CHAPTER XIV

When Kenwick entered the St. Germaine on the evening after his interview with Jarvis, a man rose from the farther corner of the lobby and came toward him. "Kenwick!" he cried, and held out his hand. "I thought you never would come. I've been waiting here an eternity." It was Clinton Morgan.

When the first, somewhat incoherent greetings were over and the two men sat facing each other across Kenwick's untidy writing-table, a moment of embarra.s.sed silence fell between them. Then, in a desperate attempt to start the conversation, "I'm afraid I've kept you waiting rather a long time," the host apologized.

"You have," his caller agreed. "It's been more than a year, hasn't it?"

He spoke in a cheerful, matter-of-fact tone as though a mere pleasure-trip had intervened between this and their last encounter. But Kenwick was looking at him intently.

"You know--about it then?"

"Yes, we know all about it." Clinton Morgan leaned over and put his hand affectionately upon the other man's shoulder. "And, by George, Kenwick, I congratulate you. I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. It was one chance against a thousand that you could win out. It's a miracle!"

Kenwick was scarcely conscious of the last sentences. His attention had stopped short at that word "we." He reached down and picked a burnt match from the carpet as he asked with a pathetic attempt at formal courtesy, "How is your sister?"

"Getting well, I believe. She has been----Well, this case of yours is a most enthralling one, Kenwick. Anybody would be interested, but particularly any one who has known you. We have been following it with great interest."

Kenwick looked at him incredulously. "How could you?"

The caller shifted his position uneasily. "Well, that's rather a long story. And Marcreta might prefer to tell you part of it herself. And that brings me to my errand. I came here to ask you up to the house.

We've just got the old place fixed over, and,"--he glanced at his watch,--"it's not nine o'clock yet. If you haven't something else on hand that----"

Kenwick cut in almost harshly. "Are you sure that your sister would care to see me? That she wouldn't perhaps be--well, afraid of me?"

Morgan laughed. "Well, I'll be there, you know, if you should get violent and begin throwing things around."

But the other man's face did not relax. His voice came low and strained as though it were being let out cautiously under high gear. "You don't understand. n.o.body can, I suppose, who hasn't been through this experience." His nervous hands stiffened upon the arms of the chair. "I tell you, Morgan, it's easier for a denizen of the underworld to live down her reputation and achieve a reputable place in society than for a man or woman to regain the confidence of the world after a period of----Well, I may as well out with the d.a.m.ned word--insanity."

"Don't call it that, Kenwick. It wasn't that. In the trenches you got a blow that put you out of commission. But you were simply in a dazed condition; mental aberration beginning with melancholia. You were never violently insane; never dangerous to anybody else."

"How do you know? How do I know? I've suffered the anguish of h.e.l.l, wondering about it. Somebody may have been killed in that accident that restored me to life. It may have been all my fault. I don't know. I've spent the last month trying to find out in a quiet way. I suppose you think I'm a coward for not going at it more directly." He looked at his companion with a defiant appeal in his eyes. "But there were reasons why I didn't want to kick up a lot of notoriety about myself. For any harm that ever came to man or woman through me, I'm eager to pay. No court decision would have to make me do it; no court decision could keep me from doing it. But I wanted to save my name if I could. I wanted to save my name so that some time it might be fit----"

"I know." Clinton Morgan interrupted hastily. The memory of that traitorous bit of paper which he had discovered in the gold and ivory book came back to him and brought a guilty flush to his cheeks. Whether he would or no, he seemed to hold in his own hands all the threads of this tragic romance. A line of Marcreta's lyric drifted through his brain:

Whence thy _uneasy_ spirit may depart?

How well that word had been chosen to describe and conceal the living death which this man had suffered!

"You see," Kenwick went on, "I'm the spiritual counterpart of the Man Without a Country. I don't belong anywhere. And, more than that, I'm a charge on the public conscience. Everybody who knows about my period of--of incompetency belongs to an unofficial vigilance committee, whose duty it is to warn society against me."

Clinton groped for a reply, but words would not come. And the fact that there was no bitterness in the other man's voice, but only the level monotony which is achieved by long suppression, made it infinitely pathetic.

