The day dragged along, and both Bristol and Mrs. Winslow became anxious. The latter paced back and forth in her room, and every few moments went to the door, and even passed out into the hall, going as far as the stairs and peering anxiously down, while the waiter at frequent intervals was summoned to provide her courage and patience of a liquid character. Finally, however, Bristol noticed that she had either concluded to take a short nap, or was determined to wait patiently, for quite a period of silence elapsed in her room, which he took advantage of to steal quietly out into the hall, leaving his door ajar so that he might re-enter it noiselessly as occasion required.
It was not long before the occasion presented itself, for Bristol had got no more than to the end of the hall when he saw Devereaux ascending the stairs from below. He quietly stepped behind the curtains that trailed from the lambrequin over the window, and watched the old man as he came up the stairs.
He was a little, gray, withered old man. Almost all his strength was gone, and he certainly had but a few more years to use what little strength was left. His hair was almost white, and his face was quite as colorless, while the weak, rheumy eyes seemed almost ready to fall through the flesh which had withered away to the bones of his face. He was a living example of the blackmailer's victim as he labored along, now and then catching at the stair-rail for help, and looking behind and around him as if fearing some sudden discovery. Arriving upon the hall floor, he peered anxiously at the numbers upon the doors, and after settling in his mind what direction to take, went on tremblingly with bowed head towards the woman who was as remorseless as death itself.
He found the room after a little trouble, and tapped at it apprehensively. It was at once opened and immediately closed after, when Bristol sprang from his hiding-place and was in the adjoining room almost as soon as the next door had closed.
During the afternoon, when Mrs. Winslow had absented herself from her room, he had dragged the bureau against the door opening into her apartment, placed a quilt from his bed upon it in order that his jumping upon it might occasion no noise, and with his knife cut a diamond shaped piece out of the green paper covering the glass transom, darkening his own room so that his eyes could not by any possibility be seen through the aperture in the piece of paper, which had a dead black appearance from Mrs. Winslow's room; and by the time the poor old man had confronted the woman in a scared kind of a way, and had seated himself upon the sofa obedient to her imperious gesture, the "retired banker's" eyes and eye-glasses looked calmly down upon a scene the whole terrible import of which, could it have been presented to the world in all its terrible hideousness, and in some form become eternally typical of the curse it illustrated, would have stood for all time a savage Cerberus frightening men from this kind of infamy and self-destruction.
In all my startling experience with criminals and the sad incidents which have in the peculiar nature of my business forced themselves upon my observation, there has been no one thing so reprehensible as the trade of the blackmailer, and there is a no more terrible torture than that inflicted by that class of criminals; and I am satisfied that could heads of families realize their terrible danger when heedlessly forming some unholy alliance, which is sure to eventually whip and scourge them until life is a burden, there would be less of the moral laxity and lechery than now burdens the world from palace and pulpit to poverty-stricken hovel.
What more pitiable picture than that of a man just ready to pass from all that should be worth having and loving to the unknown country, with fear behind and awful uncertainty beyond—with the work of a whole life, which should now bring a reward of tenderness, gratitude, and reverential esteem, embittered and blasted by the relentless curse that ever trails after weakness and passion—fear, distrust, and apprehension between himself and family, and the Damoclean sword ever above him, ready to fall at the instant he endeavors to throw the horrible shadow from him to regain honesty and uprightness!
There the old man sat, a cowardly puppet before a brazen adventuress—sat there a weak, drivelling, idiotic wreck before one so vile that she was no longer capable of regret—sat there ruined in everything worth the preservation of, suffering what he had for years suffered—the regret, the remorse, the shame, and the abject fear that were worse than a thousand deaths; while the utterly heartless woman, with her hands folded across her waist in a masculine sort of a way, looked at him smilingly, seemingly enjoying his efforts to recover the breath lost in the, to him, severe labor of getting to her room; as it appeared to be the custom for him to see her there rather than in the parlor.
The interview was business-like, and, as it was not overwhelmed with sentiment, was not protracted.
Mrs. Winslow asked Devereaux if he had brought the money, and he stammered that he had. Well, she wanted it, and didn't want any nonsense with it, either, she said, with a vast amount of meaning thrown into the words; he knew whether he owed her that amount or not, and, if he did, she didn't propose having any bickering about it.