Tongues of Flame (MacFarlane)/Chapter 31
THE sight of Adam John's bowed, despondent head held Henry's mind off his own greater anxiety for a time. "Poor devil!" he sympathized. "Something's got to be done for him. Time, time is the thing to fight for. Postponement, delay, any sort of maneuver to hold things off till the public heat cools a little and that stubborn old man can have, if not a change of heart, at least a humane reaction against staining his hand with judicial murder. And yet, I can't put up any sort of a fight for Adam till I get out of here myself. Billie! O God, send me Billie!"
He was actually praying, and Harrington was not much given to prayer. But the prayer was unanswered. Billie did not come. For that matter neither did Lahleet. Yet Henry thought he knew why. She was at home crying her eyes out over Adam John. But neither did she come next morning. Again he thought he knew why. She was at the Indian school, steeling herself against the vague, wondering glances of dark-eyed pupils who would have heard from the talk of fathers and mothers that yesterday the white man's law had done a gross injustice to one of their race.
But when three days went by without Lahleet calling—even to condole with her foster brother—Henry began to reproach her a little.
These Indians were so stoical—too stoical for him. There, for instance, sat Adam John, waiting to be sentenced for murder, with not a chance in the world now to escape it, yet stolid, unmoving upon his bed, eyes fixed, lips clasped, scarce a shoulder-shrug for hours at a time—never once a sign, while he, Henry Harrington, with every chance—absurdly held in duress upon a ridiculous charge that must fall the moment it confronted the light of day in open court—he was restless, turning, twisting, tramping to and fro in his cell like a caged beast, grumbling, muttering, raging, threatening to tear his narrow prison to pieces with the puny grippings of his own hands. He—he was different. Lahleet shouldn't neglect him this way. It was inconsiderate of her, when she had been coming and going for him so readily, serving him so enormously, appearing intuitively in the moments when he needed her most—and now when he had got the habit of it, accepting her service almost as a matter of course; when he depended on her, leaned on her—why, all at once to cease to come was surely inconsiderate. And yet, he told himself, that was the faint strain of the Indian in her, which colored so many of her actions so tremendously.
As for Billie, he still believed that she would come. "What's keeping her?" he would ask himself, over and over. "What's keeping her? She . . . It can't be easy for her to stay away from me like this. I've got to get out of here! God, it must be awful for her. Poor, dear girl. I've got to get out of here as much to lift the pressure on her as on me."
And there was a great deal of pressure upon Billie—a great deal. Endless and distracting as the days were to Henry, they were longer and almost more distracting to her. "He will surely turn today—this morning—this afternoon," she kept saying to herself agonizingly. "He'll send some word that will let me fly to him—some message—something!"
When nothing came she would grow angry, with him—with Scanlon—with her father—with the world; and, after tears, pale and distressed or flushed and tempest-tossed, but beautiful in either state, she would sit down and write to him—impulsive, tumultuous, tear-splotched notes—haughty, accusatory, reproachful notes—burning-hot with love or anger; but not one was ever dispatched. She tore them all up—scores of them—they were inadequate, every one.
Eventually she resolved to trust nothing to notes, to rise and go to Henry; a daughter of John Boland to the cell of her lover in a common jail. She got as far as to order the coupé, to dress herself for the occasion; but paused to sweep haughtily into her father's den and defy him with the announcement of what she was about to do.
"Father," she told him, but with chin quivering, "I'm going to Henry. Mills and islands and juries and all—I'm going to Henry. He's mine and I love him. I love him that much, father," her voice trembled. Instead of a defiance her announcement had become a plea.
And Old Two Blades gazed up at his daughter compassionately, his proud, self-willed, tenderly beloved daughter. "Billie," he began sadly, "I must tell you what we would have spared you. Harrington was not alone when he came out of the woods after the killing."
"Not alone?" cried the girl in low tones of astonishment mingled with dismay.
"That little teacher of the Indian school was with him," enlarged her father gravely. "He is shielding her or she, him. There is something between those two."
Billie Boland swooned into her father's arms.
"Henry? I—I could never have believed that of him!" she shuddered as she came to; and that was all she did say then. She allowed herself to be led away quite humbly by her maid; but once alone: "And so that explains it," she sobbed, beating her pillow. "They are shielding each other, are they? There's something between them, is there? And she came to me to plead for him! The little two-faced hypocrite!"
