CHAPTER XXVI
HAZEN
"An unfathomable man," grumbled Mr. Harper, entering Mr. Ransom's room in marked disorder. "They say that he has not spoken yet; but the coroner is with him and we shall hear something from him soon. I expect—" here the lawyer's voice changed and his manner took on meaning—"that his report will be final."
"Final? You mean—"
"What his fainting face showed. For all its pallor and the exhaustion it expressed, there was triumph in its every feature. The little bag was not all he saw in that pit of hell. You must prepare yourself for no common ordeal, Ransom; it will take all your courage to listen to his story."
"I know." The words came with difficulty but not without a certain manly courage. "I shall try not to make you too much trouble." Then after a moment of oppressive silence, "Did you notice, when we all came in, the figure of a woman disappearing up the stair way? It was Anitra's and it paused before it reached the top, and I saw her eyes staring down at Hazen's helpless figure with a wildness in its inquiry that has sapped all my courage. How are we to answer that girl when she asks us what has happened? How make her know that Hazen is her brother and that he has just risked his life to satisfy himself and us that Georgian was really lost in that dreadful pool."
The lawyer, darting a keen glance at the speaker, softly shook his head.
"I am not thinking of Miss Hazen," said he. "I'm wondering how far the proof he has obtained will go." He paused, listening, then made a gesture towards the hall. "There's some one there," he whispered.
Ransom rose, and with a quick turn of the wrist pulled open the door.
A man was standing on the threshold, a ghastly figure before which Ransom involuntarily stepped back.
"Hazen!" he cried; then, as the other tottered, he sprang forward again and, reaching out his hand to steady him, drew him in with the remark, "We were expecting a summons from you. We are happy that you find yourself able to come to us."
"The coroner has just gone. The doctors I dismissed. I have something to say to you—to both of you," he added as he caught sight of Mr. Harper.
Entering slowly, he sat down in the chair proffered him by the lawyer. There was something strange in his air, a quiet automaton-like quality which attracted the latter's notice and led him to watch him very closely. Ransom was busy with the door, which the strong west wind blowing through the hall made difficult to close.
"I—" The one word uttered, Hazen seemed to forget himself. Sitting quite still, he gazed straight before him at the open window. There was little to be seen there but the swaying boughs of the huge tree, but his gaze never left those tossing limbs, and his sentence hung suspended till the movement made by Ransom recrossing the room roused him, and he went on.
"I have made the plunge, gentlemen, and fortune favored me. I—" here his voice failed him again, but realizing the fact more quickly than before, he shook off his apathy, and facing the two men, who awaited his slow words with inconceivable excitement, continued with sudden concentration upon his subject, "I saw what I went to see—poor Georgian's body. I have satisfied the coroner of this fact. The little bag I tore from her side proves her identity beyond a doubt. You saw it, Mr. Harper. They tell me that you recognized it at once as the same you saw in her hand in the stage-coach. But if you had not, the initials on it are unmistakable, G. Q. H., Georgian Quinlan Hazen. Auchincloss will get his money, and soon, will he not? Answer me plainly, Harper. Such an experience merits some reward. You will not make difficulties?"
"I?" The lawyer's query had a strange ring to it. He glanced from Hazen to Ransom, and from Ransom back to Hazen, whose features had now become more composed, though they still retained their remarkable pallor.
"If the proof is positive," he then went on, "you assuredly can trust both my client and myself to remember our promise to you."
"The coroner, you say, is satisfied?"
"Yes, with the proof and my sworn statement. He is obliged to be. No one else, least of all himself, feels any desire to go down to that whirling eddy for confirmation of my story. And they are wise. I do not think that any man with less experience than myself could sound the depths of that vortex and come up alive. The noise—the swirl—the sense of being sucked down—down in ever-increasing fury—but my purpose kept the life in me. I was determined not to yield, not to faint, till I had seen—and proved—"
"What's that?"
The cry was from Mr. Ransom. A sudden gust of wind had torn its way through the room, flinging the door wide, and strewing the floor with flying papers from the large stand in the window.
