Chapter XV

The following day found Marcus Gard at the usual morning hour in conference with Dorothy. The girl was radiant. The nurses had reported a splendid sleep and a calm awakening. She had been allowed a moment with her mother, whose voice was no longer faint, but was regaining its old vibrant quality.

The doctor entered smiling and grasped Gard's extended hand.

"You said it," he laughed. "Whatever it was, you said it, all right. Mrs. Marteen slept like a child, and there's color in her face to-day. See if you can do as well again. I'll give you five minutes--no, ten."

Preceded by the doctor, he once more found his way through the velvet-hushed corridors to the softly lighted bedroom, where lay the woman who had absorbed his every thought. Her eyes, as they met his, were bright with anxiety, and her glance at the doctor was almost resentful. But it was not part of the physician's plan to interfere with any confidence that might relieve the patient's mind. With a casual nod to Mrs. Marteen, he called to the nurse and led her from the room, his finger rapidly tapping the sick-room chart, as if medical directions were first in his mind.

Left alone, Gard approached the bed, and in answer to the unspoken question in her eyes, fumbled in his pocket and brought forth the thin packets of letters and the folded yellow cheques. One by one he laid them where her hands could touch them. He dared not look at her. He felt that her newly awakened soul was staring from her eyes at the mute evidence of a degrading past.

A moment passed in silence that seemed a year of pain; then, without a sob, without a sigh, she slowly handed him a bundle of papers, withholding them only a moment as she verified the count; then, with a slight movement she indicated the fireplace. He crossed to it and placed the papers on the coals, where they flared a moment, casting wavering shadows about the silent room, and died to black wisps. Again and again he made the short journey from the bed to the grate; each time she verified the contents of the envelopes before delivering them to his hand.

Last of all the two yellow cheques crisped to ashes. He stood looking down upon them as they dropped and collapsed into cinders, and from their ashes rose the phoenix of happiness. A glow of joyful relief lighted his spirit. There, in those dead ashes, lay a dead past--a past that might have been the black future, but was now relinquished forever, voluntarily--gone--gone! He realized a supreme moment, a turning point. Fate looked him in the eyes.

He turned, and saw a face transfigured. There was a light in Mrs. Marteen's eyes that matched the glow in his own heart. Very reverently he raised her hand and kissed it; two sudden tears fell hot upon her cheeks and her lips quivered.

He had never seen her show emotion, and it went to his heart. He saw her gaze at her hands with dilating eyes, and divined before she spoke the question she whispered:

"Who killed Victor Mahr?"

He bent above her gravely. "His wife. The wife he had cruelly wronged--his wife, who escaped at last from an asylum. She is quite mad--now. She is in our hands, and to-night, at eleven o'clock, the district attorney will be at my house to see her and have the evidence laid before him--to save Teddy," he added quickly.

She looked at him wildly. "His wife--the wife that I--"

He took her hand quickly. He feared to hear the words that he knew she was about to say.

"Yes," he nodded. "Yes--she killed him."

Mrs. Marteen sank slowly back upon her pillows and lay with closed eyes. A heavy pulse beat in the arteries at her throat, and a scarlet spot burned on either cheek.

"Nemesis," she murmured. "Nemesis." She lay still for a moment. "Thank God!" she said at length, and let her hands fall relaxed upon the counterpane. She seemed as if asleep but for the quick intake of her breath.

Gard gazed upon her with infinite tenderness, yet with sudden bitter consciousness of the isolation of each individual soul. She was remote, withdrawn. Even his eager sympathy could not reach the depths of her self-tortured heart. But now at last he knew her, a completed being. The soul was there, palpitant, awake. The something he had so sorely missed was the living and real presence of spirit. It came over him in a wave of realization that he, too, had been unconscious of his own higher self until his love had made him feel the need of it in her. They two, from the depths of self-satisfied power, had gone blindly in their paths of self-seeking--till each had awakened the other. A strange, retarded spiritual birth.

He looked back over his long career of remorseless success with something of the self-horror he had read in her eyes as he had placed the incriminating papers in her frail hands. And as she had cast contamination from her, so he promised himself he would thrust predatory greed from his own life. They were both born anew. They would both be true to their own souls.

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