The Blind Man's Eyes Part 31

She hesitated; she knew that her father would not permit the vague generality that Eaton was "a gentleman." "Exactly what do you mean, Father?"

"I don't mean, certainly, to ask whether he knows which fork to use at table or enough to keep his napkin on his knee; but you have talked with him, been with him--both on the train and here: have you been able to determine what sort of people he has been accustomed to mix with?

Have his friends been business men? Professional men? Society people?"

The deep and unconcealed note of trouble in her father's voice startled her, in her familiarity with every tone and every expression. She answered his question: "I don't know, Father."

"I want you to find out."

"In what way?"

"You must find a way. I shall tell Avery to help." He thought for several moments, while she stood waiting. "We must have that motor and the men in it traced, of course. Harriet, there are certain matters--correspondence--which Avery has been looking after for me; do you know what correspondence I mean?"

"Yes, Father."

"I would rather not have Avery bothered with it just now; I want him to give his whole attention to this present inquiry. You yourself will a.s.sume charge of the correspondence of which I speak, Daughter."

"Yes, Father. Do you want anything else now?"

"Not of you; send Avery to me."

She moved toward the door which led to the circular stair. Her father, she knew, seldom spoke all that was in his mind to any one, even herself; she was accustomed, therefore, to looking for meanings underneath the directions which he gave her, and his present order--that she should take charge of a part of their work which ordinarily had been looked after by Avery--startled and surprised her by its implication that her father might not trust Avery fully. But now, as she halted and looked back at him from the door and saw his troubled face and his fingers nervously pressing together, she recognized that it was not any definite distrust of Avery that had moved him, but only his deeper trust in herself. Blind and obliged to rely on others always in respect of sight, and now still more obliged to rely upon them because he was confined helpless to his bed, Santoine had felt ever since the attack on him some unknown menace over himself and his affairs, some hidden agency threatening him and, through him, the men who trusted him. So, with instinctive caution, she saw now, he had been withdrawing more and more his reliance upon those less closely bound to him--even Avery--and depending more and more on the one he felt he could implicitly trust--herself. As realization of this came to her, she was stirred deeply by the impulse to rush back to him and throw herself down beside him and a.s.sure him of her love and fealty; but seeing him again deep in thought, she controlled herself and went out.

CHAPTER XV

DONALD AVERY IS MOODY

Harriet went down the stair into the study; she pa.s.sed through the study into the main part of the house and found Donald and sent him to her father; then she returned to the study. She closed and fastened the doors, and after glancing about the room, she removed the books in front of the wall-safe to the right of the door, slid back the movable panel, opened the safe and took out a bundle of correspondence. She closed safe and panel and put back the books; and carrying the correspondence to her father's desk, she began to look over it.

This correspondence--a considerable bundle of letters held together with wire clips and the two envelopes bound with tape which she had put into the safe the day before--made up the papers of which her father had spoken to her. These letters represented the contentions of willful, powerful and sometimes ruthless and violent men. Ruin of one man by another--ruin financial, social or moral, or all three together--was the intention of the princ.i.p.als concerned in this correspondence; too often, she knew, one man or one group had carried out a fierce intent upon another; and sometimes, she was aware, these bitter feuds had carried certain of her father's clients further even than personal or family ruin: fraud, violence and--twice now--even murder were represented by this correspondence; for the papers relating to the Warden and the Latron murders were here. There were in this connection the doc.u.ments concerning the Warden and the Latron properties which her father had brought back with him from the Coast; there were letters, now more than five years old, which concerned the Government's promised prosecution of Latron; and, lastly, there were the two envelopes which had just been sent to her father concerning the present organization of the Latron properties.

She glanced through these and the others with them. She had felt always the horror of this violent and ruthless side of the men with whom her father dealt; but now she knew that actual appreciation of the crimes that pa.s.sed as business had been far from her. And, strangely, she now realized that it was not the attacks on Mr. Warden and her father--overwhelming with horror as these had been--which were bringing that appreciation home to her. It was her understanding now that the attack was not meant for her father but for Eaton.

