Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom been desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried to plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have no line long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himself as the thing that life had at last left him—a solitary and unsatisfied man, a man without an aim, without a calling, without companionship.
"So this ends the music!" he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet. And yet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to himself. It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the last string. It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself as final as the stabbing thought of his own death itself.
He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a glass of sherry. Whether he answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that Binhart was dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the night, a broken and desolate man.
XX
Several days dragged away before Blake's mental clarity returned to him. Then block by unstable block he seemed to rebuild a new world about him, a new world which was both narrow and empty. But it at least gave him something on which to plant his bewildered feet.
That slow return to the substantialities of life was in the nature of a convalescence. It came step by languid step; he knew no power to hurry it. And as is so often the case with convalescents, he found himself in a world from which time seemed to have detached him. Yet as he emerged from that earlier state of coma, his old-time instincts and characteristics began to assert themselves. Some deep-seated inner spirit of dubiety began to grope about and question and challenge. His innate skepticism once more became active. That tendency to cynical unbelief which his profession had imposed upon him stubbornly reasserted itself. His career had crowned him with a surly suspiciousness. And about the one thing that remained vital to that career, or what was left of it, these wayward suspicions arrayed themselves like wolves, about a wounded stag.
His unquiet soul felt the need of some final and personal proof of Binhart's death. He asked for more data than had been given him. He wanted more information than the fact that Binhart, on his flight north, had fallen ill of pneumonia in New Orleans, had wandered on to the dry air of Arizona with a "spot" on his lungs, and had there succumbed to the tubercular invasion for which his earlier sickness had laid him open. Blake's slowly awakening and ever-wary mind kept telling him that after all there might be some possibility of trickery, that a fugitive with the devilish ingenuity of Binhart would resort to any means to escape being further harassed by the Law.
Blake even recalled, a few days later, the incident of the Shattuck jewel-robbery, during the first weeks of his regime as a Deputy Commissioner. This diamond-thief named Shattuck had been arrested and released under heavy bail. Seven months later Shattuck's attorney had appeared before the District Attorney's office with a duly executed certificate of death, officially establishing the fact that his client had died two weeks before in the city of Baltimore. On this he had based a demand for the dismissal of the case. He had succeeded in having all action stopped and the affair became, officially, a closed incident. Yet two months later Shattuck had been seen alive, and the following winter had engaged in an Albany hotel robbery which had earned for him, under an entirely different name, a nine-year sentence in Sing Sing.
From the memory of that case Never-Fail Blake wrung a thin and ghostly consolation. The more he brooded over it the more morosely disquieted he became. The thing grew like a upas tree; it spread until it obsessed all his waking hours and invaded even his dreams. Then a time came when he could endure it no more. He faced the necessity of purging his soul of all uncertainty. The whimpering of one of his unkenneled "hunches" merged into what seemed an actual voice of inspiration to him.