HE stood a moment with his hands against the closed door behind him, listening to Coglan's heavy breathing. Then he crossed noiselessly to the table, took the lamp and went through to the inner room.
There were two cot beds in it. Shays lay asleep on one in all his clothes, except his shoes. The other bed was broken down, a wreck on the floor. Evidently Coglan had been using it, and it was not built for slumberers of his weight, so he had gone back to the hides that had often furnished him with a bed before.
Shays turned his face away from the light and raised one limp hand in half-conscious protest. He opened his eyes and blinked stupidly. Then he sat up.
“Don't make a noise, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'm going pretty soon.”
“G-goin'—wha' for?” stammered Shays. “Wha's that for?”
“I've broke jail. I'm going to change clothes and shave, then I'll light out. You won't see me again, Jimmy.”
He sat down on the side of the bed and rocked to and fro, twisting his fingers.
“You're decent, Jimmy. When they get to posting notices and rewards, you see, you don't do a thing. Nor you don't wake Coglan. He's a damn hound. See?”
Shays shook his head, indicating either a promise or his general confusion and despondency.
“Wha' for, Hicksy?”
Allen was silent a moment.
“Jim-jams, Jimmy,” he said at last. “You'll die of those all right, and Coglan will squat on you. You ain't bright, but you've been white to me.”
“Tha's right! Tom don't like you. Hicksy, tha's right,” whispered Shays with sudden trembling. “Maybe he'd—'sh! We won't wake him, Hicksy. Wha' for?”
“He's sleeping on my clothes, so I'll take yours. Get me your razor.”
“Wha' for? Wha's that for? All right! I ain't going to wake Tom.”
He stepped unsteadily on a shoe that lay sidewise, stumbled, and fell noisily on the floor.
There he lay a moment, and then scrambled back to his feet, shaking and grumbling.
“What's the matter?” Coglan cried, now awake in the shop.
“Nothin', Tommy! I'm gettin' back, Tommy!”
“What you doin' with thot light?”
“Nothin', Tommy.”
Allen stood still. When Coglan came stamping unevenly to the door, he only made a quick shift of the lamp to his left hand, and thrust the other inside his coat till he felt the wooden handle of the chisel.
“Oi!” said Coglan.
His eyes seemed more prominent than ever, his face and neck heavier with the drink and sleep than was even natural. Allen looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“He's broke out,” Shays said, feebly deprecating. “He's goin' off,” and sat on the bed to pull on his shoes.
“Is he thot!” said Coglan.
Coglan turned back slowly into the shop. Shays shuffled after. Allen followed, too, with the lamp and said nothing, but put the lamp on the table. Coglan sat down, drank from the black bottle, and wiped his mouth. The first dim light of the morning was in the windows.
“I'll be getting along, Jimmy,” said Allen. “I'll take your razor.”
Coglan wiped his mouth again.
“An' ye'd be goin' widout takin' advice of a sinsible mon, Hicksy, an' a friend in need! Sure, sure! Didn't I say ye weren't a wise mon? Nor Jimmy here, he ain't a wise mon. An' ain't I proved it? Ain't it so? Would ye be jailed if ye was a wise mon? No! Here ye are again, an' ye'd be runnin' away this time of the mornin', an' be took by a polaceman on the first corner. I do laugh an' I do wape over ye, Hicksy. I do laugh an wape. An' all because ye won't take advice.”
“What's your advice?”
Coglan moved uneasily and cleared his throat. “'Tis this, for ye're rasonable now, sure! Ye'll hide in the back room a day or two. Quiet, aisy, safe! Jimmy an' me to watch. An' what happens to ye? Ye gets away some night wid the night before ye.”
He lowered his voice and gestured with closed fist.
“Ye'll lie under Jimmy's bed. The polaceman comes. 'Hicks!' says Jimmy, 'we ain't seen Hicks.' 'Hicks!' says I, 'Hicks be dommed! If he's broke jail he's left for Chiney maybe.' I ask ye, do they look under Jimmy's bed? No! What do they do? Nothin'!”
Allen drew a step back.
“You're right about one thing,” he said. “That reward would be easy picking for you.”
“What's thot?”
“I ain't a wise man. I know it. But I know you. That's what it is. I'm going now.”
“Ye're not!”
“Hicksy!” cried Shays feebly. “Tom, don't ye do it!”
Coglan plunged around the table and grasped at Allen's throat, at Allen's hand, which had shot behind his head, gripping the heavy chisel. Allen dodged him, and struck, and jumped after as Coglan staggered, and struck again. The corner of the chisel seemed to sink into Coglan's head.
Allen stood and clicked his teeth over his fallen enemy, who sighed like a heavy sleeper, and was still. It was a moment of tumult, and then all still in the shop. Then Shays stumbled backward over the work bench, and dropped on the hides. Allen turned and looked at him, putting the chisel into one of the side pockets of his coat, where it hung half-way out. The light was growing clearer in the windows.
