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Mrs. Balfame

[Pg 177] <h2>CHAPTER XX</h2> Mrs. Balfame was whirled to Dobton in ten minutes—herself, she fancied, the very centre of a whirlwind. The automobile was pursued by three cars containing members of the press, which shot past just before they reached Dobton Courthouse, that the occupants might leap out and fix their cameras. Other men and women of the press stood before the locked gate of the jail yard, several holding cameras. But once more the reading public was forced to be content with an appetising news-story illustrated by a tall black mummy. Mrs. Balfame walked past them holding her clenched hands under her veil, but to all appearance composed and indifferent. The sob-sisters were enthusiastic, and the men admired and disliked her more than ever. Your true woman always weeps when in trouble, just as she blushes and trembles when a man selects her to be his comforter through life. The Warden and his wife, who but a few weeks since had moved into their new quarters, had moved out again without a murmur and with an unaccustomed thrill. What a blessed prospect after screaming drunks, drug-fiends and tame commercial sinners! The doors clanged shut; Mrs. Balfame mounted the stairs hastily, and was still composed enough to exclaim with pleasure and to thank the Warden's wife, Mrs.[Pg 178] Larks, when she saw that flowers were on the table and even on the window-sills. "I guess you'll stand it all right," said Mrs. Larks proudly. "Just make yourself at home and I'll have your lunch up in a jiffy." Mrs. Cummack and Mrs. Gifning had come in the car with Mrs. Balfame, and Cummack and several other men of standing arrived almost immediately to assure her, with pale disturbed faces, that they were doing their best to get her out on bail. While she was trying to eat her lunch, the telephone bell rang, and her set face became more animated as she recognised Rush's strong confident voice. He had read the news in the early edition of the afternoon papers, in New York, telephoned to Dobton and found that his immediate fear was realised and that she was in the County Jail. He commanded her to keep up her spirits and promised to be with her at four o'clock. Then she begged her friends to go and let her rest and sleep if possible; they knew just how serious that consultation with her lawyer must be. When she was alone, however, she picked up the telephone, which stood on a side table, and called up the office of Dr. Anna Steuer. Ever since her arrest she had been dully conscious of her need of this oldest and truest of her friends. It came to her with something of a shock as she sat waiting for Central to connect, that she had leaned upon this strong and unpretentious woman far more than her calm self-satisfied mind had ever admitted. Dr. Anna's assistant answered the call, and when she heard Mrs. Balfame's voice broke down and wept loudly. [Pg 179] "Oh, do be quiet," said Mrs. Balfame impatiently. "I am in no danger whatever. Connect me with the Doctor." "Oh, it ain't only that. Poor—poor Doctor! She's been all in for days, and this morning she just collapsed, and I sent for Dr. Lequeur, and he pronounced it typhoid and sent for the ambulance and had her taken out to Brabant Hospital. The last thing she said—whispered—was to be sure not to bother you, that you would hear it soon enough—" Mrs. Balfame hung up the receiver, which had almost fallen from her shaking hand. She turned cold with terror. Anna ill! And when she most wanted her! A little window in her brain opened reluctantly, and superstition crept in. Beyond that open window she seemed to hear the surge of a furious and irresistible tide. Had it been waiting all these years to overleap the barriers about her well ordered life and sweep her into chaos? She frowned and put her thoughts more colloquially. Had her luck changed? Was Fate against her? When she thought of Dwight Rush, it was only to shrink again. If anything happened to him—and why not? Men were killed every day by automobiles, and he had an absentminded way of walking— She sprang to her feet and paced up and down the two rooms of the suite, determined upon composure, and angry with herself. She recovered her mental balance (so rarely disturbed by imaginative flights), but her spirits were at zero; and she was sitting with her elbows on her knees, her hands pressed to her face when Rush entered promptly at four o'clock. He was startled at the face she lifted. It looked older but [Pg 180]indefinably more attractive. Her inviolable serenity had irritated even him at times, although she was his innocent ideal of a great lady. The Warden, who had unlocked the door, left them alone, and Rush sat down and took both her hands in his warm reassuring grasp. "You are not to be the