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Page 21
The girl was watching him closely when he turned toward her. He had
frankly looked the room over, without concealing his intention. She was
breathing a little unsteadily, and her hair was shimmering gloriously
in the light of an overhead chandelier. She sat down with that light
over her, motioning him to be seated opposite her--across the same
table from which he had snatched the copper weight that had killed
Kirkstone. He had never seen anything quite so steady, quite so
beautiful as her eyes when they looked across at him. He thought of
McDowell's suspicion and of Shan Tung and gripped himself hard. The
same strange perfume hung subtly on the air he was breathing. On a
small silver tray at his elbow lay the ends of three freshly burned
cigarettes.
"Of course you remember this room?"
He nodded. "Yes. It was night when I came, like this. The next day I
went after John Keith."
She leaned toward him, her hands clasped in front of her on the table.
"You will tell me the truth about John Keith?" she asked in a low,
tense voice. "You swear that it will be the truth?"
"I will keep nothing back from you that I have told Inspector
McDowell," he answered, fighting to meet her eyes steadily. "I almost
believe I may tell you more."
"Then--did you speak the truth when you reported to Inspector McDowell?
IS JOHN KEITH DEAD?" Could Shan Tung meet those wonderful eyes as he
was meeting them now, he wondered? Could he face them and master them,
as McDowell had hinted? To McDowell the lie had come easily to his
tongue. It stuck in his throat now. Without giving him time to prepare
himself the girl had shot straight for the bull's-eye, straight to the
heart of the thing that meant life or death to him, and for a moment he
found no answer. Clearly he was facing suspicion. She could not have
driven the shaft intuitively. The unexpectedness of the thing
astonished him and then thrilled him, and in the thrill of it he found
himself more than ever master of himself.
"Would you like to hear how utterly John Keith is dead and how he
died?" he asked.
"Yes. That is what I must know."
He noticed that her hands had closed. Her slender fingers were clenched
tight.
"I hesitate, because I have almost promised to tell you even more than
I told McDowell," he went on. "And that will not be pleasant for you to
hear. He killed your father. There can be no sympathy in your heart for
John Keith. It will not be pleasant for you to hear that I liked the
man, and that I am sorry he is dead."
"Go on--please."
Her hands unclasped. Her fingers lay limp. Something faded slowly out
of her face. It was as if she had hoped for something, and that hope
was dying. Could it be possible that she had hoped he would say that
John Keith was alive?
"Did you know this man?" he asked.
"This John Keith?"
She shook her head. "No. I was away at school for many years. I don't
remember him."
"But he knew you--that is, he had seen you," said Keith. "He used to
talk to me about you in those days when he was helpless and dying. He
said that he was sorry for you, and that only because of you did he
ever regret the justice he brought upon your father. You see I speak
his words. He called it justice. He never weakened on that point. You
have probably never heard his part of the story."
"No."
The one word forced itself from her lips. She was expecting him to go
on, and waited, her eyes never for an instant leaving his face.
He did not repeat the story exactly as he had told it to McDowell. The
facts were the same, but the living fire of his own sympathy and his
own conviction were in them now. He told it purely from Keith's point
of view, and Miriam Kirkstone's face grew whiter, and her hands grew
tense again, as she listened for the first time to Keith's own version
of the tragedy of the room in which they were sitting. And then he
followed Keith up into that land of ice and snow and gibbering Eskimos,
and from that moment he was no longer Keith but spoke with the lips of
Conniston. He described the sunless weeks and months of madness until
the girl's eyes seemed to catch fire, and when at last he came to the
little cabin in which Conniston had died, he was again John Keith. He
could not have talked about himself as he did about the Englishman. And
when he came to the point where he buried Conniston under the floor, a
dry, broken sob broke in upon him from across the table. But there were
no tears in the girl's eyes. Tears, perhaps, would have hidden from him
the desolation he saw there. But she did not give in. Her white throat
twitched. She tried to draw her breath steadily. And then she said:
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