The Blind Man's Eyes - William MacHarg (best books to read now txt) 📗

was almost killed; but they concealed it, Edith—pretended he was only ill. I was on the train—you know, of course; I got your wire—and they suspected me of the attack."

"You? But they didn't find out about you, Hugh?"

"No; they are investigating. Santoine would not let them make anything public. He brought me here while he is trying to find out about me. So I'm here, Edith—here! Is it here too?"

Again steps sounded in the hall above. The girl swiftly busied herself with gloves and hat; Eaton stood stark in suspense. The servant above—it was a servant they had heard before, he recognized now—merely crossed from one room to another overhead. Now the girl's lips moved again.

"It?" She formed the question noiselessly.

"The draft of the new agreement."

"It either has been sent to him, or it will be sent to him very soon—here."

"Here in this house with me!"

"Mr. Santoine has to be a party to it—he's to draft it, I think. Anyway, he hasn't seen it yet—I know that. It is either here now, Hugh, or it will be here before long."

"You can't find out about that?"

"Whether it is here, or when it will be? I think I can."

"Where will it be when it is here?"

"Where? Oh!" The girl's eyes went to the wall close to where Eaton stood; she seemed to measure with them a definite distance from the door and a point shoulder high, and to resist the impulse to come over and put her hand upon the spot. As Eaton followed her look, he heard a slight and muffled click as if from the study; but no sound could reach them through the study doors and what he heard came from the wall itself.

"A safe?" he whispered.

"Yes; Miss Santoine—she's in there, isn't she?—closed it just now. There are two of them hidden behind the books one on each side of the door."

Eaton tapped gently on the wall; the wall was brick; the safe undoubtedly was backed with steel.

"The best way is from inside the room," he concluded.

She nodded. "Yes. If you—"

"Look out!"

Some one now was coming downstairs. The girl had time only to whisper swiftly, "If we don't get a chance to speak again, watch that vase." She pointed to a bronze antique which stood on a table near them. "When I'm sure the agreement is in the house, I'll drop a glove-button in that—a black one, if I think it'll be in the safe on the right, white on the left. Now go."

Eaton moved quietly on and into the drawing-room. Avery's voice immediately afterwards was heard; he was speaking to Miss Davis, whom he had found in the hallway. Eaton was certain there was no suspicion that he had talked with her there; indeed, Avery seemed to suppose that Eaton was still in the study with Harriet Santoine. It was her lapse, then, which had let him out and had given him that chance; but it was a lapse, he discovered, which was not likely to favor him again. From that time, while never held strictly in restraint, he found himself always in the sight of some one. Blatchford, in default of any one else, now appeared to assume the oversight of him as his duty. Eaton lunched with Blatchford, dined with Blatchford and Avery—Blatchford's presence as a buffer against Avery's studied offense to him alone making the meal endurable. Eaton went to his room early, where at last he was left alone.

The day, beginning with his discovery of the fact that he was in Santoine's house and continuing through the walk outside, which first had shown him the lay of the grounds, and then the chance at the sight of Santoine's study followed by the meeting just outside the study door—all this had been more than satisfactory to him. He sat at his window thinking it over. The weather had been clear and there was a moon; as he watched the light upon the water and gazed now and again at the south wing where Santoine had his study, suddenly several windows on the first floor blazed out simultaneously; some one had entered Santoine's work-room and turned on the light. Almost at once the light went out; then, a minute or so later, the same windows glowed dully. The lights in the room had been turned on again, but heavy, opaque curtains had been drawn over the windows before the room was relighted. These curtains were so close over the windows that, unless Eaton had been attracted by the first flash of light, he scarcely would have noticed that the lights were burning within the room.

He had observed, during the day, that Avery or Harriet had been at work in that room—one of them or both—almost all day; and besides the girl he had met in the hall, there had been at least one other stenographer. Must work in this house go on so continuously that it was necessary for some one to work at night, even when Santoine lay ill and unable to make other than the briefest and most important dispositions? And who was working in that room now, Avery or Harriet? He let himself think, idly, about the girl—how strange her life had been—that part of it at least which was spent, as he had gathered most of her waking hours of recent years had been spent, with her father. Strange, almost, as his own life! And what a wonderful girl it had made of her—clever, sweet, lovable, with more than a woman's ordinary capacity for devotion and self-sacrifice.

But, if she were the one working there, was she the sort of girl she had seemed to be? If her service to her father was not only on his personal side but if also she was intimate in his business affairs, must she not therefore have shared the cruel code which had terrorized Eaton for the last four years and kept him an exile in Asia and which, at any hour yet, threatened to take his life? A grim set came to Eaton's lips; his mind went again to his own affairs.

