“An event of possible interest to you has just taken place. The murderer of Mrs. Clemmens has just cut his throat.”
He saw before he had finished the first clause that he had struck at the very citadel of her terrors and her woe. At the end of the second sentence he knew, beyond all doubt now, what it was she had been fearing, if not expecting. Yet she said not a word, and by no movement betrayed that the steel had gone through and through her heart.
A demon—the maddening demon of jealousy—gripped him for the first time with relentless force.
“Ah, you have been looking for it?” he cried in a choked voice. “You know this man, then—knew him, perhaps, before the murder of Mrs. Clemmens; knew him, and—and, perhaps, loved him?”
She did not reply.
He struck his forehead with his hand, as if the moment was perfectly intolerable to him.
“Answer,” he cried. “Did you know Gouverneur Hildreth or not?”
“Gouverneur Hildreth?” Oh, the sharp surprise, the wailing anguish of her tone! Mr. Orcutt stood amazed. “It is not he who has made this attempt upon his life!—not he!” she shrieked like one appalled.
Perhaps because all other expression or emotion failed him, Mr. Orcutt broke forth into a loud and harrowing laugh. “And who else should it be?” he cried. “What other man stands accused of having murdered Widow Clemmens? You are mad, Imogene; you don’t know what you say or what you do.”
“Yes, I am mad,” she repeated—“mad!” and leaned her forehead forward on the back of a high chair beside which she had been standing, and hid her face and struggled with herself for a moment, while the clock went on ticking, and the wretched surveyer of her sorrow stood looking at her bended head like a man who does not know whether it is he or she who is in the most danger of losing his reason.
At last a word struggled forth from between her clasped hands.
“When did it happen?” she gasped, without lifting her head. “Tell me all about it. I think I can understand.”
The noted lawyer smiled a bitter smile, and spoke for the first time, without pity and without mercy.
“He has been trying for some days to effect his death. His arrest and the little prospect there is of his escaping trial seem to have maddened his gentlemanly brain. Firearms were not procurable, neither was poison nor a rope, but a pewter plate is enough in the hands of a desperate man. He broke one in two last night, and—”
He paused, sick and horror-stricken. Her face had risen upon him from the back of the chair, and was staring upon him like that of a Medusa. Before that gaze the flesh crept on his bones and the breath of life refused to pass his lips. Gazing at her with rising horror, he saw her stony lips slowly part.
“Don’t go on,” she whispered. “I can see it all without the help of words.” Then, in a tone that seemed to come from some far-off world of nightmare, she painfully gasped, “Is he dead?”
Mr. Orcutt was a man who, up to the last year, had never known what it was to experience a real and controlling emotion. Life with him had meant success in public affairs, and a certain social preeminence that made his presence in any place the signal of admiring looks and respectful attentions. But let no man think that, because his doom delays, it will never come. Passions such as he had deprecated in others, and desires such as he had believed impossible to himself, had seized upon him with ungovernable power, and in this moment especially he felt himself yielding to their sway with no more power of resistance than a puppet experiences in the grasp of a whirlwind. Meeting that terrible eye of hers, burning with an anxiety for a man he despised, and hearing that agonized question from lips whose touch he had never known, he experienced a sudden wild and almost demoniac temptation to hurl back the implacable “Yes” that he felt certain would strike her like a dead woman to the ground. But the horrid impulse passed, and, with a quick remembrance of the claims of honor upon one bearing his name and owning his history, he controlled himself with a giant resolution, and merely dropping his eyes from an anguish he dared no longer confront, answered, quietly:
“No; he has hurt himself severely and has disfigured his good looks for life, but he will not die; or so the physicians think.”
A long, deep, shuddering sigh swept through the room.
“Thank God!” came from her lips, and then all was quiet again.
He looked up in haste; he could not bear the silence.
“Imogene—” he began, but instantly paused in surprise at the change which had taken place in her expression. “What do you intend to do?” was his quick demand. “You look as I have never seen you look before.”
“Do not ask me!” she returned. “I have no words for what I am going to do. What you must do is to see that Gouverneur Hildreth is released from prison. He is not guilty, mind you; he never committed this crime of which he is suspected, and in the shame of which suspicion he has this day attempted his life. If he is kept in the restraint which is so humiliating to him, and if he dies there, it will be murder—do you hear? murder! And he will die there if he is not released; I know his feelings only too well.”
“But, Imogene—”
“Hush! don’t argue. ’Tis a matter of life and death, I tell you. He must be released! I know,” she went
