The Long Lane's Turning Part 16

He was in an upper hall and soft, luxurious carpet was under his feet.

By the dim light from the window he crept noiselessly down the stair.

There before him stood the door behind which lay the thing he must have. He put his hand on the k.n.o.b, turned it softly and opened the door.

The mental picture which he had been tracing suddenly frayed and vanished like a dissolving view. The room was brightly lighted. At one side sat a great safe, beside whose steel door stood two men, one tall and thin, whose eyes glittered through the holes of a black cambric mask, the other short and stocky with red-rimmed eyes and a shock of sand-coloured hair.

They stood like setters at point, crouching tensely forward, and the latter held a pistol levelled at him.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PRICE

With the sudden disintegration of the mental picture he had been tracing, and the instant stoppage of the tense action of mind and body, Harry Sevier came to himself. He awoke as he had done on the night of the trial, with the abrupt halt of his motor at the railroad-crossing--awoke instantly to knowledge of himself, but dazed and shaken, grasping at phantasmagoric fragments that were swiftly dissolving in his brain, in a bewilderment in which he could only stare voicelessly at the black mask that confronted him, at the round muzzle that spelled danger.

The man of the sand-coloured hair spoke: "It ain't him," he said in a low voice. "Not one of the servants, either." He stepped forward.

"How did you get in?"

"I don't--know," said Harry. "Yes, I--I fancy it was through a window."

"What did you come for?"

"I wanted to--get something."

There was an instant's pause. Then his questioner came forward with a cat-like tread. His free hand busied itself in deft exploration. "No gun on him," he said.

Something like a chuckle came from behind the mask. "I reckon he's telling the truth, but he's a new one and we scared about all out of his head there ever was in it!"

The other turned one side to where a heavy portiere screened an alcove, parted the curtains and set a chair in the hidden s.p.a.ce. He pointed to it. "Sit there," he gruffly commanded, and to the man in the mask he added, "Get on with your part of the job. We won't take no risks--I'll take care of _him_!"

Harry sat down. The dream-like fragments at which he had been grasping were gone now into thin air, and out of the misty limbo the past was growing back: the note he had received, the smashed wall-cabinet, the fiery drink that scorched his throat, his mad masquerade, the boarding of the train at the station, the friendly, stupifying flash, then flight, on and on--and then, this lighted room, the safe, the levelled weapons! Into what sordid drama of the under-world had he wandered?

He flinched at the pressure of a cold steel ring against his temple--the man with the sand-coloured hair was "taking care" of him.

The latter leaned forward and peered searchingly into his face.

"Haven't I seen you before, somewheres?" he asked.

"Who knows?" said Harry. He had answered that look by one that, even as he spoke, had opened to strange intelligence. The stocky frame, the small red-rimmed eyes, the up-thrust, wiry hair belonged to his client of that far away trial, the man whom he had sent to a convict's cell and who now, by route of ball and stripe, had fled to the dismal demesne of habitual criminality! "Who knows!" Paddy the Brick had not now the piteous, shrinking look that had been turned to his counsel in the courtroom! The manhood was gone from the mottled features, which now wore the furtive look of the hunted, the sign-manual of cunning, incorrigibility and debauch.

Paddy the Brick withdrew his eyes. The involuntary question had pa.s.sed. There was, after all, little in the smooth-shaven countenance of the man he guarded to suggest a bearded face that his memory searched for.

"Quiet!" warned the man in the mask, and kneeling by the safe door, resumed the delicate manipulation which had been so startlingly interrupted. He turned the combination swiftly and deftly, his side-face pressed against the unyielding steel, his ear listening intently to the fall of the tumblers that chattered like elfin castenets.

Harry sat silent and moveless, sharply conscious of the cold ring against his temple. Whither had his besotted flight carried him? To some distant city, into another state perhaps, where he now figured in a coa.r.s.e and desperate adventure that might end anywhere, in some shameful expose which he could not foresee. In whose house was he?

Whose money was it these nightly prowlers intended? And what ironic demon had beckoned him here to play this pa.s.sive part in the despoiling?

There was suddenly a sharp click, a turn of the nickelled handle, and on mute hinges the safe-door opened. "So!" said the man in the mask, complacently. He began to pull open drawers and ransack pigeon-holes, his fingers pa.s.sing deftly through the papers they contained.

On the instant there was a m.u.f.fled sound in the hall outside--a door swinging to, and voices.

"_S-s-s!_" The low hiss was an incarnate menace. The man by the safe swung the steel door to, but without closing its lock, and snapped off the lights. The room fell into thick darkness. Harry felt, rather than heard, that the other had swiftly entered the alcove, and drawn the portiere into place. His companion had made no sound, but the aching circlet bit hard again into Harry's temple, with a warning as sharp as it was silent.

The door opened, there was a groping footstep, then the lights went up, and a woman's voice, clear and imperious, mingled with the lower answers of the obsequious servant who had shown her in--a familiar voice at which Harry's blood seemed to grow still in his veins:

"No matter how late he is, I will wait. You say he is at his office--is it so near as that? Yes, I think you may send for him--no, wait--that telephone on the desk! Could I speak with him? No--I think after all I would rather wait. What number did you say?