“That's the end of me,” he said.
And Shays cried angrily, “Wha's that for?” and cowered with fear and dislike in his red-lidded eyes. “Keep off me! You keep off me!”
“I got to the end, Jimmy. Goodbye.”
“Keep off me!”
Allen hung his head and went out of the shop into the dark hall.
Shays heard his steps go down the outside stairway. He scrambled up from the pile of hides, and snatched his hat. He kept close to the wall, as far as possible from where Coglan lay against the legs of the table. He was afraid. He vaguely wanted to get even with the man who had killed Coglan. He had loved Coglan, on the whole, best among living men.
People in the rooms about the hall were roused by the noise, and were stirring. Someone called to him from a door in the darkness. He hurried down the outside stair. On Muscadine Street he saw Allen a half block away, walking slowly.
At the corner of the next street, as Allen stepped from the curb, the chisel dropped from his pocket, but he did not notice it, plodding on, with head down and dragging steps. Shays picked up the chisel when he came to the spot, stared at it stupidly, and thrust it in his pocket. The two kept the same distance apart and came out on the bridge.
The city and water-front for the most part were quite still, though it was nearly time for both to waken, and for the milk and market waggons to come in, and the trolley cars to begin running. The street lights had been turned off. There were forebodings of sunrise, over and beyond the disorderly roofs of East Argent. In the hush of that hour the muttering of the Muscadine whispering, rustling along the piers, seemed louder than by day. The dark buildings on the western river-front had the red glimmer of the sunrise now in their windows. No one was on the bridge except Shays and Allen, possibly a hidden and sleepy watcher in the drawbridge house.
Close to the drawbridge Allen stopped and looked back. Shays stopped, too, and muttered, “Wha's that for? Wha' for?” and found his mind blank of all opinion about it, and so, without any opinion what for, he began to run forward at a stumbling trot. Allen glanced back at him, leaped on the guard rail, threw his hands in the air, and plunged down into the river.
When Shays came there was nothing to be seen but the brown rippled surface; nor to be heard, except the lapping against the piers. He leaned over limply, and stared at the water.
“Wha' for?” he repeated persistently. “Wha's that for?” and whimpered, and rubbed his eyes with a limp hand, and leaned a long time on the rail, staring down at the mystery, with the other limp hand hung over the water pointing downward. “Wha' for?”
The city was waking with distant murmurs and nearby jarring noise. A freight train went over the P. and N. bridge.
Shays drew back from the railing and shuffled on till he had come almost to Bank Street; there he stopped and turned back, seeing a trolley car in the distance coming down Maple Street. He went down on the littered wharves, close to the abutments of the bridge, sat down on a box, leaned against the masonry, and took from his pocket the chisel he had picked up, stared at it, rubbed it in the refuse at his feet, and put it back in his pocket. The sun was risen now, the spot grew pleasantly warm, and he went to sleep muttering in the morning sunlight on the wharf by the Muscadine, and over his head went the trucks, waggons, trolley cars, the stamp of hoofs, and the shuffle of feet.
HENNION came to his office early that Saturday morning with his mind full of Macclesfield's bridge, and of the question of how to get Macclesfield interested in the Boulevard and the parks. He wondered how Macclesfield would take to the part of a municipal patriot. He thought that if he could only conquer some shining success, something marked, public, and celebrated, then, perhaps, his success might succeed with Camilla. At any rate, it paid to keep your eyes on the path where you seemed to be getting somewhere, and to follow that path, for so one travelled ahead and found that success attracted success by a sort of gravitation between them. All things came about to him who kept going. This was the native Hennion philosophy, of father and son, much as it was a Champney trait to crave something to canonise. Neither Henry Champney nor Camilla could ever find peace without believing something to be better than they could prove it to be; neither the elder Hennion nor his son could ever find peace without the occupation of making something a little better than it had been.
Hennion leaned back in his office chair and stared out of the window. “I'll bet Miss Eunice is level-headed,” he thought.
The half-begun plans and rough drawings for Macclesfield's bridge lay reproachful on his desk; a typewriter clicked in the anteroom; the clamour of trucks and trolley cars came in through the window, familiar noises, now sounding dull and far away to his ears. The maze of telephone wires and the window panes across the street glittered in the bright sunlight.
The sound of shambling feet outside approached the corridor door. The owner of the feet knocked, hesitated, and came in, the pallid, unsubstantial, wavering Shays. His lips trembled, and his hand lingered on the door knob. Hennion swung around promptly in his chair.
“Look here, Shays! You don't get nourishment enough! You've burnt holes in your stomach till it won't hold any more than a fish net. Now, I'll tell you what you'd better do.”
“Misser Hennion—Misser Hennion—I want you to see me through!”
He stretched out his hand with scattered fingers, appealingly.
