# Instruments of Darkness (collection)/Instruments of Darkness

pp. 1–87. First serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, 1923 Nov 10 to 24. The novella is a “Long Island modernization of Macbeth.”

### INSTRUMENTS OF DARKNESS
#### I

The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray 's
In deepest consequence.
—Macbeth.
The garden party was at its height when a blue-black storm cloud with silver edges began to roll up slowly from the northwest over Long Island Sound. No one seemed to notice it. A band was playing on the lawn, and people were dancing in the open space about the long narrow marble swimming pool. On the lower terrace long tables were set out with lemonade and ice cream, and all about through the gardens there were decorated booths where pop corn, homemade preserves and flowers were being sold. Flags were everywhere fluttering from tall poles, to which festoons of colored globes, as yet unlit, were fastened. Trained nurses, and ladies of the hospital committee—the fête was for the benefit of the local hospital—were conspicuous with bright red sashes across their shoulders. They were moving among the crowds, helping every one to enjoy the occasion, but to enjoy it in that special manner that necessitates the spending of money.
Azra, the clairvoyant, was the only person who noted the approach of the storm. She had been doing an excellent business in prophecy.
Magic was more popular that afternoon than sweets or flowers—perhaps because the magic was of the best quality, whereas the flowers were beginning to droop, and the sugar to melt in the still, intense heat.
Azra came of a long and distinguished line of magicians. Her father had been that celebrated Astrologer-Wizard of Waco, who had foretold the Franco-Prussian War, the Great Panic, and the eruption of Krakatua. Her mother, though less conspicuous, had, as a medium, brought comfort to thousands in the '80's. Azra, an adept in many branches of magic, had concentrated upon crystal gazing. She was a woman of commanding appearance—no longer young—tall and large featured. She had been arrested more than once—not for the usual charges made against members of her profession, but on the suspicion of being a man masquerading as a woman; though in the Orient her straight black garment and purple turban would not have been thought necessarily feminine.
She saw the approach of the storm with alarm, for she had ordered herself a new tent for the occasion—very fine—of dark purple plush spangled with gold and silver stars. A drop of water would spoil it; and so when she saw that the storm would inevitably reach them in a few minutes, she ordered her two attendants—tall women like herself, in black draperies—to remove the tent from the circle of the dark cedars and to carry it inside the castle. She herself followed them, bearing the crystal ball aloft in both hands.
Now when Mr. Duncan had lent his garden and grounds to the hospital for their annual fête, he had expressly stipulated that no one—no one at all—should set foot inside the castle itself. The committee had pledged their word; little enough, they said, in return for all Mr. Duncan's kindness; and indeed it was an open secret that the great man intended to leave the hospital a part of his great fortune. But though Duncan had faith in the honest intention of the managers, he took the precaution of posting servants at all the entrances of the castle to turn away inquisitive wanderers. He was an old man and did not like his privacy invaded.
Therefore it was to be expected that Azra, mounting to the paved terrace that immediately surrounded the castle, would have been refused admittance; but, as luck—or perhaps magic—decreed, just as she reached the terrace, the approach of the storm was made evident to every one. The first blast of wind swept the gardens, blowing away the music of the band, upsetting chairs, tearing flags; and the servants, being good-natured people, ran out to help, although the fête was not their affair at all. Azra was left free to enter the great hall unmolested.
This frowning medieval castle of dark red brick had stood for forty years on the southern edge of Long Island Sound not very far from New York. Duncan had built it just after his first spectacular success—the discovery of silver in the Mountains of the Moon. Seen from the Sound—and no Sound boat ever passed without its passengers rushing to the south rail to get a look at this celebrated building—its great size, its castellated towers and turrets, its battlements and inside courts and outside stairways made it look more like an old walled town than a modern dwelling. Seen from near by, the sharpness of its angles and the freshness of its bricks destroyed the illusion of its antiquity; but even from near by it was impressive on account of its mere bulk.
The great hall in which Azra was setting up her tent was a good reproduction of an Italian Gothic interior. It took up three stories, and would have been as dark and gloomy as a fortress, for its row of small windows was near the ceiling, but it was brightly illuminated by electric lamps.
Azra looked curiously about her. On one side a stone staircase ran up against the wall to a gallery across one end. In front of her was the main door of the castle—a heavy oak door barred with iron and studded with nails. But a corner of the hall was invaded by the cylindrical wall of one of the towers, and in this curved surface was a narrow pointed doorway—a doorway which struck Azra as interesting, for she had observed the tower room from outside, and she had reason to think that there was Mr. Duncan's private office.
In Azra's opinion there was nothing that brought so much prestige in her profession as the avowed esteem of a great financier. There was no better answer to those who mock at magic than to say that some hard-headed successful business man is a respectful client. And who in all the country was so successful and so respected a financier as Mr. Duncan?
While her attendants were busy with the tent Azra moved softly toward that little doorway. The storm had now broken. Outside standard roses and tall cedars were bending before the gale, awnings were blowing away, tables overturning, strings of lights tinkling dangerously, and the guests hurrying to shelter under the whitewashed brick arches on which the castle was built. It had not occurred to any one except Azra to break the pledge given to Duncan. She had the great hall to herself.
Inside there was silence, except for the steady hiss of the rain, the gurgling of the gutters, and the frequent rolling of thunder. Suddenly there was a bright flash, a loud clap, the electric light gave a faint pulsation and went out, leaving the hall in complete darkness. Azra at once took a step that brought her to the door. She opened it, and heard at once the sound of voices.
“Well, sir,” a man's voice was saying, as if he were resuming a narrative after some comment had been made on the extinction of the lights, “the market hung for a few minutes the way it will after an assault like that. The stock was beaten down another half point before Bethson—and upon my word, sir, that young nephew of yours had his wits about him—saw that this was a serious attack on your holdings. Then he dashed in, and without consultation, supported the stock at his own risk. That showed courage, Mr. Duncan; it saved you.”
“I shall not forget it,” answered a calm low voice, the voice of an old man.
“Worse was coming. Mark this, sir, these fellows—Cawdor and his group—now realized that they must get control of the market before Bethson had time to get into communication with you. They began to dump great blocks of their stock, driving it down a point at each sale.”
“Didn't this terrify my brokers—Bethson & Banks?”
The younger man laughed. “As much as the local police terrify a New York bootlegger. They were magnificent. Banks in the office, and Bethson on the board—they risked their financial existence—and saved you. My heaven, sir, when I think of Cawdor, a man you made—a man no one had ever heard of until you made him chairman of the Luna board—double-crossing you like this——”
The speaker's emotion prevented his thinking of an end for his sentence, and Azra heard the older voice answer with a faint sigh: “I shall never again attempt to judge a man's character from his face. There was a man in whom I always had the most unbounded confidence.”
“Well, he's done for himself,” said the other. “It must have cost him a pretty penny. And, of course, you'll put him off the Luna board.”
“Yes, I hope I'm not revengeful,” answered Duncan, “but I shall make an example of Cawdor. That's why I asked you to bring my will with you, Duffield. I named the fellow one of my executors. I should be sorry to let the world know how completely he had fooled me.”
A few minutes later a loud ring at the front door warned Azra she must move. She shut the narrow door without a sound, and glided in the darkness back to a purple tent. A footman with a candle in his hand came hurrying across the hall. He opened the front door, and Azra caught a glimpse of two men stamping their wet feet and shaking the water from their coats.
She heard the footman say: “Mr. Duncan was just asking, sir, whether you and Mr. Banks had arrived. I'll let him know you're here.”
The footman disappeared through the narrow doorway, and the great hall was in darkness until one of the newcomers lit a cigarette and Azra saw his face. He was standing sideways to her, and the long, sensitive, delicate profile was like a sharp photograph against the blackness. She knew at once that there was something mystic in the man's nature—for one psychic recognizes another—even before a long vivid flash of lightning revealed the fact that his hair, which she had thought brown, was in reality a deep burnished red like new mahogany. She had a glimpse, too, of the other man—an honest square face on a short sturdy body.
“I don't think,” said the man who had lit the cigarette—and his voice was one of those low level voices that are in themselves a charm—“I ever saw any stock fluctuate as that one did to-day.”
“I wonder how long the old man is likely to keep us waiting,” answered the shorter man. “Good heavens, what is this? Has your uncle gone in for magic, or don't you see what I see?”
Silently the curtains of the tent had been drawn back and revealed, by the dim light of a candle, the figure of Azra seated within, holding the magic crystal in her long curved hands.
“Are you alive? Are you real? Are you men or women?”
Azra did not move, but her two attendants, standing on either side, laid their fingers to their veiled lips and shook their heads.
The taller man came forward. “What are you?” he said, and his tone made the question serious and authoritative.
The two attendants beckoned him to come closer. “Azra,” they said, “this man would know his future.”
Azra did not raise her head, but stared with strangely fixed eyes at the ball in her hands.
“Bethson,” she said—she had a deep bass voice—“I see you here, a poor unknown man, hard-working, uncertain of your future. And now I see you suddenly raised to a position of power. You are sitting at the head of a table where older men are your subordinates. It is a committee. It has to do with the moon. It has already happened. But better is to come. Before this night is out—I see you lord of this castle and heir to all that it contains.”
In the complete silence her low tones had been audible to Banks also, to whom the whole incident seemed so grossly comic that he was surprised to see in the faint light streaming from the tent that his partner was staring like a man in a trance.
“Why, Beth,” he said, “why do you look so dashed at news that sounds so good? But how about me, Azra? Haven't you a little prophecy left for me? My friend here seems overcome by your good news, but I am made of sterner stuff. I can bear to hear my future, even if it's bad. Come on.”
Azra continued to ignore him, until, as before, her attendants spoke.
“Azra,” they said, “another man would know his future.”
Azra shook her head. “Do not seek to know your future,” she said. “Less fortunate than Bethson, though perhaps happier, you will die a poor man—but leave behind you a son who will be one of the richest men in the world.”
The idea of his ten-year-old boy Floyd becoming the richest man in the world made Banks laugh out loud, and he turned to Bethson, expecting him to join in his amusement, but his partner seemed hardly to have heard. Bethson pushed forward again.
“I must hear more of this, Azra,” he said. “You are right; my name is Bethson, and I am a poor and unknown broker. The rest is nonsense. Director of the moon—what does that mean? Of the Luna Mine? Why, my good Azra, Mr. Cawdor, the present chairman, is one of the healthiest people I ever knew and my uncle's best friend. And as for being the owner of this castle, if he should die to-night, I happen to know he has left everything to charity. What do you make of that?”
But Azra did not reply or even look up; and at some unseen signal the two attendants dropped the curtains and stepped inside the tent themselves. The two young men stood alone in the hall.
The storm was over now, and the normal light of late afternoon began to filter down from the row of remote windows, but so dimly that the tent was hardly visible.
“Where did they disappear to?” asked Banks, peering about.
“I wish that she had waited a moment,” said Bethson.
“Was she here at all? Or was it all a little private vision of your own, after a hard day?”
“So Floyd is to be the richest man in the world, Banks?”
“Yes—if you are to inherit Castle Douglas.”
“And to direct the mine—wasn't that it?”
“That was the idea.”
A silence fell upon them, but a different silence to each man. Banks might have walked about smiling to himself and whistling with his hands in his pockets, so unimpressed was he with the experience, as soon as the influence of Azra's presence was withdrawn; but Bethson was still plainly under the spell.
The tower door opened, and—not the footman, but Duffield, came to meet them. Duffield was Mr. Duncan's lawyer—an honorable, implacable Scotchman, utterly devoted to his chief. Twenty years before, Duncan had picked him out of the drudgery of an eternal clerkship in a great firm and promoted him to fortune as his personal counsel. In return every interest and emotion of Duffield's life were concentrated on the old man.
“Ah, Bethson,” he said, “Mr. Duncan is eager to see you. He knows all you did for him to-day. I thought it would be as well to prepare you for a suggestion he is about to make to you. Don't argue about it; he mustn't be excited. He's had a hard day. He means to make you chairman of the board—the Luna.”
Banks gave a little exclamation, but his partner did not even smile.
“I don't understand you, Mr. Duffield,” he said. “Cawdor is still chairman of the board?”
