“Let me pass!” she cried. “Don’t you dare to stop me! Don’t you dare to lay a finger on me!”
He paid no heed to her command. He lurched forward, even as she spoke, and before she could escape him he had seized her and crushed her in his arms. She cried out in terror, and tried to free herself, but she was helpless. Half-drunken as he was, he seemed, nevertheless, to be possessed of maniacal strength. Men in the barroom adjoining heard the cry and the struggle, and burst into the room and released her from his grasp, and held her assailant while she hurried away. When he saw that she was gone he became suddenly calm, self-possessed, genial. He showed no resentment toward those who had caught and restrained him. He simulated good-nature as shrewdly and cleverly as do the criminal insane. His captors, now his companions, lent themselves readily to the deception. Now that the incident was closed it was of small moment to them. It was not a thing of rare occurrence, anyway, to have the sodden hangers-on at the Silver Star aroused by a woman’s scream.
So Steve went out and mingled familiarly with the men at the bar; laughed at their questionable jokes about his gallantry, tossed dice with them, drank with them, and bade them good-night with as much ease and carelessness as though his heart were not a seething whirlpool of murderous thought.
As for Mary Bradley, she hastened through the streets toward her home, her face burning with anger and humiliation. If she had disliked and hated Stephen Lamar before, she loathed him now. Then, suddenly, she remembered his threat against her and the rector. What did he mean by it? Murder? She paused in her swift pace, overcome by fear. Not fear for herself. It mattered little what vengeance he might choose to inflict on her. But was the man whom she loved in danger? Would this desperate, drink-crazed monster seek to carry out his threat against the rector of Christ Church? Was it not her duty to warn the intended victim? For one moment she stood irresolute, then she turned in her tracks and hastened back toward the center of the city.
CHAPTER XXI
THE FINAL TRAGEDY
The rectory of Christ Church was a gloomy place that Monday evening. The mistress of the house was ill. She had been failing for weeks—slowly at first, but with terrible rapidity as the days wore on. Now the end was almost in sight. Her interview with Ruth Tracy on the Friday afternoon before had left her at the point of collapse. Then had followed the news of the riot. After that her husband had been brought home, bandaged and bloody, victim of an insensate mob. What wonder that she was overwhelmed, physically and mentally, by crowding calamities? When the doctor came from her room that Friday night he looked grave and doubtful. He had expected the collapse. It had been imminent for weeks, but the severity of it startled him. Not that there was any organic disease, he explained, but these cases of extreme nervous prostration were most difficult to treat. Sedatives had only a temporary effect; medicines of any kind would be of but little avail. Indeed the only real hope lay in extra-professional treatment, particularly along the line of mental suggestion. At best the prognosis of the case had little in it that was encouraging.
Ruth Tracy heard of Mrs. Farrar’s serious illness, and sent a trained nurse at once to care for her. She felt that this much, at least, it was her right and her duty to do.
If Sunday had been a sorrowful day in the rector’s household, Monday was deadening. The minister himself, owing to certain secondary results of his injury, had been forbidden by his physician to go out. Few people had called at the rectory during the day. He had not yet heard the scandalous gossip of the town that connected his name with Mary Bradley’s.
When evening came he, himself, put his children to bed. He heard their pathetic little prayers for their mother. Then he kissed them good-night, and went down to his study with wet eyes.