The Red Mouse Part 29

Of the scene that followed Miriam Challoner never retained a very clear impression. She remembered that at first, as if in a trance, she kept repeating his last word, while by degrees its meaning stole in upon her; then of a sensation of being about to faint through mere excess of joy.

Suddenly the thought of her temerity flashed through her brain--the enormity of the thing she had done; and she would have gone on her knees at his feet had he not caught her in time. Quickly recovering, she looked up at him. Somehow his face seemed to hold little resentment now--too little, in fact, to suit her surprising desire to humble herself in his sight.

"After all, she's rather a fool of a woman," his expression had plainly said to her overwrought senses, "and I will spare her." And yet she craved so to hear words of pardon from his lips, that she broke out almost breathlessly:--

"You will forgive me--you must.... I have done you an unutterable injury, I know." She stopped, and then with a sudden lapse to her old air of fear: "Oh, but what will happen now--what will happen to Laurie?

I have failed you; you have the right to ..."

Once more cold and indifferent, Murgatroyd looked out of the window, though he interrupted her last words by saying frigidly:--

"When I make agreements, Mrs. Challoner, I keep them. You may be sure that I shall keep this one."

Still awed in a measure by his masterful personality, but with joy in her heart, Miriam Challoner started to leave the office.

With a gesture Murgatroyd checked her quickly.

"Mrs. Challoner," he said with reproof still lingering in his voice, "there is no necessity henceforth for personal interviews. In the future if you have anything to say to me, kindly let it come through your counsel, Mr. Thorne. It is much better so--much safer. I prefer to deal with him only."

Miriam bowed acquiescence.

Directly on leaving him Miriam Challoner went to Thorne's office. It was in accordance with her promise to aid him in formulating the charges which he was preparing against the prosecutor on her behalf. These charges were for the legislature and the Grand Jury: on the one hand, impeachment; on the other, indictment. Now whether the accusation had been true or false mattered little to Thorne. On the whole, perhaps, he was inclined to disbelief; but Broderick, his colleague in the organisation, was by no means of that opinion. In any event, since it came from such an authoritative source--the lips of Mrs. Challoner--it was a charge that possessed merit, inasmuch as it would injure Murgatroyd--and Thorne was not slow to recognise that. In consequence, then, there was, unmistakably, a note of gratification in the words with which he greeted Mrs. Challoner that afternoon in his office.

"Here it is--in the form of an affidavit--just what you told me, Mrs.

Challoner. Please read it."

Trembling slightly while searching her mind for some clever way in which she might express her change of plan, Miriam Challoner slowly read the doc.u.ment. Nothing was left out, nothing exaggerated, and without a word she returned it.

"Will you sign here, please?"

There was no time to arrange any idea she may have had for new tactics: it was Thorne's voice that was insisting; it was Thorne who was holding a pen for her and indicating the correct place for her signature. And with a violent effort, Mrs. Challoner braced herself for the first lie in her life.

"It's not true. I cannot sign it."

Thorne started back. Instantly he was spluttering his annoyance at what he considered merely a woman's whim.

"Not true! Why only a short time ago you declared it was true."

"So it was--but only in a way," she said laboriously. Her face burned and paled. "I tried to bribe him, but----"

"Bribe him! How?..."

"With the money--the money I had left," she replied cautiously.

"What have you left?" he ventured.

Curiously enough, Mrs. Challoner found herself taking a certain amount of satisfaction in telling her lawyer what now was unquestionably true.

"My home--only."

"But that's mortgaged, I understand?" There was more than idle curiosity in the speaker's eyes.

"Yes. But there's an equity of about twenty or twenty-five thousand,"

she explained.

"And you tried to bribe Murgatroyd with twenty thousand dollars?"

There was no answer; and interpreting her silence as a.s.sent, he went on persistently:--

"And he refused?"

Miriam was very white now.

"He did."

"I should think so," returned Thorne. "Two hundred and fifty would be more like Murgatroyd's price--if he can be bought."

"No, he cannot be bought," Miriam ventured with perhaps a trifle more confidence in her tone than Mr. Thorne liked; and then she added, in a changed voice: "I want you, please, to retract this story. I want to take it all back. I was unstrung, I----"

"I will retract nothing," he cut in rudely. "Not a thing. Leave it as it is. If you begin to retract you'll get yourself in trouble. If Murgatroyd desires to make a move, let him...."

And with a promise to that effect, a hurried acknowledgment with an inclination of the head that she accepted his words as ending her interview, she left the office, leaving him far from certain that Peter Broderick's apprais.e.m.e.nt of Murgatroyd's character was not a correct one.

That night when the papers came out, people read them in anger and dismay; by the next morning they merely laughed; likewise the Court.

"If he were bribed," said public comment, "it was a bribe that didn't work."

And Murgatroyd, submitting to interview after interview, reiterated over and over again to the reporters:--

"I point with pride, gentlemen, to the conviction of Lawrence Challoner.

That's all I have to say."

The fiasco had helped Murgatroyd infinitely more than it had hurt him, Thorne felt in his inmost soul. For once the ma.s.ses refused to believe what on its face appeared to be true.

One evening a few weeks later, while Murgatroyd was dressing to dine at his club, as was his custom nearly every night, his servant handed him a note which the bearer had said was to be delivered immediately. It was but seldom that a square white envelope came at this time, and with a pardonable look of surprise and curiosity on his face Murgatroyd opened it and read:

"I must see you. Will you come to the house to-night?

"S. H. B."

An hour more, and he was in Mrs. Bloodgood's drawing-room, waiting more nervously than he would have cared to acknowledge to himself for the daughter of the house to appear. It was the first time that she had ever sent for him to go to her, and he was conscious of some degree of anxiety as to her motive. Clever lawyer though he was, he dreaded her catechising, particularly so, because he knew that whether she acknowledged it to herself or not, that it was at her instigation that he had adopted the role which, with or without her approval, he was now determined to play through to the end. The sound of a light step on the threshold of the room checked his disturbing speculations, and he looked up to see Shirley Bloodgood entering the room. As usual she did not permit him to open the conversation after the preliminary courtesies of greeting between them.

"Something very urgent made me send for you, Mr. Murgatroyd," she began, but her lips trembled so that she stopped abruptly after adding: "I want to talk with you."

An instinct told Murgatroyd that it would be a grievous mistake not to accept without a protesting word the note of aloofness, the desire to avoid any suggestion of former intimacy that was in her tone. Rightly he told himself that the slightest advances on his part would result in adding to her distress; that however much he would like to break down the barrier that had arisen between them, he must bide his time and trust to her emotional nature to accomplish that. And he was not mistaken, for presently an impulse to speak her mind at any cost took possession of her, and she burst forth:--

"Billy, why did you take this money? Why?..."