Part 18

"No." Her denial rang out emphatically. "Craig," she appealed, "what is the meaning of this catechism? I have been with Amy ever since I left the house. She is in great trouble. It is a terrible story."

"It is indeed," struck in Julie. "Do you swallow it, Craig? Can anybody! Perhaps now you will begin to use the reasoning powers which your infatuation for this adventuress has clouded. How could you ever have trusted her! Wasn't the bare fact of the reformatory enough?"

"Craig!" Appeal, reproach, anguish, all blended in that bitter cry.

Atwood disclaimed responsibility with a gesture.

"Your mother," he said.

"Yes; your mother," Julie echoed. "Before she sat ten minutes in this room she had told all she knew--do you understand me?--_all she knew_! I was your friend till then. I don't pretend I was not cut to the heart by Craig's mad marriage. I would have given my right hand to prevent it. Hadn't I seen you before you ever entered his studio? Didn't I know how vulgar your associates were? Perhaps your 'Amy' was the drunken little fool who created a scene in the restaurant where I made your acquaintance? But I tried to put that out of mind when I accepted the marriage. I took you into my own home; I hoped to school you to fill your new place in life worthily."

"And have I not?" Jean interpolated proudly. "Have I shamed you or him?"

Julie scorned reply.

"But I knew nothing of the refuge story," she railed on. "I never suspected the awful truth when you evaded every question I asked about your girlhood. I knew your past had been common; I could not dream it had also been criminal."

"Julie!" Atwood entreated.

"The time has come for plain dealing," she answered him. "You will live to thank me for opening your eyes."

Jean took a step nearer her accuser.

"Let her go on," she challenged contemptuously. "She only distorts what I have told you already."

Julie's dark face grew thunderous.

"Do I!" she retorted. "Let us see. What have you told Craig of this man Bartlett? What have you told him of the flat at the Lorna Doone? Where are your glib answers now? Can you suppose that, knowing your history, I would suspect nothing when Satterlee put you out of countenance at the Copley Studios? A double, indeed! From that moment you avoided the place. From that moment every shift of yours strengthened my belief that I had stumbled on one more murky chapter of your life. Satterlee's memory improved; he recalled your twin's name. Thereafter my investigations were child's play. Can you, dare you, deny that you were known at the Lorna Doone as Bartlett's wife?"

Jean's face grew pale; Craig's, her agonized glance perceived, was whiter still.

"It was a mistake," she answered. "They thought--"

"Ah!" Julie's cry was long-drawn, triumphant. "Do you hear, Craig? She admits that she was known as Mrs. Bartlett. My poor brother! By her own confession you have married either a discarded mistress or a bigamist!"

Jean's brain whirled. That passion could put such a monstrous construction on her conduct, passed belief.

"Lies!" she gasped.

"Prove them false!"

"Lies, cruel lies!"

Atwood sprang to her side.

"I could not believe them, Jean," he cried. "You are too honest, too pure--"

"Prove them false!" Julie challenged again.

Jean turned her back upon her.

"This is between you and me, Craig," she pleaded, struggling for self-control. "I am the honest woman you have always believed me. I have concealed nothing shameful. My only thought was to spare you pain. You shall know now, everything; but it is a story for your ears alone. It concerns us only, dear, our happiness, our love."

He cast a look of entreaty at Julie, who met it with an acid smile.

"You are wax in her hands," she taunted. "She can cajole you into thinking black is white."

"No, no," he protested. "You are unjust to her, Julie. I know her as you cannot. She is the soul of truth."

Jean's heart leaped at his words.

"God bless you for that!" she exclaimed. "Let her hear, then! Why should I fear her now?"

The dentist's attentions at the boarding-house, their walks and theater-goings, his help when the department store cast her out, their engagement, the taking and furnishing of a flat, the apparition of Stella, the confession and the crash--all she touched upon without false shame, without attempt to gloss her free agency and responsibility. She dealt gently with Paul, magnifying his virtues, palliating his great fault, bearing witness to the sincerity of his remorse. But Craig she could not spare, pity him as she might. She saw his drawn face wince as if under bodily pain, and before she ended he was groping for a chair. She perceived, as she had feared, that an ideal was gone from him, perhaps the dearest ideal of all; yet she did not realize what a blow she had struck this stunned, flaccid figure with averted head, till, breaking the long silence which oppressed the room when she had done, he asked,--

"Did you love this man, Jean?"

She weighed her answer painfully.

