"Don"t you think I suffer? Haven"t I borne enough in the months since I married you, for you to want to save me this? Do you owe me nothing, me whom you so wronged, whose--"
She stopped suddenly at the look on his face of mortal pain, for she had struck harder than she knew. It pierced through the fierce resentment to her deepest heart, and all her love and pity gushed back upon her in a torrent. She threw herself on her knees by the bare cot, crying pa.s.sionately:
"Oh, forgive me! Forget what I said! I did not mean it. I have forgiven you a thousand times over. I never ceased to love you. I love you now, more than all the world."
"It is true," he said, hoa.r.s.e misery in his tone. "I have wronged you.
If I could coin my blood drop by drop, to pay for the past, I could not set that right. If giving my life over and over again would save you pain, I would give it gladly. But what you ask now is the one thing I can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward. I did not kill Moreau.
That is all I can say to you or to those who try me."
"Your life!" she said with dry lips. "It will mean that. That counts so fearfully much to me--more than my own life a hundred times. Yet there is something that counts more than all that to you!"
His face was that of a man who holds his hand in the fire. "Jessica,"
he said, "it is like this with me. When you found me here--the day I saw you on the balcony--I was a man whose soul had lost its compa.s.s and its bearings. My conscience was asleep. You woke it, and it is fiercely alive now. And now with my memory has come back a debt of my past that I never paid. Whatever the outcome, for my soul"s sake I must settle it now and wipe it from the score for ever. Nothing counts--nothing can count--more than you! But I must sail by the needle; I must be truthful to the best that is in me."
She rose slowly to her feet with a despairing gesture.
""_He saved others_,"" she quoted in a hard voice, ""_himself he could not save!_" I once heard a minister preach from that text at home; it was your friend, the Reverend Henry Sanderson. I thought it a very spiritual sermon then--that was before I knew what his companionship had been to you!"
In the exclamation was the old bitterness that had had its spring in that far-away evening at the white house in the aspens, when Harry Sanderson had lifted the curtain from his college career. In spite of David Stires" predilection, since that day she had distrusted and disliked, at moments actively hated him. His mannerisms had seemed a pose and his pretensions hypocrisy. On her wedding-day, when she lashed him with the blame of Hugh"s ruin, this had become an ingrained prejudice, impregnable because rooted deeper than reason, in the heritage of her s.e.x, the eternal proclivity, which saw Harry Sanderson, his motley covered with the sober domino of the Church, standing self-righteously in surplice and stole, while Hugh slid downward to disgrace.
"If there were any justice in the universe," she added, "it should be he immolating himself now, not you!"
His face was not toward her and she could not see it go deadly white.
The sudden shift she had given the conversation had startled him. He turned to the tiny barred window that looked out across the court-yard square--where such a little time since he had found his lost self.
"I think," he said, "that in my place, he would do the same."
"You always admired him," she went on, the hard ring of misery in her tone. "You admire him yet. Oh, men like him have such strange and wicked power! Satan Sanderson!--it was a fit name. What right has he to be rector of St. James, while you--"
He put out a hand in flinching protest. "Jessica! Don"t!" he begged.
"Why should I not say it?" she retorted, with quivering lips. "But for him you would never be here! He ruined your life and mine, and I hate and despise him for a selfish hypocrite!"
That was what he himself had seemed to her in those old days! The edge of a flush touched his forehead as he said slowly, almost appealingly:
"He was not a hypocrite, Jessica. Whatever he was it was not that. At college he did what he did too openly. That was his failing--not caring what others thought. He despised weakness in others; he thought it none of his affair. So others were influenced. But after he came to see things differently, from another standpoint--when he went into the ministry--he would have given the world to undo it."
"That may have been the Harry Sanderson you knew," she said stonily.
"The one I knew drove an imported motor-car and had a dozen fads that people were always imitating. You are still loyal to the old college worship. As men go, you count him still your friend!"
"As men go," he echoed grimly, "the very closest!"
