Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 29
I'VE got to get him out—I've got to get him out tonight," the little woman was half sobbing to herself as for the second time she went down the jail steps and retired once more to that park bench beneath the boughs of a friendly tamarack. For an hour she seethed and smoldered, agonizing before the humiliating perception that she who loved Henry Harrington with all her warm heart was powerless to open prison doors for him while that girl yonder on the hill with ice-water in her veins—she, choosing to do so, even at this time of night, could have secretaries and cashiers jumping, vault doors flying open, securities tumbling out. Why, she could have Henry out of jail in fifteen minutes.
"I'll make her!" Lahleet exclaimed, mad with sudden resolve. "I'll make her!" The black eyes must have sparkled, even in the darkness. She left the bench and began to walk rapidly. Eventually, panting slightly, she stood between the statues of Lewis and Clark and gazed at the Boland mansion.
As she halted near the heroic figure of Meriwether Lewis, an automobile of high power roared up the grade, snorted past her ear and darted confidently in the direction of the porte-cochère. It was Scanlon who leaped out of the car; the lights showed her that, and if she could have known, the man was in great distress. His past had threatened to overtake him, and he was hurrying in great trepidation to his chief with the missive in his trembling hands which had shaken the tree of his life to its roots. It would have surprised Lahleet considerably to know that that sheet, of which she caught a fleeting glimpse, half open, clutched in the excited hand of the Chief Counsel, had been but twenty minutes before in the trembling fingers of Henry Harrington.
While Lahleet had been sitting on the bench in the park Sergeant Thorpe had returned to his chief with the Adam John venire and had presumed to bring along a day letter which had arrived after Harrington's departure for the chamber of commerce meeting.
Henry had started as he saw that it was from Wendell, of Barrett and Wendell, those eminent New York attorneys and experienced practitioners before the Supreme Court of the United States. Two or three weeks before Wendell had argued the case of Salzberger vs. The First National Bank and today he had got an inkling from Washington—an inkling which made him send Henry this rather frantic day letter of ugly warning and ominous premonition. Henry's heart was full of bitterness tonight; but as he read, it became almost sweet. Then he did an odd thing for him, whereat Thorpe gazed wonderingly. He lifted the missive to his lips and kissed it.
But though Henry might gloat he was still a man of honor. In his most imperative tone, he said to the faithful sergeant: "Have this telegram got right over to Scanlon. He's more or less of a nighthawk and liable to be in his office any time up to midnight—especially tonight."
This was how the message got to the Chief Fixer, and here now, with Lahleet observing him, was Scanlon with its portent quaking in his heart. "Mr. Boland," he stammered huskily, "John . . . John, will you look at this?"
Now the number of occasions in recent years on which Thomas Scanlon had hailed his chief by his first name were few; that he did so now betokened his agitation. It was an outcrop of that earlier association between the two as fellow-gamblers in the future of a wilderness.
Mr. Boland appeared to gut the message of its contents with a glance; yet hardened instead of softening with its impact. "Well?" he challenged sharply, eyes a-glitter.
"Well!" echoed Scanlon, mopping perspiration.
"But they can't do it!" snarled Mr. Boland through sheer force of the despot's habit.
"The hell of it is, they can!" Scanlon collapsed into a chair. "Almighty God! . . . If they should happen to," he shuddered.
"They won't," snapped John Boland, irritated with weakness as always. His eyes were narrowed; his glance was hard. Old Two Blades was really looking his fifty-seven years tonight; but for all of them his lined face was tightly sealed, the spike-like jaw thrust out, the lower lip rising till it engulfed the upper and tightening till his mouth was only a seam. His masked countenance was a dare to every menace, a trumpeting that his was not a spirit to be blown out of its course by even the blackest cloud of a mere summer squall.
Billie, wearing a blue negligee, with points of lace and girdled at the waist by a rope of white silk, received Lahleet in her boudoir. With the light filtering softly over her beautiful face, she appeared a proud, self-contained and superior-feeling young person. But Lahleet was in a mood to see through seemings—through the pose and the fabrics to a nerve-strung, feigning creature who rose languorously but was not languorous, who received her indulgently but felt no indulgence, a daughter of the reigning monarch patronizingly receiving the teacher of the Indian School—but, unable to hold the pose; unable to press the mask so tightly that another woman's prying eye could not see behind it the pallid cheeks of wonder and misgiving. Over this perception Lahleet gloated, merciless.
