Chapter X: A Light in the Dark

Fortunately it was late, after midnight, and a few early ones, dragged away by their fathers and mothers, were already going; and muffled in my long cloak and lace scarf I managed to slip out in the wake of a group of these--hoping they would not notice my being alone--and into my carriage, evading Jack's insistence that he must see me home by shutting the door in his face.

As the carriage went laboring off down the dark hill I crouched in a heap on the seat. If Estrella and Laura had seized me by the shoulders and bodily thrust me out of doors I could not have felt more utterly an outcast. "Does every one feel like that about me, even my friends?" I thought.

All my life I had been taught, and had believed, that only good came of telling the truth. Well, now the opportunity to prove that had come. I had done what had been demanded of me, and every one looked upon me as though I were inhuman. Had all the laws of the universe been suddenly turned upside down? Ought my lips to have been sealed instinctively by what I saw? Ought I to have been struck dumb on the witness-stand? Was it true, the terrible injustice of Laura's words, that because of me--not alone the story I had told, but my looks, my misery, my very pity for him--he had been convicted?

I was recalled to my surroundings by the rocking of the carriage. Great rains, which had fallen lately, had left the roads gullied, and rough as the sea. The moon would not rise until after one o'clock, and what made our progress really dangerous, something had gone wrong with the carriage lights. They dwindled and went out when we were but a block on our way, and no scratching of matches would make them stay lighted for a minute. At the foot of the hill the driver brought the horses to a halt, and informed me that the road ahead looked impassable.

I peered out of the window.

An unbuilt space was on my right, and across the dark expanse, and across the street which cut the other side of it I looked to the long roofs and walls of the convent, all a dull monotone scarcely distinguishable from the night. Only on the corner a solitary street lamp illuminated a little space of the wall and made a pool of light on the pavement beneath.

The silence was broken by the sound of voices talking--the jargon of peons, I thought--and I remembered that I was alone, and driving across a lonely part of the city. The voices seemed to be approaching down Powell Street, even now perhaps under the very convent walls. They sounded loud and jovial.

"Can't you turn into the sand-lot, and make a cross-cut to Mason Street?" I whispered to the driver.

Muttering that sand was "decenter than mud at least," he remounted his box and swung the horses about. In the mud the wheels and hoofs made only a soft "squshing" sound. We turned away into the dark, unlighted space without the approaching group being any the wiser of our presence.

But, as we went, I saw, suddenly emerging from behind the convent wall and coming out into the pool of light, the swinging serapes and great shadowy hats of the Mexicans. They were crossing Lombard, they were keeping straight on down Powell, probably for some of the North Beach resorts; but, as with voluble talk and laughter they passed the opposite curb, I noticed a singular thing--one man who dropped out of the group silently as if unobserved by his companions. He seemed to make one step from the lighted street into the shadow, and was swallowed up in it as completely as if he had plunged into a forest. He had entered that very tract that I had entered!

I put my head out of the window and spoke softly to the driver. "Stop! Keep perfectly still until he gets by."

The hackman seemed to understand what I wanted, and drew up the team, and we waited. I heard footsteps. They seemed to be coming straight toward the carriage. No, they were passing to the left of it. It was probable that this person was quite unconscious of our presence, but my heart was beating so hard it seemed to me he surely must hear it.

The footsteps stopped. I hardly dared to breathe. Then I heard the rough sound of a match; there came a small blue spurt, and suddenly in the little upthrown illumination I saw the lips holding tightly the cigarette; a little higher the flame stretched, and I saw the eyes and the black bar of the brows. I almost screamed. At the same instant he looked up and saw me.

It was just for an instant we gazed at each other thus. Then the match went out, the light of the cigarette failed, and I saw it drop like a glow-worm to the ground. I was looking again into nothing but impenetrable dark. Could it have been real--that glimpse of him--or only a picture on the night?

I leaned forward through the window and called softly into the blackness: "Come here!" I had the scared, shamed, unreal feeling of a child playing at conjurer who hopes, yet knows no miracle can happen. The shock was the greater then when, after a moment's interval, a formless bulk shadowed my window. I shrank back in the surprise and joy and fear of knowing him there.

"What can I do for you?" a voice asked, proceeding from the shadow, as courteously, as formally, as if it were speaking in the lighted ball-room I had just quitted.

"Oh, get in, get into the carriage!" I cried, for it seemed to me that all the city was spying on him, and the risk he ran was more than I could bear. He hesitated one more heart-breaking instant. Then, I thought, he drew back. I reached out blindly toward him and clasped his wrist.

My fingers were astonished at the great pulse that throbbed under them like a heart, sending a thrilling through my veins. Then I felt the downward sway of the carriage, and the sweeping of a serape over my feet; and I had released his wrist and knew he was sitting opposite me. I leaned out of the still open door and spoke to the cabman. "Drive over to Washington Square, and then around the Square."

