Part 72

At that moment a girl's joyous voice sounded in the hall just outside the door.

"Oh, never mind that, Beales; papa never considers me an interruption. I'm going in, anyway, to say good night; I don't care if all Wall Street is there. Has the carriage come?"

There was audible the sound of a subdued protest; then came a series of quick taps on the door and the sound of the gay voice again:

"Papa--just a minute to say good night; if I can't come in, do you come out and give me a kiss--do you hear?"

The two men looked at each other. Mr. Van Ostend stepped quickly to the door and, opening it, stood on the threshold. Something very like a diaphanous white cloud enwrapped him; two thin arms, visible through it, went suddenly round his neck; then his arms enfolded her.

"Oh, Papsy dear, don't hug me so hard! You'll crush all my flowers. Ben sent them; wasn't he a dear? I've promised him the cotillon to-night for them. Good night." She pecked at his cheek again as he released her; the cloud of white liberty silk tulle drifted away from the doorway and left it a blank.

Mr. Van Ostend closed the door; came back to the hearth; stood there, his arms folded tightly over his chest, his head bowed. For a few minutes neither man spoke. When the clock on the mantel chimed a quarter to nine, Father Honore made a movement to go. Mr. Van Ostend turned quickly to him and put out a detaining hand.

"May I ask if you are going to continue the search this evening; it's a bad night."

"Yes; I've had the feeling that, after he has been so long in hiding, he'll have to come out--he must be at the end of his strength. I am going out with two detectives now; they have been on the case with me. This is quite apart from the general detective agency's work."

"Father Honore," Mr. Van Ostend spoke with apparent effort, "I know I am right in my reasoning--and you are right in your fundamentals. We both may be wrong in the end, you in appealing to me for this aid to restrain prosecution, and I in giving it. Time alone will show us. But if we are, we must take the consequences of our act. If, by yielding, I make it easier for another man to do as Champney Googe has done, may God forgive me; I could never forgive myself. If you, in asking this, have erred in freeing from his punishment a man who deserves every bit he can get, you will have to reckon with your own conscience.--Don't misunderstand me. No spirit of philanthropy influences me in my act. Don't credit me with any 'love-to-man' attitude. I am going to advance the sum necessary to avoid prosecution if you find him; but I do it solely on that mother's account, and"--he hesitated--"because I don't want her, whom you have just seen, connected, even remotely, by the thought of what a penitentiary term implies. I don't want to entertain the thought that even the hem of my child's garment has been so much as touched by a hand that will work at hard labor for seven, perhaps fifteen, years. And I want you to understand that, in yielding, my principle remains unchanged. I owe it to you to say this much, for you have dealt with me as man to man."

"Mr. Van Ostend, we may both be in the wrong, as you say; if it prove so, I shall be the first to acknowledge my error to you. My one thought has been to save that mother further agony and to give a man, still young, another chance."

"I've understood it so."

He went to his writing table, sat down at it, and, for a moment, busied himself with making out his personal check for one hundred thousand dollars payable to the Flamsted Granite Quarries Company. He handed it to Father Honore to look at. The priest read it.

"Whatever bail is needed, if an arrest should follow now," said Mr. Van Ostend further and significantly, "I will be responsible for."

The two men clasped hands and looked understandingly into each other's eyes. What each read therein, what each felt in the other's palm beats, they realized there was no need to express in words.

"Let me hear, Father Honore, so soon as you learn anything definite; I'll keep you posted so far as I hear."

"I will. Good night, Mr. Van Ostend."

* * * * *

On reaching the iron gates to the courtyard, the priest stepped aside to give unimpeded passage to a carriage just leaving the house. As it passed him, the electric light flashed athwart the bowed glass front, already dripping with sleet, and behind it he caught a glimpse of a girl's delicate face that rose from out the folds of a chinchilla wrap, like a flower from its sheath. She was chatting gaily with her maid.

The night was wild. New York can show such in late November. A gale from the northeast was driving before it a heavy sleet that froze as it fell, coating the overhead wires and glazing the asphalt and sidewalks.