“I want you—Misser Hennion—you see me through!”
“Oh, come in! Sit down.”
Shays sat down, and Hennion looked him over.
“Had any breakfast?”
“I want you see me through!”
“What's the matter?”
Shays sat on the edge of the chair and told his story, waving a thin hand with high blue veins. He hurried, stumbled, and came on through confusion to the end.
“Hicksy come about three o'clock,” he said. “I didn't do nothing, and Tom he was asleep. Tha's right. We didn't want him, but he woke me up, and he says, 'I'm off, Jimmy,' like that. 'I broke jail,' he says, 'an' ye needn't wake Coglan,' he says, like that. Then I gets up and I falls down, plunk! like that, and Tom woke up. Then he goes arguin' with Hicksy, like they always done, and he says, 'You stay under Jimmy's bed,' he says, friendly, like that. 'You get off when there ain't nobody lookin',' he says. But Hicksy says, 'You're lookin' for the reward; you're goin' to sell me out,' he says. Then he says he's off, but Tom won't let him. Then they clinched, and Hicksy hit him with the chisel. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! You see me through! He dropped, plunk! like that, plunk! Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! Jus' like that, plunk! He clipped him dead. He did, too!” Shays paused and rubbed his lips.
“What next?”
“Then he says, 'Jimmy, that's the end of me,' like that, and he put that thing what he done it with in his pocket. He goes creepin', scroochin' out the door, like that, creepin', scroochin'. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion! I ain't goin' to stay there alone! Not me! I goes after him. And in Muscadine Street I see him, but it was dark, but I see him creepin', scroochin' along to the bridge; I see the chisel fall out and it clinked on the stones. Pretty soon I picks it up, and pretty soon I see Hicksy out on the bridge. Then he stopped. Then I knowed he'd jump. Then he jumped, plunk! jus' like that, plunk!”
He had the chisel in his hand, and showed it to Hennion.
“Let me see that.”
Hennion swung away in his chair toward the light and examined the battered handle with the straggling, ill-cut, and woe-begone face traced there.
He turned slowly and took a newspaper from his desk, rolled up the chisel in the newspaper, thrust it into a drawer, locked the drawer and turned back to the muttering Shays.
“I see. What next?”
“I says, 'Wha' for? Wha's that for?' Then I come to that place, and there ain't nothin' there. He got under quick, he did. He stayed there. He never come up. I watched. He never come up. Oh, my God! Misser Hennion, I ain't goin' to stay there! Folks was comin' on the bridge. I ain't goin' to stay there!”
“I see. What next?”
“Next?”
“Where'd you go then?”
“Misser Hennion! I went down under along the bridge, where there wa'n't anybody.”
“What next?”
“Next?”
“Did you meet anyone? Say anything?”
“Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?”
“What did you do between then and now?”
“Me? Nothin'! I went to sleep by the bridge. Then I got breakfast at Riley's 'All Night.' Then I come here. I ain't said a word, excep' to Riley.”
“What did you say to Riley?”
“Me! I says, 'Give me some coffee and an egg sandwich,' and Riley says, 'Ye're a dom little gutter pig, Jimmy,' and tha's every word.”
“I see.”
“Misser Hennion! You see me through!”
“All right. But you've got to mind this, or I get out from under you. You leave out Hicks' dropping that chisel, or your picking it up. He dropped nothing; you picked up nothing. Understand? He hit Coglan with something he had in his hand. Whatever it was, never mind. He put it in his pocket and carried it off. You followed. You saw him jump off the bridge. That's all. Tell me the thing again, and leave that out. Begin where Hicks waked you.”
“Me! Wha' for? Wha's tha' for?”
“I want you to get it fixed. Oh, never mind why! Fire away!”
While Shays repeated the story Hennion swung to and fro in his swing chair.
He had not seen the chisel these halfdozen years, but he knew the battered handle and the woful cherub face as the face of an old friend. He knew the niche in the tool chest where it belonged, and the spot where the tool chest stood in the room high over the mansards, from whose windows one looked through the upper branches of the trees out on the Muscadine. There in the summer the maple leaves would flicker in the sunlight, and in winter through bare branches one could see the river. There Milly used to sit on the floor with a white apron on and a red ribbon, and chatter like a sweet-voiced canary bird.