"Not as we know love, Craig," she said.

"You would have sold yourself for a home--for a flat in the Lorna Doone! Where was your remembrance of the birches then?"

She forgave the words in pity for the pain which begot them. She forgot Julie. Nothing in life mattered, if love were lost. A great devouring fear lest he slip from her drove her forward and flung her kneeling at his side.

"You were with me always, Craig, always," she said brokenly. "Is it too hard to believe? If you try to paint an ideal and the picture falls short, does that make your ideal less dear? What hope had I ever to meet you again? How could I dream that I stood for more in your thoughts than a heedless fugitive of whom you were well rid? You could not know that you had given me courage for the guardhouse and the prison; made me strive to become the girl you thought me; changed the whole trend of my foolish life! How then have I been unfaithful? Was it treachery to you, whom I never looked to see again, that when a good man--yes; at heart, Paul is a good man--offered me a way of escape I should take it? You ask me if I would have sold myself for a home, for that poor little flat in the Lorna Doone whose cheapness I never appreciated till to-night--I answer no. I know now that I did not love him; but I did not know it then. It was left for you to teach me."

He made no response when she ceased. His hands lay nerveless under hers; his eyes still brooded on the fireless hearth. So for a hundred heart-beats they remained together.

"You believe me, Craig?"

"Yes," he wrenched forth at last.

Jean slowly withdrew her hands.

"But you cannot wholly forgive?"

He had no answer.

"I can say no more," she added, rising; and came again face to face with Julie, who made way for her at the door. "I leave your house to-morrow, Mrs. Van Ostade. If I could, I would go to-night."

Free of gnawing secrecies at last! The thought brought a specious sense of peace. Julie's yoke broken! Her step on the stair grew buoyant. The battle desired by MacGregor had been fought. Precipitated by causes with which neither had reckoned, waged with a fierce heat alien to art, Craig's emancipation had nevertheless been at stake. The break had come, and it was beyond remedy. He must cleave to his wife.

Too excited for sleep, she began at once her preparations for quitting Julie's hateful roof, and one after another overcame the obstacles which packing in the small hours entailed. Each overflowing chair, every yawning door and drawer, testified the increased complexity of her life and the bigness of her task. The bride of a single dinner-dress had become under Craig's lavish generosity the mistress of great possessions. There were gowns of many uses and many hues; hats and blouses in extravagant number; shoes--a little regiment of shoes aligned neatly in their trees; costly trifles for her desk; books and pictures in breath-taking profusion.

She now remembered that her one trunk, with Craig's many upon which she depended, was stored on the top floor, and she debated whether to wake one of the servants or await her husband's help. In the end she did neither. She disliked Mrs. Van Ostade's servants, one and all, suspecting them of tale-bearing, and after a vain wait for Craig, who still lingered below, she went about the business for herself. It was a difficult matter to accomplish without rousing the house, and when, after much travail of mind and disused muscle, she effected the transfer of her own trunk, she was tempted to do what she could with it and let her other belongings follow as they might. This course, also, she rejected. Nothing except a complete evacuation would satisfy, and she craved the joy of leaving Julie's bridal gift conspicuously unpacked.

By three o'clock all was done, and as she flung herself wearily upon her bed she heard Craig's leaden step mount the stair. He entered their living-room, which, save for one or two small articles he would scarcely miss, she had not dismantled, switched on the electricity, and after a pause closed the door of the dressing-room connecting with the darkened chamber where she lay. Jean heard him light a cigarette and drop heavily into a chair, which he abandoned almost at once to pace the floor. The sound of his pacing went on and on, varied only by the scrape of matches as he lit cigarette after cigarette, the penetrating oriental scent of which began in time to seep into her own room and infect her with his unrest.

She took alarm to find him so implacable. Did his sister sway him still? Had Julie poisoned the truth with the acid of her hate? Might she lose him after all? She could scarcely keep herself from calling his name. And the monotonous footfall went on and on, on and on, trampling her heart, grinding its iteration into her sick brain. Then, when it seemed endurable no longer, it became a sedative, and she slept to dream that she was a new inmate of Cottage No. 6, with a tyrannous, vindictive matron whose face was the face of Julie Van Ostade.