Extraordinary as this direction was, he made no demur, only a sort of grunt, deep in his coat-collar, and almost before I was in my seat again the wheels were turning, and I saw the arm of my otherwise indistinguishable companion move darkly against the paler square of glass as he closed the carriage door, and shut us up alone together in the dark. He himself was scarcely separable from it, but I seemed to know how hard he was looking at me.

"Where were you going?" I said.

"Nowhere that you may go. Tell me quickly what you want of me."

It was strange that he, who so long had been a speechless figure--our only communication by looks--now had become a disembodied voice, like himself, quick, strong and imperious. There were a dozen questions which, over and over in imaginary interviews, I had asked him, all my anxieties and wonders and terrors about him; why he had said those first words of his to me in the police station; why he had encouraged me so recklessly with my testimony, and then fled, and of all those other puzzling inconsistencies in his behavior. But now that my opportunity and he were both here there boiled up in my brain my latest, most bitter perplexity of all, the one that had been presented to me tonight, not a question but a confession. Before I realized what I was saying I was telling him, very incoherently, how terribly I felt about having had to give my evidence, and why it had seemed the only thing to do. "But I know you do not think so," I said. "You think it strange and cruel of me that I did not keep silent."

His voice sounded very calm, almost casual. "I think nothing of the sort. You did quite right, and I am glad there is one woman who can speak the truth."

This was utterly different from anything that I had ever expected! "But," I stammered, "from the way you looked at me first when--when you ran out at the door, and then again when, I had to tell them who you were! I thought--"

I heard the sweep of his serape as he leaned forward toward me. "I hated, for your own sake, that you should see anything so hideous. When I came out of that door and saw you there on the other side of the street, do you know what you seemed to me? You seemed to me like the reminder of everything good I had ever hoped for or believed in, looking at me across that distance, horrified at me. It was that I could not bear." His voice sounded harsh and uncertain, but it was better to hear than the even off-hand tone he had used at first.

"I hated to see you have to go through that sordid business in the police station," he said, "hated to have you dragged through the court, to think you had to touch such things, even to know that they exist. I could not forgive myself! But what are you doing here alone at this hour of the night?" He broke off suddenly. The half stern, half protecting note made my heart beat.

"I was at a ball," I stammered. "I came away suddenly because--because I couldn't bear it. I heard them talking behind the curtains. They said it was I who had convicted you."

A touch came on my hand as if it had been the point of a finger, "Believe me, that is nonsense. It was I who convicted myself."

I turned toward him. I would have given anything, in that moment, for a glimpse of his face.

"If you did anything at all toward that end," he went on steadily, "remember you only helped me toward what I really wanted to do."

I kept my eyes fixed on that space of darkness from which his voice came. "If you wanted to convict yourself then why did you try to escape?"

There was quite an interval while I waited, trembling on the brink of the mystery. When at last he spoke his voice sounded a note of reserve. The unconscious intimateness was gone.

"Whatever my motive in convicting myself has been, let me assure you it has put me so far away from you that I am hardly worthy even to speak to you. But I feared you had been troubled about giving your evidence, and I am glad of this one chance to tell you that you have helped rather than hurt me. But now it is all over; you will not have to worry or think about it any more, for what I am going to do now will put me quite out of your sight."

He said it with such a sad, reckless gaiety, and it sounded so final that it seemed to me the world had come to an end with it; and, without any understanding of how or why it happened, I found myself crying, with my face in my hands. My ears were filled with the sound of my own sobs, but through them I could hear him begging me to stop, and, though he did not touch me, I could feel him now close beside me on the same seat and bending above me.

"The thing isn't worth it," I heard him say, "I deserve it all--everything! You are too good to waste any pity on me! But I love you for it. I have loved you since the moment I saw you staring at me as if I were the devil. I loved you when you came to the prison and pointed me out for what I was, the man with the pistol. I will never forget you."

At that I cried all the harder, but now there was a curious feeling of comfort in it. All the misery I had kept shut up in my thoughts for so many weeks seemed to be running out with my tears.

"What can I do to make you feel differently about it?" He was pleading.

"Don't do what you are going to do," I whispered, muffled up in my handkerchief.

He made a queer little sound in his throat--amusement or despair, I couldn't tell which. "Don't you know I can't stay here? Whether I shot the man or not I am forfeit. I have to go. But before I do I want to tell you one thing. You won't believe it, but here it is--I didn't shoot Rood!"

A great weight seemed to slip from my heart. I dropped my hands and looked up, and instead of darkness, there was his face above me, great, shadowy hollows for the eyes, and a soft, gray shadow for the mouth. His hat was thrown aside and I could see a faint light on his forehead.

