Chapter II

From Dorothy Newhall’s favorite chair, where often she sat cross-legged like a tailor, she could look through the broad library window, across velvet lawns and a flowering hedge, and thence straight down the long, white boulevard of Walton Way. It was characteristic of a certain part of her that in late years had come into the ascendency that she preferred this view—that which surveyed the fashionable traffic of the boulevard—to that from the wide glass spaces of the sun parlor, the vista of dark pines, deep in shadow, and the fields surrendering to the ardor of the Georgia sun. Dorothy’s father-in-law had contrived the sun parlor for his own delight, and in his lifetime had been rather intolerant of the stream of motor vehicles that flowed ceaselessly up Augusta’s most fashionable street; but they were all part of Dorothy’s life. To-day she saw the colored messenger boy, pedaling stiffly up the grade, before ever he had passed the great, fashionable tourist hotel on the brow of the hill.

She had time in plenty to watch him, and nothing better to do. She clasped her slender, lovely hands—hands that might have come to life upon a Da Vinci canvas—under the delicate curve of her chin, lowered her wonderful violet eyes, and watched. The boy did not look for house numbers as she rather expected him to do. Evidently he knew just where he was going, likely to some famous house like her own. Her gaze had been half-dreamy before, but now it was suddenly, surprisingly alert. Since tragedy had overtaken this household, something over a year before, she had had full cause to watch for telegrams. A swift premonition told her that the boy was heading straight toward her door.

The fact she had felt the same fear on many previous occasions and it had always come to nothing did not lessen the poignancy of the moment. She had no great sense of surprise when the boy turned into her own beautifully curving driveway, circled to the wide veranda, leisurely propped up his wheel, and passed beyond the range of her vision as he mounted the veranda steps to her door. Dorothy got up slowly from her chair. It required some effort to move so slowly; and she did it only to convince herself that she had not yet yielded entirely to the surging fear that clutched her heart. She walked freely through the door, took time to glance once at a great bouquet of flowers, and her hand was steady as she signed for the message. Then her fluttering fingers tore it open.

The next moment was a blank forever in her life. She had no memory of that first reading; yet when consciousness streamed back to her, a moment later, she lay half-sprawled over the great settee in the alcove just off the hall, and she knew the burden, if not the exact wording, of the message.

The yellow slip still lay in her hand. She did not look at it at once. Instead she lay with closed eyes, and the world swept through space, and time moved as in the grayness of half-sleep. She raised her hand slowly, and the message came with it; and slowly, laboriously, she read it through again.

It had been filed in the wireless office at Pirate Cove, in Alaska—a place of which she had never heard—and had unquestionably come by wireless to Seattle, whence it was sent by wire across the continent. It did not mince words:

MRS. PETER NEWHALL,
Walton Way,
Augusta, Georgia.

Papers found on dead body of man picked up on beach identify him
as Peter Newhall of Augusta, Georgia, though known locally by
another name. Death resulted from drowning and mutilation by
reefs. He left instructions for immediate burial also that you
be notified and personal effects be sent you. These are being
forwarded. Body was embalmed and given decent burial by my crew
near place of finding. If I can be of any other service please
command me.

CAPTAIN JOHANSEN,
Steamer _Norwood_.

Just yesterday, it seemed to her, in girlhood, she had tried to imagine how she would receive such news as this,—the sudden taking-off of some one she loved. To conceive of such a thing had been almost impossible to her. Yet here it was, bald-faced on the yellow paper; and still the boulevard lay white under the winter sun; she still moved and breathed, smelled flowers and knew the onward march of time. No tears came yet; instead only a limitless amazement. Indeed her eyes felt dry as the hand after too many immersions in water.

She _had_ loved this man who had died. No one dared deny that. It was true that he had often failed to understand her—that he was careless of her needs, that he had been insanely jealous without cause—but she had loved him and had continued to love him throughout all those cold, hard weeks before the tragedy, after his drinking had ceased being a joke to her and her friends and had become a subject avoided in his presence. He had failed to understand her, to recognize the artist-self in her that demanded expression and companionship, yet she had given him her love, her hand, a few of her best years,—indeed, all she had to give. She had done her part; and no blame could be laid on her. She had been faithful to him, and faithful until now to the image that her mind kept of what he had been.