"If it suited your whim to do so," Kenwick continued, "you might reverse the usual order of dining; begin with pie and end with soup. And the public would regard it either as a new cure for dyspepsia or an eccentricity of genius. But if I should try it, somebody would immediately suggest that I shouldn't be allowed at large. It's the irony of fate that I, who have always had a contempt for the trivial conventions of life (such a contempt that my sister-in-law never quite trusted me in polite society), should now be in a cowering bondage to them. I live all my days in a horror of doing something that might appear erratic. And I spend the nights going back over every inch of the road to see if I have. Why don't the adherents of the fire-and-brimstone theory picture h.e.l.l as a place where we can never act on impulse? As a place which dooms us forever to a hideous self-consciousness?"

Clinton Morgan spoke with a sort of angry championship. "You've had tough luck, my boy, the toughest kind of luck. But you've come out of it all right. By George, you can show the world now that you've come out on top."

"I haven't come out; that's just the trouble. I'll never be out of the woods until I've accounted for them. Did you read last night's paper, Morgan?"

"Yes. That's one thing that brought me here. Let me tell you something, Kenwick. Until about a week ago we thought you were dead. And we were relieved, for we felt that it was a happy release for you; your only way out. And then one day, not long ago, we got a clue." He still clung to the plural p.r.o.noun. "We fell over a clue, you might say, which aroused our suspicions--and we followed it down."

"You followed it down!" Kenwick cried. "You cared enough about it for that?"

His friend's reply came through guarded lips. "You have suffered horribly during these past months," he said. "But you are not the only one who has suffered."

Kenwick glanced at him sharply. Then he seemed to sense the delicacy of the other man's position. "It's just this," Kenwick explained after a moment of silence. "Since this--this thing fell on me, I instinctively divide all people into two cla.s.ses; those who knew me before it happened, and those who have only known me since. With the second group I'm always wondering if they are still unsuspecting: with the first, I'm wondering if they will ever be convinced. But go on with your story.

What did you do about the clue?"

"I'll tell you about that later. It's enough to say right now that Richard Glover----"

"Glover!" The word seemed to explode from Kenwick's lips. He leaped to his feet. "That's the name!" he cried. "That's the name that I've been groping after for two days. Sometimes I almost had it and then it would escape me. I had an idea fixed in my mind somehow that it began with a 'B.' Why, I saw that fellow at the theater the other night, Morgan. It was a most curious thing, for as soon as my eyes lighted on him the vacuum in my mind was suddenly filled. I remember traveling across the continent with him. I remember my brother Everett introducing me to him one day at home before I came West this last time. That's all I do remember about him, but it sort of connects things in my brain. I wanted to talk to him the other night and see if he couldn't help me clear things up, but when I got down to his seat, he was gone. I don't know whether he had recognized me too or not. But even so, I can't account for his wanting to avoid me. I haven't got anything against him. I might have thought the whole thing was a hallucination (for I never quite trust my own senses now), but I had a reliable witness. Now what I want to know is, why should Glover be afraid to meet me?"

"If you'll come up to the house," Morgan suggested again, "we may be able to straighten out some of these things."

When they arrived, a few minutes later, at the Pine Street home, Clinton lingered outside fussing with the engine of his car, and Roger Kenwick went alone to meet Marcreta. He found her in the fire-lighted living-room where he had parted from her, and she came to greet him with that slow grace that he knew so well, and that seemed now to stop the beating of his heart. But if either of them had expected the first moments of reunion to melt away the shadows that lay between them, they were disappointed. For the fires of memory burn deep. And the ghastly suffering with which the two years of separation had been freighted had left marks that were not to be obliterated by those words of carefully casual welcome. In spite of their efforts at commonplace dialogue, they spoke to each other in the subdued voices of those who converse in the presence of death. By tacit consent they avoided, during the first half-hour, all mention of the tragedy which had separated them.

"We've just had the house done over," Marcreta was saying as her brother entered. "During the war it was a sanitarium, and although it has all been retinted and there are new hangings everywhere, Clinton says it still smells of anesthetics. I tell him it's only his imagination. Do you get any odor of ether?"

"No," Kenwick answered.

He found talking horribly difficult. This woman, for whom his soul had yearned, seemed now to be looking at him from across a deep chasm.

