Chapter V (3)

“Her face cleared almost into something like joy.

“'I have told the truth, and I raise myself from the depths of your scorn to the place where you can feel a hot rage against me?' she asked.

“'Yes,' I said. And the light on her face was like that of which some women are capable when they are told that they are beloved.

“'And if I die?' she asked.

“'Who knows but that you might climb by it?' I said. 'Who knows but what your death might turn my anger to love again?' And with that I turned and left her there.

“That night I sat all night in my study, and in the morning they brought me the news that she was dead. She must have used some poison. What, I do not know; and the physicians called it heart-failure. But what is the matter, Doctor?”

“Nothing, nothing!” said Dr. Beaulieu. And he motioned for the narrator to proceed. But there were beads of perspiration upon the healer's forehead, and a pallor overspread his face.

“I had condemned her to death,” the penitent went on, “and she had been her own executioner. She had loved me; she had sinned against me; but she had always loved me; she had hated the flesh that sinned, and scorned it as much as I; her life was intolerable and she had been her own executioner.

“The revulsion of feeling came. I loved her again; now that I had lost her. All that day I shut myself up, seeing no one; refusing to look at the dozens of telegrams that came pouring in from friends and acquaintances, thinking--thinking--thinking----

“Night came again; and with it the word that the best friend I had was in the house; a friend of my college days, who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me in many a fight, then and since. He had come to be under the same roof with me in the hour of my bitterest bereavement, was the word he sent--how bitter now, he did not know. But he did not intrude upon the privacy of my grief. And I sat thinking--thinking--thinking--

“Suddenly the idea came to me that I would go upstairs to the chamber where she was, and look at her once more. Quietly I stole up the stairs, and through the hushed, dim house, on into the gloomy room, lighted only by the candles at the head and foot of the curtained couch on which she lay.

“In the room beyond, the watchers sat. I stole softly across the floor so as not to attract their attention; there was no one in the room with the body. I approached the couch, and with my hand put by the curtain----

“Then I dropped it suddenly. I remembered a locket which she had formerly worn that had always had my picture in it, in the early days of our married life; a locket that had never left her neck, waking or sleeping. And I wondered----

“I wondered something about women which no one has ever been able to tell me; not even a woman. I wondered if any light o' love had ever been able to make her feel anything like _real_ love, after all! I wondered if she had ever hugged the thought of her sin to her bosom, even as she had at first hugged the thought of our real love--hers and mine. I wondered if she had ever carried about with her a sentimental reminder of her lover, of any lover, as she had once done of her husband--and how long ago! I wondered how important a thing it had seemed to her, after all! She had reconciled herself to herself, with her death, and made me love her again. And I wondered to how great an extent she had ever fooled a lover into thinking she loved him! There are depths and contradictions and cross-currents in the souls of women that even women do not know, far less men--I wondered whose picture was in that locket!

“I thrust my hand through the curtains of the bed again, and then jumped back.

“I had felt something warm there.

“Did she live, after all?

“At the same instant I heard a movement on the other side of the bed. I went around.

“My best friend was removing his hand from the curtains on the other side, and in his hand was the locket. It was his hand that I had felt.

“We stared at each other. I spoke first, and in a whisper, so that the others in the next room, who had come to watch, should not hear.

“'I came for that,' I said.

“'The locket? So did I,” he said. And then added quite simply, 'My picture is in it.'

“'You lie!' I whispered, shaken by a wind of fury. And yet I knew that perhaps he did not lie, that what he said might well be true. Perhaps that was the cause of my fury.

“His face was lined with a grief and weariness terrible to behold. To look at him you would have thought that there was nothing else in the world for him except grief. It was a great grief that made him careless of everything else.

“'It is my picture,' he said. 'She loved me.'

“'I say that you lie,' I repeated. 'She may have played with you--but she never loved any one but me--in her heart she never did!'

“'You!' And because he whispered, hissing out the words, they seemed to gain in intensity of scorn. 'You! She hated you! You who neglected her, you with your damned eternal politics, you who could never understand her--love? You who could never give her the things a woman needs and must have--the warmth--the color--the romance--the poetry of life! You!--with your cold-blooded humanitarianism! I tell you, she loved _me!_ Why should I hesitate to avow it to you? It is the sweetest thing on earth to me, that she loved me! She turned from you to me because----'

“'Don't go into all that,' I said. 'I heard all about that last night--from her! Open the locket, and let us see whose face is there!'

“He opened it, and dropped the locket. He reeled against the wall, with his hands over his face, as if he had been struck a physical blow.

“I picked the toy up and looked at it.

“The face in the locket was neither his face nor mine. It was the face of--of the man who ran from the pergola and vaulted over the orchard wall into the woods that summer night a year earlier; the man whom I had not, for the moment, recognized.

“We stood there, this man who had been my best friend and I, with the locket between us, and I debated whether to strike him down----”

The narrator paused. And then he said, fixing Dr. Beaulieu with an intent gaze:

“Should I have struck him down? You, who are a teacher of ethics, who set yourself up to be, after a fashion, a preacher, a priest, a spiritual director, tell me, would I have been justified if I had killed him?”

