Chapter XXIII

Brainard, after leaving the office of the bank, had also taken, the elevator, and before Ogden had reached McDowell's floor his chief stood at the door of Freeze & Freeze; the firm did some legal business for him now and then, under his own general designation of "odd jobs." But their door was locked, as it usually was at that hour; and the old man descended again, took the street-car, and went home to tea.

"I've got him, all the same," he muttered to himself. "He can have a little leeway if he wants, but it won't carry him very far off--as things are now."

He stamped and fumed through the parlor floor for the quarter of an hour during which he attended the preparation of tea in the basement dining-room. He sat down with Burt and Cornelia and his younger daughter; Abbie had shut herself up in her room, and had sent down word that she was too ill to appear.

The table was set with the plated ware of twenty years ago, hideous in varied quirks and chasings. Just within the door of the room stood a baby's high-chair; and Brainard, in passing to his place, contrived to put a vicious foot heavily on one of its sprawling wicker legs.

He went through the meal with a great grinding of molars and a loud smacking of lips. He said nothing; he handled his knife and fork and his goblet with a heavy-handed clatter, while his eyes stared fixedly at the table-cloth. The others watched him in silence; his teeth were grinding something other than food, and the smacking of his lips indicated a relish beyond that for any mere eating and drinking.

After his second cup of tea he arose and pushed back his chair, and planted his feet with a ponderous stamp on the space over which the chair had stood.

"Burt," he said, as he moved towards the door, "you can step down the street when you get through, and tell Albert Freeze to come up here. I shall be in my room."

He commanded the attendance of his attorneys as lightly as he commanded that of his clerks. The Freezes happened to be youngish men, but it would have been the same with older ones.

He withdrew to his den. He rearranged the coke-balls that he had had spread on the top of his grate fire, and then he began to rummage among the disordered papers on his desk.

A book was lying among them--a thin volume, with the place marked by a paper-cutter.

"I wish. Abbie wouldn't leave her things around everywhere," he said, grumblingly.

He tossed the book across to a table. The paper-cutter fell out of it, but landed by its side, where it balanced on one corner of the tabletop. It was a cumbrous implement, somewhat after the fashion of a dagger, and it was smeared over with something that produced the effect of green bronze.

He went to the window and looked out before pulling down its shade; the window opened, after the manner of a door, on the side porch. A misty rain was falling--slight, but deadly chill, and through it there appeared the discolored flank of the stable, draped with the autumnal stringiness of its wild cucumber vines.

The door of the room opened with a swift and sudden quiet, and a young man stepped in. His shoulders were covered with a thousand shimmering rain-globules, and his breath gave out a strong reek of brandy. It was Marcus.

"I want to see Mr. Brainard," he had said, at the outer door, to the strange servant-girl, and he had pushed straight by her without further word.

He stood there pale and tremulous; his eyes glittered like two knife-points.

"I'm out again," he said. "I've got another chance, and I don't mean to lose this one."

His father turned on him with a fierce frown--a frown full of malevolent intention.

"It's you, is it?" He was silent for a moment. "Well, you can stay. I've been thinking about you, lately. I can 'tend to two as well as one."

"You've been thinking about me lately, have you?" Marcus repeated. He spoke with a hardihood that came from draughts of brandy more than once indulged in. "You had better have thought of me before."

"I'm thinking to just as much purpose," his father declared grimly. "I haven't been altogether in the dark," he went on, "about your goings and your doings. I know what you've been living on, and how you got it, and who put you up to it all. I know how you have been figuring on my dying and preying on me before my dying; but I'm alive yet, and the next time you see that singing Canadian scoundrel you can tell him so. And I know all about your latest tactics, too. Do you see that?"

A pass-book was lying on his desk, and between its covers there was a packet of checks, bound by a rubber strap. He drew out the top check and extended it towards his son; he used his clumsy thumb and forefinger to keep a strong hold on one end of the paper--the end that bore the signature.

"You've seen it before, too, unless I'm mistaken," he went on, with a glance in which indignation was overlaid by a cruel sense of power and a cruel determination to use it. "You didn't expect it to get around to me quite so quick, did you?"

