After the Manner of Men

PROFESSOR William Wilberforce Hartridge was reading before the cheerful grate fire in his sitting-room when his visitor was brought up by the old negro janitor.

“Come in, Mr. Tregarvon, and be at home,” he said, rising, with the aid of his crutch, for the welcoming, and making difficult work of it. “Draw your chair to the fire and be comfortable. It was kind of you to——”

“Carfax brought me your message,” Tregarvon interrupted, rather more brusquely than he meant to. “In a certain sense I suppose I am responsible for your present condition, and since you wished to see me——”

“Ah, yes; but I didn’t wish to give myself the opportunity of reproaching you for the accident, I assure you,” was the deprecatory rejoinder. “You were not even constructively to blame for my cowardly legs.” Then he added, with a touch of naïve humor: “I trust they have sufficiently learned their lesson.”

“You are having a pretty long siege of it,” Tregarvon offered, finding himself sympathizing where he had meant to be coldly self-contained.

“Old bones,” returned the schoolmaster, with his quaint smile. “They haven’t knitted quite as rapidly as they might. But let us hope that there is nothing worse than broken bones in store for any of us. May I be very frank with you, Mr. Tregarvon?”

“I shall set you the example. I can conceive of only one reason why you should wish to see me, Mr. Hartridge. You have been told that I am still determined to exact an eye for an eye in the matter of bringing certain criminals to justice, and you would like to forestall your arrest as an accessory. Am I right?”

At this the quaint smile became quizzical. “Partly; but only partly. Have you taken any steps as yet?”

“I have. After a good bit of trouble and expense I have at last succeeded in tracing the man Morgan McNabb. He is under arrest in Dallas, Texas, and I shall have him brought back as soon as the necessary papers can be obtained.”

“And your object in bringing him back?”

“Is to make him give the name of the man who hired him to put the dynamite under my drilling plant. That man is going to the penitentiary, Mr. Hartridge, if any effort of mine can send him there.”

The schoolmaster removed his spectacles to polish them, and for a time sat staring with unshielded eyes into the heart of the coal fire in the grate.

“You have all the precedents on your side,” he admitted at length. “It is your right to prosecute if you choose to do so. Yet I venture to predict that you will be exceedingly sorry if you bring Morgan McNabb to Tennessee and extort his confession—a confession which will necessarily be made public. Besides, there is a much easier way in which you can apprehend his principal.”

“Are you willing to indicate the way?” snapped Tregarvon.

“Not altogether willing; no. You are at heart a much flintier young man than you appeared to be when we first met, Mr. Tregarvon. It is an inheritance from some one of your Cornish forebears, I imagine. But I have allowed myself to be overpersuaded. You have your car here?”

“Yes.”

“I shall ask you to drive me. Will you trust me that far?”

Tregarvon rose, smiling grimly. “I shall have you for my hostage. If you are about to have me ambushed, I shall make you share my risk. Do we go at once?”

Hartridge limped to a closet and found his overcoat, and Tregarvon helped him to put it on. Then he gave the temporary cripple an arm through the laboratory corridor and down the stair. At the steps he lifted Hartridge bodily into the mechanician’s seat of the car. As yet there had been no hint given of their destination, but when he took his place behind the wheel Tregarvon asked for driving directions.

“Westward, on the cross-mountain road,” was the brief reply, and no other word was exchanged until the swiftly driven machine was approaching the intersection of the cross-road with the west-brow pike. Then Hartridge said: “To your left,” and Tregarvon had a sudden sinking of the heart. A mile away he could see the lights of Westwood House, and a great fear rose up to unsteady his hand as he made the turn out of the cross-road.

Tregarvon’s fear was realized in some measure when, at Hartridge’s direction, the car made a second left-hand turn into the Westwood grounds and was brought to a stand before the door of the old mansion. “I have obeyed you blindly thus far,” he said, as he was lifting Hartridge out of the car. “But now you must tell me. Is it Judge Birrell?”

“Wait,” said the schoolmaster, and Tregarvon helped the lame man up the steps and steadied him while he groped for the knocker. Before he could knock, the door opened silently under the hand of the judge’s daughter, and Tregarvon again gave Hartridge an arm to help him over the threshold.

Though the hall was but dimly lighted he saw at once that there had been a pitiful change in Richardia. There was the shadow of a deep grief in her eyes when she greeted him, and the hand that she gave him was nerveless and cold. He had never seen her in black before, and that, and the chill of the great hall and the grave silence of his car companion, made him feel as if he had entered a house of mourning.

