The Indian Drum by William MacHarg (classic english novels txt) 📕

Constance had recognized no relic of uneasiness from Uncle Benny's last appeal to her; she understood that thoroughly. Or, at least, she had understood that; now was there a change in the circumstances of that understanding, because of what had happened to Alan, that she found herself re-defining to herself her relation with Henry? No; it had nothing to do with Henry, of course; it referred only to Benjamin Corvet. Uncle Benny had "gone away" from his house on Astor Street, leaving his place there to his son, Alan Conrad. Something which had disturbed and excited Alan had happened to him on the first night he had passed in that house; and now, it appeared, he had been prevented from passing a second night there. What had prevented him had been an attempted robbery upon the street, her father had said. But suppose it had been something else than robbery.

She could not formulate more definitely this thought, but it persisted; she could not deny it entirely and shake it off.

To Alan Conrad, in the late afternoon of that day, this same thought was coming far more definitely and far more persistently. He had been awake and sane since shortly after noonday. The pain of a head which ached throbbingly and of a body bruised and sore was beginning to give place to a feeling merely of lassitude—a languor which revisited incoherence upon him when he tried to think. He shifted himself upon his bed and called the nurse.

"How long am I likely to have to stay here?" he asked her.

"The doctors think not less than two weeks, Mr. Conrad."

He realized, as he again lay silent, that he must put out of his head now all expectation of ever finding in Corvet's house any such record as he had been looking for. If there had been a record, it unquestionably would be gone before he could get about again to seek it; and he could not guard against its being taken from the house; for, if he had been hopeless of receiving credence for any accusation he might make against Spearman while he was in health, how much more hopeless was it now, when everything he would say could be put to the credit of his injury and to his delirium! He could not even give orders for the safeguarding of the house and its contents—his own property—with assurance that they would be carried out.

The police and hospital attendants, he had learned, had no suspicion of anything but that he had been the victim of one of the footpads who, during that month, had been attacking and robbing nightly. Sherrill, who had visited him about two o'clock, had showed that he suspected no other possibility. Alan could not prove otherwise; he had not seen his assailant's face; it was most probable that if he had seen it, he would not have recognized it. But the man who had assailed him had meant to kill; he had not been any ordinary robber. That purpose, blindly recognized and fought against by Alan in their struggle, had been unmistakable. Only the chance presence of passers-by, who had heard Alan's shouts and responded to them, had prevented the execution of his purpose, and had driven the man to swift flight for his own safety.

Alan had believed, in his struggle with Spearman in Corvet's library, that Spearman might have killed rather than have been discovered there. Were there others to whom Alan's presence had become a threat so serious that they would proceed even to the length of calculated murder? He could not know that. The only safe plan was to assume that persons, in number unknown, had definite, vital interest in his "removal" by violence or otherwise, and that, among them, he must reckon Henry Spearman; and he must fight them alone. For Sherrill's liking for him, even Constance Sherrill's interest and sympathy were nullified in practical intent by their admiration for and their complete confidence in Spearman. It did not matter that Alan might believe that, in fighting Spearman, he was fighting not only for himself but for her; he knew now certainly that he must count her as Spearman's; her! Things swam before him again dizzily as he thought of her; and he sank back and closed his eyes.

A little before six Constance Sherrill and Spearman called to inquire after him and were admitted for a few moments to his room. She came to him, bent over him, while she spoke the few words of sympathy the nurse allowed to her; she stood back then while Spearman spoke to him. In the succeeding days, he saw her nearly every day, accompanied always by her father or Spearman; it was the full two weeks the nurse had allotted for his remaining in the hospital before he saw her alone.

They had brought him home, the day before—she and her father, in the motor—to the house on Astor Street. He had insisted on returning there, refusing the room in their house which they had offered; but the doctor had enjoined outdoors and moderate exercise for him, and she had made him promise to come and walk with her. He went to the Sherrill house about ten o'clock, and they walked northward toward the park.

It was a mild, sunny morning with warm wind from the south, which sucked up the last patches of snow from the lawns and dried the tiny trickles of water across the walks. Looking to the land, one might say that spring soon would be on the way; but, looking to the lake, midwinter held. The counterscrap of concrete, beyond the withered sod that edged the Drive, was sheathed in ice; the frozen spray-hummocks beyond steamed in the sun; and out as far as one could see, floes floated close together, exposing only here and there a bit of blue. Wind, cold and chilling, wafted off this ice field, taking the warm south breeze upon its flanks.

