The Rest Hollow Mystery Part 11

He recoiled before that cry, before the havoc that it revealed to him.

Inwardly he cursed himself and then he remembered Glover, as he might have remembered a gun which he had accidentally discharged, believing it to be unloaded. He couldn't endure the thought that _he_ had hurt her and, manlike, seized upon the first scapegoat that offered itself. But he carefully refrained from a mention of the late caller. And when he spoke his voice was harsh with feeling. "Crete, how selfish of you. If you should die, what would become of me?"

The promptness of her reply struck him like a blow. "You'd marry. You're over thirty, Clint, and if it hadn't been for me you would have been married years ago and would be living a normal life in a home of your own. You think----" She was sitting upright now, facing him with a terrible courage. "You think I don't realize what you have sacrificed.

Oh, if you only knew how I've lain awake at night, staring into the dark, praying to die so that I could set you free. You promised mother.

I've always known that you did. But even if you hadn't, you would have promised yourself. And _that's_ what has 'keyed me up,' as you express it. That's what is making me live an octave higher than I can stand. It isn't--any other man who is doing it. It's you."

He sat down on the broad arm of her chair as though overcome by sudden weakness. "Well, thank G.o.d you have told me this, Crete, before it eats any deeper into your soul. Sacrifice you call it. But sacrifice involves renunciation, and I have never renounced any woman for your sake. I have never been engaged--nor wanted to be."

"But you ought to," she told him violently. "You ought to, and you would if you hadn't unconsciously put the idea away from you so many times.

You ought to have a home and wife and children. Oh, I know that you should, and the knowledge has made me desperate."

A dawning suspicion showed in his eyes and then they grew hard. "It must have," he said coldly. "It must have made you very desperate indeed--if you have been considering Glover as a way out."

She met the charge without resentment. "What other way is there for me?

You see, there wouldn't be any danger of my--caring more for somebody else afterward. That is quite beyond the range of possibility now, so it would be safer for me than for some women. And physical disability, the thing that made me--that would have made me refuse a man of a different type, wouldn't count at all with him. His ambitions are purely material, and I could capitalize them. That's all he wants. It would really be quite a fair bargain."

Clinton Morgan rose slowly and stood looking down at his sister as though she were a stranger to whom he had just been introduced. "Well, by Gad!" he breathed, and for a moment was bereft of further speech. And then his words came slowly, and more as the detached fragments of a soliloquy than a response to her own.

"Crete, of all women in the world! You, with your temperament! With an idealism that I and most other men couldn't touch with a ten-foot pole--and yet you'd work out a proposition like that! I didn't know that you saw through Glover. I made that excuse for you, that you were too unsophisticated to see through him. But sizing him up for an adventurer, you frame up a contract that----Why, I'll be hanged if I can believe it, Crete. I simply can't believe it."

She made no defense, and he went on in the same dazed tone.

"Go out on the street and pick up the first girl you meet and bring her in here. If I should make love to her and try to get her to marry me, and succeed, I'd have a much better chance of happiness than this adventure would ever give you. For, at least, I'd be swimming with both hands free. Now listen." He seemed to become suddenly aware of her presence again. "When I fall in love, I'll begin to think about getting married. But I'm not going to be hurried into it by you or anybody else.

And when I decide to marry, not you nor anybody else shall stand in my way."

She reached for him with a convulsive gesture. "Clinton, do you mean that? Do you mean that n.o.body should?"

"I pledge you my word. But this has got to be a bargain. You have demonstrated that you know how to make one. Now don't you ever let that man cross this threshold again."

"I've got to, Clint. After what happened this afternoon, I've got to let him come--for a while."

"Why?"

"Sit down and let me tell you about it. I'll have to tell you, or it will eat up my heart. But the thing will seem incredible."

"Not to me. I think after what I've just heard that I can believe anything."

"Well, you remember that I told you he had promised to read me something that he had written?"

"Yes, advertising matter for the new Carlsbad."

"I thought it was going to be that but I was mistaken. It _was_ advertising matter, but not for Carlsbad."

"For what, then?"

"For Richard Glover."

Clinton grunted. "I see. He is trying to win you by doing the _Oth.e.l.lo_ stunt on paper."

Marcreta appeared to weigh the suggestion. "I don't think it is entirely that. He wants money very badly. He has to have money, a lot of it, for this hotel venture, and he is trying every means of getting it."

"I've always been led to believe," Clinton interposed, "my friends who write have always led me to believe that story-writing (and I a.s.sume that this was some sort of story) is rather an uncertain means of capitalization for a novice."

"But this story was not written by a novice, Clint." Marcreta's voice had sunk suddenly almost to a whisper. "It was written by----"

"By whom?"

"Roger Kenwick."

Clinton Morgan stiffened in his chair. "_What?_" he cried. "You mean to say that he had the nerve to steal the thing and bring it out under his own name?"

"He is too clever to bring it out under his own name. He chose a fict.i.tious name, and he changed the opening paragraph. But except for that and the alteration of the t.i.tle, I pledge you my word, Clint, that that story is exactly as Roger Kenwick read it to me, before he went into the service."

