"It's not worth while to bring a lamp. I must drink my tea in a hurry, and run out. I have an engagement."
He heard her go out and close the door. "Casey had no right. It was a betrayal. If the man were bent on this infernal crime—put the atrocity of it aside for a moment—call it just an ordinary crime; . . . but why need he have written that letter? Why involve him? Well, not involve, perhaps; still there was a kind of responsibility—"
His eyes had been fastened on the little parlour across the road. The woman after lighting the lamp had set it in the centre of a round table and left the room. Between this table and the hearth an old man sat in an arm-chair, smoking his pipe and reading a newspaper. The back of the chair was turned toward the window, but over it Gilbart could see the crown of a grey head and small, steady puffs of smoke ascending between it and the upper edge of the paper. A light appeared in the room above; the light of a candle behind the drawn blind. It lasted there perhaps for ten minutes, and once the woman's shadow moved across the blind.
The light went out, and after a minute or two the woman reappeared in the parlour. She carried a work-basket, and after speaking a word with the old man in the chair she set the basket down on the table, drew up a chair and began to darn a child's stocking. Now and then she looked up as if listening for some sound or movement in the room overhead, but after a moment or two began to ply her needle again. The needle moved more slowly—stopped—she bowed her head over the stocking. Gilbart knew why. She was the wife of a petty officer on the Berenice. The old man in the chair went on reading.
All this while a light had been growing in Gilbart's brain, and now he saw. In this street, and the next, and the next, lived scores who had sons, husbands, brothers on board the Berenice; thin walls of brick and plaster dividing to-night their sore hearts and their prayers; a whole town with its hopes and its happy days given into keeping of one ship; not its love only but its trust for life's smallest comforts following her as she moved away through the darkness. And he alone knew! He had only to throw open the window—to fling four words into that silent street—to shout, "The Berenice is lost!"—and with the breath of it windows would fly open, partitions fall down, and all those privacies meet and answer in one terrible outcry. He put up a hand to thrust it away—this awful gift of power. He would have none of it; he was unfit. "Oh, my God!"—it was he, not Casey, who held the real infernal machine. It was here, not in the Berenice, that the levin must fall; and he, John Gilbart, held it in his fingers. "Oh, my God, I am unfit—thrust not this upon me!"
But there was no escape. He must take his hat and run—run to the Port Admiral. The errand was useless, he knew; for all the while at the back of his soul's confusion some practical corners of his brain had been working at the problem of time—was there time to follow and prevent? There was not. He knew the Berenice's natural speed to be eighteen knots. Put it at sixteen, fifteen even; still not the fastest destroyer in the port—following in a bee-line—could overtake her by midnight. And there might be, must be, delays. Yet God, too, might interfere; some providential accident might delay the cruise. He must run, at any rate. He picked up his hat and ran.
Now that he was taking action—doing something—the worst horror of responsibility left him for a while; he seemed to have cast some of it already off his own shoulders and on to the Admiral's. As he ran he found time to think of Casey. Casey was doing this thing—not in hatred or in villainy for gain—but because it seemed to him right—right, or at least necessary. Casey was laying down his own life in the deed. How could man, framed in God's image, expect ultimate good out of devilish cruelty? Yet from the world's beginning men had murdered and tortured each other on this only plea; had butchered women and the very babes; had stamped upon God's image and—marvel of marvels—for its soul's salvation, not for their own advantage. At every stride Gilbart felt his moral footing, trusted for years without question, cracking and crumbling and swirling away in blocks. Red flames leapt into the fissures and filled them. The end of the world had surely come; but—he must run to the Admiral! He kept that uppermost in his mind, and ran.
The windows of the Admiralty House blazed with light. The Admiral's wife was giving a dinner and a dance, and already a small crowd had gathered to see the earlier guests arrive. The sight dashed Gilbart. Suddenly he remembered that the letter had reached him by the afternoon post. It was now half-past seven, and he would have to explain the interval; for of course the Admiral would suspect the whole story at first. Gilbart knew the official manner; he had been privileged to study the fine flower of it in this particular Admiral one afternoon six months before, when the great man had condescended to sit on the platform at the Mission anniversary. "Tut, tut—a stupid practical joke "—that would be the beginning; and then would follow cross-examination in the coldest court-martial fashion. Well, he could explain; but it would be just as well to have the story pat beforehand.
One minute—ten minutes went by. Cabs rattled up and private carriages; officers in glittering uniforms, ladies muffled in silk and swansdown stepped past the policeman behind whom Gilbart hesitated. This would never do; better he had gone in with the story hot on his lips. He twitched the policeman's elbow.
"May I pass, please? I want to see the Admiral."