He went over again the connection that had first flashed past his mind, between the chisel in the Champney tool chest and the one wrapped in a newspaper in his desk. Aidee visited Hicks Thursday night; Friday afternoon he was at the Champney house, where Miss Eunice had noticed emotion, conjectured a crisis, and was moved to give advice; Friday night Hicks broke jail and went to Shays, quarrelled with and killed Coglan, and went off to another world, leaving Shays with the chisel; Saturday morning comes Shays, along with the story that he was stumbling through now, anxiously shying around the forbidden part of it. Well, but—now as to Aidee—that was the second time he had been to Camilla for help, and Henry Champney had liked that sort of business no better than Hennion. It wouldn't do. As to Camilla, of course the “little maid” would be “game,” but that gameness was a bit too convenient for men like Aidee, who came along with a wheelbarrow full of celestial purposes in front and a cartload of tragedies behind. Hennion did not like the kind. A man ought to handle his own troubles and not drag women into them; that is to say, not Camilla. Why in thunder couldn't he keep his mouth shut, and buy a respectable burglar's outfit, like a gentleman, from a respectable hardware dealer! However, as to Miss Eunice's “crisis,” it looked as if Aidee must have been confessing his criminal family, instead of the condition of his heart. Aidee was having a run of hard luck. Still, his criminal family was out of the way now, which did not seem a bad idea. Any chance of Camilla's name being mentioned would have to be smothered of course, which meant smothering the whole thing.
“Go on, Jimmy. Your style's picking up.”
But, of course, Camilla now would take into her soul all the responsibilities in sight, and brood and sadden over her fancies, and have nightmares. That wouldn't do either.
“Very good, Jimmy.”
He must see Camilla, and be the first to tell her. Being inside the story now, he could give a healthy point of view from the inside.
“Plunk! jus' like that!” said Shays. “He went, plunk! I come up, and I looked, and he wa'n't there. Wa'n't nothin' there. He got under quick. He stayed, but I wa'n't goin' to stay. Wha' for? Wha's that for? Folks was cornin' down Maple Street and I come away. I ain't see no more of him, but Tom, he's under the table, and there ain't no use in that, not him, nor I ain't goin' to stay there, not him.”
“You wander, Jimmy. Who's 'him'?” Miss Eunice was a wise woman, and according to her wisdom love was a sort of continuity of surprise, because women wanted it that way, and they held the leading ideas on the subject. Humph! Well—Camilla's joining Aidee that way was curious, and in fact, that “continuity of surprise” was all right. Aidee preached a kind of contempt for law; his doctrine always led him to side with the individual man against men organised, and against the structure of things; and he might have infected Camilla with his view of things, or it might be that view of things natural to women, their gift and function. What would Camilla do next? “God knows!” She would see that the “continuity of surprise” was all right. What on earth was Jimmy Shays talking about?
“Tom he says to me, 'Hicksy's a dangerous man, Jimmy,' he says, 'and I wouldn't trust him with me life or me property. Nor,' he says, 'I don't agree with his vilyanous opinions,' he says. That was Tom's word, 'vilyanous,' and it's true and it's proved, Misser Hennion, ain't it? Sure! Then he jumps into the river, plunk! like that, Misser Hennion! I ain't done no harm.”
Shays was harmless surely, and cobbled shoes besides for the benefit of society.
“Drop it, Jimmy. We'll go over to the police station.”
CAMILLA spent the morning in the store-room, staring through the window at the tree tops and glinting river. In the afternoon she went driving with her father. Henry Champney was garrulous on the subject of Dick's plans for the new railroad bridge and station, the three parks and moon-shaped boulevard.
“His conceptions impress me, Camilla. They do indeed! They do indeed!”
In Wabash Park Champney's imagination rose, and his periods lengthened. He foresaw lakes, lawns, and sinuous avenues.
“Nature judiciously governed, my dear, art properly directed, and the moral dignity of man ever the end in view. I foresee a great and famous city, these vast, green spaces, these fragrant gardens. Ha!”
He gazed benevolently at the scrubby pastures, and the creek where the small boys were shooting bullfrogs with rubber slings.
Camilla felt a certain vagueness of interest, and vaguely reproached herself. What was Alcott Aidee doing? Had his brother escaped? What was this dreadful brother like who would drag him away? But Alcott might come to the Champney house that afternoon. He might be there now. She must go back. He did not care for parks and boulevards and bridges. He loved the people, and sacrificed himself for the people, and he was going away, and did not know where it all would lead him. What did it matter whether or not one made a lawn in place of a pasture lot? But it must be wrong not to be interested in what Dick did and planned, or what her father said about it. She forced herself to answer and smile. Henry Champney was too busy unfolding his ideas to notice that her thoughts were absent. But Camilla noticed how Dick's doings, sayings, and plans seemed to occupy her father's mind of late.
“A noble thought, a worthy ambition,” Champney rumbled.
So they drove from the Park, Champney muttering and booming, Camilla wrapped in a crowd of uncertain fears and cravings. Through this cloud came the half-distinguished pain of feeling that her father could feel it possible to lean on anyone but herself, and find a wide passage through someone else than her to his fine victory over old age. It was through Dick, and of course, that made it more natural, but it hurt her.
She must find Aidee now. If his brother had escaped, it would be in the afternoon papers.
