The Long Lane's Turning Part 17

"I could not believe your voice." The heavy tones jarred across the quiet. "I could not believe that it was actually true!"

"Do you accept my offer?" Echo's voice was without a tremor; it held the same hard quality that controlled her features.

"Accept!" He came toward her--would have taken her hands, but that she drew back. "Do you remember what I told you that day in your garden, a year ago--that nothing counted, nothing but you? For you I would barter every ambition I have ever known. I would sell the world, if I had it!"

"When you told me that," she said steadily, "I answered that I did not love you. I have not changed in that regard, nor shall I ever change.

I can bring you no love, but I can--can marry you."

He laughed harshly. "Very well; I would not have it different, after all. I am not made on the pattern of other men: I would rather take you against your will--you will be all the more mine! I love even that fine disdain of yours! For it shall not last--I swear that! You shall love me in the end, as I have loved you!"

"Loved!" she repeated, with an accent of chill and wondering scorn.

"Yes, loved!" The words were almost a cry: they held fierce protest, even anger, yet there was in them a kind of appeal that lent them a sombre and tragic dignity. "But you despised me! You had stood first of all things. But if you could be nothing to me, then the game I played stood second. I played, as always, to win. The cards fell oddly--your father's letters, no matter how, came into my hands. They were to my purpose, and I would have used them. Why should I hold back? Out of regard for him? I regard no man!"

"Yet he is my father. And you profess--ah, if this is love, I had rather you hated me! I know nothing of a love that is neither brave nor compa.s.sionate, that strikes at the aged and defenceless and that is without--honour!"

He had not taken his eyes from her face, and now there grew in them a strange, haggard fire. Relentless and unscrupulous as was that love of his, Harry could have pitied him at that moment. "Honour?" he said.

"It is an empty word to me! What is honour, what is anything, to me without you--Echo, Echo!"

"If you love me so--and now, indeed, I will believe it--give me the letters!" She took a step toward him, her hands clasped together. "Be as chivalrous as you are strong! Do not do this ign.o.ble thing to break my life! I may be your friend, if not--that other. Surely you cannot want to take me at such a price! Do this and all my life long I will be grateful! Oh, I would ask you on my knees! Give me the letters!"

He looked at her where she stood breathlessly, with arms extended, her face bent and pleading, and the sight opened wide within him an abyss that thronged thick with evil pa.s.sions. The gentler purpose that for a heart-beat had fluttered white wings above the chasm dropped plummet-like into the depths. Give her up? Now, when she came to him with her offer? Resign her--to that tippling _dilettante_, that flamboyant fop and fool who had drowned his success in a bottle? Not he! A savage elation sprang up in him.

"When you are my wife!" he said.

She straightened, withdrawing her arms with a little gesture of despair and relinquishment. "Where are the letters?"

He pointed to the safe. "They are there."

"When will you give them to me?"

"To-night--the same hour you marry me. You shall burn them if you like, here--in this very room--with your own hands."

"You swear?"

"I do. And whatever else men may say of me, there is no man living who can say I have ever lied."

There was an instant's silence and when Craig spoke again all feeling had vanished from his voice. He was once more the deliberate and incisive man of action. He snapped the lid of his watch.

"It is very late," he said, "but it can be managed. It shall be at the hotel--you can rest there while I make the necessary arrangements. My chauffeur is off-duty to-night, but it is only a block away, fortunately. Shall you mind walking?"

"No," she said, apathetically.

Harry was holding himself hard. They were going. He saw clearly his course of action. His two partners in that sorry escapade might have what they had come for--he could compound with them, could take the letters to the hotel and put them into Echo's hands. She would never need to know how he had gained them--that drunken episode, whose very memory must bring a shaming flush to his cheek, should be buried forever! The letters would not have come to her from Craig, and she would stand absolved of her promise. But even as this ran through his mind, fate thrust its hidden hand from the cloud.

"One moment," said Craig. "When I came in, it was beginning to rain.

You will need a cloak of some sort." He turned abruptly to the curtained alcove.

The pressure on Harry's temple relaxed. The black mask thrust forward, the man with the sand-coloured hair parted the hangings--his outstretched arm shot out toward the advancing figure. Harry's gaze saw something red leap up from Craig's temple, even before the terrifying concussion rocked the room--a sound threaded by Echo's scream.

