CHAPTER XXX
THE GIPSY RING
The chill touch of autumn was in the air when the big steamer that brought Mrs. Spottiswoode and Echo home, crept up the bay to her wharf in the teeming North River. They arrived at daylight and the early morning found them safe aboard a Pullman rolling southward.
Looking out across the filmy glory of the October fields and the woods in their golden regalia epauletted in red, Echo thought of the day she had sailed away. She had been wretched then, and with all the tonic of fresh scenes and the savour of change, was she not as wretched now? For no letter from home had chronicled Harry Sevier's return, and moreover the knowledge that Craig had been taken half around the world to test the greatest surgical skill the planet afforded, had made his recovery, with all it might imply for her, an imminent possibility.
As she followed Mrs. Spottiswoode into the dining-car for luncheon, a lank, familiar form sprang up from a table.
"Mr. Malcolm!" she cried, and found both her hands instantly swallowed in a pair of big palms.
He was an extraordinary man, this Thomas Malcolm, whom his intimates dubbed, affectionately, "Tom." His father had begun life brilliantly, had begun to make a name and place for himself in professional life, when he had yielded to the vice of drinking, had speedily sunk himself in poverty, and had died in some slum corner wretched and unredeemed, leaving behind him a widow and a boy of ten who, with grim determination, had set himself to earn a living for both. He had but just begun to succeed in this when disease, its seeds sown in privation, took his mother from him. By dint of night-work he had gained a common-school education and had tutored himself through a southern university. At twenty-five he had founded an obscure Mission in the city which had known his father's disgrace, where for thirty years he had devoted himself to work among the rum-sodden and depraved. There was none so besotted as to be turned from his door; he was a familiar figure in the night-court and a welcome weekly visitor at the Penitentiary, few of whose inmates he did not know personally. At fifty-five no man was more beloved in the community in which he laboured, and most of all was he valued and respected by those who knew his history, and understood how the hatred of liquor had become to the boy a consuming fire that had driven him to this life of undeviating self-denial and strenuous conflict with the most sordid of vices.
Looking down at Echo from his great height, gaunt, raw-boned and with a saturnine twinkle in his cavernous eyes, his homely sallow face softened to a wonderful smile. "Why!" he said. "It's a monstrous time since we've met, my dear!" and to Mrs. Spottiswoode—"I saw your names on the passenger-list in the paper this morning, but I thought New York would have kept you at least a week."
"Not me!" she returned. "We took in all the new plays in London and spent all our money in Paris. I've no ambition now above my winter roses!" She extended her hand to Malcolm's companion.
"How do you do, Mr. Mason? I'm beginning to think you two men are desperate conspirators. Last year in New York I saw you both together."
Malcolm laughed. "A misguided philanthropist once left a part of his estate to my Mission, and Mason, here, is the legal executor. Ferbum sat."
"I hope that is Latin for 'Do sit at our table.' The car is so full, and I never could ride backward! Thank you, so much!" She sat down and bent her smart lorgnette upon the menu-card. "What shall we order, Echo?"
"Anything but the 'fried Chicken, Virginia style,'" said Mason gloomily. "It's supposed to be what that waiter has on his tray there. It's a crime and a swindle."
"Don't mind Mason," interposed Malcolm. "He's a dyspeptic. When I get to be his age—"
"You did," said the other viciously, "five years ago."
"—I'll be a vegetarian," finished the other. "Cheer up, Mason, and have a potato." He turned to Echo: "I know a girl in my town who's mighty keen to see you."
"Nancy Langham!"
He nodded. "She counts on having you down for Thanksgiving week. I hope she'll succeed. I'm giving a great 'spread' down at the Mission, and I want you girls to show me how to decorate the place. You will, then, eh? I haven't forgotten how you and Nancy helped me out last Christmas!" He reached over and patted her hand. "I do like to let it soak into Poverty Terrace that I really keep company with 'dee quality,' as the darkies say!"
Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at him curiously. "How frivolous and selfish we must all seem to you, who give up your life to such people!" she said. "I've heard so much about your work, Mr. Malcolm, especially in the prisons. I think you are wonderful. I should know how to talk to a Martian better than to a criminal. Don't you find it hard to get into sympathy with them?"
His smiling face turned serious. "'A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind,'" he quoted. "You remember your Bunyan? I always say to myself, 'There, but for the lack of a sufficient temptation, goes Thomas Malcolm!' Dear Lady, there is many a man in the Penitentiary who would be a churchwarden to-day but for bad environment and good whisky."
"And the law's mistakes," added Mason, sardonically. He had been turning over on his finger a ring with a square green stone, and Echo had been wondering vaguely where she had seen such a ring before. "I know a man who's in for ten years, and I'd stake my life he's no more guilty than I am."
"How extraordinary!" exclaimed Mrs. Spottiswoode, and Malcolm observed with wicked innocence: "I wonder who could have defended him!"
The other smiled grimly at the thrust. "Oh, he was guilty enough according to the evidence. But he was innocent, for all of that. He is the man who was accused of shooting Cameron Craig."
