no apologies and expect in answer nothing more than an unequivocal yes or no. You tell me that you have never met my brother. Can that be said of the other members of your family--of your deceased daughter, in fact?”

“No.”

“She was acquainted with Oswald Brotherson?”

“She was.”

“Without your knowledge?”

“Entirely so.”

“Corresponded with him?”

“Not exactly.”

“How, not exactly?”

“He wrote to her--occasionally. She wrote to him frequently--but she never sent her letters.”

“Ah!”

The exclamation was sharp, short and conveyed little. Yet with its escape, the whole scaffolding of this man’s hold upon life and his own fate went down in indistinguishable chaos. Mr. Challoner realised a sense of havoc, though the eyes bent upon his countenance had not wavered, nor the stalwart figure moved.

“I have read some of those letters,” the inventor finally acknowledged. “The police took great pains to place them under my eye, supposing them to have been meant for me because of the initials written on the wrapper. But they were meant for Oswald. You believe that now?”

“I know it.”

“And that is why I found you in the same house with him.”

“It is. Providence has robbed me of my daughter; if this brother of yours should prove to be the man I am led to expect, I shall ask him to take that place in my heart and life which was once hers.”

A quick recoil, a smothered exclamation on the part of the man he addressed. A barb had been hidden in this simple statement which had reached some deeply-hidden but vulnerable spot in Brotherson’s breast, which had never been pierced before. His eye which alone seemed alive, still rested piercingly upon that of Mr. Challoner, but its light was fast fading, and speedily became lost in a dimness in which the other seemed to see extinguished the last upflaring embers of those inner fires which feed the aspiring soul. It was a sight no man could see unmoved. Mr. Challoner turned sharply away, in dread of the abyss which the next word he uttered might open between them.

But Orlando Brotherson possessed resources of strength of which, possibly, he was not aware himself. When Mr. Challoner, still more affected by the silence than by the dread I have mentioned, turned to confront him again, it was to find his features composed and his glance clear. He had conquered all outward manifestation of the mysterious emotion which for an instant had laid his proud spirit low.

“You are considerate of my brother,” were the words with which he re-opened this painful conversation. “You will not find your confidence misplaced. Oswald is a straightforward fellow, of few faults.”

“I believe it. No man can be so universally beloved without some very substantial claims to regard. I am glad to see that your opinion, though given somewhat coldly, coincides with that of his friends.”

“I am not given to exaggeration,” was the even reply.

The flush which had come into Mr. Challoner’s cheek under the effort he had made to sustain with unflinching heroism this interview with the man he looked upon as his mortal enemy, slowly faded out till he looked the wraith of himself even to the unsympathetic eyes of Orlando Brotherson. A duty lay before him which would tax to its utmost extent his already greatly weakened self-control. Nothing which had yet passed showed that this man realised the fact that Oswald had been kept in ignorance of Miss Challoner’s death. If these brothers were to meet on the morrow, it must be with the full understanding that this especial topic was to be completely avoided. But in what words could he urge such a request upon this man? None suggested themselves, yet he had promised Miss Scott that he would ensure his silence in this regard, and it was with this difficulty and no other he had been struggling when Mr. Brotherson came upon him in the other room.

“You have still something to say,” suggested the latter, as an oppressive silence swallowed up that icy sentence I have already recorded.

“I have,” returned Mr. Challoner, regaining his courage under the exigencies of the moment. “Miss Scott is very anxious to have your promise that you will avoid all disagreeable topics with your brother till the doctor pronounces him strong enough to meet the trouble which awaits him.”

“You mean--”

“He is not as unhappy as we. He knows nothing of the affliction which has befallen him. He was taken ill--” The rest was almost inaudible.

But Orlando Brotherson had no difficulty in understanding him, and for the second time in this extraordinary interview, he gave evidences of agitation and of a mind shaken from its equipoise. But only for an instant. He did not shun the other’s gaze or even maintain more than a momentary silence. Indeed, he found strength to smile, in a curious, sardonic way, as he said:

“Do you think I should be apt to broach this subject with any one, let alone with him, whose connection with it I shall need days to realise? I’m not so given to gossip. Besides, he and I have other topics of interest. I have an invention ready with which I propose to experiment in a place he has already prepared for me. We can talk about that.”

The irony, the hardy self-possession with which this was said struck Mr. Challoner to the heart. Without a word he wheeled about towards the door. Without a word, Brotherson stood, watching him go till he saw his hand fall on the knob when he quietly prevented his exit by saying:

“Unhappy truths cannot be long concealed. How soon does the doctor think my brother can bear these inevitable revelations?”

“He said this morning that if his patient were as well to-morrow as his present condition gives promise of, he might be told in another week.”

Orlando bowed his appreciation of this fact, but added quickly:

“Who is to do the telling?”

“Doris. Nobody else could be trusted with so delicate a task.”

“I wish to be present.”

Mr. Challoner looked up, surprised at the feeling with which this request was charged.

“As his brother--his only remaining relative, I have that right. Do you think that Dor--that Miss Scott, can be trusted not to forestall that moment by any previous hint of what awaits him?”

“If she so promises. But will you exact this from her? It surely cannot be necessary for me to say that your presence will add infinitely to the difficulty of her task.”

“Yet it is a duty I cannot shirk. I will consult the doctor about it. I will make him see that I both understand and shall insist upon my rights in this matter. But you may tell Miss Doris that I will sit out of sight, and that I shall not obtrude myself unless my name is brought up in an undesirable way.”

The hand on the door-knob made a sudden movement.

“Mr. Brotherson, I can bear no more to-night. With your permission, I will leave this question to be settled by others.” And with a repetition of his former bow, the bereaved father withdrew.

Orlando watched him till the door closed, then he too dropped his mask.

But it was on again, when in a little while he passed through the sitting-room on his way upstairs.

No other day in his whole life had been like this to the hardy inventor; for in it both his heart and his conscience had been awakened, and up to this hour he had not really known that he possessed either.

XXXI. WHAT IS HE MAKING

Other boxes addressed to O. Brotherson had been received at the station, and carried to the mysterious shed in the woods; and now, with locked door and lifted top, the elder brother contemplated his stores and prepared himself for work.

He had been allowed a short interview with Oswald, and he had indulged himself in a few words with Doris. But he had left those memories behind with other and more serious matters. Nothing that could unnerve his hand or weaken his insight should enter this spot sacred to his great hope. Here genius reigned. Here he was himself wholly and without flaw;--a Titan with his grasp on a mechanical idea by means of which he would soon rule the world.

Not so happy were the other characters in this drama. Oswald’s thoughts, disturbed for a short time by the somewhat constrained interview he had held with his brother, had flown eastward again, in silent love and longing; while Doris, with a double dread now in her heart, went about her daily tasks, praying for strength to endure the horrors of this week, without betraying the anxieties secretly devouring her. And she was only seventeen and quite alone in her trouble. She must bear it all unassisted and smile, which she did with heavenly sweetness, when the magic threshold was passed and she stood in her invalid’s presence, overshadowed though it ever was by the great Dread.

And Mr. Challoner? Let those endless walks of his through the woods and over the hills tell his story if they can; or his rapidly whitening hair, and lagging step. He had been a strong man before his trouble, and had the stroke which laid him low been limited to one quick, sharp blow he might have risen above it after a while and been ready to encounter life again. But this long drawn out misery was proving too much for him. The sight of Brotherson, though they never really met, acted like acid upon a wound, and it was not till six days had passed and the dreaded Sunday was at hand, that he slept with any sense of rest or went his way about the town without that halting at the corners which betrayed his perpetual apprehension of a most undesirable encounter.

The reason for this change will be apparent in the short conversation he held with a man he had come upon one evening in the small park just beyond the workmen’s dwellings.

“You see I am here,” was the stranger’s low greeting.

“Thank God,” was Mr. Challoner’s reply. “I could not have faced to-morrow alone and I doubt if Miss Scott could have found the requisite courage. Does she know that you are here?”

“I stopped at her door.”

“Was that safe?”

“I think so. Mr. Brotherson--the Brooklyn one,--is up in his shed. He sleeps there now, I am told, and soundly too I’ve no doubt.”

“What is he making?”

“What half the inventors on both sides of the water are engaged upon just now. A monoplane, or a biplane, or some machine for carrying men through the air. I know, for I helped him with it. But you’ll find that if he succeeds in this undertaking, and I believe he will, nothing short of fame awaits him. His invention has startling points. But I’m not going to give them away. I’ll be true enough to him for that. As an inventor he has my sympathy; but--Well, we will see what we shall see, to-morrow. You say that he is bound to be present when Miss Scott relates her tragic story. He won’t be the only unseen listener. I’ve made my own arrangements with Miss Scott. If he feels the need of watching her and his brother Oswald, I feel the need of watching him.”

“You take a burden of intolerable weight from my shoulders. Now I shall feel easier about that interview. But I should like to ask you this: Do you feel justified in this continued surveillance of a man who has so frequently, and with such evident sincerity, declared his innocence?”

“I do that. If he’s as guiltless as he says he is, my watchfulness won’t hurt him. If he’s not, then, Mr. Challoner, I’ve but one duty; to match his strength with my patience. That man is the one great mystery of the day, and mysteries call for solution. At least, that’s the way a detective looks at it.”

“May Heaven help your efforts!”

“I shall need its assistance,” was the dry rejoinder. Sweetwater was by no means blind to the difficulties awaiting him.

XXXII. TELL ME, TELL IT ALL

The day was a grey one, the first of the kind in weeks. As Doris stepped into the room where Oswald sat, she felt how much a ray of sunshine would have encouraged her and yet how truly these leaden skies and this dismal atmosphere expressed the gloom which soon must fall upon this hopeful, smiling man.

He smiled because any man must smile at the entrance of so lovely a woman, but it was an abstracted smile, and Doris, seeing it, felt her courage falter for a moment, though her steps did not, nor her steady compassionate gaze. Advancing slowly, and not answering because she did not hear some casual remark of his, she took her stand by his side and then slowly and with her eyes on his face, sank down upon her knees, still without speaking, almost without breathing.

His astonishment was evident, for her air was strange and full of presage,--as, indeed, she had meant it to be. But he remained as silent as she, only reached out his emaciated hand and, laying it on her head, smiled again but this time far from abstractedly. Then, as he saw her cheeks pale in terror of the task before her, he ventured to ask gently:

“What is the matter, child? So weary, eh? Nothing worse than that, I hope.”

“Are you quite strong this morning? Strong enough to listen to my troubles; strong enough to bear your own if God sees fit to send them?” came hesitatingly from her lips as she watched the effect of each word, in breathless anxiety.

“Troubles? There can be but one trouble for me,” was his unexpected reply. “That I do not fear--will not fear in my hour of happy recovery. So long as Edith is well--Doris! Doris! You alarm me. Edith is not ill;--not ill?”

The poor child could not answer save with her sympathetic look and halting, tremulous breath; and these signs, he would not, could not read, his own words had made such an echo in his ears.

“Ill! I cannot imagine Edith ill. I always see her in my thoughts, as I saw her on that day of our first meeting; a perfect, animated woman with the joyous look of a glad, harmonious nature. Nothing has ever clouded that vision. If she were ill I would have known it. We are so truly one that--Doris, Doris, you do not speak. You know the depth of my love, the terror of my thoughts. Is Edith ill?”

The eyes gazing wildly into his, slowly left his face and raised themselves aloft, with a sublime look. Would he understand? Yes, he understood, and the cry which rang from his lips stopped for a moment the beating of more than one heart in that little cottage.

“Dead!” he shrieked out, and fell back fainting in his chair, his lips still murmuring in semi-unconsciousness, “Dead! dead!”

