The Long Lane's Turning Part 8

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."

He bowed and stood waiting.

"I fancied," she went on, "in certain of your remarks at the table a lurking innuendo. It is difficult to reply to such a thing. You would make it possible if you would put it in a more direct form."

"Your own observation does not appear to err in directness," he answered, after a pause. "I am afraid I must ask you to descend to plain English."

"In the course of the dinner you told a story."

"Henceforth I shall congratulate myself on my skill as a _raconteur_."

His tone was mildly ironic.

"It seemed to me--and I think I am of average intelligence and not more fanciful than most--that by that story you intended to convey, an insinuation against the reputation of a gentleman whom I do not care to hear maligned."

He looked at her with smouldering eyes. He was feeling admiration for her quick, hot southern blood and resentful spirit. It was part of that splendid type of womanhood that he had determined to make his own.

And that it was now displayed in defence of the man whose weakness he despised and whose personality he hated filled him with a dull, glooming fury. His lips twisted. "Maligned?" he repeated, in an accent that was a question.

"That was my word," she said steadily.

"You appear to attach an extraordinary importance to my tale," he retorted, with grim sarcasm.

"Do you deny that there _was_ innuendo?"

He smiled. "I can endure even that suspicion, since it is such a compliment to my own subtlety. May I ask, in my turn, in whose interest you so valorously take up the cudgels?"

"Your story directly followed a reference to Mr. Henry Sevier's handling of a case in court here. The unexpected outcome of the trial in your tale was due to the fact that its chief character, though no one realised it, was under the influence of liquor. The implication seemed obvious--that Mr. Sevier was not himself when he conducted his defence."

He shrugged his shoulders. "You are the only one who has drawn such a conclusion?"

Her pale face blazed. "Oh, I understand! You intended the inference for me alone!"

"Well?" he asked, with aggravating calmness.

"Did you insinuate that, or did you not?" Her pent-up anger was tearing now at her self-control.

He laughed, a short, jarring laugh. He felt an insane desire to seize that slender, unyielding body in his great arms, to rain kisses on that vivid, scornful mouth with its short upper lip, and bend or break her like a sapling to his savage will. "Suppose I did," he said stonily.

"What then?"

"That was a contemptible act!" The young voice cut like a whip-lash and involuntarily Craig's big fists clenched. "And if I were Mr.

Sevier, I would horsewhip you!"

A sound from behind them fell across the surcharged quiet. Both turned astonished faces--Echo's quivering with feeling, Craig's set and stormy--upon the man whose name had just been spoken. Neither had heard his step as he came quickly along the gra.s.sy path, nor had Sevier guessed the situation till those pregnant sentences sent the blood from his heart. He had thought the secret of his failure unsuspected. The realisation now that one, at least, had guessed the truth had been instantly swallowed up in the bitter knowledge that it had fallen to her--the one woman in the world--to defend him, who was undeserving!

Craig regarded him with a veiled smile that was half a sneer. The apparition had come at a fateful moment. Then his glance pa.s.sed to Echo. "May I ask," he said, "whether you have yet cross-examined Mr.

Sevier?"

He bowed and went quickly up the path toward the lighted piazzas.

There ensued a silence in which two minds travelled far. Echo had sat down upon the bench, her face averted. Her anger had faded out and her heart was hammering at the thought that Harry had heard, in her defence of him, what was in truth a confession. Across the aching interval broke the wanton bubble of a whip-poor-will.

"Echo--" he said in a m.u.f.fled voice.

She looked up at him in the feathery light. "You heard--I wish you hadn't. Yet I couldn't help it! That ridiculous slur! But you can't possibly imagine that--that any one who knows you--"

He stopped her with an abrupt gesture. "Wait. I want to--I must tell you something."

"No, no!" she protested. "You shall not! I need no a.s.surance. Do you think that I--"

He shook his head. But for that last sneering look of Craig's, that satiric challenge, he might have maintained a silence that would have seemed to her only a proper pride in himself and a deserved contempt for the whisper of malice. But the look and sneer had flicked him on the raw, had called to some element of naked honesty deep within him.

In that second he had known, shame-stricken, that whatever the outcome there could be no evasion between them. There must be the truth. He was no longer what he had thought himself, but he would be no malingerer.

"Thank you," he said, "for that! Yet what Craig wished you to believe--was quite true."

She stared at him unbelievingly. "True!" Her lips formed rather than spoke the word.

"Yes. I _was_ under the influence of liquor. But for that I should have won the case, I believe."

"But," she faltered, "I don't--understand. Why, I never saw you in--that condition in my life! I was there. I--I heard you speak."

"It is not the first time," he said steadily. "Nor the second, nor the third. Liquor helped me to win my cases. I thought I had made it my slave when it had made itself my master. This time it failed me. And I--I failed my client," he added bitterly.

She did not catch the note of pain, of deep contrition in his voice.

Her own hurt was too keen. She only heard the high-built structures of her own ideals crumbling down about her feet. "So Craig was right!"

she said under her breath.

"Don't think it is easy for me to tell you this," he went on. "It is because I must. All my life I have cared very little what others thought. But--you--I care what you think. I never knew how much till now, when I have thrown your good opinion of me in the dust!" He bent and took her hands. "Echo, is it the death of your ideal of me?"

Her lingers trembled in his grasp. Pictures were flas.h.i.+ng before her mind--frost-stung October days when they had galloped with the baying hounds, over the blown, tinted leaves and russet fields--winter skating-parties on the frozen river, summer dances like that of to-night, for which the music was now swinging a hundred yards away--always it had been she and Harry Sevier. He had been so superior to the blandishments of the smaller vices. Others had failed and fallen; only he had remained on his pedestal, a type of brilliant accomplishment. She saw now his success as unenduring, fict.i.tious, his talents besmirched with the vice that was most hateful to her. "Not the first time, nor the second, nor the third!" In their own circle she had seen the dreadful cycle more than once repeated--the slow, baleful fastening of habit, the struggle, the piteous, ign.o.ble yielding and the final slipping down to degraded depths from which there could be no resurrection. There was Chilly, her own twin-brother, with his feet set on the same primrose path. And now was it to be Harry Sevier?

She shuddered and drew her hand from his clasp.

"I--see," he said, in a slow, even voice. "You can't trust me." It was not the Sevier that had kissed her hand who spoke now, but one whom that gesture seemed to have flung an infinite distance from her.

"Can you trust yourself?" she asked.

Harry's tongue touched his lips--as it had done in his inner office on the day of the trial, when he stood looking at her picture on his desk.

Since that day he had known no breath of the periodic craving. But now, curiously, he felt his mouth growing all at once arid and dry with the old slinking thirst. _Could_ he trust himself? The question seemed to thrust itself at him with a malevolent significance. How much of his will had he indeed, surrendered? Did he know?

There rose up suddenly in him a savage resolution. Not another drop upon his lips--never, never! Not for the sake of success, not for his very life, never so long as he lived!

He took her hands in both his own, leaned down and kissed them. Then, without a word he went rapidly from her.

CHAPTER X

AFTER A YEAR