CHAPTER XXXII

All the rest of the day Celeste was with Ruth. She walked with her in the Public Gardens. She stayed away from home, fearing that some one might call, and she felt unequal to the mocking convention. Surely this was no time for smirking formalities. When, as the sun was going down, she and the child returned home she found no one there except the servants. She felt relieved, for she was not prepared yet to meet her husband's eye, for surely he would know that something unusual had happened to her. She was glad that he did not return till just before the supper was served. She took Ruth down-stairs and into the dining-room as soon as the meal was announced. William and his uncle had met again in the parlor and were talking there in low tones. She and Ruth were in their places at the table when they came in.

"Yes, we certainly put it over on them," the old man said, with a chuckling laugh. "I felt sure the market was firm and sent my wire at once."

"I was confident, too," William answered, "but I never knew you to take a risk, and it may have been due to that fact that I was so undisturbed."

"Well, I think I can say as much for you, William," the old man answered. "Since I have been with you at the bank you have been the most conservative business man I ever knew. I have sometimes thought you were too careful, but caution can never be a fault."

They took seats. The business talk continued. The bank was to become the greatest in the state—every indication was in its favor. Celeste failed to hear Ruth's pretty prattle at her side. As she looked at the two men her determination, which had been held so firmly all day, grew weak and vacillating. How could she carry out her plan before them? She sank more deeply into the mire of misery than ever. The whole world seemed black and mad under the contending forces of right and wrong. How frail was the spirit flag she was striving to hold aloft in all that clash and rush of evil!

No, the right thing could not be done—by her, at any rate. Charles would have to remain the self-elected lifelong victim that he was. After all, he would be saving her; he would be saving Ruth; he would be saving his brother whom he had always loved. Saving his brother! But was he? Could it be done so vicariously? And as this question pounded upon her brain she looked for the first time with scaleless eyes at her husband. Why had she not noticed it before? William was the mere withering husk of the man he had once been. His deep-sunken, shadowy eyes told his story; his parchment-like skin, his furtive, haunted look, repeated it; his constantly enforced attention to what was being said by others, his Judas-like manner, the quivering of his mentally handcuffed hands, confirmed it again and again. Why, William was dying—dying from the sheer poison of his putrefying soul. Only his great, staring eyes seemed alive, and they lived only in their dumb quest of mercy. Poor William! No one could save him but himself. Charles's nobility, Charles's sacrifice, would not do it. He must do it himself. Ah yes, that was the key, and it had dropped down from heaven! The thing was settled now. She would see him before the dawn of another day. She would suffer. Ruth would suffer, but William would be saved. Ah, that was the point too long overlooked! His only child would be paying the price, but in the far-off future Ruth herself, with the spiritual wisdom of age, might thank the memory of her mother for the opportunity given her.

The family retired before ten o'clock that night. Celeste sat by her daughter's bed, and with a soft, soothing song lulled her child to sleep. Gradually she felt the tiny fingers losing their grasp upon her own. Shortly afterward Celeste heard William ascending the stairs to his room adjoining hers. She heard him close his door. He always closed his door. At night or in the day he closed his door. Even at the bank he closed the door of his private office, perhaps in order that he might release the drawn cords to those perpetual curtains of his secret self.

There was another door between her room and his. Even that was shut. If she wished to see him before he retired she must hasten. She went into her own room, but did not turn on the electric light. She stood in the center of the room, shivering from head to foot as from cold. Presently she knocked on his door. Then there was a moment of tense silence. The sound must have startled her husband; and when at last he did fumblingly turn the bolt and open the door he stood there in the dark, facing her wonderingly, speechlessly.

"I—I didn't know who it was—at first!" he stammered. "I thought—thought—"

"Excuse me," she said, stroking the death-damp sweat from her brow and sliding past him into his room, "but I wanted to see you. I wanted to talk to you. It is something important, it seems to me. I couldn't do it before uncle, and you were with him all day. May we have a—a light?"