“He was. Didn't you know that it was Cawdor you were fighting to-day? He was the leader in that dirty plot to get the control away from your uncle. I really haven't had time to find out just how he did it, but he's finished.”
Duffield turned toward the narrow door, followed by Banks, but they were obliged to call Bethson twice before he joined them.
“What's the matter with him?” asked Duffield.
“He can't get used to his new honors,” answered Banks, who thought it better not to mention magic to a nature as practical as Duffield's.
In the tower room Mr. Duncan was still lying back in his deep long chair. He was an immensely tall old man—well over six feet. His face was of a waxy whiteness, and his sparse white hair still grew in strange cowlicks that had always given him trouble. His arms were unusually long, and his pale hands dangled almost to the floor. When he moved, which he did as little as possible, his motions had a slow rhythm as if he were listening to the beat of his own heart. He had trouble with his heart. There was something priestlike in his air. As a young man he had wished to study for the ministry; it was thought that he had a talent for preaching.
He belonged to that class of money-makers, not uncommon in America, to whom the working of a mine, or the exploitation of a country, or the organization of a business, is not a practical chore, but a romance, a creation, a form of self-expression. He had been fortunate in making his first large sum of money when he was still a young man, and it had kept on rolling in, even after he had ceased to be interested in money and had come to the second phase—the period when what he wanted, what he thought worth working for, was power. Now as an old man he had completed the circle and come back to the ambition of his youth—he was interested in the welfare of the world—something of a preacher, but a preacher in deeds, not words. He had immense schemes for better housing, better education, better health conditions for the poor. It was known that all his gigantic fortune was to go to these ends. He had no relatives in the world except Bethson, who was the child of his sister. He was known to disapprove of the enriching of individuals by great legacies. He felt as many men feel who have made their own fortunes, that the only excuse for the possession of great wealth is the ability to make it. It was well known that he had left Bethson ten thousand dollars in his will—something more than the young man made, in good years, out of his share of the firm's business.
Duncan moved only his eyes as Duffield and the two younger men entered.
“My dear Beth,” he said, “you have done me such a service to-day that I don't know how to thank you. But you shall not find me ungrateful.”
Beth stood looking down at his elderly relative, and his face lit up in a smile. “I'm glad you're pleased, sir,” he said, “but I feel I only did what it was up to me to do; and what, as a matter of fact, gave me great satisfaction.”
Duncan's slow smile was not unlike Bethson's as he answered: “I mean to give you a great opportunity, Beth. And I must not forget Mr. Banks, to whom I am almost equally indebted. But, Beth, my dear boy, I have decided to put you in as chairman of the Luna board—in place of Cawdor. Yes, yes; I know—you've had no experience; but I need some one there whom I can absolutely trust.” The two men exchanged a steady look. “I believe, too, that you have the makings of a good executive. I'll be behind you.”
While Bethson was expressing his gratitude Banks was studying the old man, who looked to him pitifully frail.
“See here, sir,” he said, “I don't think you're looking just right. You ought to get away and take a good long rest.”
Duffield looked at Duncan as a faithful dog looks at his master. “He has not been sleeping,” he murmured.
“The boats whistle off the point all night long,” said Duncan, “and to-night I suppose this fête will be going until almost daybreak. I did not think of that when I said they could have the grounds.”
“I tell you what you do, sir,” said Bethson; “you motor over to my house for the night. I guarantee that it will be as quiet as the grave.” Duncan put the idea aside with a smile and a flap of his long pale hand, but Bethson, his eager vivid face lit up with the excellence of his idea, pressed it: “Do come, sir! You haven't been over for ages. And Lila will be sure to make you comfortable.”
“Ah, Lila,” said Duncan, in a tone that went beyond praise. “I don't think you know Mrs. Bethson, Duffield?”
“It's generally felt that Beth married far beyond his merits,” said Banks. “She's the most beautiful being——”
The old man corrected this crude estimate. “Far more than a beauty, Duffield. A good wife. In this individualistic age when most women regard their interests as different, even antagonistic to their husbands', she is a true partner. Beth's interests are hers. I'm a great admirer of your wife's, Beth. But, no, I don't think I'd better come. I'm a troublesome visitor—an invalid—I have to bring my servant with me. It's a good deal of a strain for a small household.”
“Oh, nothing puts Lila out,” answered Bethson; “especially nothing that she does for you.”
Duncan smiled at the younger man's enthusiasm, but Duffield added his persuasions. The old man turned to him almost irritably, rapping some papers that lay on the table.
Duffield bent over and said in a lower voice, “I'll stay on here and make the final draft from the notes you've made, and then I'll drive over early in the morning——” His voice fell lower and lower.
Duncan nodded and, turning to his nephew, said, “Very well, my dear boy, thank you. I'll come if you'll telephone Lila and ask her if it will be convenient. No, not here. There's a telephone in the library. I shall be starting in about half an hour. Will you drive over with me?”
“No, thank you, sir; I have my own car here. I'll start at once, and be there to receive you.”
As Bethson crossed the hall on his way to the library he saw that the purple tent had vanished. He could almost have persuaded himself that it had never been.
There was some delay about getting his number, and as he sat waiting, with the receiver at his ear, Banks came sauntering into the room.
“Do you know what the business is that they're so busy about?” Bethson shook his head, and Banks went on. “The old man is making a new will. No, no, dear boy, don't let your face light up. Prophecy or no prophecy, you are not to get a penny more than the little legacy under the old one. It's not love of you, but having tired of Cawdor that's stirring him up. In fact he was in such a rage that it seems he tore up his old will before he got the new one signed. Cawdor was an executor and had all sorts of profitable trusteeships and things under the old one. Duncan—and I must say I feel for him—would rather die intestate than have Cawdor profit in any way by his death. It would make the old fellow look rather soft, wouldn't it, to have left as executor a fellow who had just tried to throw him out of his own mine?”
At that moment Bethson got his number, and Banks attributed the concentrated look in his eyes to that. He went away and left him telephoning. He telephoned some time. Banks went out and looked at the fête and then sauntered out in front and studied the weather. He had been there a long time when Bethson finally appeared. The earlier arrangement had been that Banks was motoring home with Bethson for the night, but now Banks had decided to wait and drive over with Duncan.
“Did you tell Lila about the prophecy?” he asked as Bethson stood an instant beside his car, pulling on his gloves.
“Certainly. I did not think it fair to keep her in ignorance of her future greatness. Won't you tell Floyd that he's to be the richest child in the world?”
Something in the tone caught Banks' attention. “Look here, Beth,” he said. “I don't believe that it's a good idea to dip into this sort of thing. So often mediums and people like that get hold of a bit of information and use it so skillfully that they get a person who doesn't know their methods hypnotized into believing everything they say.”
The silence that greeted this remark was so prolonged that Banks, who had been examining a mark on a tire, looked up and found his partner staring before him, arrested as he leaned forward to release his brake.
Banks looked up at him and laughed. “What you thinking about, Beth?” he asked.
Bethson started and released his brake. “Oh, nothing,” he answered, “only my mind works rather slowly, I think, and all these things are—well, they are surprising. I'd like to discuss this whole question of the supernatural with you some time, Banks. This isn't the first experience I've had.”
“Very gladly,” answered Banks. He thought the whole thing arrant nonsense, but he saw this was not the moment to say so.
Bethson had some twelve miles to drive; his house stood in a more remote and less desirable part of the island. He drove through narrow lonely sandy roads bordered by low oaks. His attention was not required for any difficulties of traffic, and he had much to think about. Two truths had been told to him—he had been poor and unknown, and suddenly he had been raised to a position of importance and dignity. The thing was really extraordinary! What was he to think of it? Wasn't it simpler to believe in the supernatural than to invent a series of coincidences by which Azra could have become aware of his uncle's intentions? Some people would call it thought transference. Yes, the idea of making him chairman of the Luna board must have been already in Duncan's mind, though not in his, Bethson's. But then, in whose mind was it that he should be the inheritor of the castle? Not in his; he had known at the time that Duncan had destroyed his will. If the old man should die to-night—this one night out of all eternity——
His imagination saw it all as if it were already true, he saw himself standing in his uncle's place, rich and powerful; he saw Lila triumphant, beautiful, satisfied at last.
If it could only be! To-morrow Duncan would have made his new will. If it could only be to-night! If that fluttering heart of the old man would give out to-night! If there were a way to make it.
What was prophecy? A reading of the minds of men? A reading of the mind of God? How then could it be evil? If it were evil how could it be true? He was chairman of the Luna board—a thing which seemed outside the bounds of possibility when it was first suggested—more impossible by far than that an old man with a weak heart should die that very night. If prophecy was a divine gift why was he so obsessed with an idea that made his heart beat so that he could feel it throbbing against his ribs? No, it could not be that on this familiar road, where he knew every turn, every tree, he had actually contemplated murder. He was not a murderer. He was a struggling young stockbroker motoring home to his wife.
He turned away from the idea—and the world seemed strangely flat and dull and worthless, as if he had lost a great hazard. He turned toward it again, and was afraid—hideously afraid. But why should he be afraid of something that he did not intend to do?
Well, there was only this night to live through—one way or the other. To-morrow the thing would be impossible. By this time to-morrow he would have resisted the temptation—and lost the chance. This time to-morrow he would be driving home as usual, thinking over the little details of the day's work, wondering as usual if he had done well in this or that, and what Lila would think.
Just what was it that he had said to Lila over the telephone? Her mind worked like a flash of lightning. She had seen the whole thing before the words were out of his mouth. His own imagination was rapid, and formed pictures, but they were nothing but pictures—not springs of action. Lila was different—she did not see visions, she made plans.
The cold chill of terror came over him again. What did Lila expect him to do? The haunting horror of his life was that Lila would come to despise him. She was stronger than he, and braver and cleverer. He knew his own weakness—he lacked decision, avoided action. In critical moments, however, she had so far had the power of driving him to do what she thought was best—what had always turned out to be best. Suppose they came to a situation in which he refused to let her dominate?
A bad crossroad with two cars approaching from different directions distracted his mind and forced him to put all his attention on his driving. When the little crisis was over he found the black cloud had lifted from his spirit. The whole thing had been one of those ridiculous waking nightmares into which imaginative people sometimes plunge themselves. He smiled.
“No,” he said to himself, “if Fate intends me to be my uncle's heir, Fate will have to manage it without any assistance from me.”

#### II

Liza Bethson had put on a fresh pink cotton dress and was waiting for her husband. There had never been a time in all the eight years of her marriage when his return failed to be the climax and happiness of the day. She was hideously disappointed in his achievement, and yet she loved him. Her marriage had been a tragedy, and yet she loved him. She looked at life and at him with the perfect clarity of the pessimist, and yet she loved him; he was the only person in the world she did love. She knew that for good or evil their union was indissoluble—it had the inevitable quality of the mating of complementary natures. Had he been the woman and she the man, they would have been happy. They were not happy, but they were in love.
She had been, and at thirty still was, a great beauty. Walk but a block in the streets of any city with Lila Bethson, and you would see every pair of eyes you passed turn to her with a look of startled pleasure. Her hair was black with cloudy blue shadows in it. She wore it drawn into a knot at the nape of her neck like an Italian madonna, but there was nothing of the madonna in the firm forward thrust of the jaw. Her smile had no humor in it—her outlook on life was too tragically clear for humor—but it could have a blessed friendliness which was beautiful and flattering; only sometimes it showed, as her pretty lips unclosed, her small teeth set like the teeth of a skull. She was slender, with that length between knee and thigh that suggests a nymph hunting on foot. With her small well-made hands she could do anything, and everything she did was perfect. She could cook and sew, make her own clothes, cover her own chairs, plant her own garden.
When she and Bethson fell in love she had been not only a beauty but a fashionable beauty. Fashion is usually open to superlatives, and Lila's beauty was as much cajoled and run after as a great fortune is supposed to be. Splendid marriages were offered to her on both sides of the Atlantic. It was her misfortune that she fell in love with Bethson. She did not want to love him. Young as she was, life seemed to her such a cruel game that she demanded all the distractions of material luxury and success to keep her from looking at things as they are. But whether she wanted to love him or not, she did; and it maddened her to see that he regarded her as utterly unattainable; that he worshiped her and dreamed of her, but that he was ready to break his heart by renouncing her. She was ready to break hers by marrying him.
