Omaha daily bee., 1919-07-21
CHAPTER XVII.
Evil Days

son case" Trent wrote to Sir Jane:
Molloy from Munich, whittier he hat
gone Immediately after handing ir
at the Record office a brief dis.
patch bring his work on the case tc
an unexciting close. What sent
you wasn't worth one-tenth of the
amount; but I should have no scruple
about pocketing it, if hadn't taken
a fancy-never mind why-not to
touch any money at all for this
business, I should like you, if there
is no objection, to pay for the stuff
at your ordinary space-rate, and
hand the money to some charity
which does not devote to bullying
people, if you know of any such.
have come to this place to see
/ some old friends and arrange my
ideas. and the idea that comes out
uppermost is that for a little while
l want some employment with ac-
tivity in it. | find I can't paint at
all; I couldn't paint a fence Will
you try me as your own correspond
ent somewhere? If you can find me
a good adventure | will send you
good accounts. After that | could
settle down and work"
Sir James sent him instructions
by telegram to proceed at once to
Kurland and Livonia, where Citizen
Browning was abroad again. and
town and countryside blazed in re-
volt. 1t was rowing commission,
and for two months Trent followed
his luck. 1t served him not less
we'll than usual. He was the only
correspondent who saw General
Dragilew killed in the street at Vol
mar by girl of Is. He saw burn
ings, lynchings. fusilades, hangings;
each day his soul sickened afresh
at the imbecilities born of misrule.
Many nights he lay down in danger.
Many days he went fasting. But
there was never an evening or a
morning when he did not see the
face of the woman whom he hope
lessly loved
He discovered in himself an un-
happy pride at the lasting force of
this infatuation. 1t interested him
as a phenamenon; it amazed and en-
lightened him. Such thing had not
visited him before; it confirmed so
much that he had found dubious in
the recorded experience of men.
1t was not that, at 81, he coulu
pretend to ignorance of this world
of emotion. About his knowledge,
let it be enough to say that what
he had learned had come unpursued
and unpurchased, and was without
intolerable memories; broken to the
realities of sex, he was still troubled
by its inscrutable history; he went
through life full of strange respect
for certain feminine weakness and
a very simple terror of certain fem
mime strength. He had held to
rather lukewarm faith that some
thing remained in him to be called
forth, and that the voice that should
call would be heard in its own time,
if ever, and not through any seeking.
But he had not thought of the pos
sibility that, if this proved true some
day, the truth might come in sim
lister shape. The two buildings that
had taken him utterly by surprise
in the matter of his feelings towards
Mabel Manderson were the insane
suddenness of its uprising in full
strength and its extravagant hope
lessness. Before it came, he had
been much disposed to laugh at the
permanence of unrequieted passion
as generous boyish delusion. He
knew now that he had been wrong,
and he was living bitterly in the
knowledge.
Before the eye of his fancy the
woman always came just as she was
when he had first had sight of her,
with the gesture which he ad sur
prised as he walked past unseen on
the edge of the cliff; that great ges-
ture of passionate joy in her new
liberty which had told him more
plainly than speech that her widow
hood was a release from torment,
and had confirmed with terrible
force the suspicion, active in his
mind before, that it was her pass
port to happiness with a man whom
she loved. He could not with cer-
tainty name to himself the moment
when he had first suspected that it
might be so. The seed of the thought
must have been sown, he believed,
at his first meeting with Marlowe;
his mind would have noted automat
ically that such evident strength and
grace, with the sort Of locke and
manners that the tall young man
possessed, might 20 far with any wo-
man of unfixed affections. And the
connection of this with what Mr..
Cupples had told him of the Man.
dersons' married life must have
formed itself in the unconscious
depths of his mind. Certainly it had
presented itself as an already es-
tablished thing when he began,
after satisfying himself of the iden-
tity of the murderer, to cast about
for the motive of the crime. Motive.
motive! How desperately he had
sought for another. turning his
back upon that grim thought, the
Marlowe-obsessed by passion like
himself, and privy perhaps to mad
dneing truths about the wife's un-
happine ness-had taken leaf, the
guiltiest. from the book of Both
we'll. But in all his investigations
at the time, in all his broodings on
the matter afterwards, he had been
able to discover nothing else that
could prompt Marlowe to such a
deed-nothing but that temptation,
the whole strength of which he could
not know, but which if it had existed
must have pressed urgently upon a
bold spirit in which scruple had
been somehow paralyzed. If he
could trust his senses at all, the
young man was neither insane nor
by nature evil. But that could not
clear him. Murder for woman's
sake, he thought, was not rare
crime, Heaven knew! If the modern
e