The Girl Who Had No God/Part 9

Something in her thinly drawn voice was familiar.

"I see," Ward said slowly, "it was you who telephoned me and then rang off."

"When you say that I am good and tender," Elinor went on, “you shame me. I am all that is bad and wicked. Everything. You were to have been robbed tonight. I brought you here under false pretense."

Ward was as white as she. His figure straightened.

"Then all the time that I have been telling you—”

“I did not hear. I was watching the time."

Personal fear Ward had none. He did not even follow Elinor's eyes as they glanced once more at the clock. Mrs. Bryant's venomous insinuations came back to him, all the village talk of the girl's strange rearing. Fearful thoughts flashed into his mind, to be dismissed, shaken off doggedly.

"I shall never believe anything that you do not tell me yourself. But it is only fair to me that now at last there he frankness between us."

"There are others," Elinor said, with dry lips.

"Your father?"

"He is dead. I cannot talk of him. This much I can tell you. The pariah house was burned deliberately; it was planned and carefully carried out."

"And you knew?"

"I had forbidden it."

"You had forbidden it?" He went to her and caught her by the shoulders, forcing her to look up into his face.

"You? Then all this time that you have seen what you must have seen in my eyes, you have been—"

"—At the head of a band of thieves," Elinor said slowly.

Ward released her, and turning took a slow survey of the room.

"Then I suppose this is a trap?" he said.

"It is not a trap." Her voice was dead. "I opposed this—this plan from the start. That is the reason one of the men—of my friends—suspected that I—"

"Go on. What did he suspect?"

"That I—but that doesn't matter. He burned the parish house and planned all this. Tonight he meant to get the money from you, and I—was desperate. I could think of no other way."

Ward's faith in her was slow to die. He took s step toward her, his hands out, then dropped them at his sides.

"Then—the night the parish house burned, when I came down in the dawn and found you sitting there"—he clenched his hands—"all the time you knew. You knew! And I had thought—"

He went to the table and, opening the box, slipped the notes and money it contained into his pocket. Then he buttoned his coat about him. Elinor watched him stonily.

"You are going back down the hill?"

"I am going home." He did not even look at her.

"If you would only go some place else," she said pitifully. "To the club, or to Mrs. Bryant's. Please believe me. Whatever I am, and  I have told you the worst, I am trying to think of you tonight, not of myself."

"I am going back to my house," said the assistant rector of Saint Jude's. He got as far as the door on to the terrace, and there he turned. It was as if he dared not look st her, as if he meant to carry away with him some tenderer memory than of this white-lipped, guilty woman before him.

"If I seem hard," he said unsteadily, "it is because I am suffering. You are quite safe, of course. I shall not go to the police." Had he cared less he would have been more merciful.

Old Henrietta watched his figure as he went down the garden steps and into the road.

"Strange things in this house!" she mumbled shaking her head. "Preachers coming and going at all hours, and Elinor in a church this morning. Strange things, Hilary Kingston, since you went away."

She shuffled along the terrace and into the house, her thin black shawl drawn about her shoulders. In the library Elinor lay face down on the floor. Old Henriette bent over her.

"My lamb, my pet," she soothed her. "He's a fine man, but there are many others. And when one is young and lovely—"

since Elinor made no response but only moaned, old Henriette rose from her knees and shuffled out of the room,  but cautiously, as she passed, she took from a table drawer old Hilary's revolver and carried it under her shawl.

She was very wise, was wrinkled Henriette, and she knew the Kingston blood.

Ward came down the road rapidly. There was a faint moon. One part of his mind had ceased to work; his higher faculties were dormant with misery, with the anesthesia that comes for a time after great grief or shock. Physically he was entirely alert; his keen eyes searched each clump of shrubbery before he reached it. Not that he feared attack for himself; his cup of life was bitter to his taste that night, but he carried a trust in his pockets, that he would deliver.

Huff was waiting at the foot of the Kingston place, crouched behind a wall. If the boy had been jealous before, he was maddened now. Ward had been with Elinor. Huff, coming up the hill had heard his short good-night to Henriette in the garden, had heard him come down the hill. There were only two explanations. Either the man was in love with her and had turned up that night of his own volition, or Elinor had sent for him. One was as bad as the other.

Ward did not have a chance. As he came abreast of the wall, the boy fired and he pitched forward on his face. With the re-echoing of the shot among the hills, Huff's madness died away. Murder was not his game; violent and sudden death perhaps, but never, before, a shot from behind. Had the wealth of a city been in Ward's pockets, he could not have touched it.

He thrust his revolver into his pocket, and breaking away through the shrubbery commenced a swift but noiseless ascent of the hill.

The assistant rector of Saint Jude's lay on his face in the road, with the morning offering of his congregation safe in his pockets.

The chief sent for Boroday early the next morning.

"You've turned the trick all right," he said, grimly smiling.

Boroday, as immaculate as ever, settled his tie.

"Yes?"

"Sit down," said the chief. "Now that you know you're going, I suppose you're not in any particular hurry."

