The young man had flung himself at the older man’s throat as if he would choke off the words he saw trembling on his lips. But the struggle thus begun was short. In a moment both stood panting, and Frederick, with lowered head, was saying humbly:
“I beg pardon, Wattles, but you drive me mad with your suggestions and conclusions. I have not got the money, but I will try and get it. Wait here.”
“For ten minutes, Sutherland; no longer! The moon is bright, and I can see the hands of my watch distinctly. At a quarter to ten, you will return here with the amount I have mentioned, or I will seek it at your father’s hands in his own study.”
Frederick made a hurried gesture and vanished up the walk. Next moment he was at his father’s study door.
CHAPTER XIII
WATTLES GOES
Mr. Sutherland was busily engaged with a law paper when his son entered his presence, but at sight of that son’s face, he dropped the paper with an alacrity which Frederick was too much engaged with his own thoughts to notice.
“Father,” he began without preamble or excuse, “I am in serious and immediate need of nine hundred and fifty dollars. I want it so much that I ask you to make me a check for that amount tonight, conscious though I am that you have every right to deny me this request, and that my debt to you already passes the bound of presumption on my part and indulgence on yours. I cannot tell you why I want it or for what. That belongs to my past life, the consequences of which I have not yet escaped, but I feel bound to state that you will not be the loser by this material proof of confidence in me, as I shall soon be in a position to repay all my debts, among which this will necessarily stand foremost.”
The old gentleman looked startled and nervously fingered the paper he had let fall. “Why do you say you will soon be in a position to repay me? What do you mean by that?”
The flash, which had not yet subsided from the young man’s face, ebbed slowly away as he encountered his father’s eye.
“I mean to work,” he murmured. “I mean to make a man of myself as soon as possible.”
The look which Mr. Sutherland gave him was more inquiring than sympathetic.
“And you need this money for a start?” said he.
Frederick bowed; he seemed to be losing the faculty of speech. The clock over the mantel had told off five of the precious moments.
“I will give it to you,” said his father, and drew out his check-book. But he did not hasten to open it; his eyes still rested on his son.
“Now,” murmured the young man. “There is a train leaving soon. I wish to get it away on that train.”
His father frowned with natural distrust.
“I wish you would confide in me,” said he.
Frederick did not answer. The hands of the clock were moving on.
“I will give it to you; but I should like to know what for.”
“It is impossible for me to tell you,” groaned the young man, starting as he heard a step on the walk without.
“Your need has become strangely imperative,” proceeded the other. “Has Miss Page—”
Frederick took a step forward and laid his hand on his father’s arm.
“It is not for her,” he whispered. “It goes into other hands.”
Mr. Sutherland, who had turned over the document as his son approached, breathed more easily. Taking up his pen, he dipped it in the ink. Frederick watched him with constantly whitening cheek. The step on the walk had mounted to the front door.
“Nine hundred and fifty?” inquired the father.
“Nine hundred and fifty,” answered the son.
The judge, with a last look, stooped over the book. The hands of the clock pointed to a quarter to ten.
“Father, I have my whole future in which to thank you,” cried Frederick, seizing the check his father held out to him and making rapidly for the door. “I will be back before midnight.” And he flung himself downstairs just as the front door opened and Wattles stepped in.
“Ah,” exclaimed the latter, as his eye fell on the paper fluttering in the other’s hand, “I expected money, not paper.”
“The paper is good,” answered Frederick, drawing him swiftly out of the house. “It has my father’s signature upon it.”
“Your father’s signature?”
“Yes.”
Wattles gave it a look, then slowly shook his head at Frederick.
“Is it as well done as the one you tried to pass off on Brady?”
Frederick cringed, and for a moment looked as if the struggle was too much for him. Then he rallied and eying Wattles firmly, said:
“You have a right to distrust me, but you are on the wrong track, Wattles. What I did once, I can never do again; and I hope I may live to prove myself a changed man. As for that check, I will soon prove its value in your eyes. Follow me upstairs to my father.”
His energy—the energy of despair, no doubt seemed to make an impression on the other.
“You might as well proclaim yourself a forger outright, as to force your father to declare this to be his signature,” he observed.
“I know it,” said Frederick.
“Yet you will run that risk?”
“If you oblige me.”
Wattles shrugged his shoulders. He was a magnificent-looking man and towered in that old colonial hall like a youthful giant.
“I bear you no ill will,” said he. “If this represents money, I am satisfied, and I begin to think it does. But listen, Sutherland. Something has happened to you. A week ago you would have put a bullet through my head before you would have been willing to have so compromised yourself. I think I know what that something is. To save yourself from being thought guilty of a big crime you are willing to incur suspicion of a small one. It’s a wise move, my boy, but look out! No tricks with me or my friendship may not hold. Meantime, I cash this check tomorrow.” And he swung away through the night with a grand-opera selection on his lips.
