Chapter XXV LOST IN THE MAZE
Durgan had still one strong emotion regarding his wife; he was able to feel overwhelming shame on her account, and he dreaded any publicity concerning her behavior. She had always lived so as to command the consent of good society to her doings. He had perfectly trusted her social instinct to do this as long as it lay in her power to tell her own story; but he knew, with a sense of bitter degradation, that if someone else had need to tell that story, it would sound very different.
His wife was the daughter of an uneducated hotel-keeper, and had married him, as he afterward discovered, because he had the entrance into certain drawing-rooms and clubs, which, if skilfully used, might have proved the stepping-stone to almost any social eminence. At the time of her marriage she had professed passionate love for him and sympathy for the Southern cause; and her fortune, not small, was naturally to be used in the difficult task of making part of his paternal acres productive by the paid labor of the negroes reared and trained by his father, and justly dear to the son. Disconsolate at the loss of friends and fortune—for all near to him had died in the war, of wounds or sorrow—Durgan repaid the love and sympathy of one who seemed a warm-hearted and impulsive woman with tender gratitude.
A little later, when the wife found out that Durgan would not push himself into the fashionable milieu which was open to him in Europe and America, he began to discover, tho slowly, that she would not bestow affection or time upon any less fashionable pursuit. She needed her whole fortune for the social adventures that she must make alone; and as he would not open the door of Southern pride for her, she fell to knocking at the door of Northern pride for herself. No doubt Providence has a good reason for making men before marriage blind to female character, but it was many years before Durgan bowed to the fate to which defect, not fault, had brought him. Too proud to accept any bounty from such a wife, he had sullenly shielded her from remark till she reached a position of middle-class fashion in which she could stand alone. Having attempted, in the meantime, to increase by speculation the small patrimony left him, and losing much, he had retired from the scene of her struggles some six years before the present time, proudly thankful that any public reproach was directed only at himself. Since then she had scaled social heights seemingly beyond her—he had often wondered how.
That his wife was tricky and false, that the means she had used to cajole or overawe the society she was determined to conquer bore no necessary relation to the truth, he knew; but knowing her also to be clever and cold-hearted, he had not feared that she would so transgress any social law as to make her small or large meannesses known.
But the most surprising thing in his wife's career since he left her was that she had not dropped the medium, Beardsley, as soon as his health and popularity were lost. She had been wont to drop all her instruments as soon as their use was over, and most of them had more attractions than he. The man had been poor, plebeian, and sickly; and Durgan, who had never suspected love as the cause of the odd relationship, had now some cause to suppose it rooted in the unspeakable shame of the worst of crimes. In what possible way this had come about he could not even begin to imagine, but he continued to consider his maturing suspicion in growing consternation.
If Miss Claxton had not told him the truth, she was a more finished actress than the world had yet seen. If what she said of his wife were true, the mulatto's words were corroborated—his wife was nearly connected with this awful crime.
In Durgan's mind the telegraphic address—evidently suggestive to Miss Claxton—had at last become significant. "Beard" suggested Beardsley; "84" was the date of the Claxton murder; "B" might possibly stand for Beardsley, and "D" for his wife. Then the help promised evidently involved his wife's purse. Beardsley had nothing.
If this Beardsley was guilty, he must be a most extraordinary man. It was clear that if it was he whom Hermione Claxton was shielding, she was as much determined to keep his secret to-day as at first. She could not speak of him save in tones of sorrow and tenderness. For him, too, the wife whom Durgan knew to be cold and ambitious had apparently ventured all. The extraordinary nature of a man who could on short acquaintance so deeply involve two such different women, gave Durgan so much room for astonished thought that some other things Miss Claxton had said for the time escaped his memory.
His strongest impulse after the last interview was to take Miss Claxton at her word and make no further move in the matter—at least, not now and on her account. Ultimately he must find out if his wife was in any plot to conceal a criminal, and if so, put a stop to her connivance. At present he had certainly no desire to make such action on his wife's part public, or break Bertha's heart by filling the air with a public scandal in which her sister's name would be linked with a lover who was a common charlatan and brutal criminal. If for this man's sake Hermione had left her father's death unavenged and ruined her sister's life, Bertha's wrath and sorrow might well be a thing to dread, and such knowledge a disaster that might well crush her. The mulatto might work to bring truth to light; he must work alone.
But at this point Durgan again shifted his ground of suspicion; for he still believed in Hermione Claxton's singular purity of mind and gentleness of disposition, and in his wife's callousness and shrewd selfishness. Was it possible that Beardsley had some mysterious power over both women such as a magician or modern hypnotist is said to use? But then, was not such influence in such a man too strange to be possible, too like a cheap novel to be true? A terrible thought struck cold at Durgan's heart; the man, as he knew him, was more likely to be a cat's-paw than the mover in any momentous deed. The surprise of ascertaining that his wife had had some connection with the Claxtons forced him to realize how little he knew about her life, how totally ignorant he was as to any cause she might have to hate Mr. and Mrs. Claxton. His heart failed him.
He drew in his breath in quick terror, trying to persuade himself that he could not have arrived at the bottom of a secret over which Alden had brooded so long in vain.
"Well, I understand that your visit to Hilyard was most satisfactory. You are assured of your good Adam's safety; and I find the mulatto sent a message to our friends that he would not drag their name into the business. So far so good. Do you suppose that the money and advice he expects to receive are all in the air, or how?" Alden, dandified and chirpy, his little gray beard wagging in the morning sunlight, was standing on the mountain road. There was a sharpness as of autumn in the sunshine, which made the New Yorker fresh. Durgan, who had taken to his pick and spade very early that morning, already warm, dirty, and tired, looked like some grim demiurge. Called from his work to this colloquy, he was not in good humor.