Without a word in explanation the changed Richardia led him to the stair and signed to him to precede her. Tregarvon hesitated only long enough to see that the professor was hobbling away toward the lighted library. Then he stood aside and slipped an arm under Richardia’s. “They hadn’t told me you had been ill,” he said reproachfully; and as they went up together the nearness of her set his blood afire and for the moment he forgot the scene in the deep wood timing itself in the Sunday afternoon of revealment.

At the stairhead a door stood ajar, with the flickering light of an open fire in the room beyond shining through the narrow opening. With a quick premonition that a tragedy was about to be revealed, Tregarvon followed his guide into the room. It was a huge chamber, spacious enough to belittle the few pieces of old-fashioned furnishings, and in the great four-poster bed lay a young man with an arm in a sling and his bandaged head propped high among the pillows. Though the face of the sick man was haggard and emaciated, Tregarvon recognized it instantly. It was the face of the handsome young fellow who had kept the Sunday afternoon tryst with Richardia.

It was only natural that he should be checked by a sudden feeling of antagonism, but before it could find expression it was swallowed up in an astoundment too great to be measured. Richardia had led him to the bedside and she was saying quietly: “Mr. Tregarvon has come, brother. Shall I leave him alone with you?”

The sick man roused himself with an effort that was plainly distressful. “Yes,” he said shortly. And after Richardia had gone: “I’m the man you’re looking for.”

Tregarvon dragged a chair to the bedside and sat down. In the rush of conflicting emotions one exultant fact was hammering itself into his brain and dominating all others: Richardia’s secret had not been her lover’s secret; it was her brother’s. In the turmoil of readjustment, it was inevitable that the generous impulses of former days—the days before the débâcle—should come swiftly to the surface.

“I’m glad to be here, Mr. Birrell; and that is entirely apart from anything you may be going to tell me,” he said quickly. “Are you quite sure you are able to talk?”

“I’ve got to talk; it’s up to me now. Sister told me a little while ago that you had caught Morgan McNabb; that you’re going to have him brought back here so that you can give him the third degree. I’m the man you want. Morgan did only what I made him do.”

Tregarvon was beginning to understand a little. “Perhaps you’d better tell it all, if you feel equal to it,” he suggested soberly. Then he added: “I’m not going to be your judge, Mr. Birrell.”

The sick man rocked his head on the pillows.

“You won’t understand; I couldn’t make anybody understand. But it’s got to be told. Do you know what that crook Parker did to my father?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?”

“Yes; all of it.”

“Well, it made a devil of me. I was only a kid then, but it seemed as if I grew to be a man between two days. I tried to kill Parker. Maybe you know that, too.”

“Yes; I have heard about it.”

“He didn’t die; and he spent his money like water until he got me indicted. Then I broke my father’s heart by showing the yellow streak—running away. I’ve been hid out down in Arizona ever since, but I always meant to come back and stand the gaff some day.”

“Go on,” said Tregarvon gravely.

“I didn’t come back by the railroad. The yellow streak showed up again, and I dodged the sheriff by walking in over the mountain from Piketown. The McNabbs hid me out in the ‘Pocket.’ They told me you were Parker’s man, and that you had come to finish what he’d begun. Afterward they told me you were making love to my sister, and that settled it.”

“I see,” said Tregarvon. Then: “Why didn’t you come out in the open like a man and find out a few things for yourself?”

“I couldn’t. The indictment was still hanging over me; as it is yet. And I was crazy mad. I swore I’d run you out of the country or kill you if you didn’t go. I made Morgan McNabb help me. He’d been mixed up in a feud years ago and had ambushed a man, and I was the only one who knew it. I told him I’d give him away if he didn’t help me run you off.”

“Your sister knew you had come back?”

“Yes; but she didn’t know anything else. She thought I was afraid to show myself on account of the old trouble—as I was. She was trying to fix things so that I could come back here to my father and Westwood House. I did come, but they brought me on a stretcher. Somebody set the leaves afire that night in the old negro burying-ground, and the dynamite went off and caught me while I was trying to stamp the fire out. The jig’s up now. All you’ve got to do is to send for the sheriff.”

Tregarvon saw that it was time to intervene. The sick man’s breath was coming in gasps and his face was livid.

“You mustn’t try to talk any more now,” he said, rising and taking the thin hand that was so much like Richardia’s in his own. “For a good many reasons you have nothing to fear from me. Of course, you know now that I am in no sense Parker’s representative. So far from it, the papers are already drawn which will restore to your father and his friends the property that Parker stole from them. I meant to do that from the first, if I should be lucky enough to find the coal.”