Doris sprang to her feet, thinking of nothing but his wavering, slipping life till she saw his breath return, his eyes refill with light. Then the horror of what was yet to come--the answer which must be given to the how she saw trembling on his lips, caused her to sink again upon her knees in an unconscious appeal for strength. If that one sad revelation had been all!

But the rest must be told; his brother exacted it and so did the situation. Further waiting, further hiding of the truth would be insupportable after this. But oh, the bitterness of it! No wonder that she turned away from those frenzied, wildly-demanding eyes.

“Doris?”

She trembled and looked behind her. She had not recognised his voice. Had another entered? Had his brother dared--No, they were alone; seemingly so, that is. She knew,--no one better--that they were not really alone, that witnesses were within hearing, if not within sight.

“Doris,” he urged again, and this time she turned in his direction and gazed, aghast. If the voice were strange, what of the face which now confronted her. The ravages of sickness had been marked, but they were nothing to those made in an instant by a blasting grief. She was startled, although expecting much, and could only press his hands while she waited for the question he was gathering strength to utter. It was simple when it came; just two words:

“How long?”

She answered them as simply.

“Just as long as you have been ill,” said she; then, with no attempt to break the inevitable shock, she went on: “Miss Challoner was struck dead and you were taken down with typhoid on the self-same day.”

“Struck dead! Why do you use that word, struck? Struck dead! she, a young woman. Oh, Doris, an accident! My darling has been killed in an accident!”

“They do not call it accident. They call it what it never was. What it never was,” she insisted, pressing him back with frightened hands, as he strove to rise. “Miss Challoner was--” How nearly the word shot had left her lips. How fiercely above all else, in that harrowing moment had risen the desire to fling the accusation of that word into the ears of him who listened from his secret hiding-place. But she refrained out of compassion for the man she loved, and declared instead, “Miss Challoner died from a wound; how given, why given, no one knows. I had rather have died myself than have to tell you this. Oh, Mr. Brotherson, speak, sob, do anything but--”

She started back, dropping his hands as she did so. With quick intuition she saw that he must be left to himself if he were to meet this blow without succumbing. The body must have freedom if the spirit would not go mad. Conscious, or perhaps not conscious, of his release from her restraining hand, albeit profiting by it, he staggered to his feet, murmuring that word of doom: “Wound! wound! my darling died of a wound! What kind of a wound?” he suddenly thundered out. “I cannot understand what you mean by wound. Make it clear to me. Make it clear to me at once. If I must bear this grief, let me know its whole depth. Leave nothing to my imagination or I cannot answer for myself. Tell it all, Doris.”

And Doris told him:

“She was on the mezzanine floor of the hotel where she lives. She was seemingly happy and had been writing a letter--a letter to me which they never forwarded. There was no one else by but some strangers--good people whom one must believe. She was crossing the floor when suddenly she threw up her hands and fell. A thin, narrow paper-cutter was in her grasp; and it flew into the lobby. Some say she struck herself with that cutter; for when they picked her up they found a wound in her breast which that cutter might have made.”

“Edith? never!”

The words were chokingly said; he was swaying, almost falling, but he steadied himself.

“Who says that?” he asked.

“It was the coroner’s verdict.”

“And she died that way--died?”

“Immediately.”

“After writing to you?”

“Yes.”

“What was in that letter?”

“Nothing of threat, they say. Only just cheer and expressions of hope. Just like the others, Mr. Brotherson.”

“And they accuse her of taking her own life? Their verdict is a lie. They did not know her.”

Then, after some moments of wild and confused feeling, he declared, with a desperate effort at self-control: “You said that some believe this. Then there must be others who do not. What do they say?”

“Nothing. They simply feel as you do. They see no reason for the act and no evidence of her having meditated it. Her father and her friend insist besides, that she was incapable of such a horror. The mystery of it is killing us all; me above others, for I’ve had to show you a cheerful face, with my brain reeling and my heart like lead in my bosom.”

She held out her hands. She tried to draw his attention to herself; not from any sentiment of egotism, but to break, if she could, the strain of these insupportable horrors where so short a time before Hope sang and Life revelled in re-awakened joys.

Perhaps some faint realisation of this reached him, for presently he caught her by the hands and bowed his head upon her shoulder and finally let her seat him again, before he said:

“Do they know of--of my interest in this?”

“Yes; they know about the two O. B.s.”

“The two--” He was on his feet again, but only for a moment; his weakness was greater than his will power.

“Orlando and Oswald Brotherson,” she explained, in answer to his broken appeal. “Your brother wrote letters to her as well as you, and signed them just as you did, with his initials only. These letters were found in her desk, and he was supposed, for a time, to have been the author of all that were so signed. But they found out the difference after awhile. Yours were easily recognised after they learned there was another O. B. who loved her.”

The words were plain enough, but the stricken listener did not take them in. They carried no meaning to him. How should they? The very idea she sought to impress upon him by this seemingly careless allusion was an incredible one. She found it her dreadful task to tell him the hard, bare truth.

“Your brother,” said she, “was devoted to Miss Challoner, too. He even wanted to marry her. I cannot keep back this fact. It is known everywhere, and by everybody but you.”

“Orlando?” His lips took an ironical curve, as he uttered the word. This was a young girl’s imaginative fancy to him. “Why Orlando never knew her, never saw her, never--”

“He met her at Lenox.”

The name produced its effect. He stared, made an effort to think, repeated Lenox over to himself; then suddenly lost his hold upon the idea which that word suggested, struggled again for it, seized it in an instant of madness and shouted out:

“Yes, yes, I remember. I sent him there--” and paused, his mind blank again.

Poor Doris, frightened to her very soul, looked blindly about for help; but she did not quit his side; she did not dare to, for his lips had reopened; the continuity of his thoughts had returned; he was going to speak.

“I sent him there.” The words came in a sort of shout. “I was so hungry to hear of her and I thought he might mention her in his letter. Insane! Insane! He saw her and--What’s that you said about his loving her? He couldn’t have loved her; he’s not of the loving sort. They’ve deceived you with strange tales. They’ve deceived the whole world with fancies and mad dreams. He may have admired her, but loved her,--no! or if he had, he would have respected my claims.”

“He did not know them.”

A laugh; a laugh which paled Doris’ cheek; then his tones grew even again, memory came back and he muttered faintly:

“That is true. I said nothing to him. He had the right to court her--and he did, you say; wrote to her; imposed himself upon her, drove her mad with importunities she was forced to rebuke; and--and what else? There is something else. Tell me; I will know it all.”

He was standing now, his feebleness all gone, passion in every lineament and his eye alive and feverish, with emotion. “Tell me,” he repeated, with unrestrained vehemence. “Tell me all. Kill me with sorrow but save me from being unjust.”

“He wrote her a letter; it frightened her. He followed it up by a visit--”

Doris paused; the sentence hung suspended. She had heard a step--a hand on the door.

Orlando had entered the room.

XXXIII. ALONE

Oswald had heard nothing, seen nothing. But he took note of Doris’ silence, and turning towards her in frenzy saw what had happened, and so was in a measure prepared for the stern, short sentence which now rang through the room:

“Wait, Miss Scott! you tell the story badly. Let him listen to me. From my mouth only shall he hear the stern and seemingly unnatural part I played in this family tragedy.”

The face of Oswald hardened. Those pliant features--beloved for their gracious kindliness--set themselves in lines which altered them almost beyond recognition; but his voice was not without some of its natural sweetness, as, after a long and hollow look at the other’s composed countenance, he abruptly exclaimed:

“Speak! I am bound to listen; you are my brother.”

Orlando turned towards Doris. She was slipping away.

“Don’t go,” said he.

But she was gone.

Slowly he turned back.

Oswald raised his hand and checked the words with which he would have begun his story.

“Never mind the beginnings,” said he. “Doris has told all that. You saw Miss Challoner in Lenox--admired her--offered yourself to her and afterwards wrote her a threatening letter because she rejected you.”

“It is true. Other men have followed just such unworthy impulses--and been ashamed and sorry afterwards. I was sorry and I was ashamed, and as soon as my first anger was over went to tell her so. But she mistook my purpose and--”

“And what?”

Orlando hesitated. Even his iron nature trembled before the misery he saw--a misery he was destined to augment rather than soothe. With pains altogether out of keeping with his character, he sought in the recesses of his darkened mind for words less bitter and less abrupt than those which sprang involuntarily to his lips. But he did not find them. Though he pitied his brother and wished to show that he did, nothing but the stern language suitable to the stern fact he wished to impart, would leave his lips.

“And ended the pitiful struggle of the moment with one quick, unpremeditated blow,” was what he said. “There is no other explanation possible for this act, Oswald. Bitter as it is for me to acknowledge it, I am thus far guilty of this beloved woman’s death. But, as God hears me, from the moment I first saw her, to the moment I saw her last, I did not know, nor did I for a moment dream that she was anything to you or to any other man of my stamp and station. I thought she despised my country birth, my mechanical attempts, my lack of aristocratic pretensions and traditions.”

“Edith?”

“Now that I know she had other reasons for her contempt--that the words she wrote were in rebuke to the brother rather than to the man, I feel my guilt and deplore my anger. I cannot say more. I should but insult your grief by any lengthy expressions of regret and sorrow.”

A groan of intolerable anguish from the sick man’s lips, and then the quick thrust of his re-awakened intelligence rising superior to the overthrow of all his hopes.

“For a woman of Edith’s principle to seek death in a moment of desperation, the provocation must have been very great. Tell me if I’m to hate you through life--yea through all eternity--or if I must seek in some unimaginable failure of my own character or conduct the cause of her intolerable despair.”

“Oswald!” The tone was controlling, and yet that of one strong man to another. “Is it for us to read the heart of any woman, least of all of a woman of her susceptibilities and keen inner life? The wish to end all comes to some natures like a lightning flash from a clear sky. It comes, it goes, often without leaving a sign. But if a weapon chances to be near--(here it was in hand)--then death follows the impulse which, given an instant of thought, would have vanished in a back sweep of other emotions. Chance was the real accessory to this death by suicide. Oswald, let us realise it as such and accept our sorrow as a mutual burden and turn to what remains to us of life and labour. Work is grief’s only consolation. Then let us work.”

But of all this Oswald had caught but the one word.

“Chance?” he repeated. “Orlando, I believe in God.”

“Then seek your comfort there. I find it in harnessing the winds; in forcing the powers of nature to do my bidding.”

The other did not speak, and the silence grew heavy. It was broken, when it was broken, by a cry from Oswald:

“No more,” said he, “no more.” Then, in a yearning accent, “Send Doris to me.”

Orlando started. This name coming so close upon that word comfort produced a strange effect upon him. But another look at Oswald and he was ready to do his bidding. The bitter ordeal was over; let him have his solace if it was in her power to give it to him.

Orlando, upon leaving his brother’s room, did not stop to deliver that brother’s message directly to Doris; he left this for Truda to do, and retired immediately to his hangar in the woods. Locking himself in, he slightly raised the roof and then sat down before the car which was rapidly taking on shape and assuming that individuality and appearance of sentient life which hitherto he had only seen in dreams. But his eye, which had never failed to kindle at this sight before, shone dully in the semi-gloom. The air-car could wait; he would first have his hour in this solitude of his own making. The gaze he dreaded, the words from which he shrank could not penetrate here. He might even shout her name aloud, and only these windowless walls would respond. He was alone with his past, his present and his future.

Alone!