"I see it, yes," said the young man. "And I've seen it before. What of it?" He spoke like one who had nerved himself to this--and to more.

"What of it?" cried his father, in a sudden fit of rage. "There's this of it! Do you think I'm going to stand being stripped by a thieving scamp like you? Do you think I'm going to be bled drop by drop by a couple of infernal scoundrels? Oh, that whining about your drawing, and your not being allowed to go on with it! You can handle a pen all right enough! You can draw cheeks for me, and you can draw yourself to Joliet! That's the best place, all around, for both of us."

"I shouldn't mind meeting you there," said Marcus, with a contemptuous sneer. "_There_ would be a 'couple,' sure enough--the only one _I_ know anything about."

"Where is that wretch?" cried Brainard, seizing the youth by the arm. "You know; you do, too--you see him every day! Tell me where I can find him! He must be followed up. Let me get him, too, and put him where he belongs!"

"Keep off!" called his son; "keep off, you fool! I haven't seen him for a year, and I don't want to see him for another. It's you I want to see; you and Burt--brother Burt."

His eyes glittered with a sharpened anger, and his dilated nostrils quivered with the indignation that the thought of his elder brother always aroused.

"I want to see the vice-president of the Underground National. I want to see the bridegroom who got half a million on his wedding-day. And I want him to see me. I want him to have a look at the poor devil who has been knocking around from pillar to post for the last two years, who has hidden in dives, and who has been dragged through the slums, and who has been driven from the variety stage, and has served his time more than once. Let him feel the difference; let me help him to feel it!"

"Your own blame!" cried his father. "You had the same chances and threw them all away. And you'll serve another term now--a longer one."

"I guess not," said Marcus. He looked about the room with a sharp and wary eye. It might have been thought that he sought at once both means of offence and means of escape.

There was a rap on the door; Burt's voice was heard outside.

"Here's Mr. Freeze, father. I suppose he can come right in."

Marcus reared his head suddenly.

"It's Burt!" he trumpeted. "He's here! he's here!" He sprang toward? the threshold and clamped his long fingers about his brother's throat. Burt's head struck with force against the wide jamb; he half fell, and his legs and arms writhed in company with his brother's.

"Get them apart, Freeze! Get them apart!" cried Brainard, with a loud roar. "Am I going to see Burt strangled before my very eyes?"

Marcus released his grip and staggered back into the room. He reared himself pantingly against the table. His face was deadly pale, and the perspiration was starting out in beads beneath the dark, disordered locks that lay on his forehead. The screaming of women's voices was heard in the corridor outside, and the light hastening of women's feet.

"Three to one!" panted Marcus. "It's a plot! it's a trap! I know you, Freeze. I see through all of you. But three ain't enough. You can't do it; no!"

Abbie Brainard came rushing through the hall. She reached the threshold and paused there to see her brother catch up her paper-cutter from the table, plunge it into her father's neck, and break through the window, and to hear his nimble feet clatter escape down the stairs of the side porch.

Brainard fell heavily against the marble slabs of the fire-place. Blood soaked his high, old-fashioned collar and trickled down the plaits of his shirt-front. He lay there stunned and bleeding, and lifeless--as it seemed.

His huge bulk was gotten laboriously to bed--half dragged, half lifted. He lay there for a fortnight, between life and death.

The doctor came, and with the chill gray of the first dawn came the nurse. It was to be a hand-to-hand struggle, and all the forces were engaged at once. The nurse spent the first halfhour of uncertain daylight in bringing order out of the chaos that had established its instant sway in the old man's room on the evening before. She raised or lowered the shades, adjusted the transom, quieted the fire, and arranged her bottles and bandages. She wore the dull uniform of a public institution; and she was accustomed to carry this uniform at a moment's notice into strange places and among strange people. She accepted her assignment blindly, and took up its details afterwards.

She seemed of a rather rugged, stolid build, but her eyes were eloquent with a haunting sorrow. It was as if time had redraped her figure with the flesh that sorrow and suffering had once stripped from it, but had been powerless to reclothe her spirit in its pristine hope and cheerfulness.