The grip of the thin fingers tightened upon the hand of reassurance. “My God!” breathed the prodigal, “and I’ve been trying to kill you! Mr. Tregarvon, can you go one step farther and—and turn Morgan McNabb loose? That’s what made me frame it up with sister and Hartridge and Mr. Carfax to bring you here to-night.”

“McNabb will not be brought back; I promise you that. Shall I send your sister up to you?”

“Not—not right now; tell her to play something; something low and soft that’ll make the devil let me alone. I want to think. I—I reckon I’m willing to go to the convict camps now for trying to square up with Parker; I reckon I ought to go!”

Tregarvon went out softly, closing the door behind him and groping his way down the stair. Richardia was waiting for him in the hall below, as he hoped she would be, and she led him across to the drawing-room where there were lights and a wood-fire purring and crackling in the big stone fireplace.

“Tell me,” she entreated.

“There is nothing to tell—nothing that you haven’t already guessed. I am completely disarmed, as you knew I would be. I have assured your brother that he has nothing to fear from me.”

“It has been very dreadful,” she said, moving aside to hold her hands out to the fire.

“How badly was he hurt in the explosion?”

“So badly that it is only within the past few days that we have dared to hope. Mr. Carfax hasn’t told you?”

“Not a word. Your secret has been guarded very carefully.”

“But now it is a secret no longer. If he gets well it will only be to face a trial for the attempt upon Mr. Parker’s life.”

“Nothing will come of that,” Tregarvon predicted confidently. “Parker is dead; he died suddenly in his New York office a few days ago. And no twelve Tennesseeans could ever be found who would convict your brother for trying to avenge his father’s wrongs.”

“We are your poor debtors—all of us,” she went on. “You are heaping coals of fire on our heads, and—and they burn! Of course, you know now that I was my brother’s accomplice?”

“I know nothing of the sort; of course, you were not!”

“But I was—in a way. All along, I feared that it was he who was making, or at least planning, all the trouble you were having. He was so bitter!”

Tregarvon nodded complete comprehension. “I knew you were anxious about somebody; I thought, at first, that it was Hartridge, and later that it was your father. You have had a heavy burden to carry; and I have been doing what I could to make it heavier.”

“You have,” she said quite frankly.

He did not affect to misunderstand.

“You knew all the time that Poictiers and Elizabeth were held apart only by Elizabeth’s engagement to me?”

“I guessed it. But that didn’t excuse you for—for——”

“For making love to you? I know it didn’t. But I had my punishment the Sunday afternoon when you met your brother in the wood above the ‘Pocket.’ I had gone out to meet Hartridge, and I saw you two together. I took it for granted that the man was your lover who, for some reason, couldn’t come here to Westwood House to meet you.”

“Others took it for granted, too, and I did not deny it—for Richard’s sake.”

“Is his name Richard?”

“Yes; Richard and Richardia. My father named us so, after a brother and sister of his own who were twins.”

Tregarvon glanced at his watch. There were other things to be said—many of them, but a suddenly recrudescent sense of the fitness of things told him that the moment was unauspicious.

“I suppose I’ll have to consider Hartridge and take him back to Highmount,” he offered. Then he added quite irrelevantly: “He’s in love with you, too. Speaking of accomplices, how much or how little did he have to do with the bushwhacking?”

“Nothing at all. It was only on the day of the explosion that he learned that Richard had come back, and was hiding with the McNabbs in the ‘Pocket,’ and heard, through Sill McNabb, that something was going to happen that night at your drilling plant. He suspected Richard at once, and went over to try to prevent the happening. Then your men caught Morgan McNabb, and Professor Billy hardly knew what to do. He guessed that Tryon had come over here after you and Mr. Carfax, and when you took father back with you he was afraid Morgan would be made to confess, and so make a bad matter infinitely worse. His idea in lighting the leaf fire was to give Morgan McNabb a chance to escape. Of course, he supposed the dynamite had been removed.”

“It has been a tragedy of errors from the beginning,” said Tregarvon soberly. “But I am going to expiate my part of it. Has Poictiers told you anything about my plans?”

“No.”

“I made them while I was lying in bed in the old office-building at Coalville, trying to get well enough to crawl out and take hold with my hands. It came to me then what an egregious ass I had made of myself, all the way round. I had blundered in ahead of Poictiers and didn’t have sense enough even to suspect it; and I had deliberately killed any little regard you might have had for me by showing myself up as a man who would make love to one woman while he was engaged to another. I was eaten up with shame, Richardia, and I am yet.”

