CHAPTER XI
A CALLER
AS the first of the month was approaching, Wassaquam had brought his household bills and budget to Alan that morning directly after breakfast. The accounts, which covered expenses for the month just ending and a small amount of cash to be carried for the month beginning, were written upon a sheet of foolscap in neat, unshaded writing exactly like the models in a copybook—each letter formed as carefully and precisely as is the work done upon an Indian basket. The statement accounted accurately for a sum of cash in hand upon the first of February, itemized charged expenses, and totaled the bills. For March, Wassaquam evidently proposed a continuance of the establishment upon the present lines. To provide for that, and to furnish Alan with whatever sums he needed, Sherrill had made a considerable deposit in Alan's name in the bank where he carried his own account; and Alan had accompanied Sherrill to the bank to be introduced and had signed the necessary cards in order to check against the deposit; but, as yet, he had drawn nothing.
Alan had required barely half of the hundred dollars which Benjamin Corvet had sent to Blue Rapids, for his expenses in Chicago; and he had brought with him from "home" a hundred dollars of his own. He had used that for his personal expenses since. The amount which Wassaquam now desired to pay the bills was much more than Alan had on hand; but that amount was also much less than the eleven hundred dollars which the servant listed as cash on hand. This, Wassaquam stated, was in currency and kept by him. Benjamin always had had him keep that much in the house; Wassaquam would not touch that sum now for the payment of current expenses.
This sum of money kept inviolate troubled Alan. Constance Sherrill's statement that, for her family at least, to keep such a sum would have been unusual, increased this trouble; it did not, however, preclude the possibility that others than the Sherrills might keep such amounts of cash on hand. On the first of the month, therefore Alan drew upon his new bank account to Wassaquam's order; and in the early afternoon Wassaquam went to the bank to cash his check—one of the very few occasions when Alan had been left in the house alone; Wassaquam's habit, it appeared, was to go about on the first of the month and pay the tradesmen in person.
Some two hours later, and before Wassaquam could have been expected back, Alan, in the room which had become his, was startled by a sound of heavy pounding, which came suddenly to him from a floor below. Shouts—heavy, thick, and unintelligible—mingled with the pounding. He ran swiftly down the stairs, then on and down the service stairs into the basement. The door to the house from the areaway was shaking to irregular, heavy blows, which stopped as Alan reached the lower hallway; the shouts continued still a moment more. Now that the noise of pounding did not interfere, Alan could make out what the man was saying: "Ben Corvet!"—the name was almost unintelligible—"Ben Corvet! Ben!" Then the shouts stopped too.
Alan sped to the door and turned back the latch. The door bore back upon him, not from a push, but from a weight without which had fallen against it. A big, heavy man, with a rough cap and mackinaw coat, would have fallen upon the floor, if Alan had not caught him. His weight in Alan's arms was so dull, so inert that, if violence had been his intention, there was nothing to be feared from him now. Alan looked up, therefore, to see if any one had come with him. The alley and the street were clear. The snow in the area-way showed that the man had come to the door alone and with great difficulty; he had fallen once upon the walk. Alan dragged the man into the house and went back and closed the door.
He returned and looked at him. The man was like, very like the one whom Alan had followed from the house on the night when he was attacked; certainty that this was the same man came quickly to him. He seized the fellow again and dragged him up the stairs and to the lounge in the library. The warmth revived him; he sat up, coughing and breathing quickly and with a loud, rasping wheeze. The smell of liquor was strong upon him; his clothes reeked with the unclean smell of barrel houses.
He was, or had been, a very powerful man, broad and thick through with overdeveloped—almost distorting—muscles in his shoulders; but his body had become fat and soft, his face was puffed, and his eyes watery and bright; his brown hair, which was shot all through with gray, was dirty and matted; he had three or four days' growth of beard. He was clothed as Alan had seen deck hands on the steamers attired; he was not less than fifty, Alan judged, though his condition made estimate difficult. When he sat up and looked about, it was plain that whiskey was only one of the forces working upon him—the other was fever which burned up and sustained him intermittently.
"'Lo!" he greeted Alan. "Where's shat damn Injin, hey? I knew Ben Corvet was shere—knew he was shere all time. 'Course he's shere; he got to be shere. That's shright. You go get 'im!"
