She moved toward the door which led to the circular stair. Her father, she knew, seldom spoke all that was in his mind to any one, even herself; she was accustomed, therefore, to looking for meanings underneath the directions which he gave her, and his present order—that she should take charge of a part of their work which ordinarily had been looked after by Avery—startled and surprised her by its implication that her father might not trust Avery fully. But now, as she halted and looked back at him from the door and saw his troubled face and his fingers nervously pressing together, she recognized that it was not any definite distrust of Avery that had moved him, but only his deeper trust in herself. Blind and obliged to rely on others always in respect of sight, and now still more obliged to rely upon them because he was confined helpless to his bed, Santoine had felt ever since the attack on him some unknown menace over himself and his affairs, some hidden agency threatening him and, through him, the men who trusted him. So, with instinctive caution, she saw now, he had been withdrawing more and more his reliance upon those less closely bound to him—even Avery—and depending more and more on the one he felt he could implicitly trust—herself. As realization of this came to her, she was stirred deeply by the impulse to rush back to him and throw herself down beside him and assure him of her love and fealty; but seeing him again deep in thought, she controlled herself and went out.
CHAPTER XV
DONALD AVERY IS MOODY
Harriet went down the stair into the study; she passed through the study into the main part of the house and found Donald and sent him to her father; then she returned to the study. She closed and fastened the doors, and after glancing about the room, she removed the books in front of the wall-safe to the right of the door, slid back the movable panel, opened the safe and took out a bundle of correspondence. She closed safe and panel and put back the books; and carrying the correspondence to her father's desk, she began to look over it.
This correspondence—a considerable bundle of letters held together with wire clips and the two envelopes bound with tape which she had put into the safe the day before—made up the papers of which her father had spoken to her. These letters represented the contentions of willful, powerful and sometimes ruthless and violent men. Ruin of one man by another—ruin financial, social or moral, or all three together—was the intention of the principals concerned in this correspondence; too often, she knew, one man or one group had carried out a fierce intent upon another; and sometimes, she was aware, these bitter feuds had carried certain of her father's clients further even than personal or family ruin: fraud, violence and—twice now—even murder were represented by this correspondence; for the papers relating to the Warden and the Latron murders were here. There were in this connection the documents concerning the Warden and the Latron properties which her father had brought back with him from the Coast; there were letters, now more than five years old, which concerned the Government's promised prosecution of Latron; and, lastly, there were the two envelopes which had just been sent to her father concerning the present organization of the Latron properties.
She glanced through these and the others with them. She had felt always the horror of this violent and ruthless side of the men with whom her father dealt; but now she knew that actual appreciation of the crimes that passed as business had been far from her. And, strangely, she now realized that it was not the attacks on Mr. Warden and her father—overwhelming with horror as these had been—which were bringing that appreciation home to her. It was her understanding now that the attack was not meant for her father but for Eaton.
For when she had believed that some one had meant to murder her father, as Mr. Warden had been murdered, the deed had come within the class of crimes comprehensible to her. She was accustomed to recognize that, at certain times and under special circumstances, her father might be an obstacle to some one who would become desperate enough to attack; but she had supposed that, if such an attack were delivered, it must be made by a man roused to hate his victim, and the deed would be palliated, as far as such a crime could be, by an overwhelming impulse of terror or antipathy at the moment of striking the blow. But she had never contemplated a condition in which a man might murder—or attempt to murder—without hate of his victim. Yet now her father had made it clear that this was such a case. Some one on that train in Montana—acting for himself or for another—had found this stranger, Eaton, an obstacle in his way. And merely as removing an obstacle, that man had tried to murder Eaton. And when, instead, he had injured Basil Santoine, apparently fatally, he had been satisfied so that his animus against Eaton had lapsed until the injured man began to recover; and then, when Eaton was out on the open road beside her, that pitiless, passionless enemy had tried again to kill. She had seen the face of the man who drove the motor down upon Eaton, and it had been only calm, determined, businesslike—though the business with which the man had been engaged was murder.
Though Harriet had never believed that Eaton had been concerned in the attack upon her father, her denial of it had been checked and stilled because he would not even defend himself. She had not known what to think; she had seemed to herself to be waiting with her thoughts in abeyance; until he should be cleared, she had tried not to let herself think more about Eaton than was necessary. Now that her father himself had cleared Eaton of that suspicion, her feelings had altered from mere disbelief that he had injured her father to recollection that Mr. Warden had spoken of him only as one who himself had been greatly injured. Eaton was involved with her father in some way; she refused to believe he was against her father, but clearly he was not with him. How could he be involved, then, unless the injury he had suffered was some such act of man against man as these letters and statements represented? She looked carefully through all the contents of the envelopes, but she could not find anything which helped her.
She pushed the letters away, then, and sat thinking. Mr. Warden, who appeared to have known more about Eaton than any one else, had taken Eaton's side; it was because he had been going to help Eaton that Mr. Warden had been killed. Would not her father be ready to help Eaton, then, if he knew as much about him as Mr. Warden had known? But Mr. Warden, apparently, had kept what he knew even from his own wife; and Eaton was now keeping it from every one—her father included. She felt that her father had understood and appreciated all this long before herself—that it was the reason for his attitude toward Eaton on the train and, in part, the cause of his considerate treatment of him all through. She sensed for the first time how great her father's perplexity must be; but she felt, too, how terrible the injustice must have been that Eaton had suffered, since he himself did not dare to tell it even to her father and since, to hide it, other men did not stop short of double murder.