There was a moment of silence. Clinton was recalling what she had said when he came in about ghosts. He scanned her face uneasily. And he saw in it the new expression which had startled Richard Glover. For the first time in his life he began to think of her as she might be if she were unhampered by physical infirmity. And then he fell to wondering what had pa.s.sed between her and Kenwick; just how far the tragedy of his life had affected her. The Morgan reserve had kept her completely silent upon this subject and he had never had any wish to intrude himself into her confidence. He picked up the thread of the story where she had dropped it. "How could it have happened? And how did he dare?"

"I can't even make a guess at how it happened, but so far as daring goes----Well, as I said, he is desperate for money. And the thing, as looked at from his point of view, was not so very risky. Why should it be? He must have discovered in some way that the--the author was not a possible source of trouble. And who else could care about it? Never in his wildest dreams would any one conjure up the possibility that I might know. He doesn't have the least idea, of course, that I ever knew the real author. What a nemesis! That he should have chosen me, of all the people in the world, for his audience! It's so impossible that he will never suspect it."

"But what happened after he had finished? What did you do?"

"Nothing, except to compliment him on his cleverness and try to hide every emotion that I've ever had. It was hard; I think it's the hardest test I've ever had to meet. But it has given me something that I never have had before." Her voice grew husky with sudden embarra.s.sment. "O Clint, you were right about him. I've known for quite a long time that you were right about him, but I couldn't admit it to myself; not with the course that I had decided to take. But, Clint, although I knew he was calculating and sordid and insincere, I didn't know this about him.

I didn't think he hadn't a sense of honor. If I had suspected that, it would have made everything different. But you can see," she went on eagerly, "you can see now why I must let him go on coming here for a while? Why I can't let him get beyond my sight?"

Her brother nodded. "Give him enough rope and he'll hang himself, that's the idea, isn't it?"

"I've got to be very careful, you see. He has told me a good many things about himself of late, and I'm trying to fit them all together. Some of them don't match at all. And now that he has revealed himself, I'm beginning to doubt everything. That Mont-Mer secretarys.h.i.+p, for instance, looks very improbable to me now. I've questioned him about several prominent people down there, and he doesn't seem to have heard of any of them."

"Well, don't worry any more about it just now, Crete. Let's hustle something to eat and call it a day."

When his sister had gone to bed that night Clinton sat for a long time in the library, staring into the fireplace. The little scene which had been enacted there a few hours earlier had stirred him to the depths of his being. It brought him perplexity and a poignant self-reproach. The fact that she was not the crying type of woman made her emotional abandon a particularly haunting thing.

"I've been an awful a.s.s," he muttered. "I can't see just now where it is exactly that I failed. But it's evident that somewhere along the line I've acted like one of the early Christian martyrs."

He picked up a little volume that was lying at his elbow. It was a dainty thing bound in gold and ivory. He remembered that Roger Kenwick had given it to his sister on that last night when he had come to bid her good-by. He had never looked into it before. Now he turned the pages idly. It was modern verse, and he read intermittently here and there.

Among the leaves he came at last upon a folded bit of paper. It was in Marcreta's handwriting; evidently something that she had copied. He tilted it under the light and read the trio of stanzas.

I cannot drive thee from my memory; I cannot live and tear thee from my heart.

Is there no corner of oblivion's realm Whence thy uneasy spirit may depart?

If love were dead, if love could only die, And leave me desolation and despair; The emptiness of day, the aching night, All these at last my soul could learn to bear.

But ever when I think thy fire is spent And seek the peace of death's all-sacred pain, Behold, comes Memory with her torch a-light-- And all my altar flames to life again.

Clinton Morgan folded the bit of paper with reverent fingers. For he knew, all at once, that this was not a copy of anything, but that he had unwittingly torn aside the veil of his sister's secret soul. He felt all of the honorable man's repugnance against outraged decency. The sc.r.a.p of paper seemed to scorch his fingers. With a punctilious regard for detail, which he knew to be absurd, he tried to find the exact page where it had been concealed. Then he put the volume back upon the table and went over to the window. His conjectures concerning this romance had come to an end. Now he knew, and knowing felt suddenly weighted with guilt.

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.

And then his thoughts reverted to Kenwick, and the days that now seemed almost like the unreal days of a dream, when he had first known him over at the fraternity-house in Berkeley. He recalled the night when he had brought him home to dinner and introduced him to Marcreta and tried to make him show off for her like a trained puppy. Perhaps it would have been better if he had never brought him. But these things were in the hands of fate and fate has an infinite number of tools. Standing there at the window, gazing at the reflection of the gas logs mirrored against the black pane, he found himself growing suddenly resentful of the casual emergencies of life. Mere cobweb threads they were but upon them hung the destinies of human souls. You turned the first corner instead of the second in an hour of aimless wandering, and the circulation of your life current was completely changed. It was folly to believe that all the corners were posted with signs to be read and heeded by that secret autocrat, the subconscious mind. The intricacies of such a universe made the brain reel. It was better to believe that we played the game blind, and that the stakes were to the courageous.

He went back to the table and turned out the reading-lamp, blotting out the sight of the white and gold book.