CHAPTER XIII THE MAN FROM THE TRAIN

In the supposition that he was to have less liberty, Eaton proved correct. Harriet Santoine, to whose impulses had been due his first privileges, showed toward him a more constrained attitude the following morning. She did not suggest hostility, as Avery constantly did; nor, indeed, was there any evidence of retrogression in her attitude toward him; she seemed merely to be maintaining the same position; and since this seemed difficult if they were often together, she avoided him. Eaton found his life in the house after that first day more strictly ordered into a routine which he was obliged to keep. He understood that Santoine, steadily improving but not yet able to leave his bed, had taken up his work again, propped up by pillows; one of the nurses had been dismissed; the other was only upon day duty. But Eaton did not see Santoine at all; and though he learned that Miss Davis or another stenographer, whose name was West, came daily to the house, he never was in a position again to encounter any outsider either coming or going. Besides the servants of the house, he met Blatchford, with whom Eaton usually breakfasted; he also lunched with Blatchford, and Harriet sometimes—sometimes with Avery; he dined with Blatchford and Avery or with all three.

At other times, except that he was confined to the house or to a small space of the grounds about it and was kept under constant surveillance, he was left largely to his own devices; and these at least sufficed to let him examine morning and night, the vase in which he was to find the signal that was to be left for him; these permitted examination of window-locks in other rooms, if not in Santoine's study; these permitted the examination of many other items also and let him follow at least the outline of the method of Santoine's work.

There was no longer room for Eaton to doubt that Harriet had the confidence of her father to almost a complete extent. Now that Santoine was ill, she worked with him daily for hours; and Eaton learned that she did the same when he was well. But Avery worked with the blind man too; he too was certainly in a confidential capacity. Was it not probable then that Avery, and not Harriet, was entrusted with the secrets of dangerous and ugly matters; or was it possible that this girl, worshiping her father as she did, could know and be sure that, because her father approved these matters, they were right?

A hundred times a day, as Eaton saw or spoke with the girl or thought of her presence near by, this obsessed him. A score of times during their casual talk upon meeting at meals or elsewhere, he found himself turned toward some question which would aid him in determining what must be the fact; but each time he checked himself, until one morning—it was the fifth after his arrival at Santoine's house—Harriet was taking him for his walk in the garden before the house.

It was a bright, sunshiny morning and warm—a true spring day. As they paced back and forth in the sunshine—she bare-haired and he holding his cap in his hand—he looked back at the room in the wing where Santoine still lay; then Eaton looked to the daughter, clear-eyed, clear-skinned, smiling and joyous with the day. She had just told him, at his inquiry, that her father was very much stronger that morning, and her manner more than ever evidenced her pride in him.

"I have been intending to ask you, Miss Santoine," Eaton said to her suddenly then, "if your belief in the superiority of business over war—as we were discussing it ten days ago—-hasn't suffered a shock since then?"

"You mean because of—Father?"

"Yes; you can hardly go back far enough in the history of war to find a time when the soldier's creed was not against killing—or trying to kill—a sleeping enemy."

She looked at him quickly and keenly. "I can't think of Father as being any one's enemy, though I know of course no man can do big things without making some people hate him. Even if what he does is wholly good, bad people hate him for it." She was silent for a few steps. "I like your saying what you did, Mr. Eaton."

"Why?"

"It implies your own creed would be against such a thing. But aren't we rather mixing things up? There is nothing to show yet that the attack on Father sprang out of business relations; and even if it did, it would have to be regarded as an—an atrocity outside the rules of business, just as in war, atrocities occur which are outside the rules of war. Wait! I know what you are going to say; you are going to say the atrocities are a part of war even if they are outside its recognized rules."

"Yes; I was going to say that."

"And that atrocities due to business are a part of business, even if they are outside the rules."

"Yes; as business is at present conducted."

"But the rules are a part of the game, Mr. Eaton."

"Do you belong among the apologists for war, Miss Santoine?"

"I?"

"Yes; what you say is exactly what the apologists for war say, isn't it? They say that war, in spite of its open savagery and inevitable atrocities, is not a different sort of combat from the combat between men in time of peace. That is, the acts of war differ only in appearance or in degree from the acts of peace. Is that what you believe, Miss Santoine?"

"That men in times of peace perform acts upon each other which differ only in degree from the acts of war?"

"Yes."

"Do you believe that, Mr. Eaton?"

He hesitated. "Do you want me to answer that question from my own experience or from what I would like to