For when she had believed that some one had meant to murder her father, as Mr. Warden had been murdered, the deed had come within the cla.s.s of crimes comprehensible to her. She was accustomed to recognize that, at certain times and under special circ.u.mstances, her father might be an obstacle to some one who would become desperate enough to attack; but she had supposed that, if such an attack were delivered, it must be made by a man roused to hate his victim, and the deed would be palliated, as far as such a crime could be, by an overwhelming impulse of terror or antipathy at the moment of striking the blow. But she had never contemplated a condition in which a man might murder--or attempt to murder--without hate of his victim. Yet now her father had made it clear that this was such a case. Some one on that train in Montana--acting for himself or for another--had found this stranger, Eaton, an obstacle in his way. And merely as removing an obstacle, that man had tried to murder Eaton. And when, instead, he had injured Basil Santoine, apparently fatally, he had been satisfied so that his animus against Eaton had lapsed until the injured man began to recover; and then, when Eaton was out on the open road beside her, that pitiless, pa.s.sionless enemy had tried again to kill. She had seen the face of the man who drove the motor down upon Eaton, and it had been only calm, determined, businesslike--though the business with which the man had been engaged was murder.

Though Harriet had never believed that Eaton had been concerned in the attack upon her father, her denial of it had been checked and stilled because he would not even defend himself. She had not known what to think; she had seemed to herself to be waiting with her thoughts in abeyance; until he should be cleared, she had tried not to let herself think more about Eaton than was necessary. Now that her father himself had cleared Eaton of that suspicion, her feelings had altered from mere disbelief that he had injured her father to recollection that Mr.

Warden had spoken of him only as one who himself had been greatly injured. Eaton was involved with her father in some way; she refused to believe he was against her father, but clearly he was not with him.

How could he be involved, then, unless the injury he had suffered was some such act of man against man as these letters and statements represented? She looked carefully through all the contents of the envelopes, but she could not find anything which helped her.

She pushed the letters away, then, and sat thinking. Mr. Warden, who appeared to have known more about Eaton than any one else, had taken Eaton's side; it was because he had been going to help Eaton that Mr.

Warden had been killed. Would not her father be ready to help Eaton, then, if he knew as much about him as Mr. Warden had known? But Mr.

Warden, apparently, had kept what he knew even from his own wife; and Eaton was now keeping it from every one--her father included. She felt that her father had understood and appreciated all this long before herself--that it was the reason for his att.i.tude toward Eaton on the train and, in part, the cause of his considerate treatment of him all through. She sensed for the first time how great her father's perplexity must be; but she felt, too, how terrible the injustice must have been that Eaton had suffered, since he himself did not dare to tell it even to her father and since, to hide it, other men did not stop short of double murder.

So, instead of being estranged by Eaton's manner to her father, she felt an impulse of feeling toward him flooding her, a feeling which she tried to explain to herself as sympathy. But it was not just sympathy; she would not say even to herself what it was.

She got up suddenly and went to the door and looked into the hall; a servant came to her.

"Is Mr. Avery still with Mr. Santoine?" she asked.

"No, Miss Santoine; he has gone out."

"How long ago?"

"About ten minutes."

"Thank you."

She went back, and bundling the correspondence together as it had been before, she removed the books from a shelf to the left of the door, slid back another panel and revealed the second wall-safe corresponding to the one to the right of the door from which she had taken the papers. The combination of this second safe was known only to her father and herself. She put the envelopes into it, closed it, and replaced the books. Then she went to her father's desk, took from a drawer a long typewritten report of which he had asked her to prepare a digest, and read it through; consciously concentrating, she began her work. The servant came at one to tell her luncheon was served, but--immersed now--she ordered her luncheon brought to the study. At three she heard Avery's motor, and went to the study door and looked out as he entered the hall.

"What have you found out, Don?" she inquired.

"Nothing yet, Harry."

"You got no trace of them?"

"No; too many motors pa.s.s on that road for the car to be recalled particularly. I've started what inquiries are possible and arranged to have the road watched in case they come back this way."