At present it did not occur to her that she had perhaps failed to understand him, too. Her thought had never taken this bent; indeed she was not trained to imagine another’s point of view. Fortunately it was a matter of training only, not innate selfishness. There was no hint of selfishness in her wide-open, frank, clear eyes of such a marvelous violet hue; no evil lines about her lips or running vertically between her fine, silken brows; nothing but friendliness and open-heartedness in the habitual curl of her red, rather petulant mouth. But this mouth was not curling now. The news typed on the yellow slip had gone home, and she realized that this matter of mutual understanding between herself and Peter was closed and done forever. Their great problems had been instantly, tragically solved.

She read the message again. It had been sent from Alaska, the far North, thousands of weary miles distant from her and thousands of miles farther from the corner of the earth where she had thought he had been hiding. She had not dreamed but that he had fled to South America, as Ivan Ishmin had advised. Certainly he had gone to Savannah and had boarded the disreputable trader of which Ivan had told him; but some adventure of the journey had fetched him up in the far North rather than in Rio de Janeiro. The letters Ivan had given him to his great friends in the Brazilian capital—letters to facilitate his flight back to the frontier—had evidently been no use to him, after all.

For months past Dorothy had lived in constant fear of his capture. Such news she had expected in the telegram to-day, that in spite of Ivan’s heroic efforts to cover up the fugitive’s tracks, the arm of the law had seized him at last. Ivan had withheld his testimony to the very last, running the risk of being haled into court himself on the charge of assisting a murderer to escape, not telling the tragic story of what he had seen and taken part in on the deck of the motor boat until it was veritably forced from him at the inquiry several days later, but she had not dared to believe that Peter could escape the hue and cry that was subsequently raised. But now this was over, at least. Peter could never be brought to earthly justice. He could not be brought back in irons, nor could he return to her in any way at all. This was the close of the whole, tragic chapter. He had been destined for tragedy, this laughing husband of hers; and surely she had shared in it to the full. But this was the end, even as she might have expected.

The truth grew upon her like a cloud advancing over the horizon of her thought. It was dim, at first, hardly to be believed; but now the knowledge was like a stone wall, not to be crossed or encircled. Swift, stabbing darts of pain began to pierce her heart at ever narrowing intervals: they seemed like actual blades of steel.

The full shock of such news as this scarcely ever sinks home at once. Rather it was like a bullet wound, blunting at first, but later shriveling the body with pain. Dorothy was known, throughout her beautiful resident city, for the unfailing loveliness of her appearance—eyes always bright, cheeks flushed, quaint frocks dainty and fresh, bobbed curls, clustering in dark glory about her head and around her childish, slender neck and throat—but her nearest friends would hardly have known her now. The lovely dull-red glow on her brown cheeks had faded, her sensuous mouth was drawn and haggard with agony, her eyes like dark blotches below the brows. The realization of what had occurred deepened and spread until it filled her known world. It was like a great weight that crushed her, remorselessly, to the earth.

She bowed her lovely, bobbed head into the cushion of the divan; and the blessing of tears was hers at last. The long hours of the afternoon dragged away. She was miserably alone: her mother was out of the city, even old Rose, her colored mammy, did not know of her grief and thus could not come to comfort her; and Ivan—on whom, in these past months, she had begun to lean—was in high communion with the gods as, his violin tucked under his clear-cut chin, he practiced lovingly in his studio.

She was aroused at last by the sharp ring of the telephone bell and the shuffling steps of Nora, the second girl, who went to answer it. A moment later the servant came to the doorway.

“He say it’s Mistah Ishmin,” the servant told her stolidly. “He want to know if you feel like comin’ to de ’phone——”

Dorothy hesitated, started to instruct Nora to repeat a message, then got up and went to the ‘phone herself. Ivan would be quick to come to her when he knew the tragic contents of the telegram. He was always a strong arm to lean on: even Peter had granted him this. Yet the expected surge of relief at his calling did not immediately materialize, and the groping sense of loss remained.