She stood at the window, endeavoring to get her bearings in the early light of the dim morning. The lilacs and syringas in the yard showed the crinkled brownness of latest autumn. A boy was crossing and recrossing the street to put out its lamps; and in the second-story window of the stable the flickering of a single gas-jet was helping the coachman and hostler to make up his own bed.

Behind her she heard the heavy grunting breath of the sick man. Presently another sound mingled with it--a creeping and rustling sound that made its little track along the hall and across the threshold of the half-open door. She turned; a baby was on the floor beside her--a beautiful boy with dusky, liquid eyes, and the beginnings of a poll of dark and curly hair. An inquiring pain plucked at her heart and set its signal in her eyes; she saw a resemblance that it was impossible to overlook. She cast a hungry and timorous glance about her, and presently, with a great yearning and a steadying resolve, Jane Doane was kissing Russell Vibert's child.

For this privilege she was indebted, in a sense, to Erastus Brainard. She had never been indebted to him for anything else.

The old man lay in a kind of stupor; his head had been seriously injured by his fall, and bloodpoisoning of the most virulent type pointed to his inevitable end. He had occasional moments of recurring consciousness, and at such times he attempted, with the help of Abbie and of Freeze, to bring his affairs into order, and to dispose of his belongings by will.

The Ogden affair, meanwhile, stood still. No formal steps had been taken, and the young man had Fairchild's assurance that an accommodation was sure to be brought about.

The situation became known to the Bradleys--in its general outlines, at least. They caught at the end and ignored the means, as would have been done by anybody else in their position. They considered that their friendliness towards Ogden had been misplaced and that their confidence had been betrayed. They preserved appearances with him through their daughter's final illness; and by a great effort they even produced an effect of a common suffering and a common sympathy at the funeral. But after that they never saw him again. The difficulty with the bank did not become public, but they considered themselves, all the same, no less disgraced than deceived.

The desperate illness of Brainard dragged itself along, meanwhile, and the house was saturated with gloom. Abbie assisted actively in the nursing; she watched in alternation with the first nurse and with the succeeding one. Cornelia was given an opportunity to put her hand to the household helm. As she said to herself, she was soon to manage a house of her own, and she might as well be brushing up her knowledge. "And she has got to go with me," Cornelia said to herself for the twentieth time; "she can't live here after_--this._"

Cornelia had fought out many a fight during her year in this grisly old house; but she saw now that her intended campaign on behalf of Marcus was an impossibility, and that all the forces might as well be withdrawn from the field.

Nobody had seen the youth since that fatal night; nobody, that is, who had cared to make the fact known. Neither did anybody know where he was keeping himself, save the sister on whose night-watches he had once or twice stolen by way of the window through which he had made his escape from his brother and Freeze.

He came again--for a third and last time. It was one o'clock in the morning when she heard his light touch on the window. She hastened to him with her mouth set for a terrified whisper.

"Yes, I know it's dangerous, Abbie; I know I promised not to come again. But I can't help it--I've got to hear. How is--how are things going on to-night? Is there any improvement over yesterday?" He locked his fingers in a convulsive strain. "I thought they had laid a trap for me," he said chokingly. "Just tell me yourself how it is, and after this you can send me word, as you have before. I won't come again, I promise you."

She threw herself on his breast and burst into an agony of tears. "No, you never will," she sobbed; "he is dying. There is no hope; he won't live till morning."

The young man trembled like an aspen; tears rolled out of his dark and hollow eyes. He tried to speak, but no word came. Then he clasped his sister in his arms and withdrew as he had entered.

The night, laden with anxiety and fear, dragged out its weary length. In the early morning the house resounded with a great cry. The dying man, in a brief moment of consciousness, half raised himself and heard the sound and the tidings thus conveyed. The word was passed from man-servant to maid-servant, and came to their master through the voice of a Swedish girl whose mind was capable of dealing with emotions only in the most primitive way, and whose imperfect command of English made her communication come with a horrible and harrowing directness. One second before Erastus Brainard fell back dead he knew that his son had hanged himself; the 'last picture that rose before his fleeting vision was that of his boy pendulous from the rafters of the stable, his slight body swinging to and fro and his tongue protruding uglily from the purple-black of his face.