Chapter XXI

Jim was finding it heavy going. Determined as his effort was to keep himself up to his recent, his Horatia-stirred pitch, he was forced to work harder than was reasonable or good for him. He had given up Horatia, but surely the feeling must have persisted that she might refuse to be given up and that separation for a little while would bring them together again. If he had not been so lonely it would not have been so hard for him. But many as were his acquaintances there was not one to whom he could have confided anything about himself and Horatia. When he was through with his work, and even he must admit that, if he was to work next day, each day must be allowed to end, he took long walks through the city streets, not slow, philosophic, reflective walks, but he hurried along like a man possessed or trying to get away from something--memories perhaps. Despite his careful grooming he was thinner--weary looking. It was very great strength which kept him from going to Horatia--or writing her. Two or three times he went so far as to get time-tables for the trains to the hill district. And how he hungered for news of her showed in the way he spent an hour discussing politics with Seth Heatherly, just back from a cottage near Maud’s--Seth Heatherly, who bored Jim to death but who at the end of the tedious conversation said that he had seen Horatia at a club dance with young Wentworth and that he thought there was something doing. Jim left him shortly after that and yet it was not to work for he did not return to _The Journal_ office at all that afternoon. He went to his own rooms and shut himself up. There was plenty of plain masculine fierceness and jealousy left in Jim under all his careful impersonality and apparent detachment. And so two months passed and it was mid-September.

Little Miss Christie did not think Mr. Langley looked well and, coming back from her vacation, she plucked up courage to tell him that she thought he should go away for a change. Jim was courteously non-committal and a flush rose into the self-conscious freckled cheeks until Jim noticed her sense of a rebuff and spoke to her a little more personally.

“I’m feeling all right. You look fine yourself, Miss Christie.”

“I am fine. Better than I’ve felt in a long time. Better than I’ve ever felt since that dreadful thing happened in Mr. Hubbell’s office.”

Jim idly probed her. He had never asked her about that before.

“You were the girl who was there at the time it happened.”

“Not just then, Mr. Langley. You remember he sent me out on an errand. It was while I was out that he did it. He had been acting queerly for some time but I never dreamed of such a thing. If I only hadn’t gone! And he was so good to me. He never minded all the mistakes I used to make--I was just out of business college.”

Jim smiled grimly. It was so absurd to think of Miss Christie’s supposing that her presence would have kept Jack Hubbell from the extreme edge of despair. She was talking on nervously now, tactlessly, as if a spring had been touched.

“It must have been a comfort to you to have his last words.”

“You’re mistaken. I didn’t have any words with him. I got there much later.”

“I meant in the letter he wrote that afternoon.”

“He didn’t write me any letter,” Jim answered, a little impatient of this opening up of intimate things with his stenographer. But Miss Christie opened her eyes and blundered on.

“I mean the one Mrs. Hubbell took--with her own.”

Jim’s body tightened just a little with sudden interest. But he remained calm. His next words put Miss Christie in a fright.

“I want you to tell me exactly what you know about that letter.”

The girl seemed to see all at once that she was making new history.

“Maybe she lost it,” she said feebly.

“Will you please tell me what I ask about that letter? Tell me just what happened that afternoon.”

Miss Christie gasped.

“Mr. Hubbell came in about five, quite excited--very hurried. He went into his office and shut the door--later he called me and said, ‘Letter to Mr. James Langley’--then he changed his mind and said he would write it by hand. About an hour later he came in and told me to go out and get some stamps and then to stamp and mail at once the two letters on his desk. When I came back he’d--done it. I stood staring at him and at the letters--they were to you and Mrs. Hubbell--I saw that. And then poor Mrs. Hubbell came in. The rest all was told at the inquest.”

“Yes--all that about going out for stamps. But why nothing about my letter?”

“Mrs. Hubbell read hers and then picked up yours and said to me that Mr. Hubbell wanted those letters to be a sacred secret--that she would give you yours personally and that I was especially not to mention that she had had any letter. It was his wish. It was all she could say. She put the letters in her dress and fainted dead away.”

Jim sat looking blankly at the credulous little thing before him, reciting her story with such interest in its drama.

“Mrs. Hubbell was good to you?” he asked.

“She was an angel.” The girl’s eyes filled. “Said she would do all she could to carry out his wishes and she told me that the trouble between them had been a hideous misunderstanding. She sorrowed terribly and she sent me away to get away from the reporters. They asked me so many questions. But I never told about those letters. Only I supposed----”

“That I got mine? Now, Miss Christie, I want you to keep your silence even more strictly. Never mention those letters or the tragedy again. That will do, today. You needn’t worry. Nothing will happen.”

