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Page 57
"She told me some time ago that she was ill," James said pityingly.
"Ill? She has been upon the executioner's block for years. It is not
illness; that is too tame a word for it. It is torture, prolonged as
only the evil forces of Nature herself can prolong it."
Gordon rose and shook himself angrily. "I am keeping her now almost
constantly under morphine," he said. "She has suffered more lately. The
attacks have been more frequent. There has never been the slightest
possibility of a surgical operation. From the very first it was utterly
hopeless, and if it had been the dog there, I should have put a bullet
through his head and considered myself a friend." Gordon gazed with
miserable reflection at the dog. "I am glad that the _direct_ cause of
that man's death was not what it might have been," he said.
He shook himself again as a dog shakes off water. He laughed a miserable
laugh. "Well," he said, "Clemency is free now. She can go her ways as
she will. You see she resembled her mother so closely that I had to
guard her from even the sight of her father. He would have known the
truth at once. Clemency is free, but I have paid an awful price for her
freedom and for your life. If I had not done what you doubtless know I
did that night, you would have been shot, and it would have been a
struggle between myself and her father, with the very good chance of my
being killed, and Clara and the girl left defenseless. His revolver
carried six deaths in it. It would all have depended upon the quickness
of the dog, and I should have left too much hanging upon that."
"I don't see what else you could do," James said in a low voice. He was
pale himself. He did not blame Gordon. He felt that he himself, in
Gordon's place, would have done as he had done, and yet he felt as if
faced close to a horror of murder and death, and he knew from the look
upon the other man's countenance that it was the same with him.
"I saw no other way," Gordon said in a broken voice, "but--but I don't
know whether I am a murderer or an executioner, and I never shall know.
God help me! Well," he added with a sigh, "what is done, is done. Let us
go to bed."
James said when they parted at his room door that he hoped Mrs. Ewing
would have a comfortable night.
"Yes, she will," replied Gordon quietly. Then he gave the young man's
hand a warm clasp. "God bless you!" he whispered. "If this had turned
you against the child, it would have driven me madder than I am now. I
love her as if she were my own. You and your loyalty are all I have to
hold to."
"You can hold to that to the end," James returned with warmth, and he
looked at Gordon as he might have looked at his own father.
Late as it was, he wrote that night to his own father and mother,
telling them of his engagement to Clemency. There now can be no possible
need for secrecy with regard to it. James, in spite of his vague sense
of horror, felt an exhilaration at the thought that now all could be
above board, that the shutters could be flung open. He felt as if an
incubus had rolled from his mental consciousness. Clemency herself
experienced something of the same feeling. She appeared at the
breakfast-table the next morning with her hat. "Uncle says I may go with
you on your rounds," she said to James. She beamed, and yet there was a
troubled and puzzled expression on her pretty face. When she and James
had started, and were moving swiftly along the country road, she said
suddenly, "Will you tell me something?"
James hesitated.
"Will you?" she repeated.
"I can't promise, dear," he said.
"Why not?" she asked pettishly.
"Because it might be something which I ought not to tell you."
"You ought to tell me everything if--if--" she hesitated, and blushed.
"If what?" asked James tenderly.
She nestled up to him. "If you--feel toward me as you say you do."
"If. Oh, Clemency!"
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