Phantom Wires Part 4

"Then I wrote twice to London!"

"And _those_ never came. Oh, everything was against me!" she moaned.

"But how did you get here?" he still demanded.

She did not answer his question. Instead, she asked him: "Where did you send the Paris letters?"

"To 11 bis avenue Beaucourt."

She groaned a little, impatiently.

"That was foolish--I wrote you that I was leaving there--that I _had_ to go!"

"Not a line reached me!"

He heard her little gasp of despair before she spoke.

"I was put out of there," she went on, hurriedly and evenly, yet with a _vibrata_ of pa.s.sion in her crowded utterance. "There wasn't a penny left--the pupils I had gave up their lessons. What they had heard or found out I don't know. Then I got a tiny room in the rue de Sevres.

I sold my last thing, then our wedding ring, even, to get it."

"And then what?"

"I still waited--I thought you would know, or find out, and that in some way or other I should still hear from you. I would have gone to the police, or advertised, but I knew it wouldn't be safe."

Once more the embittering consciousness of some dark coalition of forces against them swept over him. Fate, at every step, had frustrated them.

"I advertised twice, in the Herald?"

"Where would I see the Herald?"

"But you must have known I was trying to find you--that I was doing everything possible!"

"I knew nothing," she answered, in her poignantly emotionless voice.

And the thought swept through Durkin that something within her had withered and died during those last grim weeks of suffering.

"But here--how did you get here--and what's this Lady Boxspur business?" he still insisted.

"Yes, yes," she almost moaned, "if you'll only wait I'll tell you. But is it safe to stay here? Have you thought where we are?"

"Yes; it's safe, quite safe, for an hour yet."

"Why didn't you send me money, or help me?" she asked, in her dead and unhappy monotone.

"I did, eighty francs, all I had. I hadn't a penny left. I didn't know the d.a.m.ned language. I prowled about like a cat in a strange garret, but I tried everything, from the American consul at Nice to a _Herald_ correspondent at San Remo. Then I got word of a consumptive young writer from New York, at Mentone--but he died the day I was to meet him. Then I heard of the new Marconi station up the coast, and worked at wireless for two weeks, and made twenty dollars, before they sacked me for not being able to send a message out to a Messina fruit-steamer, in Italian. Then I chanced on the job of doctoring up a generator on an American yacht down here in the bay."

"Yes, yes--I know how hard it is!"

"But listen! When I was on board at work I overheard a Supreme Court judge and a special agent from the Central Office in New York and two English detectives talking over the loss of certain securities. And those securities belong to Richard Penfield!"

He knew that she had started, at the sound of that name.

"Penfield!" she gasped. "What of him?"

"When the district-attorney's men raided Penfield's New York gambling club, one of Penfield's new men got away with all his papers. They had been withdrawn from the Fifth Avenue Safe Deposit Company, for they were mostly cheques and negotiable securities, worth about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. But beyond all their face value, they const.i.tuted _prima facie_ evidence against the gambler."

"But what's all this to us, now?"

"They were smuggled to New Jersey. There the Jersey City chief of police took action, and this agent of Penfield's carried the doc.u.ments across the North River and up to Stamford. From there he got back to New York again, by night, where he met a second agent, who had secured pa.s.sage on the _Slavonia_ for Naples. The first man is Mac.n.u.tt."

"Mac.n.u.tt!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the listening woman.

"Yes, Mac.n.u.tt! He compromised with Penfield and swung in with him when the district-attorney started pounding at them both. The second man is a lawyer named Keenan, who was disbarred for conspiracy in the Brayton divorce case. Keenan and his papers are due at Genoa on Friday. I found some of this out on board the yacht. I thought it over--and it was the only way open for me. I couldn't stand out against it all, any longer. I thought I could make the plunge, without your ever knowing it--and perhaps get enough to keep you out of any more messes like this!"

"You had given me up?" she cried, reprovingly.

"No--no--no--I'd only given up waiting for chances to _find you_. My G.o.d, don't you suppose I knew you needed me!"

"It would have been too late!" she said, in her dead voice. "It's too late, already!"

"Then you don't care?" he demanded, almost brokenly.

"I'll never complain, or whine, again!" she answered with dreary listlessness.

"Then why _are_ you in this room?"

"_I mean that I've given up myself_. I'm in it, now, as deep as you!

I couldn't fight it back any longer--it _had_ to come!"

"But why, and how! Why don't you explain?"

He could feel her groping away from him in the darkness.

"Wait," she whispered.

"But why should I wait?" he demanded.

"Listen! That second room door is still unlocked, and there's danger enough here, without inviting it."

He groped after her into the bedroom. He could hear the gentle sc.r.a.pe of the key and the m.u.f.fled sound of the lock as she turned it, followed by the cautious slide of the bra.s.s bolt, lower on the door. He waited for her, standing at the foot of the bed. He could hear her sigh of weariness as she sat down on the edge of the disordered mattress.

Then, remembering that he had cut the wires of only the larger room, he felt his way to the b.u.t.ton at the head of the bed. He snapped the current open and instantly the blinding white light flooded the chamber.

"_Is_ it safe here, any longer?" she asked restlessly, pausing a moment to accustom her eyes to the light, and then gazing up at him with an impersonal studiousness of stare that seemed to wall and bar her off from him. Still again he was oppressed by some sense of alienation, of looming tragedy between them. She, too, must have known some shadow of that feeling, for he saw the look of troubled concern, of unspoken pity, that crept over her face; and he turned away brusquely.

She spoke his name, quietly; and his gaze coasted round to her again.

She watched him with wide and hungry eyes.

Her breast heaved, at his silence, but all she said was: "Is it safe, Jim?"