When they reached home she jumped out and ran up the steps, while her father drove on to the stable. She picked up the paper that lay on the porch, thrown in by the passing newsboy, who was skilful to deliver papers without getting off his bicycle. She went upstairs, and did not look at the paper till she reached the store-room.
Henry Champney came into the library, where Miss Eunice was sitting. A half hour slipped by.
“That boy!” rumbled Henry Champney to Miss Eunice in his library; “that superlative procrastination! that acme of mental, moral, and physical ineptitude! Ha! Why doesn't he bring my paper? On my word, five o'clock! Five o'clock! Does he expect me to get up in the middle of the night to read it? Nonsense! I won't do it!”
Miss Eunice shook her head gloomily, implying that not much was to be expected of this generation. Richard, she said, had been in to see Camilla. He had been very unsatisfactory and distrait. He had said that he would come in again before teatime. No one else had called. She was of the opinion that Richard was worried. It was not proper for young people, when their elders were speaking, were giving important advice—it was not considerate or well-bred of them to look vague, to answer only that it was four o'clock, and they would come back to tea, when neither statement was important. The paper boy's rough manner of throwing the paper on the porch she had never approved of.
They were still on the subject when Camilla's step was heard in the hall. Instead of coming into the library she went swiftly out of the front door. Miss Eunice, at the window, dropped her knitting.
“Camilla is going out again!”
Mr. Champney rumbled inarticulately. Miss Eunice wondered if Camilla could have taken the paper upstairs. The young people of this generation were thoughtless, inconsiderate, and headstrong. But was it not injustice to Camilla to suspect her of carrying selfishly away her father's newspaper, a thing so important to his happiness before tea? Miss Eunice put aside her knitting and left the room, feeling uneasy.
She climbed the stairs and looked into Camilla's room, then climbed the second flight to the store-room. On the floor of the store-room, in front of the window, lay the paper, crushed and rumpled. Miss' Eunice gasped, took it up, and sat down on the tool chest. How could Camilla have been so rude, so inconsiderate! The staring headlines of the front page proclaimed: “Hicks Escaped; a Murder and a Suicide. The Incidents of a Night.”
“Rumours of Important Cabinet Officer's Retirement.”
“Uprising in Southwestern Europe Expected. Rumours from Roumania.”
“Hen-nion and Macclesfield Are Agreed. Improvements projected in Port Argent.”
“John Murphy knew the Deceased Coglan.”
“Father Harra Orders Plain Funerals for his Flock. Two Carriages and a Hearse are his Limit.”
None of these proclamations gave Miss Eunice any help in her amazement. No headline, except “Hennion and Macclesfield,” seemed to have any bearing on Camilla, and the column beneath that told nothing that Richard had not already told the family, about a railroad bridge and station, park improvements and so on; in which, it had been Miss Eunice's impression, Camilla had taken less interest than was becoming.
She sat on the tool chest, and stared at the front page of the crumpled newspaper, with a vague sense of distress. The air in the room seemed tense, the creases across the front of the paper like some wild and helpless handwriting, but what the interlinear writing meant, or whether it applied to “John Murphy” or “the deceased Coglan,” or “Hennion and Macclesfield,” or the “Cabinet officer,” was beyond her. This sign of Miss Eunice's trouble was sure, that she sat a long time on the old tool chest, and no more than Camilla remembered that Henry Champney was in the library, forlorn of his afternoon paper.
When Hennion came to the Champney house again, it was a little before six. He saw through the door to the library Mr. Champney's white head bent down drowsily, where he sat in his chair.
Miss Eunice came down the stairs, agitated, mysterious, and beckoned him into the parlour. She showed him the crumpled newspaper.
“I don't understand Camilla's behaviour, Richard! She went out suddenly. I found the paper in the store-room. It is so unlike her! I don't understand, Richard!”
Hennion glanced at the front page, and stood thinking for a moment.
“Well—you'd better iron it out, Miss Eunice, before you take it to Mr. Champney. Milly will be back soon, but if you're worrying, you see, it might be just as well. He might be surprised.”
He left the house, took a car up Franklin Street and got off at the corner by the Assembly Hall. The side door was ajar.
He went in and heard voices, but not from Aidee's study, the door of which stood open, its windows glimmering with the remaining daylight. The voices came from the distance, down the hallway, probably from the Assembly Hall. He recognised Aidee's voice, and turned, and went back to the street door, out of hearing of the words.
“It's the other man's innings,” he thought ruefully. But, he thought too, that Milly was in trouble. His instinct to be in the neighbourhood when Milly was in trouble was too strong to be set aside. He leaned his shoulder against the side of the door, jammed his hands in his pockets, stood impassively, and meditated, and admired the mechanism of things.
CAMILLA went up Bank Street, and took a car at the corner of Franklin Street. It carried her past the Court House Square, and so on to the little three-cornered park, where stood the Seton Avenue Assembly Hall, and opposite the Hall the block of grey houses with bay windows, of which the third from the corner was Mrs. Tillotson's.
