He shut the door and stood a moment leaning against it. His eyes were blank, his face set. He had not known of Cameron Craig's journey abroad, nor in the rush of the campaign had he seen the newspaper paragraph which told of the success of the operation in Buda-Pesth. But in the single look across the pavement he had leaped to the truth. Craig had recovered his faculties—there had been full knowledge and vengeful purpose in the haggard eyes. What he had dreaded, the possibility which he had of late locked in an inner chamber of his mind, had come to pass. All was finished! The Sword of Damocles was about to fall!
What remained? To creep away, like a dastard, he, the leader in the fight? To fly, like the discovered thief, as he had once thought of doing? Even that was impossible now. He knew his enemy too well to suppose that he would have left that way open! The other was but playing with him, like a cat with a mouse, till the moment came to publicly denounce him. For with a kind of prescience he guessed Craig's real purpose, to seize the climactic moment and abstract from his humiliation the last ounce of sensationalism.
All night, in the silent, empty apartment, under the brilliant lights, Harry strode up and down—up and down tirelessly, his face white, his hands clenched, confronting the blank wall that reared before him. Temptation, in its most insidious form, fell upon him. Why should he not brazen it out? After all, the burden of proof was upon his accuser. He had destroyed the record-card which had held his physical measurements. Jubilee Jim could be depended upon to swear to his presence at the bungalow through the winter: wild horses would drag no other story from his faithful lips. Simple and God-fearing as the old negro was, love for his master was one of the prime articles of his emotional and uncomplex religion. For that love he would unquestioningly risk even the fires of the material hell of which his Bible told him! Such an alibi would hold. What other proof could Craig bring forward, further than a fortuitous resemblance, materially weakened now by hair and beard, to a one-time convict in a penitentiary in another state?
Was he not doubly justified in this deception? He was really innocent. If he foreswore himself a thousand times, it would be in the way both of justice and expediency. It would solve the problem. The new Cause needed him. Had he any right to fling himself away, merely in the interest of fictitious truth, on the mawkish principle of "Thou shalt not do evil that good may come"?
Yet, to perjure himself! To know himself liar and hypocrite, even in the hour when he should kiss the holy volume in the vows of a high office? He who even in that past that had been clouded by egoistic eccentricity and marred by dissipation, had always counted an oath sacred! To bind that faithful servant on the mountain to a black perjury—which would shadow his imagination with the smoke of the eternal burning!
There came to him suddenly the memory of words that had woven with the fevered imaginings of his illness on the mountain—words of Jubilee Jim's prayer:
"Dey tek yo' darlin' son ... en put er crown o' tho'ns on he beautiful haid, en he ain' done nuthin' 'cep'n good. Ah don' keer what Marse Harry have on; Ah reck'n when he come lak dis, yo' gwine he'p me he'p him—kase dat what he done fo' me!"
The stumbling, broken accents seemed to strike across the void. What if, instead of the great machine of recompense that he had distinguished in that prison experience, there were indeed a personal God, as Jubilee Jim believed, throned in his vast white heaven of glory—a God pitiful for the agony of his human creatures. Would he look down now and hear his cry for help? Harry flung himself suddenly on his knees, and leaned his forehead against the dark wainscoting. He knew that he uttered no word, but all his being seemed to resolve itself into an inarticulate cry for aidance. It was the first appeal of his life to something outside of himself, the first cry of human weakness, groping in its utter hopelessness for the Infinite. It was the last step of the long way Harry had travelled—from self-abasement to remorse and awakening conscience, through struggle with appetite to victory over himself, self-abnegation, acquiescence in the great law of retribution, and finally, in his despair, to prayer.
And out of the deep to which he had called, calmness at length came to him, and with it a clear and steady purpose. As dawn took down the red draw-bars of the sky to let in the day, he threw open a shutter and stood looking down with aching eyes upon the drowsily-waking street. There should be no lying denial, no cowardly evasion—nothing less than the naked truth. If fate, if God, demanded this last thing of him—if only so could he balance the account—he would not repine. He had fought the fight, and at the last, so far as he could, he would keep the faith!
Before the hotel had awakened, Harry was in his own apartment. He had left a note for Brent, who was to be in charge at the hotel suite, saying briefly that he should not appear that day, but would be with the Committee at eight o'clock. He had sent the same message also to Judge Allen. He told Suzuki to admit no one, disconnected his telephone, and thereafter remained at his desk writing, a plate of sandwiches at his elbow, bending himself to the final arrangement of the details of his personal affairs, as he might have done, he thought once, if by some clairvoyancy he foresaw that to-morrow he would die. Death, indeed, would have been a welcome solution if by it he could have bought extrication. Was he not going, living, to a worse death than he should ever die?