Poor little Miss Christie was dazed at what she had done, a good romance spoiling in her mind. She had thought Jim and Mrs. Hubbell, lovers, innocent lovers, refusing to marry because of their fidelity to the dead man. And he had killed himself because he had found out that he had accused her unjustly. Had she not seen many a scenario with even more serious complications?

Jim found Rose at home. She was plainly surprised and pleased at his voice over the house telephone and received him in the grey room, in modified negligee,--a white Mandarin coat over a gold silk skirt. She came towards him both hands outstretched but the grimness on his face stopped her.

“I came,” he said, “for my letter.”

And her immediate pallor, preceding her assumed bewilderment, told him that Miss Christie had told the truth.

“What letter--what’s the trouble, Jim?”

“The letter Jack wrote to me the day he died.”

“He didn’t give me any letter to you----”

“No,--you took it--fairly out of his dead hand.”

“You’re crazy, Jim!”

“No--I’ve been interviewing Miss Christie!”

If poor Miss Christie could have seen the hard look on her benefactor’s face, how her scenario would have been shattered!

“Is that girl back here?”

“She’s been working in my office.”

Mrs. Hubbell paused for a second as if to select a cue. She chose it with quick decision and acted without delay.

“You should have looked into her references before you engaged her,” she said coolly.

He was grimly silent, looking at her as if wondering what the best tactics would be.

“That Christie girl,” she said, “seems to have her own reasons for maligning me. I’ve never looked into it closely but it appears--an office liaison with Jack----” she shrugged. “So she hates me--naturally.”

“That’s a wrong twist, Rose. In the first place I knew Jack. In the second place poor Miss Christie evidently idolizes the ground you walk on. No--you’ve become absurd. Where is that letter?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about and I haven’t any desire to argue with you if you’re drunk or crazy.”

He only laughed and sat down.

“A struggle, is it? Well, let’s see the possibilities. If I don’t get that letter I publish your story. I’m not afraid of the press, God knows. And Jack wasn’t. Make a good feature story. With a few pictures of you. The newspapers must still have some of yours on file.”

She looked at him with venomous hate.

“Beast!”

He did not notice her.

“I wonder if you destroyed that letter. There’s a good deal of reason to suppose that you didn’t. People--especially women--don’t destroy letters. They keep them around--even dangerous ones.”

He had his eyes apparently on the ground--cleverly cast down but he caught an uncontrollable movement, not of her angry head but of her eyes, toward the spinet desk in the corner. It would have told anyone all he wished to know. But at that moment her tactics changed again.

“Jim, you fool,” she said, “I’ll tell you about that letter and why I never gave it to you. I did read it--yes. After I read the brutal one to me I had to read yours. In those days I was close to you, you may be gracious enough to remember. I wanted to spare you. I couldn’t give you that dead man’s curse. I burned it. It was a dreadful letter.”

Her shudder was perfect but belated. Earlier she might have hoodwinked Jim again. But not after that little fearful glance at her desk--that utterly involuntary glance.

“Yes,” said Jim, quietly, “but it’s in that desk.”

“So you think I’m a liar!”

“I know that.”

He was impatient now. “And I’m going to search that desk.”

She was before him but he put her aside with one strong hand and forced her into a chair. Some spring broke in her then. He had taken the right method, physical force, the only thing that cows such a woman. He stood over her menacingly.

“I’ll beat you--tie you--if I have to. But I mean to search that desk.”

He pulled the desk open and, disregarding the piles of documents in the pigeon-holes, rummaged through the drawers, pulling them out one by one to see if their bottoms were real. Under one of them was the usual, ridiculous, obvious “secret” drawer. It was locked; he forced it open with a paper-knife and as he did so she sprang again to prevent him. This time he hurled her away with all gentleness forgotten. And within the drawer with three or four other letters was the one he sought.

He put it in an inner pocket with hands that trembled and then turned to her.

“I’ll have you arrested,” she cried, but it was a cry of fear, not of rage.

“You’ve seen your last of me,” he returned. “And you’d better get out of town as fast as you can. I don’t know what this letter says but it’s something you’d like to keep dark. If you leave town I’ll drop the matter, unless it is something which must be seen through. If you don’t----” he paused at the door, “but why didn’t you destroy that letter?”

But the long-standing mystery of why it is hard to destroy letters remained unsolved by Mrs. Hubbell.

“I meant to,” she answered.

Without another word he left her, the letter in his hand. He went to his room and sat for a while before he opened it, terribly shaken by that familiar handwriting. It had been addressed to his rooms, and the flap of the envelope had been steamed loose, untorn. At last he read the incoherent last message of his best friend.