That lady saw Camilla through the window and met her at the door.
“My dear! My dear! There is no one here! Positively! And my little drawing-room usually thronged! Now, we can have such a talk, such an earnest talk! We women must unite. The Assembly must take a position.”
She sat by Camilla on the sofa and clasped her hand.
“I—I don't quite understand,” said Camilla.
“Surely, my dear, the two most important questions before the Assembly are these: First, shall we, or shall we not, support Mr. Hennion? second, shall we, or shall we not, adopt a fixed form of service, more ornate and beautiful? Mr. Berry takes the affirmative of both, Mr. Ralbeck the negative. I am at present in the position of a reconciler. I have in particular devoted myself to the latter question. I have examined thoroughly the ritual of the Roman Catholic Church. I have offered Mr. Aidee all my knowledge, all my literary experience. But he does not as yet take a position!”
Camilla promised a number of things, and asked for Aidee. Mrs. Tillotson thought he was at the Hall. He had not been to lunch. She was of the opinion that Mr. Aidee was distinctly avoiding her, knowing that she would insist on his taking a position, knowing her to be right in insisting.
Camilla escaped, and crossed the Avenue to the little side door that led into a hallway, out of which opened a room used by Aidee for a study. The door on the street was ajar. She had never entered that door before. She knew the windows of the study from without.
She entered the dusky hallway and knocked at the door of the study, but no one answered. She hesitated, and drew back, and then tried the knob. The door yielded and opened, but the room was empty.
In the growing dusk the corners of it were quite dark. It seemed bare, half-furnished—some books in a case, a matting, a flat littered table, a few chairs. She grasped at the sides of the open door, for the room seemed to darken and lighten alternately, and be so full of meaning as to be ghostly, seeing that no one sat at the littered table, or was even hiding, crouching in the darkened corners. The large square windows seemed to look inward rather than outward, as if the centre of interest were within, and everything outside were meaningless. Yet the room was empty.
She gave a little moan of disappointment and helplessness. He must be hiding and suffering somewhere. She must protect him from the cruel, clattering noises and tongues outside! the dull, selfish, heartless people outside, to whom the prophet and martyr was forever coming and forever rejected, wounded by blind accidents, by people blind as accidents! So pitiful! so intolerable! So strange that the room should be empty of Aidee, and yet full of him! She could fancy him there, pacing the yellow matting, staring at the window, thinking, thinking.
She turned back from the half-lit room to the darkened hallway, and saw that another door opened out of it at the end furthest from the door on the street. Wherever it led, he might be there.
She opened it bravely, and saw only a little corridor, crooking suddenly to the left and even darker than the outer hallway. She felt her way along the plastered wall to the corner, and beyond that in the darkness felt the panels of a final door. She opened it, half expecting a closet or cellar stair, and almost cried out, for the great, dim, glowing, glimmering space of the Assembly Hall was before her, with its windows now turning grey from the outer twilight; but its vaulted roof, its pillars and curved galleries of brown oak could be distinguished, its ranged tiers of seats, its wide, curved, carpeted platform, its high bulk of gilded organ pipes. She had seen it before only when the tiers of seats had been packed with people, when Aidee had filled the remaining space with his presence, his purposes, and his torrent of speech; when the organ had played before and after, ushering in and following the Preacher with its rolling music; when great thoughts and sounds, and multitudes of staring and listening people had been there, where now it was so empty, so lonely and still. Silvery dim bars of light slanted from the windows downward to the centre of the hall, and the varnished backs of the seats shone in long concentric curves. Lines of darkness lay between them; deep darkness was under the galleries; shadows clustered in the vault overhead, shadows on the platform below the organ, where stood the Preacher's high-backed seat. Aidee had given the Hall what living meaning it had. Empty, it was still haunted by his voice, haunted by his phrases.
Camilla held her breath and stared from the little dark door, across the Hall, and saw Aidee standing by one of the gallery pillars. She started forward. Aidee came slowly from under the gallery to meet her.
“Camilla!”
“Oh! Why didn't you come?”
“Come?”
“To me. I thought you would!”
He stood silently before her, and seemed absorbed and constrained.
“When did you know?” she asked, and he answered mechanically, “This morning. I went down and saw the crowd under the window. I heard them talking. A newspaper reporter told me. Then I went to the bridge, but there was another crowd there, looking down at the water. So I came back.”
They sat down in one of the seats. Camilla felt both excited and constrained. She was afraid to go on. During the dumb hour she had spent in the store-room, she had felt that life was plainly a ruinous affair, and that she was somehow touched by a horrible wickedness and stained forever. She imagined, shrinking, some disclosure and disgrace. She pictured Henry Champney's amazement and grief. And then it all had been swept from her mind by the thought of Aidee, suffering somewhere alone. But now that she had found him, she found him reserved and quiet, and she seemed to stop on the edge of a gulf or crater, to peer over, to expect some red, rending explosion, but it was all still and dim there; and it stared up at her coldly and quietly.
