_ CHAPTER X
Julian Bayne, his long coat covered with snow and jingling with icicles, his chill face scarlet with cold, his lips emitting a cloud of visible breath, his eyes intent beneath the brim of his frost-rimmed hat, stood gazing as if petrified by the strange scene he had witnessed just enacted within, the strange words he had overheard.
"What is all this?" he cried at length. "Did you think I couldn't make it?" Then to Lillian specially, as he took her hand, "Am I late?" he asked solicitously. "I made all the speed I could. I hope I haven't killed the horse."
He glanced over his shoulder through the open door, where he could see a bit of the snowy drive, on which the groom was slowly leading the animal, heavily blanketed, up and down before taking him to the stable. Although sobbing now and again from the stress of his exertions, the horse had evidently sustained no permanent injury.
"I came instantly," Julian repeated. "What is it?"
"Nothing!" cried Lillian hysterically, clinging to his arm. "They all think it is _nothing_--nothing at all."
He stared at her somewhat grimly, though evidently mystified.
"Come," he said, "let us get at the rights of this. And I'd really like a glimpse of the fire--I'm half frozen."
He threw off his overcoat, stiffened with the ice, and strode into the library toward the blazing hearth. Mrs. Marable was suddenly roused to remember the decoction that she herself had prepared, and put the glass into his hand. But he took only a single swallow, gazing in absorption at Gladys, who had undertaken to detail the discovery of the stone in the pocket of the little red coat, and the theory that Mrs. Royston had desperately based upon it. Lillian herself was hanging her head in shame for her folly, that she should for this fantastic illusion have inflicted on this man of all men, on whom indeed she had least claim, the agony he had endured, and the peril of his life.
She could never have described the overwhelming tumult of her heart when he lifted his head at the end of the story, with a look of grave and intent pondering.
"This stone is the efflorescence of a limestone cavern, given to him, no doubt, but when and where? And how is it that you did not know it, knowing his every thought?" he said in a tense, excited voice.
Lillian was on her feet again in an instant, her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, her voice trembling. "Oh, Julian, you think it is possible that Archie is alive! Oh, I believe it! I believe it! And the thought is like the elixir of life, like the ecstasy of heaven!"
He made no direct reply, but turned hastily to go to the telephone. "You cannot afford to lose any chance, even the most remote. The county officers must be notified, advertisements sent out, and offers of reward. There is not a moment to be wasted."
"But Gladys thinks it is a folly," cried Lillian, following him into the hall, eager to test the negative view, fearful of her trembling hope; "and my aunt is troubled for my sanity."
As he waited for the line, which was "busy," he turned and sternly surveyed her. "Why should you defer to their views, Lillian? Haven't you yet had enough of ordering your life by the standards of others? Be yourself--if you have any identity left at this late day. Rely on your own judgment, consult your own intuitions, rest on your own sense of right and justice and conscience, and you cannot err!"
"Oh, Julian!" she exclaimed in tearful amaze. "How can you say that of me--of _me_?"
He looked startled for one moment, as if he had spoken inadvertently, for her guidance, his inmost thought, without regard to its personal significance. Then, with a rising flush and a conscious eye, he sought to laugh off the episode. "Oh, well, I didn't _mean_ it, you know! Only the compliments of the newly arrived." And as the bell jingled he took down the receiver with obvious relief.
In the presence of poor Gladys, for whose calamity there could be no prospect of alleviation, the subject of Briscoe's death and the child's abduction as connected therewith could not be discussed in all its bearings. Only Mrs. Marable joined Lillian in the library that afternoon when the sheriff arrived, and the mother's eager hopes were strengthened to note the serious importance he attached to the discovery of the bit of stone in the pocket of the little red coat. He was obviously nettled that it should have remained there unnoted while the garment was in his keeping, but Lillian tactfully exhibited the unusual inner pocket in the facing, the "shy pocket," which, thus located, offered some excuse for the failure to find earlier its contents. With Julian Bayne's suggestions, the sheriff presently hammered out a theory very closely related to the truth. The visit of the revenue officer was detailed by Bayne, and considered significant, the more since it began to be evident that Briscoe was murdered, and in his case a motive for so perilous a deed was wholly lacking. The stone lily in the child's pocket made it evident that he himself had been in the moonshiners' cavern, the only one known to the vicinity, or that the stone had been given to him by some frequenter of that den--hardly to be supposed previous to the catastrophe. In fact, the sheriff declared that he had reason to believe that the child was wearing the coat at the time of the tragedy, and thus it could not have been cast loosely from the vehicle at the moment when the mare had fallen from the bluff to the depths below. It had been restored to the locality in a clumsy effort to prove the child's death.
