The Ordeal Part 7

"Oh!" she exclaimed, "Julian Bayne can never come safely through this ice storm and up the mountain. Listen--listen! It is hailing now! Oh, he will break his neck! Remember what a wild and savage thing it is that Julian Bayne calls a fast horse! He will lose his way in the woods and freeze to death; and after all, it is perhaps for nothing. I can wait--I can wait--time is not _so_ essential. Oh, I will postpone his coming! I will call him up again! Run, Gladys, ring the bell! Call up Long Distance! I can't get there quickly enough."

And indeed it seemed some feeble old woman hirpling through the shadows, rather than the vigorous commanding presence of a few minutes ago. Gladys felt that the reaction was ominous as Lillian held the receiver with a hand that shook as with palsy. All had feared the usual delay, but while they were still in the hall the bell jangled, and the night-clerk of the hotel in Crystal responded--little to a cheering effect to the listener, though of this he was unaware. Mr. Bayne had already set out, he stated glibly. He must be five miles away by this time (the clerk evidently thought that he pleased his interlocutor by his report of the precipitation with which Mr. Bayne had obeyed her summons). Mr. Bayne was a good judge of horse-flesh, and the clerk would venture to say that he had never handled the ribbons over a higher-couraged animal than the one he had between the shafts to-night. Pretty well matched, horse and driver--ha! ha! ha! If anything could get through the ice-storm to-night, it was those two! Oh, yes, it had been snowing hard at Crystal for two hours past.

So he rang off jauntily, fancying that Julian Bayne's presence was much desired at some house-party or romantic elopement, or other lightsome diversion in the upper country.

"How could I? How could I, Gladys?" Lillian said again and again, white, wild-eyed, and haggard, so limp and nerveless that she could not have reached the library had not the other ladies supported her between them, half carrying her to her reclining chair. "You both think I was wrong, don't you?" She looked up at them with agonized eyes, pleading for rea.s.surance.

"Well, dear, time is not an element of importance just now, it would seem, to be considered against other disadvantages--so many weeks having already pa.s.sed. A day or two more would not have mattered," returned Mrs.

Marable, fatally candid.

Once again the blast drove against the windows with elemental frenzy, shaking the sashes, that being hung loosely, rattled in their casings. No more the dark, glossy s.p.a.ces between the long red curtains reflected fragmentary bits of the bright, warm room within, or gave dull glimpses of the bosky grove and the clouded sky without. The gla.s.s was now blankly white, opaque, sheeted with ice, and only the wind gave token how the storm raged. It was indeed a wild night for a drive of fifty miles through a mountain wilderness, over roads sodden with the late rains, the deep mire corrugated into ruts by the wheels of travel and now frozen stiff.

But the roads might well be hopelessly lost under drifts of snow, and the woods were as uncharted as a trackless ocean. Many water-courses were out of the banks with the recent floods. Gladys remembered that the county paper had chronicled the sweeping away of several bridges; others were left doubtless undermined, insecure, trembling to their fall. Julian would be often constrained to trust his life to his plucky horse, swimming when out of his depth, and dragging after him, as best he might, the vehicle, heavy with its iron fixtures, and reeking with the water and the tenacious red clay mire. And then, too, the mountain streams were beset with quick-sands--indeed, every detail of the night journey was environed with danger. He could scarcely be expected to win through safely, and Gladys felt a rush of indignation that he should have attempted the feat. Must a man be as wax in a woman's hands--especially a woman whom he knew unreliable of old, who had failed him when his whole heart was bound up in her? At her utmost need, she had said, to be sure, but he had not canva.s.sed the urgency of the necessity, he had not even asked a question! He had simply rushed forth into the blizzard. But even while she contemned his foolhardiness, she was woe for Lillian!--to entertain a hope, even though the folly of illusion, as an oasis in her deep distress, a sentiment so revivifying, so potent, that it seemed to raise her as it were from the dead; and yet within the hour to be battered down by self-reproach, an anguish of anxiety, of torture, of suspense, for the fate of the man she had so arbitrarily called to her aid, to make the hope effective in the rescue of her child. Poor little Archie! It was difficult indeed to think of him as dead! Gladys felt that she must find some way to sustain Lillian.