Glancing up at her companion from time to time, Constance saw the color coming to his face, and he strode beside her quite steadily. Whatever was his inheritance, his certainly were stamina and vitality; a little less—or a little dissipation of them—and he might not have recovered at all, much less have leaped back to strength as he had done. For since yesterday, the languor which had held him was gone.

They halted a minute near the south entrance of the park at the St. Gaudens' "Lincoln," which he had not previously seen. The gaunt, sad figure of the "rail-splitter" in his ill-fitting clothes, seemed to recall something to him; for he glanced swiftly at her as they turned away.

"Miss Sherrill," he asked, "have you ever stayed out in the country?"

"I go to northern Michigan, up by the straits, almost every summer for part of the time, at least; and once in a while we open the house in winter too for a week or so. It's quite wild—trees and sand and shore and the water. I've had some of my best times up there."

"You've never been out on the plains?"

"Just to pass over them on the train on the way to the coast."

"That would be in winter or in spring; I was thinking about the plains in late summer, when we—Jim and Betty, the children of the people I was with in Kansas—"

"I remember them."

"When we used to play at being pioneers in our sunflower shacks."

"Sunflower shacks?" she questioned.

"I was dreaming we were building them again when I was delirious just after I was hurt, it seems. I thought that I was back in Kansas and was little again. The prairie was all brown as it is in late summer, brown billows of dried grass which let you see the chips of limestone and flint scattered on the ground beneath; and in the hollows there were acres and acres of sunflowers, three times as tall as either Jim or I, and with stalks as thick as a man's wrist, where Jim and Betty and I ... and you, Miss Sherrill, were playing."

"I?"

"We cut paths through the sunflowers with a corn knife," Alan continued, not looking at her, "and built houses in them by twining the cut stalks in and out among those still standing. I'd wondered, you see, what you must have been like when you were a little girl, so, I suppose, when I was delirious, I saw you that way."

She had looked up at him a little apprehensively, afraid that he was going to say something more; but his look reassured her.

"Then that," she hazarded, "must have been how the hospital people learned our name. I'd wondered about that; they said you were unconscious first, and then delirious and when you spoke you said, among other names, mine—Connie and Sherrill."

He colored and glanced away. "I thought they might have told you that, so I wanted you to know. They say that in a dream, or in delirium, after your brain establishes the first absurdity—like your playing out among the sunflowers with me when we were little—everything else is consistent. I wouldn't call a little girl 'Miss Sherrill,' of course. Ever since I've known you, I couldn't help thinking a great deal about you; you're not like any one else I've ever known. But I didn't want you to think I thought of you—familiarly."

"I speak of you always as Alan to father," she said.

He was silent for a moment. "They lasted hardly for a day—those sunflower houses, Miss Sherrill," he said quietly. "They withered almost as soon as they were made. Castles in Kansas, one might say! No one could live in them."

Apprehensive again, she colored. He had recalled to her, without meaning to do so, she thought, that he had seen her in Spearman's arms; she was quite sure that recollection of this was in his mind. But in spite of this—or rather, exactly because of it—she understood that he had formed his own impression of the relation between Henry and herself and that, consequently, he was not likely to say anything more like this.

They had walked east, across the damp, dead turf to where the Drive leaves the shore and is built out into the lake; as they crossed to it on the smooth ice of the lagoon between, he took her arm to steady her.

"There is something I have been wanting to ask you," she said.

"Yes."

"That night when you were hurt—it was for robbery, they said. What do you think about it?" She watched him as he looked at her and then away; but his face was completely expressionless.

"The proceedings were a little too rapid for me to judge, Miss Sherrill."

"But there was no demand upon you to give over your money before you were attacked?"

"No."

She breathed a little more quickly. "It must be a strange sensation," she observed, "to know that some one has tried to kill you."

"It must, indeed."

"You mean you don't think that he tried to kill you?"

"The police captain thinks not; he says it was the work of a man new to the blackjack, and he hit harder and oftener than he needed. He says that sort are the dangerous ones—that one's quite safe in the hands of an experienced slugger, as you would be with the skilful man in any line. I never thought of it that way before. He almost made it into an argument for leaving the trained artists loose on the streets, for the safety of the public, instead of turning the business over to boys only half educated."

"What do you think about the man yourself?" Constance persisted.

"The apprentice who practiced on me?"

She waited, watching his eyes. "I was hardly in a condition, Miss Sherrill, to appreciate anything about the man at all. Why do you ask?"

"Because—" She hesitated an instant, "if you were attacked to be killed, it meant that you must have been attacked as the son of—Mr. Corvet. Then that meant—at least it implied, that Mr. Corvet was killed, that