Hallie Erminie Rives

“ As she drove now from the station through the bustling, down-town streets toward Midfields, the knowledge that her father's secret was safe overshadowed all the pain through which she had passed. The dreadful memory dulled in the sunshine and the sense of security buoyed her. She would never have to tell her part in that terrible night to any one. Not even to Harry: she could tell him that she had never loved any one but him: that it had been misunderstanding that had driven her to send him that unhappy note. Her father himself need never be made aware that she knew his secret. ”

“ Why not? He was free—free to be himself again. Only one, beside Echo, had known that he and the captured house-breaker were identical—that was Craig. And Craig had been taken from his path. And who else would connect Harry Sevier, the lawyer, the club-man of well-known and reputable past, the favourite of drawing-rooms—who could ever associate him with a tawdry burglar and desperate convict who had escaped from a penitentiary in another State? Once more bearded and eye-glassed, without scar or mark to point resemblance or beckon identification, recognition would be the wildest improbability. ”

“ Life is a toss,
Dying is moss,
But booze—Oh, bully old booze, is boss!"
Harry's nerves were on edge. It was not the cheap vulgarity of the jingle nor the patent swagger of the performer, but the under-suggestion of the picture. The edge of this qualm had touched him on the street, with the odour of Chilly's breath and the moist tang of hops that had floated through the swinging-door. Now he felt a sudden anger that the coarse picturing and the tinkling keys had power to call up, even for an instant, the old slinking, craving ache in his throat. ”

“ She lifted her eyes, wide with the swift sense of the unexpected—touched now with an odd, disquieting prescience. His voice was no longer the cold, even voice of the Cameron Craig she had known. There was passion in it. She saw his big hand tremble.
"There has never been a day or hour since then when I have not wanted you! You have entered into my blood and my brain, and the want of you has coloured all I have thought and done! If this is love, then I love you—Echo, Echo!"
She shrank perceptibly at the name on his lips. "Stop!" she said. "The love you talk of must be mutual. ”

“ In the dim night-light the triple mirror of the dresser reflected the carven four-post bed, in one of whose pillows Nancy's dark head was already buried.
"Is that you, Echo?"
"Yes, it's I. Were you asleep already?"
"Almost," yawned Nancy. "I shall be in two shakes of a lamb's tail. Has Chilly come home yet?"
"No, not yet."
"Do you think he's really at the club, Echo?"
"Of course I do."
"Men are so queer!" sighed Nancy, drowsily. "We had such a lovely evening—all except Chilly's not being there." ”

“ To be haled to court, to sit as he had seen men sit so often, under a perilous judgment! For with the logic of the legal mind perilous indeed Harry knew it would be. If Craig lay dead in the room behind him, he would be charged with his murder! A chill ran over him.
As these thoughts rushed through his mind, Harry passed through a crucial episode of his mental life—its first vital and supreme moment. It was not of himself he thought now. It was only of Echo. What became of him mattered little. It was she who mattered most! At whatever risk to himself he must turn the pursuit from her! ”

“ Governor Eveland, you also are not unacquainted with me. With every one in this room I have come in contact—not as a convict, but as a citizen and an honest man. My association with you, Judge Allen, has involved certain responsibilities, and these I have accepted while I have lain under the law. For this I owe you a greater reparation than I can ever make. I know that justification in the eyes of the world is impossible, but in your own mind—in the minds of others who stand with you—it perhaps may be given me. But a justification is empty to me that springs from personal sympathy. ”

“ She went closer and peered into the inner office. Facing her from the wall was a small cabinet, its door, from which splinters of opaque glass were scattered about the rugs, smashed through as if by a heavy blow. Beneath it, on the desk-top, was a black bottle and a stained glass, tipped on its side.
All at once she started. She had caught sight of something that lay in the fire-place. She went and picked it up: it was a picture of herself—one she had never known Harry possessed—a photograph of her portrait that had been hung in a certain spring salon in Paris. ”