In a way it had not seemed such a foolish marriage for her. Although he was only a clerk he was the nephew of the most conspicuous figure in the financial world at the time. It was generally known that he was not to be Duncan's heir, but Lila said to herself there would be plenty of opportunities for a clever man. She was wrong; Duncan was not a man who fed those about him with crumbs from his table. On one or two occasions when Bethson acted on what he believed to be secret information derived from his position in Duncan's office, he had been mistaken, and his small savings were twice swept away.
The old man, who had disapproved of the marriage—he had a deep prejudice against the idea of a fashionable beauty as a poor man's wife—soon grew fond of Lila, and it was through her influence that he helped Bethson to buy a seat on the Stock Exchange and form the firm of Bethson & Banks. Banks was a cousin of Bethson's on his father's side—no relation of Duncan's; though the old man liked and approved of him. Nominally they were Duncan's brokers, but actually—for the old man liked to keep his own counsel—he spread his business among many. The young firm of Bethson & Banks made not much more than its living.
The two partners always told themselves and each other that next year they would do better—they were still young. But Lila with her terribly clear vision knew that they would never do better; that with the death of Duncan in a few years they would lose much of the business which they already had. Bethson, brilliant and charming, but oversensitive and lacking in determination; Banks, honest and not overclever—what chance had they in the tremendous competition of Wall Street? Ah, if she had been a man!
For the first few years of her marriage she had kept on seeing the people with whom she had been brought up, especially those who lived not far away on Long Island. Though they were poor and Bethson's hours long and irregular, they would often motor twenty miles in their jiggly little car to some great dinner or ball. But as time went on Lila began to see that she was no longer one of them; she was asked to the less amusing parties, almost as a favor.
She was too proud to be anything but an equal, and she suddenly cut herself off from all her old group. Except for her husband she lived alone. She never regretted the sacrifice she had made, but she did not underestimate it.
Bitter and thwarted as she was, her feeling for Bethson was so tender—so almost maternal in a way—that she never allowed a trace of reproach or complaint to creep into her attitude toward him. He would have been sensitive to this. He was well aware that he had not given her what beauty like hers could so easily have commanded. He knew that strength of will in a man is the most powerful of all sex appeals, and he was only too conscious of a certain infirmity of purpose in himself. He often thought that he could die quite happily if in dying he could leave with her the remembrance of a heroic figure.
His telephone message came to her after a long day of loneliness. More waves than sound waves come over a telephone. Their minds had met. He gave her nothing but the mere facts: The prophecy—the fulfillment of the prophecy—the second prophecy—and the coming visit.
She hung up the receiver with that calm almost saintlike look that comes with a great resolution. She was not astonished at the plan that formed instantly in her mind, but she was surprised to know, as she did know, that it was also in his. After all these years she should have known that she had touched the most fundamental difference in their different natures—to him a plan was a dream, to her it was a motive. She had as good or perhaps better intellectual equipment than her husband, but she shunned philosophy and abstract thought, for the simple reason that it was too painful; the pattern she saw was so hideous that she avoided it as she would have avoided strolling for pleasure through the wards of a hospital. Therefore when she thought definitely about the future it was only for a good reason—that she meant to act. If she thought—as she was now thinking—of the murder of this old man of whom she was in a measure fond, the thought had all the horrors of the deed, she faced it once and for all.
But Bethson, who had also been thinking of it, thought very differently. He thought not of the horrors but of the result; he saw himself master of all the power and money in the world. He saw Lila mistress of her life. His mind leaped the barrier between what was and what might be without looking at it. If he had looked at it as honestly as Lila did, he would never have leaped it, even in imagination. But as he enjoyed the daydreaming, he simply did not look. There seemed to him nothing cowardly in such a habit of mind, nothing false or vacillating in contemplating something wholly in the realms of fancy. But to Lila, who knew his ways without understanding them, there seemed, even when trifling decisions were involved, something of futility, almost of dishonor in his being willing to play with an idea which he had as a matter of fact not the least intention of ever putting into action.
The delight of the creative nature in building a dream and blowing it away, and building another, was not conceivable to her; but, as she loved him, she saw something noble even in an aspect of his nature that she disliked. She said to herself now that it was his essential gentleness that would restrain him. He desired success, was not without ambition, but was without the ruthlessness that must go with it. Well, she thought, she was ruthless enough for both of them.
It was after seven when she heard his car and saw him at the door—saw with a little catching at her heart that he looked worn and tired and hollow cheeked. He came into the sitting room and caught her in his arms.
She held him off and looked at him as at a returning hero.
“At last,” she said, “at last, my dear, your great moment! I have always felt you would do it. Since your telephone I have felt as if it were already done.”
“My dearest love,” he said almost in a whisper, “Duncan is arriving at once.”
“And when is he going away?”
His gaze shifted from her and he answered, with something artificial in his rapid utterance, “To-morrow, I believe the plan is.”
Lila fixed her large black eyes on him, compelling him to look at her, and then she slowly shook her head. “No,” she said, “not to-morrow; nor even the day after. Beth, your face is more honest than your tongue. Be careful. If I can read your plans so clearly perhaps other people can.”
“I have no plans,” he said.
She smiled, very sweetly, as a mother might smile at the easily read cunning of a child. “The guest that's coming must be cordially welcomed,” she said. “I have had an hour to think out all the details.”
“Lila, if I understand you right——”
“Oh, my dear, we have always understood each other!”
“This is something that must be carefully discussed.”
“You need do nothing but be your own cordial cheerful self. Leave all the rest to me.”
He stood absolutely still, staring at her, while she, though she returned his look, had all the quiet little gestures of a person entirely at ease. In the silence a motor horn was heard at the gate. Without another word they moved together to the front door.
Duncan never approached his nephew's house without a vivid impression of its beauty and peace. It was one of the many low clapboarded farmhouses which the English settlers of Long Island built so wisely in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was one of the earlier ones. It was only one story high, except for its gabled roof. The original shingles had never been painted and were now of a uniform silver gray.
The house stood firm and square on the ground, with lilac bushes and box about it. Your first impression was that it had been utterly untouched, and indeed the only addition the Bethsons had ever been able to afford was a servants' wing at the back, which did not appear from the road.
“I love this place,” Duncan said to Banks as they got out of the car. “The south wind brings just a taste of salt air from the sea, with none of its chill.”
“Those old farmers knew how to place a house,” Banks answered. “I always notice the old houses are set with a knowledge that seems to be lost by modern architects.”
The door opened, and Lila in her pink dress stood on the threshold.
“Ah, there she is,” said Duncan. “Lila, my dear, I hope I'm not giving you too much trouble.”
“If you were—which, of course, you're not—it would be a pleasure. Dear Uncle John, how can I ever thank you enough for what you've just done for Beth? He has been telling me about it.”
“Where is the chairman of the Luna board?” asked Duncan. He stepped heavily out of the car with the assistance of his valet, Ross. “I had rather expected to pass him on the road, and get here before him, but he drives like the wind, especially when he is driving home to you, my dear; and I, for one, don't blame him.”
The Bethsons were served by a Swiss couple whom Lila had taught and worked with and trained until they were more efficient than many larger households. At the same time with a man as much of an invalid as Duncan, it was a convenience that he always brought his own man. Ross waited on table.
Dinner was very gay. The hostess was as merry and beautiful as a happy child. Bethson seemed a trifle abstracted, but it was hardly noticeable. Duncan liked to talk of poetry and legends and remembrances of his youth. He liked to recite verses that he remembered with pleasure, and Lila's flattering attention made it easy.
When, after coffee had been served, Bethson left the table, his going was hardly noticed, though Lila, as he went, gave a casual explanation. “He must have gone for cigars,” she said.
He had gone to be alone or, rather, to be away from her; to be free from the continual suggestion of what was to come, which every smile and word of hers made to his imagination. It seemed to him utterly impossible that he had ever for an instant contemplated a crime—a crime, moreover, against his kins man and benefactor, a man who had always used his great power temperately, justly; a man who had come to him for rest and peace; his guest. The idea seemed like a silly dream dreamed by somebody else.
He stepped out on the grass which grew between the house on one side and an old apple orchard on the other. The storm, though it had cleared away so that the stars were visible, had not entirely gone, but was grumbling and lightening on the horizon. He walked some time alone, and then he saw Lila come through the long lighted window looking for him. He did not speak, he did not want her to see him, but she came to him at once and slipped her bare arm through his.
“We've finished coffee, my darling,” she said, and her tone was that of a woman almost swooning with love.
“Has he been asking for me?”
“Didn't you know he had? I sent Emil to look for you. He can't bear you out of his sight.”
His whole figure became tense, and his voice had that note of finality which is so apt to armor a weak decision.
“Lila,” he said, “we won't go on with this business.” He could not see her face, and her body did not move, but he was conscious in the darkness that her whole being was withdrawing itself from his. He felt like a child lost in a hostile crowd, like a man whose god has deserted him, but he went on: “He's really fond of me—poor old fellow—and now my position with him is so solid—with this chairmanship, I shall be able—— It is idiotic now to risk everything that I already have——” His voice died away.
She waited until it was obvious he had definitely ceased speaking. Then she said, and her voice had the keen edge of a knife: “It is certainly idiotic to suggest a scheme you have not the courage to put through. I have never complained, Beth; I have never said that I was disappointed in you, or that my life had been a hard, narrow, dull one—much worse than yours. You may believe that I've felt it, though I haven't wanted to make it any bitterer for you, and I haven't seen, up to now, how you could have changed it—being what you are. But a moment has come when you can change it. It will never come back. If you let this moment slip, it means either that you really don't care that you've spoilt my life—or else that you're just afraid. Oh, it isn't that you are so good and pure that you don't want to do this thing. You do, you do! You're sick with ambition, but you're afraid of action. You draw back like a cat that wants to get its nose in the cream pot and is afraid of a whipping; you just—don't dare.”
The major horror of his life was coming true—she did despise him.
“I dare do all a man ought to do,” he answered.
“And was it the beast or the angel in you that made you suggest this plan?” she returned. “Oh, Beth, you seemed like a superman to me then. I could have fallen down and worshiped you then—all the more because the thing was a crime, because you were risking death and disgrace for my sake. If I were a man I'd blow my brains out before I admitted to the woman I loved that after starting on such a project I could be shooed back again—like a hen trying to cross the road.”
“But if we fail?” he said, and his voice sounded pitiful in his own ears.
“We won't.” And suddenly, as he had reached the depths of despair, she was back, with her arms about him, whispering in his ear. “Oh, my darling, don't be afraid!” she said. “Listen how simple it is: These heart attacks of your uncle's come on in the early hours of the morning. That is why Ross has to sleep always in a room next—so that he can hear him call and give him a heart stimulant. To-night Ross won't hear him if he calls; I'll take care of that. Ross will sleep through until morning; but you'll hear him. You'll hear him—whether he calls or not—and you'll go up and give him his drops; other drops. No one will know, no one can know. I have put Banks off in the extension. Every one will believe that his death was due to Ross' failure to hear his call.”
She was standing, but he had sunk, half sitting, on the arm of a heavy chair, and now he turned and buried his head on her shoulder for a few seconds like a child. Then he rose, as if he had forever put away childish things.
“If you had a son like yourself, Lila,” he said, “he would have been more of a man than I am.”
“I don't want a son,” she answered violently. “I want a man.”
“Very well,” he said; “it's settled.” He spoke now with the calm of a real decision, very different from the tone in which he announced his first intention. “We must go in now and make ourselves agreeable to our guests.”
She was at once frightened and exultant at seeing that he had taken over the command of their lives.

#### III

The absence of the Bethsons was so prolonged that Ross appeared in the interval and suggested with respectful firmness that it was time for Mr. Duncan to go to bed, if he were to make an early start in the morning.
“Must you make an early start, sir?” Banks asked.
He himself hated early starts, and thought that if he were Duncan he would never get up till noon.
“Yes,” answered the old man; “I've sent the car back for Mr. Duffield, who's drafting some papers for me to-night, and he's to be here early in the morning and we shall motor to town together, before the roads are crowded. I like that better.”
He rose and put his hand on his servant's arm. Stairs were to be avoided, but the Bethson house afforded only one spare room, and that was on the second floor. It was necessarily in the angle of the sharp roof, but it took up all the second story of the main house, except for a dressing room, and where Ross was sleeping, and a bathroom. It was large and airy, with windows on three sides.