"Need we?" fell from his lips impulsively, then: "Yes, dear, of course. I quite forgot. I—I sometimes undress in the—the dark in the summer-time." He groped for the button on the wall. "Yes, I was right," he thought. "She has had something on her mind all day and last night, and she says it is important. My God! important! Only one thing is important—can it have come up again?"

His fingers touched the button. He pushed it in and the white glare filled the room like a photographer's flash-light, revealing their set visages to each other. William certainly looked old now, for a storm of terror was laying waste his whole suppressed being. She turned from him in sheer pity of his swaying frailty. She sat down in a chair, and, like the ill man that he was, he sank into another. He had unfastened his scarf and collar and the ends of both hung in disorder on his breast.

"You say it is something important?" he muttered, and with his hand he made a pretext of shading his eyes.

"Yes, William, it is important, as I see it," she answered, her stare on the floor, her bloodless hands in her lap, tightly clasped. "It is about—about a subject we have not mentioned between us lately."

"I think I understand," he breathed low. "Then you have heard from him, or at least you know where he went."

"Yes, and through Michael," she added. "Michael owed him some money and so he searched for him till finally—"

"Oh!" burst eagerly from her listener. "Then it was not the detectives—not the police. You see—you see, I thought—"

"No, he is safe in that respect, for a while, at any rate," Celeste said. "Michael found him in a retired place down in the mountains of Georgia, and—"

"Why, I—I thought he had gone abroad!" and there was no mistaking the sudden uneasiness in William's tone. "But you say he is still here in this country? Are you sure about that?"

"Yes, Michael has seen and talked with him. William, Charlie is very unhappy. Don't think that he is complaining, for he is not, but a new life has opened out before him and he is still young. William, justice must be done to him."

The hand-shade fell lower over William's eyes, but she could still see their fixed pupils just beneath the flesh-line of his palm.

"Justice!" he gasped. "Surely you are not going to—to hint at that suspicion of yours again. Haven't I shown you—told you that it would make you miserable for life?"

"It is not merely a suspicion now, William," she said, grimly. "I know it to be a fact that Charlie is wholly innocent, and that you—But, oh, you know what I mean!"

Like a murderer faced by skilled accusers confident of his guilt, William could formulate no denial. His sheer silence condemned him, that and the furtive flight of his eyes from object to object in the room. They reached everything except her set face. He and she were silent for a moment; then William spoke:

"So he talked to Michael. Probably he said a lot of things to him, and Michael has come back full of—of—"

"He said nothing of that sort to Michael," Celeste corrected, quickly. "Charlie is still true to his agreement with you. He lets Michael think that he did it when under the influence of drink. Michael hasn't the slightest idea that another is to blame."

"I see, and in spite of all this, and even Charlie's confession over his own signature, which I showed you, you still hold the idea that—"

"Yes, I know that the poor boy was innocent, and that he did it all—the written confession, the going away, the shouldering of the disgrace here, and the nameless life among strangers as a common laborer—he did all that for your sake and mine and Ruth's. Don't—don't deny it any more, William—don't lie to me! I won't stand for it! I won't! I won't! I can't!"

He gave in. He could have crawled like a worm before her in his weltering despair.

"You know it is true, don't you, William?" There were pity, gentleness, and even abiding love in her tone.

He was conquered. He covered his ashen face with his gaunt hands, and, with his elbows on his knees, he sat leaning forward, dumb and undone. Then she told him his brother's story. It fell from her lips like the sweet consolation of a consecrated nun to a dying penitent, and yet it rang full and firm with Heaven's demand for justice. With a wand of flaming truth she pointed the way—the only way. He sobbed. William for the first time sobbed in her presence. His lips hung loose and quivered like those of a whimpering child.

"Have you realized the cost?" he asked, presently. "Do you know what it will mean to you and to Ruth? As God is my judge, Lessie, I am not thinking of myself. In fact, I was thinking only of you when I did it!" Here he made a confession of how he had prepared to kill himself that she might escape the long-drawn publicity of his trial, and how his brother had thwarted the effort.

