CHAPTER IX. The Fulfilling of the Law
Christopher had helped Tucker upstairs to bed and had gone into his own room to undress, when a sharp and persistent rattle upon the closed shutters brought him in alarm to his feet. Looking out, he saw a man's figure outlined in the moonlight on the walk, and, at once taking it to be Will, he ran hastily down and unbarred the door.
"Come in quietly," he said. "Uncle Tucker is asleep upstairs.
What in thunder is the trouble now?"
Stepping back, he led the way into what so short a time ago had been Mrs. Blake's parlour, and then pausing in the center of the floor, stood waiting with knitted brows for an explanation of the visit. But Will, who had shrunk dazzled from the flash of the lamp, now lingered to put up the bar with shaking hands.
"For God's sake, what is it?" questioned Christopher, and a start shook through him at sight of the other's face. "Have you had a fit?"
Closing the parlour door behind him, Will crossed the room and caught at the mantel for support. "I told you I'd do it some day—I told you I'd do it," he said incoherently, in a frantic effort to shift the burden of responsibility upon stronger shoulders.
"You might have known all along that I'd do it some day."
"Do what?" demanded Christopher, while he felt the current of his blood grow weak. "Out with it, now. Speak up. You're as white as a sheet."
"He struck me—he struck me first. The bruise is here," resumed Will, in the same eager attempt at self justification. "Then I hit him on the head with a hammer and his skull gave way. I didn't hit hard. I swear it was a little blow; but he's dead. I left him stone dead in the kitchen. "
"My God, man!" exclaimed Christopher, and touched him on the shoulder.
With a groan, Will put up his hands and covered his bloodshot eyes. "I didn't mean to do it—I swear I didn't," he protested. "Who'd have thought his head would crush in like that at the first little blow—just a tap with an old hammer? Why, it would hardly have cracked a walnut! And what was the hammer doing there, anyway? They have no business to leave such things lying about on the hearth. It was all their fault—they ought to have put the hammer away."
A convulsive shudder ran through him, ending in his hands and feet, which jerked wildly. His face was gray and old—so old that he might have been taken, at the first glance, for a man of eighty, and in the intervals between his words he sucked in his breath with a hissing noise. Meeting Christopher's look, he broke into a spasm of frightened sobs, whimpering like a child that has been whipped.
"I told you not to drink again," said Christopher sharply as he struggled to collect his thoughts. "I told you liquor would make a beast of you."
"I'll never touch another drop. I swear I'll never touch another drop," groaned Will, still sobbing. "I didn't mean to kill him, I tell you. It wasn't as if I really meant to kill him; you see that. It was all the fault of that accursed hammer they left lying on the hearth. A man must have a lot of courage to murder anybody—mustn't he?" he added, with a feeble smile; "and I'm a coward—you know I've always been a coward; haven't I—haven't I?" he persisted, and Christopher nodded an agreement.
"You see, I wasn't to blame, after all; but he flew into such a rage—he always flew into a rage when he heard your name."
"So you brought my name in?" asked Christopher carelessly.
"Oh, it was that that did it; it was your name," replied Will breathlessly. "I told him you said he was a devil—you did say so, you know. Christopher Blake was right; he called you 'a devil,' that was it. Then he ran at me with his stick, and I jerked up the hammer, and Oh, my God, they mustn't hang me!"
"Nonsense!" retorted Christopher roughly, for the other had dropped upon the floor and was grovelling in drunken hysterics at his feet. "It makes me sick to see a man act like an ass."
"Get me out of this and I'll never touch a drop," moaned Will. "Take me away from here—hide me anywhere. I'll go anywhere, I'll promise anything, only they mustn't find me. If they find me I'll go mad—I'll go mad in gaol."
"Shut up!" rejoined Christopher, listening with irritation to the sound of the other's hissing breath. "Stop your infernal racket a minute and let me think. Here, get up. Are you too drunk to stand on your feet?"
"I'm sober—I'm perfectly sober," protested Will, and, rising obediently, he stood clutching at the chimney-piece. "Get me out of this—only get me out of this," he repeated, with a desperate reliance on the other's power to avert the consequences of his deed. "I've always been a good friend to you," he went on passionately. "The quarrel first started about you, and I stood up for you to the last. I never let him say anything against you—I never did!"
