The Chief Legatee Part 27

A man was standing on the threshold, a ghastly figure before which Ransom involuntarily stepped back.

"Hazen!" he cried; then, as the other tottered, he sprang forward again and, reaching out his hand to steady him, drew him in with the remark, "We were expecting a summons from you. We are happy that you find yourself able to come to us."

"The coroner has just gone. The doctors I dismissed. I have something to say to you--to both of you," he added as he caught sight of Mr. Harper.

Entering slowly, he sat down in the chair proffered him by the lawyer.

There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality which attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him very closely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind blowing through the hall made difficult to close.

"I--" The one word uttered, Hazen seemed to forget himself. Sitting quite still, he gazed straight before him at the open window. There was little to be seen there but the swaying boughs of the huge tree, but his gaze never left those tossing limbs, and his sentence hung suspended till the movement made by Ransom recrossing the room roused him, and he went on.

"I have made the plunge, gentlemen, and fortune favored me. I--" here his voice failed him again, but realizing the fact more quickly than before, he shook off his apathy, and facing the two men, who awaited his slow words with inconceivable excitement, continued with sudden concentration upon his subject, "I saw what I went to see--poor Georgian's body. I have satisfied the coroner of this fact. The little bag I tore from her side proves her ident.i.ty beyond a doubt. You saw it, Mr. Harper. They tell me that you recognized it at once as the same you saw in her hand in the stage-coach. But if you had not, the initials on it are unmistakable, G.

Q. H., Georgian Quinlan Hazen. Auchincloss will get his money, and soon, will he not? Answer me plainly, Harper. Such an experience merits some reward. You will not make difficulties?"

"I?" The lawyer's query had a strange ring to it. He glanced from Hazen to Ransom, and from Ransom back to Hazen, whose features had now become more composed, though they still retained their remarkable pallor.

"If the proof is positive," he then went on, "you a.s.suredly can trust both my client and myself to remember our promise to you."

"The coroner, you say, is satisfied?"

"Yes, with the proof and my sworn statement. He is obliged to be. No one else, least of all himself, feels any desire to go down to that whirling eddy for confirmation of my story. And they are wise. I do not think that any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths of that vortex and come up alive. The noise--the swirl--the sense of being sucked down--down in ever-increasing fury--but my purpose kept the life in me. I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had seen--and proved--"

"What's that?"

The cry was from Mr. Ransom. A sudden gust of wind had torn its way through the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor with flying papers from the large stand in the window.

"Nothing but wind," answered Harper, half rising to close the door, but immediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom. "Let be,"

he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order. "Keep Hazen talking. It's important; imperative. I'll see to the door."

But it was the window he closed, not the door.

Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his most trusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back to Hazen instantly. That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havoc it created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.

"I've led an adventurous life," he declared, "and, in the last few years especially, pa.s.sed through many perils and experienced much awful suffering. I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair; but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose bottom no man had ever sounded.

"I went in young--I have come out old. Look at my hands--they shake like those of a man of ninety. Yet yesterday they could have pulled to the ground an ox."

"You saw Mrs. Ransom's body down in that pool some fathoms below the surface," observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word from the shrinking husband. "Won't you particularize, Mr. Hazen? Tell us just how she was lying and where. Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know, difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you."

"The coroner has the story," Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp of the unwilling narrator. "But I will tell it again; it is your right, the painful duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom, but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the force of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rush and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but enough instinct was left for me to s.n.a.t.c.h again at the arm as I pa.s.sed, and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which I was just conscious enough to hold on to with a frenzied grip. We have spoken of this thing--a little bag which must have been fastened to her side, for the end of its connecting strap is torn away by the wrench I gave it."

"Vivid enough; but I am sure you will tell me one thing more. Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm? It would greatly add to the strength of your testimony if you could describe it."

Ransom, who had been watching Hazen, cast a sudden look back at the lawyer as he dropped these insinuating words. Something more than a cold-blooded desire for truth had prompted this almost brutal inquisition. He must know what it was, if anything in Harper's well-controlled countenance would tell him. The result transfixed him, for following the lawyer's gaze, which was fixed not on the man he was addressing but on a small mirror hanging on the opposite wall, he saw reflected in it the face and form of Anitra standing in the open doorway behind them.

She was looking at Hazen and, as Ransom noted that look, he understood Harper's previous caution and all that lay behind his insistent and cold-blooded questions. For her gaze was no longer one of simple inquiry but of horrified understanding;--_the gaze of one who heard_.

Meantime, Hazen was answering in painful gasps the lawyer's pointed question, "Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm?"

"Did I see--G.o.d help me, yes. Just a glimpse, but I knew it. Eyes that my mother had kissed, blind--staring--gla.s.sed in awe and unspeakable fright.