It lacked an hour of midnight. From Fleischmann's bakery, the goal of each man among the shivering hundreds lined up on Tenth Street, the light streamed out upon a remnant of Life's jetsam--that which is submerged, which never comes to the surface unless drawn there by some searching and rescuing hand; that which the home-sheltered never see by daylight, never know, save from hearsay. In the neighboring rectory of Grace Church one dim light was burning in an upper room. The marble church itself looked a part of the winter scene; its walls and pinnacles, already encrusted with ice crystals, glittered fantastically in the rays of the arc-light; beneath them, the dark, shuffling, huddling line of humanity moved uneasily in the discomfort of the keen wind.

At twelve o 'clock, each unknown, unidentified human unit in that line, as he reaches the window, puts forth his hand for the loaf, and thrusting it beneath his coat, if he be so fortunate as to have one, or under his arm, vanishes....

Whither? As well ask: Whence came he?

Well up towards the bakery, because the hour was early, stood Champney Googe, unknown, unidentified as yet by three men, Father Honore and two detectives, who from the dark archway of a sunken area farther down the street were scanning this bread-line. The man for whom they were searching held his head low. An old broad-brimmed felt hat was jammed over his forehead, almost covering his eyes. The face beneath its shadow was sunken, drawn; the upper lip, chin, and cheeks covered with a three weeks' growth of hair that had been blackened with soot. The long period of wandering in the Maine wilderness had reduced his clothes to a minimum. His shoes were worn, the leather split, showing bare flesh. Like hundreds of others in like case, he found himself forced into this line, even at the risk of detection, through the despairing desperation of hunger. There was nothing left for him but this--that is, if he were not to starve. And after this, there remained for him but one thing, one choice out of three final ones--he knew this well: flight and expatriation, the act of grace by which a man frees himself from this life, or the penitentiary. Which should it be?

"Never that last, never!" he said over and over again to himself during this last month. "Never, never that!"

It was the horror of that which spurred him to unimaginable exertion in the wilderness in order to escape the detectives on his track; to put them off the scent; to lead them to the Canada border and so induce them to cross it in their search. He had succeeded; and thereafter his one thought was to get to New York, to that metropolis where the human unit is reduced to the zero power, and can dive under, even vanish, to reappear only momently on the surface to breathe. But having reached the city, by stolen rides on the top of freight cars, and plunging again into its maelstrom, he found himself still in the clutch of this unnamable horror. Docks, piers, bridges, stations were become mere detective terminals to him--things to be shunned at all cost. The long perspective of the avenues, the raking view from river to river in the cross streets, afforded him no shelter from watching eyes--in every passing glance he read his doom; these, too, were things to be avoided at all hazard.

For four nights, since he sought refuge in New York, he had crawled into an empty packing-box in a black alley behind a Water Street wholesale house. Twice, during this time, he had made the attempt to board as stowaway an outward-bound steamship and sailing vessel for a South American port; but he had failed, for the Eyes were upon him--always the Eyes wherever he went, whenever he looked, Eyes that were spotting him. In the weakness consequent upon prolonged fasting and the protracted exposure during his journey from Maine, this horror was becoming an obsession bordering on delirium. It was even now beginning to dull the two senses of sight and hearing--at least, he imagined it--as he stood in line waiting for the loaf that should keep him another day, keep him for one of two alternatives: flight, if possible to South America, or ...

As he stood there, the fear that his sight might grow suddenly dim, that he might in consequence fail in recognition of those Eyes so constantly on the lookout for him, suddenly increased. He grew afraid, at last, to look up--What if the Eyes should be there! He bore the ever-increasing horror as long as he could, then--better starve and have done with it than die like a dog from sheer fright!--he stepped cautiously, softly, starting at the crackle of the ice under his tread, off the curbstone into the street. So far he was safe. He kept his head low, and walked carelessly towards Third Avenue. When nearing the corner he determined he would look up. He took the middle of the street. It cost him a supreme effort to raise his eyes, to look stealthily about him, behind, before, to right, to left--