Kitabı oku: «The Pace That Kills: A Chronicle», sayfa 7
But soon the present returned. Justine still was weeping; he no longer saw her tears, he heard them. Surely she would forgive again. It could not be that everything had gone for naught. He would speak to her, plead if need were, and in the end she would yield. She must do that, he told himself, and he groped after some falsity that should palliate the offence. He would tell her that he had been drinking again; he would deny his own words, or, if necessary, he would insist she had not heard them aright. Indeed, there was nothing that might have weight with her which he was not ready and anxious to affirm. If she would but begin, if in some splendor of indignation such as he had beheld before she would rise up and upbraid him, his task would be diminished by half. Anything, indeed, would be better than this, and nothing could be worse; it was not Justine alone that the tears were carrying from him, it was the Dunellen millions as well. Oh, abysses of the human heart! As he queried with himself, at the very moment he was experiencing his first remorse, the old self returned, and it was less of the injury he had inflicted that he thought than of the counter-effect that injury might have on him. In the attempt to throttle the child he had been balked, yet of that attempt he believed Justine to be suspicionless. Other opportunities he would have in plenty; and even were it otherwise, the child was weakly, and croup might do its work. With the future for which he had striven, there, in the very palm of his hand, how was it possible that he should have made this misstep? But he could retrieve it, he told himself; he was a good actor, it was not too late. For a little while yet he could still support the mask, and, recalling the sentimental reveries of a moment before, the forerunner of a sneer came and loitered beneath the fringes of his mustache.
"Justine!" He moved a step or two to where she lay. "Justine – "
His voice was very low and penitent, but at the sound of it she seemed to shrink. "Could she know?" he wondered.
Then immediately, through the scantness of the apartment, he heard the outer bell resound. Enervated as he was, the interruption affected him like a barb. There was some one there whom he could vent his irritation on. He hurried to the hall, but a servant had preceded him. The door was open, and on the threshold Thorold stood.
Mistrial nodded – the nod of one who is about to throw his coat aside and roll his shirt-sleeves up. "Is it for your bill you come?" he asked.
Thorold hesitated, and his face grew very black. He affected, however, to ignore the taunt. He turned to the servant that still was waiting there. "Is my cousin at home?" he asked.
"She is," Mistrial announced, "but not to you."
"In that case," Thorold answered, "I must speak to someone in her stead."
Mistrial made a gesture, and the servant withdrew.
"I have to inform my cousin," Thorold continued, "that Mr. Metuchen came to me this evening and said that when my uncle died he was in debt – "
"Stuff and nonsense!"
"He asked me to come and acquaint Justine with the facts. They are here." With this Thorold produced a roll of papers. "Be good enough to explain to her," he added, "that this is the inventory of the estate." And, extending the documents to his host, he turned and disappeared.
In the cataleptic attitude of one standing to be photographed Mistrial listened to the retreating steps; he heard Thorold descend the stairs, cross the vestibule, and pass from the house. It seemed to him even that he caught the sound of his footfall on the pavement without. But presently that, too, had gone. He turned and looked down the hall. Justine's door was closed. Then at once, without seeking a seat, he fumbled through the papers that he held. The gas-jet above his head fell on the rigid lines. In the absence of collusion – and from whence should such a thing come? – in the absence of that, they were crystal in their clarity.
There were the assets. Shares in mines that did not exist, bonds of railways that were bankrupt, loans on Western swamps, the house on Madison Avenue, mortgaged to its utmost value, property on the Riverside, ditto. And so on and so forth till the eye wearied and the heart sickened of the catalogue. Then came the debit account. Amounts due to this estate, to that, and to the other, a list of items extending down an entire page of foolscap and extending over onto the next. There a balance had been struck. Instead of millions Honest Paul had left dishonor. Swindled by the living, he had swindled the dead.
"So much for trusting a man that bawls Amen in church," mused Mistrial.
As yet the completeness and amplitude of the disaster had not reached him. While he ran the papers over he feigned to himself that it was all some trick of Thorold's, one that he would presently see through and understand; and even as he grasped the fact that it was not a trick at all, that it was truth duly signed and attested, even then the disaster seemed remote, affecting him only after the manner of that wound which, received in the heat of battle, is unnoticed by the victim until its gravity makes him reel. Then at once in the distance the future on which he had counted faded and grew blank. Where it had been brilliant it was obscure, and that obscurity, increasing, walled back the horizon and reached up and extended from earth to sky. The papers fell from his nerveless hand, fright had visited him, and he wheeled like a rat surprised. Surely, he reflected, if safety there were or could be, that safety was with Justine.
In a moment he was at her door. He tried it. It was locked. He beat upon it and called aloud, "Justine."