She stirred with the day and lay with shut eyes, tasting the blissful reality of familiar things. This was no cell-like room, no refuge pallet. She had only to stretch out her hand--thus--to the bed beside her own, and touch--? Nothing! Craig's bed stood precisely as the maid had prepared it for his coming. Was he pacing yet? She listened, but no sound came. Creeping to the living-room door she listened again; then turned the knob. Empty! The untouched pillows of the divan, the overflowing ash-tray, the lingering haze, bespoke an all-night vigil. He had not only let the sun go down upon his wrath, he had watched it rise again! An answering glow kindled in her bruised pride.

Left rudderless by his silence, she cast about eagerly for some new plan of action while she dressed. Last night she had meant to order her things sent to the studio until they could plan the future, but that course seemed feasible no longer. She searched her pocketbook for funds and found only tickets for a popular comedy. She smiled upon them grimly. Comedy, forsooth! Here was more comic stuff--the screaming farce of woman's lot! Flouted, she had no choice but to fold her hands and wait while the dominant male in his wisdom decided her destiny.

At her accustomed hour she touched the bell for her coffee, and with sharpened observation saw at once that, unlike other days, the tray held but a single service.

"Mr. Atwood breakfasted downstairs?" she said carelessly.

The maid's eyes roved the dissipated scene of Atwood's reflections and lit upon a strapped trunk which Jean had for convenience pulled into the dressing-room.

"Yes," she answered. "Mr. Craig came down very early."

"Did he go out?"

"More than an hour ago."

Jean let the coffee go cold and crumbled her toast untasted. How could she endure this passivity! Must she forever be the spectator? Amidst these drab reveries her eyes rested for some minutes upon the topmost of the morning papers, which the maid had brought as usual with the breakfast, before one of its by no means modest head-lines resolved itself into the words,--

MURDERED IN CENTRAL PARK

Then a familiar name and a familiar address leaped from the context, and she seized breathlessly upon the brief double-leaded paragraph and read it twice from end to end.

"The northern extremity of Central Park," ran the account, "became last night the scene of a tragedy which its loneliness and insufficient lighting have long invited. Shortly after midnight the body of Frederic Chapman, a commercial traveler in the employ of Webster, Cassell & Co., residing in the Lorna Doone apartments, not ten blocks from the spot where he met his death, was found with a bullet through the heart. Up to the time of going to press, no trace of the murderer or weapon had been discovered, although the physician summoned by Officer Burns, who came upon the body in his regular rounds, was of the opinion that life had been extinct less than an hour. Both precinct and central office detectives are at work upon the case. Mr. Chapman leaves a young widow, who is prostrated by the blow."

Jean sprang to her feet, her own woes forgotten in her horrified perception of Amy's dire need. Tearing out the paragraph, she penciled across its head-lines, "I have gone to her," and enclosing it in an envelope addressed to Atwood, set it conspicuously on his desk.

XXIX

Early as she reached the Lorna Doone, Jean found others before her, drawn by the morbid lure of sudden death. The hawkers of "extras" already filled the street with their cries; open-mouthed children swarmed about the entrance of the apartment-house as if this, not the park, were the historic ground; while Amy's narrow hall was choked with reporters, amidst whom Amy herself, colorless, bright-eyed, babbled wearilessly of the drummer's virtues.

"He was the best salesman they ever had," she was saying. "Put that in the paper, won't you? In another year he'd most likely have had an interest in the business. They couldn't get along without him, they said. He was the best salesman they ever had. People just had to buy when Fred called. He seemed to hypnotize customers. One man--" and she rambled into the story of a conquest, beginning nowhere and ending in fatuity with the unceasing refrain, "He was the best salesman they ever had."

The sight of Jean shunted her from this theme to self-pity. She clung to her hysterically, declaring she was her only friend and calling upon the reporters to witness what a friend she was! They had, of course, heard of Francis Craig Atwood, the great artist? This was his wife--her old friend, her only friend. Jean urged her gently toward the bedroom, and, shutting the door upon her, turned and asked the pressmen to go. They assented and left immediately, save one of boyish face who delayed some minutes for sympathetic comment on the tragedy.

"I'm only a cub reporter, Mrs. Atwood," he added, "and I have to take back something. That's the rule in our office--get the story or get out. Poor Mrs. Chapman was too upset to give me anything of value. Perhaps you'd be willing to help me make good?"

"I know nothing but what the papers have told," Jean replied.

"I don't mean the shooting--merely a fact or two about Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, whom you know so well. When were they married?"

"I can't tell you," she said hastily. "I--I was not present."

"But approximately? I don't want the dates. She looks a bride, and you know the public is interested in brides. They haven't lived here long, I suppose?"