Banks went upstairs, giving the old man an arm on the other side, and when he came down stepped out on the terrace. Something seemed to be moving stealthily in the orchard.
“Who's there?” he called out; and his partner's voice answered.
“Oh,” said Banks, “I thought you had gone to bed. Your uncle has just gone up. He seems ever so much calmer and better than this afternoon. It was just the thing for him to do—to come here for the night. He thinks Lila is perfection. He was telling me driving over that there is some jewelry belonging to his wife, locked up in the safe since her death, that he intends to give Lila. Poor old fellow, he's so lonely in that great dungeon he built for himself that he can't get used to the comfort of a little house like this.”
The two men couldn't see each other's faces in the dark, and there was perfect naturalness and ease in Bethson's voice as he replied: “If we'd had a little more warning we could have made him more comfortable—given him our rooms on the ground floor. I don't like making him go upstairs with that heart of his.”
“Oh, it didn't hurt him a bit,” Banks answered. “He was delighted with his big room—like a tent, he said. I'm off myself. I hope I shan't dream of those prophetesses. It was queer, wasn't it, Beth—their telling you you were to be chairman of the Luna?” He shook his head wonderingly.
“I haven't given it a second thought,” Bethson said, and then he added, “It might be interesting, though, to compare our recollection of what they did really say, and see if there isn't some obvious explanation. I'd like to get my facts right.”
“It seems difficult to be perfectly honest with yourself about the occult,” said Banks. “I get the idea that you believe it all a little more than I feel inclined to. Good night, old man.”
“Good night, Banks. Sleep well.”
He saw his partner to his small room in the servants' wing. There was a door from this wing into the main part of the house. When this was shut and locked the occupants of the main house were completely cut off from those in the wing. It could not be locked, however, until Ross, who, after putting his employer to bed, had returned to the kitchen, had gone up for good. Some discreet merrymaking was evidently going on in the kitchen. The Swiss couple did not often have a guest, and Ross, though of a severe exterior, was of convivial habits.
Bethson sat smoking for a long time on the terrace. At last he saw the kitchen lights go out, and presently the lights in the upper dressing room next to Duncan's were lit. Then Bethson knew he could go in. He locked the communicating wing into the back of the house, and went to his own room on the ground floor.
The door into Lila's room was open, and he knew of course that she was not asleep, that she was waiting for him; but he had no wish for company. He walked over to it and shut it. He undressed as methodically as usual, laying out his things for the morning exactly as he always did. When he had finished he put out his light; he must not appear to be watching. Duncan's room overhead was perfectly still. All sounds had ceased except the cries of treetoads in the woods, and the rumbling, now growing louder, of the thunderstorm. It seemed to be coming back. Was it to be desired or not? The crash of thunder would hide other sounds, and yet people were apt to be wakeful during a night storm.
Bethson sat down on the edge of his bed, erect and still, in the darkness. It seemed to him that nothing lived but his own vibrating imagination. In the drawer of the table was the bottle which Lila had prepared in the exact likeness of that which stood beside Duncan's bed. The plan was that on entering Duncan's room he was to substitute one bottle for the other, and then openly and at his leisure give the old man the drops from the new bottle. Then if Ross or any one else should come in, it would simply appear that Bethson was giving his uncle his usual stimulant. It was, however, impossible that Ross should wake. The faithful Scotchman was always allowed a nightcap of whiskey and water, and Lila had mixed it for him herself. If Duncan woke and found his nephew in his room, there was nothing in that to startle or alarm him.
Four o'clock was the hour decided on. Lila had been thoughtful enough to leave her little traveling clock in his room, where he could see its luminous hands creeping slowly towards four. The storm, like a person who has been brooding over wrongs and suddenly loses all self-control, now broke in a tremendous crash—and another and another. Except for the strange tingling in his wrist, Bethson hardly noticed the noise. The rain poured down. It must make a terrible racket on the roof, he thought, but there was no other sound. No one moved in the house, not even Lila. He sat with his eyes still fixed on the dial of the clock. He shut them, and still that pale luminous circle was before him. And then it changed; it was not a clock, but a phial hanging pale and shining in space—the very one that Lila had prepared for him. He opened his eyes wide on the blackness, but it was still there, hovering in front of him so clear that he stretched out his hand to touch it. Of course there was nothing there—and yet he could still see it.
It wasn't four o'clock, but he could not wait any longer. He rose, took the little bottle from the table and opened the door of his bedroom. He stood an instant at the foot of the stairs. Yes, the storm was over. The rain was still falling, but there would be no more thunder to wake those who slept. He began to mount the stairs, keeping close to the wall.
But noiselessly as he had moved, one person had heard him. Lila knew the instant he crossed the floor of his own room. She had been lying rigid on her bed when he had shut the door between the two rooms. It startled her to find that he had wished to shut her out at such a moment. It hurt her, too, and yet it also gave her confidence in him. It showed that he had no need for her strength; he had enough of his own.
As soon as he left his room she got up and looked out of her window. She could see the window of Banks' little room in the extension; it was a black square. He had not been disturbed by the storm. Presently she heard slow, stealthy steps overhead.
He was about it now.
All that was maternal in her was stirred to pity. She should have done the thing herself, she thought, and spared him. He was more sensitive, more open to remorse than she was, only the old man would have been surprised to find her ministering to him. She did not know how long she stood straining her ears. Except for the treetoads, which, after the storm, had begun their cries once more, the night was silent. Then far away in the woods an owl hooted—a prolonged terrible scream like a child in pain. On the stairs she heard her husband's voice speaking quite loudly. “'Who's there?” he said.
She went into the hall, took his hand, and led him back to his room. He had not really spoken loud, but in contrast to the silence his voice had seemed to ring out. But there was no answer, no movement anywhere, no sound. She could feel him shaking like a man in a chill; his hand was like ice.
“It's done,” he whispered. “What was that noise I heard? Who spoke to me?”
“There was no noise,” she whispered back again, “except an owl hooted, and the treetoads. You said something yourself as you came downstairs, didn't you?”
“When?”
“Just now.”
“As I came downstairs?”
“Yes.”
She could not hold his attention. “Who is in the room beyond his with the door open?”
“Ross. That's Ross' room.”
“Something seemed to come out of that room——”
“Good heavens, what?”
“Nothing; a force, a power trying to stop me. What could it have been, Lila?”
She put her arms about him. “Don't tremble so, my dearest,” she said. “Don't think about it any more.”
“But what emanation could come from an empty black doorway, Lila?”
“Beth, if you talk like that you'll drive us both mad.”
“I felt it—I thought I felt it—trying to shake my hand as I poured out the medicine.”
“What do you mean? Oh, Beth, it isn't manly to dwell on it like this. Tell me what happened. Why were you so long?”
The short summer night was over, and as they talked the windows began to grow gray and visible. It took a long time to get a connected story of what had happened. A shaded light had been burning in the old man's room when he entered.
He had said at once, “I suppose it's your drops you want, sir?”
The old man had waked up, dazed. “Yes. Did I call?” he kept saying.
His nephew assured him he had called loudly twice, and that he, Bethson, not hearing any answer from Ross had run up.
Bethson turned to Lila. “Did you ever see any one turn blue, Lila? It looks so queer—a blue face.”
“Don't think about it any more,” she said tenderly. “Go to bed. Try to sleep.”
He gave a short laugh. “Sleep?” he said. “I shall never sleep again. I gave all the sleep I had to my uncle.”
The wildness of his manner frightened her. “My dearest,” she said, “you are letting yourself become hysterical.”
Her hand slipped down his arm toward his hand, and as it touched his fingers she felt the bottle in them. She took it and looked at it. It was the wrong one—his uncle's medicine, which should have been left at the bedside.
“Look,” she said, “you've brought the wrong bottle. You must take it back.”
He covered his face with his hands, shaking his head.
“If our bottle is found everything will be clear, Beth.”
“I will not go back to that room,” he answered. “I cannot bear even to think of that blue face; I dare not look at it.”
“Very well, I'll do it,” she answered contemptuously.
But he had passed beyond the dread of her contempt. He was rocking himself to and fro as he sat on the edge of his bed, and she left him.
He was still in the same position when she came back. She induced him to go to bed. Everything was well, she kept telling him—Duncan dead, Ross still sleeping. She made him lie down, and she herself sat down on the edge of the bed, holding his hand in hers.
She did not know how long she had sat there—the sun was already streaming in the window—when she heard a motor drive up and the doorbell ring. Far off in the servants' wing she heard some one moving. She smiled at her husband reassuringly.
“Emil's coming to the door,” she said. “The bell must have waked him.”
“I wish it could wake my uncle,” said Bethson. “I wish it could. I wish it could.”
He buried his face in his pillow. She ran out and unlocked the door into the extension, just in time.
She could hear Emil's footsteps in the hall outside her door now. She had only a few seconds to get her husband into a state in which he could meet the new demands upon his courage. Now she could hear the front door being unlocked, and Mr. Duffield's cheerful voice ringing out:
“Well, well! Were you all so dissipated last night? No one stirring at half past seven?”
And then Emil's difficult English explaining that he and his wife and Ross had sat up a leetle late. He entered into great detail.
“Is Mr. Bethson up?” Duffield asked.
The moment had come. Lila, who had succeeded in getting Bethson into a dressing gown, now opened the door and almost pushed him into the hall. Then she herself stepped back, listening to every syllable.
She could tell that he had pulled himself together, for his voice sounded natural and firm.
“Good morning, Mr. Duffield. Good morning, Leonard.” This she knew was addressed to a young clerk in Duncan's office. “You're rather an early bird, aren't you?”
“Is Mr. Duncan awake yet?”
Lila drew a long breath, and against the door her whole figure grew limp. It was going to be all right.
“Not yet, I think.”
“He told me to get here early. I'm a little behind time as it is.”
“I'll take you to him.”
“Don't trouble. Where is it?”
“It's the door at the head of the stairs.”
Lila gathered that Duffield had gone up alone, for she heard her husband and the clerk talking about the storm. At the castle there had been something like a cyclone; one of the chimneys had been blown down and some people thought there had been an earthquake as well.
“Yes,” Bethson answered, as if he were not very much interested, “it was a rough night.”
“Worst I ever knew,” the younger man insisted.
Overhead she could hear Duffield's hurried footsteps, and then a shout. She had been waiting for it, and her heart gave a sickening bound. She ran out into the hall. Duffield, his face white as a sheet, was standing at the head of the stairs, looking down into the hall. Bethson and the clerk, interrupted in their talk, were looking up at him.
He said loudly, “He's dead, Bethson!”
Her husband didn't answer, but ran up the stairs, pushed past Duffield and went into his uncle's room. She started up the stairs, too, but Duffield stopped her.
“Don't go in,” he said gently; “it's a painful sight.”
Banks, half dressed, came running in from the extension. “What's the matter?” he asked.
“He's dead—Mr. Duncan,” Duffield repeated.
“Dead!” cried Lila. “How dreadful—in our house!”
Then her husband came out of Duncan's room. His pallor was natural enough now. He came very slowly, and meeting Duffield's eyes shook his head slowly.
“A death like that,” he said, “makes life seem like a pretty cheap, trivial sort of affair, doesn't it?”
And then a new figure appeared upon the scene—Ross just waked—came tumbling out barefoot, still in his cheap pajamas, his face pale, his eyes red and blurred, and his face distorted with horror. “It's my fault,” he kept repeating. “I did it. I as good as killed him.”
“What do you mean, Ross?” said Bethson sternly.
“I didn't hear him call, sir,” said Ross. It was terrible to see the abandonment of all self-restraint in a person usually as icily correct as Ross. He seemed to have lost control of his jaw, which kept twisting as he spoke. “I wouldn't have heard the day of judgment. That damned hooch of Emil's—— Mr. Duncan always said his life depended on my waking so easily; and last night——”
“Last night you were drunk,” said Bethson, in a terrible voice. Ross covered his mouth with his hand to keep back his sobs, but Bethson went on: “Good God, you might as well have murdered him! You ought to hang for that, Ross, and I'd like to do it with my own hands.”
“Gently, gently, Bethson,” said Duffield. “The poor fellow feels badly enough about it already.”
