The Dark Angel

by Seabury Quinn

  We paused to gaze upon the threshold, nostrils stinging with the acrid effluvium of caged humanity, ears fairly aching with the heaviness of silence which weighed upon the confined air. “Oh, my dear, my darling”—it was a woman’s sob-strangled voice which came to us from the gateway of the farthest cell—“I just found out. I—I never knew, my dear, until last night, when he told me. Oh, what shall I do? I—I’ll go to the governor—tell him everything! Surely, surely, he’ll—”

  The man’s low-voiced reply cut in: “No use, my dear; there’s nothing but your word, you know, and Larry has only to deny it. No use; no use!” He bowed his head against the grating of his cell a moment; then, huskily: “This makes it easier though, Beth dear; it’s been the thought that you didn’t know, and never could, that hurt, hurt more than my brother’s perfidy, even. Oh, my dear, I—”

  “I love you, Lonny,” came the woman’s hoarse avowal. “Will it help you to know that—to hear it from my lips?”

  “Help?” A seraphic smile lighted up the tired, lined face behind the bars. “Help? Oh, my darling, when I walk that little way tomorrow night I’ll feel your love surrounding me; feel the pressure of your hand in mine to give me courage at the end—” He broke off shortly, sobs knotting in his throat, but through his eyes looked such love and adoration that it brought the tears unbidden to my lids and raised a great lump in my throat.

  He reached his long, artistically fine hands acros the little space which separated his cell door from the screen of strong steel mesh which guards had set between him and the woman, and she pressed her palm against the wire from her side. A moment they stood thus; then:

  “Please, please!” she turned beseechingly to the man in blue who occupied a chair behind her. “Oh, please take the screen away a moment. I—I want so to kiss him good-bye!”

  The man looked undecided for a moment, then sudden resolution forming in his immobile face, put forth his hand to move the wire netting.

  “Here!” began our guide, but the word was never finished, for quicker than a striking snake, de Grandin’s slim, white hand shot out, seized him by the neck immediately below the medulla oblongata, exerting sudden steel-tight pressure so that the hail stopped abruptly on a strangled, inarticulate syllable and the man’s mouth hung open, round and empty as the entrance to a cave. “Monsieur,” the little Frenchman promised in an almost soundless whisper, “if you bid him stop I shall most surely kill you.” He relaxed the pressure momentarily, and:

  “It’s against the regulations!” our guide expostulated softly. “He knows he’s not allowed to—”

  “Nevertheless,” de Grandin interrupted, “the screen shall be removed, Monsieur. Name of a little blue man, would you deny them one last kiss—when he stands upon death’s door-sill? But no!”

  The screen had been removed, and, although the steel bars intervened, the man and woman clung and kissed, arms circled round each other, lips and hearts together in a final, long farewell. “Now,” gasped the prisoner, releasing the woman’s lips from his for an instant, “one long, long kiss, my dearest dear, and then good-bye. I’ll close my eyes and stop my ears so I can’t hear you leaving, and when I open them again, you’ll be gone, but I’ll have the memory of your lips on mine when—when—” He faltered, but:

  “My dear; my dear!” the woman moaned, and stopped his mouth with burning kisses.

  “Parbleu, it is sacrilege that we should look at them—about face!” whispered Jules de Grandin, and swung himself about so that his back was to the cells. Obedient to his hands upon our elbows, the warden’s secretary and I turned, too, and stood thus till the soft tap-tap of the woman’s heels informed us she had left the death house.

  We followed slowly, but ere we left the place of the condemned I cast a last look at the prisoner. He was seated at the little table which, with a cot and chair, constituted the sole furniture of his cell. He sat with head bowed, elbow on knee, knuckles pressed against his lips, not crying, but staring dry-eyed straight ahead, as though he could already vision the long vistas of eternity into which the state would hurl him the next night.

  A long line of men in prison uniform marched through the corridor as we reentered the main building of the penitentiary. Each bore an empty tin cup in one hand, an empty tin plate in the other. They were going to their evening meal.

  “Would you care to see ’em eat?” the warden’s secretary asked as the files parted at the guard’s hoarse “Gangway!” and we walked between the rows of men.

