The Red Mouse Part 35

Miriam laughed hysterically.

"What am I going to do? I know what you're going to do! You're going to bring that fifty dollars back here to me!"

"Indeed? Well I'm not!" reiterated Challoner.

Miriam tapped the pistol in her hand.

"Do you see this?"

He grunted fearlessly.

"Well, what of it?"

"Give me that money," she insisted, approaching him. As yet she had not levelled the weapon; and Challoner, seeing his opportunity, started once more.

"_Stop!_" It was a new voice that spoke now: the blow that had struck her face had suddenly transformed her into a desperate woman.

Challoner stopped; for he saw the weapon trained upon him. Again, without affecting her aim, she tapped it.

"Listen to me!" she cried, her voice growing hoa.r.s.er as she went on, "this thing has been responsible for one murder, and now, Lawrence Challoner, I'm going to kill you with it. It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back. I hate you! I despise you!" she raged. "I loved you once, I have always loved you until now; you loved me once, too, I know--though other people thought that you had married me for my money.

But I knew different--you couldn't fool me about that! And it was because of that love that I have lived for you and nothing else. You have been everything in the world to me--my G.o.d, almost. But it is all over now! I'm through with you, and I'm going to have you thrown like some soiled rag into the gutters of humanity--where you belong!"

She paused for breath, but not once did her weapon falter.

"There are two things," she resumed, "that stand out in my memory just now. The first is the night when you did not come home! Do you remember that night?--No--there were too many of them later on! But I have never forgotten that night I spent in the torture chamber! It was a white night for me."

Again she paused, and her voice deepened as she said:--

"Lawrence Challoner, the time will come when you will wail and whine and wonder why I don't come to you--why it is not my footsteps that you hear! But you will wait for me through a long, long night, and I shall never come....

"Oh, it does me good when I recall the day that Prosecutor Murgatroyd told those twelve men the kind of a man you were," she declared scornfully. "It does me good, too, to recall how you writhed under the lash and quivered when he cut you to the quick. But now I'm going to do more to you than you ever did to me--more than Murgatroyd did to you...."

She stopped, and then went on mercilessly:--

"I'm going to tear your soul out--yes, you've got a soul, or I would never have gone down into the depths with you! But now I'm through serving you without receiving so much as a smile," she continued fiercely, her body swaying, but her aim still true. "I don't ask for my rights or my just dues; a smile and a kind word now and then is all I ask. My pride is not all gone; I'd like to be proud of you just once. I lie about you to my friends--to my dearest friends--and you convict me with the miserable truth! I clung to you through all your vices, I clung to you even when you killed, I clung to you because I knew that somewhere within you there was something that clamoured for me, that clung to my affection. But feeble as it was, it is dead now. And you are the sh.e.l.l, the ugly hulk, a thing without the soul that I cared for! But I'm through with you--I'm going to kill you--don't you move--I'm through with you--through--" The next moment she dropped the weapon, and it fell clattering to the floor.

"No, no," she cried, apparently calm now. "I won't kill you--I wouldn't be guilty of such a thing. You're not worth it," she burst out into a wild laugh. "You're not worth it--no--no--no--" she cried, trailing off into hysteria.

At that instant Shirley Bloodgood once more entered the room. Some instinct had brought her back again.

"Miriam!" she exclaimed.

Miriam burst forth into another wild laugh, and then threw herself into the arms of the girl, where she lay unconscious for some moments.

"She's fainted," said Shirley, glancing at Challoner, accusingly.

Challoner stood stupidly where he was for an instant. Then he thrust his hand into his trousers pocket and pulled out a fifty dollar bill, saying in a new strange tone:--

"Shirley, I took this fifty dollar bill from the drawer over there--you'd better take it--it belongs to you."

The girl took it wonderingly.

"I'll take care of her," Challoner went on, gently taking the form of his young wife from Shirley and holding her in his arms.

It was thus that Shirley Bloodgood left them; and as the door closed on her, Challoner leaned over Miriam and stroked her face and kissed her affectionately while the tears rolled down his cheeks. That same night she was taken to a hospital with a raging fever.

XIII

The following morning, James Lawrence Challoner did that which he had never done since his marriage: he started out to look for a job.

Something, which he could not explain, was forcing him to try to get work; but had he been given to self-a.n.a.lysis, he would have known that it was Miriam's wrath in her adversity that had kindled into flame the flickering, dying spark of his manhood.

Until now, Challoner had a.s.sumed that work was to be had by any man for the mere asking of it; but he was surprised, startled, shocked, to find that it was not; that is to say, the clerkships and such work as he thought would be to his liking; and each night he returned to his cheerless, lonely room in the tenement, sore, leg-weary, after a long unsuccessful quest. Work? Little by little he was learning that there was no work "lying round loose" for the James Lawrence Challoners of this world! And yet he persevered.

"I must find something to do," he kept saying over and over again to himself.

And then one day at the end of two weeks he found himself at the end of a long line of Italian labourers who were seeking employment.

When the foreman came to Challoner, he called out in surprise:--

"What do you want?"

"Work!" replied the man inside the sh.e.l.l of Challoner.

"With the 'ginneys'?"

"With the 'ginneys,'" a.s.sented Challoner.

The foreman stared.

"All right," he said, after thinking a bit, "let's have your name."

For a brief second Challoner hesitated; there was a new light in his eyes when he said:--

"Challoner--J. L."

And all that day he worked--worked with his hands, and with his feet--worked with the gang tamping concrete. It is a simple enough process when one stands aside and looks at it; but after two hours of it, Challoner thought he would drop in his tracks.

It so happened that his work was on a new department store going up in town. Concrete suddenly had come into prominence as a building material.

Challoner and the gang stood inside a wooden mould some two or three feet wide and as long as the wall which they were building; another gang poured in about them a mixture of sand, cement, and stone. Sand, cement, and stone meant nothing to Challoner, except that when those three things were mixed with water and dumped down into his trench, he had to lift up his tamper and pound, pound, pound the mixture into solidity, in order to fill the crevices, and to make the wall hard and smooth.

Meanwhile, his feet were soaked; his boots were caked with cement; his hands were blistered frightfully; and his face was burned by the sun.

Nevertheless, Challoner sweated, toiled on.

For days after this first day of labour he was stiff, lame, and sore all over. In his soul he wanted to die; but he lived on. And then, much to his amazement, he found that the harder he worked, the better he felt: the poison of his dissolute living was working toward the surface.