He needed to be. The strongest must pause when the precipice yawns before him. The gulf can be spanned; he feels himself forceful enough for that; but his eyes must take their measurement of it first; he must know its depths and possible dangers. Only a fool would ignore these steeps of jagged rock; and he was no fool, only a man to whom the unexpected had happened, a man who had seen his way clear to the horizon and then had come up against this! Love, when he thought such folly dead! Remorse, when Glory called for the quiet mind and heart!

He recognised its mordant fang, and knew that its ravages, though only just begun, would last his lifetime. Nothing could stop them now, nothing, nothing. And he laughed, as the thought went home; laughed at the irony of fate and its inexorableness; laughed at his own defeat and his nearness to a barred Paradise. Oswald loved Edith, loved her yet, with a flame time would take long to quench. Doris loved Oswald and he Doris; and not one of them would ever attain the delights each was so fitted to enjoy. Why shouldn’t he laugh? What is left to man but mockery when all props fall? Disappointment was the universal lot; and it should go merrily with him if he must take his turn at it. But here the strong spirit of the man re-asserted itself; it should be but a turn. A man’s joys are not bounded by his loves or even by the satisfaction of a perfectly untrammelled mind. Performance makes a world of its own for the capable and the strong, and this was still left to him. He, Orlando Brotherson, despair while his great work lay unfinished! That would be to lay stress on the inevitable pains and fears of commonplace humanity. He was not of that ilk. Intellect was his god; ambition his motive power. What would this casual blight upon his supreme contentment be to him, when with the wings of his air-car spread, he should spurn the earth and soar into the heaven of fame simultaneously with his flight into the open.

He could wait for that hour. He had measured the gulf before him and found it passable. Henceforth no looking back.

Rising, he stood for a moment gazing, with an alert eye now, upon such sections of his car as had not yet been fitted into their places; then he bent forward to his work, and soon the lips which had uttered that sardonic laugh a few minutes before, parted in gentler fashion, and song took the place of curses--a ballad of love and fondest truth. But Orlando never knew what he sang. He had the gift and used it.

Would his tones, however, have rung out with quite so mellow a sweetness had he seen the restless figure even then circling his retreat with eyes darting accusation and arms lifted towards him in wild but impotent threat?

Yes, I think they would; for he knew that the man who thus expressed his helplessness along with his convictions, was no nearer the end he had set himself to attain than on the day he first betrayed his suspicions.

XXXIV. THE HUT CHANGES ITS NAME

That night Oswald was taken very ill. For three days his life hung in the balance, then youth and healthy living triumphed over shock and bereavement, and he came slowly back to his sad and crippled existence.

He had been conscious for a week or more of his surroundings, and of his bitter sorrows as well, when one morning he asked Doris whose face it was he had seen bending over him so often during the last week: “Have you a new doctor? A man with white hair and a comforting smile? Or have I dreamed this face? I have had so many fancies this might easily be one of them.”

“No, it is not a fancy,” was the quiet reply. “Nor is it the face of a doctor. It is that of friend. One whose heart is bound up in your recovery; one for whom you must live, Mr. Brotherson.”

“I don’t know him, Doris. It’s a strange face to me. And yet, it’s not altogether strange. Who is this man and why should he care for me so deeply?”

“Because you share one love and one grief. It is Edith’s father whom you see at your bedside. He has helped to nurse you ever since you came down this second time.”

“Edith’s father! Doris, it cannot be. Edith’s father!”

“Yes, Mr. Challoner has been in Derby for the last two weeks. He has only one interest now; to see you well again.”

“Why?”

Doris caught the note of pain, if not suspicion, in this query, and smiled as she asked in turn:

“Shall he answer that question himself? He is waiting to come in. Not to talk. You need not fear his talking. He’s as quiet as any man I ever saw.”

The sick man closed his eyes, and Doris watching, saw the flush rise to his emaciated cheek, then slowly fade away again to a pallor that frightened her. Had she injured where she would heal? Had she pressed too suddenly and too hard on the ever gaping wound in her invalid’s breast? She gasped in terror at the thought, then she faintly smiled, for his eyes had opened again and showed a calm determination as he said:

“I should like to see him. I should like him to answer the question I have just put you. I should rest easier and get well faster--or not get well at all.”

This latter he half whispered, and Doris, tripping from the room may not have heard it, for her face showed no further shadow as she ushered in Mr. Challoner, and closed the door behind him. She had looked forward to this moment for days. To Oswald, however, it was an unexpected excitement and his voice trembled with something more than physical weakness as he greeted his visitor and thanked him for his attentions.

“Doris says that you have shown me this kindness from the desire you have to see me well again Mr. Challoner. Is this true?”

“Very true. I cannot emphasise the fact too strongly.”

Oswald’s eyes met his again, this time with great earnestness.

“You must have serious reasons for feeling so--reasons which I do not quite understand. May I ask why you place such value upon a life which, if ever useful to itself or others, has lost and lost forever, the one delight which gave it meaning?”

It was for Mr. Challoner’s voice to tremble now, as reaching out his hand, he declared, with unmistakable feeling:

“I have no son. I have no interest left in life, outside this room and the possibilities it contains for me. Your attachment to my daughter has created a bond between us, Mr. Brotherson, which I sincerely hope to see recognised by you.”

Startled and deeply moved, the young man stretched out a shaking hand towards his visitor, with the feeble but exulting cry:

“Then you do not blame me for her wretched and mysterious death. You hold me guiltless of the misery which nerved her despairing arm?”

“Quite guiltless.”

Oswald’s wan and pinched features took on a beautiful expression and Mr. Challoner no longer wondered at his daughter’s choice.

“Thank God!” fell from the sick man’s lips, and then there was a silence during which their two hands met.

It was some minutes before either spoke and then it was Oswald who said:

“I must confide to you certain facts. I honoured your daughter and realised her position fully. Our plight was never made in words, nor should I have presumed to advance any claim to her hand if I had not made good my expectations, Mr. Challoner. I meant to win both her regard and yours by acts, not words. I felt that I had a great deal to do and I was prepared to work and wait. I loved her--” He turned away his head and the silence which filled up the gap, united those two hearts, as the old and young are seldom united.

But when a little later, Mr. Challoner rejoined Doris, in her little sitting-room, he nevertheless showed a perplexity she had hoped to see removed by this understanding with the younger Brotherson.

The cause became apparent as soon as he spoke.

“These brothers hold by each other,” said he. “Oswald will hear nothing against Orlando. He says that he has redeemed his fault. He does not even protest that his brother’s word is to be believed in this matter. He does not seem to think that necessary. He evidently regards Orlando’s personality as speaking as truly and satisfactorily for itself, as his own does. And I dared not undeceive him.”

“He does not know all our reasons for distrust. He has heard nothing about the poor washerwoman.”

“No, and he must not,--not for weeks. He has borne all that he can.”

“His confidence in his older brother is sublime. I do not share it; but I cannot help but respect him for it.”

It was warmly said, and Mr. Challoner could not forbear casting an anxious look at her upturned face. What he saw there made him turn away with a sigh.

“This confidence has for me a very unhappy side,” he remarked. “It shows me Oswald’s thought. He who loved her best, accepts the cruel verdict of an unreasoning public.”

Doris’ large eyes burned with a weird light upon his face.

“He has not had my dream,” she murmured, with all the quiet of an unmoved conviction.

Yet as the days went by, even her manner changed towards the busy inventor. It was hardly possible for it not to. The high stand he took; the regard accorded him on every side; his talent; his conversation, which was an education in itself, and, above all, his absorption in a work daily advancing towards completion, removed him so insensibly and yet so decidedly, from the hideous past of tragedy with which his name, if not his honour, was associated, that, unconsciously to herself, she gradually lost her icy air of repulsion and lent him a more or less attentive ear, when he chose to join their small company of an evening. The result was that he turned so bright a side upon her that toleration merged from day to day into admiration and memory lost itself in anticipation of the event which was to prove him a man of men, if not one of the world’s greatest mechanical geniuses.

Meantime, Oswald was steadily improving in health, if not in spirits. He had taken his first walk without any unfavourable results, and Orlando decided from this that the time had come for an explanation of his device and his requirements in regard to it. Seated together in Oswald’s room, he broached the subject thus:

“Oswald, what is your idea about what I’m making up there?”

“That it will be a success.”

“I know; but its character, its use? What do you think it is?”

“I’ve an idea; but my idea don’t fit the conditions.”

“How’s that?”

“The shed is too closely hemmed in. You haven’t room--”

“For what?”

“To start an aeroplane.”

“Yet it is certainly a device for flying.”

“I supposed so; but--”

“It is an air-car with a new and valuable idea--the idea for which the whole world has been seeking ever since the first aeroplane found its way up from the earth. My car needs no room to start in save that which it occupies. If it did, it would be but the modification of a hundred others.”

“Orlando!”

As Oswald thus gave expression to his surprise, their two faces were a study: the fire of genius in the one; the light of sympathetic understanding in the other.

“If this car, now within three days of its completion,” Orlando proceeded, “does not rise from the oval of my hangar like a bird from its nest, and after a wide and circling flight descend again into the self same spot without any swerving from its direct course, then have I failed in my endeavour and must take a back seat with the rest. But it will not fail. I’m certain of success, Oswald. All I want just now is a sympathetic helper--you, for instance; someone who will aid me with the final fittings and hold his peace to all eternity if the impossible occurs and the thing proves a failure.”

“Have you such pride as that?”

“Precisely.”

“So much that you cannot face failure?”

“Not when attached to my name. You can see how I feel about that by the secrecy I have worked under. No other person living knows what I have just communicated to you. Every part shipped here came from different manufacturing firms; sometimes a part of a part was all I allowed to be made in any one place. My fame, like my ship, must rise with one bound into the air, or it must never rise at all. It was not made for petty accomplishment, or the slow plodding of commonplace minds. I must startle, or remain obscure. That is why I chose this place for my venture, and you for my helper and associate.”

“You want me to ascend with you?”

“Exactly.”

“At the end of three days?”

“Yes.”

“Orlando, I cannot.”

“You cannot? Not strong enough yet? I’ll wait then,--three days more.”

“The time’s too short. A month is scarcely sufficient. It would be folly, such as you never show, to trust a nerve so undermined as mine till time has restored its power. For an enterprise like this you need a man of ready strength and resources; not one whose condition you might be obliged to consider at a very critical moment.”

Orlando, balked thus at the outset, showed his displeasure.

“You do not do justice to your will. It is strong enough to carry you through anything.”

“It was.”

“You can force it to act for you.”

“I fear not, Orlando.”

“I counted on you and you thwart me at the most critical moment of my life.”

Oswald smiled; his whole candid and generous nature bursting into view, in one quick flash.

“Perhaps,” he assented; “but you will thank me when you realise my weakness. Another man must be found--quick, deft, secret, yet honourably alive to the importance of the occasion and your rights as a great original thinker and mechanician.”

“Do you know such a man?”

“I don’t; but there must be many such among our workmen.”

“There isn’t one; and I haven’t time to send to Brooklyn. I reckoned on you.”

“Can you wait a month?”

“No.”

“A fortnight, then?”

“No, not ten days.”

Oswald looked surprised. He would like to have asked why such precipitation was necessary, but the tone in which this ultimatum was given was of that decisive character which admits of no argument. He, therefore, merely looked his query. But Orlando was not one to answer looks; besides, he had no reply for the same importunate question urged by his own good sense. He knew that he must make the attempt upon which his future rested soon, and without risk of the sapping influence of lengthened suspense and weeks of waiting. He could hold on to those two demons leagued in attack against him, for a definite seven days, but not for an indeterminate time. If he were to be saved from folly,--from himself--events must rush.

