Born to be Hanged, But—/Chapter 8
VIII
THE next day the papers had quite a story, and told everything but the truth. My name appeared conspicuously, for this was in a way what is called a "follow-up" story on the Smith affair, in which I had been referred to as the "notorious" et cetera. But I was not called the "notorious" et cetera in the papers which Thrope influenced upon my return.
No. "New facts had been discovered" which showed that I shot in self-defense. The three witnesses of the gambling game admitted that they lied, that the whole was a frame-up. I was not even to be arrested. The three witnesses had been arrested for perjury before the coroner's jury—such is the way, in graft and politics, henchmen are broken and thrown to the scrap-heap. True enough, they escaped prison, but they were scapegoats.
The dead seamen took the blame of the mutiny on the Jessie Darling, and Thrope, Whibley and myself had made a glorious fight against them. Not a word about Yang Li. Oh well, he never cared for publicity, any way.
And how was the name of Helen Curwen cleared? With unsuspected brilliancy. I read it two times and remained incredulous. She was Mrs. Captain Whibley, making her honeymoon voyage with the captain. And so far as anybody ever found out to the contrary—excepting, of course—Mrs. Curwen—that was true. Helen and Captain Whibley were in love and they did marry in a way that interfered not at all with the rather premature announcement.
Thrope, as a friend of the bride and of the captain, had intended to take a little sea-voyage to Honolulu and back before entering upon the last lap of his campaign. He had needed the rest. That was precisely what he had intended, for he felt certain that the letter would be a bombshell in the camp of Bryan, and he, Thrope, could afford the leisure of a sea trip even as a crucial moment of the campaign.
About the only two people I met who did not appear satisfied were Mrs. Curwen and Delaney.
Delaney almost wept. Then he swore loud and fervently. He cursed me for having ever suspected that he would give a friend a double-cross. I took his statement with sufficient salt to make it palatable and said nothing to ease his resentment against Thrope.
Much of that resentment was genuine. It had hurt Delaney's pride—however much or little it had hurt his honor—to think that anybody, even Thrope and the police, would arrange a frame-up against his friend in his own saloon.
He was angry. He asked if I thought I could ever have "got away" with the bluff I worked to get from the saloon if he had not willingly aided? I remarked that I probably could not have got away as easily as I had done if he had not been so agreeable, but that I would have shot—and he knew it.
But at that, I believe Delaney was more sincere than I really wanted to give him credit for. I am suspicious of everybody. Particularly of my friends.
I went to see Mrs. Curwen.
She was very distressed and showed it. Age seemed to have come suddenly to claim his full debt and interest.
"I am desperate—desperate," she said. Again and again she repeated that, remarking that there was no one to whom she could go. "My boy wants to tell the world I am his mother," she said, after I had let her know the vicissitudes of the ill-fated letter, "but it can't be." She said it with an intonation of finality. There was something more than a woman's sacrificial stubbornness in her voice.
"He doesn't know—even yet—all. And I can't tell him, ever!" she said.
I did not understand that remark. She did not appear to expect me to understand. I made no comment.
To make one sentence of it: Thrope, she said, was an enemy from of old; she had known him for many, many years, and for most of them had been afraid of him.
"I am terribly afraid of him," she repeated, looking at me in such a way that I could not very well help saying—
"Any time, just send word to me through Delaney of the Hoop-la Saloon."
She told me more than it is necessary to repeat of how she had watched over the boy, keeping her secret from every one but him. On his twelfth birthday she had ventured to tell him the truth.
"Or as much of it as my shame would let me. I said his father was dead and—" she broke off chokingly.
When I had first returned the letter to her she had learned that Thrope was after it and she determined to destroy it. But she could not. It meant too much. Mr. Ellis, who had been sent to San Francisco as soon as Bryan had learned of the letter being lost, and who, guided by gossip along the Barbary Coast, had searched me out, then discovered from Mrs. Curwen that it had already been returned; and he had returned to me and generously paid the money he had been given to offer as a reward.
Mrs. Curwen, afraid of Thrope, had given up the house and moved into an apartment. That was why I could not locate her. At last, determined to ease her mind for once and all, she had decided to burn the letter. Then she had found that it was gone and a blank piece of paper had been substituted. As she had read and reread it frequently, she knew the substitution had been but recently made.
She never suspected Helen, but was thoroughly frightened. She did not know that Helen and Thrope had even met. Mrs. Curwen had spent a terrible week—which had its anguish greatly increased by the disappearance of Helen.
All of her life, fear and tragedy had stalked beside her; and now she was tensely wrought up. The capacity for passive suffering had been exhausted.
"Thrope will try to use that letter against my boy," she cried, "and if he does— Oh, if he does"
She broke off.
For a moment the tigress that is in every woman appeared. Her hands became claws and her face changed to a harpy's. Stir any woman—any man—to the ultimate depths of desperation, and there will appear the claws and gleaming teeth.
Anthropologists estimate that we were beasts of the clawing hands and teeth about four times as long as we of the so-called human race have been men and women. A moment of ferocious tenseness—and she was exhausted and fell back weakly into her chair. She muttered rather than said—
"Oh, if the people only knew—but I can't tell— I won't tell! I would die first!"
She said nothing more and I did not question her, but I was more moved than I shall try to express.
I haven't repeated and do not intend to repeat what she told me of how she suffered and worked and planned to help that boy, now the fine congressman; of how her heart would almost leap from her breast at mention of his name, and of the secret pride she felt when people praised him as fearless and brilliant; of how she hung in the agony of suspense at every election for fear he might not win—and now to think his career might be crumbled in one cowardly, shameful blow against which she could oppose ho buckler!
I tried to assure her that her fear was largely anxiety; but she assured me that there was no infamy to which Thrope would not plunge with pleasure; that I had no conception of what he would do—that I had no conception of what he could do, and she would not tell me, would not tell any one! Never! Never!
I thought that I could understand her hysteria, but I was deeply touched by her sorrow, by her tragic situation. I again offered to do whatever I could at any time.