The Second Latchkey Part 29

Hearing the sound, yet not knowing whence it came, he stopped again, and so gave Annesley time to open the window.

"Knight!" she called, softly.

Then he came straight to her across the strip of lawn and up the two steps that led to the loggia. She met him on the threshold and saw his face deadly pale in the moonlight. Perhaps it was only an effect of light, but she thought that he looked tired, even ill. Still he did not speak.

"Knight, you almost frightened me!" she said. "I was afraid for an instant you might be--might be----"

"A thief!" he finished for her.

"Or a ghost," she amended. "Weren't you coming in?"

"No," he said. "I hadn't thought of it. Do you want--shall I come in?"

"Yes, please do. I--I've been waiting for you."

"I'm sorry! I hoped you'd have gone to bed. But I might have known you wouldn't."

As she retreated from the window, he followed her, as if reluctantly, into the room.

"Shall I draw the curtains?" he asked. There was weariness in his voice, as in his face. Annesley's heart went out to her beloved sinner with even more tenderness than before.

"No, let's talk in the moonlight," she answered. "Oh, Knight, I _am_ glad you've come! I began to think you never would!"

"Did you? That's not strange, for I was saying to myself that same thing."

"What same thing? I don't understand."

"That I--well, that I never ought to come to you again."

She sank down on a low sofa near the window, and looked up to him as he stood tall and straight, seeming to tower over her like one of the pine trees out there under the moon.

"Oh, Knight!" she faltered. "It's not--so bad as that!"

"Isn't it?" he caught her up sharply, eagerly. "Do you mean what you say?

Isn't it, to you--as bad as that?"

"No--no," she soothed him. "You see, I love you. That's all the difference, isn't it? You've been everything to me. You've made my life--that used to be so gray--so bright, so sweet. Only the blackest thing--oh, an unimaginably blackest thing!--could come between us, or----"

Before she could finish, he was on his knees at her feet, holding her in his arms, crushing her against his breast, soft and yielding in her light dressing-gown, with her flowing hair.

"My G.o.d, Annesley, it's too good to be true!" he said, his breath hot on her face as he kissed her cheek, her hair, her eyes. "You can _forgive_ me? I thought you'd go away. I thought you'd refuse to let me come near you. I was walking out there wondering how to make it easy for you--whether I could get rid of myself without scandal."

She had been sure that he must have repented long ago, and that it would hurt him dreadfully to have her find out the thing he had done, but she had not dreamed that his self-abas.e.m.e.nt would be so complete. She put her arms around him as he held her, and pressed his head against her neck--the dear, smooth black head which she loved better than ever in this rush of pardoning pity.

"Dearest!" she whispered. "Never, never think or speak of such a dreadful way out! Of course it was horribly wrong, and of course it was a great shock to me, but you might have known from my doing what I could to help that I didn't hate you. I said to myself there must be some excuse--some _big_ excuse. And now, if only you wouldn't mind telling me about it from the beginning, I believe it would be the best way for us both. Then I might understand."

"You are G.o.d's own angel, Anita!" he said in a choked voice. "You don't know how I've learned to love you, better than anything in this world or the next--if there is a next. I knew you were a saint, but I didn't know that saints forgave men like me.... Shall I really tell you from the beginning? You'll listen--and bear it? It's a long story."

Annesley did not see why the story of his buying the historic stolen diamond and giving it to her should be so very long, even with its explanations; but she did not say this.

"I don't care how long it is," she told him. "But you will be tired--down on your knees----"

"I couldn't tell my story to you in any way except on my knees," he answered. And the new humility of the man she had loved half fearfully for his daring, his defiant way of facing life, almost hurt, as his sudden pa.s.sion had startled the girl.

"I hardly know how to begin," he said. "Perhaps it had better be with my father and mother, because it was the tragedy of their lives that shaped mine." He was silent for a moment, as if thinking. Then he drew a long breath, as a man does when he is ready to take a plunge into deep water.

"My mother was a Russian. Her people were n.o.ble, but that didn't keep them from going to Siberia. She was brought to America by a man and woman who'd been servants in her family. She was very young, only fifteen. Her name was Michaela. I'm named after her--Michael. The three had only money enough to be allowed to land as immigrants, and to get out west--though her people had been rich." He paused a moment for a sigh.

"She and the servants--they pa.s.sed as her father and mother--found work in Chicago. My father was a lawyer there. He was an Englishman, you know--I've told you that before--but he thought his profession was overstocked at home, so he tried his luck on the other side. The old Russian chap was hurt in the factory where he worked, and that's the way my father--whose name was Robert Donaldson--got to know my mother.