No answer came. He bent his head and listened. Through the woodwork he could hear but the faintest rustle, and he called again, "Justine."
Then from within came the melody of her voice: "Who is it?"
"It is I," he answered, and straightened himself. It seemed odd to him she did not open the door at once. "I want a word with you," he added, after a pause. But still the door was locked.
"Justine," he called again, "do you not hear me? I want to speak to you."
Then through the slender woodwork at his side a whisper filtered, the dumb voice of one whom madness may have in charge.
"It is not to speak you come, it is to kill."
"Justine!" he cried. All the agony of his life he distilled into her name, "Justine!"
"You killed your child before, you shall not kill another now."
VI
"City Hall!"
The brakemen were shouting the station through the emptiness of the "Elevated."
In the car in which Mistrial sat a drunken sailor lolled, and a pretty girl of the Sixth Avenue type was eating a confection. Above her, on a panel opposite, the advertisement of a cough remedy shone in blue; beyond was a particolored notice of tennis blazers: and, between them, a text from Mark, in black letters, jumped out from a background of white:
"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
During the journey from his home Mistrial had contemplated that text. Not continuously, however. For a little space his eyes had grazed the retreating throngs over which the train was hurrying, and had rested on the insufferable ugliness of the Bowery. Once, too, he had found himself staring at the girl who sat opposite, and once he had detected within him some envy of the sailor sprawling at her side. But, all the while, that text was with him, and to the jar of the car he repeated for refrain a paraphrase of his own: "How shall it damage a man if he lose his own soul and gain the whole world?"
How indeed? Surely he had tried. For three years the effort had been constant. It was because of it he had married, it was for this he had sought to throttle his child. What his failure had been, Dunellen's posthumous felony and Justine's ultimate reproach indistinctly yet clearly conveyed. No, the world was not gained; he had played his best and he had lost: he could never recover it now.
And as the brakeman bawled in his face, the paraphrase of the text was with him. He rose and passed from the car. Beneath he could discern a grass-plot of the City Park. In spite of the night it was visibly green. The sky was leaden as a military uniform that has been dragged through the mud. From a window of the Tribune Building came a vomit of vapor. And above in a steeple a clock marked twelve.
The stairway led him down to the street. For a moment he hesitated; the locality was unfamiliar. But a toll-gate attracted him; he approached it, paid a penny, and moved onto the bridge. There, he discovered that on either side of him were iron fences and iron rails; he was on the middle of the bridge, not at the side. A train shot by. He turned again and reissued from the gate.
On the corner was another entrance, and through it he saw a carriage pass. It was that way, he knew; and he would have followed the carriage, but a policeman touched him on the arm.
"Got a permit?"
Mistrial shook his head. Why should he have a permit? And, moved perhaps by the mute surprise his face expressed, the policeman explained that the ordinary pedestrian was allowed to cross only through the safeguards of the middle path.
"I will get a cab," he reflected, and for his convenience he discerned one loitering across the way. This he entered, gave an order to the driver, and presently, after paying another toll, rolled off the stonework on to wood.
He craned his neck. Just beyond, a column of stone rose inordinately to the lowering sky; he could see the water-front of the city; opposite was Brooklyn, and in front the lights of Staten Island glowed distantly and dim. The cab was moving slowly. He took some coin from his pocket, placed it on the seat, opened the door, and, stepping from the moving vehicle, looked at the driver. The latter, however, had not noticed him and was continuing his way leisurely over the bridge and on and into the night. Mistrial let him go undetained. He had work now to do, and it was necessary for him to do it quickly; at any moment another carriage might pass or some one happen that way.
Beneath, far down, a barge was moving. He could see the lights; they approached the bridge and vanished within it. The railing, now, he saw was too high to vault, and moreover there was a bar above it that might interfere. He tossed his hat aside and clambered on the iron rail.
"You'll get six months for that," some one was crying.
But to the threat Mistrial paid no heed. He had crossed the rail, his hands relaxed, and just as he dropped straight down to the river below, he could see a policeman, his club uplifted, hanging over the fence, promising him the pleasures of imprisonment. Such was his last glimpse of earth. A multitude of lights danced before his eyes; every nerve in his body tingled; his ears were filled with sudden sounds; he felt himself incased in ice; then something snapped, and all was blank.
The next day a rumor of the suicide was bruited through the clubs.
"What do you think of it, Jones?" Yarde asked.
The novelist plucked at his beard. There were times when he himself did not know what he thought. In this instance, however, he had already learned of the disaster that had overtaken the Dunellen estate, and weaving two and two sagaciously together, he answered with a shrug.
"What do I think of it? I think he died like a man who knew how to live" – an epitaph which pleased him so much that he got his card-case out and wrote it down.
