The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916)/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
DONALD AVERY IS MOODY
HARRIET went down the stair into the study; she passed through the study into the main part of the house and found Donald and sent him to her father; then she returned to the study. She closed and fastened the doors, and after glancing about the room, she removed the books in front of the wall-safe to the right of the door, slid back the movable panel, opened the safe and took out a bundle of correspondence. She closed safe and panel and put back the books; and carrying the correspondence to her father's desk, she began to look over it.
This correspondence—a considerable bundle of letters held together with wire clips and the two envelopes bound with tape which she had put into the safe the day before—made up the papers of which her father had spoken to her. These letters represented the contentions of willful, powerful and sometimes ruthless and violent men. Ruin of one man by another—ruin financial, social or moral, or all three together—was the intention of the principals concerned in this correspondence; too often, she knew, one man or one group had carried out a fierce intent upon another; and sometimes, she was aware, these bitter feuds had carried certain of her father's clients further even than personal or family ruin: fraud, violence and—twice now—even murder were represented by this correspondence; for the papers relating to the Warden and the Latron murders were here. There were in this connection the documents concerning the Warden and the Latron properties which her father had brought back with him from the Coast; there were letters, now more than five years old, which concerned the Government's promised prosecution of Latron; and, lastly, there were the two envelopes which had just been sent to her father concerning the present organization of the Latron properties.
She glanced through these and the others with them. She had felt always the horror of this violent and ruthless side of the men with whom her father dealt; but now she knew that actual appreciation of the crimes that passed as business had been far from her. And, strangely, she now realized that it was not the attacks on Mr. Warden and her father—overwhelming with horror as these had been—which were bringing that appreciation home to her. It was her understanding now that the attack was not meant for her father but for Eaton.
For when she had believed that some one had meant to murder her father, as Mr. Warden had been murdered, the deed had come within the class of crimes comprehensible to her. She was accustomed to recognize that, at certain times and under special circumstances, her father might be an obstacle to some one who would become desperate enough to attack; but she had supposed that, if such an attack were delivered, it must be made by a man roused to hate his victim, and the deed would be palliated, as far as such a crime could be, by an overwhelming impulse of terror or antipathy at the moment of striking the blow. But she had never contemplated a condition in which a man might murder—or attempt to murder—without hate of his victim. Yet now her father had made it clear that this was such a case. Some one on that train in Montana—acting for himself or for another—had found this stranger, Eaton, an obstacle in his way. And merely as removing an obstacle, that man had tried to murder Eaton. And when, instead, he had injured Basil Santoine, apparently fatally, he had been satisfied so that his animus against Eaton had lapsed until the injured man began to recover; and then, when Eaton was out on the open road beside her, that pitiless, passionless enemy had tried again to kill. She had seen the face of the man who drove the motor down upon Eaton, and it had been only calm, determined, businesslike—though the business with which the man had been engaged was murder.
Though Harriet had never believed that Eaton had been concerned in the attack upon her father, her denial of it had been checked and stilled because he would not even defend himself. She had not known what to think; she had seemed to herself to be waiting with her thoughts in abeyance; until he should be cleared, she had tried not to let herself think more about Eaton than was necessary. Now that her father himself had cleared Eaton of that suspicion, her feelings had altered from mere disbelief that he had injured her father to recollection that Mr. Warden had spoken of him only as one who himself had been greatly injured. Eaton was involved with her father in some way; she refused to believe he was against her father, but clearly he was not with him. How could he be involved, then, unless the injury he had suffered was some such act of man against man as these letters and statements represented? She looked carefully through all the contents of the envelopes, but she could not find anything which helped her.
She pushed the letters away, then, and sat thinking. Mr. Warden, who appeared to have known more about Eaton than any one else, had taken Eaton's side; it was because he had been going to help Eaton that Mr. Warden had been killed. Would not her father be ready to help Eaton, then, if he knew as much about him as Mr. Warden had known? But Mr. Warden, apparently, had kept what he knew even from his own wife; and Eaton was now keeping it from every one—her father included. She felt that her father had understood and appreciated all this long before herself—that it was the reason for his attitude toward Eaton on the train and, in part, the cause of his considerate treatment of him all through. She sensed for the first time how great her father's perplexity must be; but she felt, too, how terrible the injustice must have been that Eaton had suffered, since he himself did not dare to tell it even to her father and since, to hide it, other men did not stop short of double murder.
So, instead of being estranged by Eaton's manner to her father, she felt an impulse of feeling toward him flooding her, a feeling which she tried to explain to herself as sympathy. But it was not just sympathy; she would not say even to herself what it was.
She got up suddenly and went to the door and looked into the hall; a servant came to her.
"Is Mr. Avery still with Mr. Santoine?" she asked.