“It hurt me; I think you will never know how much it hurt,” she said slowly. “A man asks utter and absolute loyalty of the woman he loves.”

“And the woman can ask no less of the man, you would say. That is true. I am no defender of the double standard; still less an apologist for my sex. I have only one excuse, Richardia; it wasn’t merely propinquity—as you and Poictiers seemed to think. I had never known what love was until I met you. Elizabeth is going to marry Poictiers, and you must believe me when I say that I think just as much of her—and in the same way—as I did before. But let that pass. I had found my coal mine, and had lost pretty nearly everything else, including my own self-respect. You were lost to me; doubly lost, as I thought then; so it seemed that the only thing for me to do was to set the Ocoee house in order, and after that was done to go away and try to forget.”

“You are still meaning to go away?”

“Yes. I meant to stay long enough to make somebody suffer for the bushwhackings, but that is past. I have sent for Peters, our family lawyer, and when he comes we shall settle the property affair. Three-fifths of the stock in the mine will go to my mother and sister, and the remainder will be turned over to your father to be distributed among the Parker victims. This is what I have been meaning to do all along, if I should be fortunate enough to discover the coal.”

She shook her head. “You are reckoning without my father. He won’t take the money.”

“He must be made to take it. It is only just and fair. When it comes to that, you must help me, Richardia; for his sake and for your brother’s.”

“Poor Dick!” she murmured. “He needs a friend much more than he needs the money; some one who would care enough for him to stand by and hold him up to the best there is in him. There is good in him; you may not believe it now, but there is, really—lots of it.”

“I can very readily believe it, since he is your brother and the son of your father. And he has proved it to-night by climbing into the breach for McNabb. He will have his chance on the Ocoee, and Wilmerding will be his friend.”

“Then you are determined to go away?”

“Yes. I owe it to you and to everybody else, not less than to myself. But some day, Richardia, after I have done penance for the sin of loving you before I had a right to I am coming back. But I had forgotten; your brother wished me to ask you to play for him; something that would drive the devil away. He said he wanted to think.”

She went to the piano at once. Alone among the old-fashioned house furnishings it was modern; an artist’s instrument, full-toned and responsive. Tregarvon sank into an armchair before the blazing logs and gave himself up to the quiet ecstasies of the music-lover. From the first her playing had stirred him as no other chamber-music ever had. For a time he knew that she was improvising; then there were gentle themes from Mendelssohn, shading one into another so deftly that he could never mark the changes. And at the last there was the Chopin nocturne.

While the closing chords of the night-song were still lingering in the air she came to sit in a chair at the opposite corner of the hearth.

“You played the Chopin for me; was that your way of telling me that I might come back some day, Richardia?” he asked quite humbly.

Her hands were clasped over one knee and her gaze was fixed upon the blue and yellow flames in the great fireplace, when she said softly: “You are very human—and very blind; so blind that you haven’t seen that I have had to fight for two—for myself no less than for you. And there have been times when—when I almost hated Elizabeth!”

The Tregarvon blood was not sluggish; at least, he had never found it so before; but for the moment he was like a man stricken suddenly dumb. Then the gift of speech came back, laboring as it could in the turmoil of new ecstasies.

“You had to fight for two; God help me, Richardia—if I had known that——”

She rose quickly and came to stand beside his chair.

“If you had known it, you would have been the strong one, Vance, dear. I know it; I knew it all the time; but I—was afraid—to trust—myself. You are not going away, now, are you?”

There was the sound of an opening and closing door and the stumping of the professor’s crutch on the bare floor of the hall. Tregarvon sprang up and took the small black-gowned figure in his arms.

“Going away?” he broke out passionately; “you couldn’t drive me away with an axe! I’m going to stay forever, and let you make a complete man of me. We’ll marry your father’s share of the Ocoee back to him, and together we’ll make a man of your brother. There are a million other things to say, but Hartridge is coming to look for his chauffeur and I must take him back to Highmount. Richardia—sweetheart!... If I don’t wreck the car on the way it will be a miracle.”

Very gently she disengaged herself. “You—you needn’t smother a person,” she protested, with the quaint little grimace that he loved. And then: “That is father, calling me to go to brother. Please heap some more coals of fire and be good to Professor Billy—for the sake of his loyalty to me and mine.... Yes, daddy, dear; I’m coming.”