"I'm much obliged to you," returned Christopher, and felt that he might as well have wasted his irony on a beaten hound. Turning away from the wild entreaty of Will's eyes, he walked slowly up and down the room, taking care to step lightly lest the boards should creak and awaken Tucker.
The parlour was just as Mrs. Blake had left it; her highbacked Elizabethan chair, filled with cushions, stood on the hearth; the dried grasses in the two tall vases shed their ashy pollen down upon the bricks. Even the yellow cat, grown old and sluggish, dozed in her favourite spot beside the embroidered ottoman.
On the whitewashed walls the old Blake portraits still presided, and he found, for the first time, an artless humour in the formality of the ancestral attitude—in the splendid pose which they had handed down like an heirloom through the centuries. Among them he saw the comely, high-coloured features of that gallant cynic, Bolivar, the man who had stamped his beauty upon threegenerations, and his gaze lingered with a gentle ridicule on the blithe candour in the eyes and the characteristic touch of brutality about the mouth. Then he passed to his father, portly, impressive, a high liver, a generous young blood, and then to the classic Saint—Memin profile of Aunt Susannah, limned delicately against a background of faded pink. And from her he went on to his mother's portrait, painted in shimmering brocade under rose garlands held by smiling Loves.
He looked at them all steadily for a while, seeking from the changeless lips of each an answer to the question which he felt knocking at his own heart. In every limb, in every feature, in every fiber he was plainly born to be one of themselves, and yet from their elegant remoteness they stared down upon the rustic labourer who was their descendant. Degraded, coarsened, disinherited, the last Blake stood before them, with his poverty and ignorance illumined only at long intervals by the flame of a soul which, though darkened, was still unquenched.
The night dragged slowly on, while he paced the floor with his thoughts and Will moaned and tossed, a shivering heap, upon the sofa.
"Stop your everlasting cackle!" Christopher had once shouted angrily, forgetting Tucker, and for the space of a few minutes the other had lain silent, choking back the strangling sobs. But presently the shattered nerves revolted against restraint, and Will burst out afresh into wild crying. The yellow cat, grown suddenly restless, crossed the room and jumped upon the sofa, where she stood clawing at the cover, and he clung to her with a pathetic recognition of dumb sympathy—the sympathy which he could not wring from the careless indifference of Christopher's look.
"Speak to me—say something," he pleaded at last, stretching out his hands. "If this keeps up I'll go mad before morning."
At this Christopher came toward him, and, stopping in his walk, frowned down upon the sofa.
"You deserve everything you'd get;" he said angrily. "You're as big a fool as ever trod this earth, and there's no reason under heaven why I should lift my hand to help you. There's no reason —there's no reason," he repeated in furious tones.
"But you'll do it—you'll get me out of it!" cried Will, grasping the other's knees.
"And two weeks later you'd be in another scrape."
"Not a single drop—I'll never touch a drop again. Before God I swear it!"
"Pshaw! I've heard that oath before."
Strangling a scream, Will caught him by the arm, dragging himself slowly into a sitting posture. "I'll hang myself if you let them get me," he urged hysterically. " I'll hang myself in gaol rather than let them do it. I can't face it all I can't—I can't. It isn't grandpa I mind; I'm not afraid of him. He was a devil. But it's the rest—the rest."
Roughly shaking him off, Christopher left him huddled upon the floor and resumed his steady walk up and down the room. In his ears the incoherent phrases grew presently fainter, and after a time he lost entirely their frenzied drift. "A little blow—just a little blow," ended finally in muffled sounds of weeping.
The habit of outward composure which always came to him in moments of swift experience possessed him so perfectly now that Will, lifting miserable eyes to his face, lowered them, appalled by its unfeeling gravity.
"I've been a good friend to you—a deuced good friend to you," urged the younger man in a last passionate appeal for the aid whose direction he had not yet defined.