"Why, what are we thinking of?" she exclaimed. "Julian Bayne will be half frozen when he gets here. His room must be prepared--something hot to drink, and something to eat. No, Lillian, you _mustn't_ ring the bell!

The servants have been at work all day, and have earned their rest. We will just take this matter in charge ourselves. You go to the kitchen and see if the fire has kept in the range. If not, make it up. You will find wood at hand, laid ready for getting breakfast. Mrs. Marable, look in the refrigerator, please, and see what there is for him to eat. I will get out the bed linen and blankets, for he will be exhausted, no doubt."

But when she stood alone in the upper hall, at the door of the vacant guest-room, the candle in her hand, Gladys had a sudden keen intimation that she was herself but human, endowed with muscles susceptible of overstrain, with nerves of sensitive fibre, with instincts importunate with the cry of self-interest, with impulses toward collapse, tears, terrors, anxieties--all in revolt against the sedulous constraint of will. The light of the candle in her hand, thrown upward on her face, showed the fict.i.tious animation that she had sustained vanish out of its lineaments, as life itself might flicker to extinction, and leave a mask like death. It was a tragic mask. Her lids fell over her hopeless eyes; her lips drooped; the flush of her splendid florid beauty had faded as if it had never bloomed. She discovered that she was gasping in the dull, chill air. She leaned against the bal.u.s.trade of the stairs, limp, inert, as if every impetus of vigor had deserted her. But it would never do for her to faint, she reflected. She must act for others, with just judgment, with foresight, with effective housewifely care, and with good heart and courage.

"I must think for the rest--as Ned would, if he were here," she said, still half fainting. She got the window open hard by, and a vagrant gust of the cold air stung her face as with a lash. But she was out of the direct course of the blast as it came shrilly fluttering from over the roof, and she could maintain her position, although she could scarcely breathe in the keen frigidity. Snow had fallen, deeper than she had ever seen. With it had come that strange quality of visibility that seems to appertain to a sheeted world like an inherent luminosity; or was it perchance some vague diffusion of light from the clouded moon, skulking affrighted somewhere in the grim and sullen purlieus of the sky? She listened, thinking to hear the stir of horses in their stalls, some sound from barn or byre, the wakening of the restless poultry, all snugly housed; but the somnolent stillness of the m.u.f.fled earth continued unbroken, and only the frantic wind screamed and howled and wailed.

One sombre hour succeeded another as if the succession were endless.

Long, long before there was the sense of a boreal dawn in the chill darkness, the house stood in readiness, though none came. The servants were presently astir; the fires were freshly flaring, the furniture rearranged. In view of the freeze, the gardener had seen fit to cut all the blooms in the pit to save them from blight, and a great silver bowl on the table in the hall, and the vases in the library, were filled with exotics. The fragrance oppressed Lillian in some subtle sort; the spirit of the scene was so alien to the idea of festival or function; the dim gaunt morning was of so funereal an aspect; the gathering of household companions, gloomy, silent, expectant, into one room duly set in order, was so suggestive, that the array of flowers and the heavy perfumed air gave the final significant impression of douleur and doom.

At the first glimpse of dawn, Gladys had despatched a groom, well mounted and with a fresh led horse, out on the road to descry perchance some approach of Mr. Bayne, to afford a.s.sistance if this were needed. Hours went by, and still there was no news, no return of the messenger. Now and again Mrs. Briscoe sought to exchange a word with Mrs. Marable to relieve the tension of the situation; but the elder lady was flabby with fatigue; her altruistic capabilities had been tried to the utmost in this long vigil and painful excitement, which were indeed unmeet for her age and failing strength. She did not enter into the troubled prevision of Gladys, who had been furtively watching a strange absorption that was growing in Lillian's manner, a fevered light in her eyes. Suddenly, as if in response to a summons, Lillian rose, and, standing tall and erect in her long black dress, she spoke in a voice that seemed not her own, so a.s.sured, so strong, monotonous yet distinct.

"You cruel woman," she said, as if impersonally. But Gladys perceived in a moment that she had in mind her own arraignment, as if another were taxing her with a misdeed. "In this bitter black night, in this furious ice-storm, and you did not forbid it! You did not explain your need. You summoned him to risk his life, _his life_, that he might something the earlier offer his fallible opinion, perhaps worth no more than that bit of stone! You would not wait till daylight--you would not wait one hour.

