Rebecca N. Porter

“ Kenwick continued, "you might reverse the usual order of dining; begin with pie and end with soup. And the public would regard it either as a new cure for dyspepsia or an eccentricity of genius. But if I should try it, somebody would immediately suggest that I shouldn't be allowed at large. It's the irony of fate that I, who have always had a contempt for the trivial conventions of life (such a contempt that my sister-in-law never quite trusted me in polite society) , should now be in a cowering bondage to them. I live all my days in a horror of doing something that might appear erratic. ”

“ Kenwick stood outside the closed door, a curious numbness stealing over him. Was it possible, he asked himself, that there had been some one in this house during the last twelve hours? Was it possible that this person was a woman? A solitary woman? It was unmistakably a woman's voice, and there was no sound of comforting or upbraiding or other evidence of companionship. As he knocked again at the door he wondered which one of them was the more startled by the presence of the other. ”

“ In his amber eyes was a new light. A railroad switchman who faces the company's president after saving a train from destruction might wear just that expression.
Marcreta seemed bereft of speech. She was staring at one of the lights in the house across the street as though it had hypnotized her. One of the delicate white hands was clasped tight upon the arm of her chair. Richard Glover told himself that he had never seen her look so beautiful. And for the first time since he had known her, there was not a suggestion of invalidism in her tall, regal figure. ”

“ But Kenwick went on, unheeding this attempted solace.
"At any rate, Glover apparently failed in this attempt. So in order to get himself out of this mess, there is only one thing now for him to do." He broke off, eying his visitor with somber eyes. "You know what that is, Morgan. In order to save himself, he must prove me to be a cold-blooded murderer. Can he do it? Why shouldn't he? I'm certainly not in a position to offer any convincing opposition. A contemptuous pity is what I have read in the eyes of every person whom I've seen since this thing came to light. ”

“ Only those who have suffered in solitude the agony of a nameless terror know the ghastly havoc that it can work upon the human voice. Kenwick's held now a harsh, ugly tone that had in it something like a threat. The man at the engine wheeled about and leveled his huge eyes at the spot from whence the summons came. "What the devil——?" he began.
And then explanations tumbled through the barred gate in an incoherent torrent. They left the motorist with a confused impression of an automobile tragedy, a bed-ridden woman, a feeble-minded gardener, and a haunted house. ”

“ Two hours after Roger Kenwick had taken his gruesome departure from the house of the iron gate, a mud-spattered car turned in at the side entrance to the grounds which he had quitted. The man behind the wheel drove recklessly, careening between the double row of eucalyptus-trees like some low-flying bird of prey seeking its carrion. At the shallow front steps he brought the car to an abrupt halt as though he had found the thing for which he sought. ”

“ Every care-ridden person in the world has felt the impulse, has been impelled to it by the realization that there is safety in remoteness. You will never see the stranger again, or if you do, he will have forgotten you and your trouble. A transitory interest has its advantages. It demands nothing in the way of a sequel. It keeps no watch upon your struggle; it demands no final reckoning. You and your agony are to the chance acquaintance a short-story, not a serial.
Jarvis was leaning back in his deep chair, one leg dangling carelessly over the broad arm. ”

“ The ghastly notoriety which he had striven, with the difficult patience of the impatient temperament, to avoid, had struck him with the force of a bomb and blown him skyward to be the cynosure of every eye. Never while the world stood could he ask Marcreta Morgan to take the name of Kenwick. Acquittal on any terms was all that most men would have asked of fate. ”

“ Two more trials with the electric button convinced Kenwick that the place was untenanted. He made a shade of his two hands and peered into the plate-glass window that gave on the front porch.
What he saw was an elegantly appointed dining-room furnished in old mahogany and dull blue hangings. There were carved candlesticks on the sideboard, and in the center of the bare dining-table a cut-glass bowl full of English walnuts. The somber high-backed chairs ranged along the wall seemed to the man outside to be guarding the room like a body of solemn gendarmes. ”

“ She helped her husband to find his place in the world and keep it. But he never seemed to realize that she had helped him. He always thought, though I suppose he never said, that his marriage had held him back. And she died at last of a broken heart. Through all my youth I had her tragedy before me."
There was a moment of silence between them. And then Kenwick spoke slowly. "You hadn't much faith in me, Marcreta. You admit now that you loved me, yet you hadn't much faith—in my character or my——"
"But love comes a long time before faith, Roger. It always does. ”

“ And in the moment that its victim recovers a staggering strength, it is upon him again, sweeping aside in one crashing moment the pitiful defenses of philosophy and faith which the soul has constructed to save itself from shipwreck.
Until after midnight Kenwick sat at the window waiting for a summons from the telephone. Then he went to bed and fell into a listening sort of sleep. But not during that night nor in the days that followed was there any response to his telegram. ”

“ Kenwick walked back through the darkening streets with a feeling of exultation. The pendulum of his despair was swinging backward to a height only attained by those who can plumb the depths of wretchedness. For the first time in six weeks he felt his old defiance of life. And recalling the pale ghost of a former prayer, he was ashamed of its cowardice. "That never happens to the desperate and the lonely," he reminded himself grimly. "The best security on earth for a prolonged life is to express a sincere desire to die. ”