The officer was a big, burly man, handsome in his way, his ponderosity suggesting a formidable development of muscle rather than fat. His manner was as weighty as his appearance. He seemed as if he might have been manufactured in a tobacco factory, so was the whole man permeated by nicotian odors of various sorts, but he politely declined to smoke during the long and wearing consultation, even with the permission of the ladies present, and stowed away in his breast pocket the cigars that Bayne pressed upon him, as he remarked, for reference at a moment of greater leisure. Bolt upright, a heavy hand on either big-boned knee, his shaven jowl drooping in fleshy folds over his high stiff collar, he sat gazing into the fire with round, small, gray, bullet-like eyes, while the top of his bald head grew pink and shining with warmth. He had a loud, countrified voice in his normal speech, that gave an intimation of a habit of hallooing to hounds in a fox-chase, or calling the cattle on a thousand hills, but it had sunk to a mysterious undertone when he next spoke, expressive of the importance of the disclosure he was about to make.
A few days previous, he said, he had chanced to arrest an Irish mechanic who, during the season, had been employed at the neighboring hotel in replacing some plaster that had fallen by reason of leakage. Since then, a hard drinking man, he had been idly loafing, occasionally jobbing, about the country, but the offence charged was that of being concerned in a wholesale dynamiting of fish in the Tennessee River some months ago. The man protested violently against his arrest, being unable to procure bail, and declared he could prove an alibi but for fear that a worse thing befall him. This singular statement so stimulated the officer's curiosity that his craft was enlisted to elicit the whole story. Little by little he secured its details. It seemed that on the day when the fish were dynamited contrary to law, the Irishman was some thirty miles distant from the spot--the day of the Briscoe tragedy. He believed that he was the last man who had seen Briscoe alive--unless indeed he were done to death. He was afoot, walking in the county road, not more than two miles from the vacant hotel, when he saw a dog-cart coming like the wind toward him. The gentleman, driving a splendid mare, checked his speed on catching sight of him, and called out to him. Upon approaching, he recognized Mr. Briscoe, whom he had often seen when at work at the neighboring hotel. On this occasion Mr. Briscoe asked him to hold the mare while he slipped a coat on the little boy whom he had in the dog-cart with him--a red coat it was--for it took all he knew to drive the mare with both hands. And the Irishman declared it took all _he_ knew to hold the mare for the single minute required to slip the child into the coat. Twice the plunging animal lifted him off his feet as he swung to the bit. But the gentleman did not forget to pay him royally. Mr. Briscoe tossed him a dollar, and then, with "the little bye in his red coat" sitting on the floor of the vehicle, he was off like a cyclone and out of sight in a moment. Almost immediately afterward the Irishman heard the sharp crack of a rifle, and a tumultuous crash, as of some heavy fall into the depths of the valley. To his mind, the sound of the weapon intimated some catastrophe, and he said nothing at the time as to his meeting with Mr. Briscoe. That circumstance seemed to him of no importance. He was afraid of being numbered among the suspects if any evil deed had been done. He heard the searching parties out all night, and it was a terrible sound! "It was too aisy fur a poor man to be laid by the heels fur a job he niver done, bedad, as was the case at present." He permitted himself, however, to be persuaded to let a charge of vagrancy be entered against him and go to jail, really to be held as a witness in the event of more developments in the Briscoe case; for the authorities desired that no arrests in that connection should be made public until the significance of the fact that at the time of the tragedy the child was wearing the coat--afterward found hanging loose, without a rent or a blemish, on the tree in the valley--should be fully exploited. If it were indeed a direful instance of murder and abduction, as the sheriff now believed, he wished the miscreants to rest unwitting of the activity of the officers and the menace of discovery.
"But it seems a pity for the poor innocent Irishman to have to stay in jail. How good of him to consent!" exclaimed Mrs. Marable pathetically.
The sheriff was all unacclimated to the suave altruism of fashionable circles. His literal eyebrows went up to an angle of forty-five degrees; he turned his belittling eyes on Mrs. Marable, as if she were a very inconsiderable species of wren, suddenly developing a capacity for disproportionate mischief. "Not at all, madam," he made haste to say. "He can be legally held for a witness, lest he get away and out of reach of a subpoena. It is the right of the State, and of Mrs. Briscoe as well, who will doubtless join the public prosecution. We are asking nothing of nobody, and taking nothing off nobody, neither."
"But I should like," said Lillian, "to arrange that he shall suffer no hardship. I shall be happy to defray any expense to make him thoroughly comfortable."