Between them stretched the bramble-bush; a tangle of underbrush; stark sycamore-trees that rattled hideously in the winter wind; uprooted madrone bushes stretching distorted claws heavenward in a mute appeal for vengeance. And insistently now the question beat against his brain--had he ever succeeded in crossing that ravine? Would he ever really succeed in crossing it? With the clutch of desperation he clung to the verdict of Dr. Gregson Bennet, as he had once clung for support to those grim, high-backed chairs at Rest Hollow. He recalled having once read the story of an ex-convict coming home after his release from the penitentiary to meet that most crucial of all punishments; the eyes of the woman that he loved. To his supersensitive soul, the stigma attached to him was something that was worse than crime; a thing that branded deeper and more indelibly. That it had come to him in the discharge of duty weighed not a jot on his account-sheet. He told himself that it had been a judgment. He had always been a worshiper of intellect. It had seemed to him the one enduring possession. And now it had proved itself even more ephemeral than physical health. As his eyes rested upon her, unconscious of their own sadness, he knew all at once that Marcreta understood and was trying to make it easy for him.

"The only way to make this easy for me," he heard himself saying suddenly, "is to drag it out into the light. As long as the past lies shrouded between us, we will never be able to forget it."

It was eleven o'clock when Kenwick went down the steps of the Morgan home. He refused Clinton's invitation to ride back in the car. For he wanted to walk, to walk on and on forever in the glorious starlight.

There were no stars. A gray fog had rolled in from the bay and spread itself like a huge blotter across the heavens. But he was unaware of it.

Even the street lights, shining dimly as through frosted gla.s.s, seemed to shed across his path a supernatural radiance. For although no word of love had pa.s.sed between him and Marcreta Morgan, he had come away from that visit with a wild happiness surging in his heart. There had been no effort to reestablish life upon its old basis. Marcreta, with what seemed to him an almost superhuman tact, had divined the ghastly futility of such an endeavor. And instead she had conveyed to him, by some indescribable method of her own, the a.s.surance that she would welcome, with unquestioning faith, the opening of a new and happier era.

As he had sat there in the comfort of that living-room, where on a night, not long ago, he had caught a glint of a departed glory, desire and something finer had struggled for supremacy in his soul. But courageous self-a.n.a.lysis had driven home to him the realization that he had Marcreta Morgan at a cruel disadvantage. Whether he would or no, he had come back to her clothed in the appealing garments of tragedy. He was a pensioner on her sympathy, and in her eagerness to restore to him his lost heritage, she had unconsciously disarmed herself. The temptation to cherish and set a jealous guard upon such an advantage has overpowered men and women innumerable. Kenwick sensed the treacherous sweetness of it flooding his heart like the seductive fragrance of some rare perfume, and then in a sudden fury he tore himself free of it.

"By G.o.d! I haven't got as deep in as that!" he muttered, and was unconscious that he said the words aloud. "I haven't sunk so deep that I'd pull myself up that way!" He b.u.t.toned his overcoat about him conscious for the first time of the chill breeze. Not yet, he reminded himself sharply, not yet did he have the right to conquer.

As he took the intersecting street to cut the steep down-hill slope to the hotel, he heard the echo of footsteps behind him. He quickened his gait, impatient of any distracting element, and was instantly aware that the other footsteps had quickened theirs. For half a block he walked at a round pace. Then he stopped short and waited for the other pedestrian to overtake him. A thick-set man in a black overcoat pa.s.sed him, slowed down to a creeping walk, and under the feeble light of the corner street-lamp came to a halt. Kenwick glanced at him sharply, but the man was a stranger to him. He pa.s.sed on unaccosted, but as he was stepping from the curb the stranger loomed up suddenly behind him.

"Stop!" he commanded.

Kenwick turned. A heavy hand was laid upon his arm. He stood waiting, under the gleam of the bleary light, detained more by curiosity than by the grip upon his arm. From the burly figure came a burly voice. "You are Roger Kenwick."

It was not a question, but the other man gave it sharp-voiced response.

"Yes. What is it to you?"

"A good deal to me. I've been waiting for you. Some people wouldn't have waited, but I'm a gentleman and I let you have your visit out with the lady. We'll take, the rest of the walk together. Beastly night, isn't it?"

Kenwick did not move, and his voice was more astonished than resentful.

"I think you've made a mistake in your man. You say you have been waiting for me?"