Boroday ran his hand over his silky beard.

"I should like to get to a barber."

"There is no great hurry, now," said the chief, when Boroday was comfortably settled and smoking one of his eternal Russian cigarettes, "I wish you would tell me why you disposed of that pearl the way you did. It wasn't quite up to our agreement, you know. It was to be given to me and I was to return it. Instead of that I had to make a wild goose chase out into the country.

"Ah!" said Boroday, "into the country!"

The chief, who was accustomed to reading faces, watched Boroday closely. But if there was a tightening about the Russian's eyes, it was very faint.

"You know blamed well," said the chief peevishly. "just where I had to go to get that thing. And you know blamed well also that on Sunday afternoon I always play poker. It was—well, inconsiderate to say the least."

Boroday smiled. "I am exceedingly sorry that you were put to any trouble about it," he said. "But as you may understand. I have not yet seen my—friends. and of course—"

He shrugged his shoulders. The chief was skeptical of his ignorance, never the less. He humored what he chose to consider Boroday's whim. First be gave him the note which he had received by special delivery the day before. Quick as he was, the Russian could not quite conceal his astonishment.

"In the alms box!" said the chief. "Somebody with a sense of humor had charge of this little affair. Bryant is senior warden, it seems, in this church. It was clever."

Boroday passed the letter back to him.

"I shall tell my confreres. It is quite original.

The chief was smoking a large cigar. Unlike tbs police chief of fiction and the drama, he did not speak around the cigar, but carefully removed it, not out of respect to his visitor, but out of deference to a good cigar. Now he leaned toward Boroday.

"Either," be said slowly. "It was clever, or it was necessary."

But the Russian had himself well in hand. He only smiled.

"It has occurred to me." the chief went on, "that that little town has been pretty busy lately. There was that matter of the country club, you know, and last Thursday night the parish  house burned down."

"Yes," said Boroday, politely.

"And now something else has happened and—" Suddenly the chief beat his desk with his fist—"I am pretty sick of it."

Under perfect control as he was at critical moments, the Russian's hands had a way of twitching.So now he flicked the ash from his cigarette and was politely interested.

"What happened last night?" he inquired.

"I think you know. If you don't, I'll tell you. Yesterday morning a tremendous collection was taken up at the church of Saint Jude's to build a new parish house in place of the one that burned down. The rector has been away; the assistant rector took charge of the money."

"I see."

"Of course you see. What I would like to know is why you fellows—"

Boroday spread out his hands in his foreign way.

"I fear you give me grout credit. I do not deserve it."

"—Why you fellows," the chief went on resolutely, "waited to do this job until the rector, who is old and infirm, had gone away and left a husky young assistant in his place. And that isn't all I want to know."

"In any way that I can assist you—"

"What the devil do you mean," yelled the chief, "by shooting a man down and then going away and leaving the money in his pockets? it's—it's crude—it's wasteful!"

The Russian's fingers twitched in spite of him. The chief saw it and smiled under his heavy mustache.

"Do you mean that somebody shot this—er—assistant you speak of? That is rather sad. Was there—much money?"

"Seventy-eight thousand dollars," said the chief, and put his cigar back in his month. "There is a story behind it. Boroday, and it's that story I am going to get. I'm warning you because you've played pretty square with me. I needed that pearl in my business."

Boroday rose.

"All right, chief," he said. "I am sorry about young Ward. I hope he wasn't killed."

"He wasn't killed," replied the chief. "And I haven't said his name was Ward. If you haven't had your breakfast yet, we might breakfast together.

"I overslept and haven't had time for anything."

Ward came buck to consciousness in the great four-poster bedstead in which old Hilary Kingston had lain in state. He felt very little pain and no curiosity at all as to his surroundings, only an overwhelming lassitude and weariness of life. Something—something that mattered very much had gone out of existence. Ho could not remember what it was.

There was a uniformed nurse by the bed. He had a curious antipathy to asking her anything. He had made a promise of secrecy to someone—about what?

Toward evening be had managed to evolve out of his reviving consciousness some faint memory of what had happened to him. He remembered that he was walking down a hill and that be had fallen forward. For quite a half-hour, late in the afternoon, he struggled to remember why he had gone down the hill.

Then he got it. He had been up at the hall to see Elinor. It was Elinor who had gone out of his life. Elinor! Elinor!

He slept very little during the night, and as his fever rose, he called the nurse "Elinor," and begged her frantically to tell him that something was not true.

"Of course it is not true," said the nurse, who was accustomed to being called various things.

"You did not mean it at all?" He eyed her wistfully. The nurse was large and plain, with a wide flat face. "You, with the eyes of a saint," said poor Ward, "to try to tell me that you are wicked. I see that it is impossible. I think I can sleep now."

The nurse put her hand, which was large and ill-shaped but very light and tender, on his head. And so he went to sleep.

When he was quite settled, the nurse went out into the hall where Elinor was sitting on a straight chair. She had sat there almost all of the time since Ward was carried up the night before.