"Nothing but wind," answered Harper, half rising to close the door, but immediately sitting down again with a strange look at Ransom. "Let be," he whispered, as the other rose in his turn to restore order. "Keep Hazen talking. It's important; imperative. I'll see to the door."
But it was the window he closed, not the door.
Ransom, with that obedience natural to a client in presence of his most trusted adviser, did as he was bid, and turned his full attention back to Hazen instantly. That gentleman, upon whom the rushing wind and the havoc it created had made little if any impression, rushed again into words.
"I've led an adventurous life," he declared, "and, in the last few years especially, passed through many perils and experienced much awful suffering. I have felt the pang of hunger and the pang of biting despair; but nothing I have ever endured can equal the horror which beclouded my mind and rendered powerless my body as I felt myself sliding from the sight of earth and heaven into the jaws of that rapacious eddy, whose bottom no man had ever sounded.
"I went in young—I have come out old. Look at my hands—they shake like those of a man of ninety. Yet yesterday they could have pulled to the ground an ox."
"You saw Mrs. Ransom's body down in that pool some fathoms below the surface," observed the lawyer, after waiting in vain for some word from the shrinking husband. "Won't you particularize, Mr. Hazen? Tell us just how she was lying and where. Mr. Ransom cannot but wish to know, difficult as he evidently finds it to ask you."
"The coroner has the story," Hazen began, with the slow, painful gasp of the unwilling narrator. "But I will tell it again; it is your right, the painful duty which we cannot escape. She was lying, not on the bottom, but in a niche of rock into which she had been thrown and wedged by the force of the current. One arm was free and was washing about; I tried to clutch this arm as I went down, but it eluded me. When I arose, the rush and swirl of the water was against me and I felt my senses going, but enough instinct was left for me to snatch again at the arm as I passed, and though it eluded me again, my fingers closed on something, which I was just conscious enough to hold on to with a frenzied grip. We have spoken of this thing—a little bag which must have been fastened to her side, for the end of its connecting strap is torn away by the wrench I gave it."
"Vivid enough; but I am sure you will tell me one thing more. Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm? It would greatly add to the strength of your testimony if you could describe it."
Ransom, who had been watching Hazen, cast a sudden look back at the lawyer as he dropped these insinuating words. Something more than a cold-blooded desire for truth had prompted this almost brutal inquisition. He must know what it was, if anything in Harper's well-controlled countenance would tell him. The result transfixed him, for following the lawyer's gaze, which was fixed not on the man he was addressing but on a small mirror hanging on the opposite wall, he saw reflected in it the face and form of Anitra standing in the open doorway behind them.
She was looking at Hazen and, as Ransom noted that look, he understood Harper's previous caution and all that lay behind his insistent and cold-blooded questions. For her gaze was no longer one of simple inquiry but of horrified understanding;—the gaze of one who heard.
Meantime, Hazen was answering in painful gasps the lawyer's pointed question, "Did you see the face of this body as well as the arm?"
"Did I see—God help me, yes. Just a glimpse, but I knew it. Eyes that my mother had kissed, blind—staring—glassed in awe and unspeakable fright. The mouth, whose every curve I had studied in the old days of perfect affection, drawn into a revolting grin and dripping with unwholesome weeds brought down from the shallows. All strange, yet all familiar—my sister—Georgian—dead—stark—but recognizable. Don't ask me if I saw it. I always see it; it is before me now, the forehead—the chin—the eyes—"
Ransom sprang to his feet, Harper also.
The girl in the doorway had gone white as death, and with outstretched arms and frantic, haggard eyes was striving to ward off the frightful vision conjured up by her brother's words. The movement made by the two men recalled her in an instant to herself, and she drew back—the hesitating, appealing, anxious-eyed girl whom they all knew. But it was too late. Hazen had seen as well as the others, and leaping in frenzy from his chair stood confronting her—a dominant and accusing figure—between the quietly triumphant lawyer and the crushed, almost unconscious Ransom.