You cruel woman! Already you had the best of him, his heart, to throw away at a word as if it were naught--merely a plaything, a tawdry gaud--the best and tenderest and n.o.blest heart that ever beat!--and for a silly quarrel, and for your peevish vanity, you consented to humiliate his honest pride and to hold him up to ridicule, jilted on his wedding-day. And but that he is so brave and genuine and fine of fibre, he would never have had the courage to hold up his head again. But even the basest of the yokels and groundlings could not make merry over the cozening of so n.o.ble a gentleman! And now, because of your faith in his magnanimity, you summon him forth in an ice-storm at your 'utmost need,'

all careless of his suffering, at the risk of his life. And he, fool that he is, without even a question, regardless of all that has come and gone--or, more foolish still, forgiving and forgetting--obeys your behest! You have taken all he had left, you cruel woman!--his life, this time, his life, _his life_!"

Gladys literally cowered under this storm of words, as if the pitiless hail had beaten on her own head. But as Lillian, her arms outstretched, her voice broken into shrill cries, rushed to the door, Mrs. Briscoe sprang forward, caught her arm, and sought to detain her. "What are you going to do, Lillian?"

"To raise the country-side, the county--to search for all that the storm and the floods and that baneful woman have left of him!"

She broke away hastily from the restraining clutch of Gladys, who, following her closely, saw her reel backward as if in shrinking affright from a shadowy figure standing in the dim hall.

X.

Julian Bayne, his long coat covered with snow and jingling with icicles, his chill face scarlet with cold, his lips emitting a cloud of visible breath, his eyes intent beneath the brim of his frost-rimmed hat, stood gazing as if petrified by the strange scene he had witnessed just enacted within, the strange words he had overheard.

"What is all this?" he cried at length. "Did you think I couldn't make it?" Then to Lillian specially, as he took her hand, "Am I late?" he asked solicitously. "I made all the speed I could. I hope I haven't killed the horse."

He glanced over his shoulder through the open door, where he could see a bit of the snowy drive, on which the groom was slowly leading the animal, heavily blanketed, up and down before taking him to the stable. Although sobbing now and again from the stress of his exertions, the horse had evidently sustained no permanent injury.

"I came instantly," Julian repeated. "What is it?"

"Nothing!" cried Lillian hysterically, clinging to his arm. "They all think it is _nothing_--nothing at all."

He stared at her somewhat grimly, though evidently mystified.

"Come," he said, "let us get at the rights of this. And I'd really like a glimpse of the fire--I'm half frozen."

He threw off his overcoat, stiffened with the ice, and strode into the library toward the blazing hearth. Mrs. Marable was suddenly roused to remember the decoction that she herself had prepared, and put the gla.s.s into his hand. But he took only a single swallow, gazing in absorption at Gladys, who had undertaken to detail the discovery of the stone in the pocket of the little red coat, and the theory that Mrs. Royston had desperately based upon it. Lillian herself was hanging her head in shame for her folly, that she should for this fantastic illusion have inflicted on this man of all men, on whom indeed she had least claim, the agony he had endured, and the peril of his life.

She could never have described the overwhelming tumult of her heart when he lifted his head at the end of the story, with a look of grave and intent pondering.

"This stone is the efflorescence of a limestone cavern, given to him, no doubt, but when and where? And how is it that you did not know it, knowing his every thought?" he said in a tense, excited voice.

Lillian was on her feet again in an instant, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, her voice trembling. "Oh, Julian, you think it is possible that Archie is alive! Oh, I believe it! I believe it! And the thought is like the elixir of life, like the ecstasy of heaven!"

He made no direct reply, but turned hastily to go to the telephone. "You cannot afford to lose any chance, even the most remote. The county officers must be notified, advertis.e.m.e.nts sent out, and offers of reward.

There is not a moment to be wasted."

"But Gladys thinks it is a folly," cried Lillian, following him into the hall, eager to test the negative view, fearful of her trembling hope; "and my aunt is troubled for my sanity."

As he waited for the line, which was "busy," he turned and sternly surveyed her. "Why should you defer to their views, Lillian? Haven't you yet had enough of ordering your life by the standards of others? Be yourself--if you have any ident.i.ty left at this late day. Rely on your own judgment, consult your own intuitions, rest on your own sense of right and justice and conscience, and you cannot err!"