“ But the distinction lay deep in the mental formula of the man: it was not to be perceived in externals. To-night, in his faultless evening-dress, with his keen, strong face and assured manner, he had an air even of distinction that well became him, and the instant's painful embarrassment that Echo felt as her hand touched his in their first greeting yielded quickly to an unwilling admiration of his poise and control. If that flare of passion in the garden had left its traces, they had been successfully covered. He was once more the Cameron Craig she had known—till yesterday. ”

“ It was the implication of Echo that had made the situation impossible—the unbelievable coincidence of their joint presence—in damnable propinquity with the shooting. With Echo eliminated and he himself free from that cowardly indictment, would not all yet be well? He was well enough known. He was no sordid house-breaker—in spite of the humiliating incident of his entrance there that night!
His thought broke, as a spruce young man, with the air of authority which is the perquisite and prerequisite of the private-secretary, entered and whispered with the guardian at the door. ”

“ All night, in the silent, empty apartment, under the brilliant lights, Harry strode up and down—up and down tirelessly, his face white, his hands clenched, confronting the blank wall that reared before him. Temptation, in its most insidious form, fell upon him. Why should he not brazen it out? After all, the burden of proof was upon his accuser. He had destroyed the record-card which had held his physical measurements. Jubilee Jim could be depended upon to swear to his presence at the bungalow through the winter: wild horses would drag no other story from his faithful lips. ”

“ Her mind was far away, in another city and state; her thought had entered again the gloomy prison which she had visited with Nancy Langham and Malcolm—on a day when a prisoner had intervened to save the Warden's life. The peace of autumn evenings brought no comfort to that place, save it were the mere rest of wearied bodies. A city of itself, it was as alien to that city so near it, of comfortable homes and pleasant people which she had visited, as the deep life of the coal-miner is alien to that of the free hunter who breathes the sweeter air a thousand feet above the other's sunless toil. ”

“ The newspapers Harry had read had not contained the item chronicling Craig's journey to Buda-Pesth, and recovery was not an imminent possibility to his mind. A year had gone by, and all the skill that wealth could invoke had no doubt been applied, and vainly. Even if sometime he to some extent recovered, it was more than likely that his memory of that fatal night in his library would be impaired. So Harry told himself.
Over and over he followed the trail of painful reflection, in a vicious circle that centred always in the one thought that sent his mind shrinking in upon itself—Echo. ”

“ The stocky frame, the small red-rimmed eyes, the up-thrust, wiry hair belonged to his client of that far away trial, the man whom he had sent to a convict's cell and who now, by route of ball and stripe, had fled to the dismal demesne of habitual criminality! "Who knows!" Paddy the Brick had not now the piteous, shrinking look that had been turned to his counsel in the courtroom! The manhood was gone from the mottled features, which now wore the furtive look of the hunted, the sign-manual of cunning, incorrigibility and debauch. ”

“ Have you ever been in prison?"
"No," said Harry.
"Have you committed crime—in the past?"
"As the law counts it, no."
He looked the Governor steadily in the eyes as he spoke and the other, a keen judge of men, with a knowledge, bred of long life and observation, of the workings of the human conscience, felt a strange inclination to believe. Yet for every criminal there must be a first crime. Given a good family name and the remnant of a conscience, the man's insistence could be accounted for! With a little sigh he turned to Mason. ”

“ He, Cameron Craig, could answer that question! His lips curved in a cruel smile. And Echo? She had profited by the situation—Harry had borne the brunt.
Her lover! A sinistrous rage caught him as he repeated the word to himself. No softer thought of her now lurked in the bitter chambers of his mind. She had mocked and fooled him and he hated her with the still, cold hatred which the strong and evil man feels for the weaker thing that defies him. Yet so far as she was concerned he was helpless. He could not deny his declaration that he had not known the woman in the library. ”

“ Tottering, he lurched to a chair and fell into it, even as the Governor's look took on a glare of outraged astonishment—for Craig's face now was drawn and contorted into a malignant grimace. But all at once this faded out, the features became expressionless, the eyes dull, and he slipped in a huddle from the chair to the floor.
He lay there upon his face without a word or movement. He did not hear the Governor's exclamation nor the voices about him, nor feel the touch of inquiring hands at heart and wrist. His passion had undone him. ”

