Born to be Hanged, But—/Chapter 10
X
THIS ends my story. I will get to the concluding facts briefly.
The following morning, through Delaney, Mrs. Curwen anxiously sent word for me to meet her.
It was to be a busy day for Thrope and he did not know how much, if at all, before midnight he could get to the office and keep his appointment with her. Mrs. Curwen was exceedingly nervous, but she said that she was not afraid. However, she wanted me to conceal myself in the office as a witness of what passed between them.
"I am afraid," she said tremulously, "I shall have to tell him something that no one on earth knows but myself—and—and I want you to know. I trust you—after what you did about that letter, and for Helen. And after what Mr. Ellis says."
Ellis, Edwin Ellis, I found—he was the man who had come to me offering ten thousand for the recovery of the letter and had later forced payment of that sum upon me—was a detective from Washington who had been hurried to San Francisco as soon as Mrs. Curwen had reported the loss of the letter. The first time we met he had learned that I had it, but not that I had returned it. As soon as he discovered that I had returned the letter he generously gave me the reward that Bryan had been willing to pay.
The elevator ran until ten o'clock on Saturday nights in the Thrope Building. Mrs. Curwen went up at ten, and I followed a minute later. She suggested that it might be best for us not to be seen together.
She opened the door direct from the hall into Thrope's private office and left it unlocked for me—or rather held it ajar for me, and held her finger warningly to her lip.
"Somebody's in there—I heard them move!" she whispered soundlessly, indicating a door that opened from the private office into another room.
Nobody could very well have proper business in there, since no light was burning—or at least none showed under the door.
I tiptoed across and listened, but I heard nothing.
Perhaps Mrs. Curwen had been mistaken, but the chances always were that Thrope could not be trusted; and he might have somebody there—and that somebody's presence might be for any purpose.
I looked at Mrs. Curwen. She wore a long coat and a bonnet hat. The thick veil that had covered her face was lifted so I could see how brightly her eyes were burning, eyes that seemed much sunken since we last met; and how tightly thin her lips were pressed. She looked more like a figure of stately allegory than a woman come to plead with a man, for she stood erect and the long lines of the coat that fell below her knees gave her form a certain dignity such as one seldom sees.
She would not flinch. I could tell that much.
I spoke to her with lip movement rather than with sound—noiselessly. I told her to pretend to telephone that she would not wait, and was leaving; then to step into the hall and shut the door after her.
She did so.
I stood beside the door opening into the next room and waited. For some seconds all was quiet, then I detected the shuffling of feet. Silence again. The party on the other side was listening.
The lock turned in the door. It moved cautiously, then slowly opened so that a little furtive middle-aged man blinked in the light. He was near-sighted and wore heavy glasses; and, too, he had come from a dark room into a lighted one.
Mine is not a gentle hand. My fingers fastened on the back of his neck. The other hand went over his mouth and silenced the cry that he started to make. He was a weak little office-bred clerk, frightened and not even cunning. By occupation he was court reporter, very good at shorthand he said.
Some woman was coming to blackmail Mr. Thrope and he had been posted there to take a stenographic record, he said; and at once admitted that he had lied. He tried another evasion or two, then admitted that he was Thrope's stenographer. He had been with Thrope for years. He knew that a woman was coming to meet Thrope and he had been posted to take it down. A little listening-hole had been made in the wall. I might almost say that it had been built in. He showed it to me and admitted that it had been used on many occasions. A small electric light, partly boxed in, illuminated a small shelf upon which he could rest his pad and make his notes with ease.
I took a towel, fashioned a gag, and locked Mr. Stenographer in the lavatory. I took his keys from him and investigated the various doors. I thought it might be well for me to have some way out in case I wanted to leave without interrupting the interview between Thrope and Mrs. Curwen. Thrope's offices—he was at the head of a big lumber company—occupied very nearly half of the space on one side of the building; and I found that I could open a door far down the corridor and near the stairs—almost a third of a block away from Thrope's private office.
Mrs. Curwen and I said a few words, but she was in no mood to talk; so, not knowing what minute Thrope might come, I went inside to the peep-hole and waited. I could watch her, and did. She sat very quiet, motionless, except that her breathing was deep and hurried as if she were making a severe effort to control herself.
THROPE came, big, hearty and sure of himself.
"Well, Mary," he said with kind of sardonic amusement, "we meet again."
"Yes, again."
"So you're going to try to rake up the past, eh? You know what 'll happen. I was a fool to ever try to protect you for that murder, Mary. But then, you see, I didn't really know you killed him and I loved you!"
Mrs. Curwen was amazed. She did not realize that Thrope was talking for the benefit of the stenographic report—that was not being taken.
"And so this Bryan is your brat, eh? And you want him elected. Trying to bluff me out of the running. I am too weak with women—they twist me around their fingers. You know. You used to do it. But you can't bully me! No. What do you want?"
She told him, speaking in a low, strained voice, that she wanted him to withdraw from the campaign, that she wanted him to give up the fight against Bryan.
"You will regret it—oh, how you will regret it, if you don't!"
It was more of a prophecy than a threat. She was not angry. She was pleading.
"He is your !" Thrope used the ugly word generally applied to the children of unfortunate mothers.
"And yours!" she cried.
I doubt if she had intended to say as much, to tell him that at all; but the retort was irresistibly drawn from her.