"Your man is in jail!" she assaulted bluntly.
Billie, in the present state of her nerves, was inclined to be upset. "I—I beg your pardon!" she half-stammered and half-rebuked; but there was an unsuppressible tremor in her voice, and Lahleet was surprised to find herself feeling a certain pity for this disturbed hothouse creature who had won the love of a great true man and didn't know how to value it—how to rise to its obligations.
"Forgive me," she begged impulsively, with one of her lightning changes of mood, "but Mr.—Harrington has been very terribly wronged. I think perhaps you do not understand quite how wronged."
This sudden altering of the manner of her visitor had a further shattering effect upon the pose Billie was trying to maintain; yet her face photographed a slight increase of hauteur, as questioning this girl's right to be concerned about Henry Harrington, as well as certain of the implications of her speech.
Lahleet noticed this and explained tactfully, if not altogether disingenuously: "Mr. Harrington has acted sometimes for the Indians whose children are in my school. I have come to have a very great respect for him."
Miss Boland looked instantly relieved and began to let down. "Oh, and so you came to me, of course. Naturally!" Despite her capacity for icy hardness, Billie was after all a woman and her manner confessed longing for someone to talk to about her love besides those who condemned him as utterly as she did. "You have seen him in the—the jail?" Billie's tongue stuck at the word and then jerked it out. "Tell me how he is, Miss Marceau. Is he comfortable?" she demanded anxiously. The mask had fallen off altogether; for the minute Billie Boland was just a girl, asking another girl about her lover. But Lahleet's response to such inquiries, while her black eyes sifted the blue ones, was lacking in enthusiasm.
"He is comfortable—physically—if that is what you mean," she said, "but mentally—in spirit, that is—he is broken—very much broken. Oh, Miss Boland, he can't endure this long!"
Now this was the wrong speech. It encouraged Miss Billie in the resolution to be adamant till adversity brought Henry to his senses. Her concerned expression went away, replaced by a determined one. "Mr. Harrington can save himself at any time," she assured with cool emphasis. "He is merely wrong-headed, you know."
Lahleet stared, instantly resentful yet controlling herself marvelously. "But it's all a low conspiracy," she contended. "He couldn't surrender to that and be a man."
"But he has been so stupid," frowned Billie, in tones that confessed her total exasperation. "He has humiliated me so. That chamber of commerce meeting was one long"
"That meeting was a job," scowled Lahleet, letting herself go a little; "a nasty trick to turn people against him. Madden and Clayton had votes enough to pass the McKenzie's Tongue bill. They are passing it right now while we are sitting here."
"But that's what makes it all so stupid." Billie was almost weeping. "Nobody can fight father. He is always right and he will always do what he wants to do. Everything was going on so nicely—father just loved Henry and we were going to be married in October, and take a trip around the world, and everything—and now this horrid mess!"
"But you don't think Henry Harrington killed that man?" Lahleet's voice was full now of a sense of outrage.
"Father does." Billie wept now quite frankly, overcome by her griefs and perplexities yet not committing herself to the murder theory. "He says Mr. Harrington has always been a very terrible person when he was roused. They called him Hellfire in the army, you know. Besides he makes such a mystery of it," she complained. "If he would only tell frankly all the details! If he would write to me about it even!"
"She doesn't believe it herself," Lahleet discerned shrewdly; "not for a moment she doesn't; but she's jealous because he didn't tell sweetheart all about it."
And then Miss Marceau took up the cudgels for Henry, tactfully she hoped, with: "But Mr. Harrington is a man of such high honor that there must be some reason for his being secretive—some honorable reason. Don't you believe in the man at all? Don't you trust him—at all?"
