Chapter V

It was about a week after that that events began to move with fatal rapidity.

Thomas Patrick had been out of the office all the afternoon, and when he got home that evening it was to find Mary with a curious set look about her mouth, and dinner not ready.

“His wife’s been here,” she said.

“The Chief’s? When did she get back?”

“To-day. She’d had a bill for a fur coat sent to her by mistake. I guess that brought her.”

“A fur coat!” said Thomas Patrick, with the pulses beating in his neck.

“That’s what I said. And when she went to the office and asked him about it he said he’d told you to get one for me and charge it to him.”

He was trembling now with fear and anger.

“She had her nerve, coming to _you_!”

“It’s her husband.”

“What did you tell her?”

“What could I say? Tell her he was buying fur coats for another woman?”

“How do you know that? How do you know that wasn’t your fur coat on his bill?”

“Was it?”

He hesitated. Only once before had he lied to Mary.

“Yes,” he said shortly, and went upstairs.

Dinner was very silent. Mary’s eyes seldom met his and she ate very little, but it was not until she was carrying out the plates that she came out with what was in her mind.

“I’m just wondering,” she said, “how often you’ve lied to me before.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I saw the bill for that coat. It wasn’t bought where mine came from.” She deposited her plates in the kitchen and came back. “What sort of a hold has he got on you, anyhow?” she demanded. “You’d lie for him. I believe you’d steal or kill for him.”

“You lied to save her, didn’t you?”

“That’s different,” said Mary shortly. “_She_ hadn’t done anything. But he’s as crooked about women as a dog’s hind leg, and you’d lie to protect him.”

She went into the kitchen and closed the door.

Had he been less inarticulate he might have explained to her; that a great man may have his weaknesses, and yet be great; that he must be protected from those weaknesses in order to remain great; and his own feeling that the Chief’s wife might be virtuous, and yet be as guilty as the Chief.

But he could not talk. He never had any words for great moments.

He got out his papers and spread them on the dining room table, but he did not work much. His mind kept running back to that phrase of Mary’s: “What sort of a hold has he got on you anyhow?” And beyond the closed door, where Mary was working in sombre silence, he knew she was thinking of that, too. Suspecting him, of God knows what. Perhaps even putting her fur coat in what she had once scornfully termed a “conscience fund.”

He heard Mary finish her work, and braced himself for her entrance. But she did not come in. Instead, he heard the back door open and shut, and knew she had gone to the Tufts’.

He felt strangely oppressed and anxious, and very alone. He had always been alone until the Chief and Mary had come into his life, and on them he had lavished all he had. Now Mary seemed miles away. And the Chief—if only the election was over and the Chief was busy with great affairs! Out of temptation, so to speak. A Senator could not travel in shady by-paths. He must stand in the sunlight.

He got his hat and went out. Somehow he dreaded seeing Mary again after she had been at the Tufts’. He would let her sleep on the situation, and in the morning things would look different.

He walked endless miles. He had no particular physique, and when he grew very tired he found a bench in a public square and sat down. Once he lit a match and looked at his watch. It was only eleven o’clock. Then—he was very tired—he dozed off, and it was one when he roused himself and hurried home.

There was a light in the dining room and it frightened him. Mary was sitting there, waiting for him. Waiting with what she had heard from Mr. Tufts, to confront him with it. She would never believe that he had only carried a message to the Elliot girl. She would be sitting there, her poor throat working, imagining all sorts of terrible things.

He opened the door and slipped into the house, quite white with anxiety and excitement.

Mary was at the table, leaning her elbows on it. She had been crying, and as he moved along the little hall he heard her say:

“Here he is now.”

Then she was not alone. Mr. Tufts, perhaps, waiting to——

There was a police officer standing on the other side of the table.

The room began to whirl, and Thomas Patrick caught the door frame to steady himself.

“Well?” he said. His voice did not sound like his own.

Mary was standing now, he could see through a sort of black mist, standing and searching his face with reddened, terrified eyes. Then he was in the room, and the policeman had closed the door and was putting him into a chair.

“Better sit down a minute,” he was saying. “No hurry.” And to Mary: “You haven’t a bit of liquor in the house, have you? He needs it.”

“No.”

His head cleared a little, and he looked again at Mary, this strange, frozen Mary who never came near him, but stood staring with those dreadful eyes.

“I went out for a walk,” he said. “Then I got tired and sat down, and—”

“All right, son,” the officer broke in. “We’ll have all that, later—no need of worrying the wife, y’understand.”

Suddenly Mary spoke.

“Pat!” she said tensely, “for God’s sake speak up. Tell him you didn’t even know this Lily Elliot; tell him to go home and let us go to bed. Get him out of here. What’s he doing here, worrying us to death? We’re not criminals.”

It was about the Elliot girl. Then the Chief— The mist was going, and wariness crept into his blue Irish eyes. It was a political frame-up, a stall. The opposition was behind this. Well, let them get something from him if they could.

“I’m not talking, one way or the other,” he said cannily.

“Pat!”

“I’m not talking, I tell you,” he addressed the policeman stubbornly. “I’m not playing dirty politics for anybody, and you can chase that up an alley and kill it!”

But it seemed the policeman was not trying to make him talk. It appeared, too, that all that was wanted of him was to go somewhere, and that Mary was to go to bed and not to worry. Long after, all that came back to him, wiped out though it had been by the events that followed. He remembered kissing Mary, and the frightened desperate way in which she had clung to him, and a police car waiting around the corner, and that silent drive to the City Hall.

It was only when he got to the City Hall that he knew he was under arrest.

“What for?” he demanded, feverishly. “I’ve got a right to know, haven’t I?”

“You’ll be able to do your talking in a minute,” some one said.

Then he was in the detective board room, with Stuart, the Chief of detectives across a table from him, and half a dozen newspaper men standing round. Some of them he knew, and there was curiosity in their eyes, and pity.

Pity? For what?