"No, Miss Santoine; he has gone out."
"How long ago?"
"About ten minutes."
"Thank you."
She went back, and bundling the correspondence together as it had been before, she removed the books from a shelf to the left of the door, slid back another panel and revealed the second wall-safe corresponding to the one to the right of the door from which she had taken the papers. The combination of this second safe was known only to her father and herself. She put the envelopes into it, closed it, and replaced the books. Then she went to her father's desk, took from a drawer a long typewritten report of which he had asked her to prepare a digest, and read it through; consciously concentrating, she began her work. The servant came at one to tell her luncheon was served, but—immersed now—she ordered her luncheon brought to the study. At three she heard Avery's motor, and went to the study door and looked out as he entered the hall.
"What have you found out, Don?" she inquired.
"Nothing yet, Harry."
"You got no trace of them?"
"No; too many motors pass on that road for the car to be recalled particularly. I've started what inquiries are possible and arranged to have the road watched in case they come back this way."
He went past her and up to her father. She returned to the study and put away her work; she called the stables on the house telephone and ordered her saddle-horse; and going to her rooms and changing to her riding-habit, she rode till five. Returning, she dressed for dinner, and going down at seven, she found Eaton, Avery and Blatchford awaiting her.
The meal was served in the great Jacobean dining room, with walls paneled to the high ceiling, logs blazing in the big stone fireplace. As they seated themselves, she noted that Avery seemed moody and uncommunicative; something, clearly, had irritated and disturbed him; and as the meal progressed, he vented his irritation upon Eaton by affronting him more openly by word and look than he had ever done before in her presence. She was the more surprised at his doing this now, because she knew that Donald must have received from her father the same instructions as had been given herself to learn whatever was possible of Eaton's former position in life. Eaton, with his customary self-control, met Avery's offensiveness with an equability which almost disarmed it. Instinctively she tried to help him in this. But now she found that he met and put aside her assistance in the same way.
The change in his attitude toward her which she had noted first during their walk that morning had not diminished since his talk with her father but, plainly, had increased. He was almost openly now including her among those who opposed him. As that feeling which she called sympathy had come to her when she realized that what he himself had suffered must be the reason for his attitude toward her father, so now it only came more strongly when she saw him take the same attitude toward herself; and as she felt it, she found she was feeling more and more away from Donald Avery. Donald's manner toward Eaton was forcing her to invoice exactly the materials of her companionship with Donald.
Before Eaton's entrance into her life she had supposed that some time, as a matter of course, she was going to marry Donald. In spite of this, she had never thought of herself as apart from her father; when she thought of marrying, it had been always with the idea that her duty to her husband must be secondary to that to her father; she knew now that she had accepted Donald Avery not because he had become necessary to her but because he had seemed essential to her father and her marrying Donald would permit her life to go on much as it was. Till recently, Avery's complaisance, his certainty that it must be only a matter of time before he would win her, had been the most definite—almost the only definable—fault she had found with her father's confidential agent; now her sense of many other faults in him only marked the distance she had drawn away from him. If Harriet Santoine could define her own present estimate of Avery, it was that he did not differ in any essential particular from those men whose correspondence had so horrified her that afternoon.
Donald had social position and a certain amount of wealth and power; now suddenly she was feeling that he had nothing but those things, that his own unconscious admission was that to be worth while he must have them, that to retain and increase them was his only object in life. She had the feeling that these were the only things he would fight for; but that for these he would fight—fairly, perhaps, if he could—but, if he must, unfairly, despicably.
She had finished dinner, but she hesitated to rise and leave the men alone; after-dinner cigars and the fiction of a masculine conversation about the table were insisted on by Blatchford. As she delayed, looking across the table at Eaton, his eyes met hers; reassured, she rose at once; the three rose with her and stood while she went out. She went upstairs and looked in upon her father; he wanted nothing, and after a conversation with him as short as she could make it, she came down again. No further disagreement between the two men, apparently, had happened after she left the table. Avery now was not visible. Eaton and Blatchford were in the music-room; as she went to them, she saw that Eaton had some sheets of music in his hand. So now, with a repugnance against her father's orders which she had never felt before, she began to carry out the instructions her father had given her.
"You play, Mr. Eaton?" she asked.
"I'm afraid not," he smiled.
"Really don't you?"
"Only drum a little sometimes, Miss Santoine. Won't you play? Please do."
She saw that they were songs which he had been examining. "Oh, you sing!"
He could not effectively deny it. She sat down at her piano and ran over the songs and selections from the new opera. He followed her with the delight of a music-lover long away from an instrument. He sang with her a couple of the songs; he had a good, unassuming tone. And as she went through the music, she noticed that he was familiar with almost everything she had liked which had been written or was current up to five years before; all later music was strange to him. To this extent he had been of her world, plainly, up to five years before; then he had gone out of it.