CHAPTER XXVII
SHE SPEAKS
Hazen's face was frightful to see; the more so that physical weakness contended with the outsweep of passion, so great and overwhelming in its power and destructive force that to the two onlookers it seemed to spring from deeper sources than ordinary life and death, and have its birth, as well as its culmination, in the unknown and all that is most terrible in the human mind and human experience.
Anitra's eye was spellbound by it. As it dilated upon this vision of unspeakable wrath and almost superhuman denunciation, her own exquisite face filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force and meaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startled recognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming of some hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictory experiences of the last few days had not served to prepare them.
"You hear!"
In these words Hazen loosed out his soul.
The keen cry of the wind running through the house was his only answer.
"You hear!" he repeated, advancing and laying a determined hand upon her arm. "You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness. What does it mean—Stop! no more play-acting," he fiercely admonished her, as her eyes assumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vague curiosity to the papers scattered over the floor—"we have had enough of that; you cannot deceive us—you cannot deceive me twice. You played at deafness—why? Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguish her from Georgian? Because you are not Anitra? Because you are Georgian after all?"
Georgian!
The word fell like a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy. Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen only stood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look and grasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; slowly she succumbed to it against her will and purpose, the will and purpose of a very strong woman. Her eyes rose in a painful and lingering struggle to his face. Then, with a cry her drawn and parched lips could not suppress, she flashed them in agony on Ransom, and this long-suffering man read in them the maddening truth. They were his wife's eyes; the woman before him was indeed Georgian.
"Speak!" rang out the voice of Hazen, as Harper, realizing from Ransom's face what Ransom had just realized from hers, stepped to the door and closed it. "The time is short; I have much, very much to do. For my sake, for the sake of this much-abused man, whom you allowed to marry you, speak out, tell the truth at once. You are Georgian."
"Yes," fell in almost an inaudible whisper from her lips. "I am Georgian." Then as he loosed his grasp from her arm and she was left standing there alone, some instinct of isolation, some realization of the mysterious pit she had dug for herself and possibly for others, in this avowal of her identity, wrought her brain into momentary madness, and flinging up her arms she fell on her knees before Hazen as under the stroke of some unseen thunderbolt.
"You made me say it," she cried. "On your head be the punishment, not on mine nor on his." Then as Hazen drew slowly back, touched in his turn by some emotion to which neither his look nor gesture gave any clew, she rose to her feet, and fixing him with a look of strange defiance, added in milder but no less determined tones: "A tongue unloosed talks long and loud. You have made me give up my secret, but I shall not stop at that. I shall say more; tell all my dreadful history; yours—mine. I will not be thought wicked because I undertook so great a deception. I will not have this good man's opinion of me shaken; not for a minute; what I did, I did for him and he shall know it whatever penalty it may incur. He is my husband—his love to me is priceless, and I will hold it against you—against the Cause—against Heaven—yes, and against Hell."
Here was truth. To Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Bounding across the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself. But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, was concentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warning gesture of Ransom, could hold it back.
"Traitress!" he cried, "traitress to me and to the Cause. You thought to escape what is inescapable. Do you know what you have done? You have—" The rest hung in air. A sudden weakness had seized him and he sank faltering back into a chair Harper pushed towards him, still denouncing her, however, with lifted hand and accusing eyes, the image—though no longer a speaking one—of the implacable and determined avenger.
Georgian, shocked into silence, stared at him in a frenzy of complicated emotions to which neither of them as yet had given the key capable of relieving the maddening tension.
"It is the pool; the pool," she finally murmured. "Its waters have beaten out your life." But he calmly shook his head.
"It is not in water to do that," he murmured. "Give me a moment. I've a question to ask. I think a drop of liquor—"
Harper had flask in hand almost before the word had left the other's mouth. The draft revived Hazen; he looked up at Georgian. "I believe you, so do these men believe you. But you were not alone in this plot. Where is Anitra? Where is the deaf and solitary one you dragged from the streets of New York to bolster up your plot? Tell us and tell us quickly. Where is Anitra?"
"Anitra? Do you ask that?" cried Harper, roused to speak for the first time by his boundless amazement and indignation. "You have described the body in the pool—a description which fits either sister, and yet you would make this woman tell us what you have seen with your own eyes."
