CHAPTER XLVII
WITH HIS BACK TO THE WALL
In the wide, lamp-lighted room into which this weird quartette had so startlingly entered, before the capacious fireplace two men had been sitting smoking—Judge Allen and his friend Governor Eveland. At the sudden apparition both had turned sharply toward the window—two strangely dissimilar figures: the Judge slight and spare and scholarly, his pale, finely-chiselled features tinged in the glow; the other deep-chested and powerful, of herculean mould, with a rugged face made almost patriarchal by the long grey beard which swept his chest: both countenances for the instant curiously alike in their expression of shocked surprise.
The Judge arose abruptly from his chair, his gaze shifting from the masked figure in striped clothes to Craig's face, eagerly alight and triumphant. He had no welcome for this summary entrance.
"Who is responsible for this intrusion?" he asked coldly.
Craig laughed. "I am responsible," he said. "I have business with you both. For some time, as you are aware, I have been debarred from such pursuits. However, I am now myself again, and free to pick up lost threads. Hence my call to-night."
"It can wait a more opportune time." The Judge spoke with asperity. "Moreover, I must ask you to remember that I have servants to announce my guests."
"Apologies may be in order later," Craig returned, "if my errand does not justify itself. My business with you is to inform you that you and your friends have been giving countenance to a man whom the law is tracking down—a convict who escaped from prison in the next state some months ago. You see him before you." He looked at the Governor, who had neither moved nor spoken—he had small liking for Cameron Craig. "My business with you, Governor Eveland, is to demand that you call upon the local authorities to arrest this jailbird, pending his extradition to your own jurisdiction. I have brought with me, under my personal surety, an inmate of the penitentiary"—he pointed to Paddy the Brick—"who was this criminal's cellmate and who has identified him."
There was a slight pause before the Governor replied. He had shared his host's irritation at the unceremonious entrance and this was allayed by no regard for Craig, whom he had always reckoned an evil influence in the activities of the state of which he himself was Chief Executive. Now the pallid face with its bandage across one temple, the distempered eyes and strange excitement, smote him with distaste.
"I like neither your method nor your manner, Mr. Craig. This would seem to be a matter for the police, not for me, nor, I take it, for Judge Allen. Why you choose to drag this man here, at such a moment, with this skulduddery of mask and stripes, I cannot imagine."
Craig laughed again, sneeringly. "A little fancy of my own, and regard for the dramatic proprieties..."
Treadwell strode forward with an exclamation.
"Judge—Governor Eveland!" he said explosively. "Let me say something. I came here to-night purely in my capacity of Cameron Craig's attorney, intent only on saving him from what seemed to me a piece of brazen lunacy. But I begin to see that there is something behind this, and if it isn't lunacy it is something I like still less. I withdraw here and now from any connection with him or this action—"
"Withdraw and be damned!" Craig flung him, savagely. "I know what I am about!" His voice rose. "That man, Governor Eveland, is an escaped prisoner from the penitentiary of your state! Tear off his mask and see for yourselves who our 'John Doe' really is—this fine thief and would-be murderer—the man who shot me down a year ago!"
"Stop!" The Governor's voice rang through the room. He was on his feet now, stern authority in every line of his posture. "Mr. Craig, listen to me! You have thrust yourself here without warrant of right or of invitation, in a matter which you—not I—have elected to make my business. Very well: I take the affair and this prisoner into my own hands. Do you understand?"
He paused, his lips clipped to like shears. Craig's outburst, vicious with suppressed fury, had given him a lightning-like glimpse into something unguessed in the situation. The man before him, then, in this convict dress, was the burglar convicted of that old shooting—the prisoner whom he had seen at the court-house, and whose personality had so attracted and puzzled him. Yet there was more beneath Craig's attitude than an understandable desire to punish the man who had shot him: more than that in those infuriate eyes, shaking hands and malicious triumph. The Governor had a hatred of persecution. His mind worked according to a law of stern and inflexible justice, yet to him justice opened itself to no assault of man's passions.
Under that holding look Craig sat down heavily, angry arrogance in his face. Treadwell took a chair near him, and Paddy the Brick remained standing in the background, his small eyes glancing furtively from one to the other.