"Oh, I believe in him altogether," replied Billie, lofty again. "But all at once we find him wrong-headed and obstinate. Getting himself into this awful mess. Father could save him from the consequences of everything, if onlywhy,"—the girl's face became white and sober as if she recalled an appalling fact,—"he was threatening to fight father. He wants to stand up in open court and denounce him and intimate that he is accessory to a murder himself. My father! Why, father has loved Henry like a son."
Lahleet was plunged in thought. For the first time she saw clearly into Billie's mind and could experience an intellectual sympathy for some of her reactions. "Yes," she admitted, but with malicious bluntness, "that would seem rather unfilial, wouldn't it—your lover standing up in court to defend that Indian by telling the jury that your father aimed the gun and pulled the trigger. It's—it's an awful position he's in."
"Oh, it's a perfectly preposterous position for all of us," wailed Billie. "Father is such a great man and Henry was going to be just like him. If father had lived a long time ago he would have been a—a—a—Cæsar or a Crœsus or something. His course is always so right and he is so determined—so absolutely relentless that there is no opposing him. Why, Henry's crazy to do what he's doing."
"But after all this father stuff," Lahleet broke in impatiently, "Henry Harrington is your man. You love him! These men are ruining him—breaking him—and you let them!"
"Oh, no," protested Billie, sadly, sweetly patient with this groping misconception of the well-meaning little teacher of an Indian school. They are not breaking him. Only he can break himself. I want to save him, and that's why I don't interfere. I've tried to get him to see, and I can't. Father's tried to get him to see, and he can't. What is there to do," she appealed, with a mournful cadence in her tone, "but let events teach him the lesson he won't learn otherwise?"
Lahleet was dazed. Such a point of view was not in her book. "But—he is suffering," she reminded.
Billie shivered. It was easy to see that it hurt her to think of Henry suffering, but she shook her head. "For what he has made us suffer he deserves to be punished—mentally, you know—the only way, of course, that he ever will be punished," she explained. "When he has been punished enough he will change, become the old Henry once more—and then father—well, father is very terrible in his hatreds—but he can be merciful. Whenever Henry gives up this stubborn determination of his, father will at once find a way, I have no doubt, to save him, for all his rashness. But until then"
Lahleet was glimpsing mental processes she could not understand, that her elemental nature could not brook. She moved restlessly in her chair. She felt herself ready to fly to pieces; yet the idea came clear to her again that this absurdly reasoning, ridiculously self-pitying young woman had it in her power to save Henry and that he must be saved now. "Oh, Miss Boland," she implored, trying to melt her down, "Mr. Harrington is wretched, desperate, put upon. Let me assure you that matters for him have got beyond any question of right courses and wrong courses. The pressure must be lifted from his heart. He loves you and he wants you to come to see him—to write to him—to send a flower even—he's in a perfectly terrible situation. Oh, go to him! He would go to the stake for you. Forget fine reasonings, Miss Boland. Tell him you love him. Tell him you understand him. Tell him anything that will relieve him. Lie to him if need be!"
"Lie to him?" Billie shook her head solemnly. "I couldn't do it. Henry's—why, Henry's very soul is at stake."
This was the word too much for Lahleet. It seemed an insult to the man in the jail who was there just because he was decent and square. All the hot scorn, all the tides of impatience bottling for ten minutes in her breast burst out in one volcanic eruption. "His soul?" she exploded. "If you even had a soul you'd know his wasn't in danger. You aren't worthy to mention his soul," she denounced. "You do not really love him. You only covet him—a mere possession, an ornament, to wear him like a sunburst, like a string of pearls. You have no heart. You have no discernment even—you have won the love of the finest man in the world, worth more than your millions, worth all you've got—everything! They've put him in jail, they're destroying him—his nerve, his sanity, his spirit—and of what use is Henry Harrington to any woman with his spirit broken? Everything he is, is being engulfed in this hellish plot to railroad him for crimes he is as innocent of as you are—more innocent, you—you selfish sybarite!" Lahleet paused for breath, rather proud of the word that had come last of all to her tongue.