“My dear girl, I have just heard the awful news,” he began in his gentle, comforting voice. Even over the ‘phone she caught the dim hint of his accent,—an almost imperceptible purring tone that went through every sound, like the eternal murmur that woodsmen hear, running through the silence of the forest. No man of her acquaintance spoke such perfect English; indeed his speech was more classic and refined than any one of her American-born friends. The fact that he was native of a far, mysterious country enhanced him in her eyes rather than prejudiced her against him. The tone was full, overflowing with consideration and feeling for her; and she wondered anew at the refinement, the wonderful modulation of his well-bred voice. No wonder that voice won women’s hearts. It was a highly flexible organ, reflecting perfectly every shade of his mood. “I just read it, in the papers,” he went on, “and I’m wondering if it would make you feel worse to have me come out——”

“I want you to come very much,” she answered simply.

“Perhaps you’d rather wait—I could come out later just as well—you can ‘phone me when you want me,” he went on, in his instinctive, well-bred effort to put her at her ease. “Maybe you’d like to be alone for these first hours, but if, later, I can help in any way, I am always ready.”

“No, I really want you to come.—And bring the Stradivarius, if you will. I think it will help—to hear that.”

Ivan hung up, and as she waited for him to come she sent Nora after the latest paper. She had not expected that the news would be made public so soon. Evidently it was no longer her own secret, but had been sent by wire around the world. She found the article on the first page, and saw with relief it was entirely fair:

Pirate Cove, Alaska, December 2nd—The body of Peter Newhall, of
Augusta, Georgia, was picked up dead on the beach on the north
coast of Alaska Peninsula. He was a victim of the wreck of the
cannery-boat _Jupiter_ that went to pieces on the rocks in her
effort to aid the auxiliary schooner _Vigten_, which was in
distress.

* * * * *

The above news came as a great shock to the entire city to-day.
Mr. Newhall was a member of one of the South’s most ancient and
distinguished families; and although the last part of his life
has been overtaken with tragedy, his friends remember him for
the good friend, chivalrous gentleman, and social favorite that
he was throughout the years of his young manhood.

Peter Newhall was born in this city thirty-six years ago, the
son of Col. Newhall of Gettysburg fame. He was married two years
ago to Miss Dorothy Stanhope of Savannah.

The affair that led to his downfall occurred in a motor-boat
party on the Savannah River a year ago last summer. According to
testimony brought out at the inquiry Peter had sought a bitter
quarrel with Mr. Ivan Ishmin, a violinist of international fame
who was spending the season at Aiken, South Carolina. When the
men were at the verge of blows, Paul Sarichef, Ishmin’s
secretary, interfered in Ishmin’s behalf, and turning on him in
a fury, Newhall was heard to threaten to throw him out of the
boat into the river.

Ishmin himself was the sole observer of the tragic outcome of
the quarrel, and torn between grief at the death of his
secretary and loyalty to his friend Newhall, it was with the
greatest difficulty that his testimony was drawn from him at the
inquiry. Later this same night Ishmin was aroused by angry
voices, and he left his stateroom to find his secretary, Paul
Sarichef, and Newhall struggling on the deck; and before he
could interfere, Newhall had hurled the unfortunate Russian into
the water. Ishmin immediately dived to rescue him, but he saw
the man go down for the third time before he could reach his
side. Almost crazed with grief Ishmin spent most of the night in
the river trying to rescue his friend’s body, but though once he
saw it drifting, he lost it in the darkness and it was never
recovered.

Not even the officers of the law, though making every effort to
apprehend Newhall, believed that it was a wilful, premeditated
murder. Newhall was deeply under the influence of liquor at the
time, and it is believed that he committed the crime in a burst
of drunken rage. According to Mrs. Newhall’s testimony Newhall
had wakened from a drunken stupor the next morning with no
memory whatever of either threatening Sarichef on the deck or of
throwing him overboard. He fled to Western Alaska—far out on
the Peninsula toward Siberia—and the above telegraphic dispatch
completes the tragic story.