“Oh,” cried Bethson, “it takes a lawyer to be neutral and infuriated at the same time. Well, he wasn't your uncle—nor your guest. But when I think of it—think of him lying there alone—calling for help—dying—and this fellow sleeping like a drunken pig—in the next room—well, I must say pity for Ross is not my first thought.”
It seemed to Lila as if her nerves could bear any strain, but not the relaxation of the tension. Bethson's speech was perfectly convincing—there was no danger—they were safe. Her hands and feet began to grow numb. She said quietly, “I think I'm going to faint.” No one heard her. Banks and Duffield were talking of the necessity of sending for the coroner and a doctor, and above, on the landing, her husband, like an avenging angel, was standing over the weeping Ross.
Then everything grew black before her eyes. Some one called out, “Look out for Lila!” Banks picked her up and carried her into her own room.

#### IV

It has always been said that nothing tests the character like sudden and unexpected wealth. Under this test, the Bethsons' conduct was perfect. They showed not only respect and affection for their uncle's memory but a most serious appreciation of their new responsibilities—a complete dependence on Mr. Duffield's judgment in settling the estate, a consideration for old retainers. To Banks, also, Bethson was generous; in leaving the firm he left enough capital to make Banks' life easy.
The only person to whom he showed himself utterly implacable was Ross; he could not bear Duncan's old servant in his sight. This attitude helped undoubtedly to fix in the man's mind the conviction of his own guilt; it had been growing since he was first awakened from sleep to hear of his employer's death; he was now steadily drinking. Banks pleaded for him in vain. He said that, after all, the fellow had been Duncan's confidential servant for twenty years, and should perhaps receive some pity, but Bethson wouldn't hear of it.
“I sometimes fancy,” he said, “that he did hear my uncle call, and wouldn't get up and help him. I don't ever want to see him again.”
Banks, who had a tender heart, answered, “Well, after all, Beth, if your uncle had not died just when he did, you wouldn't be where you are now.”
Bethson nodded, frowning a little. “Perhaps that's it,' he returned. “Perhaps the fact that I have profited so much by Ross' drunkenness is what makes me hate him so.”
His hate was satisfied, for within six months Ross died in an attack of delirium tremens. It was generally rumored that before he died he had admitted that in a drunken confusion he had given Mr. Duncan the wrong medicine, but this was afterward contradicted.
The only people who found anything to regret and criticize in Bethson were the other members of the boards to which he was immediately elected in place of his uncle. These men had heard of him as a gentle, civil-spoken young man, of no very great force, with whom they imagined they would be able to do pretty much as they wished. They had all been a little afraid of Duncan—they never contradicted him; his wisdom and success had become a great tradition. Now, honest men who had thought the old man too conservative, and dishonest men who had thought him too honorable, began to get ready to put a new régime into effect. The Cawdor interests raised their heads again. They had old scores to settle with Bethson. Investigation had at first brought back the report that this new figure in the financial world would not be hard to manage; he was a kindly young man, not very certain of his own opinion, and not unsusceptible to flattery.
They were bitterly disappointed. The new man was infinitely harder to deal with than Duncan had been. Duncan, after all, had had his favorites through whom one could reach his ear, to whom he expressed himself. But Bethson seemed determined to play his hand absolutely alone. He seemed to assume that every one was against him; no one, at least, was in his confidence. There was a general feeling that they had been much deceived in the sketches they had received of his character. It did not occur to them that the character itself might have changed.
There is nothing that strengthens or hardens certain types of character more than the possession of a secret.
The Bethsons had been in no hurry to leave their cottage. They stayed on there for some time, and then had gone abroad for a few months, and had spent the winter quietly enough in New York. Bethson was, of course, much occupied with the settlement of the estate and the taking up of new interests. Lila began once more to see old friends out of whose life she had dropped, and she did not spare them any of the humiliation inherent in the situation. To her, part of the pleasure of her position was not so much in seeing her old friends again as in making them suffer for past neglect. It was an art she perfectly understood. A few women quarreled with her, unable, they said, to bear Lila's insolence; but most of them bore it, some because they were fond of her, some because they lacked courage to quarrel with any one, many because they hoped for some obscure benefit to their husbands and sons by keeping on friendly terms with all the tremendous interests which Bethson now represented.
But of course it was not to be expected that the coincidence of the moment of Duncan's death should escape comment. Downtown a certain wholesome fear of libel suits kept the suggestions to raised eyebrows and whispers, but uptown and among Long Island neighbors the talk was gayer and less responsible.
“Are you dining with the murderers to-night?” they would say to each other.
“No; when Beth and Lila are about, I like better to know the cooking is done in my own kitchen,” would be the answer.
Banks, who had been deeply touched by his cousin's generosity to him, was shocked and wounded beyond measure when he found that this sort of gossip was going on—and going on among Beth's intimates. He himself had never been thrown with what he called fashionable people, and he regarded them as a race entirely apart. There was nothing of the snob about him; he did not envy them or look up to them; he did not even condemn them. He simply thought of them as people who had entirely different standards and occupations and emotions from any one he had ever seen. He had early been left a widower with one son, Floyd, a boy of ten. He lived in one of the Oranges, and thought of little but his work, his son, and a country club of which he was president. He was a humble-minded man; it was easy for him to fall into the attitude of admiration. He had always admired a certain charm and genius in his cousin; now he admired even more the way Bethson had taken his new power. He admired Lila—not only her beauty but the way she had without complaint stepped out of all the gayety of her old life. He accepted the notion easily that people were his superior—in charm and brains and social position. When he came to stay at the castle, as he did as soon as in the spring the Bethsons moved in there themselves—he shrank from contact with those whom he described as “those fashionable friends of yours, Lila”
Lila did not let this pass. “What is it, Ben?” she said. “They bore you?”
Banks was a little shocked at the idea that he would tell his hostess that he was bored by her friends.
“Oh, no,” he said. “The other way round. I feel as if they couldn't be much interested in me.”
“They'll take what I give them,” said Lila. “But they want you, Ben; they think you're an avenue to Beth's ear. And oh, dear me, how they all want that nowadays!”
One Sunday in June when Beth and Lila had run across the Sound in their motorboat to luncheon, Banks found himself caught up in a small luncheon at a neighboring house—the Alstons'. The Alstons were people who had nothing further to gain through Bethson or any one else, and so Banks was not a little flattered that by a sort of friendly accident he found himself at their table. It was, as a matter of fact, anything but an accident; it had been most carefully arranged. The Alstons needed neither money nor influence nor careers, but they were extremely greedy for amusement. It occurred to them and their small house party that nothing would be more entertaining than to run off with Beth's rather simple cousin and turn his mind inside out as to what had really happened at the time of Duncan's death. Without any profound appreciation of character, they had quite enough social expertness to do this.
The Bethsons had lately sent out cards for a dinner—the first entertainment of any size that they had given—and the appearance of these invitations had been the text of a disagreeable article in a weekly paper. Mrs. Alston spoke of it with indignation. It had already published a most scandalous article about her doings in Paris.
She said, “Oh, it was within the libel law, but every one knew they meant me—just as we all know they meant poor dear Beth by the phrase 'our new murderers.'”
Banks' ardent admiration for his cousin soon led him into a detailed defense of him, which caused him to rehearse in his own mind a connected narrative of the day of Duncan's death, from the point of view of Beth's innocence. He did not tell it all to his hosts, whose good faith he quickly began to suspect, for he was no fool; but he did begin to go over it point by point in his own mind, and though not the least suspicion of his cousin rose in his mind he began to feel a vague distress which he could not explain.
There were several odd coincidences, he now noted, besides the great coincidence of Duncan's death occurring on the only night that could have made Bethson his heir. The coincidence of his spending that night in his nephew's house—whose suggestion had it been? Duncan's own? Or had it come from Beth? He couldn't remember. The coincidence of Azra's prophecy having come that afternoon. He couldn't even remember whether or not Beth had known that Duncan's will was destroyed. He had said quite confidently to the Alstons that Beth hadn't known, and yet, afterward, it came back to him that this wasn't true. He thought he himself had told Beth about it. Well, he'd ask Beth. That was the easiest way of finding out.
He didn't ask him that evening. He had plenty of opportunities, but something within him made it difficult. The next week-end, however, when he came down again for the dinner party, bringing Duffield with him, he made up his mind he must do it.
The three men were sitting together after lunch. Lila, who hadn't been sleeping well lately, had not appeared at all.
Banks spoke without any preliminary. “Tell me something, Beth,” he said. “Did you know your uncle had destroyed his will?”
Bethson looked up, but at Duffield, not at the speaker, and it was Duffield who answered:
“He certainly did not know it from me.”
“No,” said Beth, “I didn't know. I think if I had I might have hesitated to have the old man at my house that night.”
Presently when he had left his two guests alone, Duffield looked with disapproval at Banks. “Why did you ask him that?” he said.
Banks did not answer; he was staring at the floor, and when he raised his eyes he said in a startled tone, “Look here, Duffield, I told him myself.”
“Told him what?”
“Mr. Duncan had asked me if I would witness the will, I know, and I told Beth as he was telephoning.”
Both men dropped the subject, or, rather, put it away from them. Only Banks couldn't really put it away from him. He suddenly knew positively without any doubt, without any mental process that he could trace—that his cousin had been instrumental in killing Duncan. He felt sick with horror. He remembered now also that the suggestion in Duncan's visit had come from Beth. This was what had made Beth so unaccountably different. Crime.
Banks stepped out on the terrace, seeking solitude, but it was difficult in that great building to find solitude. Lila was on the terrace, lying in a long chair, looking out over the swimming pool and the gardens to the blue glimpse of the Sound. Banks was startled to see that she was as white and almost as translucent as alabaster. Her face, which had seemed to him like a tragic mask as he first caught sight of her, broke into a smile as she saw him. She waved her hand to him.
“How are you, Lila?” he said.
He felt as if the whole book of life were open to him, and he pitied all she must be enduring day by day.
“I'm well,' she answered. “I don't sleep awfully well, but otherwise I never felt better. How do you think Beth is? I'm not quite satisfied with him. I thing he's lost weight, and he can't afford to do that.”
She spoke lightly, but her eyes appealed to Banks for his opinion. Only Banks really could not discuss his cousin's health sympathetically at that moment.
He felt he must be alone. He was passionately fond of the water. One of the things he enjoyed most at the castle was having free run of the boats. It was five o'clock, and a stiff summer breeze was blowing. He decided to take out a small racing catboat, and not to get back till dinnertime.
The boathouse was in a deep cove with high banks, so that it was hidden from shore and water. As Banks entered it he was surprised to see that his cousin was standing on the float, scanning the opening toward the Sound.
“Hello, Ben,” he said.
His voice had a curiously caressing tone that Banks had been attributing to a modest wish to remain unchanged to old friends, but in which he now saw something sinister and self-protective. As Beth laid a hand on his shoulder he moved away so decidedly that it was noticeable. Bethson noticed it. Though Banks did not look round he knew his cousin was staring at him, and guessed that the whole situation was clear. Well, all the better—they must talk it out before long. It might mean ruin to Banks, but he could not suspect a thing like that and fail to be open with his former friend. The catboat was anchored a few yards out, and Banks threw the oars into the rowboat to go out to her. As he moved about he took a side glance at his cousin's face. Yes, he thought, Beth knew what he was thinking.
But nothing in his tone betrayed it as he said, “You're going sailing?”
“Yes, if you don't want the boat. I have a notion to be alone for a few hours.”
Bethson smiled—the old smile of penetrating sweetness. “I'm sorry for that,” he answered. “There are some questions I'd like to talk over with you. You're a wise old thing, Ben—but to-morrow will do. How long shall you be gone?”
“I'll be back for dinner.” Banks could hear the dead hostility of his own voice.
“For dinner. I should hope so. Don't forget our party; Lila would never forgive you.” Banks did not answer, and Bethson insisted. “Promise me you won't fail us, Ben.”
“I promise,” answered Banks.
He would have said anything to end the interview. He stepped into the rowboat and shoved off. As he rowed away something meditative in the way his cousin was regarding him made him shiver. He knew Beth had read his mind like a book.