"Who are you?" Alan asked.
"Say, who'r you? What t'hells syou doin' here? Never see you before . . . go—go get Ben Corvet. Jus' say Ben Corvet, Lu—luke's shere. Ben Corvet'll know Lu—luke all right; alwaysh, alwaysh knows me. . . ."
"What's the matter with you?" Alan had drawn back but now went to the man again. The first idea that this might have been merely some old sailor who had served Benjamin Corvet or, perhaps, had been a comrade in the earlier days, had been banished by the confident arrogance of the man's tone—an arrogance not to be explained, entirely, by whiskey or by the fever.
"How long have you been this way?" Alan demanded. "Where did you come from?" He put his hand on the wrist; it was very hot and dry; the pulse was racing, irregular; at seconds it seemed to stop; for other seconds it was continuous. The fellow coughed and bent forward. "What is it—pneumonia?" Alan tried to straighten him up.
"Gi' me drink! . . . Go get Ben Corvet, I tell you! . . . Get Ben Corvet quick! Say—yous shear? You get me Ben Corvet; you better get Ben Corvet; you tell him Lu—uke's here; won't wait any more; goin' t'have my money now . . . sright away, your shear? Kick me out s'loon; I guess not no more. Ben Corvet give me all money I want or I talk!"
"Talk!"
"Syou know it! I ain't goin'. . . ." He choked up and tottered back; Alan, supporting him, laid him down and stayed beside him until his coughing and choking ceased, and there was only the rattling rasp of his breathing. When Alan spoke to him again, Luke's eyes opened, and he narrated recent experiences bitterly; all were blamed to Ben Corvet's absence; Luke, who had been drinking heavily a few nights before, had been thrown out when the saloon was closed; that was Ben Corvet's fault; if Ben Corvet had been around, Luke would have had money, all the money any one wanted; no one would have thrown out Luke then. Luke slept in the snow, all wet. When he arose, the saloon was open again, and he got more whiskey, but not enough to get him warm. He hadn't been warm since. That was Ben Corvet's fault. Ben Corvet better be 'round now; Luke wouldn't stand any more.
Alan felt of the pulse again; he opened the coat and under-flannels and felt the heaving chest. He went to the hall and looked in the telephone directory. He remembered the name of the druggist on the corner of Clark Street and he telephoned him, giving the number on Astor Street.
"I want a doctor right away," he said. "Any good doctor; the one that you can get quickest." The druggist promised that a physician would be there within a quarter of an hour. Alan went back to Luke, who was silent now except for the gasp of his breath; he did not answer when Alan spoke to him, except to ask for whiskey. Alan, gazing down at him, felt that the man was dying; liquor and his fever had sustained him only to bring him to the door; now the collapse had come; the doctor, even if he arrived very soon, could do no more than perhaps delay the end. Alan went up-stairs and brought down blankets and put them over Luke; he cut the knotted laces of the soaked shoes and pulled them off; he also took off the mackinaw and the undercoat. The fellow, appreciating that care was being given him, relaxed; he slept deeply for short periods, stirred and started up, then slept again. Alan stood watching, a strange, sinking tremor shaking him. This man had come there to make a claim—a claim which many times before, apparently, Benjamin Corvet had admitted. Luke came to Ben Corvet for money which he always got—all he wanted—the alternative to giving which was that Luke would "talk." Blackmail, that meant, of course; blackmail which not only Luke had told of, but which Wassaquam too had admitted, as Alan now realized. Money for blackmail—that was the reason for that thousand dollars in cash which Benjamin Corvet always kept at the house.
Alan turned, with a sudden shiver of revulsion, toward his father's chair in place before the hearth; there for hours each day his father had sat with a book or staring into the fire, always with what this man knew hanging over him, always arming against it with the thousand dollars ready for this man, whenever he came. Meeting blackmail, paying blackmail for as long as Wassaquam had been in the house, for as long as it took to make the once muscular, powerful figure of the sailor who threatened to "talk" into the swollen, whiskey-soaked hulk of the man dying now on the lounge.