“I came, because I thought I could help,” she said. “I thought it would help us both.”
“Are you troubled? You'd better let it go. It's the end of that story. I've fought it out now. I'm free of it.”
“What do you mean?”
They stared closely in the dusk into each other's eyes. Then she dropped her head, and wept with her face in her hands.
“It's not your story,” said Aidee.
“Yes, it is! It's mine!”
Then she raised her head, and he saw her wet eyes glisten in the dimness, and she said: “Teach me what it means.” And a dull shock went through him threaded by a sharp pain, a sensation so penetrating as to resemble pain, and desirable enough to be called happiness, and yet not like any pain or happiness in the remembered stretch of his concentrated and brooding life. That life, as he looked back on it, he saw starting from the old farmhouse on the plain, with its fallen fences and dry fields, the tired face of his mother in the house door, the small impish face of “Lolly” by his side. Next followed the big brick schoolhouse in the village, the schoolroom that he disliked, the books that he loved, the smoky chimney of his lamp, the pine table and the room where he studied; from which he would have to go presently down into the street and drag Lolly out of some raging battle with other boys, struggling and cursing, up to their room, where Lolly would turn on him in a moment with queer, twisted, affectionate smile, and clinging arms—“I ain't mad now, Al.” Then he saw the press-room in St. Louis, he saw Lolly imprisoned and then suddenly gone. He saw the mines and the crumbling mountain slopes in Nevada, the sheds, the dump cart, the spot where he had poured out first his long pent-up dreams to a rugged, astonished audience, and where that new passion of speech had come to him, that had seemed to fill the craving void in his heart; the spot where he had met the circuit-riding bishop and T. M. Secor. Then came his early success in Port Argent and the organisation of the Assembly; then the attack on Wood, and the growing sense of futility, in that while many listened and praised, little happened and little came of their listening or approval. “They take me for an actor, and the Assembly for a comedy,” he had thought bitterly, and he had written “The Inner Republic,” and the book that had brought to him Camilla Champney, eager and pureeyed, and asking, “What does it mean? It is my story too!”
What did it mean? Lolly lay dead in the ooze of the Muscadine and Port Argent was come to be a horror. He seemed so plainly to have failed, so drearily was Lolly dead, and all the fire in his own soul dead too, gone out in cinders, and his theory of life cracked like a hollow nutshell. He would go back to the mines, or to the slums and shops, and live again with the sweating hordes, among whom the grim secret of life lay, if anywhere; and when next he preached, he would preach the bitterest fact loudest. No, rather, if life is hopeless let us dig in the earth and say nothing. But Camilla! What of Camilla? And what did she mean? Her story too! He began to speak slowly, but presently grew rapid and eager.
“How can I explain? I never knew my fellow men, nor cared for them. They were no brothers of mine. I had but one. I never loved another human being, not these twenty years, but I had the kin instinct like hunger. Allen and I were rooted together. I thought I was a prophet, who was no more than a savage. Men are brothers by blood or interest, but for the rest they fight the old war that began before the earth had a decent crust to cover its chaos. Brotherhood of wildcats!”
“Oh, no! no!” she cried.
“For your sake, no, Camilla! Oh, through you I could hope again! You will save me, I will cut the past out and bury it, I will begin again. I will count this place with the dead and leave it forever. I need you. Come with me, my wife and hope and guide. Camilla, help me!”
“No, no!”
His sharp, strained voice frightened her. His eyes glittered and his face was white below his black hair. His intensity frightened her. The future he pointed to threatened her like an overhanging cloud, the struggle in her own heart frightened her.
“You said the story was yours. Camilla, tell me so again! We'll blot it out. I will forget! I need you! Come away from this ghastly city!”
Now she saw her father in his library, his white head bent. He was waiting and listening for her footsteps; and Dick seemed to be standing over him, listening for her to come; and Aunt Eunice, near by, was listening.
“I can't!” she cried. “I can't!”
“You must! Camilla! We will go away. It would be possible with you. I'll find a truth yet that doesn't lead to hell. I'll be a leader yet. Camilla, look at me!” She lifted her face and turned slowly toward him, and a voice spoke out in the distant, dark doorway, saying, “Milly!”—and then hesitated, and Hennion came out.
“I heard you crying,” he said quietly. “I didn't seem to be able to stand that.”
“Dick! Take care of me!” she cried, and ran to him, and put her face against his arm. The two men looked at each other for a moment.
Aidee said, “I'm answered.”
“I think you gave me a close call,” said Hennion, and drew Camilla past him into the passage, and followed her a few steps. Then he turned back, thinking:
“A fanatic is a term that mostly defines the definer, instead of the person meant to be defined. Sometimes it defines the man who uses it, as dense.”