Dr. Beaulieu seemed to shrink, seemed to contract and grow smaller, physically, under the other man's look. He opened his mouth as if to articulate, but for a second or two no word came. And then, regaining something of his usual poise, he said, although his voice was a bit husky:

“No! It is for the Creator of life to take life, and no other. Hatred and strife are disharmony, and bring their own punishment by throwing the soul out of unity with the spirit of love which rules the universe.”

It sounded stereotyped and emotionless, even in Dr. Beaulieu's own ears, as he said it; there was a mocking gleam in the eyes of the other man that spoke of a far more vital and genuine emotion. Dr. Beaulieu licked his lips and there came a knot in his forehead; beads of perspiration stood out upon his brow.

“You were right,” said Dr. Beaulieu, “in not striking him down. You were right in sparing him.”

The bearded man laughed. “I did not say that I spared him,” he said.

Dr. Beaulieu looked a question; a question that, perhaps, he dared not utter; or at least that he did not care to utter. He had dropped completely his rôle of spiritual counselor; he regarded his visitor with an emotion that might have been horror and might have been terror, or might have been a mixture of the two. The visitor replied to the unspoken interrogation in the healer's manner.

“I did not strike him down. Neither did I spare him. I waited and I--I used him. I know how to wait; I am of the nature that can wait. It was years before fate drew all things together for my purpose, and gave him into my hands--fate, assisted by myself.

“I waited, and I used him. The details are not pertinent for it is not his story that I am telling. I piloted him to the brink of destruction, and then--then, I saved him.”

“You saved him?” Dr. Beaulieu was puzzled; but his fear, if fear it was, had not abated. There was a frank menace, now, in his visitor's air. And the healer seemed to be struggling, as he listened to the tale, to force some reluctant brain-cell to unlock and give its stored memories to his conscious mind.

“I saved him. I saved him to be my creature. I broke him, and I saved him. I made him my slave, my dog, my--my anything I choose to have him. I have work for him to do.”

Again the man paused, looking about the rich profusion of Dr. Beaulieu's studio. There was a table in the room which contained a number of curios from Eastern lands. The visitor suddenly rose from his chair and picked from among them a thin, keen-bladed dagger. It was a beautiful weapon, of some Oriental make; beautiful in its lines; beautiful with the sullen fire of many jewels blazing in its hilt--an evil levin that got into the mind and led the thoughts astray even as the dainty deadliness of the whole tool seduced the hand to grasp and strike. As his visitor, strangely breaking the flow of his narrative, examined and handled the thing, Dr. Beaulieu shuddered.

“The man is as much my tool,” said the visitor slowly, “as this dagger would be your tool, Dr. Beaulieu, if you chose to thrust it into my breast--or into your own.”

He laid the dagger down on the table, and resumed his seat. Dr. Beaulieu said nothing, but he found it difficult to withdraw his eyes from his visitor's steady stare. Slumped and sagged within his chair, he said nothing. Presently the visitor went on.

“I had a fancy, Dr. Beaulieu; I had a fancy! It suited me to make my revenge a less obvious thing than striking down the old friend who had betrayed my love and confidence, a less obvious thing than striking down the other man--the man whose face was in the locket.”

As he spoke he took from his pocket a locket. He opened it, and gazed upon the face. The healer half rose from his chair, and then sank back, with a hoarse, inarticulate murmur. His face had turned livid, and he trembled in every limb. It was evident that the missing scene which he had sought before had suddenly been flashed upon the cinema screen of his recollection. He remembered, now----

“It was my fancy, Dr. Beaulieu, to make one of them take revenge upon the other, that I might thus be revenged upon them both.”

He suddenly rose, and forced the locket into the healer's nerveless grasp.

“That face--look at it!” he cried, towering over the collapsed figure before him.

Compelled by a will stronger than his own, Dr. Beaulieu looked. It was the counterfeit presentment of himself within. It fell from his trembling fingers and rolled upon the floor. The cultist buried his face in his hands.

The other man stepped back and regarded him sardonically for a moment or two.

“I should not wonder,” he said, “if the man who used to be my best friend would pay you a visit before long--perhaps in an hour, perhaps in a week, perhaps in a month.”

He picked up the dagger again, and toyed with it.

“This thing,” he said, impersonally, trying the point upon his finger, “is sharp. It would give a quick death, a sure death, an almost painless death, if one used it against another man--or against one's self.”

And without another word he turned and left the room.

Dr. Beaulieu sat and listened to his retreating footsteps. And, long after they had ceased to sound, Dr. Beaulieu still sat and listened. Perhaps he was listening for some one to come, now that the bearded man had left. He sat and listened, and presently he reached over to the table and picked up the dagger that the visitor had laid down with its handle toward him. He pressed its point against his finger, as the other man had done. It was sharp. It would give, as the fellow had said, “a quick death, a sure death, an almost painless death.”

And as he whispered these words he was still listening--listening--waiting for some one to come----

XI.--The Locked Box