He, therefore, repeated his no, with increased vehemence, adding, as he marked the reproach in his brother’s eye, “I cannot wait. The test must be made on Saturday evening next, whatever the conditions; whatever the weather. An air-car to be serviceable must be ready to meet lightning and tempest, and what is worse, perhaps, an insufficient crew.” Then rising, he exclaimed, with a determination which rendered him majestic, “If help is not forthcoming, I’ll do it all myself. Nothing shall hold me back; nothing shall stop me; and when you see me and my car rise above the treetops, you’ll feel that I have done what I could to make you forget--”

He did not need to continue. Oswald understood and flashed a grateful look his way before saying:

“You will make the attempt at night?”

“Certainly.”

“And on Saturday?”

“I’ve said it.”

“I will run over in my mind the qualifications of such men as I know and acquaint you with the result to-morrow.”

“There are adjustments to be made. A man of accuracy is necessary.”

“I will remember.”

“And he must be likable. I can do nothing with a man with whom I’m not perfectly in accord.”

“I understand that.”

“Good-night then.” A moment of hesitancy, then, “I wish not only yourself but Miss Scott to be present at this test. Prepare her for the spectacle; but not yet, not till within an hour or two of the occasion.”

And with a proud smile in which flashed a significance which startled Oswald, he gave a hurried nod and turned away.

When in an hour afterwards, Doris looked in through the open door, she found Oswald sitting with face buried in his hands, thinking so deeply that he did not hear her. He had sat like this, immovable and absorbed, ever since his brother had left him.

XXXV. SILENCE--AND A KNOCK

Oswald did not succeed in finding a man to please Orlando. He suggested one person after another to the exacting inventor, but none were satisfactory to him and each in turn was turned down. It is not every one we want to have share a world-wide triumph or an ignominious defeat. And the days were passing.

He had said in a moment of elation, “I will do it alone;” but he knew even then that he could not. Two hands were necessary to start the car; afterwards, he might manage it alone. Descent was even possible, but to give the contrivance its first lift required a second mechanician. Where was he to find one to please him? And what was he to do if he did not? Conquer his prejudices against such men as he had seen, or delay the attempt, as Oswald had suggested, till he could get one of his old cronies on from New York. He could do neither. The obstinacy of his nature was such as to offer an invincible barrier against either suggestion. One alternative remained. He had heard of women aviators. If Doris could be induced to accompany him into the air, instead of clinging sodden-like to the weight of Oswald’s woe, then would the world behold a triumph which would dwarf the ecstasy of the bird’s flight and rob the eagle of his kingly pride. But Doris barely endured him as yet, and the thought was not one to be considered for a moment. Yet what other course remained? He was brooding deeply on the subject, in his hangar one evening--(it was Thursday and Saturday was but two days off) when there came a light knock at the door.

This had never occurred before. He had given strict orders, backed by his brother’s authority, that he was never to be intruded upon when in this place; and though he had sometimes encountered the prying eyes of the curious flashing from behind the trees encircling the hangar, his door had never been approached before, or his privacy encroached upon. He started then, when this low but penetrating sound struck across the turmoil of his thoughts, and cast one look in the direction from which it came; but he did not rise, or even change his position on his workman’s stool.

Then it came again, still low but with an insistence which drew his brows together and made his hand fall from the wire he had been unconsciously holding through the mental debate which was absorbing him. Still he made no response, and the knocking continued. Should he ignore it entirely, start up his motor and render himself oblivious to all other sounds? At every other point in his career he would have done this, but an unknown, and as yet unnamed, something had entered his heart during this fatal month, which made old ways impossible and oblivion a thing he dared not court too recklessly. Should this be a summons from Doris! Should (inconceivable idea, yet it seized upon him relentlessly and would not yield for the asking) should it be Doris herself!

Taking advantage of a momentary cessation of the ceaseless tap tap, he listened. Silence was never profounder than in this forest on that windless night. Earth and air seemed, to his strained ear, emptied of all sound. The clatter of his own steady, unhastened heart-beat was all that broke upon the stillness. He might be alone in the Universe for all token of life beyond these walls, or so he was saying to himself, when sharp, quick, sinister, the knocking recommenced, demanding admission, insisting upon attention, drawing him against his own will to his feet, and finally, though he made more than one stand against it, to the very door.

“Who’s there?” he asked, imperiously and with some show of anger.

No answer, but another quiet knock.

“Speak! or go from my door. No one has the right to intrude here. What is your name and business?”

Continued knocking--nothing more.

With an outburst of wrath, which made the hangar ring, Orlando lifted his fist to answer this appeal in his own fierce fashion from his own side of the door, but the impulse paused at fulfilment, and he let his arm fall again in a rush of self-hatred which it would have pained his worst enemy, even little Doris, to witness. As it reached his side, the knock came again.

It was too much. With an oath, Orlando reached for his key. But before fitting it into the lock, he cast a look behind him. The car was in plain sight, filling the central space from floor to roof. A single glance from a stranger’s eye, and its principal secret would be a secret no longer. He must not run such a risk. Before he answered this call, he must drop the curtain he had rigged up against such emergencies as these. He had but to pull a cord and a veil would fall before his treasure, concealing it as effectually as an Eastern bride is concealed behind her yashmak.

Stepping to the wall, he drew that cord, then with an impatient sigh, returned to the door.

Another quiet but insistent knock greeted him. In no fury now, but with a vague sense of portent which gave an aspect of farewell to the one quick glance he cast about the well-known spot, he fitted the key in the lock, and stood ready to turn it.

“I ask again your name and your business,” he shouted out in loud command. “Tell them or--” He meant to say, “or I do not turn this key.” But something withheld the threat. He knew that it would perish in the utterance; that he could not carry it out. He would have to open the door now, response or no response. “Speak!” was the word with which he finished his demand.

A final knock.

Pulling a pistol from his pocket, with his left hand, he turned the key with his right.

The door remained unopened.

Stepping slowly back, he stared at its unpainted boards for a moment, then he spoke up quietly, almost courteously:

“Enter.”

But the command passed unheeded; the latch was not raised, and only the slightest tap was heard.

With a bound he reached forward and pulled the door open. Then a great silence fell upon him and a rigidity as of the grave seized and stiffened his powerful frame.

The man confronting him from the darkness was Sweetwater.

XXXVI. THE MAN WITHIN AND THE MAN WITHOUT

An instant of silence, during which the two men eyed each other; then, Sweetwater, with an ironical smile directed towards the pistol lightly remarked:

“Mr. Challoner and other men at the hotel are acquainted with my purpose and await my return. I have come--” here he cast a glowing look at the huge curtain cutting off the greater portion of the illy-lit interior--“to offer you my services, Mr. Brotherson. I have no other motive for this intrusion than to be of use. I am deeply interested in your invention, to the development of which I have already lent some aid, and can bring to the test you propose a sympathetic help which you could hardly find in any other person living.”

The silence which settled down at the completion of these words had a weight which made that of the previous moment seem light and all athrob with sound. The man within had not yet caught his breath; the man without held his, in an anxiety which had little to do with the direction of the weapon, into which he looked. Then an owl hooted far away in the forest, and Orlando, slowly lowering his arm, asked in an oddly constrained tone:

“How long have you been in town?”

The answer cut clean through any lingering hope he may have had.

“Ever since the day your brother was told the story of his great misfortune.”

“Ah! still at your old tricks! I thought you had quit that business as unprofitable.”

“I don’t know. I never expect quick returns. He who holds on for a rise sometimes reaps unlooked-for profits.”

The arm and fist of Orlando Brotherson ached to hurl this fellow back into the heart of the midnight woods.

But they remained quiescent and he spoke instead. “I have buried the business. You will never resuscitate it through me.”

Sweetwater smiled. There was no mirth in his smile though there was lightness in his tone as said:

“Then let us go back to the matter in hand. You need a helper; where are you going to find one if you don’t take me?”

A growl from Brotherson’s set lips. Never had he looked more dangerous than in the one burning instant following this daring repetition of the detective’s outrageous request. But as he noted how slight was the figure opposing him from the other side of the threshold, he was swayed by his natural admiration of pluck in the physically weak, and lost his threatening attitude, only to assume one which Sweetwater secretly found it even harder to meet.

“You are a fool,” was the stinging remark he heard flung at him. “Do you want to play the police-officer here and arrest me in mid air?”

“Mr. Brotherson, you understand me as little as I am supposed to understand you. Humble as my place is in society and, I may add, in the Department whose interests I serve, there are in me two men. One you know passably well--the detective whose methods, only indifferently clever show that he has very much to learn. Of the other--the workman acquainted with hammer and saw, but with some knowledge too of higher mathematics and the principles upon which great mechanical inventions depend, you know little, and must imagine much. I was playing the gawky when I helped you in the old house in Brooklyn. I was interested in your air-ship--Oh, I recognised it for what it was, notwithstanding its oddity and lack of ostensible means for flying--but I was not caught in the whirl of its idea; the idea by which you doubtless expect, and with very good reason too, to revolutionise the science of aviation. But since then I’ve been thinking it over, and am so filled with your own hopes that either I must have a hand in the finishing and sailing of the one you have yourself constructed, or go to work myself on the hints you have unconsciously given me, and make a car of my own.”

Audacity often succeeds where subtler means fail. Orlando, with a curious twist of his strong lip, took hold of the detective’s arm and drew him in, shutting and locking the door carefully behind him.

“Now,” said he, “you shall tell me what you think you have discovered, to make any ideas of your own available in the manufacture of a superior self-propelling air-ship.”

Sweetwater who had been so violently wheeled about in entering that he stood with his back to the curtain concealing the car, answered without hesitation.

“You have a device, entirely new so far as I can judge, by which this car can leap at once into space, hold its own in any direction, and alight again upon any given spot without shock to the machine or danger to the people controlling it.”

“Explain the device.”

“I will draw it.”

“You can?”

“As I see it.”

“As you see it!”

“Yes. It’s a brilliant idea; I could never have conceived it.”

“You believe--”

“I know.”

“Sit here. Let’s see what you know.”

Sweetwater sat down at the table the other pointed out, and drawing forward a piece of paper, took up a pencil with an easy air. Brotherson approached and stood at his shoulder. He had taken up his pistol again, why he hardly knew, and as Sweetwater began his marks, his fingers tightened on its butt till they turned white in the murky lamplight.

“You see,” came in easy tones from the stooping draughtsman, “I have an imagination which only needs a slight fillip from a mind like yours to send it in the desired direction. I shall not draw an exact reproduction of your idea, but I think you will see that I understand it very well. How’s that for a start?”

Brotherson looked and hastily drew back. He did not want the other to note his surprise.

“But that is a portion you never saw,” he loudly declared.

“No, but I saw this,” returned Sweetwater, working busily on some curves; “and these gave me the fillip I mentioned. The rest came easily.”

Brotherson, in dread of his own anger, threw his pistol to the other end of the shed:

“You knave! You thief!” he furiously cried.

“How so?” asked Sweetwater smilingly, rising and looking him calmly in the face. “A thief is one who appropriates another man’s goods, or, let us say, another man’s ideas. I have appropriated nothing yet. I’ve only shown you how easily I could do so. Mr. Brotherson, take me in as your assistant. I will be faithful to you, I swear it. I want to see that machine go up.”

“For how many people have you drawn those lines?” thundered the inexorable voice.

“For nobody; not for myself even. This is the first time they have left their hiding-place in my brain.”

“Can you swear to that?”

“I can and will, if you require it. But you ought to believe my word, sir. I am square as a die in all matters not connected--well, not connected with my profession,” he smiled in a burst of that whimsical humour, which not even the seriousness of the moment could quite suppress.