CHAPTER XIV
A FINAL TEMPTATION
Frederick looked like a man thoroughly exhausted when the final echo of this hateful voice died away on the hillside. For the last twenty hours he had been the prey of one harrowing emotion after another, and human nature could endure no more without rest.
But rest would not come. The position in which he found himself, between Amabel and the man who had just left, was of too threatening a nature for him to ignore. But one means of escape presented itself. It was a cowardly one; but anything was better than to make an attempt to stand his ground against two such merciless antagonists; so he resolved upon flight.
Packing up a few necessaries and leaving a letter behind him for his father, he made his way down the stairs of the now darkened house to a door opening upon the garden. To his astonishment he found it unlocked, but, giving little heed to this in his excitement, he opened it with caution, and, with a parting sigh for the sheltering home he was about to leave forever, stepped from the house he no longer felt worthy to inhabit.
His intention was to take the train at Portchester, and that he might reach that place without inconvenient encounters, he decided to proceed by a short cut through the fields. This led him north along the ridge that overlooks the road running around the base of the hill. He did not think of this road, however, or of anything, in fact, but the necessity of taking the very earliest train out of Portchester. As this left at 3.30 A.M., he realised that he must hasten in order to reach it. But he was not destined to take it or any other train out of Portchester that night, for when he reached the fence dividing Mr. Sutherland’s grounds from those of his adjoining neighbour, he saw, drawn up in the moonlight just at the point where he had intended to leap the fence, the form of a woman with one hand held out to stop him.
It was Amabel.
Confounded by this check and filled with an anger that was nigh to dangerous, he fell back and then immediately sprang forward.
“What are you doing here?” he cried. “Don’t you know that it is eleven o’clock a
nd that my father requires the house to be closed at that hour?”
“And you?” was her sole retort; “what are you doing here? Are you searching for flowers in the woods, and is that valise you carry the receptacle in which you hope to put your botanical specimens?”
With a savage gesture he dropped the valise and took her fiercely by the shoulders.
“Where have you hidden my money?” he hissed. “Tell me, or—”
“Or what?” she asked, smiling into his face in a way that made him lose his grip.
“Or—or I cannot answer for myself,” he proceeded, stammering. “Do you. think I can endure everything from you because you are a woman? No; I will have those bills, every one of them, or show myself your master. Where are they, you incarnate fiend?”
It was an unwise word to use, but she did not seem to heed it.
“Ah,” she said softly, and with a lingering accent, as if his grasp of her had been a caress to which she was not entirely averse. “I did not think you would discover its loss so soon. When did you go to the woods, Frederick? And was Miss Halliday with you?”
He had a disposition to strike her, but controlled himself. Blows would not avail against the softness of this suave, yet merciless, being. Only a will as strong as her own could hope to cope with this smiling fury; and this he was determined to show, though, alas! he had everything to lose in a struggle that robbed her of nothing but a hope which was but a baseless fabric at best; for he was more than ever determined never to marry her.
“A man does not need to wait long to miss his own,” said he. “And if you have taken this money, which, you do not deny, you have shown yourself very short-sighted, for danger lies closer to the person holding this money than to the one you vilify by your threats. This you will find, Amabel, when you come to make use of the weapon with which you have thought to arm yourself.”
“Tut, tut!” was her contemptuous reply. “Do you consider me a child? Do I look like a babbling infant, Frederick?”
Her face, which had been lifted to his in saying this, was so illumined, both by her smile, which was strangely enchanting for one so evil, and by the moonlight, which so etherialises all that it touches, that he found himself forced to recall that other purer, truer face he had left at the honeysuckle porch to keep down a last wild impulse toward her, which would have been his undoing, both in this world and the next, as he knew.
“Or do I look simply like a woman?” she went on, seeing the impression she had made, and playing upon it. “A woman who understands herself and you and all the secret perils of the game we are both playing? If I am a child, treat me as a child; but if I am a woman—”
“Stand out of my way!” he cried, catching up his valise and striding furiously by her. “Woman or child, know that I will not be your plaything to be damned in this world and in the next.”
“Are you bound for the city of destruction?” she laughed, not moving, but showing such confidence in her power to hold him back that he stopped in spite of himself. “If so, you are taking the direct road there and have only to hasten. But you had better remain in your father’s house; even if you are something of a prisoner there, like my very insignificant self. The outcome will be more satisfactory, even if you have to share your future with me.”
“And what course will you take,” he asked, pausing with his hand on the fence, “if I decide to choose destruction without you, rather than perdition with you?”
“What course? Why, I shall tell Dr. Talbot just enough to show you to be as desirable a witness in the impending inquest as myself. The result I leave to your judgment. But you will not drive me to this extremity. You will come back and—”
“Woman, I will never come back. I shall have to dare your worst in a week and will begin by daring you now. I—”
But he did not leap the fence, though he made a move to do so, for at that moment a party of men came hurrying by on the lower road, one of whom was heard to say:
“I will bet my head that we will put our hand on Agatha Webb’s murderer tonight. The man who shoves twenty-dollar bills around so heedlessly should not wear a beard so long it leads to detection.”