There was a question of compensation, and my father conducted the case.

He won it.

"And he won a wife, too. She was nineteen when I was born. Father was getting on, but they were poor and had a hard time to make ends meet.

They worshipped each other and worshipped me. You can think whether I adored them!

"Mother was the most beautiful creature you ever saw. Everyone looked at her. I used to notice that when I was a wee chap, walking with my hand in hers. When I was ten and going to school my father had a bad illness--rheumatic fever. We got hard up while he was sick; and then came a letter for mother from Russia. Some distant relations in Moscow had had her traced by detectives. It seemed there was quite a lot of money which ought to come to her, and if she would go to Russia and prove who she was she could get it.

"If father'd been well and making enough for us all he'd never have let her go, but he was weak and anxious about the future, so she took things into her own hands and went, without waiting for yes or no, or anything except to find a woman who'd look after father and me while she was gone.

Well, she never came back. Can you guess what became of her?" he asked, huskily.

"She died?" Annesley asked, forgetting in her interest, which grew with the story, to wonder what the history of Knight's childhood and his parents' troubles had to do with the Malindore diamond.

"She died before my father could find her; but not for a long time.

G.o.d--what a time of agony for her! Things happened I can't tell you about. We heard nothing, after a letter from the ship and a cable from Moscow with two words--'Well. Love.'

"For a while father waited and tried not to be too anxious; but after a time he telegraphed, and then again and again. No answer. He went nearly mad. Before he was well enough to travel he borrowed money and started for Russia to look for her. I stayed in Chicago--and kept on going to school. The friends who took care of me made me do that ... or thought so.

"But when I could, I played truant. I was in a restless state. I remember how I felt as if it were yesterday. Nothing seemed real, except my father and mother. I thought about them all the time. I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't study. I couldn't bear to sit at a desk. I picked up some queer pals in those months--or they picked me up. I suppose that was the beginning of the end.

"I think while he was away, finding out terrible, unspeakable things, my father forgot about me--or else he didn't realize I was big enough to mind. He never wrote. When he came back, after eleven months, he was an old man, with gray hair. I'll never forget the night he came, and how he told me about mother. It was a moonlight night, like this--with no light in the room. It was the last night of my childhood."

As the man talked, he had lifted his head from the soft pillow of the girl's white neck, and was looking into her eyes, his face close to hers.

Annesley was not thinking about the diamond.

"For a long time," Knight went on, slowly, "father could not trace my mother. He expected to find the relations who had sent her word about the legacy, but they were gone--n.o.body could tell where. n.o.body wanted to speak of them. They seemed afraid. Father went to the British and American Emba.s.sies; no use! But at last he got to know, in subterranean ways, that mother hadn't realized how dangerous it is to speak your mind in Russia. She'd left there before she was sixteen!

"She had said things about her father and mother, and what she thought of the ruling powers, and that same night--she'd been in Moscow two days--she and her relatives disappeared. It leaked out through a member of the secret police that she could have been saved by her beauty--someone high up offered to get her free. But she preferred another fate.

"She was sent to Siberia where her father and mother had gone, and had died years before. My father met a man who had seen her on the way as he was coming back. She was only just alive. The man was sure she couldn't have lived more than a few weeks.

"Yet father wouldn't give up. He went after her.... But what's the use of going on? He found the place where she had died.... Which ends that part of the story, as a story.

"Only it didn't end it for us. It filled our hearts with bitterness. We wanted revenge. Yet my father was too good a man to take it when his chance came. His conscience held him back. But he talked--talked like an anarchist, a man out to fight and smash all the hypocritical inst.i.tutions of society. If it hadn't been for me he'd have killed himself in Siberia where his wife had died a martyr; and it would have been well for him if he had!

"Because of the wild way he talked when suspicion of fraud was thrown on him by a partner the fool public believed in his guilt. He died in prison when I was fifteen, and I swore to punish the beast of a world that had killed all I loved. I swore I'd make that my life's work, and I have.

But--G.o.d!--I've punished myself, too, at last. I'm punished through you, because I've fallen in love with you, Anita, and for your sake I'd give the years that may be in front of me--all time but one day to be glad in, if I could blot out the past!"

"Maybe," the girl faltered, "maybe you're too hard on yourself. I can't believe that you, who have been so good to me, could have been very bad to others."