Billie Boland stood white with anger, waiting for the moment when, without herself being cheap or common, she could dismiss this insufferable creature who, after winning and receiving her most sacred confidence, dared to fly into this insolent frenzy. Lahleet in that breathless moment saw a Boland chin thrust itself out, Boland lips clamp with their accustomed tenacity, and all at once was aghast at herself. What had she done? Made help impossible at the only source from which help could come. There came to her the picture of Harrington, beating his head against the bars and then sitting trembling upon his bed, inquiring with an odd demented expression what had happened. Her mood of denunciation gave way, on the instant, to terrible remorse.
"Oh," she cried abruptly, wringing her hands. "Oh!" And with a burst of weeping she was on her knees before the proud Miss Boland, fingers reaching up at her hands. "Don't be angry," she pleaded, "Forgive me. Don't mind me—I'm nothing—nobody! But save him. Oh, save him, won't you? Take your pearls, take your diamonds, your bonds, anything and rush to the courthouse and let him out before they've driven him mad, mad, mad! Do you understand? His reason is in danger, I tell you!" She had seized Billie's hands and shook them violently as she looked up from her knees.
Billie's expression of cold anger had given way to one of haughty perplexity; but all at once her face cleared. "And so you love him too?" she perceived triumphantly.
But Lahleet was in no mood to resent a tone. Disheveled, she looked up through frankly streaming eyes: "Oh, yes," she nodded humbly. "But he doesn't know it. He will never know it. He loves you with all his great heart. He paces in his cell. He raves and shakes the bars. He cries out for you. He expects nothing but you. He wants to see nobody but you. I went to see him tonight and he thought it was you. The look on his face when he saw it was not—oh, it was pitiful! It was terrible—terrible for me, you can imagine." And Lahleet's utterance was again swallowed up in tearful emotion.
But, in a good many things Billie Boland went by contraries, and she went by one now. Her heart, unrelenting toward her lover, softened toward this innocent victim of his graces; and pride did not permit her to be jealous of this abject little woman, so far beneath her in the scale of opportunity. The girl's own jealousy, of course, accounted for her vitriolic outburst and made it easier to forgive. Billie shook her head sympathetically, yet reprovingly. Poor child! Unfortunate, most unfortunate that she, this teacher of an Indian school, should have let herself aspire to Henry Harrington. She should have known better—such a bright and shining figure of a man!
"I'm so sorry for you. Oh, I am really," she assured, laying a sympathetic hand on the shoulder of the weeping girl, but to find it stiffen surprisingly under her fingers.
"Sorry for me! . . . But I don't want you to be sorry for me," Lahleet protested proudly. "Don't think of me! Think of him, I beg of you. And save him!"
But Billie, studying the flaming, tear-splotched face, grew suddenly suspicious. "He sent you to me—to make his appeal for him?" she questioned sharply.
"No! . . . No! . . . No!" cried Lahleet, springing to her feet in the poignancy of her distress at such terrible misunderstanding. "He must never know that I have come. Never! . . . But, oh, do realize, Miss Boland, that you only can save him and that you must save him tonight or there won't be anything of Henry Harrington worth saving at all."
There was a pathos in this appeal that rang through Billie Boland's heart, but perversely, there was again hope in it. She saw she had to be adamant but a little longer, and her erring lover would be redeemed by his own suffering—and hers. "Miss Marceau," she began gravely, shaking her head, holding herself high, "for his own sake Mr. Harrington must see"
But Lahleet could contain herself no longer—made no effort to. "He will never see!" she screamed exultantly. "It is you who must see! . . . Oh, you wicked-hearted woman! Henry Harrington will not bend with all the weight that your vicious old father and all his cruel plotters can put upon him." Wrathfully she flung out of the door.
Billie spent some time in composing her ruffled spirits. Was ever woman called upon to bear more? Yet she was rather satisfied with herself. She had been outraged and insulted; yet had been dignified and magnanimous; she had been appealed to but had remained unyielding; she had had her hope quickened and her judgment confirmed—and besides she had learned something—something that always gives one woman satisfaction when she has learned it about another. She braced herself to wait a little longer.
"Of course, such an undisciplined creature would be inclined to exaggerate," she soliloquized, as her maid let down her hair.