"These fellows are always boasting," continued Alden. "The peculiarity in this case is that he would not take the cost of his own defence from us."
"And I offered him what I had in my pocket. He would not look at it," said Durgan, dully.
"Odd."
"Do you think so?"
"Well, of course, when a flimsy, tawdry creature of that sort refuses a bird in the hand, one wonders what he sees in the bush, especially when, as in this case, the bird in the hand could hardly prevent his robbing the bush also."
"I reckon it's beyond me," said Durgan, stupidly. Alden's simile reminded him afresh of the hole in the forked tree, which had not ceased to haunt his mind.
"You have a headache this morning, my dear sir."
"Thanks; I'm all right."
A boy, a slovenly country lout, came up the hill. He was whistling a merry air attuned to the snap of the morning. He was looking about him in the trees for birds and squirrels. His hands hung in the delicious idleness of his pockets. There was a spring in his legs to match his tone. Durgan envied him unfeignedly. He thought of his own gallant, cheerful purpose of the day before, and wished that he dare form any fresh resolve. Alden was evidently alarmed by what he had heard.
"As you know, being widely known as counsel for the Claxtons, I preferred not to appear to take any interest in this prisoner. A possible inference might have been drawn by someone. We of the law, my dear sir——"
Durgan perceived that it would be a vast relief to his conscience if Alden could visit 'Dolphus himself.
"They are lax," continued Alden; "there would be no difficulty in my seeing the man."
"Why do you want to see him?"
"I hear he wrote to New York and got a telegram back. He may, for all we know, be a member of a gang of thieves or blackmailers. They may bribe judge and jury with a thousand dollars if he threatens to round on them. A little money would go a long way in Hilyard. Then, if it is proved, so to say, that both prisoners are innocent, the authorities might arrest someone else."
"Me, for instance? I was there."
"Probably not you!" Then after a pause he added, "Miss Claxton is disposed to think that we have done all we can honestly do, and must now leave the matter in the hand of Providence; but, under Providence, I myself feel that I am responsible for leaving no effort untried to gain further light as to the basis of this fellow's hopes."
The boy, bobbing his head, explained to Durgan that he had been sent to fetch the borrowed horse.
When he had gone on, Durgan said, "'Dolphus may die before anything happens; that would be the simplest solution, perhaps." He remembered how yesterday it had seemed all-important to extract all the knowledge this man had before life went from him.
"Ah; you spoke to the doctor, I hear. It is always right, in any case, to preserve life as long as possible."
Durgan looked toward his mine. The triteness to which the dialog had descended was the more irksome because he suspected that Alden read beneath his own sudden dullness and inertia.
"When the boy brings along the horse you can ride it as far as my cousins'. He will find you a buggy, and will give you a letter which will open things at Hilyard without giving much publicity to your name and position. But you, of course, can best judge whether it's worth while to go."
"Miss Claxton has seemed averse to my going," said Alden; and because Durgan made no answer to this, he sat down on a rock, with brows knit, and determined to go.
Some twenty minutes later Durgan was called again into the road. The lout of a boy refused to give Alden the horse. He said very little; he even blubbered; but he hung on to the bridle and tried to pass.
It was soon discovered that he had been commissioned by Miss Claxton to take a telegram to Hilyard, for which service he had been promised excessive pay.
Wrath rose in Durgan. "Fool that I was to warn her," he thought. "She has wired to the man she shields to be on his guard." At that moment his wife's welfare was not in his thought, and he felt he would rather have suffered the last penalty of crime himself than allow this coil of secrets to exist longer. He inwardly cursed all women, and was very sorry for Alden.
Alden, meanwhile, unconscious of need for passion, was explaining that he knew what the telegram must be, as he had heard Miss Claxton mention that some supplies on which she was depending were delayed. As he was going he would assume the responsibility of sending it. He would pay the boy.
Durgan was afraid to speak. He picked up the boy, took a letter addressed to the telegraph clerk out of his pocket, and sent him running down the road at a forced pace. He put the sealed message in Alden's hands, and returned to his work before a word could escape his lips.
As he toiled all day with spade and mattock, he wondered incessantly whether or not Alden would open the message to see it correctly transmitted.
When the long work-day had calmed his pulse he was still too impatient to await Alden's time; sauntered down the hill, and finally reached Deer Cove.
There he saw Alden looking very tired and haggard, but in no haste to return.
The saw-mill was silent for the night. The quiet plash of the water over the dam made a pleasing accompaniment to a banjo played by a negro. The musician sat on the steps of the general store and post-office; he wore a red handkerchief on his head. Some of his kind were dancing in leisurely burlesque in an open space between the steps and the mill-race. A circle of white men looked on, exchanging foolish jokes and puffing strong tobacco. Many a bright necktie or broad-brimmed hat gave picturesqueness to the group. The quiet of the sylvan evening was over and around them all.
Alden, standing on the verandah of the post-office, looking upon this scene as if he were an habitual lounger, struck Durgan as presenting one of the saddest figures he had ever seen. No sign that could be controlled of any grief was there; but the incongruity between what the man was doing, and what in a better state of mind he would have liked to do, seemed to betoken a depression so deep that normal action was inhibited for the time.
Durgan thought one of the Blounts was perhaps with Alden. He accordingly went straight inside the store; but the place was empty. No one of gentle birth was to be seen near or far. When he came out on the verandah Alden explained that he had insisted on leaving the trap at the Blounts' and walking. "I was stiff with the drive and felt the walk would do me good. You found me resting by the way."
Durgan remarked that there was nothing like a leisurely walk when cramped with sitting long.
After a while the two were beginning the ascent of Deer together, still uttering trivial words.