"Sanderson," said David Stires, once more in his even, deadly voice, "Jessica is waiting in the room above this. She will not understand the delay. Will you go to her? Make some excuse--any you can think of--till I come."
Harry nodded and left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him, carrying with him the cowering helpless look with which Hugh saw himself left alone with his implacable judge. What to say to her? How to say it?
As he pa.s.sed the hall, the haste of demolition had already begun.
Florists" a.s.sistants were carrying the plants from the east room, and through the open door a man was rolling up the red carpet. The cluttered emptiness struck him with a sense of fateful symbolism--as though it shadowed forth the shattering of Jessica"s ordered dream of happiness.
He mounted the stair as if a pack swung from his shoulders. He paused a moment at the door, then knocked, turned the k.n.o.b, and entered.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
There, in the middle of the blue-hung room, in her wedding-dress, with her bandaged eyes, and her bridal bouquet on the table, stood Jessica.
Twilight was near, but even so, all the shutters were drawn save one, through which a last glow of refracted sunlight sifted to fall upon his face. Her hands were clasped before her, he could hear her breathing--the full hurried respiration of expectancy.
Then, while his hand closed the door behind him, a thing unexpected, anomalous, happened--a thing that took him as utterly by surprise as if the solid floor had yawned before him. Slim fingers tore away the broad encircling bandage. She started forward. Her arms were flung about his neck.
"Hugh!... Hugh!" she cried. "My husband!"
The paleness was stricken suddenly from Harry"s face. An odd, dazed color--a flush of mortification, of self-reproach, flooded it from chin to brow. Despite himself, he had felt his lips molding to an answering kiss beneath her own. He drew a gasping breath, his hand nervously caught the bandage, replaced it over the eyes, and tied it tightly, putting down her protesting hands.
"Oh, Hugh," she pleaded, "not for a moment--not when I am so happy! Your face is what I dreamed it must be! Why did you make me wait so long? And I can see, Hugh! I can really see! Let it stay off, just for one little moment more!"
He held her hands by force. "Jessica--wait!" he said in a broken whisper. "You must not take it off again--not now!"
An incredible confusion enveloped him--his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. Not only had the painful _contretemps_ nonplussed and dismayed him; not only had it heightened and horrified the realization of what she must presently be told. It had laid a careless hand upon his own secret, touching it with an almost vulgar mockery. It had overthrown in an instant the barricades he had been piling. The pressure of those lips on his had sent coursing to the furthest recesses of his nature a great wave which dikes nor locks might ever again forbid.
Her look, leaping to his face, had not noted the ministerial dress, nor in the ecstasy of the moment did she catch the agitation in his voice; or if she did, she attributed it to a feeling like her own. She was laughing happily, while he stood, trembling slightly, holding himself with an effort.
"What a dear goose you are!" she said. "The light didn"t hurt them--indeed, indeed! Only to think, Hugh! Your wife will have her sight! Do go and tell your father! He will be waiting to know!"
Harry made some incoherent reply. He was desperately anxious to get away--his thought was a snarl of tatters, threaded by one lucid purpose: to spare her coming self-abas.e.m.e.nt this sardonic humiliation. He did not think of a time in the future, when her error must naturally disclose itself. The tangle spelled _Now_. Not to tell her--not to let her know!
He almost ran from the room and down the stair.
CHAPTER VIII
"AM I MY BROTHER"S KEEPER?"
At the foot of the landing he paused, drawing a deep breath as if to lift a weight of air. He needed to get his bearings--to win back a measure of calmness.
As he stood there, Hugh came from the library. His head was down and he went furtively and slinkingly, as though dreading even a casual regard.
He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hat from the rack, pa.s.sed out of the house, and was swallowed up in the dusk. David Stires had followed his son into the hall. He answered the gloomy question in Harry"s eyes:
"He is gone," he said, "and I hope to Heaven I may never see his face again!" Then, slowly and feebly, he ascended the stair.
The library windows were shadowed by shrubbery, and the sunset splintered against the wall in a broad stripe, like cloth of crimson silk. Harry leaned his hot forehead against the chill marble of the mantelpiece and gazed frowningly at the dark Korean desk--an antique gift of his own to David Stires--where the slip of paper still lay that had spelled such ruin and shame. From the rear of the house came the pert, t.i.ttering laugh of a maid bantering an expressman, and the heavy, rattling thump of rolled trunks. There was something ghastly in the incomprehension of all the house save the four chief actors of the melodrama. The travesty was over, the curtain rung down to clapping of hands, the scene-shifters clearing away--and behind all, in the wings, unseen by any spectator, the last act of a living tragedy was rushing to completion.
Ten, fifteen minutes pa.s.sed, and old David Stires reentered the room, went feebly to his wheel-chair, and sat down. He sat a moment in silence, looking at a portrait of Jessica--a painting by Altsheler that hung above the mantel--in a light fleecy gown, with one white rose in the bronze hair. When he spoke the body"s infirmity had become all at once pitifully apparent. The fiery wrath seemed suddenly to have burned itself out, leaving only dead ashes behind. His eyes had shrunk away into almost empty sockets. The authority had faded from his face. He was all at once a feeble, gentle-looking, ill, old man, with white mustaches and uncertain hands, dressed in ceremonial broadcloth.
