CHAPTER XXXI
Frances Durkin knew the man she had to face. She knew the pagan and primordial malevolence of the being, the almost demoniacal passions that could sweep through him. More than once she had seen his obsessions tremble on the verge of utter madness. She had come to know the rat-like pertinacity, the morbid, dementating narrowness of mind, that made him what he was. In his artful and ruthless campaign against Penfield, in his relentless crushing of old-time confederates, in each and all of his earlier underground adventures, she had seen the sullen, bulldog, brutal contumacy of the man.
She expected nothing from him, neither mercy nor quarter. And yet, she told herself, she was in no way afraid of him. As she had felt before, time and time again, in moments of great danger, a vague sense of duality of being took possession of her, as if mind stood detached from body, to flutter and dodge through the darkness before her, freed from its sheath of flesh.
She felt that she might kill him now, if the chance came, quite easily and calmly. Yet she still diffidently half-hoped that the chance would be denied her. It was not that she would be cowardly about it, but it seemed to her the darker and more dubious way out of it all.
No; it was he who must do the killing, she told herself, with a sudden pang of half-delirious abnegation.
That was the utter and ultimate solution of the tangled problem; it would be over and done with in a minute. She had lived by the sword and she could die by the sword; from that moment, too, would be counted the days of MacNutt’s own doom, the release and the deliverance of Durkin!
She seemed to hug this new self-illumination to her, and a smile of scorn trembled on her lips as he stood over her, in his white and shaking wrath.
“Oh, I know you, you she-devil!” he suddenly cried out, with an animal-like snarl from the depths of his flabby throat. “I know what you’re after! You think you’ll do the cheap-heroine act; you think you’ll end it by comin’ between him and me this way! You think you’ll save his puny piker’s heart a last pang or two, don’t you! You think you’ll cheat me out of that, do you? You think that it’s just between you and me now, eh, and that you can do your martyr’s act here while he’s off somewhere else moonin’ about your eyebrows and takin’ it easy!”
And he laughed horribly, quietly. “No!” he cried, with a volley of the foulest oaths; “no! If I’m goin’ to get the name I’m goin’ to have the game! I mean to get my money’s worth out o’ this! I’m goin’ to kill you, you cat, but I’m goin’ to do it in my own way!”
The room, which rang with his hoarse voice, seemed to grow small and dark and cell-like. The great, gorilla-like figure, in the gray light, seemed to draw back and go a long way off, and then tower over her once more.
“You’re going to kill me?” she gasped, as though the thought of it had come home to her for the first time.
Her more ecstatic moment of recklessness had passed strangely away, and had left her helpless and craven.
Nothing but terror was written on her face as she cowered back from him and sidled along the wall, with her fingers groping crazily over its blind surface, as though some unlooked-for door of release might open to their touch.
“You cat! You damned cat!” he cried hoarsely, as he leaped toward her and tried to catch her by the throat. She writhed away from him and twisted and dodged and fought until she had gained the door between the front and the back room. Through this, cat-like, she shot sidewise, and swung to the door with all her strength.
It had been her intention to bolt and lock it, if possible. But he had been too quick for her. He thrust out a maddened hand to hold it back from the jamb, and she could hear his little howl of pain as the meeting timbers bit and locked on the fingers of the huge, fat hand.
As she stood there, panting, with her full weight against the door, she could see the discoloring finger-tips, and the blood beginning to drip slowly from the bruised hand. Yet she knew she could not long withstand the shock of the weight he was flinging against her. So she looked about the darkening room quickly, desperately. Her first thought was of the windows. She could fling herself from one of them, and it would all be over with her in a minute.
Then she caught sight of the nurse’s uniform of striped blue and white linen flung across the bed, and in a sudden inspirational flash she remembered the hypodermic. That, at least, would be painless—painless and sure.
She slipped away from the door, and at the next lunge of his great body MacNutt fell sprawling into the room. By the time he was on his feet she had the little hollow-needled instrument in her hand.
But he fell on her, like a terrier on a rat, caught her up, shook and crushed her in his great ape-like arms.
“Oh, I’ll show you!” he panted and wheezed. “I’ll show you!”
He dragged her writhing and twisting body through the door into the back room. She fought and struggled and resisted as best she could, catching at the door-posts and the furniture with her one free hand as she passed. She would have used her hypodermic and ended it all then and there, only his great grip pinned her right arm down to her side, and the needle lay useless between her fingers.
The room was almost in darkness by this time, and a chair was knocked over in their struggles. But still MacNutt bore her, fighting and panting, toward the little table between the two windows, where the telephone transmitter stood.
He pinned and held her down on the edge of the table with his knees and his bleeding right hand, while with his left hand he caught up the receiver of the telephone.
“Central, give me the Chelsea, quick—the Chelsea, the Chelsea!”
It was then and then only that the exhausted woman clearly understood what he meant to do. She started up, with a great cry of horror in her throat; but he muffled it with his shaking hand, and, biting out an oath, squeezed the very breath out of her body.
“I want to speak to Durkin,” panted MacNutt into the transmitter, a moment later. “Durkin, James Durkin—a man with his arm in a sling. He just took rooms with you today. Yes, Durkin.”
There was another long wait, through which Frances lay there, neither struggling nor moving, saving her strength for one last effort.
“Yes, yes; Duggan; I guess that’s it!” MacNutt was saying over the wire to the switchboard operator at the hotel. “Yes, Duggan, with a lame arm!”
Then he let the receiver swing at the end of its cord and with his freed hand drew his revolver from his pocket.