"Oh, Julian!" she exclaimed in tearful amaze. "How can you say that of me--of _me_?"

He looked startled for one moment, as if he had spoken inadvertently, for her guidance, his inmost thought, without regard to its personal significance. Then, with a rising flush and a conscious eye, he sought to laugh off the episode. "Oh, well, I didn't _mean_ it, you know! Only the compliments of the newly arrived." And as the bell jingled he took down the receiver with obvious relief.

In the presence of poor Gladys, for whose calamity there could be no prospect of alleviation, the subject of Briscoe's death and the child's abduction as connected therewith could not be discussed in all its bearings. Only Mrs. Marable joined Lillian in the library that afternoon when the sheriff arrived, and the mother's eager hopes were strengthened to note the serious importance he attached to the discovery of the bit of stone in the pocket of the little red coat. He was obviously nettled that it should have remained there unnoted while the garment was in his keeping, but Lillian tactfully exhibited the unusual inner pocket in the facing, the "shy pocket," which, thus located, offered some excuse for the failure to find earlier its contents. With Julian Bayne's suggestions, the sheriff presently hammered out a theory very closely related to the truth. The visit of the revenue officer was detailed by Bayne, and considered significant, the more since it began to be evident that Briscoe was murdered, and in his case a motive for so perilous a deed was wholly lacking. The stone lily in the child's pocket made it evident that he himself had been in the moonshiners' cavern, the only one known to the vicinity, or that the stone had been given to him by some frequenter of that den--hardly to be supposed previous to the catastrophe. In fact, the sheriff declared that he had reason to believe that the child was wearing the coat at the time of the tragedy, and thus it could not have been cast loosely from the vehicle at the moment when the mare had fallen from the bluff to the depths below. It had been restored to the locality in a clumsy effort to prove the child's death.

The officer was a big, burly man, handsome in his way, his ponderosity suggesting a formidable development of muscle rather than fat. His manner was as weighty as his appearance. He seemed as if he might have been manufactured in a tobacco factory, so was the whole man permeated by nicotian odors of various sorts, but he politely declined to smoke during the long and wearing consultation, even with the permission of the ladies present, and stowed away in his breast pocket the cigars that Bayne pressed upon him, as he remarked, for reference at a moment of greater leisure. Bolt upright, a heavy hand on either big-boned knee, his shaven jowl drooping in fleshy folds over his high stiff collar, he sat gazing into the fire with round, small, gray, bullet-like eyes, while the top of his bald head grew pink and shining with warmth. He had a loud, countrified voice in his normal speech, that gave an intimation of a habit of hallooing to hounds in a fox-chase, or calling the cattle on a thousand hills, but it had sunk to a mysterious undertone when he next spoke, expressive of the importance of the disclosure he was about to make.

A few days previous, he said, he had chanced to arrest an Irish mechanic who, during the season, had been employed at the neighboring hotel in replacing some plaster that had fallen by reason of leakage. Since then, a hard drinking man, he had been idly loafing, occasionally jobbing, about the country, but the offence charged was that of being concerned in a wholesale dynamiting of fish in the Tennessee River some months ago.

The man protested violently against his arrest, being unable to procure bail, and declared he could prove an alibi but for fear that a worse thing befall him. This singular statement so stimulated the officer's curiosity that his craft was enlisted to elicit the whole story. Little by little he secured its details. It seemed that on the day when the fish were dynamited contrary to law, the Irishman was some thirty miles distant from the spot--the day of the Briscoe tragedy. He believed that he was the last man who had seen Briscoe alive--unless indeed he were done to death. He was afoot, walking in the county road, not more than two miles from the vacant hotel, when he saw a dog-cart coming like the wind toward him. The gentleman, driving a splendid mare, checked his speed on catching sight of him, and called out to him. Upon approaching, he recognized Mr. Briscoe, whom he had often seen when at work at the neighboring hotel. On this occasion Mr. Briscoe asked him to hold the mare while he slipped a coat on the little boy whom he had in the dog-cart with him--a red coat it was--for it took all he knew to drive the mare with both hands. And the Irishman declared it took all _he_ knew to hold the mare for the single minute required to slip the child into the coat. Twice the plunging animal lifted him off his feet as he swung to the bit. But the gentleman did not forget to pay him royally.