For his state that day, the man blamed Benjamin Corvet. Alan, forcing himself to touch the swollen face, shuddered at thought of the truth underlying that accusation. Benjamin Corvet's act—whatever it might be that this man knew—undoubtedly had destroyed not only him who paid the blackmail but him who received it; the effect of that act was still going on, destroying, blighting. Its threat of shame was not only against Benjamin Corvet; it threatened also all whose names must be connected with Corvet's. Alan had refused to accept any stigma in his relationship with Corvet; but now he could not refuse to accept it. This shame threatened Alan; it threatened also the Sherrills. Was it not because of this that Benjamin Corvet had objected to Sherrill's name appearing with his own in the title of the ship-owning firm? And was it not because of this that Corvet's intimacy with Sherrill and his comradeship with Constance had been alternated by times in which he had frankly avoided them both? What Sherrill had told Alan and even Corvet's gifts to him had not been able to make Alan feel that without question Corvet was his father, but now shame and horror were making him feel it; in horror at Corvet's act—whatever it might be—and in shame at Corvet's cowardice, Alan was thinking of Benjamin Corvet as his father. This shame, this horror, were his inheritance.
He left Luke and went to the window to see if the doctor was coming. He had called the doctor because in his first sight of Luke he had not recognized that Luke was beyond the aid of doctors and because to summon a doctor under such circumstances was the right thing to do; but he had thought of the doctor also as a witness to anything Luke might say. But now—did he want a witness? He had no thought of concealing anything for his own sake or for his father's; but he would, at least, want the chance to determine the circumstances under which it was to be made public.
He hurried back to Luke. "What is it, Luke?" he cried to him. "What can you tell? Listen! Luke—Luke, is it about the Miwaka—the Miwaka? Luke!"
Luke had sunk into a stupor; Alan shook him and shouted in his ear without awakening response. As Alan straightened and stood hopelessly looking down at him, the telephone bell rang sharply. Thinking it might be something about the doctor, he went to it and answered it. Constance Sherrill's voice came to him; her first words made it clear that she was at home and had just come in.
"The servants tell me some one was making a disturbance beside your house a while ago," she said, "and shouting something about Mr. Corvet. Is there something wrong there? Have you discovered something?"
He shook excitedly while, holding his hand over the transmitter lest Luke should break out again and she should hear it, he wondered what he should say to her. He could think of nothing, in his excitement, which would reassure her and merely put her off; he was not capable of controlling his voice so as to do that.
"Please don't ask me just now, Miss Sherrill," he managed. "I'll tell you what I can—later."
His reply, he recognized, only made her more certain that there was something the matter, but he could not add anything to it. He found Luke, when he went back to him, still in coma; the blood-shot veins stood out against the ghastly grayness of his face, and his stertorous breathing sounded through the rooms.
Constance Sherrill had come in a few moments before from an afternoon reception; the servants told her at once that something was happening at Mr. Corvet's. They had heard shouts and had seen a man pounding upon the door there, but they had not taken it upon themselves to go over there. She had told the chauffeur to wait with the motor and had run at once to the telephone and called Alan; his attempt to put her off made her certain that what had happened was not finished but was still going on. Her anxiety and the sense of their responsibility for Alan overrode at once all other thought. She told the servants to call her father at the office and tell him something was wrong at Mr. Corvet's; then she called her maid and hurried out to the motor.
"To Mr. Corvet's—quickly!" she directed.
Looking through the front doors of her car as it turned into Astor Street, she saw a young man, carrying a doctor's case, run up the steps of Corvet's house. This, quite unreasonably since she had just talked with Alan, added to her alarm; she put her hand on the catch of the door and opened it a little so as to be ready to leave the car as soon as it stopped. As the car drew to the curb, she sprang out, and stopped only long enough to tell the chauffeur to be attentive and to wait ready to come into the house, if he was called.
The man with the bag—Constance recognized him as a young doctor who was starting in practice in the neighborhood—was just being admitted as she and her maid reached the steps. Alan stood holding the door open and yet blocking entrance when she came up. The sight of him told her that it was not physical hurt that happened to him, but his face showed her there had been basis for her fright.
"You must not come in!" he denied her; but she followed the doctor so that Alan could not close the door upon her. He yielded then, and she and her maid went on into the hall.
She started as she saw the figure upon the couch in the library, and as the sound of its heavy breathing reached her; and the wild fancy which had come to her when the servants had told her of what was going on—a fancy that Uncle Benny had come back—was banished instantly.
