I have only a dazed and chaotic memory of them taking Dr. Balman away. Of Corole and Fred Hajek going under guard. Of myself sitting numbly in Room 18, with Maida beside me gripping my hand, until O’Leary returned. Jim accompanied him.
I think it was seeing Jim sit down on the white bed with his coat still wet with rain, and noting the marks of muddy shoes and wet coats on the once white counterpane, that aroused me to a sense of reality.
It was dawn by that time. The electric light was paling and growing sickly under the gray streaks of daybreak at the windows, and I recall a vague little feeling of amazement when the thin rays of washed-out sunlight began to find their way into the room. Sunlight after a week of rain!
O’Leary, entering the room, had closed the door and crossed to the radiator and sunk wearily down upon it. He appeared worn and enormously tired, with no shred of the jubilance I should have expected.
“Well,” my voice quavered a little as I spoke. “Well—you have succeeded.”
“Yes. I’ve got my man.”
“You don’t seem to be rejoicing about it.”
“I am not,” said Lance O’Leary flatly. “That is, don’t misunderstand me—I am glad that I have done my duty. But I am sorry to see a man, a brilliant scientist, a scholar, a useful surgeon—go wrong. Dr. Balman has actually given his life—mistakenly of course, for his science. He wanted the radium, he needed the money it would bring. For the rest he was, as much as anything, a victim of circumstance. It is a sad thing—yet just.”
“Dr. Balman was a wicked man,” I said. Odd how we were speaking of him in the past tense.
“Yes,” agreed O’Leary. “But Dr. Letheny was equally culpable. Strange how a man can devote his life to a woman or—a career. Well,” he broke off, shrugging, “there’s no use philosophizing. Don’t mind my low spirits. I should feel much lower if I had failed.”