“And what surety have I that you do not consider this very matter of mine as coming within the bounds you speak of?”

“None. But you must trust me that far.”

Brotherson surveyed him with an irony which conveyed a very different message to the detective than any he had intended. Then quickly:

“To how many have you spoken, dilating upon this device, and publishing abroad my secret?”

“I have spoken to no one, not even to Mr. Gryce. That shows my honesty as nothing else can.”

“You have kept my secret intact?”

“Entirely so, sir.”

“So that no one, here or elsewhere, shares our knowledge of the new points in this mechanism?”

“I say so, sir.”

“Then if I should kill you,” came in ferocious accents, “now--here--”

“You would be the only one to own that knowledge. But you won’t kill me.”

“Why?”

“Need I go into reasons?”

“Why? I say.”

“Because your conscience is already too heavily laden to bear the burden of another unprovoked crime.”

Brotherson, starting back, glared with open ferocity upon the man who dared to face him with such an accusation.

“God! why didn’t I shoot you on entrance!” he cried. “Your courage is certainly colossal.”

A fine smile, without even the hint of humour now, touched the daring detective’s lip. Brotherson’s anger seemed to grow under it, and he loudly repeated:

“It’s more than colossal; it’s abnormal and--” A moment’s pause, then with ironic pauses--“and quite unnecessary save as a matter of display, unless you think you need it to sustain you through the ordeal you are courting. You wish to help me finish and prepare for flight?”

“I sincerely do.”

“You consider yourself competent?”

“I do.”

Brotherson’s eyes fell and he walked once to the extremity of the oval flooring and back.

“Well, we will grant that. But that’s not all that is necessary. My requirements demand a companion in my first flight. Will you go up in the car with me on Saturday night?”

A quick affirmative was on Sweetwater’s lips but the glimpse which he got of the speaker’s face glowering upon him from the shadows into which Brotherson had withdrawn, stopped its utterance, and the silence grew heavy. Though it may not have lasted long by the clock, the instant of breathless contemplation of each other’s features across the intervening space was of incalculable moment to Sweetwater, and, possibly, to Brotherson. As drowning men are said to live over their whole history between their first plunge and their final rise to light and air, so through the mind of the detective rushed the memories of his past and the fast fading glories of his future; and rebelling at the subtle peril he saw in that sardonic eye, he vociferated an impulsive:

“No! I’ll not--” and paused, caught by a new and irresistible sensation.

A breath of wind--the first he had felt that night--had swept in through some crevice in the curving wall, flapping the canvas enveloping the great car. It acted like a peal to battle. After all, a man must take some risks in his life, and his heart was in this trial of a redoubtable mechanism in which he had full faith. He could not say no to the prospect of being the first to share a triumph which would send his name to the ends of the earth; and, changing the trend of his sentence, he repeated with a calmness which had the force of a great decision.

“I will not fail you in anything. If she rises--” here his trembling hand fell on the curtain shutting off his view of the ship, “she shall take me with her, so that when she descends I may be the first to congratulate the proud inventor of such a marvel.”

“So be it!” shot from the other’s lips, his eyes losing their threatening look, and his whole countenance suddenly aglow with the enthusiasm of awakened genius.

Coming from the shadows, he laid his hand on the cord regulating the rise and fall of the concealing curtain.

“Here she is!” he cried and drew the cord.

The canvas shook, gathered itself into great folds and disappeared in the shadows from which he had just stepped.

The air-car stood revealed--a startling, because wholly unique, vision.

Long did Sweetwater survey it, then turning with beaming face upon the watchful inventor, he uttered a loud Hurrah.

Next moment, with everything forgotten between them save the glories of this invention, both dropped simultaneously to the floor and began that minute examination of the mechanism necessary to their mutual work.

XXXVII. HIS GREAT HOUR

Saturday night at eight o’clock.

So the fiat had gone forth, with no concession to be made on account of weather.

As Oswald came from his supper and took a look at the heavens from the small front porch, he was deeply troubled that Orlando had remained so obstinate on this point. For there were ominous clouds rolling up from the east, and the storms in this region of high mountains and abrupt valleys were not light, nor without danger even to those with feet well planted upon mother earth.

If the tempest should come up before eight!

Mr. Challoner, who, from some mysterious impulse of bravado on the part of Brotherson, was to be allowed to make the third in this small band of spectators, was equally concerned at this sight, but not for Brotherson. His fears were for Oswald, whose slowly gathering strength could illy bear the strain which this additional anxiety for his brother’s life must impose upon him. As for Doris, she was in a state of excitement more connected with the past than with the future. That afternoon she had laid her hand in that of Orlando Brotherson, and wished him well. She! in whose breast still lingered reminiscences of those old doubts which had beclouded his image for her at their first meeting. She had not been able to avoid it. His look was a compelling one, and it had demanded thus much from her; and--a terrible thought to her gentle spirit--he might be going to his death!

It had been settled by the prospective aviator that they were to watch for the ascent from the mouth of the grassy road leading in to the hangar. The three were to meet there at a quarter to eight and await the stroke and the air-cars rise. That time was near, and Mr. Challoner, catching a glimpse of Oswald’s pallid and unnaturally drawn features, as he set down the lantern he carried, shuddered with foreboding and wished the hour passed.

Doris’ watchful glance never left the face whose lightest change was more to her than all Orlando’s hopes. But the result upon her was not to weaken her resolution, but to strengthen it. Whatever the outcome of the next few minutes, she must stand ready to sustain her invalid through it. That the darkness of early evening had deepened to oppression, was unnoticed for the moment. The fears of an hour past had been forgotten. Their attention was too absorbed in what was going on before them, for even a glance overhead.

Suddenly Mr. Challoner spoke.

“Who is the man whom Mr. Brotherson has asked to go up with him?”

It was Oswald who answered.

“He has never told me. He has kept his own counsel about that as about everything else connected with this matter. He simply advised me that I was not to bother about him any more; that he had found the assistant he wanted.”

“Such reticence seems unpardonable. You have--displayed great patience, Oswald.”

“Because I understand Orlando. He reads men’s natures like a book. The man he trusts, we may trust. To-morrow, he will speak openly enough. All cause for reticence will be gone.”

“You have confidence then in the success of this undertaking?”

“If I hadn’t, I should not be here. I could hardly bear to witness his failure, even in a secret test like this. I should find it too hard to face him afterwards.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Orlando has great pride. If this enterprise fails I cannot answer for him. He would be capable of anything. Why, Doris! what is the matter, child? I never saw you look like that before.”

She had been down on her knees regulating the lantern, and the sudden flame, shooting up, had shown him her face turned up towards his in an apprehension which verged on horror.

“Do I look frightened?” she asked, remembering herself and lightly rising. “I believe that I am a little frightened. If--if anything should go wrong! If an accident-” But here she remembered herself again and quickly changed her tone. “But your confidence shall be mine. I will believe in his good angel or--or in his self-command and great resolution. I’ll not be frightened any more.”

But Oswald did not seem satisfied. He continued to look at her in vague concern.

He hardly knew what to make of the intense feeling she had manifested. Had Orlando touched her girlish heart? Had this cold-blooded nature, with its steel-like brilliancy and honourable but stern views of life, moved this warm and sympathetic soul to more than admiration? The thought disturbed him so he forgot the nearness of the moment they were all awaiting till a quick rasping sound from the hangar, followed by the sudden appearance of an ever-widening band of light about its upper rim, drew his attention and awakened them all to a breathless expectation.

The lid was rising. Now it was half-way up, and now, for the first time, it was lifted to its full height and stood a broad oval disc against the background of the forest. The effect was strange. The hangar had been made brilliant by many lamps, and their united glare pouring from its top and illuminating not only the surrounding treetops but the broad face of this uplifted disc, roused in the awed spectator a thrill such as in mythological times might have greeted the sudden sight of Vulcan’s smithy blazing on Olympian hills. But the clang of iron on iron would have attended the flash and gleam of those unexpected fires, and here all was still save for that steady throb never heard in Olympus or the halls of Valhalla, the pant of the motor eager for flight in the upper air.

As they listened in a trance of burning hope which obliterated all else, this noise and all others near and distant, was suddenly lost in a loud clatter of writhing and twisting boughs which set the forest in a roar and seemed to heave the air about them.

A wind had swooped down from the east, bending everything before it and rattling the huge oval on which their eyes were fixed as though it would tear it from its hinges.

The three caught at each other’s hands in dismay. The storm had come just on the verge of the enterprise, and no one might guess the result.

“Will he dare? Will he dare?” whispered Doris, and Oswald answered, though it seemed next to impossible that he could have heard her:

“He will dare. But will he survive it? Mr. Challoner,” he suddenly shouted in that gentleman’s ear, “what time is it now?”

Mr. Challoner, disengaging himself from their mutual grasp, knelt down by the lantern to consult his watch.

“One minute to eight,” he shouted back.

The forest was now a pandemonium. Great boughs, split from their parent trunks, fell crashing to the ground in all directions. The scream of the wind roused echoes which repeated themselves, here, there and everywhere. No rain had fallen yet, but the sight of the clouds skurrying pell-mell through the glare thrown up from the shed, created such havoc in the already overstrained minds of the three onlookers, that they hardly heeded, when with a clatter and crash which at another time would have startled them into flight, the swaying oval before them was whirled from its hinges and thrown back against the trees already bending under the onslaught of the tempest. Destruction seemed the natural accompaniment of the moment, and the only prayer which sprang to Oswald’s lips was that the motor whose throb yet lingered in their blood though no longer taken in by the ear, would either refuse to work or prove insufficient to lift the heavy car into this seething tumult of warring forces. His brother’s life hung in the balance against his fame, and he could not but choose life for him. Yet, as the multitudinous sounds about him yielded for a moment to that brother’s shout, and he knew that the moment had come, which would soon settle all, he found himself staring at the elliptical edge of the hangar, with an anticipation which held in it as much terror as joy, for the end of a great hope or the beginning of a great triumph was compressed into this trembling instant and if--

Great God! he sees it! They all see it! Plainly against that portion of the disc which still lifted itself above the further wall, a curious moving mass appears, lengthens, takes on shape, then shoots suddenly aloft, clearing the encircling tops of the bending, twisting and tormented trees, straight into the heart of the gale, where for one breathless moment it whirls madly about like a thing distraught, then in slow but triumphant obedience to the master hand that guides it, steadies and mounts majestically upward till it is lost to their view in the depths of impenetrable darkness.

Orlando Brotherson has accomplished his task. He has invented a mechanism which can send an air-car straight up from its mooring place. As the three watchers realise this, Oswald utters a cry of triumph, and Doris throws herself into Mr. Challoner’s arms. Then they all stand transfixed again, waiting for a descent which may never come.

But hark! a new sound, mingling its clatter with all the others. It is the rain. Quick, maddening, drenching, it comes; enveloping them in wet in a moment. Can they hold their faces up against it?

And the wind! Surely it must toss that aerial messenger before it and fling it back to earth, a broken and despised toy.

“Orlando?” went up in a shriek. “Orlando?” Oh, for a ray of light in those far-off heavens For a lull in the tremendous sounds shivering the heavens and shaking the earth! But the tempest rages on, and they can only wait, five minutes, ten minutes, looking, hoping, fearing, without thought of self and almost without thought of each other, till suddenly as it had come, the rain ceases and the wind, with one final wail of rage and defeat, rushes away into the west, leaving behind it a sudden silence which, to their terrified hearts, seems almost more dreadful to bear than the accumulated noises of the moment just gone.