"I have told her," he said presently, in a broken voice. "You are kind, Sanderson, very kind. G.o.d help us!"
"What has G.o.d to do with it?" fell a voice behind them. Harry faced about. It was Jessica, as he had first seen her in the upper room, with the bandage across her eyes.
"What has G.o.d to do with it?" she repeated, in a hard tone. "Perhaps Mr.
Sanderson can tell us. It is in his line!"
"Please--" said Harry.
He could not have told what he would have asked, though the accent was almost one of entreaty. The harsh satire touched his sacred calling; coming from her lips it affronted at once his religious instinct and his awakened love. It was all he said, for he stopped suddenly at sight of her face, pain-frosted, white as the folded cloth.
"Oh," she said, turning toward the voice, "I remember what you said that night, right here in this very room--that you sowed your wild oats at college with Hugh--that they were "a tidy crop"! You were strong, and he was weak. You led, and he followed. You were "Satan Sanderson," Abbot of The Saints, the set in which he learned gambling. Why, it was in your rooms that he played his first game of poker--he told me so himself! And now he has gone to be an outcast, and you stand in the pulpit in a ca.s.sock, you, the "Reverend Henry Sanderson"! You helped to make him what he has become! Can you undo it?"
Harry was looking at her with a stricken countenance. He had no answer ready. The wave of confusion that had submerged him when he had restored the bandage to her eyes had again welled over him. He stood shocked and confounded. His hand fumbled at his lapel, and the white carnation, crushed by his fingers, dropped at his feet.
"I am not excusing Hugh now," she went on wildly. "He has gone beyond excuse or forgiveness. He is as dead to me as though I had never known him, though the word you spoke an hour ago made me his wife. I shall have that to remember all my life--that, and the one moment I had waited for so long, for my first sight of his face, and my bride"s kiss! I must carry it with me always. I can never wipe that face from my brain, or the sting of that kiss from my lips--the kiss of a forger--of my husband!"
The old man groaned. "I didn"t know he had seen her!" he said helplessly. "Jessica, Hugh"s sin is not Sanderson"s fault!"
In her bitter words was an injustice as pa.s.sionate as her pain, but for her life she could not help it. She was a woman wrenched and torn, tortured beyond control, numb with anguish. Every quivering tendril of feeling was a live protest, every voice of her soul was crying out against the fact. In those dreadful minutes when her mind took in the full extent of her calamity, Hugh"s past intimacy and present grim contrast with Harry Sanderson had mercilessly thrust themselves upon her, and her agony had seared the swift ant.i.thesis on her brain.
To Harry Sanderson, however, her words fell with a wholly disproportionate violence. It had never occurred to him that he himself had been individually and actively the cause of Hugh"s downfall. The accusation pierced through the armor of self-esteem that he had linked and riveted with habit. The same pain of mind that had spurred him, on that long-ago night, to the admission she had heard, had started to new life a bared, a scathed, a rekindling sin.
"It is all true," he said. It was the inveterate voice of conscience that spoke. "I have been deceiving myself. I was my brother"s keeper! I see it now."
She did not catch the deep compunction in the judicial utterance. In her agony the very composure and restraint cut more deeply than silence. She stood an instant quivering, then turned, and feeling blindly for the door, swept from their sight.
White and breathless, Jessica climbed the stair. In her room, she took a key from a drawer and ran swiftly to the attic-studio. She unlocked the door with hurried fingers, tore the wrappings from the tall white figure of the Prodigal Son, and found a heavy mallet. She lifted this with all her strength, and showered blow upon blow on the hard clay, her face and hair and shimmering train powdered with the white dust, till the statue lay on the floor, a heap of tumbled fragments.
Fateful and pa.s.sionate as the scene in the library had been, her going left a pall of silence in the room. Harry Sanderson looked at David Stires with pale intentness.
"Yet I would have given my life," he said in a low voice, "to save her this!"
Something in the tone caught the old man. He glanced up.
"I never guessed!" he said slowly. "I never guessed that you loved her, too."
But Harry had not heard. He did not even know that he had spoken aloud.
David Stires turned his wheel-chair to the Korean desk, touching the bell as he did so. He took up the draft and put it into his pocket. He pressed a spring, a panel dropped, and disclosed a hidden drawer, from which he took a crackling parchment. It was the will against whose signing Harry had pleaded months before in that same room. The butler entered.
"Witness my signature, Blake," he said, and wrote his name on the last page. "Mr. Sanderson will sign with you."
An hour later the fast express that bore Jessica and David Stires was shrieking across the long skeleton railroad bridge, a dotted trail of fire against the deepening night. The sound crossed the still miles. It called to Harry Sanderson, where he sat in his study with the evening paper before him. It called his eyes from a paragraph he was reading through a painful mist--a paragraph under heavy leads, on its front page: