CHAPTER XIX
Among his various amiable capacities, Ely Ives included that of ceremonial arranger. Festivities were his delight; he was ever on the lookout for occasions of celebration: any excuse for a gratulatory function sufficed him. Before leaving on his chase to Manzanita, he had conceived the festal notion of a dinner in honor of Banneker, not that he cherished any love for him since the episode of the bet with Delavan Eyre, but because his shrewd foresight perceived in it a closer binding of the editor to the wheels of the victorious Patriot. Also it might indirectly redound to the political advantage of Marrineal. Put thus to that astute and aspiring public servant, it enlisted his prompt support. He himself would give the feast: no, on better thought, The Patriot should give it. It would be choice rather than large: a hundred guests or so; mainly journalistic, the flower of Park Row, with a sprinkling of important politicians and financiers. The occasion? Why, the occasion was pat to hand! The thousandth Banneker editorial to be published in The Patriot, the date of which came early in the following month.
Had Ives himself come to Banneker with any such project, it would have been curtly rejected. Ives kept in the background. The proposal came from Marrineal, and in such form that for the recipient of the honor to refuse it would have appeared impossibly churlish. Little though he desired or liked such a function, Banneker accepted with a good grace, and set himself to write an editorial, special to the event. Its title was, “What Does Your Newspaper Mean to You?” headed with the quotation from the Areopagitica: and he compressed into a single column all his dreams and idealities of what a newspaper might be and mean to the public which it sincerely served. Specially typed and embossed, it was arranged as the dinner souvenir.
As the day drew near, Banneker had less and less taste for the ovation. Forebodings had laid hold on his mind. Enderby had been back for five days, and had taken no part whatever in the current political activity. Conflicting rumors were in the air. The anti-Marrineal group was obviously in a state of confusion and doubt: Marrineal’s friends were excited, uncertain, expectant.
For three days Banneker had had no letter from Io.
The first intimation of what had actually occurred came to him just before he left the office to dress for the dinner in his honor. Willis Enderby had formally withdrawn from the governorship contest. His statement given out for publication in next morning’s papers, was in the office. Banneker sent for it. The reason given was formal and brief; nervous breakdown; imperative orders from his physician. The whole thing was grisly plain to Banneker, but he must have confirmation. He went to the city editor. Had any reporter been sent to see Judge Enderby?
Yes: Dilson, one of the men frequently assigned to do Marrineal’s and Ives’s special work had been sent to Enderby’s on the previous day with specific instructions to ask a single question: “When was the Judge going to issue his formal withdrawal”: Yes: that was the precise form of the question: not, “Was he going to withdraw,” but “When was he,” and so on.
The Judge would not answer, except to say that he might have a statement to make within twenty-four hours. This afternoon (continued the city editor) Enderby, it was understood, had telephoned to The Sphere and asked that Russell Edmonds come to his house between four and five. No one else would do. Edmonds had gone, had been closeted with Enderby for an hour, and had emerged with the brief typed statement for distribution to all the papers. He would not say a word as to the interview. Judge Enderby absolutely denied himself to all callers. Physician’s orders again.
Banneker reflected that if the talk between Edmonds and Enderby had been what he could surmise, the veteran would hardly attend the dinner in his (Banneker’s) honor. Honor and Banneker would be irreconcilable terms, to the stern judgment of Pop Edmonds. Had they, indeed, become irreconcilable terms? It was a question which Banneker, in the turmoil of his mind, could not face. On his way along Park Row he stopped and had a drink. It seemed to produce no effect, so presently he had another. After the fourth, he clarified and enlarged his outlook upon the whole question, which he now saw in its entirety. He perceived himself as the victim of unique circumstances, forced by the demands of honor into what might seem, to unenlightened minds, dubious if not dishonorable positions, each one of them in reality justified: yes, necessitated! Perhaps he was at fault in his very first judgment; perhaps, had he even then, in his inexperience, seen what he now saw so clearly in the light of experience, the deadly pitfalls into which journalism, undertaken with any other purpose than the simple setting forth of truth, beguiles its practitioners—perhaps he might have drawn back from the first step of passive deception and have resigned rather than been a party to the suppression of the facts about the Veridian killings. Resigned? And forfeited all his force for education, for enlightenment, for progress of thought and belief, exerted upon millions of minds through The Patriot?... Would that not have been the way of cowardice?... He longed to be left to himself. To think it all out. What would Io say, if she knew everything? Io whose silence was surrounding him with a cold terror.... He had to get home and dress for that cursed dinner!
Marrineal had done the thing quite royally. The room was superb with flowers; the menu the best devisable; the wines not wide of range, but choice of vintage. The music was by professionals of the first grade, willing to give their favors to these powerful men of the press. The platform table was arranged for Marrineal in the presiding chair, flanked by Banneker and the mayor: Horace Vanney, Gaines, a judge of the Supreme Court, two city commissioners, and an eminent political boss. The Masters, senior and junior, had been invited, but declined, the latter politely, the former quite otherwise. Below were the small group tables, to be occupied by Banneker’s friends and contemporaries of local newspaperdom, and a few outsiders, literary, theatrical, and political. When Banneker appeared in the reception-room where the crowd awaited, smiling, graceful, vigorous, and splendid as a Greek athlete, the whole assemblage rose in acclaim—all but one. Russell Edmonds, somber and thoughtful, kept his seat. His leonine head drooped over his broad shirt-bosom.
Said Mallory of The Ledger, bending over him:
“Look at Ban, Pop!”
“I’m looking,” gloomed Edmonds.
“What’s behind that smile? Something frozen. What’s the matter with him?” queried the observant Mallory.
“Too much success.”
“It’ll be too much dinner if he doesn’t look out,” remarked the other. “He’s trying to match cocktails with every one that comes up.”
“Won’t make a bit of difference,” muttered the veteran. “He’s all steel. Cold steel. Can’t touch him.”
Marrineal led the way out of the ante-room to the banquet, escorting Banneker. Never had the editor of The Patriot seemed to be more completely master of himself. The drink had brightened his eyes, brought a warm flush to the sun-bronze of his cheek, lent swiftness to his tongue. He was talking brilliantly, matching epigrams with the Great Gaines, shrewdly poking good-natured fun at the stolid and stupid mayor, holding his and the near-by tables in spell with reminiscences in which so many of them shared. Some wondered how he would have anything left for his speech.
While the game course was being served, Ely Ives was summoned outside. Banneker, whose faculties had taken on a preternatural acuteness, saw, when he returned, that his face had whitened and sharpened; watched him write a note which he folded and pinned before sending it to Marrineal. In the midst of a story, which he carried without interruption, the guest of honor perceived a sort of glaze settle over his chief’s immobile visage; the next moment he had very slightly shaken his head at Ives. Banneker concluded his story. Marrineal capped it with another. Ives, usually abstemious as befits one who practices sleight-of-hand and brain, poured his empty goblet full of champagne and emptied it in long, eager draughts. The dinner went on.
The ices were being cleared away when a newspaper man, not in evening clothes, slipped in and talked for a moment with Mr. Gordon of The Ledger. Presently another quietly appropriated a seat next to Van Cleve of The Sphere. The tidings, whatever they were, spread. Then, the important men of the different papers gathered about Russell Edmonds. They seemed to be putting to him brief inquiries, to which he answered with set face and confirming nods. With his quickened faculties, Banneker surmised one of those inside secrets of journalism so often sacredly kept, though a hundred men know them, of which the public reads only the obvious facts, the empty shell. Now and again he caught a quick and veiled glance of incomprehension of doubt, of incredulity, cast at him.
He chattered on. Never did he talk more brilliantly.
Coffee. Presently there would be cigars. Then Marrineal would introduce him, and he would say to these men, this high and inner circle of journalism, the things which he could not write for his public, which he could present to them alone, since they alone would understand. It was to be his magnum opus, that speech. For a moment he had lost physical visualization in mental vision. When again he let his eyes rest on the scene before him, he perceived that a strange thing had happened. The table at which Van Cleve had sat, with seven others, was empty. In the same glance he saw Mr. Gordon rise and quietly walk out, followed by the other newspaper men in the group. Two politicians were left. They moved close to each other and spoke in whispers, looking curiously at Banneker.
What manner of news could that have been, brought in by the working newspaper man, thus to depopulate a late-hour dining-table? Had the world turned upside down?
Below him, and but a few paces distant, Tommy Burt was seated. When he, too, got slowly to his feet, Banneker leaned across the strewn, white napery toward him.
“What’s up, Tommy?”
For an instant the star reporter stopped, seemed to turn an answer over in his mind, then shook his head, and, with an unfathomable look of incredulity and shrinking, went his way. Bunny Fitch followed; Fitch, the slave of his paper’s conventions, the man without standards other than those which were made for him by the terms of his employment, who would go only because his proprietors would have him go: and the grin which he turned up to Banneker was malignant and scornful. Already the circle about Ely Ives, who was still drinking eagerly, had melted away. Glidden, Mallory, Gale, Andreas, and a dozen others of his oldest associates were at the door, not talking as they would have done had some “big story” broken at that hour, but moving in a chill silence and purposefully like men seeking relief from an unendurable atmosphere. The deadly suspicion of the truth struck in upon the guest of honor; they, his friends, were going because they could no longer take part in honoring him. His mind groped, terrified and blind, among black shadows.
Marrineal, for once allowing discomposure to ruffle his imperturbability, rose to check the exodus.
“Gentlemen! One moment, if you please. As soon as—”
The rest was lost to Banneker as he beheld Edmonds rear his spare form up from his chair a few paces away. Reckless of ceremony now, the central figure of the feast rose.
“Edmonds! Pop!”
The veteran stopped, turning the slow, sad judgment of his eyes upon the other.
“What is it?” appealed Banneker. “What’s happened? Tell me.”
“Willis Enderby is dead.”
The query, which forced itself from Banneker’s lips, was a self-accusation. “By his own hand?”
“By yours,” answered Edmonds, and strode from the place.
Groping, Banneker’s fingers encountered a bottle, closed about it, drew it in. He poured and drank. He thought it wine. Not until the reeking stab of brandy struck to his brain did he realize the error.... All right. Brandy. He needed it. He was going to make a speech. What speech? How did it begin.... What was this that Marrineal was saying? “In view of the tragic news.... Call off the speech-making?” Not at all! He, Banneker, must have his chance. He could explain everything.
Brilliantly, convincingly to his own mind, he began. It was all right; only the words in their eagerness to set forth the purity of his motives, the unimpeachable rectitude of his standards, became confused. Somebody was plucking at his arm. Ives? All right? Ives was a good fellow, after all.... Yes: he’d go home—with Ives. Ives would understand.
All the way back to The House With Three Eyes he explained himself; any fair-minded man would see that he had done his best. Ives was fair-minded; he saw it. Ives was a man of judgment. Therefore, when he suggested bed, he must be right. Very weary, Banneker was. He felt very, very wretched about Enderby. He’d explain it all to Enderby in the morning—no: couldn’t do that, though. Enderby was dead. Queer idea, that! What was it that violent-minded idiot, Pop Edmonds, had said? He’d settle with Pop in the morning. Now he’d go to sleep....
He woke to utter misery. In the first mail came the letter, now expected, from Io. It completed the catastrophe in which his every hope was swept away.
I have tried to make myself believe (she wrote) that you could not have Betrayed him; that you would not, at least, have let me, who loved you, be, unknowingly, the agent of his destruction. But the black record comes back to me. The Harvey Wheelwright editorial, which seemed so light a thing, then. The lie that beat Robert Laird. The editorial that you dared not print, after promising. All of one piece. How could I ever have trusted you!
Oh, Ban, Ban! When I think of what we have been to each other; how gladly, how proudly, I gave myself to you, to find you unfaithful! Is that the price of success? And unfaithful in such a way! If you had been untrue to me in the conventional sense, I think it would have been a small matter compared to this betrayal. That would have been a thing of the senses, a wound to the lesser part of our love. But this—Couldn’t you see that our relation demanded more of faith, of fidelity, than marriage, to justify it and sustain it; more idealism, more truth, more loyalty to what we were to each other? And now this!
If it were I alone that you have betrayed, I could bear my own remorse; perhaps even think it retribution for what I have done. But how can I—and how can you—bear the remorse of the disaster that will fall upon Camilla Van Arsdale, your truest friend? What is there left to her, now that the man she loves is to be hounded out of public life by blackmailers? I have not told her. I have not been able to tell her. Perhaps he will write her, himself. How can she bear it! I am going away, leaving a companion in charge of her.
Camilla Van Arsdale! One last drop of bitterness in the cup of suffering. Neither she nor Io had, of course, learned of Enderby’s death, and could not for several days, until the newspapers reached them. Banneker perceived clearly the thing that was laid upon him to do. He must go out to Manzanita and take the news to her. That was part of his punishment. He sent a telegram to Mindle, his factotum on the ground.
Hold all newspapers from Miss C. until I get there, if you have to rob mails. E.B.
Without packing his things, without closing his house, without resigning his editorship, he took the next train for Manzanita. Io, coming East, and still unaware of the final tragedy, passed him, halfway.
While the choir was chanting, over the body of Willis Enderby, the solemn glory of Royce Melvin’s funeral hymn, the script of which had been found attached to his last statement, Banneker, speeding westward, was working out, in agony of soul, a great and patient penance, for his own long observance, planning the secret and tireless ritual through which Camilla Van Arsdale should keep intact her pure and long delayed happiness while her life endured.
CHAPTER XX
A dun pony ambled along the pine-needle-carpeted trail leading through the forest toward Camilla Van Arsdale’s camp, comfortably shaded against the ardent power of the January sun. Behind sounded a soft, rapid padding of hooves. The pony shied to the left with a violence which might have unseated a less practiced rider, as, with a wild whoop, Dutch Pete came by at full gallop. Pete had been to a dance at the Sick Coyote on the previous night which had imperceptibly merged itself into the present morning, and had there imbibed enough of the spirit of the occasion to last him his fifteen miles home to his ranch. Now he pulled up and waited for the slower rider to overtake him.
“Howdy, Ban!”
“Hello, Pete.”
“How’s the lady gettin’ on?”
“Not too well.”
“Can’t see much of anythin’, huh?”
“No: and never will again.”
“Sho! Well, I don’t figger out as I’d want to live long in that fix. How long does the doc give her, Ban?”
“Perhaps six months; perhaps a year. She isn’t afraid to die; but she’s hanging to life just as long as she can. She’s a game one, Pete.”
“And how long will you be with us, Ban?”
“Oh, I’m likely to be around quite a while yet.”
Dutch Pete, thoroughly understanding, reflected that here was another game one. But he remarked only that he’d like to drop in on Miss K’miller next time he rode over, with a bit of sage honey that he’d saved out for her.
“She’ll be glad to see you,” returned the other. “Only, don’t forget, Pete; not a word about anything except local stuff.”
“Sure!” agreed Pete with that unquestioning acceptance of another’s reasons for secrecy which marks the frontiersman. “Say, Ban,” he added, “you ain’t much of an advertisement for Manzanita as a health resort, yourself. Better have that doc stick his head in your mouth and look at your insides.”
Banneker raised tired eyes and smiled. “Oh, I’m all right,” he replied listlessly.
“Come to next Saturday’s dance at the Coyote; that’ll put dynamite in your blood,” prescribed the other as he spurred his horse on.
Banneker had no need to turn the dun pony aside to the branch trail that curved to the door of his guest; the knowing animal took it by habitude, having traversed it daily for a long time. It was six months since Banneker had bought him: six months and a week since Willis Enderby had been buried. And the pony’s rider had in his pocket a letter, of date only four days old, from Willis Enderby to Camilla Van Arsdale. It was dated from the Governor’s Mansion, Albany, New York. Banneker had written it himself, the night before. He had also composed nearly a column of supposed Amalgamated Wire report, regarding the fight for and against Governor Enderby’s reform measures, which he would read presently to Miss Van Arsdale from the dailies just received. As he dismounted, the clear music of her voice called:
“Any mail, Ban?”
“Yes. Letter from Albany.”
“Let me open it myself,” she cried jealously.
He delivered it into her hands: this was part of the ritual. She ran her fingers caressingly over it, as if to draw from it the hidden sweetness of her lover’s strength, which must still be only half-expressed, because the words were to be translated through another’s reading; then returned it to its real author.
“Read it slowly, Ban,” she commanded softly.
Having completed the letter, his next process was to run through the papers, giving in full any news or editorials on State politics. This was a task demanding the greatest mental concentration and alertness, for he had built up a contemporary history out of his imagination, and must keep all the details congruous and logical. Several times, with that uncanny retentiveness of memory developed in the blind, she had all but caught him; but each time his adroitness saved the day. Later, while he was at work in the room which she had set aside for his daily writing, she would answer the letter on the typewriter, having taught herself to write by position and touch, and he would take her reply for posting. Her nurse and companion, an elderly woman with a natural aptitude for silence and discretion, was Banneker’s partner in the secret. The third member of the conspiracy was the physician who came once a week from Angelica City because he himself was a musician and this slowly and courageously dying woman was Royce Melvin. Between them they hedged her about with the fiction that victoriously defied grief and defeated death.
Camilla Van Arsdale got up from her couch and walked with confident footsteps to the piano.
“Ban,” she said, seating herself and letting her fingers run over the keys, “can’t you substitute another word for ‘muffled’ in the third line? It comes on a high note—upper g—and I want a long, not a short vowel sound.”
“How would ‘silenced’ do?” he offered, after studying the line.
“Beautifully. You’re a most amiable poet! Ban, I think your verses are going to be more famous than my music.”
“Never that,” he denied. “It’s the music that makes them.”
“Have you heard from Mr. Gaines yet about the essays?”
“Yes. He’s taking them. He wants to print two in each issue and call them ‘Far Perspectives.’”
“Oh, good!” she cried. “But, Ban, fine as your work is, it seems a terrible waste of your powers to be out here. You ought to be in New York, helping the governor put through his projects.”
“Well, you know, the doctor won’t give me my release.”
(Presently he must remember to have a coughing spell. He coughed hollowly and well, thanks to assiduous practice. This was part of the grim and loving comedy of deception: that he had been peremptorily ordered back to Manzanita on account of “weak lungs,” with orders to live in his open shack until he had gained twenty pounds. He was gaining, but with well-considered slowness.)
“But when you can, you’ll go back and help him, even if I’m not here to know about it, won’t you?”
“Oh, yes: I’ll go back to help him when I can,” he promised, as heartily as if he had not made the same promise each time that the subject came up. There was still a good deal of the wistful child about the dying woman.
Out from that forest hermitage where the two worked, one in serene though longing happiness, the other under the stern discipline of loss and self-abnegation, had poured, in six short months, a living current of song which had lifted the fame of Royce Melvin to new heights: her fame only, for Banneker would not use his name to the words that rang with a pure and vivid melody of their own. Herein, too, he was paying his debt to Willis Enderby, through the genius of the woman who loved him; preserving that genius with the thin, lustrous, impregnable fiction of his own making against threatening and impotent truth.
Once, when Banneker had brought her a lyric, alive with the sweetness of youth and love in the great open spaces, she had said:
“Ban, shall we call it ‘Io?’”
“I don’t think it would do,” he said with an effort.
“Where is she?”
“Traveling in the tropics.”
“You try so hard to keep the sadness out of your voice when you speak of her,” said Camilla sorrowfully. “But it’s always there. Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing anybody can do.”
The blind woman hesitated. “But you care for her still, don’t you, Ban?”
“Care! Oh, my God!” whispered Banneker.
“And she cares. I know she cared when she was here. Io isn’t the kind of woman to forget easily. She tried once, you know.” Miss Van Arsdale smiled wanly. “Why doesn’t she ever say anything of you in her letters?”
“She does.”
“Very little.” (Io’s letters, passing through Banneker’s hands were carefully censored, of necessity, to forefend any allusion to the tragedy of Willis Enderby, often to the extent of being rewritten complete. It now occurred to Banneker that he had perhaps overdone the matter of keeping his own name out of them.) “Ban,” she continued wistfully, “you haven’t quarreled, have you?”
“No, Miss Camilla. We haven’t quarreled.”
“Then what is it, Ban? I don’t want to pry; you know me well enough to be sure of that. But if I could only know before the end comes that you two—I wish I could read your face. It’s a helpless thing, being blind.” This was as near a complaint as he had ever heard her utter.
“Io’s a rich woman, Miss Camilla,” he said desperately.
“What of it?”
“How could I ask her to marry a jobless, half-lunged derelict?”
“Have you asked her?”
He was silent.
“Ban, does she know why you’re here?”
“Oh, yes; she knows.”
“How bitter and desolate your voice sounds when you say that! And you want me to believe that she knows and still doesn’t come to you?”
“She doesn’t know that I’m—ill,” he said, hating himself for the necessity of pretense with Camilla Van Arsdale.
“Then I shall tell her.”
“No,” he controverted with finality, “I won’t allow it.”
“Suppose it turned out that this were really the right path for you to travel,” she said after a pause; “that you were going to do bigger things here than you ever could do with The Patriot? I believe it’s going to be so, Ban; that what you are doing now is going to be your true success.”
“Success!” he cried. “Are you going to preach success to me? If ever there was a word coined in hell—I’m sorry, Miss Camilla,” he broke off, mastering himself.
She groped her way to the piano, and ran her fingers over the keys. “There is work, anyway,” she said with sure serenity.
“Yes; there’s work, thank God!”
Work enough there was for him, not only in his writing, for which he had recovered the capacity after a long period of stunned inaction, but in the constant and unwearied labor of love in building and rebuilding, fortifying and extending, that precarious but still impregnable bulwark of falsehood beneath whose protection Camilla Van Arsdale lived and was happy and made the magic of her song. Illusion! Banneker wondered whether any happiness were other than illusion, whether the illusion of happiness were not better than any reality. But in the world of grim fact which he had accepted for himself was no palliating mirage. Upon him “the illusive eyes of hope” were closed.
While Banneker was practicing his elaborate deceptions, Miss Van Arsdale had perpetrated a lesser one of her own, which she had not deemed it wise to reveal to him in their conversation about Io. Some time before that she had written to her former guest a letter tactfully designed to lay a foundation for resolving the difficulty or misunderstanding between the lovers. In the normal course of events this would have been committed for mailing to Banneker, who would, of course, have confiscated it. But, as it chanced, it was hardly off the typewriter when Dutch Pete dropped in for a friendly call while Banneker was at the village, and took the missive with him for mailing. It traveled widely, amassed postmarks and forwarding addresses, and eventually came to its final port.
Worn out with the hopeless quest of forgetfulness in far lands, Io Eyre came back to New York. It was there that the long pursuit of her by Camilla Van Arsdale’s letter ended. Bewilderment darkened Io’s mind as she read, to be succeeded by an appalled conjecture; Camilla Van Arsdale’s mind had broken down under her griefs. What other hypothesis could account for her writing of Willis Enderby as being still alive? And of her having letters from him? To the appeal for Banneker which, concealed though it was, underlay the whole purport of the writing, Io closed her heart, seared by the very sight of his name. She would have torn the letter up, but something impelled her to read it again; some hint of a pregnant secret to be gleaned from it, if one but held the clue. Hers was a keen and thoughtful mind. She sent it exploring through the devious tangle of the maze wherein she and Banneker, Camilla Van Arsdale and Willis Enderby had been so tragically involved, and as she patiently studied the letter as possible guide there dawned within her a glint of the truth. It began with the suspicion, soon growing to conviction, that the writer of those inexplicable words was not, could not be insane; the letter breathed a clarity of mind, an untroubled simplicity of heart, a quiet undertone of happiness, impossible to reconcile with the picture of a shattered and grief-stricken victim. Yet Io had, herself, written to Miss Van Arsdale as soon as she knew of Judge Enderby’s death, pouring out her heart for the sorrow of the woman who as a stranger had stood her friend, whom, as she learned to know her in the close companionship of her affliction, she had come to love; offering to return at once to Manzanita. To that offer had come no answer; later she had had a letter curiously reticent as to Willis Enderby. (Banneker, in his epistolary personification of Miss Van Arsdale had been perhaps overcautious on this point.) Io began to piece together hints and clues, as in a disjected puzzle:—Banneker’s presence in Manzanita—Camilla’s blindness.—Her inability to know, except through the medium of others, the course of events.—The bewildering reticence and hiatuses in the infrequent letters from Manzanita, particularly in regard to Willis Enderby.—This calm, sane, cheerful view of him as a living being, a present figure in his old field of action.—The casual mention in an early letter that all of Miss Van Arsdale’s reading and most of her writing was done through the nurse or Banneker, mainly the latter, though she was mastering the art of touch-writing on the typewriter. The very style of the earlier letters, as she remembered them, was different. And just here flashed the thought which set her feverishly ransacking the portfolio in which she kept her old correspondence. There she found an envelope with a Manzanita postmark dated four months earlier. The typing of the two letters was not the same.
Groping for some aid in the murk, Io went to the telephone and called up the editorial office of The Sphere, asking for Russell Edmonds. Within two hours the veteran had come to her.
“I have been wanting to see you,” he said at once.
“About Mr. Banneker?” she queried eagerly.
“No. About The Searchlight.”
“The Searchlight? I don’t understand, Mr. Edmonds.”
“Can’t we be open with each other, Mrs. Eyre?”
“Absolutely, so far as I am concerned.”
“Then I want to tell you that you need have no fear as to what The Searchlight may do.”
“Still I don’t understand. Why should I fear it?”
“The scandal—manufactured, of course—which The Searchlight had cooked up about you and Mr. Banneker before Mr. Eyre’s death.”
“Surely there was never anything published. I should have heard of it.”
“No; there wasn’t. Banneker stopped it.”
“Ban?”
“Do you mean to say that you knew nothing of this, Mrs. Eyre?” he said, the wonder in his face answering the bewilderment in hers. “Didn’t Banneker tell you?”
“Never a word.”
“No; I suppose he wouldn’t,” ruminated the veteran. “That would be like Ban—the old Ban,” he added sadly. “Mrs. Eyre, I loved that boy,” he broke out, his stern and somber face working. “There are times even now when I can scarcely make myself believe that he did what he did.”
“Wait,” pleaded Io. “How did he stop The Searchlight?”
“By threatening Bussey with an exposé that would have blown him out of the water. Blackmail, if you like, Mrs. Eyre, and not of the most polite kind.”
“For me,” whispered Io.
“He held that old carrion-buzzard, Bussey, up at the muzzle of The Patriot as if it were a blunderbuss. It was loaded to kill, too. And then,” pursued Edmonds, “he paid the price. Marrineal got out his little gun and held him up.”
“Held Ban up? What for? How could he do that? All this is a riddle to me, Mr. Edmonds.”
“Do you think you really want to know?” asked the other with a touch of grimness. “It won’t be pleasant hearing.”
“I’ve got to know. Everything!”
“Very well. Here’s the situation. Banneker points his gun, The Patriot, at Bussey. ‘Be good or I’ll shoot,’ he says. Marrineal learns of it, never mind how. He points his gun at Ban. ‘Be good, or I’ll shoot,’ says he. And there you are!”
“But what was his gun? And why need he threaten Ban?”
“Why, you see, Mrs. Eyre, about that time things were coming to an issue between Ban and Marrineal. Ban was having a hard fight for the independence of his editorial page. His strongest hold on Marrineal was Marrineal’s fear of losing him. There were plenty of opportunities open to a Banneker. Well, when Marrineal got Ban where he couldn’t resign, Ban’s hold was gone. That was Marrineal’s gun.”
“Why couldn’t he resign?” asked Io, white-lipped.
“If he quit The Patriot he could no longer hold Bussey, and The Searchlight could print what it chose. You see?”
“I see,” said Io, very low. “Oh, why couldn’t I have seen before!”
“How could you, if Ban told you nothing?” reasoned Edmonds. “The blame of the miserable business isn’t yours. Sometimes I wonder if it’s anybody’s; if the newspaper game isn’t just too strong for us who try to play it. As for The Searchlight, I’ve since got another hold on Bussey which will keep him from making any trouble. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”
“Oh, what does it matter! What does it matter!” she moaned. She crossed to the window, laid her hot and white face against the cool glass, pressed her hands in upon her temples, striving to think connectedly. “Then whatever he did on The Patriot, whatever compromises he yielded to or—or cowardices—” she winced at the words—“were done to save his place; to save me.”