She read the piece through, then washed her tear-reddened eyes and waited for the sound of Ivan’s long, low roadster on the drive. She resolved at once to keep a brave front in his presence, mostly because of a great good-sportsmanship that Peter had found and loved in her long ago, and partly, perhaps, for purely feminine reasons that were—by a long stretch of the imagination—almost disloyalty to Peter’s memory. She had always cared to appear at her best in Ivan’s presence. She secretly wondered if this were not, after all, an indication that what he had begged for was his at last,—her heart.

Had her love gone out to him in these past, bleak, miserable months of mourning? It is true that he had always attracted her with his striking good looks that almost constituted beauty, the charm of his manner, most of all his wonderful music. He had always suggested a splendid tiger to her, lithe, graceful, quivering with restrained power, marvelously subtle and deft. His ardent attentions to her—while other women tried in vain to lionize and run after him—had been immensely flattering to her. But both of these things had been true even before Peter’s disgrace, and she did not confuse them with heart’s desire. However, in the last few months she had found herself regarding him in a different light. He had been her almost constant companion, her consolation, a tower of strength to lean on. The great sea of tenderness that in her first months of marriage had been Peter’s had not flowed out to him yet; but there was, indeed, absolute respect, the deepest admiration, a sense of need, perhaps even—in certain mysterious hours—a feeling of deep fear. He fascinated her, this master violinist from the East. And there was no barrier between them now. The divorce Ivan had urged upon her would not now be necessary; the news from far Alaska had made her free.

In a moment Ivan himself was standing at her side, his countenance clouded in sympathy for her. She was ever amazed at this man. He was tall and looked slender; but she knew the iron in those long, easily flowing muscles. Once he had lifted her down from her horse—long and long ago—and she remembered yet the hardness of steel that had reached her through the caressing gentleness of that embrace. Their lips had met that day—illicitly—but he had begged her pardon with a gallantry that even her gallant husband could not have equalled; and had been the model of discretion thereafter. There was a darkness, a foreign look in his handsome face that fascinated her even as it estranged her, something Oriental and mysterious that she could not exactly trace or analyze. Ishmin was of noble blood, but it was the blood of a race oceans and centuries apart from hers in ideas, in philosophy, in attitude toward life.

He had come out of Russia at the beginning of the revolution, and was hailed at once as a new master of the violin. Before that time he was widely known in the theater of Petrograd and the Russian court, but he had not cared to seek laurels abroad. He had told her of his vivid, romantic youth in a great, weird, ancestral castle lost in the wild fastnesses of the Siberian side of the Ural Mountains. She never thought of him as a Slav; indeed, he was almost pure Mongol, and the Oriental strain revealed itself in his high cheek bones, his black, glossy hair, most of all in the almost imperceptible slant of his glittering, musician’s eyes. His hand itself was a miracle to her,—slender, long-fingered, throbbing with his musician’s passion, ineffably deft and agile.

“My dear girl!” he told her, his thin face lighting. He took her hand, bowed, and touched it to his lips. Then they took seats, side by side, on the big divan. His voice streamed on, comforting, cheering not only with his carefully chosen though swift-flowing words, but by the exquisite modulation of its tones.

“I suppose you’ll never forgive me,” he said at last, in a more quiet hour.

“I don’t see how I owe you anything but gratitude——”

“You know what I mean. You remember—that morning—after the trouble. You remember that when Peter wakened from his drunken sleep and could not remember the fight on the deck at all, he wanted to stay and fight the thing through the courts? It was I, you remember—of course with your help—who induced him to flee. And his flight has ended—by that.” He pointed to the telegram.

“I don’t see how it can be held against you, in the least degree,” Dorothy assured him earnestly. “You were kind—generous—wonderful all the way through.” Her voice dropped a tone. “Besides, this is no worse—better, in fact—that he should die doing a decent thing—going to the help of a sinking ship—than to die—in the prison on Elbert Street!”

“There would have been some way out! Life imprisonment, at the worst——”

“Life imprisonment! No, Ivan—not for Peter. Liberty was always a passion with him—with all his race, for that matter—and he’d rather be dead than in prison. I’ve got that consolation at least.”

“How amazed I am that this should come from the North when we both supposed he was in South America.”