"What is this thought which I cannot get rid of?" asked Christopher moodily of himself. "And what business is it of mine, anyway? What am I to the boy or the boy to me?" But even with the words he remembered the morning more than five years ago when he had gone out to the gate with his bird gun on his shoulder and found Will Fletcher and the spotted foxhound puppies awaiting him in the road. He saw again the boy's face, with the sunlight full upon it—eager, alert, a little petulant, full of good impulses readily turned adrift. There had been no evil upon it then—only weakness and a pathetic absence of determination. His own damnable intention was thrust back upon him, and he heard again the words of Carraway which had reechoed in his thoughts. "The way to touch the man, then, is through the boy." So it was the way, after all .
He almost laughed aloud at his prophetic insight. He had touched the man vitally enough at last, and it was through the boy. He had murdered Bill Fletcher, and he had done it through the only thing Bill Fletcher had ever loved. From this he returned again to the memory of the deliberate purpose of that day—to the ribald jests, the coarse profanities, the brutal oaths. Then to the night when he had forced the first drink down Will's throat, and so on through the five years of his revenge to the present moment. Well, his triumph had come at last, the summit was put upon his life's work, and he was—he must be—content.
Will raised his head and looked at him in reviving hope.
"You're the only friend I have on earth," he muttered between his teeth.
The first streak of dawn entered suddenly, flooding the room with a thin gray light in which the familiar objects appeared robbed of all atmospheric values. With a last feeble flicker the lamp shot up and went out, and the ashen wash of daybreak seemed the fit medium for the crude ugliness of life.
Towering almost grotesquely in the pallid dawn, Christopher came and leaned above the sofa to which Will had dragged himself again.
"You must get out of this," he said, "and quickly, for we've wasted the whole night wrangling. Have you any money?"
Will fumbled in his pocket and brought out a few cents, which he held in his open palm, while the other unlocked the drawer of the old secretary and handed him a roll of banknotes.
"Take this and buy a ticket somewhere. It's the money I scraped up to pay Fred Turner."
"To pay Fred Turner?" echoed Will, as if in that lay the significance of the remark.
"Take it and buy a ticket, and when you get where you're going, sit still and keep your mouth shut. If you wear a bold face you will go scot—free; remember that; but everything depends upon your keeping a stiff front. And now go—through the back door and past the kitchen to the piece of woods beyond the pasture. Cut through them to Tanner's Station and take the train there, mind, for the North."
With a short laugh he held out his big, knotted hand.
"Good—by," he said, " and don't be a damned fool."
"Good—by," answered Will, clinging desperately to his outstretched arm. Then an ashen pallor overspread his face, and he slunk nervously toward the kitchen, for there was the sound of footsteps on the little porch outside, followed by a brisk rap on the front door.
"Go!" whispered Christopher, hardly taking breath, and he stood waiting while Will ran along the wooden platform and past the stable toward the pasture.
The rap came again, and he turned quickly. "Quit your racket and let me get on my clothes!" he shouted, and hesitated a little longer.
As he stood alone there in the center of the room, his eyes, traversing the walls, fell on the portrait of Bolivar Blake, and with one of the fantastic tricks of memory there shot into his head the dying phrase of that gay sinner: "I may not sit with the saints, but I shall stand among the gentlemen."
"Precious old ass!" he muttered, and unbarred the door.
As he flung it open the first rays of sunlight splashed across the threshold, and he was conscious, all at once, of a strange exhilaration, as if he were breasting one of the big waves of life.
"This is a pretty way to wake up a fellow who has been planting tobacco till he's stiff," he grumbled. "Is that you, Tom?" He glanced carelessly round, nodding with a kind of friendly condescension to each man of the little group. "How are you, Matthew? Hello, Fred!"
Tom drew back, coughing, and scraped the heel of his boot on the topmost step.
"We didn't mean to git you out of bed, Mr. Christopher," he explained apologetically, "but the truth is we want Will Fletcher an' he ain't at home. The old man's murdered, suh."
"Murdered, is he?" exclaimed Christopher, with a long whistle, "and you want Will Fletcher—which shows what a very pretty sheriff you would make. Well, if you're so strong on his scent that you can't turn aside, most likely you'll find him sleeping off his drunk under my haystack. But if you're looking for the man who killed Bill Fletcher, then that's a different matter," he added, taking down his hat, "and I reckon, boys, I'm about ready to come along."