[Ill.u.s.tration: "What you been doin" to yerself?" he gasped]
"No--Burke!"
The word was like a pistol shot.
"Y-yessir!" Burke was stammering. In his excitement he was hardly conscious that another bill had found its way into his hand, but his hand had automatically reached for and closed on it.
"Keep your mouth shut."
"Y-yessir."
"Keep it shut till to-morrow morning. You haven"t seen anything or anybody at all to-day. Understand?"
"Y-yessir."
"After to-night you can talk about me all you like. But you"re to forget absolutely that you ever saw the lady. Is that clear?"
"Y-yessir!"
"Thank you. Good-by."
He started the car and swung it out into the storm. As it went Burke saw the girl catch the boy"s arm and heard something that sounded partly like a cry and partly like a sob.
"Laurie!"
"H-ush!"
The car was tearing through the storm and drifts at fifty miles an hour, and this time it was headed down the road for New York.
Burke"s eyes followed it, as far as he could see it, which was not far.
Then he retreated to the "office," and, dropping heavily into his desk chair, stared unseeingly at a calendar on the wall.
"That lad"s been up to somethin"," he muttered. "I wonder what my dooty is."
It was a long moment before he remembered to open his hand and look at the bill he was holding. As he did so his eyes widened. The bill was a large one. It amounted to much more than the combined value of the bills dropped into that willing palm during the day. Briskly and efficiently it solved the little problem connected with Mr. Burke"s "dooty." With a quick look around him, he thrust it into his pocket.
"I ain"t really _seen_ nothin"," he muttered, "an" I ain"t sure of nothin", anyhow."
"What has happened? Oh, Laurie, what has happened?"
For a time Laurie did not answer. Then she felt rather than saw his face turn toward her in the darkness.
"Doris."
"Yes."
"Will you do something for me?"
"Yes, Laurie, anything."
"Then don"t speak till we reach New York. When we get to your studio I"ll tell you everything. Will you do that?"
"But--Laurie--"
"Will--you--do--it?" The voice was not Laurie"s. It was the harsh, grating voice of a man distraught.
"Yes, of course."
Silence settled upon them like a substance, a silence broken only by the roar of the storm and the crashing of wind-swept branches of the trees that lined the road. The car"s powerful search-lights threw up in ghostly shapes the covered stumps and hedges they pa.s.sed and the ma.s.ses of snow that beat against them. Subconsciously the girl knew that this boy beside her, driving with the recklessness of a lost soul, was merely guessing at a road no one could have seen, but in that half-hour she had no thought for the hazards of the journey. Her panic had grown till it filled her soul.
She wanted to cry out, to shriek, but she dared not. The compelling soul in the rigid figure beside her held her silent. Her nerves began to play strange tricks. She became convinced that the whole experience was a nightmare, an incredible one from which she would wake if that terrible figure so close to her, and yet so far away, would help her. But it wouldn"t. Perhaps it never would. The nightmare must go on and on. Soon all sense of being in a normal world had left her.
Once, in a frantic impulse of need of human contact, she laid her hand on the arm nearest her, over the wheel. The next instant she withdrew it with a shudder. For all the response she had found she might have touched a dead man. Something of the look of a dead man, too, was in the boy"s face and eyes as he bent forward, motionless as a statue, his features like stone and his eyes as unhuman as polished agate, staring fixedly at the road before them.
A low-bending, ice-covered branch whipped her face and she shrieked, fancying it the touch of dead fingers. Several times huge shapes from the roadside seemed to spring at them, but their progress was too swift even for spectral shapes. Or was it?
It was on a stretch of road through the woods that the obsession in her mind took its final and most hideous form. Close behind them, and ringing in their ears, she fancied she heard a cry in the voice of Shaw.
It was not Shaw"s human voice. She would not have known it in a human world. It had pa.s.sed through the great change; but it was recognizable, because she, too, had pa.s.sed through some great change. Recognizable, too, was the sound of Shaw"s running feet, though she had never heard them run, and though they were running so lightly on the top of the snow.
He was just behind them, she thought. If she turned she knew she would see him, not as she had known him, plump, sleek, living and loathsome, but stark, rigid, and ready for his grave, yet able to pursue; and the new, unearthly light of his bulging eyes seemed burning into her back.
She groaned, but the groan brought no response from the tense figure beside her. The only sounds were the howls of the wind, the frenzied protests of the tortured trees, and the fancied hail of a dead man, coming closer and closer.
CHAPTER XVII
LAURIE MAKES A CONFESSION
The lights of Long Island City greeted them with rea.s.suring winks through the snow. Seeing these, Doris drew a deep breath. She had let her nerves run away with her, she subconsciously felt. Now, rising from the depths of her panic to a realization of contact with a living world, as they crossed the bridge to Manhattan, seeing hurrying men and women about her, hearing the blasts of motor horns and the voices of motor drivers, she fiercely a.s.sured herself that she had been an hysterical fool.
In the first moments of reaction she even experienced a sense of personal injury and almost of resentment toward her companion. He had put her through the most horrible half-hour of her life. It seemed that no service he had rendered could compensate her for such suffering. On the other hand, he _had_ brought her safely back to New York, as he had promised to do. Surely, it was not for her to cavil at the manner in which he had done it. Something, of course, had happened, probably a racking fight between the two men. Laurie was exhausted, and was showing it; that was all.
With their arrival at her studio, his manner did not change. He a.s.sisted her from the car, punctiliously escorted her to the elevator, and left her there.
"I have some telephoning to do," he explained. "I shall not leave the building, and I expect to be with you again in about fifteen minutes.
With your permission, I am asking my two partners to meet me in your studio, Rodney Bangs and Jacob Epstein. What I have to tell must be told to all three of you, and"--his voice caught in a queer fashion--"it is a thing I don"t want to tell more than once. I think I can get them right away. They"ll probably be in their rooms, dressing for dinner. May they come here?"
"Of course."
Her panic was returning. His appearance in the lighted hall was nothing short of terrifying, and not the least uncanny feature was his own utter unconsciousness of or indifference to it.
"Thanks. Then I"ll wait for them down here, and bring them up to your studio when they come."
He left her with that, and Henry, the night elevator man, who went on duty at six o"clock, indifferently swung the lever and started his car upward.