Part 25

“I’m too late, I’m too late!” exclaimed Haines in a tense, suppressed voice. “The sher’ff’s thar, ’mongst the others, in that room. I viewed him thar a minit ago.”

Assuming that he knew the worst, Royce’s courage came back. With some wild idea of devising a scheme to meet the emergency, he sprang upon the vacant stage, on which the curtain had been rung down despite the applause, still resolutely demanding a repetition of the feat, and through the rent in the trembling fabric swiftly surveyed the house with a new and, alas, how different a motive! His eyes instantly fixed upon the rustic face, the hair parted far to the side, as the sheriff vigorously stamped his feet and clapped his hands in approbation. That oasis of refined, ideal light where Miss Fordyce sat did not escape Royce’s attention even at this crisis. Had he indeed brought this sorry, ignoble fate upon himself that he might own one moment in her thoughts, one glance of her eye, that he might sing his song to her ear? He had certainly achieved this, he thought sardonically. She would doubtless remember him to the last day she should live. He wondered if they would iron him in the presence of the ladies. Could he count upon his strong young muscles to obey his will and submit without resistance when the officers should lay their hands upon him, and thus avoid a scene?

And all at once--perhaps it was the sweet look in her face that made all gentle things seem possible--it occurred to him that he despaired too easily. An arrest might not be in immediate contemplation,--the _corpus delicti_ was impossible of proof. He could surely make such disposition of his own property as seemed to him fit, and the explanation that he was at odds with his friends, dead-broke, thrown out of business in the recent panic, might pass muster with the rural officer, since no crime could be discovered to involve the destruction of the clothes. Thus he might still remain unidentified with Lucien Royce, who pretended to be dead and was alive, who had had in trust a large sum of money in a belt which was found upon another man, robbed, and perhaps murdered for it. The sheriff of Kildeer County had never dreamed of the like of that, he was very sure.

The next moment his heart sank like lead, for there amongst the audience, quite distinct in the glooms, was the sharp, keen, white face of a man he had seen before,--a detective. It was but once, yet, with that idea of crime rife in his mind, he placed the man instantly. He remembered a court-room in Memphis, during the trial of a certain notable case, where he had chanced to loiter in the tedium of waiting for a boat on one of his trips through the city, and he had casually watched this man as he gave his testimony. His presence here was significant, conclusive, to be interpreted far otherwise than any mission of the sheriff of the county. Royce did not for one moment doubt that it was in the interests of the Marble Company, the tenants of the estate _per autre vie_, although the criminal charge might emanate directly from the firm whose funds had so mysteriously disappeared from his keeping, whose trust must now seem so basely betrayed. There was no possible escape; the stanch walls of the building were unbroken even by a window, and the only exit from behind the partition was through the stage itself in full view of the watchful eyes of the officers. Any effort, any action, would merely accelerate the climax, precipitate the shame of the arrest he dreaded,--and in her presence! He felt how hard the heart of the _cestui que vie_ was thumping at the prospect of the summary resuscitation. He said to himself, with his ironical habit of mind, that he had found dying a far easier matter. But there was no responsive satire in the hunted look of his hot, wild, glancing eyes, the quiver of every muscle, the cold thrills that successively trembled through the nervous fibres. He looked so unlike himself for the moment, as he turned with a violent start on feeling the touch of a hand on his arm, that Seymour paused with some deprecation and uncertainty. Then with a renewed intention the manager said persuasively, “You won’t mind doing it over again, will you? You see they won’t be content without it.”

A certain element of surprise was blended with the manager’s cogitations which he remembered afterward rather than realized at the moment. It had to do with the altered aspect of the man,--a sudden grave tumultuous excitement which his manner and glance bespoke; but the perception of this was subacute in Seymour’s mind and subordinate to the awkward dilemma in which he found himself as manager of the little enterprise. There was not time, in justice to the rest of the programme, to repeat the basket trick, and had the farce been the work of another he would have rung the curtain up forthwith on its first scene. But the pride and sensitiveness of the author forbade the urging of his own work upon the attention of an audience still clamorously insistent upon the repetition of another attraction, and hardly likely, if balked of this, to be fully receptive to the real merits of the little play.