The sheriff looked down on feminine intelligence. The law was exclusively man's affair. He made it and administered it. The officer had seldom known women to intrude into it, save to get the worst of it. Its minister had an air of burly ridicule that trenched on contempt as he broke into a laugh of great relish.
"The county can accommodate its boarders without your help, Mrs. Royston. Much obliged, all the same. He ain't no nice customer. He is mighty lucky to be sure of his grub and fire and shelter this tough winter. He ain't got to do any work. He has the freedom of the yard and the halls and the office at all hours. No, madam, he is as snug as a bug in a rug. You'll have a chance to spend all the money that you care to put up in this affair, if I'm not mightily mistaken. No use in wastin' any of it on Micky."
The fact that the child had not been wearing the coat when starting on the drive, but had been seen in it immediately previous to the catastrophe; that it should be subsequently found and not on his body, of which no trace had ever been discovered, went far to convince the authorities that the garment had been restored to the locality afterward in pursuance of an effort to prove his death. They had begun to believe that the child had in some manner escaped at the time of the tragedy, and was now held in retreat lest he disclose incriminating evidence. But it was a barren triumph of logic. They realized that any demand of the reward offered must needs bring a counter inquiry concerning the facts of Briscoe's murder, and therefore from the beginning they had little hope that any good result would ensue from the wide publicity and the extended search that his mother and her adviser had inaugurated. The child remained as if caught up in the clouds. Though extravagant offers of reward for any information concerning him, as well as for his ultimate recovery, were scattered broadcast throughout the country; though every clue, however fantastic or tenuous or obviously fraudulent, was as cautiously examined as if it really held the nucleus of discovery; though fakers and cheats of preposterous sorts harassed the proceedings and wrought many malevolent bits of mischief in disappointed revenge, being treated with a leniency which would suffer aught, all, rather than clog any vague chance of a revelation of the seclusion of the lost child--there seemed no prospect, no hope.
It had been Lillian's instinct to continue in the place where the child had been last seen--she felt a fictitious sense of proximity in the familiar localities that had known him. But with the exigencies of the systematic effort for his recovery she returned to her own home in the city of Glaston, whither Gladys accompanied her, as being more accessible when her presence in the search was required.
Julian Bayne gave himself wholly to the effort. He travelled here and there, pervading the country like some spirit of unrest, threading the intricacies of city slums, north, south, east, and west, personally interviewing all manner of loathly creatures, damaged by vice and sloth and ignorance and crime almost out of all semblance of humanity. He had not dreamed that such beings existed upon the earth. Sometimes, unaware of the circumstances and the danger they courted, they caught up a child wherewith to deceive him, if it might be, generally a pitiable, puny thing, swarming with vermin, half famished and forlorn. But Julian was dubious how ill treatment and lack of nourishment might have transformed the heir of the proud Archibald Royston, and in each instance he summoned Lillian through long journeys, tortured with alternations of hope and suspense, to inspect the waif. All without avail. True, she invariably bettered the condition of the little creature, thus fortunate in attracting her notice, purveying clothes and food, and paying a good round price for the consent of its keepers to place it in some orphanage or other juvenile refuge. So exhaustive, so judicious, so tireless, was the search, so rich the reward, that as time went by and no result ensued, the authorities became more than ever convinced that since the child's abduction was complicated with the more desperate crime of Briscoe's murder, this effectually precluded any attempt at his restoration by the kidnappers; for indeed, to those who knew the facts, the large reward was obviously the price of a halter. As this theory gained strength, their ardor in the search declined, and Lillian and Julian realized that more than ever the child's restoration would depend on their individual exertions.
The effort came to seem an obsession on the part of Bayne. He was worn and weary; his business interest languished, and his friends, remonstrating in vain, regarded it as the culminating injury to his life and prospects already wrought by the influence of this woman.
Indeed, one of the chief difficulties of the continuance of the enterprise was the resistance they must needs maintain to the remonstrance of friends. This finally came to be so urgent that it even involved an effort to circumscribe the futile activities. In view of the provisions of Mr. Royston's will no portion of the minor's estate could be used to defray the extremely lavish expenses that the thoroughness and extent of the search involved. All the large disbursements of money came from Mrs. Royston's own share of her husband's fortune. This brought her uncle, Mr. Marable, into the discussion. Her resources would not sustain these heavy draughts, he urged. In case the child remained perdu, to be sure, and the legal presumption of his death obtain by reason of the lapse of time, his estate would by the terms of the will vest in her, and thus financially all might be well. But on the contrary, should he be found in the course of time, this wild extravagance would result in bankrupting her. She thought it necessary to keep detectives in constant pay to hold their efforts and interest to the search, even though the ultimate rich reward were dangled continually before their eyes. The flamboyant advertisements, the widespread publicity over half the world, had involved commensurate cost. Large sums had been disbursed for information merely that was rooted in error and bore only disappointment. Then, too, were the inevitable mistakes, the fakes and cheats, and the expenses of a score of agents effecting nothing. Mr. Marable rubbed the wisps of gray hair on either side of his corrugated temples, and wrung his solvent hands in financial anguish.
