She was feeling for her handkerchief in the pocket of the fur-trimmed coat. Some of the men in the court-room averted their eyes. The face of more than one woman softened. Clinton Morgan sat regarding his sister with a curious composure. In his eyes was that mixture of compassion and awe that he had worn on the night when the gold and ivory book had betrayed to him her secret.
"Yes?" Dayton went on gently, but with the same relentless persistence. "He wrote to you again? And what did he say?"
"He said that he wanted me to have something that had belonged—to his brother. He told me that he felt that Roger Kenwick would have wished me to have it. And with the letter there came a box in which I found——"
She had finished her search in the pocket of the motor-coat, and now she held something between her gloved fingers. "Mr. Everett Kenwick himself had only received it a short time before. There had been some delay and confusion about it, owing I suppose to his brother having been sent home—in just the way that he was. He himself never knew that he had won it. But it was such a wonderful display of courage——And the French officer whose life he had saved sent a letter, too, saying that France was grateful and wanted to express her appreciation in some way so——"
And then she held it up before them; before the lawyers and the jury and the crowd of spectators—a bit of metal on its patch of ribbon. Holding it out before them, she sat there like a sovereign waiting to confer a peerage. And not the judge's gavel nor the commanding voice of the district attorney could still the tumult that rose and swelled into tumultuous applause.
On the day following the notorious Kenwick murder trial, the Mont-Mer papers carried little other news. A special representative from the "San Francisco Clarion" and several Los Angeles journalists fed their copy over the wires and had extras out in both cities by eight o'clock.
"Kenwick Acquitted" was the head-line which his own paper ran, with his picture and one of Richard Glover sharing prominence upon the front page. And because of Kenwick's previous connection with this daily and the fact that the two star witnesses for the defense were well known in the Bay region, the "Clarion's" story was the most comprehensive and colorful.
It opened with a report of Dayton's speech which, it appeared, had electrified every one in the court-room, including the prisoner himself. But it had been unnecessary for the attorney to make a plea for his client, after the quietly dramatic testimony of the last witness for the defense. In thrilling terms the "Clarion" described Kenwick's final service at the front, when he had made his way alone across No-Man's-Land and saved for France one of her most gallant officers, and had given in exchange that thing which is more precious than life itself. Only through an accident, which had killed the man who had meant to batten upon his misery, had he been released from a pitiable bondage.
Having thus sketched in his "human interest," the reporter proceeded to tell the story which had proved so overwhelmingly convincing to the jury and audience. How, in his skilfully planned narrative, Richard Glover had transposed the identities of the two dead men. How, upon receiving his commission from Everett Kenwick, he had first turned over his charge to Ralph Regan, admitted by his own sister to be an addict to drugs and a ne'er-do-well whom she was helping, in a surreptitious way, to support. How the accounts, forwarded from the Kenwick lawyer in New York, showed that Regan must have received out of the arrangement only his living and enough of the drug to keep him satisfied but not wholly irresponsible. How, upon his own infrequent visits to the patient (whom he himself had conducted across the continent instead of the mythical Bailey) Glover had foreseen two months before the tragedy that Regan could no longer be relied upon and had told him that he was about to be dismissed.
How he had then secured the services of one Edward Marstan, whom he believed to be without family, and who represented himself as a physician in good standing but heavily in debt. How the arrangement had been made that he assume charge of the patient at the Mont-Mer depot, whither Kenwick was to be brought up from a day's sojourn in Los Angeles by Regan. How the physician, accompanied by his wife, had arrived from San Francisco that very day; how Marstan had quarreled with his wife, and leaving her unconscious in a room at Rest Hollow, had gone into town to get his charge. How, on the way out from town he had been killed in an accident while driving his own car, and how, by a curious fate, Kenwick had been restored to sanity and had found his way back alone to his former asylum.
The story then went on to relate how Ralph Regan, evidently desperate over his loss of a home and drug supplies, had returned to Rest Hollow by stealth the following night, either to make a plea to the new caretaker or to search for drugs, and of how, finding the house dark and apparently deserted, he had forsaken all hope of reinstatement and had ended his life with the revolver which he had brought either for murder of Marstan or for suicide. The shot which he fired, the paper stated, had evidently been used to test his own nerve or the cartridges; and it had done its work. Letters written to his sister a few weeks before the tragedy, and produced by her in court, indicated a depression amounting to acute melancholia.
