The Chief Legatee Part 29

"He told me what had led to all this misery. That as yet this compact was between us two, and us two only. That he had considered my youth, and in speaking of me to the Chief had held back my name even while promising my a.s.sistance. That he should continue to consider it, by keeping my name in reserve till he had returned from his mission, and if that mission failed, or succeeded too well, and he did not return, I might regard myself as freed from the Cause, unless my enlarging nature led me to attach myself to it of my own free will. That said, he went, and for a year I lived under the dread of his return and all the obligations that return would entail. Then came tidings of his death, tidings for which he may not have been responsible, but which he never contradicted, and I thought myself free--free to enjoy life, and the fortune that had so unexpectedly come to me; free to love and, alas! free to marry. And that is why," she pursued, in all the anguish of a dreadful retrospect, "I recoiled in such horror and hung, a dead weight on your arm, when on turning from the altar where we had just pledged ourselves to mutual love and mutual life, I saw among the faces before me the changed but still recognizable one of my brother, and beheld him make the fatal sign which meant, 'You are wanted. Come at once.'"

"Wretch!" issued from the frenzied lips of the half-maddened bridegroom, as his glance flashed on Hazen. "Had you no mercy? Have you no mercy now, that you should torture her young, credulous soul with these fanciful obligations; obligations which no human being has any right to impose upon another, whatsoever the Cause, holy or unholy, he represents?"

"Mercy? It is the weakness of the easy soul. There is no ease here," he cried, touching his breast with no gentle hand.

"Then you forget my money," suggested Georgian. "Can you expect mercy from a man who sees a million just within his grasp? I know," she acknowledged, as Hazen lifted that same ungentle hand in haughty protest, "that it was not for himself. I do not think Alfred would disturb a fly for his own comfort, but he would wreck a woman's hopes, a good man's happiness for the Cause. He admitted as much to me, _and more_, in the interview we held that afternoon at the St. Denis. I had to go to him at once, and I had to employ subterfuge in order to do so," she went on in rapid explanation, as she saw her husband's eye refill with doubt under a remembrance of the shame and anguish of that unhappy afternoon. "I had not the courage to leave you openly at the carriage door. Besides, I hoped to work on Alfred's pity in our interview together, or, if not that, to buy my release and return to you a free woman. But the wound which had changed his face for me had changed and made hard his heart. He had other purposes for me than quiet living with a man who could have no real interest in the Cause. The money I inherited, the rare and growing beauty which he declared me to have, were too valuable to the brethren for me to hope for any existence in which their interests were not paramount. I might return to you, subject to the same authoritative beck and call which had put me in my present position, or I might leave you at once and forever. No half measures were possible. Was I, a bride, loving and beloved by my husband, to listen to either of these alternatives? I rebelled, and then the thunderbolt fell.

"I was no longer on probation, no longer subject to his will alone. I was a fully affiliated member. That day my name had been sent to the Chief.

This meant obedience on my part or a vengeance I felt it impossible to consider. While I lived I need never hope again for freedom without penalty.

"'While I lived'; the words rang in my ears. I did not need to weigh them; I knew that they were words of truth. There is no power on earth so inescapable as that exercised by a secret society, and this one has a terrible safeguard. None but he who keeps the list knows the members.

You, Roger, might be one, and I never suspect it, unless you chose to give me the sign. Knowing this, I realized that my life was not worth the purchase if I sought to cross the will of my own brother. Nor yours, either. It was the last thought which held me. While I dutifully listened, my mind was working out the deception which was to release me, and when I left him it was to take the first step in the complicated plot by which I hoped to recover my lost happiness. And I nearly succeeded.

You have seen what I have borne, what difficulties I have faced, what discoveries eluded, but this last, this greatest ordeal, was too much. I could not listen unmoved to a description of my own drowned body. I, who had calculated on all, had not calculated on this. The horror overcame me--I forgot--perhaps because G.o.d was weary of my many deceptions!"

CHAPTER XXIX

"THERE IS ONE WAY"

"Have you done?"

Hazen was on his feet and, rigid still, but oscillating from side to side, as though his strength did not suffice to hold him quite erect, was surveying them with eyes sunk so deeply in his head that they looked like dying sparks reanimated for an instant by some pa.s.sing breath.

The half-fainting woman he addressed did not answer. She was looking up at Ransom for the sympathy and pardon he was as yet too dazed to show.

Hazen made a move. It was that of physical suffering sternly endured.

"Let me speak," he urged. "I have a question to ask. I must ask it now.

Who was the woman who came up from New York with you? There were two of you then."

Without turning her head Georgian replied:

"That was Bela, my maid; the same one who personated me on the afternoon of my wedding."

"That accounts for the coa.r.s.eness of her neck," Hazen explained with a certain grim humor to the lawyer, who had given a slight start of surprise or humiliation. Then quietly to Georgian:

"Was it she who threw the comb and dropped your bag where my man found it?"

"I threw the comb; threw it from my window before I uttered that loud shriek. It did not go very far; but I had to be satisfied with the fact that it lay in the direction of the waterfall. But it was to Bela I entrusted the flinging of the bag. I gave it to her when she left the coach. I had explained to her long before just what a place she would find herself in when she was set down at the foot of the lane; how she was to make her way in the darkness till she came to where there were no more trees, when she was to strike across to the stream, led by the noise of the waterfall. I was very particular in my directions, because I knew the danger she incurred of slipping into the chasm. It was her fear of this and the more than ordinary darkness, I presume, which made her throw the bag hap-hazard. I simply wanted it dropped on the bank above the waterfall."