Orlando was in that shout of natural forces, but he is not in this stillness. They look aloft, but the heavens are void. Emptiness is where life was. Oswald begins to sway, and Doris, remembering him now and him only, has thrown her strong young arm about him, when--What is this sound they hear high up, high up, in the rapidly clearing vault of the heavens! A throb--a steady pant,--drawing near and yet nearer,--entering the circlet of great branches over their heads--descending, slowly descending,--till they catch another glimpse of those hazy outlines which had no sooner taken shape than the car disappeared from their sight within the elliptical wall open to receive it.

It had survived the gale! It has re-entered its haven, and that, too, without colliding with aught around or any shock to those within, just as Orlando had promised; and the world was henceforth his! Hail to Orlando Brotherson!

Oswald could hardly restrain his mad joy and enthusiasm. Bounding to the door separating him from this conqueror of almost invincible forces, he pounded it with impatient fist.

“Let me in!” he cried. “You’ve done the trick, Orlando, you’ve done the trick.”

“Yes, I have satisfied myself,” came back in studied self-control from the other side of the door; and with a quick turning of the lock, Orlando stood before them.

They never forgot him as he looked at that moment. He was drenched, battered, palpitating with excitement; but the majesty of success was in his eye and in the bearing of his incomparable figure.

As Oswald bounded towards him, he reached out his hand, but his glance was for Doris.

“Yes,” he went on, in tones of suppressed elation, “there’s no flaw in my triumph. I have done all that I set out to do. Now--”

Why did he stop and look hurriedly back into the hangar? He had remembered Sweetwater. Sweetwater, who at that moment was stepping carefully from his seat in some remote portion of the car. The triumph was not complete. He had meant--

But there his thought stopped. Nothing of evil, nothing even of regret should mar his great hour. He was a conqueror, and it was for him now to reap the joy of conquest.

XXXVIII. NIGHT

Three days had passed, and Orlando Brotherson sat in his room at the hotel before a table laden with telegrams, letters and marked newspapers. The news of his achievement had gone abroad, and Derby was, for the moment, the centre of interest for two continents.

His success was an established fact. The second trial which he had made with his car, this time with the whole town gathered together in the streets as witnesses, had proved not only the reliability of its mechanism, but the great advantages which it possessed for a direct flight to any given point. Already he saw Fortune beckoning to him in the shape of an unconditional offer of money from a first-class source; and better still,--for he was a man of untiring energy and boundless resource--that opportunity for new and enlarged effort which comes with the recognition of one’s exceptional powers.

All this was his and more. A sweeter hope, a more enduring joy had followed hard upon gratified ambition. Doris had smiled on him;--Doris! She had caught the contagion of the universal enthusiasm and had given him her first ungrudging token of approval. It had altered his whole outlook on life in an instant, for there was an eagerness in this demonstration which proclaimed the relieved heart. She no longer trusted either appearances or her dream. He had succeeded in conquering her doubts by the very force of his personality, and the shadow which had hitherto darkened their intercourse had melted quite away. She was ready to take his word now and Oswald’s, after which the rest must follow. Love does not lag far behind an ardent admiration.

Fame! Fortune! Love! What more could a man desire? What more could this man, with his strenuous past and an unlimited capacity for an enlarged future, ask from fate than this. Yet, as he bends over his letters, fingering some, but reading none beyond a line or two, he betrays but a passing elation, and hardly lifts his head when a burst of loud acclaim comes ringing up to his window from some ardent passer-by: “Hurrah for Brotherson! He has put our town on the map!”

Why this despondency? Have those two demons seized him again? It would seem so and with new and overmastering fury. After the hour of triumph comes the hour of reckoning. Orlando Brotherson in his hour of proud attainment stands naked before his own soul’s tribunal and the pleader is dumb and the judge inexorable. There is but one Witness to such struggles; but one eye to note the waste and desolation of the devastated soul, when the storm is over past.

Orlando Brotherson has succumbed; the attack was too keen, his forces too shaken. But as the heavy minutes pass, he slowly re-gathers his strength and rises, in the end, a conqueror. Nevertheless, he knows, even in that moment of regained command, that the peace he had thus bought with strain and stress is but momentary; that the battle is on for life: that the days which to other eyes would carry a sense of brilliancy--days teeming with work and outward satisfaction--would hold within their hidden depths a brooding uncertainty which would rob applause of its music and even overshadow the angel face of Love.

He quailed at the prospect, materialist though he was. The days--the interminable days! In his unbroken strength and the glare of the noonday sun, he forgot to take account of the nights looming in black and endless procession before him. It was from the day phantom he shrank, and not from the ghoul which works in the darkness and makes a grave of the heart while happier mortals sleep.

And the former terror seemed formidable enough to him in this his hour of startling realisation, even if he had freed himself for the nonce from its controlling power. To escape all further contemplation of it he would work. These letters deserved attention. He would carry them to Oswald, and in their consideration find distraction for the rest of the day, at least. Oswald was a good fellow. If pleasure were to be gotten from these tokens of good-will, he should have his share of it. A gleam of Oswald’s old spirit in Oswald’s once bright eye, would go far towards throttling one of those demons whose talons he had just released from his throat; and if Doris responded too, he would deserve his fate, if he did not succeed in gaining that mastery of himself which would make such hours as these but episodes in a life big with interest and potent with great emotions.

Rising with a resolute air, he made a bundle of his papers and, with them in hand, passed out of his room and down the hotel stairs.

A man stood directly in his way, as he made for the front door. It was Mr. Challoner.

Courtesy demanded some show of recognition between them, and Brotherson was passing with his usual cold bow, when a sudden impulse led him to pause and meet the other’s eye, with the sarcastic remark:

“You have expressed, or so I have been told, some surprise at my choice of mechanician. A man of varied accomplishments, Mr. Challoner, but one for whom I have no further use. If, therefore, you wish to call off your watch-dog, you are at liberty to do so. I hardly think he can be serviceable to either of us much longer.”

The older gentleman hesitated, seeking possibly for composure, and when he answered it was not only without irony but with a certain forced respect:

“Mr. Sweetwater has just left for New York, Mr. Brotherson. He will carry with him, no doubt, the full particulars of your great success.”

Orlando bowed, this time with distinguished grace. Not a flicker of relief had disturbed the calm serenity of his aspect, yet when a moment later, he stepped among his shouting admirers in the street, his air and glance betrayed a bounding joy for which another source must be found than that of gratified pride. A chain had slipped from his spirit, and though the people shrank a little, even while they cheered, it was rather from awe of his bearing and the recognition of that sense of apartness which underlay his smile than from any perception of the man’s real nature or of the awesome purpose which at that moment exalted it. But had they known--could they have seen into this tumultuous heart--what a silence would have settled upon these noisy streets; and in what terror and soul-confusion would each man have slunk away from his fellows into the quiet and solitude of his own home.

Brotherson himself was not without a sense of the incongruity underlying this ovation; for, as he slowly worked himself along, the brightness of his look became dimmed with a tinge of sarcasm which in its turn gave way to an expression of extreme melancholy--both quite unbefitting the hero of the hour in the first flush of his new-born glory. Had he seen Doris’ youthful figure emerge for a moment from the vine-hung porch he was approaching, bringing with it some doubt of the reception awaiting him? Possibly, for he made a stand before he reached the house, and sent his followers back; after which he advanced with an unhurrying step, so that several minutes elapsed before he finally drew up before Mr. Scott’s door and entered through the now empty porch into his brother’s sitting-room.

He had meant to see Doris first, but his mind had changed. If all passed off well between himself and Oswald, if he found his brother responsive and wide-awake to the interests and necessities of the hour, he might forego his interview with her till he felt better prepared to meet it. For call it cowardice or simply a reasonable precaution, any delay seemed preferable to him in his present mood of discouragement, to that final casting of the die upon which hung so many and such tremendous issues. It was the first moment of real halt in his whole tumultuous life! Never, as daring experimentalist or agitator, had he shrunk from danger seen or unseen or from threat uttered or unuttered, as he shrank from this young girl’s no; and something of the dread he had felt lest he should encounter her unaware in the hall and so be led on to speak when his own judgment bade him be silent, darkened his features as he entered his brother’s presence.

But Oswald was sunk in a bitter revery of his own, and took no heed of these signs of depression. In the re-action following these days of great excitement, the past had re-asserted itself, and all was gloom in his once generous soul. This, Orlando had time to perceive, quick as the change came when his brother really realised who his visitor was. The glad “Orlando!” and the forced smile did not deceive him, and his voice quavered a trifle as he held out his packet with the words:

“I have come to show you what the world says of my invention. We will soon be great men,” he emphasised, as Oswald opened the letters. “Money has been offered me and--Read! read!” he urged, with an unconscious dictatorialness, as Oswald paused in his task. “See what the fates have prepared for us; for you shall share all my honours, as you will from this day share my work and enter into all my experiments. Cannot you enthuse a little bit over it? Doesn’t the prospect contain any allurement for you? Would you rather stay locked up in this petty town--”

“Yes; or--die. Don’t look like that, Orlando. It was a cowardly speech and I ask your pardon. I’m hardly fit to talk to-day. Edith--”

Orlando frowned.

“Not that name!” he harshly interrupted. “You must not hamper your life with useless memories. That dream of yours may be sacred, but it belongs to the past, and a great reality confronts you. When you have fully recovered your health, your own manhood will rebel at a weakness unworthy one of our name. Rouse yourself, Oswald. Take account of our prospects. Give me your hand and say, ‘Life holds something for me yet. I have a brother who needs me if I do not need him. Together, we can prove ourselves invincible and wrench fame and fortune from the world.’”

But the hand he reached for did not rise at his command, though Oswald started erect and faced him with manly earnestness.

“I should have to think long and deeply,” he said, “before I took upon myself responsibilities like these. I am broken in mind and heart, Orlando, and must remain so till God mercifully delivers me. I should be a poor assistant to you--a drag, rather than a help. Deeply as I deplore it, hard as it may be for one of your temperament to understand so complete an overthrow, I yet must acknowledge my condition and pray you not to count upon me in any plans you may form. I know how this looks--I know that as your brother and truest admirer, I should respond, and respond strongly, to such overtures as these, but the motive for achievement is gone. She was my all; and while I might work, it would be mechanically. The lift, the elevating thought is gone.”

Orlando stood a moment studying his brother’s face; then he turned shortly about and walked the length of the room. When he came back, he took up his stand again directly before Oswald, and asked, with a new note in his voice:

“Did you love Edith Challoner so much as that?”

A glance from Oswald’s eye, sadder than any tear.

“So that you cannot be reconciled?”

A gesture. Oswald’s words were always few.

Orlando’s frown deepened.

“Such grief I partly understand,” said he. “But time will cure it. Some day another lovely face--”

“We’ll not talk of that, Orlando.”

“No, we’ll not talk of that,” acquiesced the inventor, walking away again, this time to the window. “For you there’s but one woman;--and she’s a memory.”

“Killed!” broke from his brother’s lips. “Slain by her own hand under an impulse of wildness and terror! Can I ever forget that? Do not expect it, Orlando.”

“Then you do blame me?” Orlando turned and was looking full at Oswald.

“I blame your unreasonableness and your overweening pride.”

Orlando stood a moment, then moved towards the door. The heaviness of his step smote upon Oswald’s ear and caused him to exclaim:

“Forgive me, Orlando.” But the other cut him short with an imperative:

“Thanks for your candour! If her spirit is destined to stand like an immovable shadow between you and me, you do right to warn me. But this interview must end all allusion to the subject. I will seek and find another man to share my fortunes; (as he said this he approached suddenly, and took his papers from the other’s hand) or--” Here he hastily retraced his steps to the door which he softly opened. “Or” he repeated--But though Oswald listened for the rest, it did not come. While he waited, the other had given him one deeply concentrated look and passed out.