Recalled to the witness-stand and subjected to crucial cross-examination, the gardener at Rest Hollow had broken down in his testimony, admitted that he was afraid of Glover, and that although he had been in too dazed a condition on the fatal night to examine the body of the dead man, he knew Ralph Regan to have been the former attendant and had frequently talked to him about the patient's symptoms, about which Regan appeared to know little and care less.
The narrative then went on to tell how Richard Glover had discovered among the possessions of his charge certain manuscripts which he deemed suitable for publication, and how he had, after the death of the elder Kenwick, sold one of them under the name of Ralph Regan, choosing a real rather than a fictitious name in order that he might shift the theft to helpless shoulders if it were ever discovered. How he had, with the Kenwick capital entrusted to him, invested in large realty holdings which had completely absorbed his attention. How he had padded his accounts in order to wring extra money from Everett Kenwick under the guise of "special treatments" for the patient and so on. How on the night of the fatality he had driven to Rest Hollow from Los Angeles to give some final instructions to the new employee, and how, stumbling upon the dead body of Regan, he had been shocked to find himself involved in a tragedy. How he had then cold-bloodedly decided to have the body identified as Kenwick, partly to save himself from the charge of criminal neglect and partly because he knew that Everett Kenwick had left in his will a bequest that was to come to him "for faithful service" upon the death or recovery of his brother. How, not dreaming that his charge would ever recover, he had thus used his death as a means of gaining extra funds which he badly needed just at that time.
How he had accordingly selected certain of the patient's personal possessions with which he had been entrusted, to deceive the coroner. How all the subsequent action had seemed to play into his hands: the coroner's easy acquiescence in the suicide theory and the identity of the body; the chance discovery, through Arnold Rogers, that the story of Kenwick's self-destruction had already been accepted by the community.
How, preceding the coroner's inquest, Glover had spent the morning tracing the antecedent action of the tragedy and had heard of the accident which had killed Marstan. How he had erred in suspecting that the real victim of the tragedy was Kenwick and that the attendant had had the body identified as his own and then made his escape, fearing to communicate the news of the disaster to his employer. How he, Glover, had been startled to discover later that Kenwick was not only alive but had apparently recovered his mental health.
The remainder of the story was given as the testimony of Madeleine Marstan, well-known favorite in the former Alcazar stock company, and Granville Jarvis, expert psychologist, whose skilful work was a strong plea for the admission of that newest of the sciences into court-room procedure.
During this latter testimony, the "Clarion" asserted, interest had been divided between the ultimate fate of the accused and the valuable contributions which the laboratory experiments of the witness had given the case. The word-tests which he had provided to the medium were, he had explained, one of the surest means of discovering the train of associations which lodge in the guilty mind. He had never been convinced that Glover himself had committed a murder, but suspected that his crime lay in trying to fasten it upon a man whom he knew to be both innocent and helpless. The cards, containing a mixture of irrelevant and relevant words, had been shown him and then he had been instructed to turn his head in the opposite direction. These instructions he had carefully observed except in the cases of terms which held evil associations. In such cases his eyes almost invariably turned back to the card with the printed word. Such terms as "gravel" and "oleander" had produced this attraction. But they had also aroused his suspicions. And from the day of his first call upon "Madame Rosalie" the situation between them had been a succession of clever manœuvers. Neither one of them had dared to let the other go. But in this encounter Mrs. Marstan had had the advantage. What he was able to find out about her was little compared with what she had discovered concerning him.
That she possessed unmistakable psychic powers could not be disputed. By a means of communication, which she could not herself explain, she had received at the time of Roger Kenwick's interview with her a message from the spirit of Isabel Kenwick, confessing that it was she who had unwittingly brought Richard Glover into his life, and entreating his forgiveness.
As to the concluding story of the actress, it was concerned with her description of how she had identified the body of her husband at the morgue on the evening of her flight from Rest Hollow; of how she had turned all arrangements for its shipment and burial over to the Mont-Mer and San Francisco undertakers, desiring to figure as little as possible in connection with the death of the man who had ruined her life. Of how she had succeeded in paying the debts against his name and had recently signed a stage contract with an eastern theatrical company.
