CHAPTER XLIX
THE GOVERNOR TAKES A HAND
On the startled silence, already so tense with conflicting forces, the accusation fell with the suddenness of an electric shock.
Its effect on Paddy the Brick was instantaneous. He drew back, his hand clutching at the curtains. He was looking not at Echo, but past her, at the Governor, who had risen towering in his place, and if ever guilt and the dread that is confession showed upon a face, it was written upon his, in lines unmistakable that he who ran might read.
Craig started from his seat. "You fool!" he snarled at him.
But Paddy the Brick gave him no glance. The fear of the hunted was upon him; he saw himself taken in a snare, the witnesses to his unpunished act confronting him, and clutching at him the hand of the Law. He turned, and with one desperate jerk, tore the hangings aside, and with arms before his face, plunged bodily through the shattering glass of the bay-window to the garden.
So abrupt and fateful had been the crash of his headlong flight, that for a breath it seemed as if all there had been turned to stone. Craig first found voice.
"Enough of this farce!" he cried. "Governor Eveland, this man is an escaped convict, and I call upon you to do your duty!"
The Governor turned swiftly on him, his cavernous eyes flashing fire. His long forefinger shot out like a javelin.
"You coward and blackmailer!" he blazed. "The man you brought here as your witness was the one who shot you! His very flight is confession. And I believe you knew he was the guilty one!" His deep voice rang like a bell, quick with indignation and contempt. "You hate this man before you, and when he came between you and your plan, you tried to lie the noose about his neck!"
Craig's face was convulsed, his hands moving in distorted gestures. A writhing spot of pain was bubbling like a white-hot coal beneath the bandage on his temple. He burst into a wild laugh.
"Damn your beliefs!" he shouted. "You know who I am! The whole state knows me! What I swore to I'll swear to again. You can't make black into white by your opinions. This man is a convict—a convict! Do you hear? He is under sentence..."
The Governor had seated himself at the table and was writing swiftly. He looked up now.
"And I," he thundered, "am Governor. As such, I don't care who he is. I don't want to know. It is enough that I am convinced of his innocence, as I am of your perjury. Here is his pardon. From this moment he is free!"
He rose, and if honest indignation could have blasted, his look would have blasted the man who stood livid and gasping before him:
"Let me tell you one thing more, Cameron Craig! If you dare to drag his name or that of this woman into publicity now, to satisfy your mean revenge, I'll see that you are indicted, so help me God! We shall find whose testimony will be believed!"
Craig, swaying now on suddenly numb and uncertain feet, would have shouted too, but his tongue seemed tied and a heavy torpor was clutching all his limbs. He heard his own voice come forth ragged and broken:
"I—I dare! You—this—!"
Tottering, he lurched to a chair and fell into it, even as the Governor's look took on a glare of outraged astonishment—for Craig's face now was drawn and contorted into a malignant grimace. But all at once this faded out, the features became expressionless, the eyes dull, and he slipped in a huddle from the chair to the floor.
He lay there upon his face without a word or movement. He did not hear the Governor's exclamation nor the voices about him, nor feel the touch of inquiring hands at heart and wrist. His passion had undone him. The dulling pulse beat on, but the brain had once more ceased its functioning; nor would it ever again quicken that inert body, at the behest of the great surgeon in Buda-Pesth or of any other.
Outside in the hall there were confusion and wondering voices, as the Governor, bending his great frame to the burden, with the aid of the Judge and other willing hands, bore the helpless, sagging form to the car that waited at the foot of the drive with its attendants. Before he followed the rest, Treadwell had turned and held out his hand to the man in the convict dress, and there was in the gesture, no less than the warm clasp, assurance man to man of steadfast silence and a friendship that was to be without end.
In the silent room—in a quiet that seemed curiously heavy after the storm of ebullient passion and pain that had swept it—Echo, sitting stirless but with every vein throbbing painfully, saw the striped figure pass behind the big leathern screen, to emerge a moment later, still wearing the mask but clad now in the conventional black-and-white of masculine evening-dress. In his hand he carried a striped bundle. He laid this on the red coals of the grate and the flames leaped up to wind it in a mass of brightness, shaming, for one triumphant minute, the dim light of the shaded lamp. As he stood with his back to her, looking down upon the smouldering tinder, some trick in the posture brought her a quick thrill of wretchedness. In the radiance she buried her face in her hands.
"Echo!"
She started and looked up with a sudden wildness, for the cry seemed weirdly to have materialised from the very substance of her longing. The figure had turned from the fireplace—was standing before her—with uncovered face!