  “Mais non,” de Grandin answered. “Me, I, too, desire to eat tonight, and the spectacle of men eating like caged brutes would of a certainty destroy my appetite. Thank you for showing us about, Monsieur, and please, I beg, do not report the guard’s infraction of the regulations in taking down that screen. It was a work of mercy, no less, my friend!”

  THE MILES CLICKED SWIFTLY off on my speedometer as we drove along the homeward road. De Grandin was for the most part sunk in moody silence, lighting one evil-smelling French cigarette from the glowing stump of another, occasionally indulging in some half-articulate bit of highly individualized profanity; once or twice he whipped the handkerchief from his left cuff and wiped his eyes half-furtively. As we neared the outskirts of Harrisonville he turned to me, small eyes blazing, thin lips retracted from small even teeth.

  “Hell and furies, and ten million small blue devils in the bargain, Friend Trowbridge,” he exclaimed, “why must it be? Is there no way that human justice can be vindicated without the punishment descending on the innocent no less than on the guilty? Me, I damn think—” He turned away for a moment, and:

  “Mordieu, my friend, be careful!” he clutched excitedly at my elbow with his left hand, while with the other he pointed dramatically toward the figure which suddenly emerged from the shadowy evergreens bordering the road and flitted like a wind-blown leaf across the spot of luminance cast by my headlights.

  “Cordieu, she will not die of senility if she persists in such a way of walking—” he continued, then interrupted himself with a shout as he flung both feet over the side of the car and rushed down the road to grapple with the woman whose sudden appearance had almost sent us skidding into the wayside ditch.

  Nor was his intervention a split-second too soon; for even as he reached her side the mysterious woman had run to the center of the highway bridge and was drawing herself up, preparatory to leaping over the parapet to the rushing stream which foamed among a bed of jagged rocks some fifty feet below.

  “Stop it, Mademoiselle! Desist!” he ordered sharply, seizing her shoulders in his small, strong hands and dragging her back from her perilous perch by main force.

  She fought like a cornered wildcat. “Let me go!” she raged, struggling in the little Frenchman’s embrace, then, finding her efforts to break loose of no avail, writhed suddenly around and clawed at his cheeks with desperation-strengthened fingers. “Let me go; I want to die; I must die; I will die, I tell you! Let me go!”

  De Grandin shifted his grip from her shoulders to her wrists and shook her roughly, as a terrier might shake a rat. “Silence, Mademoiselle; be still!” he ordered curtly. “Cease this business of the monkey at once, or pardieu”—he administered another vigorous shake—“I shall be forced to tie you!”

  I added my efforts to his, grasping the struggling woman by the elbows and forcing her into the twin shafts of light thrown by the car’s driving-lamps.

  Stooping, the Frenchman retrieved her hat and placed it on her dark head at a decidedly rakish angle, then regarded her speculatively a moment. “Will you promise to restrain yourself if we release you, Mademoiselle?” he asked after a few seconds’ silent scrutiny.

  The girl—she was little more—regarded us sullenly a moment, then burst into a sharp, cachinnating laugh. “You’ve just postponed it for a while,” she answered with a shrug of her narrow shoulders. “I’ll kill myself as soon as you leave me, anyway. You might as well have saved yourselves the trouble.”

  “U’m?”
de Grandin murmured. “Exactly, precisely, quite so, Mademoiselle. I had that very thought in mind, and it is for that reason that we shall not leave you for a little so small moment. Pains of a dyspeptic pig, are we then murderers? But of course not. Tell us where you live, and we shall do ourselves the honor of escorting you there.”

  She faced us with quivering nostrils and heaving, tumultuous bosom, anger flashing from her eyes, a diatribe of invective seemingly ready to spill from her parted lips. She had a rather pretty, high-bred face unnaturally large, dark eyes, seeming larger because of the violet half-moons under them; death-pale skin contrasting sharply with the little tendrils of dark, curling hair which hung about her cheeks beneath the rim of her wide leghorn hat. There was something vaguely familiar about her features, about the soft, throaty contralto of her voice, about the way she moved her hands to emphasize her words. I drew my brows together in an effort at remembrance, even as de Grandin spoke.