It was the coroner, the constable, Knapp, and Abel on their way to the forest road on which lived John and James Zabel.
Frederick and Amabel confronted each other, and after a moment’s silence returned as if by a common impulse towards the house.
“What have they got in their heads?” queried she. “Whatever it is, it may serve to occupy them till the week of your probation is over.”
He did not answer. A new and overwhelming complication had been added to the difficulties of his situation.
CHAPTER XV
THE ZABELS VISITED
Let us follow the party now winding up the hillside.
In a deeply wooded spot on a side road stood the little house to which John and James Zabel had removed when their business on the docks had terminated. There was no other dwelling of greater or lesser pretension on the road, which may account for the fact that none of the persons now approaching it had been in that neighbourhood for years, though it was by no means a long walk from the village in which they all led such busy lives.
The heavy shadows cast by the woods through which the road meandered were not without their effect upon the spirits of the four men passing through them, so that long before they reached the opening in which the Zabel cottage stood, silence had fallen upon the whole party. Dr. Talbot especially looked as if he little relished this late visit to his old friends, and not till they caught a glimpse of the long sloping roof and heavy chimney of the Zabel cottage did he shake off the gloom incident to the nature of his errand.
“Gentlemen,” said he, coming to a sudden halt, “let us understand each other. We are about to make a call on two of our oldest and most respectable townsfolk. If in the course of that call I choose to make mention of the twenty-dollar bill left with Loton, well and good, but if not, you are to take my reticence as proof of my own belief that they had nothing to do with it.”
Two of the party bowed; Knapp, only, made no sign.
“There is no light in the window,” observed Abel. “What if we find them gone to bed?”
“We will wake them,” said the constable. “I cannot go back without being myself assured that no more money like that given to Loton remains in the house.”
“Very well,” remarked Knapp, and going up to the door before him, he struck a resounding knock sufficiently startling in that place of silence.
But loud as the summons was it brought no answer. Not only the moon-lighted door, but the little windows on each side of it remained shut, and there was no evidence that the knock had been heard.
“Zabel! John Zabel!” shouted the constable, stepping around the side of the house. “Get up, my good friends, and let an old crony in. James! John! Late as it is, we have business with you. Open the door; don’t stop to dress.”
But this appeal received no more recognition than the first, and after rapping on the window against which he had flung the words, he came back and looked up and down the front of the house.
It had a solitary aspect and was much less comfortable-looking than he had expected. Indeed, there were signs of poverty, or at least of neglect, about the place that astonished him. Not only had the weeds been allowed to grow over the doorstep, but from the unpainted front itself bits of boards had rotted away, leaving great gaps about the window-ledges and at the base of the sunken and well-nigh toppling chimney. The moon flooding the roof showed up all these imperfections with pitiless insistence, and the torn edges of the green paper shades that half concealed the rooms within were plainly to be seen, as well as the dismantled knocker which hung by one nail to the old cracked door. The vision of Knapp with his ear laid against this door added to the forlorn and sinister aspect of the scene, and gave to the constable, who remembered the brothers in their palmy days when they were the life and pride of the town, a by no means agreeable sensation, a
s he advanced toward the detective and asked him what they should do now.
“Break down the door!” was the uncompromising reply. “Or, wait! The windows of country houses are seldom fastened; let me see if I cannot enter by one of them.”
“Better not,” said the coroner, with considerable feeling. “Let us exhaust all other means first.” And he took hold of the knob of the door to shake it, when to his surprise it turned and the door opened. It had not been locked.
Rather taken aback by this, he hesitated. But Knapp showed less scruple. Without waiting for any man’s permission, he glided in and stepped cautiously, but without any delay, into a room the door of which stood wide open before him. The constable was about to follow when he saw Knapp come stumbling back.
“Devilish work,” he muttered, and drew the others in to see.
Never will any of these men forget the sight that there met their eyes.
On the floor near the entrance lay one brother, in a streak of moonlight, which showed every feature of his worn and lifeless face, and at a table drawn up in the centre of the room sat the other, rigid in death, with a book clutched in his hand.
Both, had been dead some time, and on the faces and in the aspects of both was visible a misery that added its own gloom to the pitiable and gruesome scene, and made the shining of the great white moon, which filled every corner of the bare room, seem a mockery well-nigh unendurable to those who contemplated it. John, dead in his chair! James, dead on the floor!
Knapp, who of all present was least likely to feel the awesome nature of the tragedy, was naturally the first to speak.
“Both wear long beards,” said he, “but the one lying on the floor was doubtless Loton’s customer. Ah!” he cried, pointing at the table, as he carefully crossed the floor. “Here is the bread, and—” Even he had his moments of feeling. The appearance of that loaf had stunned him; one corner of it had been gnawed off.
The Anna Katharine Green Mystery Megapack Page 119
