"No, I ain't—honest—it's all over—well, damn it, Carucci says the Tabor girl didn't die. He says that's only the fake they put up, an' she's alive an' around the same as ever."
For a moment the words did not mean anything. I was groping madly among a mass of reminiscences, the noises in the house, the room with the presence in it, into which Carucci had broken, the tangled half-confidences of the family. Then the picture of Lady twisting nervously at the slender chain came uppermost in imagination, and through the eddying fog of my mind the whole nightmare leaped forth in a flash of horrible clearness, a score of interwoven circumstances outlining it as with threads of fire: the wedding-ring worn hidden at her breast, her raising of unaccountable barriers, her hopelessness, the family's fear of publicity and growing anxiety over my intimate presence among them, the cloud upon Mrs. Tabor, her aversion to Reid and the elaborate explanation of her slip in calling her daughter Miriam—I leaned my forehead on my hands.
Maclean had me by the shoulder: "Brace up, man," he muttered; "here, drink your drink. You'll have everybody looking at you."
CHAPTER XVII
THE BORDERLAND, AND A NAME
"It's an infernal lie," I said dully.
"Sure it is." Maclean was thoroughly embarrassed and uncomfortable. "The way I work it out is, there's probably just enough in it somewhere for Carucci to build on. Maybe Reid did get into some mess or other 'way back before he was married, an' Carucci works that in with what he thinks he knows about the family now, an' dopes out this scandal in high life business. Or maybe he don't believe it himself, an' just has it in for the old man. You can't tell whether it's muck-rakin' or mud-slingin', but it's bound to be partly both, you see? I only told you so you'd know what was around. Well, are you comin'?"
I got my hat mechanically, and went out with him into the dust and the heat. The sense of unreality that had been upon me that early morning in the automobile was returned now in the breathless afternoon. The hazy slit of sky overhead, the stark light and shadow of the street, had the tones of a cheap colored photograph. The very smell of the air was like a memory of itself. The roar and jangle of the traffic seemed to come from a distance through a stillness that listened; and the wail of a hand-organ on the corner somehow completed and enhanced it all. I had only had one serious illness in my life, and that had been long ago; but I remembered that upon my first venturing out of doors after it, things had looked so; and I wondered for a moment whether I were going to be ill again. But that was nonsense. I was not a person to collapse upon the hearing of bad news; and besides, this news, I did not believe. Maclean had not believed it himself, in telling it to me. Only, he had so much less knowledge than I of its consistency. Grant for once that Lady was Miriam, that she was an only daughter—and they all would have done even as I had seen them doing. So Lady would have worn her ring, so feared our growing intimacy, so felt the burden of an abnormality not her own, so confessed to me the barrier and in extremity lied about her name, so the family would have shrunk from any notice, and striven to rid themselves of Carucci and of me. Straight this way pointed every line of mystery since the beginning; here was one logical motive for all. The explanation fitted every fact; only, I could not believe it of the people. A small cloud covered the sun, and the hot street turned suddenly gray. A horse clocked heavily around the corner, the rumble of the wheels behind him suddenly muffled as they struck the asphalt of the avenue. We were going up the steps of a house, a house closed for the summer with lead-colored board shutters over the lower windows, and an outer door of the same, on which the bright brass disk of a spring lock took the place of a knob. Maclean glanced again up at the number as he pressed the bell.
"Admit one gent and phantoms," he said sniffing. "Now you put your soul in a safe pocket, an' button it in. This gang, they'd snitch it in a second."