She flung herself down upon the collapsed MacNutt, and tore open his coat and vest. As she did so the polished pig-skin wallet fell out on the floor.
His heart was still beating, but it would be murder, she felt, to leave him there without attention. His life was his own. She wanted and would take only what the written law would allow. She wanted only her own.
She came to a sudden pause, as she looked from the paper wealth between her fingers to the huge and huddled figure beside her. Some inner and sentinel voice, from the calmer depths of her nature, was demanding of her how much of what had thus come into her hand was her own? After all, how much of that terrible and tainted wealth could truly be called their own?—was the untimely question this better part of her was crying out.
She knew that in the end most usurious toll would be exacted for what she took. Her life had taught her that no lasting foundation of good, no enduring walls of aspiration, could be built on the engulfing sloughs of evil. And as she looked at her prostrate enemy once more, and breathed out a fervent and grateful: “Oh, God, I thank Thee for this deliverance!” a sudden chastening and abnegative passion prompted her to thrust back every dollar she had drawn from that capacious wallet.
Then she thought of the future, of the exigent needs of life, of the necessities of her immediate flight; and her heart sank within her. To begin life again with a clean slate—that had been her constant wish. Yet much as she hungered to do so, she dare not leave it all. As with many another aspiring soul in quieter walks of life, she found herself grimly but sorrowfully compelled to leave the pure idea sacrificed on the altar of compromise. All life, she told herself, was made up of concessions. She could only choose the lesser evil, and through it still strive to grope a little onward and upward.
So she slowly detached one Treasury note—it was for one thousand dollars—from the bulky roll, and the rest she restored to its wallet. It was a contribution to conscience. As she replaced that wallet in the inner pocket of the prostrate man, her feelings were akin to those of some primordial worshipper before his primordial Baal or his exacting Juggernaut. She felt that with that sacrifice she was appeasing her gods. She consoled herself with the thought that the Master of Destiny would know and understand—that she had given up the great thing that she might not sorrow in the little. As yet, He would not expect too much of her! That minute fraction of what she might have taken, she argued with herself, appeasingly,—surely that little moiety of what they had fought and worked for might be theirs.
It was fifteen minutes later that a frightened and pale-faced woman left word at the corner drugstore that an old gentleman was ill of morphine poisoning, and asked if the ambulance might be sent for. All that the clerk could remember, when he was later questioned by the somewhat bewildered police, was that she had seemed weak and sick, and had asked for some aromatic spirits of ammonia, and that the side of her face was swollen and bruised where she lifted her veil. He was of the opinion, too, that she had been under the drug herself, or had been drinking heavily, for she walked unsteadily, and he had had to call a taxi for her and help her into it. What made him believe this, on second thoughts, was the fact that she had flung herself back in her seat and said, “Thank God, oh, thank God!” half a dozen times to herself.
CHAPTER XXXII
Neither Frances nor Durkin seemed to care to come on deck until the bell by the forward gangway had rung for the last time, and the officer from the bridge had given his last warning of: “All visitors ashore!”