After a time Shaughnessy withdrew his gaze, and, with a convulsive movement, snapped the watch shut. Slowly, fearfully, he approached the prostrate young fellow on the floor, afraid of what he should see. Now he bent on one knee over the senseless O'Byrn, peering strangely into his face. He thrust the watch into the little Irishman's pocket, as if anxious to hide it from his own vision. Then, timidly, he raised the inert right arm of his victim and slipped the sleeve up from the wrist. There was the scar.
A deep groan burst from Shaughnessy's lips; in his eyes gloomed, with added intensity, the horror that was the heritage of the past.
CHAPTER XXI
THE LASH
IN the breadth and the depth of evil in the man whom the world had long known as John Shaughnessy there was one wicked act whose memory was torment. Unprincipled, ruthless, cruel as he was, this thing, perhaps in inevitable reprisal for outraged higher laws, had long haunted him; disturbing his sleep, embittering his waking hours. For it was only just that a man base enough to leave, in far worse case than the widow and the orphan, those he was morally and legally bound to protect, should be disturbed by ghosts. It was remorse, it had long been remorse, from which this calloused devil was suffering. His evil, white face was a mask to hide much that the masquerader would have given all at times to have forgotten.
For a long time Shaughnessy bent over the silent figure on the floor; crouching, motionless as if cut in stone. His eyes, unnaturally brilliant, repellent in their fixed glare, rested long on the reporter's unconscious face. That face—how freckled, how grotesquely homely! Why, he had been a handsome baby! Still, the same mop of red, curly hair; and, after all, did he but open his eyes Shaughnessy thought there would be a definite resemblance to another. Shaughnessy recollected having been vaguely troubled once or twice before by this half-sensed similitude of the young fellow to someone he had known. He knew now. Why, the boy looked like his mother, of course; though there was only a pathetic hint of it, for his mother had been very pretty. This Shaughnessy could vouch for. Poor unfortunate, had she not been his wife?
And his son, lying on the floor; the son Shaughnessy had thought dead; was it not a joyful reunion? Shaughnessy groaned aloud, for he had long writhed under the lash of conscience for this one thing. The rest of his ill-doing did not trouble him; it was for the blackest crime of all, alone, that he paid the penalty. And a bitter penalty he paid, for, whatever the seeming, outraged nature generally exacts her due. This man had heartlessly deserted a wife who had been devoted to him, despite his deviltry, and his helpless baby; deserted them more indifferently than most men would leave a dog. It was slow in coming, the time of reckoning, but the day came when the black heart and soul of Shaughnessy quivered under the lash. And the lash bit the deeper because of the need for repression, for the man writhed in secret. It was Shaughnessy who lived; the other man was dead; yet his foul ghost, with the memory of the foul deed he wrought, would not be laid.
Shaughnessy, with a haggard glance at the motionless form on the floor, rose and walked uncertainly to an easy chair. He sat limply, a thin, white hand shading his eyes. He was oblivious to his surroundings, for the tumult of the past pounded in his brain.
The tumult of the past! What a record had been his, this white-faced man with hunted eyes that now stared with a weird, fixed horror back into the past. They saw again another man than the Shaughnessy of vile political power; a younger man, in whom was no repression; the slave of wayward passions which marred lives other than his own. But what were wife and child? Merely incumbrances then, and, toward the last, hardly to be borne.
And at the beginning? Why, the young man had once been respectable, and of the type to be pointed out as one destined to make his mark. Starting at the lowest round of a big business house, in a far-off city, it had not taken him long to prove his rare mettle, and at twenty-five he had reached a point further than most men attain in a lifetime. He had married a girl who believed in him as she believed in God—and she had been his dupe almost from the first.