CHAPTER XXXIII
When Rush arrived at the sitting-room of the jail's private suite he found Mrs. Balfame, not in tears as he had nervously anticipated, but distraught, pacing the room, her hands in her disordered hair.
"I am done for! done for!" she cried as Rush hastily closed the door. "It would have been better if I had told the truth in the beginning—that I had gone out that night. It was not such a bad excuse,—that I thought I saw a burglar down there,—and it was God's truth. Or I could have said I was walking about the grounds because I had a headache—"
"It never would have gone down. If I could have discovered who the other person in the grove was—found him and his forty-one-calibre revolver, well and good. Failing that, our line of defence is the best possible. I will admit, though," he too was pacing the room,—"it looks bad to-day, pretty bad. There isn't the ghost of a chance to prove Mott was the man. Gore has the time to the minute he left Susie Lacke's; you must have gone out some time before—"
"Oh, he didn't do it. I've not thought it for a moment. No such luck. It was some enemy who went straight to New York—in that car. But I—I—Auburn—the electric chair—they all believed—Oh, my God! God!"
She had tossed her arms above her head then flung herself down before the table, her face upon them, rocking her body back and forth. Her voice was deep with horror and despair, her abandonment far more complete than on the day of her arrest; and wrought up himself, Rush was stirred with the echo of all he had felt that day. In the semi-intimacy of these past ten weeks, when he had talked with her for hours at a time, she had disillusioned him in many ways, bored him, forced him to admit that her lovely shell concealed an uninteresting mind, and that the only depths in her personality that he was permitted to glimpse were such as to make him shrink, by no means to excite that fascination even in repulsion peculiar to the faults of a more passionate nature. He still thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, however, and if it was beauty which now left him cold, his admiration of her had been renewed these last three days when her manner and appearance in court had been beyond all praise. He had excoriated himself for his fickleness, his contemptible failure as a lover; and the more he hated himself the more grimly determined he was to behave precisely as if he still loved and revered her as he had when ready to sacrifice life itself for her sake. He was in such an impasse that he cared little what became of himself.
He leaned over the table and pressed his hands hard on her arms.
"Listen!" he said peremptorily. "You never will go to Auburn. You will leave this jail not later than the middle of next week, a free woman. If I cannot get you off by my address to the jury,—and it will be the supreme effort of my life,—I'll take the stand and swear that I committed the murder myself."
"What?" She lifted her head and stared up at him. His face was set, but his eyes glowed like blue coals.
"Yes. I can put it over, all right. You remember I went to your house from the Club that day. Nobody saw me go; no one saw me leave. From the moment I left you, until the following morning, no one—no one that I know of—saw me that night, except Dr. Anna. We met out on the road leading to Houston's farm, and she drove me in. She believes I did it. So does Cummack, and if necessary he will manage to get an affidavit from her—"