He had; he had read him because for a year he had been expecting to read him. He feared no one as he feared Banks, because he knew his cousin's simple brave nature. He respected Banks more than any man he had ever known, and loved him—had loved him, in the days when he was capable of love. He could ruin Banks; or, rather, Banks' suspicion would ruin Banks himself. A less honest man would never let himself suspect the partner on whose free capital he existed, but that would not influence Banks, or would influence him to action. Yes, Banks would act. How?
Bethson sat there a long time with his chin in his hand, gazing out toward the Sound, until, as dusk fell, a smart little black motorboat made its appearance in the cove. There were two men in it, but only one stepped out. He might have been a yachtsman, so perfect was his blue serge coat and white shoes. Everything about him was perfect, except his countenance.
“Good evening, Mr. Bethson,” he said briskly. “Sorry to be a little late. Some suspicious-looking craft cruising about. Unload the stuff right here as usual, I suppose? That's it, Frankie; right on the float. Is that your boat becalmed off the point a mile or so west of here? Who's that in it? Some one you can trust?”
“Why, I'm afraid not,” said Beth slowly. “I'm afraid not. I want to speak to you about him before you go.”
The man's face darkened and his body grew tense, like an animal that hears an approaching danger.
“Look here,” he said, “have you let us in for something?”
“Not intentionally,” answered Bethson, still very quietly, though he studied the other closely. “But that fellow out there is a danger—to you—and to me too.”
The man got the idea at once. “Is he alone?” he asked.
It was extraordinarily easily accomplished, Bethson thought, as not so very long afterward the black motor-boat moved out into the lilac twilight settling down over the Sound. He would hardly have believed that men could be so easily brought to commit murder for a sum of money, not immense. Was it for money? Was it for the story that Banks was a danger to their tremendous business, a tale which even as he poured it into their ears sounded in his own extremely unbelievable. Yet they had seemed to believe it. Or was it on account of the strange and irresistible power over his fellow men which had come to him of late; had come, not with the possession of money but with the sense of crime. Ever since the murder of his uncle—at least since the morning after it, when it became clear that the crime could not possibly be fixed upon him—Bethson had been as one initiated, for whom the ordinary limitations of morals did not exist. He paid a high price, for he lived entirely alone, regarding every one but Lila as his enemy. Poor Lila. There had been a time, he remembered, when he had been afraid even of her. Now their situation was reversed. It was she who had opened this door to him, through which he had passed so far beyond her.
He heard a footstep on the steep path that led him down to the boathouse, and saw his wife approaching. She had evidently been running, for she was breathing fast, and as she saw him she gave a little moaning cry of relief.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, “there you are! I've been so worried. I could not find you anywhere.”
He looked at her with surprise; she was crying.
“I'm sorry you were worried,” he said. “I like to be alone at times.”
“It isn't good for you,” she returned. “You go over it all again and again. What good does it do? It's all past and finished. What's done is done.”
“Half done,” he returned. “I must have security, Lila. It's no good to me to possess the whole world if I can't have safety. I would rather be dead than be continually afraid—or live in terror of these terrible dreams.”
“That same dream again?” she asked, hanging on his answer.
He nodded. “Well, at least,” he said, “the dead don't dream. I've done that for my uncle. He sleeps—better than you and I do. His worries are all over——”
“My dearest,” she interrupted, “you simply mustn't go on like that. You break my heart. You look so desperate. You must contrive to change your expression. We're having all these people to dinner. And you know how they'll be on the lookout for anything strange—the beasts!”
His countenance cleared and he smiled at her with something of his old sweetness. “Don't worry, dear girl,” he said. “They won't see anything in my manner. But one thing—be nice to Ben this evening, when he gets home. Something is working in his mind. He's changed toward me. He suspects. He'll make trouble for me some day.”
Her jaw set with its old menace. “He's not immortal,” she said.
He laughed oddly. “A very competent and wifely thought. Perhaps you, too, have turned prophet.”
“What are you thinking of, Beth?”
He took her little chin in his hand and looked down at her. “Nothing you need know, my darling, until it is something more than a thought. Come, it's getting dark—and those infernal treetoads will begin soon. I hate their noise.”
He took her hand and led her toward the house as if she were a child.
The main entrance to the castle had been shut that evening, so as to leave the great hall undisturbed for the dinner. Lila received her guests in one of the smaller drawing-rooms. She was in black, and her little dark head blazed with diamonds. Her pallor did not show under her rouge, and her large eyes gleaming with excitement made her seem extraordinarily alert and beautiful.
Beth, too, running downstairs a little late, pulling down his white waistcoat as he entered, looked as if he hadn't a care in the world. Lila cast one quick appraising look at him as he entered, and saw that everything once again was well.
The party was a notable one—an English duke, an ex-royalty from Southern Europe, a poet, an artist and several celebrated actors and actresses, but a comfortably safe majority of fashionable people to save the feast from being in any way a freak party. Lila knew her own world.
It was a large dinner—over fifty—and they were late in assembling. It was almost nine o'clock when the butler whispered to Lila that every one was there except Mr. Banks, who was not in the castle. Lila looked across at her husband.
“Shall we wait for Ben, Beth?” she called. “He hasn't come in to dress yet. Where can he be?”
“Becalmed off the point, probably,” her husband answered. “No, certainly don't wait.” And presently he offered his arm to the ex-princess, and they began to go in to dinner.
The great hall looked very different from what it had been when Azra set up her lonely tent there. Now sixteenth-century tapestries covered the gallery, and Spanish banners hung on the walls. The immense long table furnished, but did not fill the great floor. It was set with alternate bowls of flowers and fruit, and very tall candles in golden candlesticks. It looked, as one of the artists suggested, like a Veronese picture—except that it lacked a black page, and he was going to say, a few half-naked goddesses, but on looking about at the company he decided to leave out the latter clause.
Lila had the ex-royalty on her right, and the English duke on her left. “It isn't every hostess that can shove a duke off on her left,” some one remarked.
At the other end of the table Duffield, who was sitting one away from the host, leaned toward him, and asked, “What in the world do you suppose has happened to Banks?”
Beth turned from his royal guest and answered: “I know exactly what has happened. He went mooning along, not noticing the tide, and when the wind dropped, as it usually does here at sunset, he found he couldn't make the harbor. If I had known he hadn't come in I'd have sent some one after him in a motor-boat before this.”
All the length of the table conversation broke out at once.
“Fancy Lila's being able to make this great dungeon habitable.”
“Oh, habitable! Isn't that too strong a word?”
“No one ever denied she had executive ability; some people say too much.”
“Isn't she looking lovely?”
“Yes, but I think he has more romantic charm.”
“My dear, that's just your ghoulish admiration of murderers.”
“Well, any prison warden will tell you that they are always delightful people.”
“Do you really think he killed his uncle?”
“Certainly—only don't, please, say I said so. I'm trying to get him to give my son a job.”
“Mercy, you are brave! Or don't you care for the poor lad?”
“Where's the faithful cousin—not presentable enough for great occasions?”
“No; they said he was expected, but I see there's no place left for him.”
The hall was dimly lit, partly because such great spaces are not easy to light, but partly because Lila knew that nothing destroys beauty and conversation so much as a dazzling illumination. Now as she looked down the length of the table to her husband at the other end, she thought that she had gone too far; there really was hardly enough light, she could barely see his expression. Her eyes were never long away from him. She saw that he was making himself most agreeable; the princess was talking unceasingly. On his other side, the Duchess was beginning to contend for a little attention, but the princess was too pleased with him to let him go.
Dinner was nearly over when Lila, absorbed for an instant in her own companions and lulled to confidence in her success, saw that, in answer to some message brought by the butler, her husband had risen and left the table. She sent a footman to inquire; Mr. Bethson had been called to the telephone.
“Was it a message from Mr. Banks?” she asked.
No, the footman had not caught the name, but it was not Mr. Banks.
Bethson was gone only a few minutes, and when he came back Lila saw a change in his manner so slight that no one else would have noticed it, but to her it was strange and inexplicable. He seemed to step with a triumphant unnatural gait and a curious smile curved the corners of his mouth.
Duffield leaned forward. “A message from Banks?” he said.
“No—not from Ben,” answered Beth. “I'm afraid he's just side-stepped the party. Got himself becalmed on purpose.”
The princess, who since her stay in America had developed a tremendous fancy for ice cream, said without looking up, “Do sit down and eat this delicious ice, Mr. Bethson, before it melts.”
Getting no reply she looked where every one was now looking—at her host. He was staring in rigid horror at his empty chair, which the butler had drawn back for him.
“My place is taken,” he said.
“This is your place, sir,” said the butler.
“Where?”
“Here, sir; here,” answered the man civilly.
“Who has done this?” said Bethson, steadying himself by a hand on the table. “Who has dared to play this trick on me in my own house?”
Duffield rose and laid his hand on the younger man's shoulder.
“What are you talking about, my dear fellow? Sit down.”
Bethson flung off the hand. “I see what it is—a trap!” he shouted. “But you won't catch me! You have no proof!”
Lila came running—really running from her end of the table. She put her arm about his shoulder, and murmured to the people near him: “Please don't pay any attention to him. He has these turns sometimes when he overworks. He always has had them. It will pass in a second.” In his ear she breathed: “For heaven's sake, pull yourself together! Be a man!”
“The thing that's sitting in my chair isn't a man.”
His tone made her heart stand still. “Control yourself,” she said. “You're making the most hideous faces. Every one is watching you. There's nothing there but an empty chair.”
“Empty! Look there! Do you call that empty? He's going now—he's gone!'” He turned and stared at her as if he saw her for the first time. “Didn't you see him too? As I stand here I saw him—Ben.”
“For shame, Beth! For shame!” she murmured.
“It's these damned mediums,” he answered, as if unaware of the people standing amazed about them. “They bring people back from the dead. In old times dead men stayed dead—and murdered ones too—but nowadays we've changed all that and we let them come back and take the chairs of the living—and surely that's more unnatural than any murder could be.”
“My dear,” said Lila, achieving a faint smile, “you are really alarming our poor guests.”
He turned and looked slowly round the circle which had formed about them, and pulled himself together.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “The truth is I've been doing a lot of work with mediums lately. I'm afraid I seem merely crazy to you, but I have always had a notion I saw things hidden to most people. Forgive me if you can. I was going to suggest a toast before I sat down.” He held out his glass to his butler, who had been hovering at a word from Lila to give his employer something to drink immediately. “To absent friends—especially to good old Ben Banks.”
The guests, glad of an excuse to return to their places and behave as if nothing had happened, took it up eagerly, but as Bethson lifted his glass to drink he gave a wild ringing shriek, and flung the glass from him, using his hands to ward off some invisible danger.
“Get out!” he shouted. “Get away! I won't have it, I won't have you here!” He ran half across the hall, driving something ahead of him which no one but himself could see. When he returned he appeared content. “It's gone,” he said, bowing to right and left. “We're quite safe now. Let us sit down and finish our dinner in peace.”
Lila was at his side. “I'm afraid our guests hardly feel like sitting down again, Beth,” she said bitterly.
He looked at her in surprise. “How can you take such a terrible thing so calmly, Lila?” he said.
“What thing—what did you see?” asked Duffield, thrusting himself between the couple; but Lila would not have that. She saw that her husband was about to answer.
“Don't question him, please, Mr. Duffield,” she said; “it makes him worse. Get rid of all these people, and I'll take him upstairs.”
She succeeded in getting him into his own room, and sent for the doctor. As she sat there with him she could hear the steady throbbing of the motors taking the guests away. It was like a great retreating tide. The world, she thought, was deserting them, but she cared very little. She really believed her husband had gone mad.
When they were first alone he had said in a low confidential tone, “You know it came for me—it was after me—it's not the first time, either, in the history of the world.”
But after a little time he had grown rational and had sent for Duffield. Word came back that the lawyer had packed his bag and left the house. Every one had gone.
“He won't come to me?”
“Fe's left the house, dear,” Lila answered. “He suspects—he knows, Beth. We must face that. They all know.”
Her husband shrugged his shoulders. “What if he does know? He has no proof. Don't be afraid, Lila. I'll tell you how to conquer fear. Strike! Whenever you have reason to fear a man—strike at him!”
“Oh, Beth—no—no more of this sort of thing.”
“We can't turn back, my dear. We must go on. Self-interest must come first. If Duffield is a danger Duffield must be got rid of. No, no murder—that's too troublesome—but if it should turn out that he had been dishonest in dealing with my uncle's estate, who would pay any attention to what he said of me? I must see Azra again. I have a plan.” He began to murmur to himself, nodding and waving his hand.
