"Wretch!" issued from the frenzied lips of the half-maddened bridegroom, as his glance flashed on Hazen. "Had you no mercy? Have you no mercy now, that you should torture her young, credulous soul with these fanciful obligations; obligations which no human being has any right to impose upon another, whatsoever the Cause, holy or unholy, he represents?"
"Mercy? It is the weakness of the easy soul. There is no ease here," he cried, touching his breast with no gentle hand.
"Then you forget my money," suggested Georgian. "Can you expect mercy from a man who sees a million just within his grasp? I know," she acknowledged, as Hazen lifted that same ungentle hand in haughty protest, "that it was not for himself. I do not think Alfred would disturb a fly for his own comfort, but he would wreck a woman's hopes, a good man's happiness for the Cause. He admitted as much to me, and more, in the interview we held that afternoon at the St. Denis. I had to go to him at once, and I had to employ subterfuge in order to do so," she went on in rapid explanation, as she saw her husband's eye refill with doubt under a remembrance of the shame and anguish of that unhappy afternoon. "I had not the courage to leave you openly at the carriage door. Besides, I hoped to work on Alfred's pity in our interview together, or, if not that, to buy my release and return to you a free woman. But the wound which had changed his face for me had changed and made hard his heart. He had other purposes for me than quiet living with a man who could have no real interest in the Cause. The money I inherited, the rare and growing beauty which he declared me to have, were too valuable to the brethren for me to hope for any existence in which their interests were not paramount. I might return to you, subject to the same authoritative beck and call which had put me in my present position, or I might leave you at once and forever. No half measures were possible. Was I, a bride, loving and beloved by my husband, to listen to either of these alternatives? I rebelled, and then the thunderbolt fell.
"I was no longer on probation, no longer subject to his will alone. I was a fully affiliated member. That day my name had been sent to the Chief. This meant obedience on my part or a vengeance I felt it impossible to consider. While I lived I need never hope again for freedom without penalty.
"'While I lived'; the words rang in my ears. I did not need to weigh them; I knew that they were words of truth. There is no power on earth so inescapable as that exercised by a secret society, and this one has a terrible safeguard. None but he who keeps the list knows the members. You, Roger, might be one, and I never suspect it, unless you chose to give me the sign. Knowing this, I realized that my life was not worth the purchase if I sought to cross the will of my own brother. Nor yours, either. It was the last thought which held me. While I dutifully listened, my mind was working out the deception which was to release me, and when I left him it was to take the first step in the complicated plot by which I hoped to recover my lost happiness. And I nearly succeeded. You have seen what I have borne, what difficulties I have faced, what discoveries eluded, but this last, this greatest ordeal, was too much. I could not listen unmoved to a description of my own drowned body. I, who had calculated on all, had not calculated on this. The horror overcame me—I forgot—perhaps because God was weary of my many deceptions!"
CHAPTER XXIX
"THERE IS ONE WAY"
"Have you done?"
Hazen was on his feet and, rigid still, but oscillating from side to side, as though his strength did not suffice to hold him quite erect, was surveying them with eyes sunk so deeply in his head that they looked like dying sparks reanimated for an instant by some passing breath.
The half-fainting woman he addressed did not answer. She was looking up at Ransom for the sympathy and pardon he was as yet too dazed to show.
Hazen made a move. It was that of physical suffering sternly endured.
"Let me speak," he urged. "I have a question to ask. I must ask it now. Who was the woman who came up from New York with you? There were two of you then."
Without turning her head Georgian replied:
"That was Bela, my maid; the same one who personated me on the afternoon of my wedding."
"That accounts for the coarseness of her neck," Hazen explained with a certain grim humor to the lawyer, who had given a slight start of surprise or humiliation. Then quietly to Georgian:
"Was it she who threw the comb and dropped your bag where my man found it?"
"I threw the comb; threw it from my window before I uttered that loud shriek. It did not go very far; but I had to be satisfied with the fact that it lay in the direction of the waterfall. But it was to Bela I entrusted the flinging of the bag. I gave it to her when she left the coach. I had explained to her long before just what a place she would find herself in when she was set down at the foot of the lane; how she was to make her way in the darkness till she came to where there were no more trees, when she was to strike across to the stream, led by the noise of the waterfall. I was very particular in my directions, because I knew the danger she incurred of slipping into the chasm. It was her fear of this and the more than ordinary darkness, I presume, which made her throw the bag hap-hazard. I simply wanted it dropped on the bank above the waterfall."
