The Long Lane's Turning Part 39

Craig started from his seat. "You fool!" he snarled at him.

But Paddy the Brick gave him no glance. The fear of the hunted was upon him; he saw himself taken in a snare, the witnesses to his unpunished act confronting him, and clutching at him the hand of the Law. He turned, and with one desperate jerk, tore the hangings aside, and with arms before his face, plunged bodily through the shattering gla.s.s of the bay-window to the garden.

So abrupt and fateful had been the crash of his headlong flight, that for a breath it seemed as if all there had been turned to stone. Craig first found voice.

"Enough of this farce!" he cried. "Governor Eveland, this man is an escaped convict, and I call upon you to do your duty!"

The Governor turned swiftly on him, his cavernous eyes flashing fire.

His long forefinger shot out like a javelin.

"You coward and blackmailer!" he blazed. "The man you brought here as your witness was the one who shot you! His very flight is confession.

And I believe _you knew he was the guilty one_!" His deep voice rang like a bell, quick with indignation and contempt. "You hate this man before you, and when he came between you and your plan, you tried to lie the noose about his neck!"

Craig's face was convulsed, his hands moving in distorted gestures. A writhing spot of pain was bubbling like a white-hot coal beneath the bandage on his temple. He burst into a wild laugh.

"d.a.m.n your beliefs!" he shouted. "You know who I am! The whole state knows me! What I swore to I'll swear to again. You can't make black into white by your opinions. This man is a convict--a _convict_! Do you hear? He is under sentence..."

The Governor had seated himself at the table and was writing swiftly.

He looked up now.

"And I," he thundered, "am Governor. As such, I don't care who he is.

I don't want to know. It is enough that I am convinced of his innocence, as I am of your perjury. Here is his pardon. From this moment he is free!"

He rose, and if honest indignation could have blasted, his look would have blasted the man who stood livid and gasping before him:

"Let me tell you one thing more, Cameron Craig! If you dare to drag his name or that of this woman into publicity now, to satisfy your mean revenge, I'll see that you are indicted, so help me G.o.d! We shall find whose testimony will be believed!"

Craig, swaying now on suddenly numb and uncertain feet, would have shouted too, but his tongue seemed tied and a heavy torpor was clutching all his limbs. He heard his own voice come forth ragged and broken:

"I--I dare! You--this--!"

Tottering, he lurched to a chair and fell into it, even as the Governor's look took on a glare of outraged astonishment--for Craig's face now was drawn and contorted into a malignant grimace. But all at once this faded out, the features became expressionless, the eyes dull, and he slipped in a huddle from the chair to the floor.

He lay there upon his face without a word or movement. He did not hear the Governor's exclamation nor the voices about him, nor feel the touch of inquiring hands at heart and wrist. His pa.s.sion had undone him.

The dulling pulse beat on, but the brain had once more ceased its functioning; nor would it ever again quicken that inert body, at the behest of the great surgeon in Buda-Pesth or of any other.

Outside in the hall there were confusion and wondering voices, as the Governor, bending his great frame to the burden, with the aid of the Judge and other willing hands, bore the helpless, sagging form to the car that waited at the foot of the drive with its attendants. Before he followed the rest, Treadwell had turned and held out his hand to the man in the convict dress, and there was in the gesture, no less than the warm clasp, a.s.surance man to man of steadfast silence and a friendship that was to be without end.

In the silent room--in a quiet that seemed curiously heavy after the storm of ebullient pa.s.sion and pain that had swept it--Echo, sitting stirless but with every vein throbbing painfully, saw the striped figure pa.s.s behind the big leathern screen, to emerge a moment later, still wearing the mask but clad now in the conventional black-and-white of masculine evening-dress. In his hand he carried a striped bundle.

He laid this on the red coals of the grate and the flames leaped up to wind it in a ma.s.s of brightness, shaming, for one triumphant minute, the dim light of the shaded lamp. As he stood with his back to her, looking down upon the smouldering tinder, some trick in the posture brought her a quick thrill of wretchedness. In the radiance she buried her face in her hands.

"Echo!"

She started and looked up with a sudden wildness, for the cry seemed weirdly to have materialised from the very substance of her longing.

The figure had turned from the fireplace--was standing before her--with uncovered face!

CHAPTER L

REVELATION

"_You!_" she said. "_You--you!_"

"Yes."

With her eyes upon him she moved away with uncertain, backward steps.

When she spoke again it was with a quick breath that was like a sob, and in a voice scarcely audible, with breaks between the words: "It is--it was?--_you_--"

"It was I."

"You!"

"Yes."

"All--the time?"

"All the time."

There was a silence. She had begun to tremble from head to foot. Her face was turned away and her hands were shaking; she clenched them tight. Her voice fell lower, till it was the merest whisper:

"You were the--the convict--the man--in Craig's library?"

He came nearer. "Yes," he said.

She put one hand to her throat. "I--don't care to understand--now.

I--I'm only trying--to realise--" She paused. The doming tinder in the fire-place broke and fell, and for a last instant a yellow-ochre burst of flame threw a bright golden veil about them. Two great tears rolled down her cheeks. "Then you," she whispered, "then you know why I went there. You could not believe that I--that I--"

"My darling!" His arms were around her now, crushing her to him with tender fierceness, till she could feel his heart thudding against her breast, and the blossom crushed there held for him the scent of all the roses of all the world. He bent his head and their lips clung into a kiss. "Never--never--that!" he murmured, with his lips against her cheek, "though I must be forgiven very much. I was blind. I thought you knew--knew that it was really I there in the prison, knew and were willing that it should be! And all the while..."

"And I," she whispered, "I thought you had gone away, and didn't care--any more. And all along--all along..."

When they drew a little apart so that each might better see the other's face, the wonder and miracle had touched them both with a kind of awe.

She looked at him with lips that were still trembling under the startled glory in her eyes. "The day after that--that night--I went to your office, saw my broken picture--and--the bottle. I guessed--I guessed--"

"It was true," he said. "I threw away my promise to you. I would have thrown myself away with it! But it was not to be, sweetheart! I have come back to you, dearest--dearest of all the world!"

So they stood, haloed in the lamp-light, clinging together, swayed and shaken, love and youth and dream melted into one golden eternity, pouring forth tender, sweet confessions in broken words and silences, oblivious to the pa.s.sage of time, to the clamour that had begun to rise from the rooms across the hall--to a sound that came over the tree-tops of the avenue, blazing now with fireworks, the sound of jubilance and marching feet, drawing nearer and nearer.

At midnight the great porch of Midfields was hung gay with lanterns and bunting and Harry stood watching the rear-guard of torch-bearers stream down the drive. The battalions had gathered like magic when the blowing of whistles announced that the returns from the crucial counties spelled victory beyond peradventure. They had swung down the main street, a band at their head, a shouting, jostling army, to acclaim the Governor-Elect.

With his friends of the long fight--Judge Allen, Brent and a score of others--about him, he had spoken to them, a short speech full of feeling. They, not he, had won the fight, he told them. And the victory was an earnest of the future. But the race was not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong; the forces they had that day vanquished would return to the struggle, and they must be beaten again and again till the State, and every home within its borders, was free forever. Now the cheering was over and the throngs had trooped away after the band, to parade the denser streets of the business section, while the Committee lingered for an exultant aftermath in the dismantled east room.

As Governor Eveland stood with the Judge on the porch, looking out over the trampled lawn, Treadwell came up the drive.

"I thought," he said, "that you would like to know about Craig. He is as he was before they took him abroad for the operation. It is unlikely that there will ever be any change again, they think."