It seemed like a miracle in the first, wondering moment. The next I understood what had happened. The quarter moon was rising, and everything was filmed with her dim silver. For a little I looked up at him quite contentedly, with a feeling of peace at my heart that I had not felt since I had first seen him. "Of course I believe you," I said. "I was only so frightened because in the court you wouldn't speak, and no one would speak for you and explain how it happened. It made it seem as if you were the one. That was why every one thought so."

He smiled rather grimly. "Yes, that is what I supposed."

"But now you will go back, you will tell them how it really happened, you will be proved innocent?"

"I can't be proved innocent," he answered harshly. "There is nothing here for me." Yet all the while he looked at me so wistfully that it was hard to understand.

"But there is I," I said. "Doesn't it matter to you that I care?"

He did not move or speak, only kept looking down at me with those dark hollows of his eyes, not a glimmer of light moved in them that I could see, and, listening to the deep come-and-go of his breathing I felt frightened.

"No, I never thought, I never dreamed such a thing was possible," he said at last, in a queer, shocked, half-awed voice. "You don't know what you are talking about, child," and he leaned forward, resting his elbow on his knee and his forehead in his hand.

"But I do know! I care terribly. All these days when I haven't known what had become of you I have been understanding it, and I am glad I said it," I put my hand on his, which rested on the seat beside me.

He shook it off, pushed it away from him. "No, don't do that," he said quickly. "Don't tell me that it is so. You are too good for it!" Then he said slowly, measuring every word as if he meant I should clearly understand: "This comes too late for me. I have gone too far in the wrong direction, and now I am going away with the Spanish Woman."

"No, no, no!" I cried vehemently. "You must not! You are too good for that!"

"No, that is all I am good for now. And she has done everything for me. The sortie at the court house was hers. She has kept me hidden in her house all these days; and, when that was searched, in the convent garden. She has chartered a lugger to take us to Mexico. It is lying out in the bay, now, on the other side of Chestnut Street Hill. She has slipped me out of her house with a group of her peons for a screen. I am going aboard now. She is coming out at dawn." He lifted his head and looked at me again, smiling a little, "And if your conscience can keep you from reporting this before eight o'clock this morning we shall be safe."

He said it in a monotonous, dull tone, as if there were no longer any question about it, as if for some reason the thing were irrevocable! And yet I couldn't understand why. There was no reason in it at all that one could see. I had the dreadful sense of fighting something invisible.

"But all that she has done for you," I insisted, "hasn't made any one happy. It has only kept making things worse and worse for you and every one else, and finally it has made you a coward."

How that made him wince! "That's not quite the fact, that's too ugly," he said quickly. "I can't let you think that; it isn't all my weakness. It is partly that I owe it to her. I am bound to do this, just as you were bound to speak the truth in court. You won't understand it I know, for to you the world is black and white, and each incident stands by itself. But as a man lives these incidents are interwoven like the links of a chain, each one depending on the others, so that sometimes what appears to be a bad thing is really the only decent thing if one knows the circumstances."

"But it is because you are only looking at a little string of wrong things, that the last one of them looks right, because it's like the others," I said. "If you go back to the big wrong that started them all and straighten it out, you will see that everything that follows will straighten itself."

He threw back his head, looking down at me with an expression I could not make out, astonished, incredulous, and half ashamed. "Out of the mouths of babes--" I thought that was what he said very softly. Then, "And this great wrong, Miss Fenwick?"

I was conscious that somehow I had gained an advantage, and I kept my eyes upon him as if in such a fashion I could hold it tight. "You must tell them how Martin Rood really died."

"Ah, never!" The word rang with such unexpected finality that all my hope went tumbling at the sound.

"Oh, he loves her, he loves her!" I thought and my pleading became the pleading of despair. "Yes, yes, you will go back, if not for my sake then for your own, and tell them what you have told me, and the rest of it; and I know everything will come out right."

He still kept gazing at me with that puzzling expression, only now there seemed to be more of tenderness than of incredulity in it. "You seem to have great faith in things coming out right."

"Oh, but it's true," I urged. "They will, if only you will go back and face the thing."

Slowly he shook his head. "Yes, it may be true. It may even be workable in some cases, but I have got too far away from what is right ever to get back. If I should try I would only succeed in doing some one else still greater wrong--a wrong that even you, with all your awful sense of justice, could not ask me to do."

He turned from me, and sat for a little while gazing straight before him, and I looked at his stern profile set against the window glass, saw the shift of expression upon it, and knew that he was thinking. At last, turning to me again, as if there had been no interval between his words, "But this much I can do," he said. "Even if I can not quite get back to the great wrong, I will go back as far as I can in honor to set this thing right. I will give myself up--" He waited a moment, then added: "On one condition; that you will promise never to say a word of what I have told you to-night."