"I saw the girl," Mr. Harper broke in. "She wore a black skirt like the one you now wear, a black blouse and a red-checked handkerchief knotted about her throat. But the young woman who was seen leaving these parts the next morning had on some kind of a red dress and wore a hat. Bela had thrown away her hat; it was picked up where the coach stopped and afterwards brought here."
"I know. My plans went deep; I foresaw the possibility of her being recognized by her clothes. To guard against this, I had her skirt and blouse made double, the one side black, the other a bright color. She had simply to turn them. The extra hat she carried with her; it was small and easily concealed. Her neckerchief she probably tucked away. I had its mate in my pocket, and when I left my room by the window, as I did the moment after I had locked the two rooms, it was with my hair pulled down and this neckerchief about my shoulders. How did I dare the risk! I wonder now; but it was life, life I was after; life and love; nothing else would have made me so fearless; nothing else would have given me such confidence in myself or lent such speed to my feet, running as I did in the darkness."
"You ran around the house to the lane, and entered it by the turn-stile."
"Yes, and so quickly that I had time to splash myself with mud and lose all my natural characteristics before any one came to find me. It was Anitra they met, panting and disheveled, at the head of the lane; Anitra in appearance, Anitra in heart. I did not act a part; I was Anitra; Anitra as I had conceived her. To me she was and is an active, living personality. Whenever I faced you in her character, I thought with her half-educated mind; felt with her half-disciplined heart. I even shut my ears to sounds; I would not hear; half the time I did not. Nor did I fall back into my old ways when I was alone. From the minute Georgian closed her door upon you for the last time, and I darkened my skin in preparation for a permanent assumption of Anitra's individuality, I became the imaginary twin, in thought, feeling, and action. It was my only safeguard. Alas! had I only gone one step further and made myself really deaf!"
The cry was bitterness itself, but it passed unheeded. Mr. Ransom could not speak and Hazen had other cares in mind.
"Where is this woman Bela now?" he asked.
Georgian was too absorbed or too unwilling, to answer.
He repeated the question, this time with an authority she could not resist. Rising slowly, she faced him for one impressive moment.
"My God!" came from her lips in startled surprise. "How pale you are! Sit down or you will fall."
He shook his head impatiently.
"It's nothing. Answer my question. Where is this Bela now?"
"I don't know. She is beyond my reach—and yours. I told her to lose herself. I think she is clever enough to do so. The money I paid her was worth a few years spent in obscurity."
The spark lighting his eye brightened into baleful flame, but she met it calmly. An indomitable spirit confronted one equally indomitable, and his was the first to succumb. Turning from her, Hazen took out pencil and paper from his pocket, and, crossing to the window with that same peculiar and oscillating motion of which he seemed unconscious, or which he found it impossible to subdue, he wrote a line, folded it, and before even Harper was aware of his purpose threw up the sash and flung it out, uttering a quick, sharp whistle as he did so.
"What's that you're up to?" shouted the lawyer, rushing to the window and peering over the other's shoulder into the open space below, from which a man was just disappearing.
"Am I a prisoner of the police that you should ask me that?" returned Hazen, haughtily.
"No, but you should be," retorted Harper. "I don't like your ways, Hazen. I don't like what you and your sister have said about the Cause and the conscienceless obedience exacted from its members. I don't like any of it; least of all this passing over of poor Bela's name to one whose duty it will possibly be to make trouble for her."
Hazen smiled and moved from the window. No one there had ever seen such a smile before, and the oppression which it brought heightened Georgian's fear to terror.
"Let be!" she cried, lifting her hands towards Harper in inconceivable anxiety. "A quarrel with him will not help you and it may greatly injure me. Alfred, what am I to expect? Something dreadful, I can see. Your face is not the face of one who forgives, or who sees in a gift of money an adequate recompense for a cowardly withdrawal."
"You read rightly," said he. "Your fortune will be accepted by the Chief, but he will never forget the cowardice. What faith can he put in one who prefers her own happiness to the general good? You must prepare for punishment."
"Punishment!" broke scornfully from Harper's lips.
She hushed him with a look before which even he stood aghast.
"You will only waste words," she cried. "If he says punishment, I may expect punishment." And turning back to Ransom, in a burst of longing and passion, she raised her eyes to him again, saying, "You do not forgive because you do not realize my danger. But you will realize it when I am gone."