She put her arms about him. “Don't talk any more,” she said. “You need sleep.”
She herself had been taking a sleeping powder for months, and now she induced him to take one. Presently he fell asleep, with his head on her arm. She was utterly exhausted, but she did not move. She sat there, perched on the edge of his bed, looking down at him. She had not felt him as near to her, as dependent upon her for months; and under her fear and despair his nearness made her almost happy.
When at last the doctor arrived he expressed more concern for her than for his patient.
Early the next morning Banks' body was found. There was nothing to suggest murder. The catboat was drifting, the body was doubled over the side with the head in the water. There were marks of one heavy blow on the back of the head. It was supposed that the boom had hit him and knocked him unconscious, and he had drowned before recovering his senses.
The coronor's inquest pronounced it death by accident. But the verdict of the world was different. A few believers in spiritism took the incident as proving that Bethson had been instrumental in his cousin's death. The absence of any apparent motive did not silence their tongues. The castle was deserted.
Bethson himself gave not the least sign that he noticed the change. He went about his business no more silent and remote than before. Murderer or not, he still wielded tremendous financial power, and those who believed him to be a murderer had an uncomfortable secondary knowledge that a man who did not hesitate to kill would hesitate even less to ruin.
From the directorates in which he held the majority of stock, it was, of course, impossible to force him out. From several boards on which he had been put as a compliment or in hope of some equivalent favor, in the first days of his rise to power, it was tactfully suggested that he resign. He definitely refused, and if he found himself forced out he took care that his displeasure was made manifest in some act of open hostility.
There is no department of life in which people are so timid as in relation to their investments, and as soon as it was understood that any one who dared to behave as if Bethson were a murderer had a dangerous fight on his hands, many people began to say that, after all, there was no proof—and if the man were entirely innocent it was rather hard on him to be condemned without any process of law.
But there was one man who knew that Bethson had in Banks' suspicions a motive for desiring his death, and that man was Duffield.

#### V

Lila, in all her bold facing of life's possible disasters, had never faced the possibility of losing her husband's affection. That had seemed more permanent than life itself; or if she had ever imagined his turning from her it was to picture him caught up in a second by a younger and more beautiful woman—suddenly, as she and he had at first loved. But to lose him as she was now losing him was so strange as to be almost unbelievable to her—to lose him because he had outgrown all need of her, because, she sometimes fancied, all the associations he had with her and her love had become loathsome to him.
There were weeks when she hardly saw him. Day after day his secretary, Seyton, would telephone from New York that Mr. Bethson was sorry, but he would not be able to get down to the castle for dinner that evening, and then later a second message—Mr. Bethson was so sorry, but he would not be able to get down at all; he had been called out of town, or he had a business meeting that would keep him late. Day after day Lila would complete a solitary day by a lonely dinner.
She was infinitely more alone than she had ever been at the cottage. There she had had her interest in the house itself to keep her busy, and the certain joy of his return to keep her happy, but here she had nothing to do but to wander through the gardens, wondering into what new schemes of crime and danger her husband was going without advice of hers.
No neighbor ever darkened her doors, and even the servants hurried away like rabbits or shrank back against the wall as she passed them. She was so lonely that she sent for Banks' boy, Floyd, to keep her company; but hers was never a temperament to enjoy companionship with childhood, and in her present strained tense mood a ten-year-old barbarian, healthy and crude, eager to fish and swim and ride the stone lions on the terrace, was anything but a pleasure. She would spend hours locked in her own room to avoid seeing his round, honest, little face.
Though her husband now told her nothing, she knew, with the almost traitorous acumen of intimate love, that he was working for the destruction of Duffield's reputation. Duncan, who had always enjoyed secrecy, had used those about him as screens even to his most philanthropic actions. She guessed that it would not be difficult to find some transaction in which Duffield, acting for the old man, might be made to appear to have acted dishonestly. Strange to say, this idea shocked Lila. She had once boasted that she was more ruthless than her husband. She was, where clean murder was concerned; but the idea of ruining an honorable warm-hearted man like Duffield for no reason except that he dared to harbor a suspicion—this went beyond what she could conceive of doing. Yet she knew that Duffield was an enemy to be feared—implacable, high-minded and wise. He, too, must be at work. The situation was this—one man must destroy the other.
Every man's hand was against her husband; she knew that. The Cawdor group, who when they dared to attack a man of Duncan's reputation had been looked upon as knaves, now when they raised their hands against Bethson were regarded as just avengers. Cawdor had acquired the mine next to the Luna—the Beechwood Mine—and was making offers of consolidation advantageous in every respect, except that they insisted on the elimination of Bethson from the board. His own board would gladly have yielded—no one more eagerly desired his elimination than they did—but a legal point, the trusteeing of Banks' stock, kept the power still in Bethson's hands. And a strange terror of him kept the board paralyzed. He had—assisted perhaps by his evil reputation—an extraordinary ability to inspire fear.
Heartbroken by his desertion of her, and frightened by the hatred of him which she saw manifested everywhere, Lila worried even more about his physical health. It was a continual nightmare to her that he might have another such seizure as he had had at the dinner—when she would not be there to get him away. She sent to New York for a young doctor she knew of, but the afternoon he came was one of the many on which Bethson did not come home.
Expecting him every moment, however, she induced the doctor to stay on, first for dinner and then to spend the night. After dinner he began to question her about her own health, in which he seemed to be more interested than in her husband's. She had been for some time now taking morphine in increasingly large doses, and she did not wish her own situation discussed. She left him abruptly, with a suggestion that young doctors should attend only to the cases they had been called to attend.
She woke late the next morning to hear that the doctor had left the house several hours before. A note from him was brought to her. He urged her to take care of herself—to regard herself as a person seriously ill. He advised her to consult a psychoanalyst.
“If I were a churchman,” he added, “I should say a clergyman.”
She crumpled the letter into a ball and flung it away. It struck her as both impertinent and sinister. She rang for her maid. At first there was no answer, and, when her finger resting permanently on the button brought a housemaid, she learned that her maid had left the house—a woman who had been with her for a year—had packed her trunk and gone without notice.
A strange suppressed excitement pervaded the house. Even little Floyd showed an unusual desire to hang about her, and once he asked shyly: “Why did Marie go away like that, Cousin Lila? There are not such things as ghosts, are there?”
At this hint she sent for Warder, the butler, a man of some intelligence and character. He, also, it appeared, wished to leave when his month was up. Lila scowled at him, until the fine line of black eyebrows ran in a continuous line across her white forehead. Why did he want to leave? She insisted on knowing why. He attempted a few civil evasions, but at length she got her answer.
For weeks there had been rumors that the castle was haunted—stories of a white figure that flitted at midnight down the great staircase. She flung her utter contempt at the man.
“And you're afraid of ghosts, Warder. Is that it?”
No, Warder was not afraid of ghosts, but last night it appeared that Marie had called the young doctor to witness the apparition on the staircase.
“It turned out to be you yourself, madam, walking in your sleep.”
If Warder had desired revenge for her recent tone he now had it. Her little face seemed to shrivel with terror.
“I walk in my sleep, Warder?”
“Yes, madam; carrying a candle.”
There was a terrible silence, in which she managed to rally her courage.
“Well, really,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders, “I can't see why that should terrify you. If it was I it wasn't a ghost.”
“No, madam.”
Prolonged questioning brought out the fact that she not only walked, she spoke; she set her candle down and acted a little scene; she did something with her hands, it seemed as if she were dropping something into a glass, and as she tipped the imaginary phial she counted—she sighed and counted. It was this counting that was so terrible.
“Good gracious, Warder, how can counting be terrible?” she asked, stamping her foot. “How do I count?”
“You say, 'Nine—ten—eleven—death,' madam.”
She sent him out of the room, with a final sneer at this cowardice. So she had broken down, too—no stronger than Bethson had been. To think that for all the months she had been counting those fatal drops—nine—ten—eleven—death. She must stop her morphine. It might kill her to stop it, but, after all——
She felt that her husband must know of this; or at least she must have the comfort of his presence. He must come to her—he must! She telephoned the office and heard from Seyton that he had gone out of town.
She guessed where he had gone—to Azra. He did nothing nowadays without consultation with the clairvoyant. Lila flung herself face downward on her unmade bed. She was utterly alone. No young and beautiful rival could have taken away her husband as completely as Azra had taken him. He lived in another world.
Azra had become a very great personality. She had always held the belief that the dealer in magic should be like a Greek oracle, not as accessible, but as inaccessible as possible; that the shrine should be approached with difficulty and delay. The tremendous publicity that had come to her after her prophecies to Bethson made it possible for her to erect barriers. She bought a large tract of rocky land in Northern New Jersey. There was a natural cavern in it of some size, and here she received her votaries. They came literally in hundreds—camping sometimes for days in tents set up just outside the gates of her wild domain.
People came from all over the country to consult her. Marvelous tales were current of her supernatural powers. She saw people one at a time and only on moonlight nights. They were obliged to walk the long mile from the entrance of her land to the mouth of the cave alone—with the knowledge that in all the great inclosure there were only Azra and her two attendants and the visitor.
Even the great Mr. Bethson was kept waiting—and he did wait—breaking his appointments in New York, night after night, humbly waiting for Azra's convenience.
At last one night toward the end of July, when the moon was full, she gave him an appointment. The high wooden gates shut behind him, and he walked across the rough rock-strewn moor toward the little wooded hill on the side of which was Azra's cave. He had long since passed beyond the crystal-gazing phase. Now under Azra's directions he himself saw visions, which rarely needed any interpretation of hers. In the cave a pale fire was smoldering. He sat down before it, while Azra and her attendants stood crooning and chanting above it.
He lost all sense of time as he sat there with his chin in his hands, gazing at the streamers of smoke. The moon, he afterward remembered, was getting low, when the floating gray smoke began to take the shape of an enormous head, a head larger than his whole body, and out of the unseen mouth he heard a voice warning him to beware of Duffield. He smiled to himself. He needed no warning on that subject; that was already being thoroughly well attended to.
Then, before he could question it, the head faded, and in its place he saw the figure of a small child, who in a high piping treble voice bade him be fearless, for no earth-born man would ever do him harm. The words flooded him with joy, bringing to him an absolute belief in his own invincibility. He had, then, nothing to fear from Duffield or any one else. Unless a woman? Was that what was meant?
The figure of the child was disappearing or, rather, was breaking up into lighter streamers of smoke, and a new form was rising—another pale child, piping to him again of courage and success: “Fear nothing, fear nothing,” the shrill little voice kept repeating, “for until the moon falls into the forest you shall prosper.”
The visions came faster and faster now; music, too, seemed to ring in his ears; again the spirit of Banks seemed to stand before him, but this time smiling in triumph. He flung himself on the ground, groaning and covering his eyes.
In the dawn of the summer morning he came to. He looked about him. Azra was sitting gazing at the fire, and did not turn her head. The two attendants had vanished. He felt stiff, all his skin was sensitive, the light hurt his eyes, pale as it was, and yet with it all he was so penetrated with a joyful confidence in himself and his future that he walked on air. The moon was setting behind the hill, setting but not falling—the eternal moon. Now indeed he had cast out fear forever. No earth-born man could ever do him harm.
When he got back to his office he found as usual a number of people waiting to see him—all those whom even the competent Seyton had not been able to put off or had not judged it desirable to evade. Duffield's lawyer was the greatest figure at the American bar. Bethson for his case had been obliged to employ an unknown attorney who would do his bidding, but Duffield could take his choice of the most honorable names. Yet it was a good sign, Bethson thought, that they should already be coming to him. They were frightened—and they had reason to be.
He went straight to his private office. Seyton told him that Mrs. Bethson had telephoned from the castle, wanting very much to speak to him as soon as he came in. He nodded but gave no orders to call the castle. There was a doctor here, too, Seyton said, who had been waiting for hours. Bethson looked up.
“A doctor?” he said.
“Mrs. Bethson's doctor, I think, sir. He is anxious about Mrs. Bethson, he told me.”
