The Cheat (Holman)/Chapter 21
Steaming pork and beans for breakfast on a hot end-of-August morning were a new sensation for Dudley and he had never seen such a smeary, thick cup as the one in which they served him the purple coffee. But he found to his surprise that he was hungry and thoroughly relished his meal.
He was quite cheerful when Officer Delaney appeared to take him before the judge. His fellow prisoner in the courtroom was the now sobered Italian. The judge was old and his skin fit too tightly over his jaw bones. He emitted a slight and unexpected whistle when enunciating words with an "s" sound. Under other circumstances it would have been funny.
The Italian was summoned first and Judge Rossbottom, gazing at the repentant roisterer over ancient silver-rimmed glasses, insulted the eighteenth amendment by fining him $5.00 and letting him go. When it came Dudley's turn to stand before him, the Judge addressed Officer Delaney, "Have you heard anything this morning about the condition of the man who was shot?"
"He's been taken to the Soundview Hospital. They said over the telephone he was still in critical shape." Dudley wondered if that grin were frozen into Delaney's face.
"The charge is," said the Judge crisply, "felonious assault with intent to kill. If Prince Rao-Singh dies, it will be changed to murder in the first degree. The trial will be set later. Meantime, you will hold the prisoner here."
"But I can get bail—any amount," Dudley started to protest.
"Not in a ease of this kind," the Judge dismissed his offer and would listen to no more.
Dudley began to realize what he was really up against. Rao-Singh hated him as only an Oriental can hate, and the Hindu possessed unlimited resources. He would do anything in the world to send him to jail for a long term. Moreover, Rao-Singh would probably drag Carmelita into the case if he possibly could. Whatever the wounded man's feelings for Carmelita had once been, and Dudley shuddered to think what they probably were, he without a doubt was now blazing with an intense anger against her, because she had resisted him and then shot him. At least Rao-Singh would feel that way as soon as he was strong enough. And the newspapers would leap upon this angle of the case with a whoop of joy. A young American husband had shot a millionaire Hindu prince. The American had for several months been living practically apart from his beautiful young Spanish wife, who was a neighbor of the glamorous victim and seen in his company almost every day. It wouldn't take an alert reporter for a New York yellow newspaper fifteen minutes to gather these facts, evolve jealousy as the motive for the shooting and work it into a story rich in spicy hints, "it is saids" and scandalous innuendoes and probably illustrated with photographs of Carmelita's house and Rao-Singh's study, with an "X" indicating where the body was found. Dudley had seen this done so many times before. It was a story after a yellow reporter's heart.
In a way it was fortunate. He couldn't hope to keep Carmelita out of the case entirely anyway, and by playing up his strong motives for shooting Rao-Singh the newspapers would throw themselves and the public off the real scent. Meantime he had better get in touch with Carmelita. She had been on his mind ever since that astounding sight of her escaping through Rao-Singh's French windows. He was fearfully anxious to know the real story of what had happened and worried to know what she was doing now. He was only too well aware of her fiery impulsiveness on occasion. She would be eager to learn what had caused his disappearance. And there were the reporters who would probably come storming her house during the day—
As if an echo of his fear he now became aware that Officer Delaney, about to take him back to his cell, was warding off a noisy, thin young man who seemed bent upon approaching Dudley.
"Git away!" finally roared Delaney and put an enormous hand upon the noisy one's chest and fairly flung him to one side.
"That's that fresh young reporter," he commented to Dudley when they were walking down the corridor leading from the courtroom to the cell tier. "He wanted to talk to you, and I guessed you didn't care to have him, eh? One word to him and he'll have every paper in New York down here."
They had to pass through the room where Dudley had been received the night before. He remembered the telephone.
"I wonder if I could 'phone my wife?" Dudley asked suddenly.
"Well—if you're quick about it, maybe," Delaney, having vanquished a reporter, one of his natural enemies, was feeling generous.
"Thanks. If you could step outside in the corridor a second. I can't get away, you know."