She looked at him quickly. There was no doubt about the genuineness of this amazement. It was of no great importance—plainly the outcome of some minor incident of his flight—that Peter should have fled north instead of south as planned; yet she got the idea that Ivan was profoundly stirred and shaken. He saw her look of surprise and turned quickly in explanation. “He took such a chance, Dorothy! I had a perfect course laid out for him—one that no one could have followed—but up there, in American territory, he was in hourly risk of arrest! It frightens me to think of the risk he ran——”

“But there is no risk now!” she told him grimly. “He’s past all that——”

“Yes. Perhaps it’s for the best. Try not to mourn too much, little girl. He would have been a marked man, a fugitive from justice, all his life. This way he died honorably. Perhaps it was for the best.”

To turn the current of her thought he took his violin—a marvelous thing of shell-like mahogany—from its case, and standing beside the window, he began to play. He had always told her that brilliant, adoring throngs could not draw the music out of him that she could; and she believed him. He chose the simple but eternally beautiful Schubert’s Serenade, and at the first round, perfect, moving note, her heart leaped into her throat.

He was wooing her with his music. The marvelous succession of sounds was an actual appeal to her. She stole a look at his face: it was white with exultation; his chin embraced the instrument, his hand caressed it.

He was telling her of his love,—a love that would go through fire or water, triumph or disgrace. She need never doubt its reality, its genuineness. She felt, that moment, he would renounce his high place and go to the end of the world for her, that there was no sacrifice he would not make to win her, no lengths to which he would not go. It was a love that glorified her, but yet it some way appalled her too.

It was not the kind of love that Peter had given her,—tender, almost fatherly, a tolerant, protective love and yet strong with that eternal strength of the Anglo-Saxon. Peter had been bitterly jealous at last, but it had taken many little indiscretions—harmless, truly, but yet doubtless intolerable from his point of view—to make him so. She would not dare play thus with Ivan! His jealousy would be like a firebrand, his hate like a dagger blade. Peter could not have hated any one if he had tried. Hate was not in him; the madness that dwells in the cups, not hatred, had impelled the reckless, tragic deed on the motor boat more than a year before. It was true that he had now and then given way to violent anger, wild and ungoverned as the storms that sweep down the North Sea and wash his ancestral home; but he could not cherish a grudge or bear malice, and his tolerance, his finely developed sense of right and wrong, most of all his eternal fairness toward his foes, would keep him from any deliberate crime. It was not thus with Ivan. His crimes would never be the reckless ones of anger: they would be deliberate, carefully covered, remorseless.

The Anglo-Saxon does not live for women alone; he is too busy with his wars. He does not even prefer to do his drinking with women; rather he prefers other men, comrades in arms. When there are no wars he gives the fighting side of himself to his business, perhaps to sport or adventure. To his wife he gives comradeship, the tenderness that is all that he knows of love and unceasing, vigilant protection; but she is merely the dearest part of his life rather than his life itself, the shelter and warmth that he comes to after his day of toil or battle. The love that Ivan told her of in his soaring music was not like this. It was hot, deadly, passionate rather than tender; and Christian fellowship between man and woman had no part in it. Peter would not have ruined himself financially, perhaps he would not have even broken old and dear friendships with other men in order to hold her love. In the hour of need he would have gone to the sea’s depths for her, but he would have taken the stand that if he could not hold her love without needless sacrifice it was not worth holding. This man who played Schubert’s Serenade was of another race and another mind. He demanded her with a passion that brooked no interference.

He was bewildering her now with the incredible music,—playing of a white moon that poured down into summer gardens, of dream castles far away, of exotic fragrances. He was pleading with her now; and she could not remember that Peter had ever pleaded, except for forgiveness after some blundering wrong. His desire for her was articulate in every note.

Yet she did not make full response in her heart. In a way Ivan defeated his own ends. The very beauty of his music recalled to Dorothy a tenderness that was gone, a grace and a happiness that she had found in Peter’s arms in those first glorious months of their marriage. There was no fierceness then, no white heat, but there were holy hours breathless with a sweet, unearthly happiness. There was comradeship such as she could never, though she loved him to the world’s end, feel for this fiery artist of another race; there was a mutual joy in the adventure of living, and there was laughter, not to be heard again.

It was for the best that Peter was dead, Ivan had said. Yet the words stuck in her throat when she tried to repeat them.