"That's an attractive girl," he told his cousin.
The little cherubic minister, who worried in secret about his cousin's soul, was delighted. He dreamed often of having his cousin Matthew reformed by the influence of some sweet woman. A Dominican religious brought her forward.
"Miss Holt, Miss Agnes Holt." Kerrigan was introduced to her. He talked banalities to her for a half-hour, when she shyly took her leave of him, blushing furiously under the glances of her schoolmates. When he was alone Kerrigan smiled queerly, with a distant look in his eyes.
At forty-five there comes always to a man of Kerrigan's type, with the first gray hairs, the fear of age. There will be an inevitable day when he will no longer attract women, and when, in the bars and about the clubs, he will be referred to as an old man of another generation, and there arises in his mind the fear of loneliness in the fifties and the sixties, with Death hurrying breathlessly toward him day by day. The only thing to do then is to begin anew with a young wife, far away from the swirl of the city.
"It's the only life," they say pathetically; "a wife and kiddies, a little bit of land somewhere, away from all this stuff." And they wave their hands at the gleaming glasses and the pictures on the bar-room walls. "There's nothing to it," they aver; and they drink up and have another one.
He met the religious as he was going away.
"That Miss Holt," he said, "is a very attractive girl." It was the only adjective he knew to fit her.
"Yes," the nun agreed. "We all like her. She 's been with us nearly all her life. Her father died when she was young. He was an inventor; Leonard Holt was his name."
"The name is familiar." Kerrigan was shocked, but his self-restraint was superb. "Died after some business depression, if I remember aright?"
"He was murdered!" The little religious's eyes flashed magnificently. "Murdered! In the way of business!"
Kerrigan had heard that word used of Holt's end more than once. But the fourteen years had been full ones, and the matter had not troubled him much--things like that happened so often. And, besides, it was not true. A murder predicates a murderer, and he was no murderer. It was all a business arrangement. And the man could n't stand the gaff. That was all!
"All rotten foolishness!" he swore. But somehow, this last time, perhaps on account of the dramatic meeting with the daughter, it would not go out of his head.
And no more would go out of his head the thought and picture of Agnes Holt in her white dress and blue sash, with her Saint Cecilia profile. She haunted him night and day. At that period, peculiar in a man as the late thirties are in women, he fell in love, or in what for him would pass for love. In all his selfish business career he had known intimately no woman like her, and her aloof, unrifled virginity struck him like a blinding flash of light.
"After all," he said, in the manner of his kind, "there is nothing on God's earth like a sweet, pure woman!"
And for days he thought about her and about love, not as a young man might, in a burning equation with factors of living flame, but in the smoldering symbols of maturity, which are so long in the consuming and so hard to quench. He would go away from Broadway--"quit the whole condemned shooting-match," as he weirdly termed it--and take a place in Westchester or Long Island, a good, comfortable house with grounds to it. They would be glad to have him in such a community. He would be one of the village trustees; run for president. And he would fashion a new life there with a young and beautiful bride, whom everybody would envy him. There would be children, too. Undoubtedly there would be children.
"She 'll be glad to get away from the convent," he thought shrewdly. And, after all, perhaps he had treated Holt a bit shabbily. He would make up for it in the way he would treat his daughter. She should wear diamonds.
"I 'm thinking of marrying and settling down, Father John," he told the little clergyman one day.
"I 'm glad to hear of it, Cousin Matthew," he said, rubbing his plump little hands, his cherub's face beaming benignantly. "I 'm delighted. I am so!" He shook his finger waggishly. "And I think I know the young lady, too."
"It's the little Holt girl we met at the convent that day."
"You must come over and meet her again," Father John planned. "I 'll talk to the Mother Superior."
And so, with due chaperonage, Kerrigan met Agnes Holt several times, and each time he became more impressed with her. She would say little, blushing mostly, and playing with something in her lap. She understood vaguely that this portly, mustached man was thinking of marrying her, but that denoted nothing to her, so cloistered had her life been.
"Yes," or "No," or "Thank you," was nearly the limit of her conversation, and she had difficulty in not adding "sir." At times she would accompany him, with Father John, to a matinée in New York to see a carefully chosen family production, or to have tea at the less-worldly restaurants. Occasionally she would burst out with a naïve exclamation.
"I once rode in a Fifth Avenue bus with Sister Mary Joseph," was the sort of thing she would vouchsafe.
"If you were n't to marry her," Father John said, "she would enter the convent as a lay sister."
More and more as he met her Kerrigan's mind was taken up by the idea of her father. The contour of her face; a certain look of her eye; a light in her hair when the sun shone on it, would recall the inventor, and immediately within him would rise a measure of uneasiness which he could not get rid of. He once asked her if she remembered him.
"He died when I was young, very young," she said. "An accident in a ferry-boat. I have spent all my life with the sisters."
As he went to and from the convent, he often met the religious who had spoken of Holt's death as murder. And as often as he met her, so often would his mind revert to that sinister word, and he would find himself arguing about it internally, as though he were defending himself in a court of law. He would try to shake off the mood.
"Of all the blamed foolishness!" he would tell himself angrily.
But the idea would persist, and, growing morbid about it, he found himself reading carefully the charges of judges in cases of homicide. He went to the public library and conned upon the subject in encyclopedias. He read of the magnificent fair play in trial by jury.
"I guess that settles it," he told himself. "There 's nothing to it."
He went on, however, and, reading farther, he came on the ancient custom of trial by ordeal of justice--of the test of a man's innocence by touching the dead body of a murdered man. If the person suspected were guilty, blood would exude from the corpse. A couplet of Shakespeare's was quoted--from the play of "Richard III":
O, gentlemen, see, see! dead Henry's wounds Open their congeal'd mouths and bleed afresh!
The thing made his flesh creep. He read of the grisly test of the dead hand, and of the ordeal by fire and the ordeal by poison.
"There 's no sense to that!" he muttered angrily, and little beads of perspiration gathered on his brow. Even the innocent would waver under such a test. Trial by jury--that was the sensible way.
And then, one day, in a bleak sitting-room in the convent, he proposed to Agnes Holt.
"Agnes--" he cleared his throat, and he was honestly husky--"I suppose you have understood that my intentions toward you had a wedding in view. I can make you very happy."
"I must talk to the Mother Superior," she said, blushing furiously, her voice low.
He took her hand, and, opening a case, put a ring on her finger.
"I have talked to the Mother Superior, myself," he told her, "and that is all right." He drew her toward him, trembling a little, and on her forehead, with his mustached lips, he kissed her. He was suddenly still, and strangely cold. The touch of that skin reminded him of his last hand-shake with Leonard Holt.
"I must put an end to this obsession!" he told himself angrily, that night at his hotel, and he poured himself stiff drinks of Bourbon. Should he tell Father John? No! he decided. He knew Father John well for a relative and a friend and a genial companion with lovable peccadillos. But he knew, too, that the little clergyman could thunder with the thunder of Sinai. Marry the daughter of a man in whose death he was implicated! Never would Father John consent. The cleric would not understand. What could a priest know of business?
"It's no use going to him," Kerrigan decided.
He stopped a moment, thinking. And, half-laughing and half-nervous, he remembered a conversation with a friend of his, a great Wall Street operator, who combined the shrewdness of his kind with his kind's superstition, and had recourse in moments of tension to clairvoyants and tarot cards. He told Kerrigan of M. Sergius.
"He's a Greek monk--been expelled from Mount Athos for practising magic. What that man can tell you--"
"I suppose the next thing you 'll tell me is that he raises spirits."