Alan led her into the room across from the library.
"You shouldn't have come in," he said. "I shouldn't have let you in; but—you saw him."
"Yes."
"Do you know him?"
"Know him?" She shook her head.
"I mean, you've never seen him before?"
"No."
"His name is Luke—he speaks of himself by that name. Did you ever hear my father mention a man named Luke?"
"No; never."
Luke's voice cut suddenly their conversation; the doctor probably had given him some stimulant.
"Where'sh Ben Corvet?" Luke demanded arrogantly of the doctor. "You go get Ben Corvet! Tell Ben Corvet I want drink right away. Tell Ben Corvet I want my thousan' dollar . . . !"
Constance turned swiftly to her maid. "Go out to the car and wait for me," she commanded.
Luke's muffled, heavy voice went on; moments while he fought for breath interrupted it.
"You hear me, you damn Injin! . . . You go tell Ben Corvet I want my thousan' dollars, or I make it two nex' time! You hear me; you go tell Ben Corvet. . . . You let me go, you damn Injin!". . .
Through the doorway to the library they could see the doctor force Luke back upon the couch; Luke fought him furiously; then, suddenly as he had stirred to strength and fury, Luke collapsed again. His voice went on a moment more, rapidly growing weaker:
"You tell Ben Corvet I want my money, or I'll tell. He knows what I'll tell. . . . You don't know, you Injin devil. . . . Ben Corvet knows, and I know. . . . Tell him I'll tell . . . I'll tell . . . I'll tell!" The threatening voice stopped suddenly.
Constance, very pale, again faced Alan. "Of course, I understand," she said. "Uncle Benny has been paying blackmail to this man. For years, perhaps. . . ." She repeated the word after an instant, in a frightened voice, "Blackmail!"
"Won't you please go, Miss Sherrill?" Alan urged her. "It was good of you to come; but you mustn't stay now. He's—he's dying, of course."
She seated herself upon a chair. "I'm going to stay with you," she said simply. It was not, she knew, to share the waiting for the man in the next room to die; in that, of itself, there could be nothing for him to feel. It was to be with him while realization which had come to her was settling upon him too—realization of what this meant to him. He was realizing that, she thought; he had realized it; it made him, at moments, forget her while, listening for sounds from the other room, he paced back and forth beside the table or stood staring away, clinging to the portières. He left her presently, and went across the hall to the doctor. The man on the couch had stirred as though to start up again; the voice began once more, but now its words were wholly indistinguishable, meaningless, incoherent. They stopped, and Luke lay still; the doctor—Alan was helping him now—arranged a quite inert form upon the couch. The doctor bent over him.
"Is he dead?" Constance heard Alan ask.
"Not yet," the doctor answered; "but it won't be long, now."
"There's nothing you can do for him?"
The doctor shook his head.
"There's nothing you can do to make him talk—bring him to himself enough so that he will tell what he keeps threatening to tell?"
The doctor shrugged. "How many times, do you suppose, he's been drunk and still not told? Concealment is his established habit now. It's an inhibition; even in wandering, he stops short of actually telling anything."
"He came here—" Alan told briefly to the doctor the circumstances of the man's coming. The doctor moved back from the couch to a chair and sat down.
"I'll wait, of course," he said, "until it's over." He seemed to want to say something else, and after a moment he came out with it. "You needn't be afraid of my talking outside . . . professional secrecy, of course."
Alan came back to Constance. Outside, the gray of dusk was spreading, and within the house it had grown dark; Constance heard the doctor turn on a light, and the shadowy glow of a desk lamp came from the library. Alan walked to and fro with uneven steps; he did not speak to her, nor she to him. It was very quiet in the library; she could not even hear Luke's breathing now. Then she heard the doctor moving; Alan went to the light and switched it on, as the doctor came out to them.
"It's over," he said to Alan. "There's a law covers these cases; you may not be familiar with it. I'll make out the death certificate—pneumonia and a weak heart with alcoholism. But the police have to be notified at once; you have no choice as to that. I'll look after those things for you, if you want."