At any rate Aidee was a force and had a direction, and force ought not to be wasted that way, for the credit of dynamics. So Hennion justified himself, and then confused his motive by thinking, “It's hardly a square game besides.” He stepped from the door into the dim Hall again, and said slowly:
“By the way, I saw Hicks last one night, some two weeks ago, and he told me who he was. He intended, I believe, to leave a message for you. Maybe he mentioned it to you. I think he told no one else who he was.”
Hennion paused. Aidee made no motion nor sound, but stood stiffly resistant.
“Well, you see, this morning, Jimmy Shays, the shoemaker, brought me that chisel. It seems Hicks used it last on Coglan, and then left it behind him, which was rather careless. Well, I knew the tool. The fact is, it was mine. Strikes me you might as well have gone somewhere else for your hardware.”
Still no sound.
“However, being mine, I took the liberty of pitching it into the river, where it really belonged, and swore Jimmy into a state of collapsed secrecy. Consequently, I'm in collusion. Consequently, I'm mentioning this to you in order to clean up the ground between us. It makes no great difference. That's all right. I only wanted to point out that you're clear of the mess. Now, there's a job for you in Port Argent. I think you can fill the place rather better—better than anyone else. Will you stay?”
“No.”
“Oh! But I've heard it said, political power was safe in the hands of those who had to make a sacrifice in order to accept it.”
“I won't make it.”
“It turns out a hypocritical sacrifice for me, you know. I'm on the highroad to corruption. You might stay in Port Argent and keep me honest. Will you?”
“No.”
“All right. Good-night.”
The little side streets between Seton Avenue and Maple Street were shaded by young maples, the street lamps frequent, and now being lit. Hennion and Camilla walked slowly. She shivered once or twice, and half sobbed, and clung to him. They talked very little at first.
“Milly,” he said at last, “of course, you know, I'm backing you, anyway. You shall do as you like.”
“I know, Dick. You're good. You're very good to me.”
“Well—maybe I'm wrong—I've been that before—but it looks to me in this way, that, after all, most impossible things are possible somehow, or somehow else, and it's better to go straight at the steep places. It stirs your blood to see how steep they are. I don't know altogether—I don't ask—but if you see anything that looks steep ahead, why, perhaps it is, perhaps it is—but then, what of it? And that's the moral I've been hedging around to, Milly.”
After a silence she asked, “How did you know I was there?”
“I thought it likely.”
He told her of his talk with Hicks in the cell, and how Shays, the shoemaker, had come to him that morning, but he omitted the fact that the chisel had been “used on Coglan.” Passing that point, he went on, comfortably comforting.
“You know, people don't own all the miscellaneous consequences of what they do. For instance, I knew Coglan. He was a blackguard and loafer, and generally drunk, and his death was rather a judicious selection. Hicks was a curious man. Maybe he wasn't quite sane. He jumped into the river on his own notion, to the happy relief of the public, which might have had scruples about hanging him. Still, you must see that as you didn't arrange all these social benefits, they'll have to be credited to your good luck, if they're credited at all. Aidee helped him to break jail, which was natural enough. It's a debatable moral maybe, if anyone wants to debate it, but who wants to? I'm no casuist, anyway. He shouldn't have come to you. But since he did, why, of course you'd do something of the kind, same as the wind blows. I know you, Milly. Is it your part in it that troubles you? You'd better take my judgment on it.”
“What is it?” she said, half audibly.
“My judgment? Only that I want you for myself.”
He went on quietly after a pause: “There are objections to interfering with the law, if your conscience means that. Those who try it, I think, don't often know what they're doing. If they do it theoretically, they're staking a small experience against a big one. The chances of being right are mainly against them. Aren't they? It looks so. Your getting mixed with that kind of thing or people, is—would be, of course, rather hard on us, on Mr. Champney and me. But your nerve was good. Is that what you want my judgment on?”
They turned up the path to the Champney house.
“You knew all about it!” she said hurriedly. “But you don't understand. It was because I thought him so great and noble, and I do! I do! Oh, he is! But I'm not brave at all. No, you don't know! He asked me to help, and it was so dark and painful, what he meant to do before he came again. It frightened me. He asked me to marry him, and break off everything here, and I was afraid! I'm a coward! I wouldn't do it because I was afraid. I'm a coward.”
“Did, did he?” said Hennion comfortably. “That was good nerve, too.”
“You don't understand,” she said with a small sob, and then another.
“Maybe not. But I think you had other reasons.”
They looked in through the tall library window, and saw Henry Champney sitting alone by his table, the gas jet flaring over him, and his white head dropped over on his hand. Hennion went on: “There's some of this business that it doesn't suit me to argue about or admit. But it occurs to me that”—pointing toward the window—“that may have been a reason.”
“You do understand that,” she said, and they went in together.