"No; not long," she assented, thankful for the loophole; "a few weeks."

"This was their first home?"

"Practically. They boarded for a time. Excuse me now, please. You must see how much she needs me."

"She is lucky to have you, Mrs. Atwood. Girlhood friends, I presume?"

"Yes, yes. Go now, please."

She turned him out at last and paused an instant to brace her nerves before joining Amy. At the far end of the hall the parlor door stood ajar, and she saw with a shiver that the shades were down. Then Amy peered from the bedroom in search of her, a grief-stricken figure with wringing hands.

"Don't keep me in here," she moaned. "Let me walk, walk." And she moved toward the darkened room.

"Not there!" Jean cried, preventing her. "Not there!"

Amy stared an instant and then uttered a laugh more terrible than tears.

"He is not in the parlor," she replied. "They took him to an undertaker's. There's a man--I forgot to tell you--there's a man from the undertaker's here now. He wants clothes, black clothes. He's in the spare room, hunting. I--I couldn't touch them. I told him to look for himself. You help him, Jean. I couldn't touch Fred's things. It seemed--oh, I just couldn't!"

Jean let her wander where she would, and opened the guest-room door. A heavy-jowled man pivoted about at her entrance and stuffed a handful of letters into a pocket of one of the dead drummer's coats. The garment was not black.

"What are you doing there?" she demanded. "That coat might answer for a horse-race, not a funeral."

The man had a glib answer ready.

"I took it down to look behind," he said. "The letters fell out."

She doubted his word and, walking to the closet, made a selection from the more sober wear.

"Take these," she ordered.

He thanked her, gathered the clothing together, and left the room; and she heard the hall door close after him while she lingered a moment to replace the things his rummaging had disturbed. Coming out herself, the first object to meet her eye was a telltale bit of cloth protruding from the umbrella-rack, into which, she promptly discovered, the supposed undertaker's assistant had stuffed every article she had given him. The sight unnerved her, and she sought Amy in the parlor and told her what she had seen.

"Don't let people in here," she warned. "The man was, of course, a reporter. No experienced detective would have left the clothes behind."

Amy plucked at her throat as if stifled.

"What did he w-want?" she chattered. "What did he want?"

"Scandal, probably."

"You think so?" whispered the girl, ghastly white. "You think so? You don't suppose he came because--because he suspects--"

"Suspects whom?"

"Me!" she wailed, her cry trembling to a shriek. "Me! Me! Me! I did it, Jean. I shot him. I killed Fred. I'm the one. I--"

Jean clapped a hand over her mouth.

"Hush!" she implored. "You're mad!"

Amy tore herself free and dropped huddled to the floor.

"I'm not mad. I wish I were. They'd only lock me up, if I were mad. Now they'll kill me, too."

Jean shook her roughly.

"Stop!" she commanded. "Some one might overhear and believe you. Don't say such things. It's dangerous."

Amy threw back her head with a repetition of her awful laugh.

"You don't believe me!" she cried. "I'll make you believe me. Listen: He came home last night after you left. You hadn't been gone ten minutes when he came. He'd been drinking, but he was good-natured, and I thought I would speak to him myself. It didn't seem as if I could wait for you to speak to him, Jean. I thought I could manage it--he was so good-natured--and so I asked him to make me an honest woman. I never mentioned the baby--then! And I wasn't cross or mean with him. I asked him as nice as I knew how. But he wouldn't listen--it was the drink in him--and he struck me. Fred never struck me before in his life. He was always such a gentleman. It was the drink in him made him strike me. After that I went into the bedroom and cried, and I heard him go to the sideboard and pour out more whisky. He did it twice. By and by he came into the hall and took his hat, and I called to him and asked him not to go out again. I said I was sorry for bothering him; but he went out just the same. Then I followed. I knew, I don't know how, but I knew he was going to Stella's, and it didn't seem, after all I'd been through, I could stand for it. Sure enough, he turned down the avenue toward that flat of hers I told you about, with me after him keeping on the other side. I lagged behind a little when he reached Stella's street, for it was lighter by her door than on the avenue, and when I got around the corner he wasn't anywhere to be seen, and I knew for certain he'd gone in at her number. I'd been trembling all over up to then, but now I felt bold as a lion, I was so mad, and I marched straight up to the house myself. I decided I wouldn't ring her bell--it's just one of those common flat-houses without an elevator--but somebody else's, and then, after the catch was pulled, go up and take them by surprise.