Mr. Briscoe tossed him a dollar, and then, with "the little bye in his red coat" sitting on the floor of the vehicle, he was off like a cyclone and out of sight in a moment. Almost immediately afterward the Irishman heard the sharp crack of a rifle, and a tumultuous crash, as of some heavy fall into the depths of the valley. To his mind, the sound of the weapon intimated some catastrophe, and he said nothing at the time as to his meeting with Mr. Briscoe. That circ.u.mstance seemed to him of no importance. He was afraid of being numbered among the suspects if any evil deed had been done. He heard the searching parties out all night, and it was a terrible sound! "It was too aisy fur a poor man to be laid by the heels fur a job he niver done, bedad, as was the case at present."

He permitted himself, however, to be persuaded to let a charge of vagrancy be entered against him and go to jail, really to be held as a witness in the event of more developments in the Briscoe case; for the authorities desired that no arrests in that connection should be made public until the significance of the fact that at the time of the tragedy the child was wearing the coat--afterward found hanging loose, without a rent or a blemish, on the tree in the valley--should be fully exploited.

If it were indeed a direful instance of murder and abduction, as the sheriff now believed, he wished the miscreants to rest unwitting of the activity of the officers and the menace of discovery.

"But it seems a pity for the poor innocent Irishman to have to stay in jail. How good of him to consent!" exclaimed Mrs. Marable pathetically.

The sheriff was all unacclimated to the suave altruism of fashionable circles. His literal eyebrows went up to an angle of forty-five degrees; he turned his belittling eyes on Mrs. Marable, as if she were a very inconsiderable species of wren, suddenly developing a capacity for disproportionate mischief. "Not at all, madam," he made haste to say. "He can be legally held for a witness, lest he get away and out of reach of a subpoena. It is the right of the State, and of Mrs. Briscoe as well, who will doubtless join the public prosecution. We are asking nothing of n.o.body, and taking nothing off n.o.body, neither."

"But I should like," said Lillian, "to arrange that he shall suffer no hardship. I shall be happy to defray any expense to make him thoroughly comfortable."

The sheriff looked down on feminine intelligence. The law was exclusively man's affair. He made it and administered it. The officer had seldom known women to intrude into it, save to get the worst of it. Its minister had an air of burly ridicule that trenched on contempt as he broke into a laugh of great relish.

"The county can accommodate its boarders without your help, Mrs. Royston.

Much obliged, all the same. He ain't no nice customer. He is mighty lucky to be sure of his grub and fire and shelter this tough winter. He ain't got to do any work. He has the freedom of the yard and the halls and the office at all hours. No, madam, he is as snug as a bug in a rug. You'll have a chance to spend all the money that you care to put up in this affair, if I'm not mightily mistaken. No use in wastin' any of it on Micky."

The fact that the child had not been wearing the coat when starting on the drive, but had been seen in it immediately previous to the catastrophe; that it should be subsequently found and not on his body, of which no trace had ever been discovered, went far to convince the authorities that the garment had been restored to the locality afterward in pursuance of an effort to prove his death. They had begun to believe that the child had in some manner escaped at the time of the tragedy, and was now held in retreat lest he disclose incriminating evidence. But it was a barren triumph of logic. They realized that any demand of the reward offered must needs bring a counter inquiry concerning the facts of Briscoe's murder, and therefore from the beginning they had little hope that any good result would ensue from the wide publicity and the extended search that his mother and her adviser had inaugurated. The child remained as if caught up in the clouds. Though extravagant offers of reward for any information concerning him, as well as for his ultimate recovery, were scattered broadcast throughout the country; though every clue, however fantastic or tenuous or obviously fraudulent, was as cautiously examined as if it really held the nucleus of discovery; though fakers and cheats of preposterous sorts hara.s.sed the proceedings and wrought many malevolent bits of mischief in disappointed revenge, being treated with a leniency which would suffer aught, all, rather than clog any vague chance of a revelation of the seclusion of the lost child--there seemed no prospect, no hope.

It had been Lillian's instinct to continue in the place where the child had been last seen--she felt a fict.i.tious sense of proximity in the familiar localities that had known him. But with the exigencies of the systematic effort for his recovery she returned to her own home in the city of Glaston, whither Gladys accompanied her, as being more accessible when her presence in the search was required.