He might as well not have spoken. Neither he nor she seemed to hear him. Certainly neither heeded.
"Anitra?" she repeated softly and with a strange intonation. "I am Anitra. I am both Georgian and Anitra. There have never been two of us since I came into this house."
CHAPTER XXVIII
FIFTEEN MINUTES
"There have never been but one of us since I came into this house."
Monstrous assertion! or so it seemed to Ransom as the whirl of his thoughts settled and reason resumed its sway. Only one! But he had himself seen two; so had Mrs. Deo and the maids; he could even relate the differences between them on that first night. Yet had he ever seen them together, or even the shadow of one at the same moment he saw the person of the other? No, and with such an actress as she had shown herself to be these last two days, such changes of appearance might be possible, though why she should engage in such a deep, almost incredible plot was a mystery to make the hair rise,—she, the tender, exquisite, the beloved woman of his dreams.
She saw the maddening nature of his confusion and, springing to him, fell on her knees with the imploring cry:
"Patience! Do not try to think—I will tell you. It can all be said in a word. I was bound to this brother of mine, to do his bidding, to follow his fortunes through life, and up to death, by promises and oaths to which those uttered by me at the marriage altar were but toys and empty air. Anitra, or the dream sister my misery took from the dead, was not so bound, so I strove to secure our joy by the seeming death of Georgian and a new life as her twin. You do not understand; you cannot. You have no measure with which to gauge such men as my brother. But it will be given you. There is no hope now. The weakness of a moment has undone us."
Ransom must have heard her, after events proved that he did, but he gave no token of it. The visions that were whirling through his mind still held it engrossed. He saw her, not as she stood before him now, trembling and appealing, but as she had looked to him in the hall that first night, as she had looked to him down by the mill-stream, as she had looked when she told her story as Anitra, and later when she had faced the landlady as Georgian, and the confusion of it all left no room in his conscience for any other impression. But Mr. Harper, though surprised as he had never been before in all his professional career, lost himself in no such abyss. With the freedom which long-delayed insight into the truth gives to a man of his positive nature and training, he left speculation and all endeavor to reconcile events with her declaration, and plunged at once to the obvious question of the moment.
Fixing his keen gaze on Hazen, he observed very quietly, but with an underlying note of sarcasm:
"If this lady is your sister, Georgian Ransom, and there is no Anitra save the fast fading memory of the child commemorated in your family's monument, then your statement as to the body you saw under the ledge was false?"
The answer came deliberately, unaffected both by the manner of the accusation or by the accusation itself.
"Perfectly so," said he, "I saw no body. Perhaps my description would have been less vivid if I had. My intention you know. This woman had deceived me to the point of making me believe that she was indeed Anitra, the twin, and not my millionaire sister, and Georgian's fortune being necessary to her heir, I wished to cut short the law's delay by an apparent identification. I never doubted from the moment this woman faced with such well-played ignorance the mark of great meaning we had placed upon her door, that Georgian was in the river, as you all believed. Why then not give her a positive resting-place, since this would smooth out all difficulties and hasten the very end for which she had apparently sacrificed herself."
If there was any irony in his heart, his tongue did not show it. Indeed his manner betrayed little. Immobility had again replaced all tokens of anger, and immobility which only yielded now and then to a slight contortion more expressive of physical pain than of mental agitation. Yet in Georgian's eyes he had lost none of his formidable qualities, for the dismay with which she followed his words grew as she listened, and reached its height as he added in final explanation:
"The bag I did draw out of the pool, but only because I had taken it down there in my blouse front. Did you think a man could see that or anything else indeed in that maddening swirl of water?"
"But it was Mrs. Ransom's bag," came from Harper in ill-disguised amazement. Even his sang-froid was leaving him before these evidences of a plot so deep as to awaken awe. "Where did you get it? Not from Mrs. Ransom herself? Her own surprise is warranty for that."