The young man was allowed to come in. He entered with a strange sense of fear. He had been shaken by his experiences of the previous night. Wakened by the repeated low knocking of the frightened maid, he had stood in the great black empty hall and had watched Lila Bethson come slowly down the great staircase. Never in all his life had he seen such mental agony depicted on any face as on hers—and the horror of that terrible counting—nine—ten—eleven—and then the whispered word “death.”
From all the whispered talk that he had heard, not only at the castle but in the world, he had expected to see in Bethson a criminal, a monster, a Nero. Instead he found himself facing a slim pale man, not much older than himself, with a delicate long profile and eyes too wide opened, that stared beyond the visitor at empty space.
“I came to speak to you about Mrs. Bethson,” he began.
“How does she seem?”
As the doctor opened his mouth to answer, the telephone on Bethson's desk tinkled. It was a private wire and rang only for those whom Seyton, in the outer office, allowed to come through. Bethson took down the receiver.
“Yes, put Mr. Cawdor on.”
There was a delay in fulfilling this order, and the doctor went on, with a hurried sense that the time allotted to him was short. “Her trouble is mental, Mr. Bethson. She must have peace of mind.”
He spoke earnestly, and was surprised and shocked at Bethson's short laugh. At first he thought this must have been occasioned by something that came over the wire, but the next instant he saw his mistake as Bethson answered, “Peace? Yes, by all means, doctor, give her that if you can. Or is it possible that even your skill is not equal to that?”
The young man, indifferent to being made fun of, replied, “For that we must have the full coöperation of the patient. I did not find Mrs. Bethson at all eager to coöperate.”
“Coöperate!” cried Bethson. “Oh, I'm sick of doctors! What you mean is that we must all cure ourselves. I'm a better doctor than you are. I am doing what I can to give her peace, security.” The young doctor thought for an instant that he was conversing with a madman—such eyes! Then a sound came over the wire, and Bethson's whole manner changed. “Ah, Cawdor, is that you? No—no—no. My answer is just what it was yesterday.” He smiled and hung up the receiver. “More peace for Mrs. Bethson—another man beaten into asking a compromise, doctor.”
The young man went away with a strange sensation of never having been heard, of never having really engaged the attention of this great financier on a question so unimportant as the life or death of his wife.
Several weeks elapsed before Bethson went back to the castle. His life was now upon an utterly new basis. He had lost the confidence, almost the acquaintance of all honest men, but he was none the worse off for that. He understood now how to control and govern them—all, every one of them. You could rule any one if you yourself were without fear. He laughed at thinking how it was that he had discovered the secret of power. If he had not committed a crime he would never have known it.
He arrived at the castle late in the afternoon, and was surprised that Lila was not in the hall to meet him. Certainly Seyton had telephoned her that he was coming.
“Where is Mrs. Bethson?” he asked Warder angrily.
“In her room, sir. The nurse said you might go up if you wished, sir.”
The nurse! Yes, he believed Seyton had said something to him about a nurse. It had made no impression. He felt a sense of annoyance, almost of disgust that Lila should be in a state to need a nurse.
He went to her room, and saw what seemed to him an utter stranger stretched upon his wife's bed. Could that face like a little ivory skull be Lila's? Those sharp black eyes like pieces of coal? The queer thin body? He stood at the foot of the bed, staring at her. She did not speak or move. Perhaps she was too weak, but she looked at him with those alien eyes, and two tears rose slowly in them and flowed down to the pillow on either side of her face.
The nurse hurried him out of the room. Mrs. Bethson was so weak; perhaps to-morrow if she were stronger——
He knew she would never be stronger, and yet before he had reached the foot of the stairs his mind had left her and was back at his own problem, his own power—the destruction of Duffield. How much better than to kill Duffield it would be to brand him to the world as a dishonest attorney—a man who had robbed Duncan, his benefactor. Who would then pay any attention to any charge Duffield might make against him? Against him there was no proof—no proof at all. Let them suspect what they would—the world could not hate him more than it did already. Let them hate him. Hatred fed something within him that gave him strength.
The next day again Lila was too weak to speak to him, but the nurses told him she grew restless and tearful if he left the castle. He consented to stay. The tower room made an excellent office.
Duffield's lawyer called up again, wishing to see him. No, Bethson refused. He would see Duffield himself—not his lawyer. There was a consultation at the other end of the wire. When would he see him? Bethson named nine o'clock the next morning. No, not later; that was his only spare time. It was true he wished to get the interview over before the stock market opened, for he was expecting a decision from the court as to the voting of the trusteed stock, and he knew a final battle for control would follow this. But also he was glad to make Duffield come to him inconveniently early like this—as a suppliant.
This telephone conversation had taken place about ten o'clock one evening. He leaned back in the same long low chair that his uncle had sat in. He contemplated his coming interview with Duffield—not thinking out what he would say, but assuring the control of his inner mood—repeating to himself until the knowledge would emanate from him, that he was secure—no earth-born man could ever harm him; no, not until the moon fell into a forest. The prophecy had taken on a promise as authoritative to him as holy writ to a mystic.
He had sat thus immovable for two hours or more when suddenly a wild scream sounded from the body of the castle, as piercing and eerie as the hoot of the owl on the night of Duncan's murder. Then that sound had made his hair stir with fright. Now his pulse did not miss a beat. He opened the door of his tower room, and found himself face to face with one of the trained nurses hurrying to call him.
“Oh, Mr. Bethson,” she said, “I'm so sorry to be obliged to tell you—but Mrs. Bethson has just died.”
He looked down at her a second in silence. Then he turned back to his room and shut the door behind him. His predominating emotion was surprise at the untimeliness of natural death. A woman of Lila's greatness of spirit should have died at some great and significant moment; she should not have sickened and failed while the fight was still on. How pointless! Life seemed to him utterly without design; there was no pattern, no plan, as optimists were continually telling you there was. It was all an ugly accident—an idiotic sequence of horror.
Well, he was not planless. Once again his mind went back to his coming interview. He would break Duffield then, once and for all. He himself was unbreakable, without fear.
He sat there all night. Once the nurse came back to ask him questions about his wife's body, but he sent her away without an answer. Early in the morning Warder came with the pretense of asking him where he would have his breakfast. He gave orders that Duffield was to be brought to him at once, on his arrival, and that he was not to be disturbed otherwise.
Punctually at nine Warder knocked on the door of the tower room to say Mr. Duffield had come.
“I told you to bring him here at once,” said Bethson, and then saw why Warder had come first himself. He had a telegram on a silver tray.
Bethson opened it absently, listening to the steps of Duffield approaching across the stone floor of the great hall. It was from Seyton; he glanced, as he always did, first at the signature. Then he read the message. It said: “Moon has fallen into Beechwood.”
His heart stopped beating; a wave of fear like physical nausea swept over him. “Warder!” he yelled. The man came running back, with a white frightened face. Bethson controlled his voice. “Get this telegram repeated, at once. There's some mistake about it. It's wrong. It must be wrong. The moon cannot have fallen into a forest.”
“No; no, indeed, sir,” the butler said soothingly, and took the yellow sheet.
Looking down, Bethson saw that his hand was shaking. This was no prelude to the interview before him. The moon—Seyton did sometimes call the Luna Mine that. He had never thought of it before in connection with Azra's prophecy.
Duffield was in the room now, looking at him. His eyes were not the eyes of a beaten man. But then, he was clever—used to wearing a mask. How calm the fellow was! But then, he did not know about the moon having fallen into a wood.
“Bethson,” said his visitor, folding his arms, “what a damned scoundrel you are!”
The fight was on now, and Bethson felt himself grow calmer again, though he was listening for Warder's return to explain the message. Either it was a mistake or a trick; some one had found out that those were the only words in all the world that could shake his courage. It could not be a mere coincidence.
He smiled his crooked smile. “Have you come all this way at this hour in order to tell me that, Duffield?” he said.
“No, I haven't come to talk,” answered his visitor.
At that moment Warder's discreet knock was heard; he entered.
“Well?” said Bethson. He braced himself.
“No mistake, sir. The message wasn't very clear, but that's the best they could make of it. The moon has fallen into some sort of wood, sir.”
There was a pause. Bethson sank into a chair and dropped his clenched fist twice on his knee. “You may go, Warder,” he said. He glanced about the room as if he would like to go himself.
He heard Duffield's voice.
“I don't suppose you need an interpreter to tell you what that means, Bethson. Cawdor has got hold of that trusteed stock. The Beechwood is taking over the Luna.”
Bethson passed his hand rapidly over his face.
“Look here, Duffield,” he said gently, “go away, will your You and I have some accounts to settle, but I won't be responsible for what I may do if you bother me to-day about your own affairs. I have other things to think of.”
“What you may do to me?” said Duffield. “What could you do to me? You're done for. We've held off on account of Lila, but now that she's dead, poor soul, now that she has killed herself——”
“Lila killed herself?” It seemed to sink him still deeper that he should hear this from another.
“Yes,” Duffield answered. “Didn't they tell you? She took an overdose when the nurse was out of the room. I held off a little on her account. Your uncle loved her; she saw it all coming. We've got you now.”
Bethson felt the armor that surrounded him was broken. He cared terribly now that his poor Lila had committed suicide. He made an effort now to regain his serenity.
“Duffield,” he said, “nothing can touch me.”
“Oh, yes, it can! Your bravo has confessed. We caught him in a bootlegging battle—and he gave you up—among others. The law has caught you at last, Bethson. Why, look at you—you're trembling with fear!”
Bethson looked down at his body; it was shaking. He looked up with an astonished stare. “It can't be fear,” he said. “I have found the way of getting rid of fear. Azra promised me—no man born on this earth can harm me.”
Duffield gave what was for him very unusual—a short laugh. “Indeed,” he said. “Well, you may be interested to know, then, that I was born at sea.”
He himself was unprepared for the effect of these words. Bethson gave a strange moaning cry, more like a dog than a man.
“Curse you for saying that,” he said. He sank down at his desk and covered his face with his hands.
“There isn't anything for you to do but to give up,” said Duffield, still with his nasal impersonality of tone. “The police will be here any moment, you know.”
So definite a threat seemed for an instant to restore Bethson's courage. “I'll fight every inch of the way,” he said. “Magic or no magic.”
Duffield was leaning against the door. “It will be an interesting trial,” he said. “I don't suppose there is one human creature whom you could get to testify for you. Think how your former associates will flock to stare at you on the stand. And the papers—the headlines! Duncan's Slayer in Death House—and the accounts of your last moments. If I were revengeful I should ask nothing better than that you should fight it out.”
Bethson looked round him cautiously, quietly, as an animal looks before it darts to escape. Duffield saw it.
“What would you give me, Bethson,” he said, and he sounded even quieter than before—“what would you give me for a loaded revolver?”
“Have you one? Give it to me. Half my fortune—if you want it.”
“Floyd's money, as you might say; but I'll give it to you for nothing, on one condition—that you don't use it until I am in the presence of witnesses.”
Bethson nodded his acceptance of this, of any conditions; and Duffield in the most matter-of-fact manner took the revolver from his coat pocket and laid it on a chair. Then he left the room, shutting the door carefully behind him.
Near the door Warder was waiting with his hat—a coarse Panama straw of unfashionable shape.
Duffield held out his hand for it. His hand was perfectly steady. Warder was not so untroubled.
“May I speak to you, sir?” he said. “I really don't know what I should do. No arrangements have been made for Mrs. Bethson's funeral, nor even a notice of her death put properly in the papers. It's quite outside the range of my experience. And the young gentleman, sir—it is certainly no house for him to remain in.”
“The young gentleman?” said Duffield.
Warder moved his hand across the hall and, looking through one of the long windows on the terrace, Duffield saw Banks' boy triumphantly astride a stone lion. He was urging it on, gripping it with his knees, waving his hand as if leading a charge or winning a tournament or perhaps merely moving forward among his devoted adherents to some great ceremonial. The morning sunlight shone brightly on his rounded young profile and short blond hair.
The sight of so much youth and gayety affected both men exactly the same way. They looked at each other and smiled, each with a shake of the head.
As they looked a single shot sounded from the lower room.
Warder with a cry started at once for the tower door, but Duffield paused, still looking out at the boy, who had changed his pose and was now bending with one hand on his knee and one on his hip to hear some plea directed to him from below.
Duffield's heart was penetrated with a sudden joy. The boy was good material, and noble, like his father—an heir such as Duncan himself might have loved.