  “Mademoiselle,” he told her with a bow, “you are too beautiful to die, accordingly—ah, parbleu, I know you now!

  “It is the lady of the prison, my good Trowbridge!” He turned to me, wonder and compassion struggling for the mastery of his face. “But certainly.” To her: “Your change of dress deceived me at the first, ma pauvre.”

  He drew away a pace, regarding her intently. “I take back my remark,” he admitted slowly. “You have an excellent reason for desiring to be rid of this cruel world of men and man-made justice, Mademoiselle, nor am I any stupid, moralistic fool who would deny you such poor consolation as death may bring, but”—he made a deprecating gesture—“this is not the time nor the place nor manner, Mademoiselle. It were a shame to break your lovely body on those rocks down there, and—have you thought of this?—there is a poor one’s body to be claimed and given decent burial when the debts of justice have been paid. Can not you wait until that has been done, then—”

  “Justice?” cried the woman in a shrill, hard voice. “Justice? It’s the most monstrous miscarriage of justice there ever was! It’s murder, I tell you; wilful murder, and—”

  “Undoubtlessly,” he assented in a soothing voice, “but what is one to do? The law’s decree—”

  “The law!” she scoffed. “Here’s one time where the strength of sin really is the law! Law’s supposed to punish the guilty and protect the innocent, isn’t it? Why doesn’t the law let Lonny go, and take that red-handed murderer who did the killing in his place? Because the law says a wife can’t testify against her husband! Because a perjured villain’s testimony has sent a blameless man to death—that’s why!”

  De Grandin turned a fleeting glance on me and made a furtive, hardly noticeable gesture toward the car. “But certainly, Mademoiselle,” he nodded, “the laws of men are seldom perfect. Will not you come with us? You shall tell us your story in detail, and if there is aught that we can do to aid you, please be assured that we shall do it. At any rate, if you will give consideration to your plan to kill yourself, and having talked with us still think you wish to die, I promise to assist you, even in that. We are physicians, and we have easily available some medicines which will give you swift and painless release, nor need anyone be the wiser. You consent? Good, excellent, bien. If you please, Mademoiselle.” He bowed with courtly, Continental courtesy as he assisted her into my car.

  She sat between us, her hands lying motionless and flaccid, palms upward, in her lap. There was something monotonous, flat and toneless, in her deep and rather husky voice as she began her recitation. I had heard women charged with murder testifying in their own defense in just such voices. Emotion played upon too harshly and too long results in a sort of anesthesia, and emphasis becomes impossible.

  “My name’s Beth Cardener—Elizabeth Cardener,” she began without preliminary. “I am the wife of Lawrence Cardener, the sculptor. You know him? No? No matter.

  “I am twenty-nine years old and have been married three years. My husband and I have known each other since childhood. Our families had adjoining houses in the city and adjoining country places at Seagirt. My husband and I and his twin brother, Alonzo, played together on the beach and in the ocean in summer and went to school together in the winter, though the boys were two grades above me, being three years older. They looked so much alike that no one but their family and I—who was with them so much that I was almost like a sister—could tell them apart, and Lonny was always getting into trouble for things which Larry did. Sometimes they’d change clothes and one would go to call on the girl with whom the other had an engagement, and no one ever knew the difference. They never fooled me, though; I could usually tell them by a slight difference in their voices, but if I weren’t quite sure, there was one infallible clue. Lonny had a little scar behind his left ear. I struck him there with a sand-spade when he was six and I was three. He and Larry had been teasing me, and I flew into a fury. He happened to be nearer, and got the blow. I was terribly frightened after I’d done it, and cried far more than he did. The wound wasn’t really serious, but it left a little, white scar, not more than half-an-inch in length, which never disappeared. So, when the boys would try to play a joke on me I’d make them let me turn their ears forward; then I could be certain which was Lonny and which Larry.