He went past her and up to her father. She returned to the study and put away her work; she called the stables on the house telephone and ordered her saddle-horse; and going to her rooms and changing to her riding-habit, she rode till five. Returning, she dressed for dinner, and going down at seven, she found Eaton, Avery and Blatchford awaiting her.

The meal was served in the great Jacobean dining room, with walls paneled to the high ceiling, logs blazing in the big stone fireplace.

As they seated themselves, she noted that Avery seemed moody and uncommunicative; something, clearly, had irritated and disturbed him; and as the meal progressed, he vented his irritation upon Eaton by affronting him more openly by word and look than he had ever done before in her presence. She was the more surprised at his doing this now, because she knew that Donald must have received from her father the same instructions as had been given herself to learn whatever was possible of Eaton's former position in life. Eaton, with his customary self-control, met Avery's offensiveness with an equability which almost disarmed it. Instinctively she tried to help him in this. But now she found that he met and put aside her a.s.sistance in the same way.

The change in his att.i.tude toward her which she had noted first during their walk that morning had not diminished since his talk with her father but, plainly, had increased. He was almost openly now including her among those who opposed him. As that feeling which she called sympathy had come to her when she realized that what he himself had suffered must be the reason for his att.i.tude toward her father, so now it only came more strongly when she saw him take the same att.i.tude toward herself; and as she felt it, she found she was feeling more and more away from Donald Avery. Donald's manner toward Eaton was forcing her to invoice exactly the materials of her companionship with Donald.

Before Eaton's entrance into her life she had supposed that some time, as a matter of course, she was going to marry Donald. In spite of this, she had never thought of herself as apart from her father; when she thought of marrying, it had been always with the idea that her duty to her husband must be secondary to that to her father; she knew now that she had accepted Donald Avery not because he had become necessary to her but because he had seemed essential to her father and her marrying Donald would permit her life to go on much as it was. Till recently, Avery's complaisance, his certainty that it must be only a matter of time before he would win her, had been the most definite--almost the only definable--fault she had found with her father's confidential agent; now her sense of many other faults in him only marked the distance she had drawn away from him. If Harriet Santoine could define her own present estimate of Avery, it was that he did not differ in any essential particular from those men whose correspondence had so horrified her that afternoon.

Donald had social position and a certain amount of wealth and power; now suddenly she was feeling that he had nothing but those things, that his own unconscious admission was that to be worth while he must have them, that to retain and increase them was his only object in life.

She had the feeling that these were the only things he would fight for; but that for these he would fight--fairly, perhaps, if he could--but, if he must, unfairly, despicably.

She had finished dinner, but she hesitated to rise and leave the men alone; after-dinner cigars and the fiction of a masculine conversation about the table were insisted on by Blatchford. As she delayed, looking across the table at Eaton, his eyes met hers; rea.s.sured, she rose at once; the three rose with her and stood while she went out.

She went upstairs and looked in upon her father; he wanted nothing, and after a conversation with him as short as she could make it, she came down again. No further disagreement between the two men, apparently, had happened after she left the table. Avery now was not visible.

Eaton and Blatchford were in the music-room; as she went to them, she saw that Eaton had some sheets of music in his hand. So now, with a repugnance against her father's orders which she had never felt before, she began to carry out the instructions her father had given her.

"You play, Mr. Eaton?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not," he smiled.

"Really don't you?"

"Only drum a little sometimes, Miss Santoine. Won't you play? Please do."

She saw that they were songs which he had been examining. "Oh, you sing!"

He could not effectively deny it. She sat down at her piano and ran over the songs and selections from the new opera. He followed her with the delight of a music-lover long away from an instrument. He sang with her a couple of the songs; he had a good, una.s.suming tone. And as she went through the music, she noticed that he was familiar with almost everything she had liked which had been written or was current up to five years before; all later music was strange to him. To this extent he had been of her world, plainly, up to five years before; then he had gone out of it.

She realized this only as something which she was to report to her father; yet she felt a keener, more personal interest in it than that.

Harriet Santoine knew enough of the world to know that few men break completely all social connections without some link of either fact or memory still holding them, and that this link most often is a woman.