least bit frightened," he said. "The great thing for you to remember is that your husband's political crowd rules, and simply laughs at your arrest. They are more positive than ever that some political enemy did it. Balfame's temper was growing shorter and shorter, and he had many enemies, even in his own party. But the crowd will pull every wire to get you off, and they can pull wires, all right—" "But on what evidence am I arrested? What did those abominable people say to the Grand Jury? Am I never to know?" "Well, rather. It's all in the afternoon papers, for one of the reporters got the evidence before the Grand Jury did." He had taken off his overcoat, and he crossed the room and took from a pocket a copy of The Evening News. She glanced over it with her lips drawn back from her teeth. It contained not only the story the enterprising Mr. Bruce had managed to obtain from Frieda and Conrad Jr., but a corroboration of the maid's assertion that, warned by the family friend and lawyer, Mr. Dwight Rush, to disappear, she had gone to Papa Kraus for advice. Not a word, however, of blackmail. "So the public believes already that I am a murderess! No doubt I should be convinced as readily [Pg 181]myself. It is all so adroit!" Mrs. Balfame spoke quietly but with intense bitterness. "I suppose I must be tried—more and still more publicity. No one will ever forget it. Do you suppose it is true young Kraus saw me that night?" "God knows!" He got up again and moved nervously about the room. "I wish I could be sure. That is the point to which I must give the deepest consideration—whether you are to admit or not that you went out. The Grand Jury and Gore believe it. Young Kraus has a very good name. Frieda has always been well behaved. There are six Germans on the Grand Jury, moreover. We must see that none get on the trial jury. Gore wants to believe—" "But he was a friend of Dave's." "Exactly. He is making much of that point. Affects to be filled with righteous wrath because you killed his dear old friend. Trust a district attorney. All they care for is to win out, and he has his spurs to win, in the bargain. I met him a few moments ago; he was about equally full of gin fizzes and the 'indisputable fact' that you are the only person in sight with a motive. Oh, don't! Don't!" Mrs. Balfame had broken down. She flung her arms over the table and her head upon them. More than once in her life she had shed tears both diplomatic and spontaneous, but for the first time since she was a child she sobbed heavily. She felt forlorn, deserted, in awful straits. "Anna is ill," she articulated. "Anna! My one real friend—the only one that has meant anything to[Pg 182] me. Life has gone pretty well with me. Now everything is changed. I know that terrible things are about to happen to me." "Not while I am alive. I heard of Dr. Anna's illness on my way to New York. Lequeur was on the train. You—you must let me take her place. I am devoted to you heart and soul. You surely know that." "But you are not a woman. It's a woman friend I want now, a strong one like Anna. Those other women—oh, yes, they're devoted to me—have been, but they've suddenly ceased to count, somehow. Besides, they'll soon believe me guilty. I hate them all. Only Anna would have understood—and believed." Rush had been administering awkward little pats to the soft masses of her hair. Suddenly he realised that his faith in her complete innocence was by no means as stable as it had been; she had confessed to him that she had been in the grove that night stalking the intruder. How absurd to believe that she had gone out unarmed. He had read the circumstantial details of the reporter's interviews with Frieda and young Kraus. While the writers were careful not to make the downright assertion that Mrs. Balfame had fired the fatal shot, the public saw her in the act of levelling one of the pistols—so mighty is the power of the trained and ruthless pen. As he stood looking down upon his unexpected surrender to emotional excitement, he asked himself deliberately: What more natural, if she had a pistol in her hand and that low-lived creature presented himself abruptly and alone, than that it should go off of its own accord, so to speak, whether hers had been the bullet[Pg 183] to penetrate that loathsome target or not? If so, what had she done with the pistol? He sat down and laid his hand firmly on her arm. "There is something I must tell you. It is something Frieda forgot to tell the reporter, but she gave it to the Grand Jury. With the help of a couple of extra gin fizzes, I extracted it from Gore. It is this: she told the Grand Jury that several times when she did her weekly cleaning upstairs she saw a pistol in the drawer of a table beside your bed. Will—won't you tell me?" He felt the arm in his clasp grow