"Thank you; if you will." Alan went with the doctor to the door and saw him drive away. Returning, he drew the library portières; then, coming back to Constance, he picked up her muff and collar from the chair where she had thrown them, and held them out to her,
"You'll go now, Miss Sherrill," he said. "Indeed, you mustn't stay here—your car's still waiting, and—you mustn't stay here . . . in this house!"
He was standing, waiting to open the door for her, almost where he had halted on that morning, a few weeks ago, when he had first come to the house in answer to Benjamin Corvet's summons; and she was where she had stood to receive him. Memory of how he had looked then—eager, trembling a little with excitement, expecting only to find his father and happiness—came to her; and as it contrasted with the way she saw him now, she choked queerly as she tried to speak. He was very white, but quite controlled; lines not upon his face before had come there.
"Won't you come over home with me," she said, "and wait for father there till we can think this thing out together?"
Her sweetness almost broke him down. "This . . . together! Think this out! Oh, it's plain enough, isn't it? For years—for as long as Wassaquam has been here, my father has been seeing that man and paying blackmail to him twice a year, at least! He lived in that man's power. He kept money in the house for him always! It wasn't anything imaginary that hung over my father—or anything created in his own mind. It was something real—real; it was disgrace—disgrace and worse—something he deserved; and that he fought with blackmail money, like a coward! Dishonor—cowardice—blackmail!"
She drew a little nearer to him. "You didn't want me to know," she said. "You tried to put me off when I called you on the telephone; and—when I came here, you wanted me to go away before I heard. Why didn't you want me to know? If he was your father, wasn't he our—friend? Mine and my father's? You must let us help you."
As she approached, he had drawn back from her. "No; this is mine!" he denied her. "Not yours or your father's. You have nothing to do with this. Didn't he try in little cowardly ways to keep you out of it? But he couldn't do that; your friendship meant too much to him; he couldn't keep away from you. But I can—I can do that! You must go out of this house; you must never come in here again!"
Her eyes filled, as she watched him; never had she liked him so much as now, as he moved to open the door for her.
"I thought," he said almost wistfully, "it seemed to me that, whatever he had done, it must have been mostly against me. His leaving everything to me seemed to mean that I was the one that he had wronged, and that he was trying to make it up to me. But it isn't that; it can't be that! It is something much worse than that! . . . Oh, I'm glad I haven't used much of his money! Hardly any—not more than I can give back! It wasn't the money and the house he left me that mattered; what he really left me was just this . . . dishonor, shame . . ."
The doorbell rang, and Alan turned to the door and threw it open. In the dusk the figure of the man outside was not at all recognizable; but as he entered with heavy and deliberate steps, passing Alan without greeting and going straight to Constance, Alan saw by the light in the hall that it was Spearman.
"What's up?" Spearman asked. "They tried to get your father at the office and then me, but neither of us was there. They got me afterwards at the club. They said you'd come over here; but that must have been more than two hours ago."
His gaze went on past her to the drawn hangings of the room to the right; and he seemed to appreciate their significance; for his face whitened under its tan, and an odd hush came suddenly upon him.
"Is it Ben, Connie?" he whispered. "Ben . . . come back?"
He drew the curtains partly open. The light in the library had been extinguished, and the light that came from the hall swayed about the room with the movement of the curtains and gave a momentary semblance of life to the face of the man upon the couch. Spearman drew the curtains quickly together again, still holding to them and seeming for an instant to cling to them; then he shook himself together, threw the curtains wide apart, and strode into the room. He switched on the light and went directly to the couch; Alan followed him.
"He's—dead?"
"Who is he?" Alan demanded.
Spearman seemed to satisfy himself first as to the answer to his question. "How should I know who he is?" he asked. "There used to be a wheelsman on the Martha Corvet years ago who looked like him; or looked like what this fellow may have looked like once. I can't be sure."
He turned to Constance. "You're going home, Connie? I'll see you over there. I'll come back about this afterward, Conrad."
Alan followed them to the door and closed it after them. He spread the blankets over Luke. Luke's coats, which Alan had removed, lay upon a chair, and he looked them over for marks of identification; the mackinaw bore the label of a dealer in Manitowoc—wherever that might be; Alan did not know. A side pocket produced an old briar: there was nothing else. Then Alan walked restlessly about, awaiting Spearman. Spearman, he believed, knew this man; Spearman had not even ventured upon modified denial until he was certain that the man was dead; and then he had answered so as not to commit himself, pending learning from Constance what Luke had told.