They stared at each other, and stared and stared, and made no move.
"Is that true?" he asked in a low, almost inaudible voice.
"Yes!" And quickly, pleadingly she sketched the history of how she had helped and guarded the boy, and never told him who his father was, and made him feel that it was better that he should not let the world know who his mother was, because she wanted him to rise—to go up and on, and be honest, to be noble.
"And he couldn't do it," she hissed, "if he knew such blood as yours was in his veins."
Thrope believed her. He knew she spoke the truth. But he was a politician, and there was less manhood in him than there is in the jackal, which will fight for its own.
"You lie, woman. You lie! You can't prove that I"
"No," she cut in, "because I had a good father and mother. And met you secretly because they disliked you. I can prove nothing! I do not need proof. You know it. Oh, give up this campaign—let him win. Don't drag up my shame to light. I don't care. But it is for him. For my boy—your son! That letter—that horrible unlucky letter! How proud I was when he sent it to me. You might have made the letter public because you will do anything to get your end. But now—now you must not fight him! I didn't intend to tell you. It was my secret, mine and God's!"
"Leave God out of it, when you lie! You can't bluff me like that. He's yours—and you're trying to drag me into it! This is the craftiest political deal I've ever run up against. I suppose he put you up to come! Now look here, old girl, I'll show you what happens when anybody tries to put something over on me! Every word of this interview goes in the paper tomorrow morning—in the Tribune! There's a stenographer in there has taken down every word. I'm not afraid. Let the public judge between us. My son, ! Your !"
The fold of Mrs. Curwen's cloak was pushed aside. A large ivory handled, nickel-plated revolver came into view, and as it came into view, she shot.
Thrope fell dead. A bullet in his brain.
THEN people came a-pounding at the door and flung it open, for it was not locked, I turned hastily back from that door that led inside and, without seeming to have a purpose in doing so, barred the way. So Mrs. Curwen escaped alone. I had taken the gun from her hand as she stood motionless, looking down upon the man whom she had at last paid with the full measure of vengenace.
The shot that killed Thrope seemed, too, to have numbed her realization of what she had done. It was not until I took the gun from her hand and pushed her inside the room from which I had just come that she seemed to understand that there was a chance to escape. She had not appeared to think of trying to, or of caring to escape. I am inclined to believe that she had come determined to kill him anyway. Certainly she knew that she had nothing to fear from the stenographic report of the conversation upon which Thrope had depended.
It was not gallantry or even forethought on my part that caused me to turn and take the blame. I did it instinctively. But, having done so, I could not refuse to carry the rôle out. I would make no statement to any one. The evidence was incontrovertible. I could not escape conviction.
Let me review the situation briefly. If Mrs. Curwen kept silent I could not escape hanging. If she confided with Bryan and he, as the governor, declined to injure his career by pardoning me, I could not escape. True, I could have stirred up a sensation, but I could have proved nothing. Blake of the Tribune offered to use his influence—preposterous! he had none and I told him so—in getting me a pardon if I would tell the truth.
He suspected that Mrs. Curwen was implicated. He also thought of using the copy and photograph of one page of the letter, but was afraid to go through with it. But Bryan, who was readily elected, was in almost as bad a fix as I: if he pardoned me, people would say that he had connived with me to put his personal and political enemy out of the way; if he did not pardon me—well, he had his own conscience to live with.
The truth could not come out unless his own mother was thrown into the prisoner's dock and the hideous and sordid story exhausted to its last detail.
Any way out somebody's life would be ruined—some innocent person's life, for I refuse to consider Mrs. Curwen guilty, though I think she had been touched by madness. A jury might have acquitted her, but Thrope's friends would have been powerful; besides, her son's career would have been ruined—and that was more to her than life.
I felt sorry for her, and for the young governor; but not sorry enough to be hanged, though I showed some patience in the trial and conviction.
In fact, I had to be convicted before the governor could help me! I was convicted and was sentenced by a judge of Thrope's own choosing to be hanged.
That judge put much feeling into the reading of the death sentence. He had shown all through the trial plenty of gratitude to the memory of the man who had raised him on stuffed ballots to the bench.
I have never had much use for circumstantial evidence or belief in capital punishment since those trying days.
What happened? In some mysterious manner I got hold of a revolver and held up the turnkey one morning between midnight and dawn. My good friend Delaney had paid that turnkey the sum of ten thousand dollars to give me this revolver and to be held up; and of course Delaney had no objections to paying out such a large sum because it was the ten thousand dollars that Bryan, through Ellis, had given me as a reward for returning that letter—of malignant influence.
By an odd coincidence that nobody seemed to remark, I escaped on the night before Captain Whibley—who had left the Thrope Lumber Company's service—sailed on a windjammer for Sydney.
But four people knew: Delaney, Sam Tyler, who met me at the wharf and took me to Whibley's ship, and Whibley and Helen. Mrs. Curwen had told her. So the bread I had cast upon the water came back to me, and the governor had not connived at my escape, nor was he embarrassed by having to pardon me. I believe that he would have done so—still, it is a terrible thing to make a politician, even an honest one, choose between his conscience and his career.
SICKNESS, death, cut Governor Bryan off as he was finishing his second term. Shortly afterward Mrs. Curwen died. With the death of her son she had nothing more to live for. The confession that cleared my name was found under her pillow.