When the trial was ended the crowd that jammed the room rose and surged toward the man in the prisoner's box, like a human tidal wave. "Keep them back, Dayton," Kenwick implored. "I don't want to talk to them."
Somehow his attorney managed to check the onrush, and the throng of congratulatory spectators was headed toward the exits. The room was almost empty when some one touched the prisoner's arm.
"Can you give me a few words?" It was one of the local reporters. "You're a newspaper man yourself, Mr. Kenwick, and you know how it is about these things."
Kenwick shook him off. "Come around later, to the hotel, if you like," he said, and turned to take a hand that was timidly held out to him.
"I didn't know whether you'd be willing to speak to me or not, Mr. Kenwick. But I just wanted to tell you that I'm satisfied, more than satisfied with—the way it has all come out."
"I am glad to hear that, Mrs. Fanwell," Kenwick told her gravely. "I would never have been quite satisfied myself unless I had heard you say that. I wish you would leave your address with Dayton, for, you see, I feel a little bit responsible for you, and I would like to put you in the way of getting a new hold on life."
The only other person in the room with whom he stopped to talk was Madeleine Marstan, who stood in conversation with Dayton near the door. To her his words of thanks were the more eloquent perhaps because they came haltingly, impeded by an emotion which he could not master.
"It was nothing," she told him. "Nothing that I didn't owe you, Mr. Kenwick."
"I don't see that you owed me anything," he objected. "As the affair has developed, we were both the victims of an ugly plot. It certainly was not your fault. And once out of that accursed house, you were free."
"Not my fault—no," she repeated, "but my responsibility afterward." She gazed past him out of the window where, at the curb, Arnold Rogers was assisting a fur-coated figure into the Paddington limousine. "You see, Edward Marstan was my husband and——Well, some day you may come to realize, Mr. Kenwick, that when a woman has loved, there is no such word as 'free.'"
At the foot of the stairway Kenwick spoke with an almost curt suppression to Granville Jarvis. "I'm going over to the hotel with Morgan. Come over there."
The other man made no reply save a slight inclination of his head, and there was in his eyes an expression which haunted and mystified the released prisoner.
"Jarvis is a wizard," he said to Clinton Morgan as they walked the few short blocks to Mont-Mer's leading hostelry. "If they ever let down the bars of the court-room to men like that, they'll revolutionize legal procedure. He seems to have seen this case from every angle."
"From more angles than you imagine," his friend replied. "And he had let me in on some of the most interesting of his findings that were not revealed in court. For instance, he examined that gardener this morning, just for his own satisfaction. The boy was willing, even flattered by the attention. Jarvis told me afterward that a witness like that ought to be ruled out of court. And he is typical of the mass of men and women who assist in acquitting the guilty and sending the innocent to the gallows. The average physician examining him would pronounce him normal. He can hear a sound distinctly, for instance, but he is afflicted with that common defect, the equivalent, Jarvis says, of color-blindness in the visual realm, which makes it impossible for him to tell whether the sound comes from behind or in front of him. And he lacks completely a visual memory. He could recall the exact words that Gifford said to him on the night of the suicide but he couldn't remember whether the body was covered or uncovered when he saw it. And as for the tests with Glover——By the way, what are you going to do with Glover?"
"I don't know yet. I haven't got that far. I think I can forgive him everything except that infamous story about Everett being close with me while I was under age. Why, I had too much money while I was in college, Morgan. That's the chief reason why I didn't push my literary work with greater zeal. The creative temperament is naturally indolent. It requires a spur, not necessarily a financial one, but so much the better if it is. Of course Glover and I will have to have a financial reckoning. I can see now why my frantic messages to our family lawyer were never answered. I suppose he's had dozens of communications from people purporting to be connected by blood or marriage with the Kenwick estate. Yes, Glover has got some things to answer to me for, but——" His mind flew back to that last evening that he had spent in the fire-lit living-room on Pine Street. "He brought hell into my life for a time," he ended slowly. "But he brought—something else into it, too."
It was half an hour later, after Kenwick had bathed and dressed for dinner, that Granville Jarvis came up to his room. Kenwick admitted him with an inarticulate word of greeting. Then while with fumbling fingers he put on a fresh collar, he made an attempt at normal conversation.
"Been expecting you," he said. "Morgan is down in the lobby. We'll all have dinner here first and then——"
"Can't do it," Jarvis cut in. "I have another engagement for dinner, and I'm leaving town on the eight-forty northbound. I just ran up to say good-by and—good luck."