The Governor resumed his seat and bent his deliberate gaze on the figure that had been standing movelessly before him. A quick memory had come to him of the other's face, now hidden, as he remembered to have once seen it—clear-eyed, vivid and forceful, strangely lacking in the ear-marks of the criminal, a face that had often recalled itself to his mind since that day. He had no vulgar curiosity, but the patent mystery in the background called to him strangely.
"Are you, as this man alleges, a prisoner who some months ago broke jail in the adjoining state?"
"I am." The voice, muffled by the mask, was low but distinct.
"The man who shot him in his library?"
"No."
The questioning, deep grey eyes looked steadily at the mask—it seemed as if the gaze would bore through the cloth. "But you were found guilty of that offence!"
"I was convicted, yes."
The Governor was silent a moment; then his hand reached for the pen on the table. "On the admission, then," he said slowly, "it is my duty to request the authorities to take you into custody. You are aware of your rights under the law?"
The striped figure bowed. "I am. I shall waive extradition. With your permission, however, I should like to make a statement."
"He can make that in the jail," interposed Craig contemptuously. "Take off his mask and send for the police."
The Governor frowned. "He can make it here and now, if he so chooses. This is not your house, Mr. Craig. If you do not care to listen, there will be no objection to your withdrawal—with your witness."
There was a fleeting pause, in which a livid red mounted to Craig's brow, dark against the bandage. Then the Governor turned.
"Do you take your solemn oath that what you are about to say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?"
"I do."
The Governor leaned back in his chair. "You may make your statement," he said quietly.
Harry bowed. He was feeling a chill sense of estrangement, as though the bars that were so soon to shut him from the life of which he had been a part had already fallen between him and his friends. But he was oddly self-controlled. In the few moments he had been thinking swiftly—not of himself, but of the cause he represented, the men who had pinned their faith upon him and whom he had betrayed, whose leader, Judge Allen, sat there now ignorant of the ruin that overwhelmed them. To say to him, "I, Harry Sevier, whom you honoured, whom you made the bearer of your party banner, reached forth for this trust knowing myself a hunted man, outlawed of honest folk!" They were his friends, his loyal comrades in the fight, men whose friendship had been tried out by long years! In this last hour he shrank from a judgment biased with sympathy, and a fierce craving was rising in him for a justification based on no personal appeal.
He took a step backward to the mantel and stood thus, a little removed from them, looking from one to the other. He spoke in a low voice—not the alert, vibrant voice of the old Harry Sevier, but one alien, metallic, and strangely devoid of feeling.
"What I have to say may soon be said. It was not of my own will that I came here with covered face, and since this masquerade is not of my choosing, it may serve its purpose a moment longer. You, Judge Allen, know me well. Governor Eveland, you also are not unacquainted with me. With every one in this room I have come in contact—not as a convict, but as a citizen and an honest man. My association with you, Judge Allen, has involved certain responsibilities, and these I have accepted while I have lain under the law. For this I owe you a greater reparation than I can ever make. I know that justification in the eyes of the world is impossible, but in your own mind—in the minds of others who stand with you—it perhaps may be given me. But a justification is empty to me that springs from personal sympathy. I want it as man to man. For this reason I keep on the mask a little longer."
He paused. The Governor had not spoken; he had settled back in his great chair, one hand in his beard. The Judge was leaning intently forward, his hands clasped; he had never taken his eyes from the speaker, save once to glance at Craig, who sat with narrowed eyes and heavy lips curved in a malicious sneer. Treadwell's elbow was on his knee, his chin in his palm, his brows drawn into a frown that told nothing, and behind all stood Paddy the Brick, furtively watching.
When the striped figure spoke again, it was in a voice which held a first thin thrill of feeling:
"I have said that I lay under the law, but it was through that law's error. I was unjustly accused and wrongfully convicted. I was innocent."
The Governor spoke, coldly and deliberately. "You were taken at midnight in the Craig house."
"I had entered it for no dishonest purpose. I broke no bolt nor bar—that had been done before my arrival."
"You allege, then, that you were not in company with the robbers?"
"I was not. They were there when I entered."
"Why did you not give the alarm?"
"They made me their prisoner. A pistol was at my head."
"You did not so testify at your trial."
"I declined to testify at all."
The Governor nodded. "That is true," he said. "I remember."
