| 1 2 3 4 5 |  |
|
"Twenty thousand dollars. More. It doesn't matter. It's life for both of you. Have you the right to refuse it? Take it and go." She let the bank-notes fall from her hands unnoticed. "Do you think I would leave you now?" she cried in a voice of thrilled music. "Even if they weren't sure to trace me, as they would be." This last she uttered as an unimportant matter dismissed with indifference. "There will be nothing to trace. My confession will cover the ground." "Confession? To what?" "To the murder of Ely Crouch." Some sort of sound I was conscious of making. I suppose I gasped. But they were too engrossed to hear. "You would do even that? But the penalty--the shame--" "What do they matter to a dying man?" he retorted impatiently. She had fallen back from him, in the shock of his suggestion, but now she came forward again slowly, her glorious eyes fixed on his. So they stood face to face, soul to soul, deep answering unto deep, and, as I sit here speaking, I saw the wonder and the miracle flower in her face. When she spoke again, her words seemed the inevitable expression of that which had passed silently between them. "Do you love me?" "Before God I do," he answered. "Take me away! There's time yet. I'll go with you anywhere, anywhere! I'm all yours. I've loved you from the first, I think, as you have loved me. All I ask is to live for you, and when you die, to die with you." Fire flashed from his face at the call. He took a step toward her. A shout, half-muffled, sounded from outside the window. Instantly the light and passion died in his eyes. I have never seen a face at once so stern and so gentle as his was when he caught the outreaching hands in his own. "You forget that they must find one of us, or it's all no use. Listen carefully, dear one. If you truly love me, you must do as I bid you. Give me my chance of fooling fate; of making my death worth while. It won't be hard." He took the little box from his pocket. "It will be very easy." "Give it to me, too," she pleaded like a child. "Ah, Ned, we can't part now! Both of us together." He shook his head, smiling. The man's face was as beautiful as a god's at that moment or an angel's. "You must go back to your sister," he said simply. "You haven't the right to die." He turned to the table, drew a sheet of paper to him and wrote four words. You all know what they were; his confession. Then his hand went up, a swift movement, and a moment later he was setting back the glass of water upon the desk whence he had taken it. "Love and glory of my life, will you go?" he said. "Yes," she whispered. Not until then did the paralysis, which had gripped me when I saw Ned turn the pellets into his hand, relax. I ran forward. The girl cried out. Ned met me with his hand against my breast. "How much have you heard?" he said quickly. "Enough." "Then you'll understand." His faith was more irresistible than a thousand arguments. "Take her home, Chris." I held out my hand. "Come," I said. She turned and faced him. "Must I? Alone?" What a depth of desolation in that word! "There is no other way, dearest one." "Good-bye, then, until we meet," she said in the passionate music of her voice. "Every beat of my heart will bring me nearer to you. There will be no other life for me. Soon or late I'll come to you. You believe it. Say you believe it!" "I believe it." He bent and kissed her lips. Then his form slackened away from the arms that clasped it, and sank into the chair. A policeman's whistle shrilled outside the window. The faintest flicker of a smile passed over the face of the sleeper. I took her away, still with that unearthly ecstasy on her face. * * * * * The glow of the narrator's cigar waxed, a pin-point of light in a world of dimness and mystery. Subdued breathing made our silence rhythmic. When I found my voice, it was hardly more than a whisper. "Good God! What a tragedy!" "Tragedy? You think it so?" The Little Red Doctor's gnarled face gleamed strangely behind the tiny radiance. "Dominie, you have a queer notion of this life and little faith in the next." "'She met death as a tryst,'" murmured the old librarian. "And he! 'Trailing clouds of glory!' The triumph of that victory over fate! One would like to have seen the meeting between them, after the waiting." The Little Red Doctor rose. "When some brutal and needless tragedy of the sort that we medical men witness so often shakes my faith in my kind, I turn to think of those two in the splendor of their last meeting on earth, the man with the courage to face death, the woman with the courage to face life." He strode over to the table and lifted the newspaper, which had slipped to the floor unnoticed. The girlish face turned toward us its irresistible appeal, yearning out from amidst the lurid indignities of print. "You heard from her afterward?" I asked. "Often. The sister died and left her nothing to live for but her promise. Always in her letters sounded the note of courage and of waiting. It was in the last word I had from her--received since her death--set to the song of some poet, I don't know who. You ought to know, Mr. Sheldon." His deep voice rose to the rhythm.
"Ah, long-delayed to-morrow! Hearts that beat "May Probyn," the librarian identified. "Too few people know her. A wonderful poem!" Silence fell again, folding us and our thoughts in its kindly refuge. Rising, I crossed to the window and drew the curtain aside. A surging wind had swept the sky clear, all but one bank of low-lurking, western cloud shot through with naming crimson. In that luminous setting the ancient house across Our Square, grim and bleak no longer to my eyes, gleamed, through eyes again come to life, with an inconceivable glory. Behind me in the shadow, the measured voice of the witness to life and death repeated once more the message of imperishable hope: "And still I say, 'To-morrow we shall meet.'" THE END
|
||
|
| 1 2 3 4 5 | |