No heartfelt understanding was possible between these two men.

Crossing the hall, Orlando knocked at the door of Doris’ little sitting-room.

No answer, yet she was there. He knew it in every throbbing fibre of his body. She was there and quite aware of his presence; of this he felt sure; yet she did not bid him enter. Should he knock again? Never! but he would not quit the threshold, not if she kept him waiting there for hours. Perhaps she realised this. Perhaps she had meant to open the door to him from the very first, who can tell? What avails is that she did ultimately open it, and he, meeting her soft eye, wished from his very heart that his impulse had led him another way, even if that way had been to the edge of the precipice--and over.

For the face he looked upon was serene, and there was no serenity in him; rather a confusion of unloosed passions fearful of barrier and yearning tumultuously for freedom. But, whatever his revolt, the secret revolt which makes no show in look or movement, he kept his ground and forced a smile of greeting. If her face was quiet, it was also lovely;--too lovely, he felt, for a man to leave it, whatever might come of his lingering.

Nothing in all his life had ever affected him like it. For him there was no other woman in the past, the present or the future, and, realising this--taking in to the full what her affection and her trust might be to him in those fearsome days to come, he so dreaded a rebuff--he, who had been the courted of women and the admired of men ever since he could remember,--that he failed to respond to her welcome and the simple congratulations she felt forced to repeat. He could neither speak the commonplace, nor listen to it. This was his crucial hour. He must find support here, or yield hopelessly to the maelstrom in whose whirl he was caught.

She saw his excitement and faltered back a step--a move which she regretted the next minute, for he took advantage of it to enter and close behind him the door which she would never have shut of her own accord. Then he spoke, abruptly, passionately, but in those golden tones which no emotion could render other than alluring:

“I am an unhappy man, Miss Scott. I see that my presence here is not welcome, yet am sure that it would be so if it were not for a prejudice which your generous nature should be the first to cast aside, in face of the outspoken confidence of my brother: Oswald. Doris, little Doris, I love you. I have loved you from the moment of our first meeting. Not to many men is it given to find his heart so late, and when he does, it is for his whole life; no second passion can follow it. I know that I am premature in saying this; that you are not prepared to hear such words from me and that it might be wiser for me to withhold them, but I must leave Derby soon, and I cannot go until I know whether there is the least hope that you will yet lend a light to my career or whether that career must burn itself to ashes at your feet. Oswald--nay, hear me out--Oswald lives in his memories; but I must have an active hope--a tangible expectation--if I am to be the man I was meant to be. Will you, then, coldly dismiss me, or will you let my whole future life prove to you the innocence of my past? I will not hasten anything; all I ask is some indulgence. Time will do the rest.”

“Impossible,” she murmured.

But that was a word for which he had no ear. He saw that she was moved, unexpectedly so; that while her eyes wandered restlessly at times towards the door, they ever came back in girlish wonder, if not fascination, to his face, emboldening him so that he ventured at last, to add:

“Doris, little Doris, I will teach you a marvellous lesson, if you will only turn your dainty ear my way. Love such as mine carries infinite treasure with it. Will you have that treasure heaped, piled before your feet? Your lips say no, but your eyes--the truest eyes I ever saw--whisper a different language. The day will come when you will find your joy in the breast of him you are now afraid to trust.” And not waiting for disclaimer or even a glance of reproach from the eyes he had so wilfully misread, he withdrew with a movement as abrupt as that with which he had entered.

Why, then, with the memory of this exultant hour to fend off all shadows, did the midnight find him in his solitary hangar in the moonlit woods, a deeply desponding figure again. Beside him, swung the huge machine which represented a life of power and luxury; but he no longer saw it. It called to him with many a creak and quiet snap,--sounds to start his blood and fire his eye a week--nay, a day ago. But he was deaf to this music now; the call went unheeded; the future had no further meaning, for him, nor did he know or think whether he sat in light or in darkness; whether the woods were silent about him, or panting with life and sound. His demon had gripped him again and the final battle was on. There would never be another. Mighty as he felt himself to be, there were limits even to his capacity for endurance. He could sustain no further conflict. How then would it end? He never had a doubt himself! Yet he sat there.

Around him in the forest, the night owls screeched and innumerable small things without a name, skurried from lair to lair.

He heard them not.

Above, the moon rode, flecking the deepest shadows with the silver from her half-turned urn, but none of the soft and healing drops fell upon him. Nature was no longer a goddess, but an avenger; light a revealer, not a solace. Darkness the only boon.

Nor had time a meaning. From early eve to early morn he sat there and knew not if it were one hour or twelve. Earth was his no longer. He roused, when the sun made everything light about him, but he did not think about it. He rose, but was not conscious that he rose. He unlocked the door and stepped out into the forest; but he could never remember doing this. He only knew later that he had been in the woods and now was in his room at the hotel; all the rest was phantasmagoria, agony and defeat.

He had crossed the Rubicon of this world’s hopes and fears, but he had been unconscious of the passage.

XXXIX. THE AVENGER

“Dear Mr. Challoner:

“With every apology for the intrusion, may I request a few minutes of private conversation with you this evening at seven o’clock? Let it be in your own room.

“Yours truly,

“ORLANDO BROTHERSON.”

Mr. Challoner had been called upon to face many difficult and heartrending duties since the blow which had desolated his home fell upon him.

But from none of them had he shrunk as he did from the interview thus demanded. He had supposed himself rid of this man. He had dismissed him from his life when he had dismissed Sweetwater. His face, accordingly, wore anything but a propitiatory look, when promptly at the hour of seven, Orlando Brotherson entered his apartments.

His pleasure or his displeasure was, however, a matter of small consequence to his self-invited visitor. He had come there with a set purpose, and nothing in heaven or earth could deter him from it now. Declining the offer of a seat, with the slightest of acknowledgments in the way of a bow, he took a careful survey of the room before saying:

“Are we alone, Mr. Challoner, or is that man Sweetwater lurking somewhere within hearing?”

“Mr. Sweetwater is gone, as I had the honour of telling you yesterday,” was the somewhat stiff reply. “There are no witnesses to this conference, if that is what you wish to know.”

“Thank you, but you will pardon my insistence if I request the privilege of closing that door.” He pointed to the one communicating with the bedroom. “The information I have to give you is not such as I am willing to have shared, at least for the present.”

“You may close the door,” said Mr. Challoner coldly. “But is it necessary for you to give me the information you mention, to-night? If it is of such a nature that you cannot accord me the privilege of sharing it, as yet, with others, why not spare me till you can? I have gone through much, Mr. Brotherson.”

“You have,” came in steady assent as the man thus addressed stepped to the door he had indicated and quietly closed it. “But,” he continued, as he crossed back to his former position, “would it be easier for you to go through the night now in anticipation of what I have to reveal than to hear it at once from my lips while I am in the mood to speak?”

The answer was slow in coming. The courage which had upheld this rapidly aging man through so many trying interviews, seemed inadequate for the test put so cruelly upon it. He faltered and sank heavily into a chair, while the stern man watching him, gave no signs of responsive sympathy or even interest, only a patient and icy-tempered resolve.

“I cannot live in uncertainty;” such were finally Mr. Challoner’s words. “What you have to say concerns Edith?” The pause he made was infinitesimal in length, but it was long enough for a quick disclaimer. But no such disclaimer came. “I will hear it,” came in reluctant finish.

Mr. Brotherson took a step forward. His manner was as cold as the heart which lay like a stone in his bosom.

“Will you pardon me if I ask you to rise?” said he. “I have my weaknesses too.” (He gave no sign of them.) “I cannot speak down from such a height to the man I am bound to hurt.”

As if answering to the constraint of a will quite outside his own, Mr. Challoner rose. Their heads were now more nearly on a level and Mr. Brotherson’s voice remained low, as he proceeded, with quiet intensity.

“There has been a time--and it may exist yet, God knows--when you thought me in some unknown and secret way the murderer of your daughter. I do not quarrel with the suspicion; it was justified, Mr. Challoner. I did kill your daughter, and with this hand! I can no longer deny it.”

The wretched father swayed, following the gesture of the hand thus held out; but he did not fall, nor did a sound leave his lips.

Brotherson went coldly on:

“I did it because I regarded her treatment of my suit as insolent. I have no mercy for any such display of intolerance on the part of the rich and the fortunate. I hated her for it; I hated her class, herself and all she stood for. To strike the dealer of such a hurt I felt to be my right. Though a man of small beginnings and of a stock which such as you call common, I have a pride which few of your blood can equal. I could not work, or sleep or eat with such a sting in my breast as she had planted there. To rid myself of it, I determined to kill her, and I did. How? Oh, that was easy, though it has proved a great stumbling-block to the detectives, as I knew it would! I shot her--but not with an ordinary bullet. My charge was a small icicle made deliberately for the purpose. It had strength enough to penetrate, but it left no trace behind it. ‘A bullet of ice for a heart of ice,’ I had said in the torment of my rage. But the word was without knowledge, Mr. Challoner. I see it now; I have seen it for two whole weeks. I did not misjudge her condemnation of me, but I misjudged its cause. It was not to the comparatively poor, the comparatively obscure man she sought to show contempt, but to the brother of Oswald whose claims she saw insulted. A woman I should have respected, not killed. A woman of no pride of station; a woman who loved a man not only of my own class but of my own blood--a woman, to avenge whose unmerited death I stand here before you a self-condemned criminal. That is but justice, Mr. Challoner. That is the way I look at things. Though no sentimentalist; and dead to all beliefs save the eternal truths of science, I have that in me which will not let me profit, now that I know myself unworthy, by the great success I have earned. Hence this confession, Mr. Challoner. It has not come easily, nor do I shut my eyes in the least to the results which must follow. But I can not do differently. To-morrow, you may telegraph to New York. Till then I desire to be left undisturbed. I have many things to dispose of in the interim.”

Mr. Challoner, very white by now, pointed to the door before he sank again into his chair. Brotherson took it for dismissal and stepped slowly back. Then their eyes met again and Mr. Challoner spoke his first word:

“There was another--a poor woman--she died suddenly--and her wound was not unlike that inflicted upon Edith. Did you--”

“I did.” The answer came without a tremour. “You may say and so may others that I was less justified in this attack than in the other; but I do not see it that way. A theory does not always work in practice. I wished to test the unusual means I contemplated, and the woman I saw before me across the court was hard-working and with nothing in life to look forward to, so--”

A cry of bitter execration from Mr. Challoner cut him short. Turning with a shrug he was about to lift his hand to the door, when he gave a violent start and fell hastily back before a quickly entering figure of such passion and fury as neither of these men had ever seen before.

It was Oswald! Oswald, the kindly! Oswald, the lover of men and the adorer of women! Oswald, with the words of the dastardly confession he had partly overheard searing hot within his brain! Oswald, raised in a moment from the desponding invalid to a terrifying ministrant of retributive justice.

Orlando could scarcely raise his hand before the other’s was upon his throat.

“Murderer! doubly-dyed murderer of innocent women!” was hissed in the strong man’s ears. “Not with the law but with me you must reckon, and may God and the spirit of my mother nerve my arm!”

XL. DESOLATE

The struggle was fierce but momentary. Oswald with his weakened powers could not long withstand the steady exertion of Orlando’s giant strength, and ere long sank away from the contest into Mr. Challoner’s arms.

“You should not have summoned the shade of our mother to your aid,” observed the other with a smile, in which the irony was lost in terrible presage. “I was always her favourite.”

