CHAPTER XXVI
THE HAUNTER OF THE SHADOW
But for the iron control to which he had schooled himself, Sevier, in that second, must have made a panic movement of betrayal. He dragged his eyes away instantly, his heart beating as if it must burst, as the deliberate judicial accents struck across the courtroom:
"I have no desire to say anything to add to your anxiety of mind. The rulings of the court, if they have had any bias, have not leaned to the side of the Commonwealth. There is no legal right that has not been afforded you and if you have not chosen to meet the evidence with candour it is to be presumed that it is because candour could have lent no degree of mitigation to the circumstances. The jury has found you guilty as charged, and I should be doing less than my duty, if I allowed sympathy based upon imagined facts to subtract from the full legal penalty. The judgment of this court is, therefore, that you be imprisoned in the state's penitentiary during a period of twenty years."
Harry hardly heard the pronouncement for the mental confusion that held him. Echo knew! All the time while he had been fighting back recognition, she had known! How had she guessed? Had his voice, perhaps, that night when he had saved her, betrayed him? He remembered her white and agonised look when he had thrust her from the door of Craig's house and bade her run. A doubt, coupled with his absence from home, would have driven her, somehow or other, to discover the truth. She had been near him often, perhaps, realising the situation, conscious of what he had been striving for, knowing that only silence for a time could save them both! In that instant's view he had seen the look of suffering and sickness in her face. In these long weeks—if, indeed, she had known it so long—what an anguish of anxiety she must have been enduring!
As the voice ceased and he sat down, through the warm wave that was coursing over him, Harry felt a chilling realisation of the risk she had run in coming there. An impulsive word, an indiscreet look, and suspicion might have been roused leading to discovery. Sitting before this bar he was only an unknown criminal, a submerged "John Doe" on whom the make-shift expediency of the law spent itself. But the veil once lifted, he would be Harry Sevier, club-man and lawyer whose pleading folk had once flocked to hear, now caught in the vise of the law and proven thief and degenerate.
In the emptying room he felt the cool hand of his counsel touch his own, and followed him—with a watchful deputy-sheriff now in hand-reach—to a side door that opened into a chamber at the rear of the court-room. On the threshold the lawyer turned to the sheriff.
"There's no hurry, Jerry," he said peevishly. "You wait out here a few minutes. The old man himself is coming. He wants to see him."
"Mr. Mason," said Sevier as the other closed the door. "I shall not pretend to thank you for your interest and kindness."
The man of briefs shrugged his shoulders. "There's nothing to thank me for," he answered briskly. "Now, if I had cleared you—"
Harry nodded. "Naturally, you couldn't do that. You were at a disadvantage."
"Thanks to you!"
"Yes, I didn't assist you much, I know."
"Didn't help me at all," came back in a growl.
"No doubt you think I might have," said Harry. "But please don't count me unresponsive. It is only that the logic of the situation appealed to me as unanswerable. But it is a privilege," he added, with the glimmer of a smile, "to have been associated with you."
Mason looked at him with a twist to his saturnine lips. "You have been my most remarkable client," he said. "It would have pleased me to have gotten you off. But unluckily for you, I'm no Harry Sevier."
It was fortunate that the face of the man beside him was turned away, or he might have seen it go white and startled. "I'm sure I lost no chance I might have had," said the other slowly, "even though you're not Harry Sevier, whoever he is."
The other laughed shortly. "He's a lawyer in the next state. I heard him plead once. He didn't bother with evidence! He'd clear Judas Iscariot with that silver tongue of his! Ah, well..." He shrugged his shoulders again, and turned to a closed door. "I'll see if the old man is ready."
"One moment." Harry had drawn the ring with the square uncut emerald from his finger, and now he held it out. "I should consider it a favour, if you would take this—it has no particular value, I am sorry to say—as a little remembrance."
Mason turned the ring over in his hands. Under the churlish pose a guilty flush stole up his lean, eccentric face that betrayed unmistakably the friendliness and liking he had learned for the man whose plight angered and whose attitude puzzled him. "Thank you!" he said, and a sudden smile made the grim demeanour all at once soft and human. He slipped it on his finger. "Thank you! I shall be proud to keep it."
He opened the door and Sevier followed him into the room adjoining.
There, looking out of the window, the fingers of one thin hand in his plenteous blue-grey beard, the other behind him, stood the Governor of the State. Harry felt a thrill run through him. He knew the older man by sight, for they had met once casually in the past. Had Echo already spoken? Did the other know?
"Governor," said the lawyer, "I beg to present my client, whose cause I have so poorly represented."
In the deep grey, kindly eyes that were studying him attentively, Harry saw instantly, however, that there was no hidden knowledge, and his heart, that had leaped quickly, dropped into measured beating. He bowed.
"My counsel did wonders," he said, "but the day of miracles is past."
The reply was simple enough, but the visitor unconsciously looked his surprise. He had been prepared for something in a way unusual, for Mason had employed his intimacy to inspire something of his own keen interest in his client. Face to face with the latter, the Governor understood the lawyer's puzzlement. Here was a man who had been arrested as a house-breaker and who, caught in the very act, had shot a man down. Yet he found it suddenly credible, as Mason had declared, that the man was no ordinary burglar, was indeed, or had been, a gentleman. But there were gentlemen-thieves! He met Harry's tone with noncommittal courtesy.
"You will not consider this an intrusion, I hope," he said. "My friend here was anxious that I should see you. He has been deeply concerned in your case."
"It is a pleasure," Harry replied simply. "He has been put to considerable pains, in which there is very little credit, I am afraid."
"His interest," the Governor went on, "as he has assured me, arises from a conviction that there is some hidden element in the affair that, if it had been brought out, might have put a different face upon it."
Harry bowed but did not answer.
"You have a good reason, I take it, for maintaining the silence as to yourself which my friend here finds so difficult?"
"The very best," said Harry grimly.
The Governor mused a moment. "You will pardon me, I am sure, if I ask you one other question. Have you ever been in prison?"
"No," said Harry.
"Have you committed crime—in the past?"
"As the law counts it, no."
He looked the Governor steadily in the eyes as he spoke and the other, a keen judge of men, with a knowledge, bred of long life and observation, of the workings of the human conscience, felt a strange inclination to believe. Yet for every criminal there must be a first crime. Given a good family name and the remnant of a conscience, the man's insistence could be accounted for! With a little sigh he turned to Mason.
"Shall I see you at the Castlemans to-night?" he asked as they shook hands.
"I'm dining at the Langhams," Mason replied. "It's a farewell dinner for Miss Allen."
"A charming girl, Echo!" said the Governor. "I've known her since she was a child. A farewell, did you say? Is her visit over?"
"Yes, she's off to Europe to-morrow."
The lawyer went with the Governor to the door and stood a moment looking after him as he crossed the lawn to his carriage. He did not see the look that had suddenly slipped to the face of the man standing behind him—a look mingled of sudden wonder and questioning disquiet.
To Europe! Echo? Was she going away now ... knowing it all ... knowing what he had passed through, what lay before him? Going without written word or secret sign to him?
Harry felt a strange sinking of the heart. It seemed to him as if a cold shadow had suddenly fallen across the room—a shadow in which lurked something vague and formless, something whose existence his faith denied, yet which stood silently staring at him with a cruel and terrifying smile.