There was a rush, a curse and a scramble, flying feet and a dismayed shout from the hall--then a shocked quiet in which he stood disconcerted and appalled, staring between the s.h.i.+elding curtains, through pungent smoke-wreaths, at a girl, her hand over her eyes, who shrank in overmastering terror from a ma.s.sive form that lay collapsed on the rug before her--Cameron Craig, inert and still, blind and deaf now to sight and sound, the brain empty of scheming, the full cup of his ambition dashed from his lips by the cras.h.i.+ng bullet of a slinking house-breaker.

CHAPTER XX

WHAT MATTERED MOST

With that scream Harry's every nerve had become as tense as wire. In his mind's eye he saw her innocency tangled in this hideous web of burglary--perhaps of murder, her name on every lip, her face blazoned in every yellow extra, as the "woman in the case!" The crisis spelled _now_ and he acted with swift instinct.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed the black mask from the floor and adjusted it to his own face, then darted to the safe and jerked open its heavy door. While the retreating servant's alarm still echoed from the hallway of the empty wing, his fingers, with the swiftness of desperation, went searching the papers in the safe. He came almost instantly upon what he sought--a thin packet of letters, tied together with a small photographic plate, ticketed with the name "Beverly Allen."

Echo had shrunk back, was leaning now against the wall, thriving terror of him in her eyes. He came toward her.

"Here!" he said, his voice m.u.f.fled by the mask. "The letters! Take them and go--go instantly!"

"He has--killed him!" she gasped. "Why do you--"

Harry was sick with apprehension. As in the instant of drowning the smothering intelligence sees pa.s.s in vivid review before it the innumerable mosaic of a busy life-time, so he saw, swiftly arrayed in the imminent climax, the perilous hazards by which she was surrounded.

Suppose Craig was dead, and she were apprehended, the letters put in evidence, and she told the truth, word for word, as she knew it. If her own estimate of their significance was a correct one, might not the most sinister suspicion then rest upon her? And if, as seemed likely, she was wrong in that surmise--even were the presence of accidental burglars proven--what could explain her presence there, alone in Craig's midnight library? Would it not seem to the great sceptical, sophisticated world only a tale invented to cover the old hackneyed story of a woman's infatuation? Would it not ruin her? He thrust the packet into her shaking hands, seized her arm and dragged her to the hall.

"Quick!" he said, roughly. "The house is roused! Hurry--for heaven's sake!" He thrust her through the outer door. "Down the path to the gate! Go!"

She looked at him a breathless instant. On the floor above them a window was flung open and a shout rang out. Then, drawing a breath that was a sob, she caught the letters to her breast, turned, and fled in an anguish of speed through the misty shrubbery.

In the bluntness of the dilemma Harry's only thought had been to get her away and speedily--then to make his own escape. For he himself stood also in evil case. If Echo's presence there would be difficult to explain, what could be said of his own? To whom, save perhaps the occasional student of aberrant mental phenomena, would the true story of his blind and besotted adventuring seem credible? It came to him instantly now, however, that to insure her safe retreat, he must jeopardise, perhaps fatally, his own. The two house-breakers had no doubt planned their flitting--possibly a handy ladder in some hidden angle of the wall; but the open gate was the only route he knew, and he had sent Echo by this way. For him to follow in her footsteps would draw the d.a.m.nable hue and cry and double the odds against her. She needed, perhaps, only minutes, but the stir of frightened awakening that sounded through the upper floor told him that for him even seconds might be fatal. Great beads of sweat broke on his forehead.

And what an alternative! He, Harry Sevier, of position and clean honour, to be arrested red-handed, in apparent comrades.h.i.+p with criminals, a partner in a desperate attempt at robbery under arms! 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 pa.s.sed 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!

A burly man-servant, bareheaded and coatless, came panting from the rear between the trees. Lest he take the path toward the gate, Harry blundered, in his view, across the lighted porch and dashed around the wing, the other giving instant cry. Harry led him on, doubling about the shrubbery. Near at hand the wall reared, hopelessly high and without a break. He skirted a huddle of servants' quarters, rounded the main building and came again to the front. And then, approaching at a double-quick across the lawn, he caught the flash of a bull's-eye.

With a wave of thankfulness he realised that the helmeted figure who carried it was coming from the gate. Echo had pa.s.sed through safely!

Unseen he slipped again into the shadow of the great open door from which he had come. Until that moment he had not realised that he still held in his hand the black mask. There was nothing to do now--his own escape was impossible, but he had saved her!

Suddenly the hall light went up, and with it a brusque voice spoke from the stairway.

"Hands up! I'm covering you. He's here, lads--we've got him cornered.

Tell that silly maid to quit screaming and ring up the police."

Harry had lifted his hands above his head. The black mask fell at his feet. "All right," he said.

CHAPTER XXI