Oswald shuddered. Orlando had spoken truly; she had always been blindly, arrogantly trustful of her eldest son. No fault could she see in him; and now--

Impetuously Oswald struggled with his weakness, raised himself in Mr. Challoner’s arms and cried in loud revolt:

“But God is just. He will not let you escape. If He does, I will not. I will hound you to the ends of this earth and, if necessary, into the eternities. Not with the threat of my arm--you are my master there, but with the curse of a brother who believed you innocent of his darling’s blood and would have believed you so in face of everything but your own word.”

“Peace!” adjured Orlando. “There is no account I am not ready to settle. I have robbed you of the woman you love, but I have despoiled myself. I stand desolate in the world, who but an hour ago could have chosen my seat among the best and greatest. What can your curses do after that?”

“Nothing.” The word came slowly like a drop wrung from a nearly spent heart. “Nothing; nothing. Oh, Orlando, I wish we were both dead and buried and that there were no further life for either of us.”

The softened tone, the wistful prayer which would blot out an immortality of joy for the one, that it might save the other from an immortality of retribution, touched some long unsounded chord in Orlando’s extraordinary nature.

Advancing a step, he held out his hand--the left one. “We’ll leave the future to itself, Oswald, and do what we can with the present,” said he. “I’ve made a mess of my life and spoiled a career which might have made us both kings. Forgive me, Oswald. I ask for nothing else from God or man. I should like that. It would strengthen me for to-morrow.”

But Oswald, ever kindly, generous and more ready to think of others than of himself, had yet some of Orlando’s tenacity. He gazed at that hand and a flush swept up over his cheek which instantly became ghastly again.

“I cannot,” said he--“not even the left one. May God forgive me!”

Orlando, struck silent for a moment, dropped his hand and slowly turned away. Mr. Challoner felt Oswald stiffen in his arms, and break suddenly away, only to stop short before he had taken one of the half dozen steps between himself and his departing brother.

“Where are you going?” he demanded in tones which made Orlando turn.

“I might say, To the devil,” was the sarcastic reply. “But I doubt if he would receive me. No,” he added, in more ordinary tones as the other shivered and again started forward, “you will have no trouble in finding me in my own room to-night. I have letters to write and--other things. A man like me cannot drop out without a ripple. You may go to bed and sleep. I will keep awake for two.”

“Orlando!” Visions were passing before Oswald’s eyes, soul-crushing visions such as in his blameless life he never thought could enter into his consciousness or blast his tranquil outlook upon life. “Orlando!” he again appealed, covering his eyes in a frenzied attempt to shut out these horrors, “I cannot let you go like this. To-morrow--”

“To-morrow, in every niche and corner of this world, wherever Edith Challoner’s name has gone, wherever my name has gone, it will be known that the discoverer of a practical air-ship, is a man whom they can no longer honour. Do you think that is not hell enough for me; or that I do not realise the hell it will be for you? I’ve never wearied you or any man with my affection; but I’m not all demon. I would gladly have spared you this additional anguish; but that was impossible. You are my brother and must suffer from the connection whether we would have it so or not. If it promises too much misery--and I know no misery like that of shame--come with me where I go to-morrow. There will be room for two.”

Oswald, swaying with weakness, but maddened by the sight of an overthrow which carried with it the stifled affections and the admiration of his whole life, gave a bound forward, opened his arms and--fell.

Orlando stopped short. Gazing down on his prostrate brother, he stood for a moment with a gleam of something like human tenderness showing through the flare of dying passions and perishing hopes; then he swung open the door and passed quietly out, and Mr. Challoner could hear the laughing remark with which he met and dismissed the half-dozen men and women who had been drawn to this end of the hall by what had sounded to them like a fracas between angry men.

XLI. FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING

The clock in the hotel office struck three. Orlando Brotherson counted the strokes; then went on writing. His transom was partly open and he had just heard a step go by his door. This was nothing new. He had already heard it several times before that night. It was Mr. Challoner’s step, and every time it passed, he had rustled his papers or scratched vigorously with his pen. “He is keeping watch for Oswald,” was his thought. “They fear a sudden end to this. No one, not the son of my mother knows me. Do I know myself?”

Four o’clock! The light was still burning, the pile of letters he was writing increasing.

Five o’clock! A rattling shade betrays an open window. No other sound disturbs the quiet of the room. It is empty now; but Mr. Challoner, long since satisfied that all was well, goes by no more. Silence has settled upon the hotel;--that heavy silence which precedes the dawn.

There was silence in the streets also. The few who were abroad, crept quietly along. An electric storm was in the air and the surcharged clouds hung heavy and low, biding the moment of outbreak. A man who had left a place of many shadows for the more open road, paused and looked up at these clouds; then went calmly on.

Suddenly the shriek of an approaching train tears through the valley. Has it a call for this man? No. Yet he pauses in the midst of the street he is crossing and watches, as a child might watch, for the flash of its lights at the end of the darkened vista. It comes--filling the empty space at which he stares with moving life--engine, baggage car and a long string of Pullmans. Then all is dark again and only the noise of its slackening wheels comes to him through the night. It has stopped at the station. A minute longer and it has started again, and the quickly lessening rumble of its departure is all that remains of this vision of man’s activity and ceaseless expectancy. When it is quite gone and all is quiet, a sigh falls from the man’s lips and he moves on, but this time, for some unexplainable reason, in the direction of the station. With lowered head he passes along, noting little till he arrives within sight of the depot where some freight is being handled, and a trunk or two wheeled down the platform. No sight could be more ordinary or unsuggestive, but it has its attraction for him, for he looks up as he goes by and follows the passage of that truck down the platform till it has reached the corner and disappeared. Then he sighs again and again moves on.

A cluster of houses, one of them open and lighted, was all which lay between him now and the country road. He was hurrying past, for his step had unconsciously quickened as he turned his back upon the station, when he was seized again by that mood of curiosity and stepped up to the door from which a light issued and looked in. A common eating-room lay before him, with rudely spread tables and one very sleepy waiter taking orders from a new arrival who sat with his back to the door. Why did the lonely man on the sidewalk start as his eye fell on the latter’s commonplace figure, a hungry man demanding breakfast in a cheap, country restaurant? His own physique was powerful while that of the other looked slim and frail. But fear was in the air, and the brooding of a tempest affects some temperaments in a totally unexpected manner. As the man inside turns slightly and looks up, the master figure on the sidewalk vanishes, and his step, if any one had been interested enough to listen, rings with a new note as it turns into the country road it has at last reached.

But no one heeded. The new arrival munches his roll and waits impatiently for his coffee, while without, the clouds pile soundlessly in the sky, one of them taking the form of a huge hand with clutching fingers reaching down into the hollow void beneath.

XLII. AT SIX

Mr. Challoner had been honest in his statement regarding the departure of Sweetwater. He had not only paid and dismissed our young detective, but he had seen him take the train for New York. And Sweetwater had gone away in good faith, too, possibly with his convictions undisturbed, but acknowledging at last that he had reached the end of his resources. But the brain does not loose its hold upon its work as readily as the hand does. He was halfway to New York and had consciously bidden farewell to the whole subject, when he suddenly startled those about him by rising impetuously to his feet. He sat again immediately, but with a light in his small grey eye which Mr. Gryce would have understood and revelled in. The idea for which he had searched industriously for months had come at last, unbidden; thrown up from some remote recess of the mind which had seemingly closed upon the subject forever.

“I have it. I have it,” he murmured in ceaseless reiteration to himself. “I will go back to Mr. Challoner and let him decide if the idea is worth pursuing. Perhaps an experiment may be necessary. It was bitter cold that night; I wish it were icy weather now. But a chemist can help us out. Good God! if this should be the explanation of the mystery, alas for Orlando and alas for Oswald!”

But his sympathies did not deter him. He returned to Derby at once, and as soon as he dared, presented himself at the hotel and asked for Mr. Challoner.

He was amazed to find that gentleman already up and in a state of agitation that was very disquieting. But he brightened wonderfully at sight of his visitor, and drawing him inside the room, observed with trembling eagerness:

“I do not know why you have come back, but never was man more welcome. Mr. Brotherson has confessed.”

“Confessed!”

“Yes, he killed both women; my daughter and his neighbour, the washerwoman, with a--”

“Wait,” broke in Sweetwater, eagerly, “let me tell you.” And stooping, he whispered something in the other’s ear.

Mr. Challoner stared at him amazed, then slowly nodded his head.

“How came you to think--” he began; but Sweetwater in his great anxiety interrupted him with a quick:

“Explanations will keep, Mr. Challoner. What of the man himself? Where is he? That’s the important thing now.”

“He was in his room till early this morning writing letters, but he is not there now. The door is unlocked and I went in. From appearances I fear the worst. That is why your presence relieves me so. Where do you think he is?”

“In his hangar in the woods. Where else would he go to--”

“I have thought of that. Shall we start out alone or take witnesses with us?”

“We will go alone. Does Oswald anticipate--”

“He is sure. But he lacks strength to move. He lies on my bed in there. Doris and her father are with him.”

“We will not wait a minute. How the storm holds off. I hope it will hold off for another hour.”

Mr. Challoner made no reply. He had spoken because he felt compelled to speak, but it had not been easy for him, nor could any trifles move him now.

The town was up by this time and, though they chose the least frequented streets, they had to suffer from some encounters. It was a good half hour before they found themselves in the forest and in sight of the hangar. One look that way, and Sweetwater turned to see what the effect was upon Mr. Challoner.

A murmur of dismay greeted him. The oval of that great lid stood up against the forest background.

“He has escaped,” cried Mr. Challoner.

But Sweetwater, laying a finger on his lip, advanced and laid his ear against the door. Then he cast a quick look aloft. Nothing was to be seen there. The darkness of storm in the heavens but nothing more.--Yes! now, a flash of vivid and destructive lightning!

The two men drew back and their glances crossed.

“Let us return to the highroad,” whispered Sweetwater; “we can see nothing here.”

Mr. Challoner, trembling very much, wheeled slowly about.

“Wait,” enjoined Sweetwater. “First let me take a look inside.”

Running to the nearest tree, he quickly climbed it, worked himself along a protruding branch and looked down into the open hangar. It was now so dark that details escaped him, but one thing was certain. The air-ship was not there.

Descending, he drew Mr. Challoner hastily along. “He’s gone,” said he. “Let us reach the high ground as quickly as we can. I’m glad that Mr. Oswald Brotherson is not with us or--or Miss Doris.”

But this expression of satisfaction died on his lips. At the point where the forest road debouches into the highway, he had already caught a glimpse of their two figures. They were waiting for news, and the brother spoke up the instant he saw Sweetwater:

“Where is he? You’ve not found him or you wouldn’t be coming alone. He cannot have gone up. He cannot manage it without an assistant. We must seek him somewhere else; in the forest or in our house at home. Ah!” The lightning had forked again.

“He’s not in the forest and he’s not in your home,” returned Sweetwater. “He’s aloft; the air-ship is not in the shed. And he can go up alone now.” Then more slowly: “But he cannot come down.”

They strained their eyes in a maddening search of the heavens. But the darkness had so increased that they could be sure of nothing. Doris sank upon her knees.

Suddenly the lightning flashed again, this time so vividly and so near that the whole heaven burst into fiery illumination above them and the thunder, crashing almost simultaneously, seemed for a moment to rock the world and bow the heavens towards them. Then a silence; then Sweetwater’s whisper in Mr. Challoner’s ear:

“Take them away! I saw him; he was falling like a shot.”

Mr. Challoner threw out his arms, then steadied himself. Oswald was reeling; Oswald had seen too. But Doris was there. When the lightning flashed again, she was standing and Oswald was weeping on her bosom.