She realized this only as something which she was to report to her father; yet she felt a keener, more personal interest in it than that. Harriet Santoine knew enough of the world to know that few men break completely all social connections without some link of either fact or memory still holding them, and that this link most often is a woman. So now, instinctively, she found, she was selecting among the music on the racks arias of lost, disappointed or unhappy love. But she saw that Eaton's interest in these songs appeared no different from his interest in others; it was, so far as she could tell, for their music he cared for them—not because they recalled to him any personal recollection. So far as her music could assure her, then, there was—and had been—no woman in Eaton's life whose memory made poignant his break with his world.
Presently she desisted and turned to other sorts of music. Toward ten o'clock, after she had stopped playing, he excused himself and went to his rooms. She sat for a time, idly talking with Blatchford; then, as a servant passed through the hall and she mistook momentarily his footsteps for those of Avery, she got up suddenly and went upstairs. It was only after reaching her own rooms that she appreciated that the meaning of this action was that she shrank from seeing Avery again that night. But she had been in her rooms only a few minutes when her house telephone buzzed, and answering it, she found that it was Donald speaking to her.
"Will you come down for a few minutes, please, Harry?"
She withheld her answer momentarily. Before Eaton had come into her life, Donald sometimes had called her like this,—especially on those nights when he had worked late with her father,—and she had gone down to visit with him for a few minutes as an ending for the day. She had never allowed these meetings to pass beyond mere companionship; but to-night she thought of that companionship without pleasure.
"Please, Harry!" he repeated.
Some strangeness in his tone perplexed her.
"Where are you?" she asked.
"In the study."
She went down at once. As he came to the study door to meet her, she saw that what had perplexed her in his tone was apparently only the remnant of that irritation he had showed at dinner. He took her hand and drew her into the study. The lights in the room turned full on and the opaque curtains drawn closely over the windows told that he had been working,—or that he wished to appear to have been working,—and papers scattered on one of the desks, and the wall safe to the right of the door standing open, confirmed this. But now he led her to the big chair, and guided her as she seated herself; then he lounged on the flat-topped desk in front of and close to her and bending over her.
"You don't mind my calling you down, Harry; it is so long since we had even a few minutes alone together," he pleaded.
"What is it you want, Don?" she asked.
"Only to see you, dea—Harry." He took her hand again; she resisted and withdrew it. "I can't do any more work to-night, Harry. I find the correspondence I expected to go over this evening isn't here; your father has it, I suppose."
"No; I have it, Don."
"You?"
"Yes; Father didn't want you bothered by that work just now. Didn't he tell you?"
"He told me that, of course, Harry, and that he had asked you to relieve me as much as you could; he didn't say he had told you to take charge of the papers. Did he do that?"
"I thought that was implied. If you need them, I'll get them for you, Don. Do you want them?"
She got up and went toward the safe where she had put them; suddenly she stopped. What it was that she had felt under his tone and manner, she could not tell; it was probably only irritation at having important work taken out of his hands. But whatever it was, he was not openly expressing it—he was even being careful that it should not be expressed. And now suddenly, as he followed and came close behind her and her mind went swiftly to her father lying helpless upstairs, and her father's trust in her, she halted.
"We must ask Father first," she said.
"Ask him!" he ejaculated. "Why?"
She faced him uncertainly, not answering.
"That's rather ridiculous, Harry, especially as it is too late to ask him to-night." His voice was suddenly rough in his irritation. "I have had charge of those very things for years; they concern the matters in which your father particularly confides in me. It is impossible that he meant you to take them out of my hands like this. He must have meant only that you were to give me what help you could with them!"
She could not refute what he said; still, she hesitated.
"When did you find out those matters weren't in your safe, Don?" she asked.
"Just now."
"Didn't you find out this afternoon—before dinner?"
"That's what I said—just now this afternoon, when I came back to the house before dinner, as you say." Suddenly he seized both her hands, drawing her to him and holding her in front of him. "Harry, don't you see that you are putting me in a false position—wronging me? You are acting as though you did not trust me!"
She drew away her hands. "I do trust you, Don; at least I have no reason to distrust you. I only say we must ask Father."
"They're in your little safe?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"And you'll not give them to me?"
"No."
He stared angrily; then he shrugged and laughed and went back to his desk and began gathering up his scattered papers. She stood indecisively watching him. Suddenly he looked up, and she saw that he had quite conquered his irritation, or at least had concealed it; his concern now seemed to be only over his relations with herself.
"We've not quarreled, Harry?" he asked.
"Quarreled? Not at all, Don," she replied.
She moved toward the door; he followed and let her out, and she went back to her own rooms.