"No, I got it from the river, another reason why I credited her drowning. It was fished up from the sand, a little way from the Fall. My man found it; I had sent him there in a vain hope that he might find evidence of the tragedy which others had overlooked. He did, but he told no one but me. You flung the thing too far," he remarked to Georgian. "You should have dropped it nearer the bank. Only such a prodder as my man Ives would ever have discovered it."
Georgian shook her head, impatient at such banalities, in the face of the important matters they had to discuss. "To the point," she cried, "tell these men what will clear me of everything but a wild attempt at freedom."
"I have said what I had to say," returned her brother.
Georgian's head fell. For a moment her courage seemed to fail her.
Mr. Harper rose and locked the door.
"We must have no intruders here," said he, pausing with a certain sense of shock, as he noticed the faint smile, full of some sinister meaning, which for an instant twisted Hazen's lips at these words.
But the delay was but momentary. With an odd sense of haste he rushed at once to the attack.
Stepping in front of Hazen, he observed with force and unmistakable resolution:
"Your devotion to the legatee Auchincloss cannot possibly be explained by any ordinary feeling of obligation. Your sister has mentioned a Cause. Can he by any possibility be the treasurer of that Cause?"
But Hazen was as impervious to direct attack as he had been to a covert one.
"Georgian will tell you," said he. "When a woman looks as she looks now, and is so given over to her own personal longings that she forgets the most serious oaths, the most binding promises, nothing can hold back her speech. She will talk, and since this must be, let her talk now and in my presence. But let it be briefly," he admonished her, "and with discretion. An unnecessary word will weigh heavily in the end. You know in what scales. You shall have just fifteen minutes."
He looked about for a clock, but seeing none drew out his watch from his vest pocket and laid it on the table. Then he settled himself again in his chair, with a look and gesture of imperative command towards Georgian.
Struck with dismay, she hesitated and he had time to add: "I shall not interrupt unless you pass the bounds where narrative ends and disclosure begins." And Harper and Ransom, glancing up at this, wondered at his rigidity and the almost marble-like quiet into which his restless eye and frenzied movements had now subsided.
Georgian seemed to wonder also, for she gave him a long and piercing look before she spoke. But once she had begun her story, she forgot to look anywhere but at the man whose forgiveness she sought and for the restoration of whose sympathy she was unconsciously pleading.
Her first words settled one point which up to this moment had disturbed Ransom greatly.
"You must forget Anitra's story. It was suggested by facts in my own life, but it was not true of me or mine in any of its particulars. Nor must you remember what the world knows, or what my relations say about my life. The open facts tell little of my real history, which from childhood to the day I believed my brother dead was indissolubly bound up in his. Though our fathers were not the same and he has old-world blood in his veins, while I am of full American stock, we loved each other as dearly and shared each other's life as intimately as if the bond between us had been one in blood as it was in taste and habit. This was when we were both young. Later, a change came. Some old papers of his father fell into his hands. A new vision of life,—sympathies quite remote from those which had hitherto engrossed him, led him further and further into strange ways and among strange companions. Ignorant of what it all meant, but more alive than ever to his influence, I blindly followed him, receiving his friends as my friends and subscribing to such of their convictions as they thought wise to express before me. Another year and he and I were living a life apart, owning no individual existence but devoting brain, heart, all we had and all we were, to the advancement and perpetuation of an idea. I have called this idea the Cause. Let that name suffice. I can give you no other."
Pausing, she waited for some look of comprehension from the man she sought to enlighten. But he was yet too dazed to respond to her mute appeal, and she was forced to continue without it. Indicating Hazen with a gesture, she said, with her eyes still fixed on those of her husband:
"You see him now as he came from under the harrow; but in those days—I must speak of you as you were, Alfred—he was a man to draw all eyes and win all hearts. Men loved him, women adored him. Little as he cared for our sex, he had but to speak, for the coldest breast to heave, the most indifferent eye to beam. I felt his power as strong as the rest, only differently. No woman was more his slave than I, but it was a sister's devotion I felt, a devotion capable of being supplanted by another. But I did not know this. I thought him my whole world and let him engross me in his plans and share his passions for subjects I did not even seek to understand.
