Then his face went white as a sheet, he staggered where he stood and the match burned down to the flesh of his hands and scorched it. For in the far corner he had perceived, flat upon its back, a haggard, bloodstained, white-haired thing that winked and blinked at him with vacant eyes and muttered and gibbered incoherently.
* * * * *
Reason came back to Blalock one day many weeks later.
He opened his eyes with the light of understanding in them, and they told him from his surrounding that he was in a hospital. Outside, the sun was shining brightly, and in a little park, just beyond, birds were singing and the breeze brought him the sound of children at play.
“Awake at last, are you?” asked the white-capped nurse who came into the room just then.
“Yes,” said Blalock, in a rasping whisper. He did not know it then, but the calm, soothing voice he once had boasted was his best asset in a sick room, was gone forever. The terrific strain to which he had put his vocal cords in his paroxysms in the dark cell had shattered them.
“You are doing splendidly,” the nurse assured him brightly. “You have been seriously ill, but you are recovering rapidly now.”
“No,” said Blalock positively, as one who knows. “I shall never get well. Give me a mirror, please.”
“I don’t believe there is one handy,” she evaded, loath to let him see the havoc in his face.
But he insisted.
“Please,” he begged, “I am prepared and I do not think I will be overcome. I will be brave.”
Reluctantly, then, she started to place the silvered glass in his hand. As he reached out to take it, he stopped, his hand half-way. The hand he was accustomed to see, with its tapering fingers and well-kept nails, the hand that so deftly had performed delicate operations, was gone. Instead was a slim, clawlike thing, with distorted knuckles and joints.
Blalock finally extended it, took the mirror and, slowly but steadily, brought it into line with his eyes. He had expected some changes, but not the sight that greeted him. The black, wavy hair had given place to locks of snowy white. His face was drawn and wrinkled, and lack-luster eyes stared back at him from cavernous sockets. Long he gazed at this apparition, then silently he let the mirror fall upon the cover and closed his eyes.
“Don’t take it so hard, doctor,” begged the nurse. “You have been through a harrowing experience and your face shows it now. But in a short time--” The lie did not come easily, and her tongue faltered.
“Never mind that,” whispered Blalock. “It doesn’t matter now. Send for Stevenson, please.”
The chairman of the Prison Commission came without delay. Compelling himself to conceal the repulsion he felt at sight of the broken man upon the bed, he bustled in with forced pleasantries.
“Stevenson,” said Blalock when finally the other had taken a chair and the nurse had withdrawn. “I have something to tell you. That day I went into the dark cell--”
“Now, now, old man,” soothed Stevenson, laying a restraining hand upon the other’s arm. “Don’t let’s talk about that. We abolished it that very day. Why bring up that awful experience of yours? No one knows about it but the commission, the warden and your doctor and nurse here. We all are pledged not to talk about it, and the newspapers didn’t have a line except that you were taken ill. Let the past take care of itself, Blalock, old man, and let us talk of other things.”
A flash of the old will power shone in the sick man’s eyes.
“No,” he said firmly. “No, Stevenson, the past cannot take care of itself. Bend closer, Stevenson, I must tell you something, and it seems I’m not strong enough yet to talk out loud.
“That day I so boastfully demanded that I be locked up in ‘solitary.’ I thought I knew myself and my will power. I believed that I had such control over my mind and my body that I could defy any torture man might devise, without quailing--despite the knowledge that my conscience was not the lily-white thing I had led others to believe it was. For, Stevenson, my conscience was black--as black as hell! It held the knowledge of a great sin on my part, a huge wrong that had been done another.
“But I had stifled it by my will power until I believed it a thing that was dead, that could never throw off the bondage to which I had doomed it, and arise and accuse me. It was to prove that I was superior to it that I deliberately chose to be locked up with it where, alone with my thoughts, I could prove myself the master, once for all.
