CHAPTER XLVIII
THE HEART OF A WOMAN
For an instant there was a blank silence. The Judge sat as if stunned, one hand across his lips, the other clenched on his knee. Harry's breath had caught in his throat; he stood taken aback and confounded, his thought shocked apart and dispersed as a street explosion dissipates a crowd of pedestrians. He forgot all else, was conscious only of the deep fire of her eyes and the white surge of her breast, only that he loved her and that she stood on the brink of ruin—she whose name was unspotted from the world! An irrepressible exclamation burst from his lips.
The Governor put up his hand. "We will have the truth!" he said sternly.
He sat erect in his chair, his bushy brows drawn together, his compelling eyes holding Echo's. Slowly he turned his grey head toward Craig.
"It was Miss Allen," said Craig. His smouldering gaze had fastened on her with a savage joy. The drama was rushing now to its inevitable dénouement.
The crisis had come to Echo with fateful suddenness. From the porch—whither she had stolen, full of excitement, to listen to the bulletins from the east room that spelled victory for the cause of Harry Sevier—she had glimpsed through the French window that gathering in the library—the striped masked figure standing as before his judges, Craig with his bandaged temple, the silent listeners. The mask and the convict garb recalled that terrible midnight at Craig's house and the later episode at the jail, blent in a shuddering composite, even as the significance of the scene came home to her with a sudden horrifying clarity. It was true then; Craig had returned recovered! The escaped convict had been retaken, and he had come forward to repeat his mistaken testimony! In her confusion of mind she did not reason: it did not occur to her that here was no tribunal of justice. The suggestion was overpowering: she only knew that within that room men sat again in judgment upon him with whose fate her own peace of mind was so entangled. And she knew the truth! In the swift surprise the shame and horror of the publicity which had wrestled with her pain of conscience during the weeks succeeding her visit to the jail and the baleful certitude it had brought, rolled over her anew with the anguished dread of Harry Sevier's contempt. But there was no wavering: the fight had been fought out once for all, and she had waited for Craig's revelation with outer calmness, though with her blood stilling to an icy current in her veins. Two things had come to her at the same instant: Craig did not intend to involve her, and the convict knew who she was. As she leaned against the sill listening, the meaning of that obstinate refusal to answer had thrilled her. He, like Craig, had known her, then, all along. Yet he had not betrayed her, nor would he betray her even now! The thought had spurred her resolve and sent her forward into the room with that confession on her lips.
She came forward slowly, with what seemed a pathetic weariness. Her face was without colour and there were bruised shadows beneath her eyes, but above them her amber hair was like sunbeams in a mesh of gold.
"Governor Eveland," she said, "you have known me all my life. I do not think you have ever had cause to doubt my word."
"There is no need to remind me of that, my child," he answered, gravely. "Neither I nor any one who knows you, would believe you spoke anything but the truth."
A wan smile, in which was yet a glint of pride, crossed her face. "Then," she said, "I have faith that you will believe me now. I went to that house to gain a thing dearer than my own happiness. No one at home knew it. I did so secretly—my parents believed that I had gone to visit my aunt."
She paused an instant, and turned upon Craig a look of mingled scorn and aversion. "This man had once done me the honour to ask me to marry him, and I had done myself the honour to refuse. He had in his hands—how it had come to him I have never known—a letter which he threatened to publish. It was a personal letter that had no bearing on the present—one written before I was born—but it had the power to bring pain and humiliation upon some one I loved."
The Judge lifted his head; his eyes were moist and shining. "That is true," he said, in a smothered voice. "I knew of the letter, and—of the threat."
She did not proceed at once; her gaze was still upon Craig, and she waited.
"It is true enough," he said, and burst into jarring laughter. "Yes, gentlemen. It is the fact. I had that letter and I would have made my price on it!" He looked from one to the other challengingly, the arrogance and unscrupulousness of the man leaping in his eyes. But no one spoke. Only Treadwell, his eyes averted, moved his chair a little further from him.
"Yes," she repeated, deliberately. "You made your price. I went there that night, to your house, to beg you for that letter. I waited for you till you came, and when you would not give it to me otherwise, I agreed to marry you."