Ransom, under a sudden releasement of the tension of doubt and awe which had hitherto held him speechless, gave her one wild stare, then caught her to his breast.
She uttered a happy sigh.
"Ah!" she murmured in the soft ecstasy and boundless relief of the moment, "how I have learned to love you during the fears and agonies of this awful week."
"And I you," was the whispered answer. "Too deeply," he impetuously added in louder tones, "to let any harm come to you now."
She smiled; but desperation fought with love in that smile. Gently releasing herself, she cast another glance at Hazen, upon whose gray and distorted countenance there had settled a great gloom, and passionately exclaimed:
"Had law or love been able to interfere with the judgment of our Chief, I should not have been driven into the herculean task of deceiving you and the whole world as to my real identity." Then with slowly drooping head, and the manner of one who has heard his doom pronounced, she hoarsely whispered; "The death-mark was scrawled upon my door last night. This is never done without the consent of the Chief. No one can save me now, not even my own brother."
"False. I scrawled those lines," declared Ransom. "It was a test—"
"Which I commanded you to make," put in Hazen. Then in fainter and less strenuous tones, "She's right. Georgian Ransom is doomed; no one can save her."
"False again!" This time it was Harper who interposed. "I can and will. You forget that I know the name of your Chief. Conspiracy such as you hint at is indictable in this country. I am a lawyer. I shall protect, not only your sister, but her money."
The smile he received in return evinced no ordinary scorn.
"Try it," said he. Then with a laugh so low as to be almost inaudible, yet so full of meaning that even Harper's cheek lost color, he calmly declared: "No one knows the name of our Chief. Auchincloss is a member and a valuable one—the only one whose name Georgian positively knows; but he's but a unit in a thousand. You cannot reach the Head or even the Heart of this great organization through him, and if you did and punished it, the Cause would grow another head and you would be as far from injuring us as you are now. Georgian is right. Not even I can save her now." Then, with a steady look into each of their faces, he smiled again and one and all shuddered. "But the Cause will go on," he cried in tones ringing with enthusiasm. "Mankind will drop its shackles and we, we shall have unriveted one of its chains. It is worth dying for, I, Alfred Hazen, say it."
Slowly he sank back into his chair. The pallor which had astounded all from the first had now become the ghastly mask of a soul whose only token of life glimmered through the orbits of his fast glazing eyes. He breathed, but in great pants. Georgian became alarmed.
"What is it?" she cried, forgetting her own fears and threats in the horror which his appearance excited. "This is something more than exhaustion from the pounding of that murderous eddy. What have you done? Tell me, Alfred, tell me."
For the first time since his entrance into the room a suggestion of sweetness crept into his tone.
"Simply forestalled the verdict of the Chief," said he. "I was under oath to leave the country to-day on no ordinary errand. I failed to keep my word, believing that the interests of the Cause could be better served by what I have here undertaken than by the fulfilment of my primal duty. But we are not allowed the free exercise of our own judgment, else what man could be depended on? With us, neglect means death, no matter what the excuse or the Cause's benefit. I knew this when I made my choice last night. I have been dying ever since, but only actually since I came into this room. When the doctors decided that I had received no mortal hurt in the eddy, I—"
"Alfred!" The sister-heart spoke at last. "Not—not poison!"
"That is what you may call it here," said he, with a return to his old imperious manner, "but later and to the world it will be kindness on your part to name it exhaustion—the effect of my battle with the water. The doctors will reconsider their diagnosis and blame my poor heart. You will have no trouble about it. It is my heart—I feel it failing—failing—"
He was sinking, but suddenly his whole nature flared up. Bounding to his feet, he stood before them, with eyes aflame and a passionate strength in his attitude which held them spellbound.
"What can law, what can selfish greed, what can self-aggrandizement and the most pitiless ambition effect against men who own to such discipline as this? Nothing. The world will go on, you will try your little ways, your petty reforms, your slow-moving legislation and promise of justice to the weak, but the invincible is the ready; ready to act; ready to suffer, ready to die so that God is justified of his children and man lifted into brotherhood and equality. You cannot strive against the unseen and the fearless. The Cause will triumph though all else fails. Georgian, I am sorry—" He was tottering now, but he held them back with a stern gesture, "I don't think I ever knew just what love was. There is one way—only one—"
But from those lips the explanation of this one way never came. As they saw the change in him and rushed to his support, his head fell forward on his breast and all was over.