“For Martin Ellis had shaken my confidence. Where before I had been certain I was doubtful, I wanted to prove him a liar and at the same time satisfy myself that I was a free man and not the galley slave of that thing which we call a guilty conscience.
“In that cell, that conscience which I believed I had killed rose up to show me it had been but sleeping. Under other conditions it might have slept on indefinitely. In there it overwhelmed me with a sense of its power and made me feel that I was about to meet my God without even so much as a veil behind which to hide my guilty thoughts. No matter which way I turned I saw an accusing finger pointing at me out of the darkness and the solitude was shattered by a voice which cried out that those who sin must pay and pay and pay until the slate is wiped clean. And I had sinned, but I had not paid.
“Conscience is a terrible thing once it is aroused, Stevenson. It is living, vibrant, and it lashes and scourges until it has exacted its toll. That was what it did to me there in the darkness, alone and at its mercy, and with no chance to escape. And in my agony and fear I cursed the God who had created me and saddled me with this thing. I learned my lesson, though, before I was through. I who had presumed to place my own puny will above the Great Eternal Will; I who had dared to believe that the great order of things, the plan by which we all must live and die, must make an exception of me, learned that I was wrong.
“_Martin Ellis is innocent_, Stevenson, and I trust to you to see that justice is done. He did not kill Agnes Keller and I knew it. And I stood by and let him be convicted. More, I took the stand against him and helped to make that conviction certain. I told only the truth in my testimony, but I did not tell all I knew and what I omitted would have saved Ellis. I did not want to testify at all, but the prosecution refused to let me take advantage of the confidential relation which is supposed to exist between physician and patient.
“The state was right in its theory that the man who strangled Agnes Keller did so because he was responsible for her condition and did not wish to marry her. She came to me in my study on the night she met her death and told me she had discovered she was about to become a mother.
“She refused to take any steps I suggested and she said that her child, when it was born, must have the legal right to bear the name of its father. And that very night she was lured into an automobile with the promise that the man who was to blame would take her to a nearby town and make her his wife. But on that lonely country road he turned upon her and killed her with his bare hands.
“And how do I know these things? Because, Stevenson, I was the man responsible for her condition, _and it was I who killed her_!”
[Illustration]
_The_ Closing Hand
_A Powerful Short Story_
_by_ Farnsworth Wright
Solitary and forbidding, the house stared specterlike through scraggly trees that seemed to shrink from its touch.
The green moss of decay lay on its dank roofs, and the windows, set in deep cavities, peered blindly at the world as if through eyeless sockets. So forbidding was its aspect that boys, on approaching its cheerless gables, stopped their whistling and passed on the opposite side of the street.
Across the fields, a few huddled cottages gazed through the falling rain, as if wondering what family could be so bold as to take up its abode within the gloomy walls of that old mansion, whose carpetless floors for two years had not felt the tread of human feet.
In an attic room of the house two sisters lay in bed, but not asleep. The younger sister cringed under the dread inspired by the bleak place. The elder laughed at her childish fears, but the younger felt the spell of the old building and was afraid.
“I suppose there is really nothing to frighten me in this dreary old house,” she admitted, without conviction in her voice, “but the very feel of the place is horrible. Mother shouldn’t have left us alone in this gruesome place.”
“Stupid,” her sister scolded, “with all the silverware downstairs, somebody has to be here, for fear of burglars.”
“Oh, don’t talk about burglars!” pleaded the younger girl. “I am afraid. I keep imagining I hear ghostly footsteps.”
Her sister laughed.
“Go to sleep, Goosie,” she said.
“‘Haunted’ houses are nothing but superstition. They exist only in imagination.”
“Why has nobody lived here for two years, then? They tell me that for five years every family moved out after being here just a short time. The whole atmosphere of the house is ghastly. And I can’t forget how the older Berkheim girl was found stabbed to death in her bed, and nobody ever knew how it happened. Why, she may have been murdered in this very room!”