'Seven-thirty-two Sumner?' Thank you. Then if he does not come soon, I will call him up. Thank you--no, I want nothing."

Harry repressed an impulse to cry aloud. A thin streak of light showed between the edges of the silken hanging, through which the man in the mask was peering, and for a slender instant, under the crook's elbow, he could see into the room. The slender figure standing there under the chandelier was Echo Allen!

She was in a dark travelling dress and wore a light veil through which her profile looked strained and white. The unexpected sight of her intensified the haggard pain of heart which had come back to Harry with his awakening, and this was staggered by the knowledge that they two were together in this unknown dwelling.

The door closed upon the servant. Behind the portiere the red-rimmed eyes peered questioningly into the eyelet holes of the black mask.

They said as plainly as speech, "There is only the woman. Why not make for the open--now?" But the other was an older hand. The room had but the single door and the servant might be standing on the other side.

Grim danger lurked in hue and cry, and there was always the chance that the woman might weary of waiting and go. He had a liking for the long chance. He shook his head.

Harry's straining ears caught now the dragging rustle of a skirt. Echo was moving slowly across the floor, and in a moment he saw her again through the slender opening. She was standing tense and straight, her hands wrung together, finger twisting against finger, before the desk telephone. He saw her hand go out to the instrument, then draw back as though it had been a poisonous snake. Then suddenly he saw her seize the transmitter and put it to her ear. The bell whirred.

"Madison, seven-thirty-two."

There was a pause, in which she repeated the number, and in it Harry felt that her face had hardened and set, like some cooling plastic beneath an invisible mould.

"Is that--is it ... Mr. Cameron Craig?"

In spite of his iron control, Harry could not repress a start. He knew now where he was! The house behind whose curtain he perforce skulked with a brace of thieves, was Cameron Craig's! And she, on this very day, had journeyed here too. A sense of an overfate, sardonic and unescapable, rushed upon him. What a topsy-turveydom of chance, what a dove-tailing of accident, had wrought for this strange _contretemps_!

In the instant she waited a harrowing question stabbed him. What was she doing here, to-night, at midnight--in this environment which had bred unseemly stories--to enter which, under such circ.u.mstances, a woman must be unmindful of what should be most dear?

"... Do you know my voice? Yes, you are right.... Unbelievable, yes.

Many things are unbelievable that--happen. Listen. I am at your house, in your library.... No! Wait. I have something to say to you, _now_. You shall answer it first. Once you asked me to marry you. I will do so, on one condition.... The--the letters written by my father. You will not use them, publish them. You will give them into my hands.... Yes.... One has been photographed--yes, the plate. You swear to do so, when I am your wife? ... Yes, to-night--if you--wish.... What? In--in five minutes? ..."

The receiver clattered down upon the desk, as she sank into a chair and covered her face with her hands. To her the broken sentences had knelled hope gone, the pa.s.sing of youth and love, the coming of a night in which was no star; but to the man sitting in such a.s.siduous stillness behind the curtains, they had told a story that sent the warm blood coursing through his veins. Instead of being false to him, Echo was really sacrificing herself on the altar of name and family. She did not love the man with whom she had just spoken! It was constraint that had sent her there at that dubious hour, to make a bitter bargain.

Letters written by her father? What they were--in what way compromising--Harry could not guess. Some indiscreet correspondence perhaps, which, twisted out of context, might be made ground of malicious political criticism. He knew her love for her father. In some way she had learned of these letters, had scented danger to him, and now would ward the harm from him at any cost to herself! "Think as gently of me as you can"--the words of her note pa.s.sed through Harry's mind. When she wrote that she had known that she should give herself to Craig! He felt a whirl of rage. The cowardly, contemptible cad, who would have his desire at the cost of all that was decent and clean-handed! It should never be, never, never! Why else had fate dropped him there, like a stone from a sling? And yet for the moment he was as helpless as a rat in a trap. There, only a half-dozen steps away lay those letters, the safe door unlocked. Yet the steely pressure on his temple told him that a single word, a move, and he would be ingloriously past rendering aid to anybody, with a bullet in his skull.

Harry was conscious that the two men beside him exchanged glances--they were going to make a dash for it. His every nerve tightened. But at that instant the door opened upon the obsequious servant. "Did you ring, Madame?" he asked.

"I rang the telephone," she replied dully. "I called up Mr. Craig. He is coming."

"Very good, madame." This time he did not leave, but moved about the room, setting straight a book upon the table, adjusting a vase, glancing furtively at her the while. The moment for flight had pa.s.sed.

Endless minutes ensued. Then in the strained silence there fell a sharp step outside, and the servant went quickly from the room. Harry felt a little tremor run over him. There was the sound of a key grating in a lock. The outer door opened and clanged shut.

Behind the portiere Harry sat motionless, the muzzle of the weapon at his temple, his hair stirring to the suppressed breathing above his head, and the man in the mask shifted his felt-shod feet, restlessly but without sound.

CHAPTER XIX

PADDY THE BRICK INTERVENES