"Yes, I realize the cost," Celeste answered, "but Ruth and I must pay it. It seems to me now that a greater thing in God's sight than paying our own debts is paying the debts of others. Charlie is trying to pay our debts, but he shall not. William, he shall not. You are dying under the strain that is on you. It is God's way of blighting His fruitless trees."

"You are right," he faltered. "A felon's cell, a convict's chains, would furnish relief compared with the tortures I have been enduring. But you and the baby—oh, Lessie, that is unbearable! That thought has haunted me for over a year."

"I know, but don't think of it now," she said. "Act at once. See uncle to-night before he retires. He is still in the library. He said he had something to read."

"I'll tell him at the bank in the morning," William said. "It is the proper place for it. Yes, yes, I'll tell him. You look as if you doubt it, but I'll keep my word. If you stop to think of it, you will see that there is nothing else to do."

"Wait!" Celeste rose and went out into the hallway. She leaned over the balustrade and peered downward; then she came back. "I see the light in the library," she said. "He is there now. Go. It must be settled to-night. I am holding myself to it with all the strength of my soul. I am afraid I will weaken. Another night and I might. Charlie's rights and Ruth's are in a balance, and they are seesawing up and down. Hurry! Hurry! Go this minute!"

He rose and staggered from the room. Celeste sat down and leaned forward. She listened, all her soul in her ears. She remembered that the old stairs had a harsh habit of creaking when one went down or up them. They were uttering no sound now. Why? she wondered. Softly she got up and crept out into the hall. There in the darkness stood William on the first step, a hand on the railing. His face was turned toward the foot of the stairs. The narrow strip of carpet stretched down toward the dim light below. He was staring at the light as if turned to stone by its gruesome import. She crept to him, touched him on the arm. He turned his death-mask of a face to her, and moved his flabby lips soundlessly.

"Go on," she said.

"You forget one thing, Lessie." His voice came now in a rasping whisper. "You forget that this thing was Charlie's own suggestion. He proposed it. He would expect me to live up to it, as well as he himself. You mentioned Ruth. She was in his mind at the time, as well as you and me. Then there was another thing. He had—he said so himself—he had disgraced himself here. He had acted in a way that made him want to disappear, never to be heard of again. This would bring all that up again. I have no doubt that he would want the matter to rest just as it is."

"Yes, he would, and for that very reason it shall not," Celeste flashed out. "He loves a good girl, and she loves him. If you are silent to-night they will be parted forever. The thing is killing you; it will kill me, too. Are you trying to force me to be your accomplice?"

His head rocked negatively like a stone poised on a pivot, but still he did not move forward. Gently she caught his hand, the one still on the railing, and as she did so his fingers automatically clutched the wood as if he were afraid of falling down the stairs.

"I'll go," he said. "You see, I was wondering just how to put it to uncle. He will be humiliated in a peculiar way. I hardly know how to say it, but he has all along felt the—the stigma of Charlie's—of what he thinks Charlie did—felt it so keenly that he has overdone his—his praise of me. You understand—of me. He has boasted of my—my moral stamina and ability on all occasions, in that way, you see, to make up for Charlie's—or what he thinks was Charlie's bad conduct. It will upset him terribly. It will fill him with chagrin, for—for I and the bank and its success have become his very life. I dread the effect on him. He is old, you know, and not so very strong. What would we do if it were to result disastrously—I mean to him, you understand? If Charlie hadn't done this thing of his own accord—"

"Stop, William," Celeste said, with a resolute sigh. "I see how hard it is for you to do. Let me do it. I'll know what to say perhaps better than you. Besides, if you consent to my going to him it will be the same as if you did it. In fact, I'll tell him you sent me."

"No, I'll have to put it through," said William, suddenly. He barred the way by thrusting his disengaged hand against the wall, the other still holding on to the balustrade. "Go to your room. I'll attend to it."

He moved forward now, and, standing still, she saw him slowly descend the stairs and vanish at the library door. Then she went back to her own room. But she did not disrobe nor turn on the light. She remained sitting in a chair at a window through which the rays of a street lamp fell. She would wait for William's return. She loved him; she was sorry for him; she wanted to cry, but could not.