  “When the war came and the boys were seventeen, both were wild to go, but their father wouldn’t let them. Finally Larry ran away and joined the Canadians—they weren’t particular in checking up on ages in Canada those days. Before Larry had been gone three weeks his brother joined him, and they were both assigned to the same regiment. Larry was given a lieutenancy shortly after he joined up and Lonny was made a subaltern before they sailed for France.

  “Both boys were slightly gassed at the second battle of the Marne and were in recuperation camp until the termination of hostilities. They came back together, in uniform, of course, in ’19, and I was in a perfect frenzy of hero-worsbip. I fell madly in love with both of them. Both loved me, too, and each asked me to marry him. It was hard to choose between them, but Lonny—the one I’d ‘marked’ with my spade when we were kids—was a little sweeter, a little gentler than his brother, and finally I accepted him. Larry showed no bitterness, and the three of us continued as close, firm friends, even after the engagement, as we’d been before.

  “Lonny was determined to become a painter, while Larry had ambitions to become a sculptor, and they went off to Paris for a year of study, together, as always. We were to be married when they returned, and Larry was to be best man. We’d hoped to have a June wedding, but the boys’ studies kept them abroad till mid-August, so we decided to postpone it till Thanksgiving Day, and both the boys came down to Seagirt to spend the remainder of the season.

  “There was a girl named Charlotte Dey stopping at a neighbor’s house, a lovely creature, exquisitely made, with red-gold hair and topaz eyes and skin as white as milk. Larry seemed quite taken with her, and she with him, and Lonny and I began to think that he’d found consolation there. We even wished in that romantic way young lovers have that Larry’d hurry up and pop the question so we could have a double wedding in November.

  “You remember I told you our houses stood beside each other? We’d always been so intimate that I’d been like a member of the Cardener family, even before I was engaged to Lonny. We never thought of knocking on each others doors, and if I wanted anything from the Cardeners: or they wanted anything from our house, we were as apt to enter through one of the French windows opening on the verandas as we were to go through the front door.

  “One evening, after Lonny and I had said goodnight, I happened to remember that I’d left a book in the Cardener library, and I especially wanted that book early next morning; for it had a recipe for sally lunn in it, and I wanted to get up early and make some as a surprise for Lonny next morning at breakfast. So I just ran across the intervening lawn and up the veranda steps, intent on going through the library window, getting the book and going back to bed without saying anything to anybody. I’d just mounted the steps and st
arted down the porch toward the library when Lonny loomed up in front of me. He’d slipped on his pajamas and beach robe, and had been sitting on a porch rocker. ‘Beth!’ he exclaimed in a sort of nervous, almost frightened way.

  “‘Why, yes, it’s I,’ I answered, putting my hand in his and continuing to walk toward the library window.

  “‘You mustn’t come any farther,’ he suddenly told me, dragging me to a stop by the hand which he’d been holding. ‘You must go back, Beth!’

  “‘Why, Lonny!’ I exclaimed in amazement. Being told I couldn’t go and come at will in the Cardener house was like being slapped in the face.

  “‘You must go back, please,’ he answered in a sort of embarrassed, stubborn way. ‘Please, Beth; I can’t explain, dear; but please go, quickly!

  “There was nothing else to do, so I went. I couldn’t speak, and I didnt want him to see me crying and know how much he’d hurt me.

  “I didn’t go back to my room. Instead I walked across the stretch of lawn behind the house, down to the beach, and sat there on the sand. It was a bright September night, and the full moon made it almost light as day; so I couldn’t help seeing what followed. I’d sat there on the beach for fifteen minutes, possibly, when I happened to look back. The boys’ rooms opened on the side veranda and to reach the library one had to pass them. Part of the porch was full-roofed, and consequently in shadow; the remainder was roofed with slats, like a pergola, and the moonlight illuminated it almost as brightly as it did the beach and the back lawn. As I glanced back across my shoulder I saw two figures emerge from one of the French windows leading to the boys’ rooms; which one I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like Lonny’s. One was a man in pajamas and beach robe, the other was a woman, clothed only in a light nightdress, kimono and sandals. I sat there in a sort of stupor, too surprised and horrified to move or make a sound, and as I looked the moonlight glinted on the girl’s gold hair. It was Charlotte Dey.