This telegram on the table was the end. “Reversed and dismissed,” were the sinister words of it. On this night commemorating the birth of that great founder of brotherhood, whose idealistic conceptions her father had always so magnificently followed, she must decide what she would do.
The thing was sharp and clear before her. She must either wreck the majestic legend of her father, or degrade herself! As she had carried the thing along by various shifts since her father’s death, she could easily make it appear that she had, herself, embezzled this trust fund. That would leave the memory of her father clean; but it clearly meant that she herself could not escape the criminal courts. The heirs of her father’s friend were insistent and hostile. They would have the pound of flesh, now that the fortune was gone.
For a time she sat motionless, her eyes vaguely on the carved ivory image on the table before her. Then, she got up, and, with her hands clasped behind her back, stood looking down at the crucifix.
It was about ten inches high, rudely carved in the Chinese fashion out of the segment of an elephant’s tusk four inches in diameter. The cross represented the trunk of a tree, the roots thrust out for the base. The figure, with arms extended, was nailed to the broken limbs of this tree-trunk, forming the cross. The whole top of the tree-trunk made the head of the figure, thrown back under a crown of thorns. And there in the quaint English letters cut around the base was the legend: “Inasmuch as you have turned your head to save us, may He turn His head to save you.”
Well, the thing was an idle hope. There was no help in the world: either her own life or the memory of her father was on the way to dreadful wreckage!
Then desperation overcame her. She went out of the library through the great hall to the door. A maid helped her into her coat. She gave a direction that the servants should be dismissed for the night, no one should remain up, she would let herself in with her latchkey when she returned. She went out.
At the bronze gates as she passed into the street a man sauntering along the wall spoke to her. She knew him at once. It was Walker of the Secret Service. So they were already beginning to keep her under surveillance! The explanation of this detective did not mislead her. He was looking for a dangerous criminal, he said, who had come into the city and had made inquiries about this house.
Marion Dillard replied with some polite appreciation of the thoughtfulness of the police for her security, and went on. At the end of the bronze fence, as she passed, she observed another figure crouched against the wall as though it also kept guard on her house; but it moved away as she approached, as though to conceal itself around the turn of the wall inclosing the spacious grounds. She smiled grimly. The watch kept on her would be efficient; here was another. She went along the street to the great bridge.
She paused for a moment before the immense stone lions on their great pedestals at the bridge head. They looked old, haggard, changing into monsters under a draping of snow! Then she set out to walk across the bridge into the country beyond, past the cathedral on the hill, lighted, and from which the melody of vague and distant music descended. And the feeling in the girl as she moved dreadfully in the night, became a sort of wonder. Was this a vast delusion, or was there in fact a Will in the universe determined on righteousness, and moving events to the aid of those who devoted their lives to its service?
She went on, walking stiffly like a dead body hypnotized into a pretension of life.