Munsey's Magazine/Volume 86/Issue 4/The Unwritten Story/Chapter 21
XXI
A sharp trilling of the hall telephone by the library door shattered the tension. Wyatt answered it.
“Yes—hello!”
Clear, though faint with distance, he heard Disney's voice.
“Is that Mr. Lockwood's house?”
“Yes!” he answered, with a surge of emotion at the heart. “Good morning, Disney!” He held his voice steady. Swiftly he was thinking: “She doesn't know! The way she speaks proves that she doesn't know!”
“Why, good morning, Rodman!” her surprised answer came. “How do you happen to be there at this time of day?”
“Oh, I just dropped around to tell you about a concert engagement I think you might fill,” he fabricated, sobered by the task that now confronted him. A fine sweat prickled on his forehead. “Where are you now?”
“Worcester. Had the most wonderful time. Such a concert!”
“Tm glad! When are you coming back to town?”
“That's what I'm phoning about. I've been invited to stay here until to-morrow with Mrs. Kimball. She's our cellist, you know. To-morrow morning she'll bring me in—motor in. Do you think mother would object?”
He forced a laugh.
“Mother mightn't, but I would!” he said. “Listen, Disney—your mother's up in her room, with a headache.” Damn it, if he had to lie, to save that girl, he would make a complete job of it! “I really think it would worry her if you stayed away. Couldn't you give it up?”
“Why, of course! I'll take the first train in.”
“No, wait! I'm loafing to-day—not a thing in the world to do.” For sheer mendacity, that took prizes! “Want to do something for me?”
“That depends. What is it? But—you're sure mother isn't really—”
“There, now! Didn't I say it was only a headache? Tell you what, Disney—I'll take my car and run out and get you. It's only forty miles. I can be there in less than no time. A drive, this kind of a spring day—it 'll be just what the doctor ordered. Want to?”
“I reckon I do!”
Her voice over the wire thrilled and pained him. It brought him both exultation and dread. The objective part of him was calmly talking to her. The subjective was racing on:
“Oh, Lord, if she doesn't only get hold of a newspaper before I get to Worcester!”
Now his objectivity was speaking into the receiver:
“I'll be right along, then!”
“Splendid! I'll be all ready.”
“Where'll I find you?”
“No. 19, Malabar Road; and I'll be awfully glad to see you!”
“Don't wander out. Stay right there. Right? Fine! Good-by, dear—good-by!”
He smeared his wet forehead with a hand that shook, as he hung up and turned back into the library.
“Listen—I'm going to bring her in. I'll tell her—all she ever must know. If she calls up again, you'll tell her nothing?”
“Nothing,” assented Mrs. Forrester.
Sinking down on the broad divan, she sat there shivering.
“Bless my soul!” the doctor exclaimed. “What an extraordinary young man! I wish,” he added, with the sudden upswelling of a bitter and tremendous envy, “I wish to God I was your age, and had a girl like that to love, and to fight and lie for!”
Wyatt, however, waited for no commentaries. Already, with his hat jammed on tight, he was down the stairs, past the wondering officer, out through the door—through the idlers and his envious confreres on the sidewalk.
“Taxi, here!” he shouted, as a vacant one slid past. He jumped it, was away—away on his crusade.
His own roadster was at the Irvington Garage, near Huntington Avenue Station. Thither, at all the speed—liberally interpreted—that the law allowed, the taxi rushed him. Four minutes after arriving there, he was shooting his own machine up Irvington Street.
If Thoreau is right in saying that the whole life of a man may be referred to a few deep experiences, this moment in Wyatt's life was crucial.
“Now for Veazie!”
Wyatt's thought centered on this last remaining peril. Were Veazie to be rounded up and made to talk—but Wyatt refused to dwell on what the newspapers would do then.
“God! If only Veazie's home—if only I can catch him!”
Forgotten now were all Wyatt's professional instincts. His story of all stories, the “scoop” that would have set his name on pinnacles of newspaper achievement—down it had crashed to ruin.
A traitor to his cause, false to all his hitherto compelling motives—getting the news and getting it first—he had completely reversed Lovelace's philosophy:
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not duty more!
A modern knight-errant, instead of spurring his mailed steed into battle for his ladylove, he stepped on the gas and whirled along Huntington Avenue, taking long chances with the traffic rules. He burned the asphalt to the Abercrombie Apartments, which sheltered the illustrious psychic, jammed to a quick stop, ran up the steps, and pushed the button marked:
Professor Maximilian Veazie
To his immense relief, the door latch presently clicked. Up he rushed, three stairs at a time, knocked at the professor's door, and was faced by a startled Irish maid.
