“For God’s sake, listen! You must listen, Blaine!” he shrieked. “I am one of the prominent men of this country! I have three married daughters, two of them 307 with small children! The disgrace, the infamy of this, will kill them! I will make restitution; I will––”
“Pennington Lawton had one daughter, unmarried, unprovided for! Did you think of her?” asked Blaine, grimly. “I’m sorry for the innocent who must suffer with you, Mr. Mallowe, but in this instance the law must take its course. Lead him away.”
When the wailing, quavering voice had subsided behind the closing door, Henry Blaine turned to young Morrow with a weary look of pain, age-old, in his eyes.
“Unpleasant, wasn’t it?” he asked grimly. “I try to school myself against it, but with all my experience, a scene like this makes me sick at heart. I know the wretch deserves what is coming to him, just as Rockamore knew when he unfalteringly sped that bullet––just as Carlis knew when he heard his own voice repeated by the dictagraph. And yet I, who make my living, and shall continue to make it, by unearthing malefactors; I, who have built my career, made my reputation, proved myself to be what I am by the detection and punishment of wrong-doing––I wish with all my heart and soul, before God, that there was no such thing as crime in all this fair green world!”
CHAPTER XXI
CLEARED SKIES
Just as in autumn, the period of Indian summer brings a reminiscent warmth and sunshine, so sometimes in late winter a day will come now and then which is a harbinger of the not far-distant springtide, like a promise, during present storm and stress, of better things to come.
Such a day, balmy and gloriously bright, found four people seated together in the spacious, sunny morning-room of a great house on Belleair Avenue. A young man, pale and wan as from a long illness, but with a new steadiness and clarity born of suffering in his eyes; a girl, slender and black-robed, her delicate face flushing with an exquisite, spring-like color, her eyes soft and misty and spring-like, too, in their starry fulfillment of love that has been tried and found all-sufficing; another sable-clad figure, but clerically frocked and portly; and the last, a keen-faced, kindly-eyed man approaching middle-age––a man with sandy hair and a mustache just slightly tinged with gray. He might, from his appearance and bearing, have been a great teacher, a great philanthropist, a great statesman. But he was none of these––or rather, let us say, he was all, and more. He was the greatest factor for good which the age had produced, because he was the greatest instrument of justice, the crime-detector of the century.