"Where are you going?"
Jarvis smiled. "To Argentina, so far as you are concerned. But you can call it Columbia if you like. I'm returning to my work there. You see, I've been away on leave."
"You've got to stay long enough for me to tell you something," Kenwick's voice cut in authoritatively. "But you couldn't stay long enough, Jarvis, for me to thank you for what you've done."
His caller held up a hand. "Please don't. Not that—please."
"But," Kenwick went on, "you've got to hear an apology. I was just about on the verge of a collapse over there, and when you got up in court as the representative of Glover——Well, I didn't know the game, you see and I thought——"
"I know; Brutus." It was Jarvis who finished the sentence. "And in a sense, you were right," he went on slowly. "For what I did, I did—not for you."
"You did it for science, of course; because to you I was an interesting case. But what can I ever do to repay you? How can——"
"I have been paid." The same haunting, baffling expression was in the scientist's eyes, and he was not looking at the man whom his testimony had freed.
"Oh, I don't mean money!" Kenwick cried hotly. "I know you have that!"
"I don't mean money, either." He forced his gaze back to his host. And then that sixth sense which is in the soul of every creative artist awoke in Kenwick's being and made his eyes luminous with understanding.
Jarvis picked up his hat from the chair into which it had dropped. "I'm going out to the Paddingtons' for dinner," he said casually. "I'll have about——" He snapped open the cover of his watch, then closed it again. "The most devilish thing about life on this planet, Kenwick, is that we can't do very much for each other. The game is largely solitaire. But for any good that I ever did I've been well repaid. Any man ought to be satisfied, I think, when the gods allow him two full hours—in Utopia."
It was the morning after his acquittal that Kenwick and Marcreta Morgan drove out of the Paddington gateway in one of the Utopia machines. They turned to the left and took the stretch of perfect asphalt road that led to the old Raeburn house.
The mystery of its destruction had never been explained. Richard Glover, and every one else who was connected with the case of Ralph Regan, had proved a satisfactory alibi. The owner of Rest Hollow had been notified by wire of its destruction and he had replied with orders that the grounds were to be kept locked and admission denied to all callers. It had undoubtedly been one of the handsomest homes in a community of handsome homes, but since the first days of its existence fate had destined it for tragedy. And perhaps its owner was relieved to know that only a pile of whitening ashes marked the grave of his own romance and the prison of another man's hope. At all events, the mystery of its passing never has been solved, and conjecture concerning it is still a favorite topic around the tea-tables of Mont-Mer's fashionable suburban district.
"But I want to see it in ruins," Kenwick had told Marcreta after their first radiant hour together. "I want to know that it is really gone off the face of the earth, so that when it comes to me in memory I can assure myself that it is only a dream."
They turned the last corner and came suddenly in sight of the tall iron gate. Across it a sinister chain swung ominously, warning the world away from communication with that most dreadful affliction that can befall a human soul. The ruins of Rest Hollow loomed somber and shapeless before them, and Roger Kenwick brought his car to a stop in the very spot where Arnold Rogers had once halted, hesitated, and then gone on his way. Guarding the pile like a battered but relentless sentinel was the tall, charred chimney of the dining-room. As he looked at it, Kenwick's hand sought instinctively for that of the woman beside him, as though to assure himself of her reality. And then he heard himself ask the question that for so long had beaten against his brain.
"How could you do it? How could you send me away that night, dear, into the horrors of war and—this, without hope?"
"I couldn't know," she told him desperately. "I couldn't foresee what was coming. And I wanted you to win a place in the world. I wanted you to win, as I knew you could if you were unhampered by——"
"Unhampered!" He echoed the word incredulously, as though it were quite new and its meaning not clear. "Is any one ever hampered by love and inspiration and all that——"
"You don't understand," she said. "Nobody can understand physical disability except those who have suffered it. My mother had a sister who was a bed-ridden invalid. She helped her husband to find his place in the world and keep it. But he never seemed to realize that she had helped him. He always thought, though I suppose he never said, that his marriage had held him back. And she died at last of a broken heart. Through all my youth I had her tragedy before me."