“I’m afraid so,” returned the other gently.
“Do you know what he’s doing now?” she demanded.
“I understand he’s back at Manzanita.”
“He is. And from what I can make out,” she added fiercely, “he is giving up his life to guarding Miss Van Arsdale from breaking her heart, as she will do, if she learns of Judge Enderby’s death—Oh!” she cried, “I didn’t mean to say that! You must forget that there was anything said.”
“No need. I know all that story,” he said gravely. “That is what I couldn’t forgive in Ban. That he should have betrayed Miss Van Arsdale, his oldest friend. That is the unpardonable treachery.”
“To save me,” said Io.
“Not even for that. He owed more to her than to you.”
“I can’t believe that he did it!” she wailed. “To use my letter to set spies on Cousin Billy and ruin him—it isn’t Ban. It isn’t!”
“He did it, and, when it was too late, he tried to stop it.”
“To stop it?” She looked her startled query at him. “How do you know that?”
“Last week,” explained Edmonds, “Judge Enderby’s partner sent for me. He had been going over some papers and had come upon a telegram from Banneker urging Enderby not to leave without seeing him. The telegram must have been delivered very shortly after the Judge left for the train.”
“Telegram? Why a telegram? Wasn’t Ban in town?”
“No. He was down in Jersey. At The Retreat.”
“Wait!” gasped Io. “At The Retreat! Then my letter would have been forwarded to him there. He couldn’t have got it at the same time that Cousin Billy got the one I sent him.” She gripped Russell Edmonds’s wrists in fierce, strong hands. “What if he hadn’t known in time? What if, the moment he did know, he did his best to stop Cousin Billy from starting, with that telegram?” Suddenly the light died out of her face. “But then how would that loathsome Mr. Ives have known that he was going, unless Ban betrayed him?”
“Easily enough,” returned the veteran. “He had a report from his detectives, who had been watching Enderby for months.... Mrs. Eyre, I wish you’d give me a drink. I feel shaky.”
She left him to give the order. When she returned, they had both steadied down. Carefully, and with growing conviction, they gathered the evidence into something like a coherent whole. At the end, Io moaned:
“The one thing I can’t bear is that Cousin Billy died, believing that of Ban.”
She threw herself upon the broad lounge, prone, her face buried in her arms. The veteran of hundreds of fights, brave and blind, righteous and mistaken, crowned with fleeting victories, tainted with irremediable errors, stood silent, perplexed, mournful. He walked slowly over to where the girl was stretched, and laid a clumsy, comforting hand on her shoulder.
“I wish you’d cry for me, too,” he said huskily. “I’m too old.”
CHAPTER XXI
Every Saturday the distinguished physician from Angelica City came to Manzanita on the afternoon train, spent two or three hours at Camilla Van Arsdale’s camp, and returned in time to catch Number Seven back. No imaginable fee would have induced him to abstract one whole day from his enormous practice for any other patient. But he was himself an ardent vocal amateur, and to keep Royce Melvin alive and able to give forth her songs to the world was a special satisfaction to his soul. Moreover, he knew enough of Banneker’s story to take pride in being partner in his plan of deception and self-sacrifice. He pretended that it was a needed holiday for him: his bills hardly defrayed the traveling expense.
Now, riding back with Banneker, he meditated a final opinion, and out of that opinion came speech.
“Mr. Banneker, they ought to give you and me a special niche in the Hall of Fame,” he said.
A rather wan smile touched briefly Banneker’s lips. “I believe that my ambitions once reached even that far,” he said.
The other reflected upon the implied tragedy of a life, so young, for which ambition was already in the past tense, as he added:
“In the musical section. We’ve got our share in the nearest thing to great music that has been produced in the America of our time. You and I. Principally you.”
Banneker made a quick gesture of denial.
“I don’t know what you owe to Camilla Van Arsdale, but you’ve paid the debt. There won’t be much more to pay, Banneker.”
Banneker looked up sharply.
“No.” The visitor shook his graying head. “We’ve performed as near a miracle as it is given to poor human power to perform. It can’t last much longer.”
“How long?”
“A matter of weeks. Not more. Banneker, do you believe in a personal immortality?”
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I don’t know, either. I was thinking.... If it were so; when she gets across, what she will feel when she finds her man waiting for her. God!” He lifted his face to the great trees that moved and murmured overhead. “How that heart of hers has sung to him all these years!”
He lifted his voice and sent it rolling through the cathedral aisles of the forest, in the superb finale of the last hymn.
“For even the purest delight may pall, And power must fail, and the pride must fall And the love of the dearest friends grow small— But the glory of the Lord is all in all.”