"Well, you got your nerve with you." But Delaney obeyed.
When Dudley got his number and Carmelita's almost hysterical voice came rushing over the wire, after he had told her where he was, though not why, he was glad he had taken the precaution to lure the officer out of earshot. She was excited, almost incoherent, and he had difficulty gathering from her torrent of words that she would be right down.
An hour later he looked up from his sitting posture on his rude bunk at the sound of feet shuffling outside to find the grinning Delaney standing beside Carmelita. The sight of her white face, the dark circles under her eyes, her general appearance of wretchedness filled him with fear and tenderness.
She had not slept the night before. Fortunate in not meeting a soul in her wild flight from the scene of the shooting, she had had barely strength enough to struggle up to her bedroom. There she had paced the floor practically all night, interrupting her nervous walking at intervals to fling herself upon the bed in a vain attempt to sleep or to sink into the chair in front of her dressing table and, turning her half-nude back around, gaze with fresh terror upon the cruel mark of the indignity she had suffered, the inflamed Bengal tiger seal of Rao-Singh that seemed burning through her back into her heart. At daylight, because she knew her maid would be knocking soon, she mustered strength enough to disrobe and don a negligée and pretend to have just awakened. A cup of strong coffee was her breakfast, and then had come the telephone call from Dudley and his astounding news.
Delaney was unlocking Dudley's cell. "Youse can talk down in the witness room." He was making a great concession. But he was kind of sorry for this fellow, and the lady would be a corker if she weren't feeling so badly. Dudley walked out of the cell and she flung herself into his arms, kissing him, choking sobs. Delaney led the way two doors down on the other side of the corridor and, closing them inside, stepped out to stand sentry at the door.
"Oh, Dudley, what are you doing in this awful place?" she cried when they were alone. She was hoping the reason was not what she feared, that he had not by any chance become involved in her own great trouble.
Dudley Drake was one of those perhaps fortunate people who frequently lose their heads completely in the face of petty annoyances but who in the midst of important crises are able to summon forth an unnatural calm that leaves the mind free to function and keeps the emotions firmly in check.
"You will have to speak more quietly," he cautioned her gently. "The officer is just outside the door. And please try to pull yourself together." She tried. He carried two chairs as far away as possible from Delaney's post. She sat down obediently and he took his seat opposite and very close to her. "We are in a fearful fix, Carmelita," he said. "We might as well face the facts at once. I had reason to believe you were in trouble after you left me last night. I followed you to Rao-Singh, arriving just as you came through the window and started torunhome. I went into the study through the same window and—well, Rao-Singh was shot. I was arrested, and I admitted I shot him."
He paused. He would give her the chance to deny entire responsibility in the matter even to him, even though she must know he was aware of the real assailant of Rao-Singh, if she wished to. She could accept his sacrifice entirely without telling him the truth.
Her tired eyes were wide as she looked into his, as if she were living over again the scenes of the night before. "I can't let you do that, Dudley," she cried softly, remembering his injunction about Delaney. "You must know—I shot him—myself." Her head sank forward a little. There was a full moment of silence.
"Why? Why did you sham a telephone eall from Lucy Hodge and go to him?"
His voice contained pity for her but it was insistent in its questioning. Face twisted with emotion, she came to her resolve at last. She would tell him everything, get rid of this awful thing that had been weighing down her very heart for so many weeks. If it killed.
There is a blessed relief in confession which a guiltless person can never know. That isthe psychology behind an important tenet of one of the world's greatest religions. In the mind of the guilty one whatever punishment follows the confession cannot be as bad as the guilt which is eating their very soul.
If it killed his love for her forever, Carmelita would tell him. And so she slipped, almost without her own volition, off the chair and down upon the floor in a miserable heap at his feet.