Seymour remembered afterward, but did not note at the time, the obvious effort with which the juggler controlled his agitation. “Oh, anything goes!” he assented, and in a moment more the curtain had glided up with less than its usual convulsive resistance. They were standing again together with composed aspect in the brilliance of the footlights, and Seymour, with a change of phrase and an elaboration of the idea, was dilating afresh upon the essential values of the positive in life; the possible pernicious effects of any delusion of the senses; the futility of finding pleasure in the false, simply because of the flagrancy of its falsity; the deleterious moral effects of such exhibitions upon the very young, teaching them to love the acrobatic lie instead of the lame truth,--from all of which he deduced the propriety of tying the juggler up for the rest of the evening. But the bullet-heads were not as dense as they looked. They learned well when they learned at all, and the pauses of this rodomontade were filled with callow chuckles and shrill whinnies of appreciative delight, anticipative of the wonder to come. They now viewed with eager forwarding interest the juggler’s bonds, little dreaming what grim prophecy he felt in their restraint, and the smallest boy of the lot shrilly sang out, when all was done, “Give him another turn of the rope!”

Seymour, his blond face flushed by the heat and his exertions to the hue of his pink-and-white blazer, ostentatiously wrought another knot, and down the juggler went on the floor, encased in the unbroken netting; the cloth was thrown over the man and the basket, and Seymour turned anew to the audience and took up the thread of his discourse. It came as trippingly off his tongue as before, and in the dusky gray-purple haze, the seeming medium in which the audience sat, fair, smiling faces, full of expectation and attention, looked forth their approval, and now and again broke into laughter. When, having concluded by announcing that he intended to convey the discomfited juggler off the stage, he found naught under the cloth but the empty net without a mesh awry, the man having escaped, his rage was a trifle more pronounced than before. With a wild gesture he tossed the net out to the spectators to bid them observe how the villain had outwitted him, and then sprang into the basket and stamped tumultuously all around in the interior, evidently covering every square inch of its surface, while the detective’s keen eyes watched with an eager intensity, as if the only thought in his mind concerned the miracle of the juggler’s withdrawal. Out Seymour plunged finally, and with dogged resolution he put the lid on and began to cord up the basket as if for departure.

“Save the little you’ve got left,” whinnied out a squirrel-toothed mouth from the front bench, almost too broadly a-grin for articulation.

“Get a move on ye,--get a move!” shouted another of the callow youngsters, reveling in the fictitious plight of the discomfited manager as if it were real.

He seemed to resent it. He looked frowningly over the footlights at the front row, as it hugged itself and squirmed on the bench and cackled in ecstasy.

“I wish I had him here!” he exclaimed gruffly. “I’d settle him--with this--and this--and this!” Each word was emphasized with the successive thrusts of the sharp blade of the bowie-knife through the wickerwork.

“That’s enough! That’s enough!” the remonstrant elderly gentleman in the audience admonished him, and he dropped the blade and came forward to beg indulgence for the unseemly and pitiable position in which he found himself placed. He had barely turned his back for a moment, when this juggler whom he had taken so much pains to secure, in order to protect the kind and considerate audience from further deceits of a treacherous art, mysteriously disappeared, and whither he was sure he could not imagine. He hesitated for a moment and looked a trifle embarrassed, for this was the point at which the basket should begin to roll along the floor. He gave it a covert glance, but it was motionless where he had left it. Raising his voice, he repeated the words as with indignant emphasis, thinking that the juggler had not caught the cue. He went on speaking at random, but his words came less freely; the audience sat expectant; the basket still lay motionless on the floor. Seeing that he must needs force the crisis, he turned, exclaiming with uplifted hands, “Do my eyes deceive me, or is that basket stirring, rolling on the floor?”

But no; the basket lay as still as he had left it. There was a moment of tense silence in the audience. His face grew suddenly white and chill, his eyes dilated--fixed on something dark, and slow, and sinuous, trickling down the inclined plane of the stage. He sprang forward with a shrill exclamation, and, catching up the bowie-knife, severed with one stroke the cords that bound the basket.

“Are you hurt?” he gasped in a tremulous voice to the silence beneath the lid, and as he tossed it aside he recoiled abruptly, rising to his feet with a loud and poignant cry, “Oh, my God! he is dead! he is dead!”

