Even at that moment, the words struck him sharply. Involuntarily he slackened his pace, and half-turned to catch the remainder of the sentence, but it was inaudible. The uncertainty before him, the terror behind, were, for the time, almost forgotten in a certain chill curiosity. "Holden with the cords—holden with the cords," he repeated to himself, as he hurried on,—"I wonder what book she was reading! I should really like to hear the end of that sentence!"
Still keeping up his swift pace and vigilant glance, he nevertheless sank into a partial abstraction. Some disconnected sentences, breaking at intervals from his lips, served to show the current of his thoughts.
"Set it down, once for all," he muttered, "that crime—absolute crime, of which the law can take hold—is a mistake.—Into the best-laid scheme, the one most carefully framed and skilfully executed, Chance—many would say, Providence (can there be a Providence after all?)—drops some trivial, fortuitous circumstance, which disconcerts or betrays everything.—The question is, could it have been foreseen?—I have worn that ring for sixteen years.—No! no! it is too subtile and too intricate a matter to think about now. I have more pressing subjects of reflection.—Only, set it down, for future use, that the essential thing is to keep clear of crime."
"Holden with the cords!" echoed suddenly and pertinaciously through his memory, as if by way of defiant answer to the conclusion that he had reached. He set his teeth, and dashed more swiftly onward.
Ere long, he reached the railway depot. In a large, underground space, half-filled with smoke and steam, a train stood on the track, the engine fretting and snorting like a steed impatient to be off, and the bell ringing out a hasty summons, curiously typifying the sharp call to leap on to some favorable train of circumstances, and be borne away to fortune or to ruin, which life often gives us, at certain fateful moments of its rapid career. Roath sprang to the rear platform, and, on the instant, the train moved.
Swiftly it left the depot behind: decayed fences, rickety outhouses, heaps of rubbish and offal, quickly receded into a dingy perspective of backside city life; scattered coal-yards, and freight and engine-houses, succeeded; and then, the cool, moist air coming in at the windows, and a swift-gliding panorama of what looked like a terrestrial sky and stars, told him that he was being borne rapidly along the causeway that traversed the broad bay,—in the tranquil waters of which the fair night-heavens were faithfully mirrored. Hastily running his eye over his fifty or sixty fellow-passengers, and finding no familiar face, he settled himself back in his seat with a long-drawn breath of relief. He remembered that he was on an express train, with twenty miles between him and the next station; he could count upon a safe half hour, at least, for the working out of the difficult problem before him. To that problem he at once addressed himself, with the whole force of his intellect and will;—though ever and anon, that perplexing fragment of a sentence would float distractingly through his mind, saying itself over and over to the accompaniment of the sharp click of the rails,—"Holden with the cords—Holden with the cords!"
From that night, for many years, Edmund Roath disappeared as completely from the sight and search of all who had known him, as if the train wherein he sat had suddenly flung itself headlong from that narrow causeway, and those deep, silent, star-mirroring waters, closing above him, had steadfastly refused to give up their dead. In brief space of time, his very name, as well as the circumstances that had made it notorious, was forgotten by those who had been most diligent in passing it from mouth to mouth. Seldom was it recalled even by the few who had known him best, and had yielded the heartiest admiration to his rare intellectual gifts. Having never taken any real hold of any human heart, it was but natural that he should pass behind the first intervening cloud, and leave no vacancy.
Did he thereby escape the worst consequences of his sin?