The gasping woman felt the crushing pressure released for a moment, and fought to free her right hand. It came away from his hold with a jerk, and as her finger slipped into the little metal piston-ring she flung the freed arm up about his shoulder and clung to him. For a sudden last thought had come to her, a rotten thread of hope, on which swayed and hung her last chance of life.
It was through the coat and clothing of the struggling MacNutt that the little needle was forced, through the skin, and deep into the flesh of the great, beefy shoulder. She held it there until the barrel was empty, then it fell on the floor.
“You’d try to stab me, would you!” he cried, madly, uncomprehendingly, as he struggled in vain to throttle the writhing body, and then raised his revolver, to beat her on the head. The signal-bell rang sharply, and he caught up the receiver instead.
“Now!” he gloated insanely, deep in his wheezing throat. “Now! Is that Durkin speaking? Is that Durkin? Oh, it is! Well, this is MacNutt—I say your old friend MacNutt!” and he laughed horribly, dementedly.
“You’ve done a good deal of business over the wires, Durkin, in your day, haven’t you? Well, you listen now, and you’ll hear something doin’! I say listen now, and you’ll hear something doin’!”
“Jim!” screamed the woman, pinned down on the edge of the table. “Jim!” she screamed insanely. “Oh, Jim, save me!”
She could hear the sharp phonographic burr of her husband’s voice through the receiver.
“Oh, Jim, he’s killing me!” she wailed.
For MacNutt had taken up the revolver in his trembling left hand and was forcing the head with all its wealth of tumbled hair closer and closer up before the transmitter.
It had been too late! She closed her eyes, and in one vivid, kaleidoscopic picture all her discordant and huddled life stood out before her.
She felt a momentary shiver speed through the body that pinned her so close to it, as she waited, and it seemed to her that the gripping knees relaxed a little. He was speaking now, but brokenly and mumblingly.
“Listen, you welcher, while I—”
She felt the little steel barrel waver and then muzzle down through her hair until it pressed on her skull. At the touch of it she straightened her limp body, galvanically, desperately. He staggered back under the sudden weight.
Then she caught his hand in hers, and with all her strength twisted the menacing barrel upward. The finger trembling on the trigger suddenly compressed as she did so. The bullet plowed into the ceiling and brought down a shower of loosened plaster.
Then he fell, prone on his face, and she stood swaying drunkenly back and forth, watching him through the drifting smoke. Twice he tried to raise himself on his hands, and twice he fell back moaning, flat on his face.
“It’s a lie, Jim, it’s a lie!” she exulted insanely, turning and springing to the transmitter, and catching up the still swaying receiver. “Do you hear me, Jim? It’s a lie—I’m here, waiting for you! Jim, can’t you hear?”
But Durkin had fainted away at the other end of the wire, and no response came to her cries.
She flung herself down upon the collapsed MacNutt, and tore open his coat and vest. As she did so the polished pig-skin wallet fell out on the floor.
His heart was still beating, but it would be murder, she felt, to leave him there without attention. His life was his own. She wanted and would take only what the written law would allow. She wanted only her own.
She came to a sudden pause, as she looked from the paper wealth between her fingers to the huge and huddled figure beside her. Some inner and sentinel voice, from the calmer depths of her nature, was demanding of her how much of what had thus come into her hand was her own? After all, how much of that terrible and tainted wealth could truly be called their own?—was the untimely question this better part of her was crying out.
She knew that in the end most usurious toll would be exacted for what she took. Her life had taught her that no lasting foundation of good, no enduring walls of aspiration, could be built on the engulfing sloughs of evil. And as she looked at her prostrate enemy once more, and breathed out a fervent and grateful: “Oh, God, I thank Thee for this deliverance!” a sudden chastening and abnegative passion prompted her to thrust back every dollar she had drawn from that capacious wallet.
Then she thought of the future, of the exigent needs of life, of the necessities of her immediate flight; and her heart sank within her. To begin life again with a clean slate—that had been her constant wish. Yet much as she hungered to do so, she dare not leave it all. As with many another aspiring soul in quieter walks of life, she found herself grimly but sorrowfully compelled to leave the pure idea sacrificed on the altar of compromise. All life, she told herself, was made up of concessions. She could only choose the lesser evil, and through it still strive to grope a little onward and upward.
So she slowly detached one Treasury note—it was for one thousand dollars—from the bulky roll, and the rest she restored to its wallet. It was a contribution to conscience. As she replaced that wallet in the inner pocket of the prostrate man, her feelings were akin to those of some primordial worshipper before his primordial Baal or his exacting Juggernaut. She felt that with that sacrifice she was appeasing her gods. She consoled herself with the thought that the Master of Destiny would know and understand—that she had given up the great thing that she might not sorrow in the little. As yet, He would not expect too much of her! That minute fraction of what she might have taken, she argued with herself, appeasingly,—surely that little moiety of what they had fought and worked for might be theirs.
It was fifteen minutes later that a frightened and pale-faced woman left word at the corner drugstore that an old gentleman was ill of morphine poisoning, and asked if the ambulance might be sent for. All that the clerk could remember, when he was later questioned by the somewhat bewildered police, was that she had seemed weak and sick, and had asked for some aromatic spirits of ammonia, and that the side of her face was swollen and bruised where she lifted her veil. He was of the opinion, too, that she had been under the drug herself, or had been drinking heavily, for she walked unsteadily, and he had had to call a taxi for her and help her into it. What made him believe this, on second thoughts, was the fact that she had flung herself back in her seat and said, “Thank God, oh, thank God!” half a dozen times to herself.