But the pity of it was—the shame of it, she told herself, when her weepings were over—that she still loved him. Yet now she would never go to him—never; pride would see to that. She wept afresh because she had been robbed of the sweet privilege of flying to her lover in the hour when the situation of both had become extreme.
She was impelled to write him one hot and scathing line but did not. Her treatment of him continued to be—silence, the coldest, cruelest blow that love can strike at love—an icy dagger pointed at the heart. Hour by hour that dagger entered, chilling and killing. Excuse-inventing could not stand up against it. At last it seemed that it had done its work. But that was not until the fifth day; and on the fifth day Lahleet came, but even then not to see Henry—to stand before Adam John's cell, with the two gutturaling at each other in that strange jargon of theirs—she sympathetically at times, encouragingly cross-examining, apparently; he stolidly, despondently.
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For this was the day when Adam John must appear for sentence.
But after a little she moved over to speak to Henry and was horrified to find herself gazing at a mere wreck, a ruin of a man. His face had grayed and shrunken; there were dark hollows under his eyes. His light brown hair, usually so carefully brushed, was disheveled and stuck up at angles. The accustomed clear white of his eyes was bloodshot. There was a looseness, a trembling of the lips. His was the face of a man upon whom despair had come, into whose mind utter disillusionment had crushed. The light in his pupils, as he stared out at her, was—eccentric. He did not greet her, confess that he had missed her, or ask her what she had been doing. He accepted her presence simply as something for which he was mutely grateful, and upon the surface of his mind there broke into speech the only thing that mattered: "She didn't come!" he whispered solemnly as if awed by the immensity of some spiritual catastrophe. "She didn't come!"
Lahleet pressed her beating heart.
She loved Henry Harrington—loved him. She had kept away from him these four days purely from pride. It was not her place to be chief comforter to him so long as he looked for his chief comfort to another—but when he turned to her! Oh, how she could devote herself to him then! She, with her headlong courage in her veins; she, reckless daredevil, passionate, capable of savage abandon! Once the other woman failed, she would find a way to clear her lover from this absurd entanglement—at no matter what cost to herself. He would be hers then—worth everything—a man for whom to spare herself nothing—no longer a character to admire, a nobility to worship, but a sweetheart to live for, to die for! Her blood smoked in her veins—but her mind was cool.
"I've been a fool," Harrington confessed weakly, as feeling that some speech were necessary.
"No! No!" the girl urged quickly, tactfully. "You have been a man of large faith."
"I have been blind," he reproached himself.
"No, no," she objected again. "You have merely been looking at some things so intently that you did not see certain other things."
Harrington blinked and stared wonderingly. He took account of the difference in two women. Before him was this little slip of a girl, teacher of an Indian school, who was herself a racial hybrid, but in friendship and loyalty a thoroughbred. Up yonder on the hill was a different type of woman; pure in blood, softly nurtured and richly circumstanced—his kind of woman! And she loved him; but . . . feebly, futilely.
Harrington was speaking no word, yet Lahleet felt the crisis in their relations and her hand was small enough to creep through the bars; she too was wordless. There were noises about them, of course; low buzzes of conversation, an occasional oath, the clang of steel doors, the voice of a trusty paging a prisoner in the huge cage below; yet these were mere externals. Harrington's consciousness had relapsed into some vast cosmic silence. All was still within him as in the soundless spaces of the universe. An entire eon of time—of thinking, comparing, contrasting—seemed to elapse before he became conscious of some stir in the corridor, something happening. He knew what instantly—they were taking Adam John away to sentence him to death. Lahleet withdrew her hand from his, stifled a sob with savage stoicism, and turned to follow.
And he was staying behind—to hear his love sentenced to death! So he thought, not perceiving that it might have been hope which died, not his love—that it was because his love lived on that his anguish was so great. However it was, he eased himself down upon that narrow shelf which in a jail is called a bed, and gave way to his emotions. He was so weak that his body did not shake with sobbings; his eyes merely streamed. This was the bitterest of all the bitter hours and it was a long hour—it lasted from five minutes to ten in the morning onward, onward . . . eternitics onward; while he waited for Adam John to come back—and Adam John never came back!
For, while Harrington steeped his soul in the bitterness of black despair, a swirl of mighty events was getting up in Socatullo County—world events, almost—of which he could know nothing, until the sound of them snarled, boomed, roared through the streets and found their excited echo in the jail as elsewhere in the community.