The great voice was lost in the sighing of the winds. They rode on, thoughtful and speechless. When the physician turned to his companion again, it was with a brisk change of manner.
“And now we’ll consider you.”
“Nothing to consider,” declared Banneker.
“Is your professional judgment better than mine?” retorted the other. “How much weight have you lost since you’ve been out here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Find out. Don’t sleep very well, do you?”
“Not specially.”
“What do you do at night when you can’t sleep? Work?”
“No.”
“Well?”
“Think.”
The doctor uttered a non-professional monosyllable. “What will you do,” he propounded, waving his arm back along the trail toward the Van Arsdale camp, “when this little game of yours is played out?”
“God knows!” said Banneker. It suddenly struck him that life would be blank, empty of interest or purpose, when Camilla Van Arsdale died, when there was no longer the absorbing necessity to preserve, intact and impregnable, the fortress of love and lies wherewith he had surrounded her.
“When this chapter is finished,” said the other, “you come down to Angelica City with me. Perhaps we’ll go on a little camping trip together. I want to talk to you.”
The train carried him away. Oppressed and thoughtful, Banneker walked slowly across the blazing, cactus-set open toward his shack. There was still the simple housekeeping work to be done, for he had left early that morning. He felt suddenly spiritless, flaccid, too inert even for the little tasks before him. The physician’s pronouncement had taken the strength from him. Of course he had known that it couldn’t be very long—but only a few weeks!
He was almost at the shack when he noticed that the door stood half ajar.
But here, where everything had been disorder, was now order. The bed was made, the few utensils washed, polished, and hung up; on the table a handful of the alamo’s bright leaves in a vase gave a touch of color.
In the long chair (7 T 4031 of the Sears-Roebuck catalogue) sat Io. A book lay on her lap, the book of “The Undying Voices.” Her eyes were closed. Banneker reached out a hand to the door lintel for support.
A light tremor ran through Io’s body. She opened her eyes, and fixed them on Banneker. She rose slowly. The book fell to the floor and lay open between them. Io stood, her arms hanging straitly at her side, her whole face a lovely and loving plea.
“Please, Ban!” she said, in a voice so little that it hardly came to his ears.
Speech and motion were denied him, in the great, the incredible surprise of her presence.
“Please, Ban, forgive me.” She was like a child, beseeching. Her firm little chin quivered. Two great, soft, lustrous tears welled up from the shadowy depths of the eyes and hung, gleaming, above the lashes. “Oh, aren’t you going to speak to me!” she cried.
At that the bonds of his languor were rent. He leapt to her, heard the broken music of her sob, felt her arms close about him, her lips seek his and cling, loath to relinquish them even for the passionate murmurs of her love and longing for him.
“Hold me close, Ban! Don’t ever let me go again! Don’t ever let me doubt again!”
When, at length, she gently released herself, her foot brushed the fallen book. She picked it up tenderly, and caressed its leaves as she adjusted them.
“Didn’t the Voices tell you that I’d come back, Ban?” she asked.
He shook his head. “If they did, I couldn’t hear them.”
“But they sang to you,” she insisted gently. “They never stopped singing, did they?”
“No. No. They never stopped singing.”
“Ah; then you ought to have known, Ban. And I ought to have known that you couldn’t have done what I believed you had. Are you sure you forgive me, Ban?”
She told him of what she had discovered, of the talk with Russell Edmonds (“I’ve a letter from him for you, dearest one; he loves you, too. But not as I do. Nobody could!” interjected Io jealously), of the clue of the telegram. And he told her of Camilla Van Arsdale and the long deception; and at that, for the first time since he knew her, she broke down and gave herself up utterly to tears, as much for him as for the friend whom he had so loyally loved and served. When it was over and she had regained command of herself, she said:
“Now you must take me to her.”
So once more they rode together into the murmurous peace of the forest. Io leaned in her saddle as they drew near the cabin, to lay a hand on her lover’s shoulder.
“Once, a thousand years ago, Ban,” she said, “when love came to me, I was a wicked little infidel and would not believe. Not in the Enchanted Canyon, nor in the Mountains of Fulfillment, nor in the Fadeless Gardens where the Undying Voices sing. Do you remember?”
“Do I not!” whispered Ban, turning to kiss the fingers that tightened on his shoulder.
“And—and I blasphemed and said there was always a serpent in every Paradise, and that Experience was a horrid hag, with a bony finger pointing to the snake.... This is my recantation, Ban. I know now that you were the true Prophet; that Experience has shining wings and eyes that can lock to the future as well as the past, and immortal Hope for a lover. And that only they two can guide to the Mountains of Fulfillment. Is it enough, Ban?”
“It is enough,” he answered with grave happiness.
“Listen!” exclaimed Io.
The sound of song, tender and passionate and triumphant, came pulsing through the silence to meet them as they rode on.