"Men"s likings are strange," she said. "Because he never had temptations like yours, and has never done what the law calls wrong, you think he is as n.o.ble as you--n.o.ble enough to shield a murderer to his own danger."
"Ah, no, Jessica," he interposed gently. "I only said that in my place, he would do the same."
"But _you_ are shielding a murderer," she insisted fiercely. "You will not admit it, but I know! There can be no justice or right in that! If Harry Sanderson is all you think him--if he stood here now and knew the whole--he would say it was wicked. Not brave and n.o.ble but wicked and cruel!"
He shook his head, and the sad shadow of a bitter smile touched his lips. "He would not say so," he said.
A dry sob answered him. He turned and leaned his elbows on the narrow window-sill, every nerve aching, but powerless to comfort. He heard her step--the door closed sharply.
Then he faced into the empty cell, sat down on the cot and threw out his arms with a hopeless cry:
"Jessica, Jessica!"
CHAPTER XLIII
THE LITTLE GOLD CROSS
Jessica left the jail with despair in her heart. The hope on which she had fed these past days had failed her. What was there left for her to do? Like a swift wind she went up the street to Felder"s office.
A block beyond the court-house a crowd was enjoying the watery discomfiture of Hallelujah Jones, and shrinking from recognition even in the darkness--for the arc lights were still black--she crossed the roadway and ran on to the unpretentious building where the lawyer had his sanctum. She groped her way up the unlighted stair and tapped on the door. There was no answer. She pushed it open and entered the empty outer room, where a study lamp burned on the desk.
A pile of legal looking papers had been set beside it and with them lay a torn page of a newspaper whose familiar caption gave her a stab of pain. Perhaps the news of the trial had found its way across the ranges, to where the names of Stires and Moreau had been known. Perhaps every one at Aniston already knew of it, was reading about it, pitying her!
She picked it up and scanned it hastily. There was no hint of the trial, but her eye caught the news which had played its role in the court-room, and she read it to the end.
Even in her own trouble she read it with a shiver. Yet, awful as the fate which Harry Sanderson had so narrowly missed, it was not to be compared with that which awaited Hugh, for, awful as it was, it held no shame!
In a gust of feeling she slipped to her knees by the one sofa the room contained and prayed pa.s.sionately. As she drew out her handkerchief to stanch the tears that came, something fell with a musical tinkle at her feet. It was the little cross she had found in front of the hillside cabin, that had lain forgotten in her pocket during the past anxious days. She picked it up now and held it tightly in her hand, as if the tangible symbol brought her closer to the Infinite Sympathy to which she turned in her misery. As she pressed it, the ring at the top turned and the cross parted in halves. Words were engraved on the inside of the arms--a date and the name _Henry Sanderson_.
The recurrence of the name jarred and surprised her. Hugh had dropped it--an old keepsake of the friend who had been his _beau ideal_, his exemplar, and whose ancient influence was still dominant. He had clung loyally to the memento, blind in his constant liking, to the wrong that friend had done him. She looked at the date--it was May 28th. She shuddered, for that was the month and day on which Doctor Moreau had been killed--the point had been clearly established to-day by the prosecution. To the original owner of that cross, perhaps, the date that had come into Hugh"s life with such a sinister meaning, was a glad anniversary!
Suddenly she caught her hand to her cheek. A weird idea had rushed through her brain. The religious symbol had stood for Harry Sanderson and the chance coincidence of date had irresistibly pointed to the murder. To her excited senses the juxtaposition held a bizarre, uncanny suggestion. This cross--the very emblem of vicarious sacrifice!--suppose Harry Sanderson had never given it to Hugh! Suppose he had lost it on the hillside himself!
She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the paper again: "Who has been for some months on a prolonged vacation"--the phrase stared sardonically at her. That might carry far back--she said it under her breath, fearfully--beyond the murder of Doctor Moreau! Her face burned, and her breath came sharp and fast. Why, when she brought her warning to the cabin, had Hugh been so anxious to get her away, unless to prevent her sight of the man who was there--to whom he had taken her horse? Who was there in Smoky Mountain whom he would protect at hazard of his own life? Yet in this crisis, even, her appeal to his love had been fruitless. He had called Harry Sanderson his closest friend, had said that in his place Harry would do the same. She remembered his cry: "What you ask is the one thing I can not do. It would make me a pitiful coward!" She had asked only that he tell the truth. To protect a vulgar murderer was not courageous. But what if they were bound by ties of old friendship and college _camaraderie_? Men had their standards.
