"You"ll tell me before you go! You"ll tell before--"
"You didn"t kill," answered Donaldson.
"Thank G.o.d!"
"She is n"t even wounded seriously."
"She knows that it was I?"
"Yes. She knows."
"How she must hate me, gentle Elaine."
"It is hard for her to hate any one."
"You think she--she might forgive?"
"I don"t know. That remains to be seen."
The man buried his face in his arms and wept. This was not maudlin sentimentality; it struck deeper.
"Are you ready to do anything more than regret?" demanded Donaldson.
"Are you ready to make a fight to quit that stuff?"
"So help me as long as I live--"
"Don"t tell me that. I want you to think it over a while. I "m going to have some one stay here with you until I get back this afternoon.
Will you remain quiet?"
"Yes."
"And remember that even if by chance you did n"t do much harm, still you struck. You struck a woman; you struck your sister."
Arsdale cringed. Each word was a harder blow than he, even in his madness, could strike.
"It"s a--terrible thing to remember. But--but it will be always with me. It will never leave me."
As soon as the detective arrived Donaldson gave him his instructions, adding,
"Look out for tricks, and be ready to tell me all he says to you."
"I "ve had "em before," answered the man.
CHAPTER XVII
_An Interlude_
She was waiting for him in the library with an expression both eager and worried. She crossed the room to meet him, but paused half-way as though really fearful of some change. But she saw only the same kind, tense face, looking perhaps a bit heavy from weariness, the same dark eyes with their strange fires, the same slight droop of the shoulders.
There was certainly nothing to fear in him as he stood before her with a tender, quizzical smile about his large mouth. He looked to her now more like a big boy than the cold, stern man she had half expected.
"Are you afraid?" he asked.
"No, not standing here where I can see you. But over the telephone with your strange voice and your half meanings--what _did_ you mean?"
"Nothing you need worry about."
She became suddenly serious.
"I want to tell you now that there is no need of your trying to hide anything at all from me about Ben."
"I am hiding nothing. But," he asked with quick intuition, "are _you_?"
She hesitated, met his eyes, and dropped her voice.
"I can tell you nothing--not even you--unless you have learned it."
"I, in my turn, don"t know what you mean," he answered. "I have learned nothing new about him. And it is too fair a morning," he concluded abruptly, "to bother over puzzles. Things have happened so rapidly that we are probably both muddled, and if we could spend the time in explanations we should doubtless find that neither of us means anything."
She was clearly relieved, but it raised a new question in Donaldson"s mind. Of course she understood nothing of what had taken place last night unless by mental telepathy. But in these days of psychic revelations a man could n"t feel secure even in his thoughts. There was apparently some inner secret--she had touched upon it before--relating to the Arsdale curse. Doubtless if one pried carefully enough many another skeleton could be found in the closets of the house of this family half-poisoned now through three generations.
It was early and it suddenly occurred to her that he had probably not yet breakfasted.
She struggled a moment with a conflicting sense of hospitality and propriety, but finally said resolutely, "I should be glad if you would breakfast with me. You ought to try your new cook."
The picture he had of her sitting opposite him at the coffee brought the warm blood to his cheeks.
"I--why--"
"Will you have your chop well done?" she broke in, without giving him time to frame an excuse.
"Yes," he answered.
She left him.
Within a very short time she announced the meal with pretty grace, which concealed all trace of nervousness, save for the heightened color of her cheeks, which, he noted, were as scarlet as though she herself had been bending over a hot stove. She led the way into an exquisite little dining room, which he at once took to be the expression of her own taste. It was in white and apple green, with a large trellised window opening upon the lawn. A small table had been placed in the sun near the window, and was covered with dazzling white linen, polished silver, and cut gla.s.s, which, catching the morning beams, reflected a prismatic riot of colors. The chops, lettuce, bread and b.u.t.ter, and coffee were already served. As he seated her, he felt as though he were living out a dream--one of the dreams that as a very young man he had sometimes dreamed when, lying flat upon his back in the sun, he had watched the big cotton clouds wafted, like thistledown, across the blue.
It might have been Italy for the blue of the sky and the caressing warmth of the sun. They threw open the big window and in flooded the perfume of lilacs and the twitter of sparrows, which is the nearest to a bird song one can expect in New York. But after all, this was n"t New York; nor Spain; nor even the inner woods; it was just Here. And Here is where the eyes of a man and a woman meet with spring in their blood.
Griefs of loss, bitter, poignant; sorrows of mistakes, bruising, numbing; the ache of disappointments, ingrat.i.tudes, betrayals,--Nature surging on to her fulfillment sweeps them away, like fences before a flood, allowing no obstructions to Youth"s kinship with Spring. So the young may not mourn long; so, if they do, they become no longer young.
The man and the woman might have been two care-free children for all they were able to resist the magic of this fair morning or the subtler magic of their own emotions.
To the man it suggested more than to the woman because he gave more thought to it, but the woman absorbed more the spirit of it because she more fully surrendered herself.
Donaldson found himself with a good appet.i.te. There was nothing neurotic about him. He was fundamentally normal--fundamentally wholesome--with no trace of mawkishness in his nature. As he sipped the hot golden-brown coffee, he tried to get at just what it was that he felt when he now looked at her. It came to him suddenly and he spoke it aloud,