Greater Love Hath No Man/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
VARGE MAKES A DISCOVERY
ALREADY late afternoon, Varge came through the penitentiary gates, and with quick, eager steps traversed the few hundred yards of roadway to the warden's house. Four days had passed since he had been there; four days that had seemed interminably long and restless days; four days, too, that had been miserable, unpleasant ones for him.
Old and familiar faces had crowded the little court-room in Berley Falls again, and he had shared the sordid honour with Twisty Connors and the Butcher of being the centre of attraction, the sensation of the moment. The eyes that had gazed on him there had lost no whit of the interest with which they had gazed when, once before, he had stood in that same room, then on trial for his own life—they had lost only their friendliness. And in the faces of those who crowded the benches to capacity was—strange phase of human nature!—that smug, morbid content that springs from the sometime personal intimacy with one who, having gained celebrity, whether from unenviable notoriety or exalted fame, will presently afford them the exquisite conceit of airing that intimacy to less favoured mortals from the vantage ground of lofty condescension!
It had not escaped Varge in any measure—the nodding, wagging heads, the gaping mouths, the whispered conversations into one another's ears. It was impossible to have been insensible to it, and he was glad that it was over; though, too, there had been compensation—a firm clasp of John Randall's hand, and another from Sheriff Marston.
Each day of the four, he, with a dozen others under guard, had been taken from the penitentiary in the morning and driven to Berley Falls to act as witnesses in the trials of Twisty and the Butcher, as ringleaders, together with their accomplices for the murder of Wenger. Contrary to expectation, but to his own relief, the proceedings had been concluded shortly before noon that day—Twisty and the Butcher receiving the full sentence of the law; and the rest, found guilty of manslaughter, being given an additional twenty years to the terms they were then serving.
And now, as he turned in at the driveway and swept the lawn and shrubbery with a rapid glance, a sense of disappointment came over him, slowing for the moment his step. He had hoped that she might be there; and he had half-promised himself the gladness that would come from the sound of her voice in cheery greeting, and the added sunshine from the smile of her lips and eyes—but she was nowhere in sight.
He kept on up the driveway, his eyes falling here and there, on this bed and that, on evidences of her work during his enforced absence. How dearly she loved her garden, the plants and flowers and trees and vines—and how like them, too, she was in her freshness and her purity, in her sweet, faultless beauty, in the delicate fragrance of innocence that she breathed about her!
Gradually his step quickened again. She was somewhere in the house, probably; and sometime before the afternoon was over, when she discovered that he was back again at work, she would come out to tell him of a score of little things that she wanted done. Meanwhile, there were the morning glories to be planted that were to cover the trellis of the back porch; and there were the side borders by the hedges between the house and the barn to be made ready—there was plenty to do—the four days of absence had played serious havoc with plans that he knew were very near and vital to her.
In the barn that served as tool-house—for the warden did not keep a horse—Varge collected the various implements he required, and, coming out again, set vigorously to work upon one of the borders.
A half-hour saw this task completed, and then he crossed slowly to the opposite hedge to begin upon the other.
The previous sense of disappointment was upon him again. He had been wrong; she was evidently not in the house, but away somewhere—he had seen Martha, the Rand's servant, at the window, and Martha would surely have told her that he was there had she been within. But still he clung to hope—it seemed as though more than ever that afternoon he needed the uplift of her presence, the sound of her voice in his ears to soothe the heaviness of spirit that was creeping over him—perhaps even yet she would return before it was time for him to go back to his cell and the years of hours before the sunlight came again.
What was it that was weighing him down now so strangely, so insistently? He had been happier during the two weeks that had just gone than he had believed it possible he could be in his hopeless convict life, and the summer at least held out to him—who of all men had no right to live but in the present—the promise of that same gladness, the same warm, bright glints of sunlight through the rifts of leaden clouds that had been his now for these two weeks. What was it? It could not be just the disappointment that her absence this afternoon had brought him. It seemed more an intuition, a presentiment hanging over him, that in a curious, ironic way strove to warn him against something, while, too, it seemed to mock at him.
The beat of horse's hoofs sounded from the road, the crunch of wheels on the driveway—and suddenly Varge's face lighted up, and the grave troubled look was gone. Her laugh, mellow, silvery, full of genuineness as it always was, came to him from the front of the house, and he leaned an instant on his spade to listen.
Then slowly the light faded from his face and into it crept a white rigidness, and his hands clenched upon the spade handle until it seemed the tight-drawn skin must crack and part over the knuckles—another laugh, another voice he knew as well as hers had reached him.
Motionless he stood there—like a statue in the act of driving a spade home into the ground—one foot uplifted with its heavy prison boot resting on the top of the blade, the grey-and-black striped form bent a little forward as though to bring the body-weight and shoulder muscles into play.
Her step was on the front veranda now. There was a confused murmur of laughter and voices; and then hers, merrily:
"Well, put the horse in the barn firsts and then we'll see about it—I don't know whether there'll be time before tea or not."
A moment more Varge stood without movement, then he laid down the spade, crossed quickly to the barn, and withdrew out of sight behind one of the stalls. He had barely a minute to wait. The carriage wheels rattled on the gravel drive coming toward him past the side of the house, a shadow fell across the barn doors—and as the stamp of hoofs rang loudly on the wooden flooring, he stepped suddenly from the stall to the horse's head. With a little neigh and whinny that was almost human in its recognition and greeting, the animal rubbed its nose against his shoulder.