The blood flew to Echo's face and she bent her head over her salad. She felt as though she had strayed unwittingly into an ambush where all the old dread and terror from which she had fled had sprung again upon her.
"But," said Mrs. Spottiswoode, "I thought Craig himself identified him."
Mason sniffed. "Craig was in no condition to identify anybody. I saw the man and talked with him, day after day, for weeks. He was no criminal—why, his very look gave the theory the lie!"
A keen, thriving wonder crossed Echo's thought at the blunt assertion. That livid face back of the spitting revolver hung before her mental sight with strange vividness—the surly, wicked lips, the low brow and narrow eyes. How was it possible that such a countenance could assume at wont a look of innocency that would deceive a lawyer, even against damning evidence, into a belief that he was a victim of circumstances?
"What is your theory of the shooting, then?" asked Mrs. Spottiswoode, interestedly.
The lawyer was silent a moment, drawing little circles on the cloth with his fork. "I haven't a wholly satisfactory one," he said at length, slowly. "But I don't believe he did it. Craig, it is certain, had a rendezvous with a woman, and the woman saw the shooting. I believe her testimony would have proven that the man who was tried and convicted was not the man who did it. That fact disposed of, I believe he could have shown, if he had chosen to, that he had no connection with the burglars, and would have been acquitted."
"Cherchez la femme!" murmured the lady.
"Yes. She would not come forward."
Mrs. Spottiswoode looked at Malcolm. "Have you seen him?" she asked.
"No, I've been in New Orleans for three months. But I hope to begin my visits at the Penitentiary very soon, and I'm looking forward to meeting him."
"You'll agree with me, I'll bet a hat!" said Mason. "By the way"—he held up his hand—"he gave me this ring, the day he was sentenced."
Echo felt every nerve suddenly tighten. For it had come to her in a flash where she had seen that ring's counterpart: it had been on the finger of the masked burglar on that horrible midnight in Craig's library—when he had held out to her the letters from the safe! Her heart began to beat suffocatingly. "Take them and go—go instantly!"—she seemed to hear the tense command strike across the car. A thrill ran over her. Was the ring a kind of badge, a sign of their guilty calling? Or could it be that the man who was being tried was not the man who had shot Craig—but the other, the one who had saved her?
She began to tremble, for another thought stabbed her. If this was so, how could she honourably keep silence? The instant question touched her conscience, her quick sense of justice and duty, with sudden insistence. But for the spoilers themselves, she was the only witness of that deed in the library. Craig—so narrow had been for him that instant of observation—might have been mistaken. But not she! The very fright and horror of the moment had indelibly fixed the shooter's face upon her mind. Suppose Mason's hypothesis were correct—suppose he had been no burglar, but an honourable man, caught, as she had been, in a web of circumstance. In the crisis he had acted as a gentleman, had thought of her before himself. Instead of flying with the others, he had lingered to do that generous deed for her. What if it were because of that he had been taken! If so, what a debt she owed him!
It came to her suddenly that she must be certain. Never again could she know peace of soul till she knew the truth. If the man in the Penitentiary was indeed the man who had shot Craig, well and good. If not...
She turned her head, for Malcolm was speaking to her. "When you come to Nancy's you must let me take you both out to see these protégés of mine that have to be shut up for the good of their souls. Wouldn't you like to, eh?"
She thought he must hear the beating of her pulse. "Would—don't they resent being stared at?" she faltered.
"Bless your heart!" he said, with one of his bear-like laughs. "It's good for them. They don't get a squint at roses and sunshine every day! A sight like you two girls will make them want to get out, and keep them on their best behaviour, so as to earn all the commutation good marks bring! I'll get the Warden to take us through the shops. That's the most interesting part."
"I must be quite certain!" The words seemed singing themselves over in a banal refrain that sounded through the stir and rumble of the station, mingling with 'Lige's hearty voice of welcome, and her father's loving greeting as he lifted her carefully from the car step.
"You're a lot better? Sure?" he queried anxiously, as he held both her hands tight in his.
"Sure!" she smiled. "We've had a wonderful time. I couldn't begin to tell you about it in my letters. But I'm glad to be home just the same! How are mother and Chilly? Mr. Malcolm was on the train—there he is now, waving his hand from the window. Did the wireless tell you we lost a propeller-blade two days out?"
The dusk flowed over them in violet waves as they drove homeward and she laughed and talked gaily, with her hand clasped in his under the carriage-robe, the horses prancing and curvetting in the keen October air. Once, at a crossing, she put out her hand and touched the coachman's arm.
"Take Main Street, 'Lige," she directed. "I'd like to see how it looks."
As he swung into the broader thoroughfare, her father said, "You're looking at the new bank building. You see it's nearly done."
But she was really looking beyond, at a four-storied office-front, on whose second floor the windows of a suite showed in chaste, golden letters the legend, "Henry Sevier, Attorney-at-Law." The windows were blank and dusty, and their blinds were drawn.
"Why, you're shivering!" said her father suddenly, and drew the robe more closely about her.
She smiled at him.
"No," she said, "but I think I'm just a little tired. Drive faster, 'Lige. I—I want to get home."