“What?”
“Will confront him myself with the question, if I have to tear down the walls of the prison to reach him. His mind I must and will know.”
“Very well, then, you do. I have told you,” declared Mr. Orcutt. “Swearing would not make it any more true.”
Lifting her face to heaven, she suddenly fell on her knees.
“O God!” she murmured, “help me to bear this great joy!”
“Joy!”
The icy tone, the fierce surprise it expressed, started her at once to her feet.
“Yes,” she murmured, “joy! Don’t you see that if he thinks me guilty, he must be innocent? I am willing to perish and fall from the ranks of good men and honorable women to be sure of a fact like this!”
“Imogene, Imogene, would you drive me mad?”
She did not seem to hear.
“Craik, are you guiltless, then?” she was saying. “Is the past all a dream! Are we two nothing but victims of dread and awful circumstances? Oh, we will see; life is not ended yet!” And with a burst of hope that seemed to transfigure her into another woman, she turned toward the lawyer with the cry: “If he is innocent, he can be saved. Nothing that has been done by him or me can hurt him if this be so. God who watches over this crime has His eye on the guilty one. Though his sin be hidden under a mountain of deceit, it will yet come forth. Guilt like his cannot remain hidden.”
“You did not think this when you faced the court this morning with perjury on your lips,” came in slow, ironical tones from her companion.
“Heaven sometimes accepts a sacrifice,” she returned. “But who will sacrifice himself for a man who could let the trial of one he knew to be innocent go on unhindered?”
“Who, indeed!” came in almost stifled tones from the lawyer’s lips.
“If a stranger and not Craik Mansell slew Mrs. Clemmens,” she went on, “and nothing but an incomprehensible train of coincidences unites him and me to this act of violence, then may God remember the words of the widow, and in His almighty power call down such a doom—”
She ended with a gasp. Mr. Orcutt, with a sudden movement, had laid his hand upon her lips.
“Hush!” he said, “let no curses issue from your mouth. The guilty can perish without that.”
Releasing herself from him in alarm, she drew back, her eyes slowly dilating as she noted the dead whiteness that had settled over his face, and taken even the hue of life from his nervously trembling lip.
“Mr. Orcutt,” she whispered, with a solemnity which made them heedless that the lamp which had been burning lower and lower in its socket was giving out its last fitful rays, “if Craik Mansell did not kill the Widow Clemmens who then did?”
Her question—or was it her look and tone?—seemed to transfix Mr. Orcutt. But it was only for a moment. Turning with a slight gesture to the table at his side, he fumbled with his papers, still oblivious of the flaring lamp, saying slowly:
“I have always supposed Gouverneur Hildreth to be the true author of this crime.”
“Gouverneur Hildreth?”
Mr. Orcutt bowed.
“I do not agree with you,” she returned, moving slowly toward the window. “I am no reader of human hearts, as all my past history shows, but something—is it the voice of God in my breast?—tells me that Gouverneur Hildreth is as innocent as Craik Mansell, and that the true murderer of Mrs. Clemmens—” Her words ended in a shriek. The light, which for so long a time had been flickering to its end, had given one startling flare in which the face of the man before her had flashed on her view in a ghastly flame that seemed to separate it from all surrounding objects, then as suddenly gone out, leaving the room in total darkness.
In the silence that followed, a quick sound as of rushing feet was heard, then the window was pushed up and the night air came moaning in. Imogene had fled.
Horace Byrd had not followed Hickory in his rush toward the house. He had preferred to await results under the great tree which, standing just inside the gate, cast its mysterious and far-reaching shadow widely over the wintry lawn. He was, therefore, alone during most of the interview which Miss Dare held with Mr. Orcutt in the library, and, being alone, felt himself a prey to his sensations and the weirdness of the situation in which he found himself.
Though no longer a victim to the passion with which Miss Dare had at first inspired him, he was by no means without feeling for this grand if somewhat misguided woman, and his emotions, as he stood there awaiting the issue of her last desperate attempt to aid the prisoner, were strong enough to make any solitude welcome, though this solitude for some reason held an influence which was anything but enlivening, if it was not actually depressing, to one of his ready sensibilities.
The tree under which he had taken his stand was, as I have intimated, an old one. It had stood there from time immemorial, and was, as I have heard it since said, at once the pride of Mr. Orcutt’s heart and the chief ornament of his grounds. Though devoid of foliage at the time, its vast and symmetrical canopy of interlacing branches had caught Mr. Byrd’s attention from the first moment of his entrance beneath it, and, preoccupied as he was, he could not prevent his thoughts from reverting now and then with a curious sensation of awe to the
