CHAPTER XIV
THE NIGHT WATCH
The next morning Elijah Stone appeared in Katherine’s office as per request. He was a thickly, if not solidly, built gentleman, in imminent danger of a double chin, and with that submerged blackness of the complexion which is the result of a fresh-shaven heavy beard. He kept his jaw clinched to give an appearance of power, and his black eyebrows lowered to diffuse a sense of deeply pondered mystery. His wife considered him a rarely handsome specimen of his sex, and he permitted art to supplement the acknowledged gifts of nature so far as to perfume his glossy black hair, to wear a couple of large diamond rings, and to carry upon the watch chain that clanked heavily across the broad and arching acreage of his waistcoat a begemmed lodge emblem in size a trifle smaller than a paper weight.
He was an affable, if somewhat superior, being, and he listened to Katherine with a still further lowering of his impressive brows. She informed him, in a perplexed, helpless, womanly way, that she was inclined to believe that her father was “the victim of foul play”—the black brows sank yet another degree—and that she wished him privately to investigate the matter. He of course would know far, far better what to do than she, but she would suggest that he keep an eye upon Blake. At first Mr. Stone appeared somewhat sceptical and hesitant, but after peering darkly out for a long and ruminative period at the dusty foliage of the Court House elms, and after hearing the comfortable fee Katherine was willing to pay, he consented to accept the case. As he left he kindly assured her, with manly pity for her woman’s helplessness, that if there was anything in her suspicion she “needn’t waste no sleep now about gettin’ the goods.”
In the days that followed, Katherine saw her Monsieur Lecoque shadowing the movements of Blake with the lightness and general unobtrusiveness of a mahogany bedstead ambling about upon its castors. She soon guessed that Blake perceived that he was being watched, and she imagined how he must be smiling up his sleeve at her simplicity. Had the matters at stake not been so grave, had she been more certain of the issue, she might have put her own sleeve to a similar purpose.
In the meantime, as far as she could do so without exciting suspicion, she kept close watch upon Blake. It had occurred to her that there was a chance that he had an unknown accomplice whose discovery would make the gaining of the rest of the evidence a simple matter. There was a chance that he might let slip some revealing action. At any rate, till Mr. Manning came, her rôle was to watch with unsleeping eye for developments. Her office window commanded the entrance to Blake’s suite of rooms, and no one went up by day whom she did not see. Her bedroom commanded Blake’s house and grounds, and every night she sat at her darkened window till the small hours and watched for possible suspicious visitors, or possible suspicious movements on the part of Blake.
Also she did not forget Doctor Sherman. On the day of her departure for New York, she had called upon Doctor Sherman, and in the privacy of his study had charged him with playing a guilty part in Blake’s conspiracy. She had been urged to this course by the slender chance that, when directly accused as she had dared not accuse him in the court-room, he might break down and confess. But Doctor Sherman had denied her charge and had clung to the story he had told upon the witness stand. Since Katherine had counted but little on this chance, she had gone away but little disappointed.
But she did not now let up upon the young minister. Regular attendance at church had of late years not been one of Katherine’s virtues, but after her return it was remarked that she did not miss a single service at which Doctor Sherman spoke. She always tried to sit in the very centre of his vision, seeking to keep ever before his mind, while he preached God’s word, the sin he had committed against God’s law and man’s. He visibly grew more pale, more thin, more distraught. The changes inspired his congregation with concern; they began to talk of overwork, of the danger of a breakdown; and seeing the dire possibility of losing so popular and pew-filling a pastor, they began to urge upon him the need of a long vacation.
Katherine could not but also give attention to the campaign, since it was daily growing more sensational, and was completely engrossing the town. Blake, in his speeches, stood for a continuance of the rule that had made Westville so prosperous, and dwelt especially upon an improvement in the service of the water-works, though as to the nature of the improvements he confined himself to language that was somewhat vague. Katherine heard him often. He was always eloquent, clever, forceful, with a manly grace of presence upon the platform—just what she, and just what the town, expected him to be.