The sudden transition from the purely festival character of the atmosphere to the purlieus of grim tragedy told heavily on every nerve. There was one null moment blank of comprehension, and then women were screaming, and more than one fainted; the clamor of overturned benches added to the confusion, as the men, with grim set faces and startled eyes, pressed forward to the stage; the children cowered in mute affright close below the footlights, except one small creature who thought it a part of the fun, not dreaming what death might be, and was laughing aloud in high-keyed mirth down in the dusky gloom. A physician among the summer sojourners, on a flying visit for a breath of mountain air, was the first man to reach the stage, and, with the terror-stricken Seymour, drew the long lithe body out and straightened it on the floor, as the curtain was lowered to hide the ghastly _mise en scène_ which it might be terror to women and children to remember. His ready hand desisted after a glance. The man had died from the first stroke of the bowie-knife, penetrating his side, and doubtless lacerating the outer tissues of the heart. The other strokes were registered,--the one on his hand, the other, a slight graze, on the neck. A tiny package had fallen on the floor as the hasty hands had torn the shirt aside from the wound: the deft professional fingers unfolded it,--a bit of faded flower, a wild purple verbena; the physician looked at it for a moment, and tossed it aside in the blood on the floor, uninterested. The pericardium was more in his line. He was realizing, too, that he could not start to-morrow, as he had intended, for his office and his rounds among his patients. The coroner’s jury was an obstinate impediment, and his would be expert testimony.

Upon this inquest, held incongruously enough in the ballroom, the facts of the information which Owen Haines had brought to the juggler and the presence of the officers in the audience were elicited, and added to the excitements incident to the event. The friends of young Seymour, who was overwhelmed by the tragedy, believed and contended that since escape from prosecution for some crime was evidently impossible, the juggler had in effect committed suicide by holding up his left arm that the knife might pierce a vital part. Thus they sought to avert the sense of responsibility which a man must needs feel for so terrible a deed wrought, however inadvertently, by his own hand. But crime as a factor seemed doubtful. The sheriff, indeed, upon the representations of Sims, supplemented by the mystery of the lime-kiln which Knowles had disclosed, had induced the detective to accompany him to the mountains to seek to identify the stranger as a defaulting cashier from one of the cities for whose apprehension a goodly amount of money would be paid. But in no respect did Royce correspond to the perpetrator of any crime upon the detective’s list.

“He needn’t have been afraid of me,” he observed dryly; “I saw in a minute he wasn’t our fellow. And I was just enjoying myself mightily.”

The development of the fact of the presence of the officers and the juggler’s knowledge that they were in the audience affected the physician’s testimony and his view of the occurrence. He accounted it an accident--the nerve of the young man, shaken by the natural anxiety at finding himself liable to immediate arrest, was not sufficient to carry him through the feat; he failed to shift position with the celerity essential to the basket trick, and the uplifting of the arm, which left the body unprotected to receive the blow, was but the first effort to compass the swift movements necessary to the feat. The unlucky young manager was exonerated from all blame in the matter, but the verdict was death by accident.

Nevertheless, throughout all the years since, the argument continues. Along the verge of those crags overlooking the valley, in the glamours of a dreamy golden haze, with the amethystine mountains on the horizon reflecting the splendors of the sunset sky, and with the rich content of the summer solstice in the perfumed air; or amongst the ferns about the fractured cliffs whence the spring wells up with a tinkling tremor and exhilarant freshness and a cool, cool splashing as of the veritable fountain of youth; or in the shadowy twilight of the long, low building where the balls go crashing down the alleys; or sometimes even in the ballroom in pauses of the dance when the music is but a plaint, half-joy, half-pain, and the wind is singing a wild and mystic refrain, and the moonlight comes in at the windows and lies in great blue-white silver rhomboids on the floor despite the dull yellow glow of the lamps,--in all these scenes which while yet in life Lucien Royce haunted, with a sense of exile and a hopeless severance, as of a man who is dead, the mystery of his fate revives anew and yet once more, and continues unexplained. Conjecture fails, conclusions are vain, the secret remains. Hey! Presto! The juggler has successfully exploited his last feat.

The Riverside Press CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U. S. A. ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY H. O. HOUGHTON AND CO.

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