“DEAR JIM--

“How in the name of mercy I can write what I must I don’t know. I
am in hell. I thought I was in hell before when I found what Rose
was. But it’s worse now. To find that I’ve put it on you
publicly--to have branded you in my crazy anger as her associate is
worse. And I can’t bear any more. My head is going to pieces. It’s
suicide, degradation--madness. Suicide is best. But first you’ve
got to have the facts and my shamed apology and my attempt at
reparation. Some things I’ll have to tell you--ugly as they are.
But there are women who don’t deserve the decent chivalry of men’s
silence. Rose is bad. She never gave me much peace--coldness,
hatred, passion--I never knew. But I loved her--a lot of me still
loves her--that’s the degrading thing. I got unmistakable proofs of
her infidelity. I had been away and while I was gone someone had
spent the night in the house--some man. She stupidly left evidences
for me to find. I found them. I suspect it wasn’t the first time
but it was the first time she had been stupid. I demanded the name
of the man--she wouldn’t admit anything. I fell pretty low and
opened letters. There was that one from you--you spoke of the ‘good
time you’d had that night.’ I was crazy, you know. Rose was vicious
but she did not show especial outrage at my accusing you. She
denied everything so I believed everything.

“As far as she was concerned I was right. She was careless enough
to receive the man again--at lunch today. With the servant out. I
found out and went home to see you and finish with you. But I crept
in and found it wasn’t you. It was another fellow. They were
laughing and having a gay time over the way they were doing us
both. The good joke was my interpretation of your letter. You and
not he had been the victim, and Rose said you had been with her
enough to make me jealous--that you would never deny anything that
she didn’t want you to.

“How she’s played us!

“I’m through. I can’t see you because you might dissuade me and I
don’t want to be dissuaded. The world’s rotten and I want to get
out of it. Every ounce of rotten passion in me for that woman drags
me down farther. It’s killing her or myself and it’s easier this
way. Only please do this for me. Give the statement enclosed to the
newspapers. Sounds rather spectacular but it must be done. It must
be done. And for God’s sake be careful whom you marry and steer
clear of Rose. Good-bye, old Jim.”

That was all except for a signed statement saying that John Hubbell wished to publicly acknowledge that in naming James Langley as co-respondent in the case of Hubbell vs. Hubbell he had been under a complete misapprehension and wished so to state--that Mr. Langley was entirely innocent of any such entanglement. It said nothing whatever about his wife.

“Thank God he knew,” groaned Jim under his breath. “Thank God he knew.” He sat staring bleakly out of his window as if he looked on waste and desolation.

Many thoughts must have been comforting and torturing him. Of course it was too late for the statement to be used but it healed a wound in Jim which even Horatia could not have cured. It must have seemed ironic to him that he had let such a woman come between him and Horatia. That for a promise to such a woman he had waived his right to yield to Horatia’s request--worst of all that in the society of such a woman he had let Horatia linger. If reason told him that the cause of his separation from Horatia might have been anything else, still there might not have been any immediate cause of alienation.

He looked at the time-tables taken from his pocket. They showed him what he knew, that within six hours he could be with Horatia. But the flame in his face died out and he looked again bitter--discouraged. There was Anthony!

That night the most dreadful forest fires of years broke out around the city. There were always forest fires--often very bad ones, but never had they been so terrible and so devastating. It was a relief to Jim to bury himself in the work of help as well as of publicity. The Hill district was safe. He kept half a dozen wires busy until he was sure of that. This fire was coming from the other way, sweeping through the farming country, destroying homes, farms, cattle and human life.

That night too, in one of the large city hospitals on the other side of the city, several babies were born. The nurse made the mother of one of them as comfortable as she could and then tiptoed out.

“Rotten to be as alone as that,” she confided to another blue and white figure, whom she met in the nursery. “Usually you have somebody around. But she didn’t have a soul.”

“Where is her husband?”

“I asked her. She said that he was out of the country. She looks respectable enough. Good clothes--not a bit sporty.”

“He probably is away--or a rotter.”

“Put a tape on the kid’s arm, will you?”

“What number is her room?”

“434. Isn’t Mrs. Gordon in 434? Yes.”

“Cute baby. Is she glad it’s a girl?”

“Says she is. I asked her what she was going to call it. She was sort of sleepy, but she said Horatia. Funny name, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Gordon was Grace Walsh.

Horatia’s old housemate lay back further on her pillow in her bare hospital room and smiled wearily at some thought. Perhaps she was thinking she would not be so alone now.