“Take them away,” she sobbed, “take them away!”
Mannie Day and Vance closed in upon the visitors, and motioning them before them, drove them from the room.
Part III
The departure of the District Attorney and Miss Coates left Vera free to consider how serious, if she carried out her threat, the consequences might be. But of this chance she did not avail herself. Instead, with nervous zeal she began to prepare for her masquerade. It was as though her promise to Winthrop to abandon her old friends had filled her with remorse, and that she now, by an extravagance of loyalty, was endeavoring to make amends.
At nine o’clock, with the Vances, she arrived at the house of Mr. Hallowell. Already, to the same place, a wagon had carried the cabinet, a parlor organ, and a dozen of those camp chairs that are associated with house weddings and funerals; and while, in the library, Vance and Mannie arranged these to their liking, on the third floor Vera, with Mrs. Vance, waited for that moment to arrive when Vance considered her entrance would be the most effective.
This entrance was to be made through the doorway that opened from the hall on the second story into the library. To the right of this door, in an angle of two walls, was the cabinet, and on the left, the first of the camp chairs. These had been placed in a semicircle that stretched across the room, and ended at the parlor organ. The door from Mr. Hallowell’s bedroom opened directly upon the semicircle at the point most distant from the cabinet. In the centre of the semicircle Vance had placed the invalid’s arm chair.
Vance, in his manner as professional and undisturbed as a photographer focussing his camera and arranging his screens, was explaining to Judge Gaylor the setting of his stage. The judge was an unwilling audience. Unlike the showman, for him the occasion held only terrors. He was driven by misgivings, swept by sudden panics. He scowled at the cabinet, intruding upon the privacy of the room where for years, without the aid of accessories, by his brains alone, he had brought Mr. Hallowell almost to the point of abject submission to his wishes. He turned upon Vance with bitter self-disgust.
“So, I’ve got down as low as this, have I?” he demanded.
Vance heard him, undisturbed.