"I was only seventeen, he twenty-five. It was for him to think, not me. And he did think but to my eternal undoing. The Cause needed a woman's help, a woman's enthusiasm. Without considering my motherless condition, my helplessness, the immaturity of my mind, he drew me day by day into the secret meshes of his great scheme, a scheme which, as I failed to understand till it had absorbed me, meant the unequivocal devotion of my whole life to the exclusion of every other hope or purpose. Favored, he called it, favored to stand for liberty, the advancement of men, the right of every human being to an untrammeled existence. And favored I thought myself, till one awful day when my brother, coming suddenly into my room, found me making plans for an innocent pleasure and told me such things were no longer for me, that a great and immortal duty awaited me, one that had come sooner than he expected, but which my youth, beauty, and spirit eminently fitted me to carry on to triumph.
"I was frightened. For the first time in my memory of him he looked like his Italian father, the man we had all tried to forget. Once while rummaging amongst my mother's treasures I had come across a miniature of Signor Toritti. He was a handsome man but there was something terrible in his eye; something to make the ordinary heart stand still. Alfred's burned with the same meaning at this moment, and as I noted his manner, which was elevated, almost godlike, I realized the difference in our heredity and how natural to him were the sacrifices for which my mind and temper were as naturally unprepared. With difficulty I asked him to explain himself, and it was with terror that I listened when he did. He may have been made to ask, but I was not made to hear such words. He saw my inner rebellion and stopped in mid-harangue. He has never forgiven me the disappointment of that moment. I have never forgiven him for making me sign away my independence, my holdings, and my life to a Cause I did not thoroughly understand."
"Your life?" echoed Ransom, roused to involuntary expression by this word.
"Surely not your life," echoed the lawyer, with the slow credulity of the matter-of-fact man.
"I have said it," she murmured, her head falling on her breast. At which token of weakness, Hazen stirred and took the words from her mouth.
"The organization," said he, "is a secret one and its code is self-sacrifice. To the band of noble men and women, of whose integrity and far-reaching purpose you can judge little from the whinings of a love-sick girl, life and all personal gratifications are as dust in the balance against the preservation and advancement of universal happiness and the great Cause. I thought my sister, young as she was, sufficiently great-minded to comprehend this and sufficiently great-hearted to do the society's bidding with joy at the sacrifice. But I found her lacking, and—" He stopped and almost lost himself again, but roused and cried with sudden fire, "Tell what I did, Georgian."
"You took my duty on yourself," she conceded, but coldly. "That was brotherly; that was noble, if you had not exacted a vow from me in return, destined to lay waste my whole life. Released from this one great duty, I was to hold myself ready to fulfil all others. At the lift of a hand—a finger—I was to leave whatever held me and go after the one who beckoned in the name of the Cause. No circumstances were to be considered; no other human duty or affection. If it were to enter upon a fuller and more adventurous life, well and good; if it were to encounter death and the cessation of all earthly things, that was well too, and a good to be embraced with ardor. Obedience was all, and obedience at a mere signal! I took the oath and then—"
"Yes, then—" emphasized Hazen in wavering but peremptory tones.
"He told me what had led to all this misery. That as yet this compact was between us two, and us two only. That he had considered my youth, and in speaking of me to the Chief had held back my name even while promising my assistance. That he should continue to consider it, by keeping my name in reserve till he had returned from his mission, and if that mission failed, or succeeded too well, and he did not return, I might regard myself as freed from the Cause, unless my enlarging nature led me to attach myself to it of my own free will. That said, he went, and for a year I lived under the dread of his return and all the obligations that return would entail. Then came tidings of his death, tidings for which he may not have been responsible, but which he never contradicted, and I thought myself free—free to enjoy life, and the fortune that had so unexpectedly come to me; free to love and, alas! free to marry. And that is why," she pursued, in all the anguish of a dreadful retrospect, "I recoiled in such horror and hung, a dead weight on your arm, when on turning from the altar where we had just pledged ourselves to mutual love and mutual life, I saw among the faces before me the changed but still recognizable one of my brother, and beheld him make the fatal sign which meant, 'You are wanted. Come at once.'"