But Luke had said nothing about Spearman. It had been Corvet, and Corvet alone, of whom Luke had spoken; it was Corvet whom he had accused; it was Corvet who had given him money. Was it conceivable, then, that there had been two such events in Corvet's life? That one of these events concerned the Miwaka and Spearman and some one—some one "with a bullet hole above his eye"—who had "got" Corvet; and that the other event had concerned Luke and something else? It was not conceivable, Alan was sure; it was all one thing. If Corvet had had to do with the Miwaka, then Luke had had to do with it too. And Spearman? But if Spearman had been involved in that guilty thing, had not Luke known it? Then why had not Luke mentioned Spearman? Or had Spearman not been really involved? Had it been, perhaps, only evidence of knowledge of what Corvet had done that Spearman had tried to discover and destroy?
Alan went to the door and opened it, as he heard Spearman upon the steps again. Spearman waited only until the door had been reclosed behind him.
"Well, Conrad, what was the idea of bringing Miss Sherrill into this?"
"I didn't bring her in; I tried the best I could to keep her out."
"Out of what—exactly?"
"You know better than I do. You know exactly what it is. You know that man, Spearman; you know what he came here for. I don't mean money; I mean you know why he came here for money, and why he got it. I tried, as well as I could, to make him tell me; but he wouldn't do it. There's disgrace of some sort here, of course—disgrace that involves my father and, I think, you too. If you're not guilty with my father, you'll help me now; if you are guilty, then, at least, your refusal to help will let me know that."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Then why did you come back here? You came back here to protect yourself in some way."
"I came back, you young fool, to say something to you which I didn't want Miss Sherrill to hear. I didn't know, when I took her away, how completely you'd taken her into—your father's affairs. I told you this man may have been a wheelsman on the Corvet; I don't know more about him than that; I don't even know that certainly. Of course, I knew Ben Corvet was paying blackmail; I've known for years that he was giving up money to some one. I don't know who he paid it to; or for what."
The strain of the last few hours was telling upon Alan; his skin flushed hot and cold by turns. He paced up and down while he controlled himself.
"That's not enough, Spearman," he said finally. "I—I've felt you, somehow, underneath all these things. The first time I saw you, you were in this house doing something you ought not to have been doing; you fought me then; you would have killed me rather than not get away. Two weeks ago, some one attacked me on the street—for robbery, they said; but I know it wasn't robbery—"
"You're not so crazy as to be trying to involve me in that—"
There came a sound to them from the hall, a sound unmistakably denoting some presence. Spearman jerked suddenly up; Alan, going to the door and looking into the hall, saw Wassaquam. The Indian evidently had returned to the house some time before; he had been bringing to Alan now the accounts which he had settled. He seemed to have been standing in the hall for some time, listening; but he came in now, looking inquiringly from one to the other of them.
"Not friends?" he inquired. "You and Henry?"
Alan's passion broke out suddenly. "We're anything but that, Judah. I found him, the first night I got here and while you were away, going through my father's things. I fought with him, and he ran away. He was the one that broke into my father's desks; maybe you'll believe that, even if no one else will."
"Yes?" the Indian questioned. "Yes?" It was plain that he not only believed but that believing gave him immense satisfaction. He took Alan's arm and led him into the smaller library. He knelt before one of the drawers under the bookshelves—the drawer, Alan recalled, which he himself had been examining when he had found Wassaquam watching him. He drew out the drawer and dumped its contents out upon the floor; he turned the drawer about then, and pulled the bottom out of it. Beneath the bottom which he had removed appeared now another bottom and a few sheets of paper scrawled in an uneven hand and with different colored inks.
At sight of them, Spearman, who had followed them into the room, uttered an oath and sprang forward. The Indian's small dark hand grasped Spearman's wrist, and his face twitched itself into a fierce grin which showed how little civilization had modified in him the aboriginal passions. But Spearman did not try to force his way; instead, he drew back suddenly.
Alan stooped and picked up the papers and put them in his pocket. If the Indian had not been there, it would not have been so easy for him to do that, he thought.