“You found?” he exclaimed, low and unsteady. “You found——?”
“It was true,” answered Latimer. “The worst.”
Baird stood stock still; if Latimer had been awake to externals he would have seen that it was because he could not move—or speak. He was like a man stunned.
Latimer continued:
“She was sitting in her little room alone when I entered it. She looked as if she had been passing through hours of convulsive sobbing. She sat with her poor little hands clutching each other on her knees. Hysteric shudders were shaking her every few seconds, and her eyes were blinded with weeping. A child who had been beaten brutally might have sat so. She was too simple and weak to bear the awful terror and woe. She was not strong enough to conceal what there was to hide. She did not even get up to greet me, but sat trembling like an aspen leaf.”
“What did you say to her?” Baird cried out.
“I only remember as one remembers a nightmare,” the other man answered, passing his hand over his brow. “It was a black nightmare. I saw before I spoke, and I began to shake as she was shaking. I sat down before her and took both her hands. I seemed to hear myself saying, ‘Margery—Margery, don’t be frightened—don’t be afraid of Lucian. I will help you, Margery; I have come to talk to you—just to talk to you.’ That was all. And she fell upon the floor and lay with her face on my feet, her hands clutching them.”
For almost five minutes there was no other word spoken, but the breathing of each man could be heard.
Then Latimer’s voice broke the stillness, lower and more monotonous.
“I had but one resolve. It was to save her and to save my mother. All the soul of our home and love was bound up in the child. Among the desperate plans I had made in the long nights of lying awake there had been one stranger than the rest. I had heard constantly of Americans encountering each other by chance when they went abroad. When one has a secret to keep one is afraid of every chance, however remote. Perhaps my plan was mad, but it accomplished what I wanted. Years before I had travelled through the mountain districts of North Carolina. One day, in riding through the country roads, I had realised their strange remoteness from the world, and the fancy had crossed my mind that a criminal who dressed and lived as the rudely scattered population did, and who chose a lonely spot in the woods, might be safer there than with the ocean rolling between him and his secret. I spent hours in telling her the part she was to play. It was to be supposed that we had gone upon the journey originally planned. We were to be hidden—apparently man and wife—in some log cabin off the road until all was over. I studied the details as a detective studies his case. I am not a brilliant man, and it was intricate work; but I was desperate. I read guide-books and wrote letters from different points, and arranged that they should be sent to our mother at certain dates for the next few months.