There was a moment of silence between them. And then Kenwick spoke slowly. "You hadn't much faith in me, Marcreta. You admit now that you loved me, yet you hadn't much faith—in my character or my——"
"But love comes a long time before faith, Roger. It always does. And I was younger then. I didn't know so much about life and—and character. But, oh, when they wrote me about this! I would have given anything on earth to have lived over again our last night together!"
"I know! I know!" His voice was vibrant with self-reproach.
"Your brother must have been splendid," she went on. "He wrote me such a wonderful letter. But he couldn't soften it; nobody can ever dilute the big tragedies of life. We must drink them unstrained. I knew that you were somewhere in this county, and when I came down here, just that one time, I liked to feel that I was near you. I couldn't have endured to see you, but I wanted to be near you for a little while before—I did anything else. And then that night when you came back, I couldn't be sure——Everything was so changed. You were so different from the carefree boy who had gone away. I knew, of course, that you would be; in a sense, I wanted you to be. But I didn't want you to feel bound by anything that had gone before. I was afraid you might feel that way. Oh, a woman is at such a disadvantage, Roger. She is always at a disadvantage if the man she loves is honorable and chivalrous."
"I had work to do," he reminded her gently. "I had to quiet the title to my name. For when a woman marries a man, Marcreta, she marries his past, every bit of it. Before I could offer my life to you again, I had to be certain that every minute of it was clean and decent and above reproach. I was not willing to let any of it go on the grounds of irresponsibility. I never would have been satisfied. And you never would have been satisfied. There would always have been for both of us terrible moments of doubt. The bramble-bush lay between us. I had to tear it away first; I had to tear it away and look bravely at whatever lay underneath."
A shaft of golden sunlight suddenly broke through the January clouds and slanted across the road. Roger Kenwick's eyes followed it as though seeking for the treasure that might lie revealed at last at the end of a rainbow. A sharp exclamation escaped him. And he felt the quick response of the hand that still lay in his.
Drawing the heavy motor-cloak closer about her, he helped Marcreta Morgan out of the car and guided her to a spot about a hundred yards on the other side of the iron gate. "I remember now!" His words came in the low, awed voice of one who suddenly encounters in broad daylight some object that has played conspicuous part in an evil and oft-recurring dream.
"At last!" he said, and stood rooted to the roadside gazing at the thing for which, during the last two months, he had been so desperately groping. "This one thing," he went on, "this one thing about those impenetrable months here I do remember. I believe that if I had chanced to see it on that afternoon of my recovery, if I had only chanced to come this way instead of around by the other road, it might have restored to me some memory of this place."
They stood now on the edge of the strip of pavement, where dead leaves spread a spongy carpet between the asphalt and the barbed-wire fence that bordered the opposite estate. And what they looked upon was a huge boulder, half embedded in the earth. By some mighty and persistent force it had been rent asunder, and now, up through the cleft which tore its surface with a long jagged scar, a sapling eucalyptus-tree, perfectly shaped and beautifully proportioned, had pushed its way. A zephyr or perhaps a bird had sown the seed in this rock-bound prison. And with a vitality that appeared incredible it had taken root and grown there, stretching vigorous, red-tipped leaves heavenward. In some miraculous manner its tap-root had found the sustaining soil, and its flame-colored crown the sunlight. There it stood, on the lonely road to Rest Hollow, a living torch of liberty, flaunting its heroic triumph above the shattered body of its foe.
"On the day that Glover first brought me here, I saw that tree." Kenwick's voice was scarcely more than a whisper. "I remember looking out at it from an opening in the fence. I didn't know just why I was here, but I had a sense of—I can't describe it to you—but it was a sense of imprisonment. I knew that if I wanted to get out of that place I couldn't do it, and there's no feeling on earth like that. And then I saw—this, and it thrilled me. In a curious, unexplainable way it gave me hope. I don't recall anything else about the place, and I don't remember whether I ever saw this again. But during these last two months I have been looking for something that I knew I had lost out of my life, and here it is."
Marcreta Morgan reached over and touched the sapling's damp bark with reverent fingers. From a cleft in the conquered boulder came the pungent odor of the crushed leaves that were sustaining this new life. She turned to the man beside her with shining eyes.
"The resurrection!" she cried.
He drew her close to him beneath the tender branches of the valiant little sapling.
"An imprisoned soul," he whispered, "liberated at last—by the miracle of love."