“ His momentary glimpse on that day of Echo had stung his every sense to quivering protest. It had pierced, as with a fiery sword, the torpor which had unwrapped his love with its protecting armour and that love had awaked to agonised consciousness, vivified and intensified. Then, in his loneliness, the knowledge that the woman he would have died for had left him to drag out his penalty, would sweep over him till a fierce hatred of her would rise up in him—to be swept away as swiftly by something sweeter and stronger that would not be denied. ”

“ Harry was aware that in the countenance of the state's attorney puzzle and a stealthy relief struggled together. With desperate narrowness he watched the faces of the jury for a sign, a tentative withdrawal of stolidity that betokened a quickened and awakening interest. But they sat moveless and impassive. There was a last hideous pause, in which he thought the foreman suppressed an incipient yawn, when his own brain refused further struggle. He knew that he had been betrayed. The door of human sympathy would not open—he had lost the magic key. ”

“ A thousand times she lost herself in wonder that a man capable of such a deed to an unknown woman could yet be a common burglar, one of the desperate gang whose leader was now awaiting trial, and whose malignant face and levelled pistol haunted her. Then the shuddering thought would roll over her that she, Echo Allen, had witnessed the awful act of murder, and she would hide her face in her pillow, trembling and spent. ”

“ She had no thought that this might be accomplished without publicity, or that testimony which might be basis for executive action could be secret. In imagination she pictured herself standing before the same tribunal by which an innocent man had been condemned, telling her story to the impartial and impersonal Law—telling it openly, before all the world!
The world? It was not this thought which in this moment of harrowing decision seemed to scratch her soul like an etcher's needle. She was thinking now only of Harry Sevier. ”

“ As he gazed in consternation, a bell clangored and along the corridor came tramping a line of men clad in dingy stripes, pallid face close to shabby shoulder, one knee rising and falling to the damnable rhythm of the prison lock-step.
Harry felt an algid chill creep over him. He sat upright, his whole body rigid, each detail of the significant picture stamping itself upon his quivering perception. Midway of the line a turnkey unlocked a door in the barred wall and two links of the human chain detached themselves and entered—one stooped and crafty and cringing ”

“ Echo came to her feet, all her blood on fire. In her resentment it had seemed to her that by very silence she had made herself party to that slur upon the man she loved, and she had been aching fiercely to repel it.
Craig tossed his segar away. He made no apologies for having followed her from the piazza. "May I sit here and talk to you?" he asked.
She remained standing. "Mr. Craig," she said with quiet emphasis, "I am glad you have come to me here. I have something to ask you which I could not have asked you—there." ”

“ It was the fruit of victory, and fiercely sweet in proportion to the bitterness of the struggle. Yet in his new sensitiveness the realisation had held a flicker of self-shame. Never in those old days had he employed that talent for the greater good: only for individual ambition, often for the blunt defeating of the clear ends of justice! It was another Harry Sevier who spoke now, one to whom conscience now stood as mentor, to whom principle was become a guiding star. ”

“ To creep away, like a dastard, he, the leader in the fight? To fly, like the discovered thief, as he had once thought of doing? Even that was impossible now. He knew his enemy too well to suppose that he would have left that way open! The other was but playing with him, like a cat with a mouse, till the moment came to publicly denounce him. For with a kind of prescience he guessed Craig's real purpose, to seize the climactic moment and abstract from his humiliation the last ounce of sensationalism. ”

“ Near him Harry saw the party leaders, among them Judge Allen, newly-elected President of the Civic Club; they showed a singular self-assurance overlaid by vivid excitement. In the galleries were banks of feminine faces, tier on tier, merged in a tumultuous hand-clapping like silver rain. Below, the house was on its feet, a sea of waving flags and handkerchiefs.
The tumult swelled, then died away to pulsing band-music and in the subsidence, Brent leaned over Harry's shoulder to give him the quick pressure of a hand—words could not have said so much. ”