He sought in this cause to take advantage of Bayne's influence with Lillian, and made an effort to induce him to remonstrate with her. They were in the library of her house in Glaston, looking over some papers together, a real estate mortgage, in fact, by which Lillian intended to raise a large sum for more unrestricted use in the extension of the search.
Bayne sat at the table, scanning the money-lender's memoranda, his experience as a broker having developed a keen scent for any untoward or mischievous detail.
"But in seeking the wisest methods of economy, the essential opportunity may escape her. While she is financiering, the child may die in the hands of his abductors, or he may succumb to hardship otherwise--be disfigured by disease or disabled by exposure, or slaughtered, so to speak, mentally or morally, or spirited away and be heard of never again. No, no," Bayne declared definitely; "I could not advise her to consider money in this connection."
Mr. Marable could ill brook contradiction or dissent. He quivered with more than the infirmities of age as he stood by the table, supporting himself on his cane.
"You don't reflect, Mr. Bayne, that though she gets the child's estate if he dies or continues lost--if he lives and this expenditure goes on, she will be penniless--you don't realize that. She will be a poor woman--she will have nothing left of her provision as a widow."
"Well, that suits me to the ground," Bayne retorted unexpectedly. "I shall be glad to profit as little as possible by Mr. Royston's property."
The notary public, come to take Mrs. Royston's acknowledgment, was announced at the moment, and the two gentlemen, still wrangling, went into the reception room to meet him. Mrs. Marable, her eternal Battenberg in her hands, looked up through the meshes of a perplexity, as visible as if it were a veritable network, at Gladys, who was standing in the recess of the bay-window, a book in her hand.
"I didn't understand that remark of Mr. Bayne's as to the poverty of Mr. Royston's widow," the old lady submitted.
Gladys, the match-maker, laughed delightedly. "_I did!_" she cried triumphantly.
As she went out of the room, she encountered Lillian in the hall, summoned to sign and acknowledge the papers. The flush on the cheek of Gladys, the triumph in her eyes, the laugh in the curves of her beautiful lips, arrested Mrs. Royston's attention. "What are you laughing about?" she asked, in a sort of plaintive wonderment.
"About something that Julian said just now."
"What was it?" Lillian queried, still bewildered in a sort.
The flush deepened on Mrs. Briscoe's cheek, her eyes were full of light, her voice chimed with a sort of secret joy.
"I will not tell you!" she cried, and, still smiling, she floated down the hall, her book in her hand.
Lillian stood motionless in amaze. Something that Julian Bayne had said to work this metamorphosis! Something that she must not hear, must not know! The look in her friend's eyes, the tone of her voice, stayed with Lillian in every moment of surcease of torment for the child's rescue, and worked their own mission of distress. Had she thought indeed that she could hold Julian Bayne's heart through all vicissitudes of weal and woe, of time and change? She had of her own free choice thrown it away once as a thing of no worth. She had never justified her course, or thought it could be deemed admirable as an exponent of her character. And here she was constantly contrasted with a woman who had no fault, no foible, who was generous, whole-souled, splendid, and beautiful, already with a strong hold on his affections, close to him, the widow of his cousin who was always the friend of his heart. And so sweet she was, so unconscious of any thought of rivalry! That night she came late to Lillian's room to say good-night once more, to counsel hope, and urge an effort to sleep. Even when she seemed gone at last, she opened the door again to blow a kiss and smile anew. When the door had closed finally Lillian, standing near the mirror, could but note the difference. She was ghastly in her gay and modish attire, for she had instantly laid aside her mourning for the death of the boy, as an affront to her faith that he still lived. The sharp tooth of suspense had eaten into her capacities of endurance; her hopes preyed upon her in their keen, fictitious exaltations; the alternations of despair brought her to the brink of the grave. She was reduced almost to a shadow; she would go about the affair--she would entertain no other--with a sort of jerking, spasmodic activity as unlike muscular energy as if she were an automaton. She had no rest in her sleep, and would scream and cry out in weird accents at intervals, and dream such dreams! She would blanch when questioned, and close her lips fast, and never a word escaped them of what these visions of terror might be. _