Jessica"s veins were all afire. A rector-murderer? A double career? Was it beyond possibility? At the sanatorium she had re-read _The Mystery of Edwin Drood_; now she thought of John Jasper, the choir-master, stealing away from the cathedral to the London opium den to plan the murder of his nephew. The mad thought gripped her imagination. Harry Sanderson had been wild and lawless in his university days, a gamester, a skeptic--the Abbot of the Saints! To her his pretensions had never seemed more than a graceful sham, the generalities of religion he spread for the delectation of fashionable St. James only "as sounding bra.s.s and a tinkling cymbal." He had been a hard drinker in those days. What if the old desire had run on beneath the fair exterior, denied and repressed till it had burst control--till he had fled from those who knew him, to Hugh, in whose loyalty he trusted, to give it rein in a debauch? Say that this had happened, and that in the midst of it Moreau, whom he had known in Aniston, had come upon him. Antic.i.p.ating recognition, to cover his own shame and save his career, in drunken frenzy perhaps, he might have fired the shot on the hillside--that Moreau, taken unawares, had thought was Hugh"s!
It came to her like an impinging ray of light--the old curious likeness that had sometimes been made a jest of at the white house in the aspens.
Moreau and Prendergast had believed it to be Hugh! So had the town, for the body had been found on his ground! But on the night when the real murderer came again to the cabin--perhaps it was his coming that had brought back the lost memory!--Hugh had known the truth. In the light of this supposition his strained manner then, his present determination not to speak, all stood plain.
What had he meant by a debt of his past that he had never paid? He could owe no debt to Harry Sanderson. If he owed any debt, it was to his dead father, a thousand times more than the draft he had repaid. Could he be thinking in his remorse that his father had cast him off--counting himself nothing, remembering only that Harry Sanderson had been David Stires" favorite, and St. James, which must be smirched by the odium of its rector, the apple of his eye?
Jessica had s.n.a.t.c.hed at a straw, because it was the only buoyant thing afloat in the dragging tide; now with a blind fatuousness she hugged it tighter to her bosom. The joints of her reasoning seemed to dovetail with fateful accuracy. She was swayed by instinct, and apparent fallacies were glozed by old mistrust and terror of the outcome which was driving her to any desperate expedient. Beside Hugh"s salvation the whole universe counted as nothing. She was in the grip of that fierce pa.s.sion of love"s defense which feeds the romance of the world. One purpose possessed her: to confront Harry Sanderson. What matter though she missed the remainder of the trial? She could do nothing--her hands were tied. If the truth lay at Aniston she would find it. She thought no further than this. Once in Harry Sanderson"s presence, what she should say or do she scarcely imagined. The horrifying question filled her thought to the exclusion of all that must follow its answer. It was surety and self-conviction she craved--only to read in his eyes the truth about the murder of Moreau.
She suddenly began to tremble. Would the doctors let her see him? What excuse could she give? If he was the man who had been in Hugh"s cabin that night, he had heard her speak, had known she was there. He must not know beforehand of her coming, lest he have suspicion of her errand.
Bishop Ludlow--he could gain her access to him. Injured, dying perhaps, maybe he did not guess that Hugh was in jeopardy for his crime. Guilty and dying, if he knew this, he would surely tell the truth. But if he died before she could reach him? The paper was some days old; he might be dead already. She took heart, however, from the statement of his improved condition.
She sprang to her feet and looked at her chatelaine watch. The east-bound express was overdue. There was no time to lose--minutes might count. She examined her purse--she had money enough with her.
Five minutes later she was at the station, a scribbled note was on its way to Mrs. Halloran, and before a swinging red lantern, the long incoming train was shuddering to a stop.