She faced the Governor again. "I was to marry him within the hour. Then—then came the shot from the alcove. I was mad with fright and with fear. There had been three men behind the curtains. Two ran—the man who had done the shooting and another. The third—"
She broke off and turned to the motionless figure in the striped clothes. "I know now that you were the third!" she said. "I thank you—with all my heart I thank you, for what you did!"
There was no answer from behind the mask, and she again addressed the Governor:
"This man must have heard my pleading and pitied me. He thought of me before he thought of his own escape. He took the letter I had come for from the safe and gave it to me, then dragged me to the door and told me to run. So I—I got away."
The room was so still that one heard now, through the closed doors, the muffled click of the telegraph keys in the east-room, and the voices of the clerks calling the tally of figures. Wistfulness and pain had crept into her voice now.
"Next day the newspapers said that the man who had fired the shot had been arrested. I believed this to be true, for though I went one day to the trial, I was in the court-room only a few moments and I could not see the face of the man who was being tried."
The striped figure made a sudden involuntary movement. She had not seen him, then? Could it be that he had been mistaken, that she had not known? Harry's heart began to beat violently.
"I believed it till months afterward, when I came back from Europe. Then I saw a ring which this man had given to his lawyer. It was like the one the man who had given me the letters had worn that night, and this made me afraid that a mistake had been made. I visited the Penitentiary to find out. It was the day of the attack on the warden—when this man was stabbed in his defence."
Again she paused and her eyes shifted to the masked figure. "You must have known me," she said gently. "You must have known my name. Yet you never told. Do you think, whatever it might mean to me—after what you did—that I could keep silent, if the truth may help you now?"
Sevier had no answer. Through and through the maze of his conflicting feeling was stabbing an assurance sharpened with unbelievable joy. He had been thinking her cowardly and calloused with worldly selfishness; here she was risking all—and not for him, Harry Sevier, whom she loved, but for an unknown convict!
The Governor was looking at her with intentness. "You mean that he is not the one who did the shooting?"
"He is not."
Craig sneered. "She says what she has been told to say," he said with dry lips. "You will understand why, presently."
"Perhaps," returned the Governor, coldly, "I shall." Then, turning to Echo—
"How do you know this is not the man?"
"This man is tall; the man who did the shooting was short."
"But—his face. You saw it that night distinctly? Would you know it if you saw it again?"
"As well as I know yours."
He said no more, and after an instant's pause, she went on:
"Mr. Mason, his lawyer, had told me he believed that if the shooting could have been disproved, his client might have been cleared, and knowing what I did, it seemed to me that I must tell the whole. It—was not easy, for while that night I had thought only of keeping the secret of the letter, I came to see later what the world would say of my presence there. And a woman's name is all she has. So ... I made up my mind. But that same day I read that the man had escaped from prison. There seemed no longer any need then of my telling. There had been no need till now."
She stopped, and stood looking steadily at the Governor, her hands twisted together, her face white. She was far less vividly conscious of him, however, and of all the others—Craig, her father, Treadwell—than of one whom she thought far away, but who now, sometime or other, must know!
The Governor spoke, quietly and evenly:
"Let us go back to a matter of detail. I should like to picture the scene that night a little more distinctly. Where were you standing when the shot was fired?"
She changed her position slightly. "Here, nearly in the centre of the room."
"And the man who shot from the alcove?"
"There." She pointed one side, to the bay-window, before which now stood Paddy the Brick.
The latter would have drawn away, but the Governor stayed him with a gesture. "No, stand where you are, if you please," he said. And Paddy the Brick stood still, shifting his feet and ill-at-ease, his narrow eyes turning stealthily toward Craig.
To Echo the illusion was considerable, for the room was not unlike that other library in which had occurred the scene she was so painfully redrawing. There was the same effect of rich bookcases, of desk and picture-hung walls, and in lieu of the alcove was the big double window with its heavy drawn curtains. The Governor stretched his hand and tilted the shade of the lamp, so that its light fell full upon the latter, lighting the cringing face of the stool-pigeon before it.
"What was the man who shot like?" he asked.
"He was middle-sized and thick-set, with light hair that sprang in a cowlick from his forehead. He..."
She had stopped abruptly. She was staring with wide, horrified eyes at the man who stood blinking in the radiance—at the up-thrust, sand-coloured hair, the rounded shoulders, the red-rimmed eyes, which now held a trapped look of animal fear.
She stiffened. She pointed at him.
"You!" she cried. "You are the man who fired that shot!"