CHAPTER XXX
NOT YET
They had laid him on the bed and Mr. Harper, in his usual practical way, was hastening to rouse the house, when Georgian stepped before him and laid her hand upon the door.
"Not yet," said she with authority. "He said there was a way—let us find it before we give up our secret and our possible safety. Mr. Harper, have you guessed that way?"
"No, except the usual one of protection through the law which he scouts. I do not believe, Mrs. Ransom, in any other being necessary. Your brother's threats answered a very good purpose while he was alive, but now that he is dead they need not trouble you. I'm not even sure that I believe in the organization. It was mostly in your brother's brain, Mrs. Ransom; there's no such band, or if there is, its powers are not so unlimited as he would make you believe."
She simply pointed to the motionless form and the distorted face which were slowly assuming an expression of great majesty.
"There is my answer," said she. "Men of his strong attributes do not kill themselves from fancy. He knew what he did."
"And you think—"
"That I will not live a week if I pass that door under the name of Georgian Ransom. Mr. Harper, I am sure of it; Roger, I beg you to believe what I say. It may not come here—but it will come. The mark has been set against my name. Death only will obliterate this mark. But the name—that is already a dead one—shall it not stay so?—It is the one way—the way he meant."
"Georgian!"
It was a cry of infinite protest. Such a cry as one might expect from the long-suffering Ransom. It drew her from the door; it brought her to his side. As their eyes and hands met, Harper stepped back to the bedside, and remembering the sensitiveness of the man before him, softly covered his poor face. When he turned back, Mrs. Ransom was slowly shaking her head under her husband's prolonged look and saying softly:
"No, not Georgian, Anitra. Henceforth Anitra, always Anitra. Can you endure the ordeal for the sake of the safety and peace of mind it will bring?"
"I endure it! Can you? Remember the deafness that marks Anitra."
"That can be cured." Her smile turned almost arch. "We will travel; there are great physicians abroad."
"A sister—not a wife?"
"Your wife in time—Ah, it will mean a new courtship and—Anitra is a different woman from Georgian—she has suffered—you will love her better."
"O God! Harper, are we living, awake, sane? Help me at this crisis. I do not know where I am or what this is she really asks."
"She asks the impossible. She asks what you can, perhaps, give, but not what I can. You forget that this deception calls for connivance on my part, and whatever you may think of me or my profession, deception is foreign to my nature and very repugnant to me."
"And you refuse?"
"Mrs. Ransom, I must."
The hope which had held her up, the life which had returned to body and spirit since this prospect of a possible future had dawned upon her, faded from glance and smile.
"Then good-by, Roger, we shall never have those happy days together of which we have often dreamt. I may stay with you a week, a month, a year, but the horror of a great fear will be over us, and never, never can we know joy."
She threw herself into her husband's arms; she clung to him.
"One moment," she cried, "one moment of perfect happiness before the shadow falls. Oh, how I must love you, Roger, to say such words, to think such thoughts, with the body of the brother I loved so deeply once, lying there dead before us, killed by his own hand."
Ransom softly drew her aside where her eyes could not fall upon the bed.
Harper stopped still where he was, the picture of gloom and uncertainty.
"It must be settled now," said Ransom. "As we leave this room, our relations must remain."
"I cannot but think your fears all folly," muttered Harper. "Yet the responsibility you force upon me is terrible. If it were not for that will! How can I present it to the Surrogate when I know the testator is still alive?"
"You need not. I will do that," said Ransom.
"And the property! Given to a man we none of us know. Property that is not legally his."
"I will make it so," cried Georgian with a burst of new and uncontrollable hope as she saw, as she thought, this conscientious lawyer yielding. "There is paper here; draw up a deed of gift. I will sign it and you shall hold it so that whether I live or die, Auchincloss' title to his money shall be absolute. Thus much I wish to do, that Alfred's life should not have been sacrificed for nothing."
"Let me think."
Harper was wavering.
A half-hour later the door of Ransom's room was flung hurriedly open, and loud cries for Mrs. Deo and the office clerk rang through the house. And when they and others came running at the call, it was to find Mr. Ransom and the lawyer hanging over the recumbent figure of the dead Hazen, and the deaf girl Anitra pointing at the group, with wild and inarticulate cries.