The mouth, whose every curve I had studied in the old days of perfect affection, drawn into a revolting grin and dripping with unwholesome weeds brought down from the shallows. All strange, yet all familiar--my sister--Georgian--dead--stark--but recognizable. Don't ask me if I saw it. I always see it; it is before me now, the forehead--the chin--the eyes--"

Ransom sprang to his feet, Harper also.

The girl in the doorway had gone white as death, and with outstretched arms and frantic, haggard eyes was striving to ward off the frightful vision conjured up by her brother's words. The movement made by the two men recalled her in an instant to herself, and she drew back--the hesitating, appealing, anxious-eyed girl whom they all knew. But it was too late. Hazen had seen as well as the others, and leaping in frenzy from his chair stood confronting her--a dominant and accusing figure--between the quietly triumphant lawyer and the crushed, almost unconscious Ransom.

CHAPTER XXVII

SHE SPEAKS

Hazen's face was frightful to see; the more so that physical weakness contended with the outsweep of pa.s.sion, so great and overwhelming in its power and destructive force that to the two onlookers it seemed to spring from deeper sources than ordinary life and death, and have its birth, as well as its culmination, in the unknown and all that is most terrible in the human mind and human experience.

Anitra's eye was spellbound by it. As it dilated upon this vision of unspeakable wrath and almost superhuman denunciation, her own exquisite face filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force and meaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startled recognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming of some hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictory experiences of the last few days had not served to prepare them.

"You _hear_!"

In these words Hazen loosed out his soul.

The keen cry of the wind running through the house was his only answer.

"You _hear_!" he repeated, advancing and laying a determined hand upon her arm. "You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness. What does it mean--Stop! no more play-acting," he fiercely admonished her, as her eyes a.s.sumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vague curiosity to the papers scattered over the floor--"we have had enough of that; you cannot deceive us--you cannot deceive _me_ twice. You played at deafness--why? Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguish her from Georgian? Because you are not Anitra? Because you are Georgian after all?"

Georgian!

The word fell like a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy.

Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen only stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and grasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; slowly she succ.u.mbed to it against her will and purpose, the will and purpose of a very strong woman. Her eyes rose in a painful and lingering struggle to his face. Then, with a cry her drawn and parched lips could not suppress, she flashed them in agony on Ransom, and this long-suffering man read in them the maddening truth. They were his wife's eyes; the woman before him was indeed Georgian.

"Speak!" rang out the voice of Hazen, as Harper, realizing from Ransom's face what Ransom had just realized from hers, stepped to the door and closed it. "The time is short; I have much, very much to do. For my sake, for the sake of this much-abused man, whom you allowed to marry you, speak out, tell the truth at once. You are Georgian."

"Yes," fell in almost an inaudible whisper from her lips. "I am Georgian." Then as he loosed his grasp from her arm and she was left standing there alone, some instinct of isolation, some realization of the mysterious pit she had dug for herself and possibly for others, in this avowal of her ident.i.ty, wrought her brain into momentary madness, and flinging up her arms she fell on her knees before Hazen as under the stroke of some unseen thunderbolt.

"You made me say it," she cried. "On your head be the punishment, not on mine nor on his." Then as Hazen drew slowly back, touched in his turn by some emotion to which neither his look nor gesture gave any clew, she rose to her feet, and fixing him with a look of strange defiance, added in milder but no less determined tones: "A tongue unloosed talks long and loud. You have made me give up my secret, but I shall not stop at that. I shall say more; tell all my dreadful history; yours--mine. I will not be thought wicked because I undertook so great a deception. I will not have this good man's opinion of me shaken; not for a minute; what I did, I did for him and he shall know it whatever penalty it may incur. He is my husband--his love to me is priceless, and I will hold it against you--against the Cause--against Heaven--yes, and against h.e.l.l."

Here was truth. To Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Bounding across the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself.

But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, was concentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warning gesture of Ransom, could hold it back.

"Traitress!" he cried, "traitress to me and to the Cause. You thought to escape what is inescapable. Do you know what you have done? You have--" The rest hung in air. A sudden weakness had seized him and he sank faltering back into a chair Harper pushed towards him, still denouncing her, however, with lifted hand and accusing eyes, the image--though no longer a speaking one--of the implacable and determined avenger.

Georgian, shocked into silence, stared at him in a frenzy of complicated emotions to which neither of them as yet had given the key capable of relieving the maddening tension.

"It is the pool; the pool," she finally murmured. "Its waters have beaten out your life." But he calmly shook his head.

"It is not in water to do that," he murmured. "Give me a moment. I've a question to ask. I think a drop of liquor--"

Harper had flask in hand almost before the word had left the other's mouth. The draft revived Hazen; he looked up at Georgian. "I believe you, so do these men believe you. But you were not alone in this plot. Where is Anitra? Where is the deaf and solitary one you dragged from the streets of New York to bolster up your plot? Tell us and tell us quickly.