“But he ain't up yet!” the maid asserted. “An' he only sees people by appointment, an'—”
Wyatt brushed her aside, strode in, and banged the door.
“He'll see me! Where's his room?”
“Here, what's all this disturbance?” sounded an angry voice. The professor, in bath robe and slippers, became dimly visible down the hallway. “Who's breaking into my—”
“Veazie, you old crook!” Wyatt flung, his anger rising like the tides of Fundy. “You've got about ten minutes to get out, before Boston gets too damned hot for you! Understand?”
“Wha—what?” the professor stammered, paling.
“Lockwood's been murdered—stabbed to death in his library. You'd better buy a ticket a mile long, and keep going!”
“My—God! You don't say!”
“Call police headquarters and ask 'em, if you don't believe me!”
Veazie, quivering, aimlessly moved his hirsute hands and gulped:
“Who—who are you?”
“The best friend you ever had, you faker! Well, what are you going to do? Stay here and get twenty years—the chair, maybe? Collusion might carry a first-degree sentence; or are you going to blow?”
“Blow? Where to?”
“To hell, for all I care! Anywhere, just so you get out of the country. Canada—Mexico. My car's outside, and I'll give you a lift away from town. Come on—show some speed!”
The professor made no answer, but turned and ran into his bedroom. There followed sounds of bureau drawers being banged. The maid, palsied with terror, stared from a dim angle of the hallway. Fevered, with blood pounding hotly in his temples, Wyatt paced the apartment.
“Get a move on there!” he ordered.
In less than ten minutes—they seemed ten hours—Veazie reappeared. He looked strangely diminished, terrified in a furtive and repulsive way. His garments hung awry. A bulging suit case dragged at his arm.
“Ready!” he choked.
“Give that maid some hush money!” Wyatt ordered.
Veazie set down the suit case and dug bills from a fat pocketbook crammed with the fruits of varied deceptions.
“Katie!”
Trembling, she came. He thrust the bills into her hand.
“You keep your mouth shut!” commanded Wyatt. “Stay right here for at least two weeks. Tell all callers that he's gone to New York on business. If you say he's not coming back”—Wyatt most ungallantly shook a fist in her chalky face—“you're liable to get mixed up in a case that 'll land you in jail! Get me?”
“Oh, saints preserve us, sir! I won't—”
“State's prison, mind! That's enough for you!”
Two minutes, and they were out of the apartment house, into Wyatt's roadster. As Wyatt jumped the car ahead, they heard a newsboy calling an early special:
“Moider! Moider on Beacon Hill! All about de millionaire moider!”
“There you are, professor!” Wyatt gibed. “You're in luck to-day—if only you keep going!”
“I swear to God I—I've had no hand in this! I never—”
“Oh, no, of course not! You're only an innocent bystander! By gad, but you're about the most innocent-looking man I ever laid an eye on!”
And this was the last word between them till Wyatt dropped the cringing wretch at the Newton railroad station, just as a west-bound Boston and Albany train came slowing in.
“Ticket a mile long, remember!” then repeated Wyatt. “Keep going, and never come back! The electric chair's used in this State—and it kills you so damned dead that not even a fake spiritualist's ghost would ever get any spirit of returnity at all! That 'll do for you!”
Veazie made no answer. Sick with a terror that wrung his ratlike little soul, he walked in an odd, mechanical way—like a disjointed marionette—to the train, and heavily clambered up the steps.
“All abo-o-o-o-ard!”
Locomotive bell and coughing exhaust were music to Wyatt as the heavy train tooled into motion. At a car window he caught one glimpse of a panic-smitten face—a face with the unseeing eyes of fear, with a red mustache that blazed against a leaden pallor. Then Maximilian Veazie was flicked forever from his life.
“Well, there goes my one big scoop!” said Wyatt, a bit grimly. “There'll never be another one like that for me!”
But then he laughed—laughed in the knowledge that any loss for the sake of love is golden gain. His heart, tuned to the miracle of the spring morning, leaped to meet the future as he threw in the clutch and roared away from the station bound for Worcester.
And so one story died, and another, sweeter far, trembled on the horizon of the yet-to-be.
Both were unwritten stories, but what infinities of difference lay between them! The one that perished—somber and fraught with tragedy and pain—left the world better for its passing. The other, consonant with springtide and this old earth's warming to life eternally renewed—was radiant with youth and hope and joy.
“All things work together for good,” saith a very wise and ancient Book.
It was proved once more that day; for up through stress and weakness, agony and greed and every evil doing, all things had indeed worked for happiness, and love, and good.
THE END