"Lady Mine," he answered softly—but his eyes played coldly upon Harold Merton on the buggy seat.
Merton's face on the instant had gone grey-white, and the reins had fallen from nerveless hands across the dashboard.
Varge's eyes still held upon the other, not a flicker in their steady gaze, a question in their depths that needed no words to amplify it.
Merton wet his lips with the tip of his tongue.
"You—you here?" he stammered. "I—I thought you were at Berley Falls this afternoon."
"You thought I was at Berley Falls!"—the words came with quick significance from Varge's lips. "Well?"
"At—at the trial, you know," stumbled Merton, realising that his remark had been unfortunate and clumsily trying to gloss it over. "Everybody knew, of course, that you were there, and everybody thought it would last for several days yet. I—I thought you were there, and so naturally I was surprised to find you here, and—and—" he stammered again, paused, shifted uneasily in his seat, tried to meet Varge's eyes, and then flung out nervously: "Curse it, why do you look at me like that! Don't look at me like that, I tell you!"
No muscle of Varge's face moved, save a slight contraction around the corners of his lips that gave an added sternness to the grim, set expression already there. When he spoke it was without raising his voice, and the quiet evenness of his tones might almost have been mistaken for nonchalance.
"You knew that after I left the hospital I was made a trusty and since then have been working here?"
"Yes," said Merton sullenly; "I knew it. Why?"
"You were here yesterday?"
"No."
"The day before?"
"Yes."
"The day before that?"
Merton hesitated—met Varge's eyes an instant—and the denial on his lips became an affirmative snarl.
"You have been coming then in the daytime when you thought I was away—otherwise, since I have been a trusty, your visits have been in the evenings—is that it?"
Merton made no answer.
"Get down from that seat and come here into the stall!" Varge ordered abruptly.
"What for?" demurred Merton.
"Because," said Varge curtly, "it will be just as well for you if we are not seen from the house—and because I have something to say to you. Get down!"
For a moment Merton seemed to debate with himself; then, with a show of braggadocio, he swung out of the buggy and swaggered into the stall.
"Well?" he inquired, a hint of defiance in his tones, as Varge followed him.
Varge stepped close to him.
"How long have you been visiting Miss Rand?" he demanded bluntly.
"I don't see that it is any of your business," Merton responded surlily.
"Shall I help you to answer?" said Varge sternly. "Since that day when you came to see me in the penitentiary yonder—is that right?"
"Well," snarled Merton; "supposing it is? What is it to you?" He broke into a sharp, nervous laugh. "You're not jealous, are you? One would think you were in love with her yourself the way you—"
The sentence was never finished. The next instant Merton had crouched back against the side of the stall, his hands flung out as wards in front of him.
"No, no, Varge; I didn't mean that," he cried out. "I—I was only joking. Can't you see I was only joking?"
Without a trace of colour in his face, white to the lips, his eyes blazing, Varge had closed the single step between them.
"You have dared to come here," he said hoarsely. "You have dared to touch that pure life with yours, black to the soul with the guilt of hell! Answer me! How far has this thing gone?" His hand closed suddenly down with a crushing, vise-like grip on Merton's shoulder.
"Keep away," Merton grovelled. "Keep away—keep your hands off me with that ghastly strength of yours."
"Answer me!"—Varge's voice was ominously, deadly low. "How far has this thing gone?"
"I—I love her," mumbled Merton. "I—I told her so."
"And she?"—Varge's lips scarcely moved, as the words came tensely.
"She said she didn't love me"—the snarl was creeping back into Merton's voice, and an ugly look into his face.
Varge's hand dropped from the other's shoulder, and he stepped back.
"Thank God," he said, "she has been saved that hurt!"
"Is there anything else you want to know?" Merton burst out violently. "Anything else you can bully out of me because you hold something over my head? If there isn't, I'll go."
Varge looked at him for a long minute—and in that minute the months of prison horror rose before him, came again the scene of a murdered father, then the picture of Janet Rand in all her sweetness, her trust, her innocence, her fair young life—and a red mist swam before his eyes in which Merton's face seemed to assume ghoulish, distorted features, filling him with insensate fury, prompting him to crush out the treacherous, inhuman life as he would that of some foul, creeping thing. He turned suddenly away—he dared not trust himself 
"ANSWER ME! HOW FAR HAS THIS THING GONE?"
Merton edged out of the stall toward the buggy and started for the door.
Then Varge turned—sure of himself again.
"Wait!" he commanded curtly. "There is nothing else I want to ask you—but there is something that I have to say. When you leave here to-night, you leave here for the last time—do you understand?" He paused for an instant, holding Merton with his eyes. "You can write Miss Rand from Berley Falls that you are going away, or make any other excuse that you like to account for your visits ceasing abruptly—but they are to cease. That is all."
"And supposing I refuse?"—Merton's tones were ugly.
"Some one will be coming here to look for you in a minute," said Varge calmly. "I will put the horse up."
Stronger than any threat was the quiet assurance of Varge's irrelevant response, and for a moment, with working face, his hands opening and shutting at his sides, Merton stood there; then, with cowed, sullen, whispered words upon his lips, he turned and went out of the door.