Phantom Wires Part 33

A sudden sickening fear crept through his aching bones, seeming to leave them fluid, like wax.

"You--you did it?" he asked unsteadily. The face he gazed into looked aged and worn and pallid in the dim half-light of the breaking morning.

A sudden great pity for her tore at his heart.

"No," she cried fiercely. "No--not me!"

But she was still tugging insanely at his obdurate arm. "I tell you, Jim, you must hurry, or it will be too late!"

"Thank G.o.d!" he gasped, scarcely hearing her pleadings.

They were skirting three early delivery-wagons, waiting to unload at the supply door of the hotel. A boy pa.s.sing in the street beyond was shrilly whistling "Tammany."

"Tell me--now!" demanded Durkin.

"When you fainted Mac.n.u.tt reached back for the revolver. He would have shot you, only Keenan called for him. He cried down the shaft that he was dying. He--he must have pushed the b.u.t.ton as he fell. Mac.n.u.tt was still on the floor of the cage, leaning out to take aim at us. Then the steel of the shaft-door and the steel of the elevator cage as it went up came to--oh--I _can't_ tell you now!"

Durkin came to a stop, swaying against her.

"You mean the cage worked automatically, that it went up, with Mac.n.u.tt still leaning out?"

"Yes!" gasped the woman brokenly; and Durkin felt the s.h.i.+ver of the tortured body on which he leaned.

He was silent as they swung into the open street. His exhausted and uncoordinating brain was idly busy with some vague impression of the poignant irony of that end, of how that uncomprehending yet ineluctable power with which this man had toyed and played and sinned had, at the ultimate moment, established its authority and exacted its right.

He pulled himself up with a fluttering gasp, weak, sick, overcome, and was wordlessly grateful for the sustaining arm at his side.

For, once in the open, they were walking eastward, without a sense, momentarily, of either direction or destination.

Above the valley of the mist-hung street a thin and yellow light showed where morning was coming on, tardily, thickly. The boy whistling "Tammany" pa.s.sed out of hearing.

"Thank G.o.d! oh, thank G.o.d!" Frank suddenly sobbed out, tossed and exalted on a wave of blind grat.i.tude.

"G.o.d?" moaned the defeated and unhappy man at her side, dragging painfully on with his bruised and bitter body. "What has G.o.d to do with all this--or with us?"

She could not answer. She saw only a wide and gloomy vista of tangled crime and offense, stretching back into the past, as the tumbled and huddled waves of a sea run out to its crowding skyline. But it was the sea that had delivered them.

Broken, frustrated and defeated, hunted and homeless, without consolation for her Yesterday or respect for her Today, she looked up at the slowly wakening morning with a feeling that seemed to fuse and blend into the fiercest of joy.

Then the momentary exaltation died out of her weary body. They had life--but life was not enough! A sense of something within her falling and crumbling away, a silence of dark questioning and indecision, took possession of her.

Then out of her misery she cried still again, pa.s.sionately, persistently, as she clutched and clung to him, her mate for whom and with him she was once destined to be a wanderer over the face of the earth:

"There must be a G.o.d! I tell you, there _must_ be a G.o.d. He has let us escape!"

The man looked at her, questioningly.

"Don't you understand? This is the last?"

"The last?"

"Yes--yes, the last! You said it would be never again, if once you escaped from this!"

He had forgotten. But the woman at his side, holding him up, had remembered.

"Come!" she said. And they went on again.

CHAPTER x.x.x

ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE

Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the row of pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to the gloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the towering office-buildings on either side of it. There was a touch of autumn in the air, and a black frost of the night before had left the sidewalks carpeted with the mottled roans and yellows and russets of the fallen leaves.

Summer was over and gone. And all life, in some way, seemed to have aged with the ageing of the year. There was something mournful, to the ears of the waiting woman, in the very rustle of the dry leaves under her feet, as she paced the Square. The sight of the half-stripped tree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thought of skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. They seemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability of all things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to live and exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creeping changes and the insidious pa.s.sing away of youth and all it meant to her!

"I hate autumn, most awfully," she had confessed to her husband that morning, dolefully.

She went on, pa.s.sing from under the shadow of the trees, grateful for the rea.s.suring thin suns.h.i.+ne of the late afternoon, that touched the roofs and the tree-tops with gilt, and bathed the more towering office-buildings in a brazen glory of light, and left the street-dust swimming in a vapor of pale gold. The city noises seemed m.u.f.fled and quiescent. A sense of fulfillment, of pensive maturity, of tranquillity after tumult, lay over even the urban world before her. She scarcely knew why or how it was, but it left her melancholy, lonely, homesick for things she could not name.

The waiting woman looked up, and saw her husband. Suddenly, with one deep breath, all the emptiness of life was a thing, if not of the past, at least of the background of consciousness.

He was quite close to her by this time, and as she stood there, waiting, she swept him with her quick and searching gaze. He appeared before her, in that fleeting moment of impersonal vision, strangely objective, as completely and acutely visualized as though she had looked upon him for the first time.

Something in his face wrung her heart, foolishly, something in the wordless, Rembrandt-like poignancy with which it stood out, through the cold autumn sunlight of the late afternoon, in its mortal isolation of soul, its sense of being detached and denied the companions.h.i.+p of its kind. He looked old and tired. He, too, was voyaging towards some melancholy autumnal maturity, some sorrowful denudation of youth, that left him pitiful to her impotently aching heart. He, too, stood in want of some greater love than even she could ever bring to him, as surely as she still cried out for the solace of some companions.h.i.+p, not closer than his, but of a different fiber. She had found herself, of late, vaguely hungering for some influence less autumnal, less vesper-like, to hold and wall her back from those grayer hours of retrospection which crept into her life. Yet this was a secret she had kept always locked in her own holy of holies. For even in the face of that indeterminate feeling, it still stabbed her like a knife to think of any thought or life coming between her and her husband.

She hurried to him, with her habitual little throaty cry, and caught his arm in hers. The gesture was almost a pa.s.sionate one.

"Jim, you're working too hard!" she said, as they went on again, arm in arm.

He studied her upturned face. The pale oval under the great heavy crown of glinting chestnut seemed paler than usual, the violet eyes seemed more shadowy. There clung to her a puzzling and unfamiliar sense of fragility.

"What is it?" he asked, coming to a stop.

"I'm worried about _you_!" she cried. "This is the fourth, almost the fifth month, you've shut yourself up with that transmitter!"

"But it's _work_!" he answered, unmoved.

"Yes, I know, but work without a holiday, without rest----"

"But think what it's going to be to us! All I've got to do now is to get my selenium cell simplified enough for commercial purposes! And another month will do it!"

"But eight months ago you said that!"

"There's nothing left to stick us _now_. Once I get this cell the way I want it, we'll start manufacturing, for all we're worth. In less than six months we'll be filling contracts here in America. Two months later we'll be introducing into seven different countries in Europe a fully protected and patented transmitting camera as far ahead of the old-fas.h.i.+oned photophone as a Bell telephone is ahead of a tin speaking-tube."

"I know, Jim; but you must be more careful! You must, in some way, stop working so hard!"