"But," I protested, "then how will they ever know you are innocent?"

"They won't."

"Oh, but then you will be--" I began, with a wail.

"Wait, don't speak, don't answer until I have asked you another question," and the strong touch of his hand held me quiet. "Suppose I can't make it come out right--don't you think it is better to make a strike to get as near to the right as I can, instead of going on, getting deeper and deeper into the wrong?"

"Yes," I whispered. "Don't you?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "I only know that since I have seen you I can't go on. After being with you only for this little while, after what you have told me, I can't go to her."

We faced each other in silence. My hands were clasped tightly in my lap but my heart went out to him in gratitude and thankfulness.

Then, bending a little toward me, "Now, have I your word?" he gently asked.

I could have promised him more than my word in that moment.

He smiled. "I know that I can trust you. I have seen that you have a loyal heart; but this promise shan't cost you anything. I shall answer no questions. Now, I shall have to send a message to Senora Valencia."

"Oh, do not," I begged. "She will stop you from going back. You don't know what she is capable of; she can do anything!"

"No one can undo what you have done," he said. "She will not stop me. I must send her a word to tell her she is to go away on the lugger without me."

"But why?" I cried. "I am afraid to have you go near the house. I know I shall never see you again."

"Come, you must be brave. I am only going to write a line and slip it under the gate. We must not be cruel if we are righteous, you know."

I hardly understood his scruple, but the determination of his voice made me feel that it was right. Thus reassured the practical question rose as to what there was he could write with or upon. We should have to be quick, for already, the first pale change, which is scarcely dawn but only that fading of the deepest blue of night, was in the sky. He fumbled in all his pockets, and in the folds of his sash. We explored the seat and the floor of the carriage. In my eagerness my cloak slipped from my shoulders, and as he drew it up around me again, with nervous fingers fastening the clasps across the bosom, "What is that?" he asked suddenly.

I put my hand down and it touched a stiff little edge of paper thrusting from my girdle. I drew it out. It was my dance program. I had quite forgotten about it. One side of it was scrawled thickly with names, but most of the other side was clear, and the little white pencil was still fastened to it.

He took it from me, and holding it on the palm of his hand, "I wonder if you have any idea what thing you are asking me to do?" he said.

I did not speak, because I felt that if I opened my mouth it would be to say something weak and foolish, and when I had put the card into his hand I had seen him hesitate; so I knew that he needed all my strength. He bent his head and began to write slowly and laboriously because of the swinging of the carriage; and, letting down the window, I put my head out and addressed the driver who was hunched up like a shivering bird on his high seat.

"Drive to the Senora Valencia's house." For perhaps an hour he had been jogging us around and around the Square, and one would have thought that this order would have come upon him as a surprise. But he only turned his head slowly toward me, and then as slowly back again, with a movement that made me think of a mechanical toy, then he guided the horses' heads from Washington Square into Lombard Street.

I had sunk back into my corner and covered my eyes with my hand. "Do you want to read what I have written?" I heard Johnny ask.

I shook my head. I felt that I had made him do something terrible, as he said, I did not know how terrible. I did not even look when the carriage stopped, when I heard him getting out. But even from where I sat I could hear the beat of the brass knocker. A moment passed, with fear thick at my heart; then he was back again. He gave the direction to the driver before he got in, and the cab turned and was rattling down the street, with a speed that suggested that the hackman was at last stirred to excitement by the name of our final destination. We two looked into each other's face.

"You would better drop me at Montgomery," Johnny said.

"No," I answered, "I am going to take you all the way." He frowned. I thought he was going to object. "Let me stay with you as long as I can," I begged. "It will make it easier for me."

Still with his eyes on me his lips moved with some word. Not a sound came through but I thought he had said my name. And all the while through the cold, gray twilight we were driving downward through the city. The farther we went the more a strange and calm feeling settled upon me, and the more I forgot everything in the world but him. It seemed as if for ever we would continue to drive on together with this wonderful quietness between us.

But the carriage was drawing up. I looked at him anxiously. "What is the matter? Why are we stopping?"

His face was strange. "Don't you know? It is the prison."

He half rose, his hand was on the door, he had turned his back on me. A sudden anguish went through me, keen as physical pain. Something that was not my mind at all seemed to be acting for me. I caught hold of his arm with I don't know what impulse to pull him back.

He turned, looking at me with smiling eyes, gently unclasped my fingers, bent his head and touched them with his lips. "Don't spoil it," he said, "and remember your word."

I watched him walking down the half block to the prison door, a figure tall and solitary, and in spite of his gay Mexican trappings, with an air of somber resolution. So I saw him pass the lone, gray house fronts, and be swallowed up in the great entrance of the prison.