There was a moment's pause, then the voice continued:
"It is sometimes inevitable that the law, whose purpose it is to be just, is terribly unjust. Sometimes the sole clue to a situation which seems to spell inevitable guilt lies in a fact, small in itself, whose significance is such that it cannot be brought forward. This was my case. The fact which would have cleared me could not be told. I became a convict. For six months I was an inmate of the Penitentiary. Then—the way opened to freedom, and I took it. What man would not have done so? I acknowledged no right of the law over my body. I went back to my former life, and took up my old profession here in this city."
"Here!" The Judge muttered, under his breath.
"And in that life I found opening responsibilities. New work called to me. My help was needed. I could not shirk it. I knew the risk always, but I counted it small. And the need was great! With such a work waiting my hand, a labour that no one else, it seemed, could do—one upon which much depended—was I to stand aside, to withhold my effort on the slender chance that discovery might sometime overtake me?"
The speaker seemed to have forgotten the Governor, to have swept all else to one side and to be addressing now only the Judge, in an appeal that touched the older man profoundly. It was, he thought, as though the man's whole soul was crying out in some sense for forgiveness and absolution for an injury unwittingly inflicted.
"The one thing has happened now which must lay the past bare. I must meet this—the scandal, the shame. My life, all that makes life worth living, ends to-night, and I stand before you with the bare soul of a truthful man. You have known me and trusted me. You—and others—have put faith in me...." The voice, for the first time, faltered and fell.
The Judge's head had been bowed, but he lifted it now.
"God alone knows the secrets of our hearts," he said, heavily. "If you were innocent—but of that how can I say? My view of your actions since your escape—those which may affect me—must necessarily hang upon that point. I could believe that you are not a burglar. It may be that knowledge of your true identity will presently convince me of this. And I might be persuaded that your presence in the Craig house that night was no more than an unfortunate coincidence. But the evidence of the shooting appeared at the time irrefutable. I cannot conceive that the mere knowledge of what you are would be likely to affect my belief in that respect. Your statement as to that is not only wholly unsupported, but was—and is—bluntly contradicted by the man who was shot."
He ceased speaking. No word came from the striped figure, only a slight movement of one hand, expressing at once resignation and futility. Then the hand lifted to the mask.
The Governor, however, stayed the action of revealment with a sudden gesture.
"One moment," he said quickly. "We have gone so far, I should like to go a step further—and still forensically, if you please. The question of identity may wait. Do I understand that you deny that you fired that shot?"
"I do."
Craig lurched forward in his chair. "This is no trial court!" he exclaimed savagely. "He has had his hearing once."
"Be silent!" commanded the Governor. "This man is in my hands, not in yours!" The warning was heavy and vengeful, and it held now all the electric energy of the man that had made him famous through a long career of criminal practice before his Governorship days, and that now, unleashed, dominated the room. Before it Craig whitened with a surge of anger that sent a keen probe of pain through his temple. He sat back, breathing hard, his great fingers working on the arms of his chair.
The Governor was leaning forward now, his hand on the table.
"If I recollect—and I think I do, as certain aspects of the case interested me at the time—there was a witness to the shooting beside the men who were assumed to be your comrades. There was a woman there."
"She did not see my face."
"But she might have seen the face of the shooter. Why did she not see yours?"
"I wore a mask."
"Is not a mask, in itself, a badge of criminal intent?"
"It was not mine. One of the men dropped it when they ran."
"If, being innocent," the Governor went on, "you put on the mask, the only presumption is that you did not wish the woman to recognise you. Therefore, she knew. Did you speak to her?"
There was no reply.
"If you spoke to her, it was when the man who had fired the shot was in flight. Your words to her, verified by herself—if she were reputable—would be evidence that you did not do the shooting. Why then, did you not call her as a witness?"
The long French-window had swung again ajar and the cooling evening breeze rustled the paper that lay upon the table. From the far road there came a muffled, long-drawn cheer, that trailed across the tense silence of the room.
"If the significant fact which could be brought forward at your trial was the identity of this missing witness; if her testimony would show that the law had erred—if it might operate to establish your innocence—would not she herself justify you in revealing it?"
The silence, a longer one this time, remained unbroken.
"Do you still refuse to tell the name of the woman?"
"I do."
The Governor leaned to the table and picked up the pen. But in the instant there was a quick step behind them.
All turned. Echo stood framed in the window—a figure in filmy white, against which a single rose glowed like a hot ruby.
"I was that woman, Governor Eveland," she said clearly.