The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 23
CHAPTER XXIII
The House Divided
ALONE—chained to the invalid chair wherein, day in, day out, for years on end, he had suffered the Promethean torments of the life that would not die out of his wretched carcass— Seneca Trine sat waiting, with the impassivity of a graven figure.
"Another hour! … In sixty minutes more they will be here, Judith and Marrophat and Rosepoor fool—and him! They will put him down before me, bound and helpless, if not dead …"
A slight pause prefaced words that were a whimpered prayer: "God grant that Alan Law may be laid down still living here at my feet! Then …"
A bitter smile twisted his tortured features. "When I have seen him die as his father died—then—ah, God!—then at last I, too, may die!"
There was a long silence, then a groan of exasperated protest: "Why do they not come? Why does Judith delay? She must have found so many opportunities to leap and strike, why has she always failed? Where is that message she sent me yesterday?"
His one sound hand groped out and sought a mass of papers on the desk beside him, sorting out from among then two yellow forms. Painfully he blinked over these and slowly his pain-bent lips conned their wording.
"Alan and Rose safe with me—will bring both home to-morrow night without fail," he read the first aloud, and then the second: "Have motor-car waiting for me to-morrow morning from three o'clock till called for—New Bedford waterfront—Judith."
"No!" he affirmed with the fervour of one persuaded by his own desires, "I must not doubt the girl! Patience!" he whispered, and, closing his eyes, rested his head against the back of the chair and was for a long time still. … But when the girl entered softly, as if fearful of disturbing his slumbers, she found him with head erect and eyes ablaze.
"Judith!" he cried, his great voice vibrating like a brazen bell. "At last! You have brought him? Where is he?" The girl dropped her head. After an instant of incredulous disappointment the man shot a single, frigid question at her.
"You have failed?"
"I have failed," she confessed.
"Why?"
She shrugged slightly. "Who knows why one fails? I did my best; he was too much for me, outwitted me at every turn, and now I bring you only Rose."
She faltered, awed by the glare of his infuriated eyes. "Let me explain," she begged.
He snapped her short. "There is something beneath this, something you will not tell me."
His hand sought the row of buttons on the desk and pressed one long. Almost instantly a servant glided into the room.
"My daughter Rose—have her brought here to me at once!"
In another moment the replica of his daughter Judith was ushered into his presence.
Upon this one he loosed the lightnings of his wrath without ruth. They met for the first time since she had mutinied against him, and left his roof to go to the lover whose life her father sought.
Rose suffered him in silence. His most galling recrimination educed no retort. But she listened with covert avidity, hoping that some word of his might betray the secret of her lover's fate since she had been torn from his protection. That word, however, did not come before Judith stirred her sister's temper beyond control.
In a lull in Trine's tirade, Judith chose to interject:
"Don't be so hard on the silly fool, she's not responsible, she's sick with love for that good-looking simpleton!"
"And you!" Rose turned on her passionately. "What about you? If I love Alan Law, at least I love him openly. I'm not ashamed to own it—and I don't pursue him, as you do, pretending I mean to sacrifice him to a wicked family feud, and then spare him, as you do, hoping so to work upon his sympathies. There," she cried to her father, "there stands the daughter who has betrayed your faith."
The retort on Judith's lips was checked by her father's gesture and a word that rang through the room like the tolling of a bell. "Silence!"
Abashed, she averted her face and hung her head.
"I think," Trine announced in a voice of ice, "I have learned now what I needed to know."
His fingers sought the row of buttons, and when a servant responded, he inquired.
"Mr. Marrophat has returned?"
"He is in the waiting-room, sir."
"Conduct Miss Judith Trine to him and tell him I hold him personally responsible for her safekeeping. He will understand."
"Very good, sir."
"No!" Trine silenced Judith's attempt to protest and exculpate herself, "not another word. Go!"
Sullenly the girl obeyed.
And for a long time thereafter the father, alone with Rose, essayed in vain to break down her mutinous silence.
Only, in the end, he was able to shatter her calm by a remark so uttered as to seem an inadvertent avowal that he had already brought about the assassination of her lover. Even that failed of its purpose, for her taciturnity yielded only to hysteria; and realizing that he wasted breath. Trine summoned two of his creatures and had her led weeping from the room to be held prisoner in her bedchamber on the topmost floor of the house.