"I will tell you, Dudley, I will tell you everything," she began and in her recital she began back at her first visit to Canary Cottage and related in pitiless detail the whole miserable account of her weakness and deception—the lie she had told him about receiving a huge sum of money from her mother's will, her disastrous gambling, the true source of the necklace he had found caught in the safe, her frantie efforts to pay her debts and her misuse of the charity funds, and finally the events leading up to her clandestine visit to Rao-Singh the night before and its tragic termination. She did not spare herself in the slightest but there was one point upon which she insisted with frantic emphasis—she had been guilty of no wrongdoing with Rao-Singh, she had never eared in the slightest for the Hindu, and whatever Dudley's attitude might be toward her from now on she would always love her husband.
"I don't expect you—to love me now—but—but please, please—believe me." And suddenly she broke down completely. She buried her pain-seared face in his lap and gave way to the sobs that racked her.
Dudley Drake was only human. He stared straight ahead of him at the brick wall opposite. Her whole life since she had left the apartment then had been a sham. She had deceived him at every turn, and it hurt him deeply. Her hat had fallen upon the concrete floor and he was stroking her dark mass of hair, muttering words of comfort without meaning them or knowing what he was doing. He had told her once that he believed their marriage a mistake, and he wondered if he hadn't made the biggest mistake of all in rushing in and sacrificing himself for her now that he had heard this heartbreaking confession. But as she continued to sob and he looked down upon her helpless, racked body, a softer mood came upon him.
She had made a great sacrifice for him too. She could have had any luxury money could buy—armies of servants, motors, gowns, admirers—and she had forsaken it all to elope with him, a poor man, in Paris. He had taken her to a stifling three-room prison—what a terrible place it must have seemed to her!—and denied her every pleasure she had been taught to crave, forgetting everything in his determination to grow rich quickly by pursuing Chartres and closing with him. And, after all, she had just been a pawn of fate. She had taken an initial false step, and knowing her, he could appreciate how it happened. And the rest of her trouble had followed as a perfectly natural consequence. Like pulling out the bottom card of a stack.
Whatever she had done, she was the woman he loved, his wife. He would forgive her! He would—
And suddenly his overwhelming love for her assailed him in a warm stream he could not deny, and tears were rolling unchecked down his own eyes. He took her head between his two hands and raised her face almost roughly to his and rained upon her mouth, her eyes, her forehead the kisses that made her live again. In an instant he recovered control of himself and freed one hand to dig it into his eyes and wipe away the evidence of his weakness. He was trying to smile.
"It's all right, sweetheart," he murmured. "We'll stick together. I'll see you through."
It seemed too wonderful to her to believe, and she was softly weeping tears of relief now, while he tried to comfort her. Soon she recovered also and was facing him bravely. Indeed she was the first to speak again.
"I cannot let you sacrifice yourself for me, Dudley. I am entirely to blame, as I have just told you. I will go to the policeman out there and confess. Let them put me in jail—I can stand anything now, now that I know you still love me—if only they will set you free."
"That would be foolish, dearest," he reasoned gently with her. "For one thing they would not believe you. And for the other a man can get along so much better in a—matter of this kind than a woman. Once you were mixed up in this, your name would be smirched forever, you would be finished. With me it is, different. Rao-Singh is not going to die—he can't. I shall get out of this all right, never fear."
She would have rushed out yet had he no€—seized her by the wrist.
"But, Dudley—" she began unconvinced.
"Please—leave this whole trouble entirely to me. I absolutely forbid you to confess or say a word about it to anybody. Especially the reporters—please be very careful with them. They will come flocking around, never fear. I've telephoned my uncle and he's coming down to-day. He will probably attend to all the legal details for me, and we couldn't have a better man. So there's nothing for you to do but go home quietly and wait and be brave. And—I forgive you for everything, and I love you." He took her again in his arms and kissed her. As he released her, still protesting against the course he had outlined for her, Delaney opened the door, coughing discreetly. Dudley watched her walk slowly away from him down the corridor toward the outer air, and he knew that for the time being he could rely upon her to be silent. Though for how long—