“ The cañon was redolent with the odor of damp timber and decaying vegetation.
Kenwick buttoned his heavy overcoat about him and limped painfully toward the cliff, keeping as nearly as possible a straight line from his starting-point. Although his surroundings were totally unfamiliar his mind was clear. But he had that curious sensation of a man who has slept all night in a strange bed, and in the first moment of wakening is unable to adjust himself to his environment. While he groped his way through the tangled underbrush his memory struggled to clear a passage back to the present. ”

“ The last two hours of genial companionship were swept aside as ruthlessly as though they had never been, and Kenwick found himself back again at that ghastly moment when he had torn open the yellow envelope. For he was to learn, in the crucial school of experience, that the sorrow of bereavement is not a permanently engulfing flood, but that it comes in waves, ebbing away under the pressure of objective living only to gather volume for a renewed attack. ”

“ But courageous self-analysis had driven home to him the realization that he had Marcreta Morgan at a cruel disadvantage. Whether he would or no, he had come back to her clothed in the appealing garments of tragedy. He was a pensioner on her sympathy, and in her eagerness to restore to him his lost heritage, she had unconsciously disarmed herself. The temptation to cherish and set a jealous guard upon such an advantage has overpowered men and women innumerable. ”

“ You couldn't expect a furnace to heat a house with a gale like that blowing into it. He had dragged himself to within a few feet of the pane when all at once he stopped. Two wide boards had been nailed across the aperture. It was a clumsy job, hurriedly done. Kenwick stood there gazing at it. So it was only for this that he had made the painful journey from the den! And the carpenter was gone. The customary deathly stillness prevailed.
He stood there listening for the sound of retreating footsteps but it was another sound that caught his ear. ”

“ And then had followed a sentence or two of promise, of affection, of admonition, murmured in a hasty undertone intended to escape the ears of the statuesque creature who was his brother's wife. Kenwick had wondered afterward whether they had escaped her, whether, anything vital ever escaped Isabel Kenwick. And yet his farewell to her had been a flawless scene. She was always the central figure in some flawless scene. His brother's whole life seemed to him to be enacted upon a perfectly appointed stage. ”

“ He could imagine now how she must have felt as she had sat, a few hours before, listening to the paragraphs of Kenwick's masterpiece as they fell from the glib tongue of Richard Glover. There was an expression almost of awe upon his face. She could write all that, feel all that for one man, and then deliberately plan to marry another, to set him free! The thing seemed preposterous, and yet he knew it to be true. ”

“ But if there is any season of life when the sane well-balanced man or woman may be tempted into the region of the occult it is during that interval between the shock of bereavement and readjustment to an altered order of existence when the soul quivers upon the brink of two worlds. The lapse of time between shock and readjustment varies with every temperament, but in that period of helpless groping we all stand close to the psychic, the unexplainable, the supernatural.
If Kenwick had expected to find Madame Rosalie's domain extraordinary in any particular, he was distinctly disappointed. ”

“ But Kenwick, despite Dayton's admonition to "Brace up and eat a good meal," waved it indifferently aside.
"I'm done for," he said simply. "I don't see how any twelve men could hear the evidence that was presented this morning and find me innocent. And by the time Jarvis gets through telling anything he likes, and proving it——Well, it appears that every person who has been connected in any way with me since this trouble fell upon me has taken advantage of my misfortune to enrich himself. I don't care much now what they do with me. When you lose your faith in humanity it's time to die. ”

“ Then Granville Jarvis, glancing at the haggard face of the young man across the table, ventured the first personal remark of the hour. "You've scarcely eaten a thing, and you look all in. I don't want to intrude into your affairs, but is there anything I can do?"
It was that unexpected kindliness that always proves too much for overstrung nerves. "I've just had bad news," Kenwick admitted. "It's rather shaken me up. But you can't do anything, thanks."
"Better take a walk out in the fresh air," Jarvis suggested. "I know how you feel. It's beastly—when a man is all alone." ”

“ In response to this summons one of the veiled women in the rear of the room rose and came forward. She was quietly dressed in a gown of clinging black silk and a black turban with a touch of amethyst. Every eye in the court-room was fixed upon her, but she took the oath with the unembarrassed self-possession of one long accustomed to the public gaze. Kenwick, turned toward her, detected a faint odor of heliotrope.
"Where do you live, Mrs. Marstan?" Dayton inquired.
She gave a street and number in San Francisco.
"What is your occupation?"
"I am an actress." ”

“ But it had been unnecessary for the attorney to make a plea for his client, after the quietly dramatic testimony of the last witness for the defense. In thrilling terms the "Clarion" described Kenwick's final service at the front, when he had made his way alone across No-Man's-Land and saved for France one of her most gallant officers, and had given in exchange that thing which is more precious than life itself. Only through an accident, which had killed the man who had meant to batten upon his misery, had he been released from a pitiable bondage. ”

“ Clinton had seen other men change, chameleon-like, in the presence of his sister, and he found himself wondering now as he watched Kenwick take his headlong leap into the future, whether it was Marcreta's regal beauty which inspired their admiration or her physical disability which appealed to their chivalry. ”