"I saw the girl," Mr. Harper broke in. "She wore a black skirt like the one you now wear, a black blouse and a red-checked handkerchief knotted about her throat. But the young woman who was seen leaving these parts the next morning had on some kind of a red dress and wore a hat. Bela had thrown away her hat; it was picked up where the coach stopped and afterwards brought here."

"I know. My plans went deep; I foresaw the possibility of her being recognized by her clothes. To guard against this, I had her skirt and blouse made double, the one side black, the other a bright color. She had simply to turn them. The extra hat she carried with her; it was small and easily concealed. Her neckerchief she probably tucked away. I had its mate in my pocket, and when I left my room by the window, as I did the moment after I had locked the two rooms, it was with my hair pulled down and this neckerchief about my shoulders. How did I dare the risk! I wonder now; but it was life, life I was after; life and love; nothing else would have made me so fearless; nothing else would have given me such confidence in myself or lent such speed to my feet, running as I did in the darkness."

"You ran around the house to the lane, and entered it by the turn-stile."

"Yes, and so quickly that I had time to splash myself with mud and lose all my natural characteristics before any one came to find me. It was Anitra they met, panting and disheveled, at the head of the lane; Anitra in appearance, Anitra in heart. I did not act a part; I _was_ Anitra; Anitra as I had conceived her. To me she was and is an active, living personality. Whenever I faced you in her character, I thought with her half-educated mind; felt with her half-disciplined heart. I even shut my ears to sounds; I would not hear; half the time I did not. Nor did I fall back into my old ways when I was alone. From the minute Georgian closed her door upon you for the last time, and I darkened my skin in preparation for a permanent a.s.sumption of Anitra's individuality, I became the imaginary twin, in thought, feeling, and action. It was my only safeguard. Alas! had I only gone one step further and made myself really deaf!"

The cry was bitterness itself, but it pa.s.sed unheeded. Mr. Ransom could not speak and Hazen had other cares in mind.

"Where is this woman Bela now?" he asked.

Georgian was too absorbed or too unwilling, to answer.

He repeated the question, this time with an authority she could not resist. Rising slowly, she faced him for one impressive moment.

"My G.o.d!" came from her lips in startled surprise. "How pale you are! Sit down or you will fall."

He shook his head impatiently.

"It's nothing. Answer my question. Where is this Bela now?"

"I don't know. She is beyond my reach--and _yours_. I told her to lose herself. I think she is clever enough to do so. The money I paid her was worth a few years spent in obscurity."

The spark lighting his eye brightened into baleful flame, but she met it calmly. An indomitable spirit confronted one equally indomitable, and his was the first to succ.u.mb. Turning from her, Hazen took out pencil and paper from his pocket, and, crossing to the window with that same peculiar and oscillating motion of which he seemed unconscious, or which he found it impossible to subdue, he wrote a line, folded it, and before even Harper was aware of his purpose threw up the sash and flung it out, uttering a quick, sharp whistle as he did so.

"What's that you're up to?" shouted the lawyer, rushing to the window and peering over the other's shoulder into the open s.p.a.ce below, from which a man was just disappearing.

"Am I a prisoner of the police that you should ask me that?" returned Hazen, haughtily.

"No, but you should be," retorted Harper. "I don't like your ways, Hazen.

I don't like what you and your sister have said about the Cause and the conscienceless obedience exacted from its members. I don't like any of it; least of all this pa.s.sing over of poor Bela's name to one whose duty it will possibly be to make trouble for her."

Hazen smiled and moved from the window. No one there had ever seen such a smile before, and the oppression which it brought heightened Georgian's fear to terror.

"Let be!" she cried, lifting her hands towards Harper in inconceivable anxiety. "A quarrel with him will not help you and it may greatly injure _me_. Alfred, what am I to expect? Something dreadful, I can see. Your face is not the face of one who forgives, or who sees in a gift of money an adequate recompense for a cowardly withdrawal."

"You read rightly," said he. "Your fortune will be accepted by the Chief, but he will never forget the cowardice. What faith can he put in one who prefers her own happiness to the general good? You must prepare for punishment."

"Punishment!" broke scornfully from Harper's lips.

She hushed him with a look before which even he stood aghast.

"You will only waste words," she cried. "If he says punishment, I may expect punishment." And turning back to Ransom, in a burst of longing and pa.s.sion, she raised her eyes to him again, saying, "You do not forgive because you do not realize my danger. But you will realize it when I am gone."

Ransom, under a sudden releas.e.m.e.nt of the tension of doubt and awe which had hitherto held him speechless, gave her one wild stare, then caught her to his breast.

She uttered a happy sigh.

"Ah!" she murmured in the soft ecstasy and boundless relief of the moment, "how I have learned to love you during the fears and agonies of this awful week."

"And I you," was the whispered answer. "Too deeply," he impetuously added in louder tones, "to let any harm come to you now."

She smiled; but desperation fought with love in that smile. Gently releasing herself, she cast another glance at Hazen, upon whose gray and distorted countenance there had settled a great gloom, and pa.s.sionately exclaimed:

"Had law or love been able to interfere with the judgment of our Chief, I should not have been driven into the herculean task of deceiving you and the whole world as to my real ident.i.ty." Then with slowly drooping head, and the manner of one who has heard his doom p.r.o.nounced, she hoa.r.s.ely whispered; "The death-mark was scrawled upon my door last night. This is never done without the consent of the Chief. No one can save me now, not even my own brother."