rigid, but Mrs. Balfame answered without a trace of her recent agitation: "I told you before that I never had a pistol. It would be like her to be spying about among my things, but I wonder she would admit it." "She is delighted with her new importance, and, I fancy, has been bribed to tell all she knows." "In that case she wouldn't mind telling more. And no doubt she will think of other sensational items before the trial. She will have awakened in the night after the crime and heard me drop the pistol between the walls, or she will have seen me loading it on the afternoon of the shooting." "Yes, there is no knowing when those low-grade imaginations, once started, will stop. Memory ceases to function in brains of that sort, and its place is taken by a confused jumble of induced or auto suggestions, which are carefully straightened out by the practised lawyer in rehearsals. But I almost wish that you had taken a pistol out that night and would tell me where to find it. I'd lose it somewhere out in the marsh." "I had no pistol." Not yet could she take him into[Pg 184] her confidence to that extent, although she knew that he was about to stake his professional reputation on her acquittal. He dismissed the subject abruptly. "By the way, I gave the story of Frieda's attempt to blackmail you to Broderick and two other men just before I left town—laying emphasis on the fact that you always drank a glass of filtered water before going to bed. They made a wry face over that, but it is news and they must publish it. There are many things in your favour—particularly Frieda's assertion before the coroner that she knew nothing of the case. She is a confessed perjurer. Also, why didn't she answer when you called up to her, if she was on the back stairs? There are things that satisfy a grand jury that will not go down with a trial jury. Now you must, you must trust me." She looked up at him dully. But in a moment her eyes warmed and she smiled faintly. All the female in her responded to the traditional strength and power of the male. She also knew the sensitiveness of man's vanity and the danger either of starving it or dealing it a sudden blow. She sometimes felt sorry for men. It was their self-appointed task to run the planet, and they must be reminded just so often how wonderful they were, lest they lose courage; one of the several obliging weaknesses of which women rarely scrupled to take advantage. As she put out her hand and took his, she looked very feminine and sweet. Her face was flushed and tears had softened her large blue-grey eyes that could look so virginal and cold. "I know you will get me off. Don't imagine for a moment I doubt that; it is a sustaining faith that will[Pg 185] carry me through the trial itself. But it is this terrible ordeal in prison that I dread—and the publicity—my good name dragged in the dust." "You can change that name for mine the day you are acquitted." It suddenly occurred to her that this might be a very sensible thing to do, and simultaneously she appreciated the fact that he possessed what was called charm and magnetism. Moreover, the complete devotion of even a passably attractive member of the over-sex in alarming predicaments was a very precious thing. Possibly for the first time in her life she experienced a sensation of gratitude, and she smiled at him so radiantly that he caught his breath. "No one but you could have consoled me for the loss of Anna, but you are not to say one word of that sort to me until I am out of this dreadful place. I couldn't stand the contrast! Will you promise?" "Very well." "Now will you really do something for me—get me a sleeping powder from the druggist? To-morrow I shall be myself again, but I must sleep to-night." "I'll get it." His voice was matter of fact, for love made certain of his instincts keen if it blunted others. "That is, if you will promise to go to bed early and see none of these reporters, men or women. They are camped all over the Courthouse yard." She gave an exclamation of disgust. "I'll never see another newspaper person as long as I live. They are responsible for this, and I hate them." "Good! You shall have the powder in ten minutes. Oh, by the way, will you give me a written permit to pass the night in your house? I want to go through[Pg 186] your husband's papers and see if I can find any clue to unknown enemies. He may have received threatening letters. I can obtain the official permission without any difficulty." She wrote the permit unsuspiciously. At nine o'clock that night he let himself into the Balfame house determined to find the pistol before morning. He knew the police would get round to the inevitable search some time on the following day. <hr /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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