The Shadow (Stringer)/Chapter 19
XIX
NO catastrophe that was mental in its origin could oppress for long a man so essentially physical as Blake. For two desolate hours, it is true, he wandered about the streets of the city, struggling to medicine his depression of the mind by sheer weariness of the body. Then the habit of a lifetime of activity reasserted itself. He felt the need of focusing his resentment on something tangible and material. And as a comparative clarity of vision returned to him there also came back those tendencies of the instinctive fighter, the innate protest against injustice, the revolt against final surrender, the forlorn claim for at least a fighting chance. And with the thought of his official downfall came the thought of Copeland and what Copeland had done to him.
Out of that ferment of futile protest arose one sudden decision. Even before he articulated the decision he found it unconsciously swaying his movements and directing his steps. He would go and see Copeland! He would find that bloodless little shrimp and put him face to face with a few plain truths. He would confront that anemic Deputy-Commissioner and at least let him know what one honest man thought of him.
Even when Blake stood before Copeland's brownstone-fronted house, the house that seemed to wear a mask of staid discretion in very drawn blind and gloomy story, no hesitation came to him. His naturally primitive mind foresaw no difficulties in that possible encounter. He knew it was late, that it was nearly midnight, but even that did not deter him. The recklessness of utter desperation was on him. His purpose was something that transcended the mere trivialities of everyday intercourse. And he must see him. To confront Copeland became essential to his scheme of things.
He went ponderously up the brown stone steps and rang the bell. He waited patiently until his ring was answered. It was some time before the door swung open. Inside that door Blake saw a solemn-eyed servant in a black spiked-tailed service-coat and gray trousers.
"I want to see Mr. Copeland," was Blake's calmly assured announcement.
"Mr. Copeland is not at home," answered the man in the service-coat. His tone was politely impersonal. His face, too, was impassive. But one quick glance seemed to have appraised the man on the doorstep, to have judged him, and in some way to have found him undesirable.
"But this is important," said Blake.
"I 'm sorry, sir," answered the impersonal-eyed servant. Blake made an effort to keep himself in perfect control. He knew that his unkempt figure had not won the good-will of that autocratic hireling.
"I 'm from Police Headquarters," the man on the doorstep explained, with the easy mendacity that was a heritage of his older days. He produced the one official card that remained with him, the one worn and dog-eared and once water-soaked Deputy-Commissioner's card which still remained in his dog-eared wallet. "I 've got to see him on business, Departmental business!"
"Mr. and Mrs. Copeland are at the Metropolitan, sir," explained the servant. "At the Opera. And they are not back yet."
"Then I 'll wait for him," announced Blake, placated by the humbler note in the voice of the man in the service-coat.
"Very good, sir," announced the servant. And he led the way upstairs, switching on the electrics as he went.
Blake found himself in what seemed to be a library. About this softly hung room he peered with an acute yet heavy disdain, with an indeterminate envy which he could not control. It struck him as being feminine and over fine, that shadowy room with all its warm hangings and polished wood. It stood for a base of life with which he had no patience. And he kept telling himself that it had not been come by honestly, that on everything about him, from the silver desk ornaments to the marble bust glimmering out of its shadowy background, he himself had some secret claim. He scowled up at a number of signed etchings and a row of diminutive and heavily framed canvases, scowled up at them with quick contempt. Then he peered uncomfortably about at the shelves of books, mottled streaks of vellum and morocco stippled with gold, crowded pickets of soft-lettered color which seemed to stand between him and a world which he had never cared to enter. It was a foolish world, that world of book reading, a lackadaisical region of unreality, a place for women and children, but never meant for a man with a man's work to do.
His stolidly contemptuous eyes were still peering about the room when the door opened and closed again. There was something so characteristically guarded and secretive in the movement that Blake knew it was Copeland even before he let his gaze wheel around to the newcomer. About the entire figure, in fact, he could detect that familiar veiled wariness, that enigmatic and self-concealing cautiousness which had always had the power to touch him into a quick irritation.
"Mr. Blake, I believe," said Copeland, very quietly. He was in full evening dress. In one hand he held a silk hat and over one arm hung a black top-coat. He held himself in perfect control, in too perfect control, yet his thin face was almost ashen in color, almost the neutral-tinted gray of a battle-ship's side-plates. And when he spoke it was with the impersonal polite unction with which he might have addressed an utter stranger.
"You wished to see me!" he said, as his gaze fastened itself on Blake's figure. The fact that he remained standing imparted a tentativeness to the situation. Yet his eyes remained on Blake, studying him with the cold and mildly abstracted curiosity with which he might view a mummy in its case.
"I do!" said Blake, without rising from his chair.
"About what?" asked Copeland. There was an acidulated crispness in his voice which hinted that time might be a matter of importance to him.
"You know what it 's about, all right," was Blake's heavy retort.
"On the contrary," said Copeland, putting down his hat and coat, "I 'm quite in the dark as to how I can be of service to you."
Both his tone and his words angered Blake, angered him unreasonably. But he kept warning himself to wait, to hold himself in until the proper moment arrived.
"I expect no service from you," was Blake's curtly guttural response. He croaked out his mirthless ghost of a laugh. "You 've taught me better than that!"
Copeland, for all his iciness, seemed to resent the thrust.
"We have always something to learn," he retorted, meeting Blake's stolid stare of enmity.
"I guess I've learned enough!" said Blake.
"Then I hope it has brought you what you are looking for!" Copeland, as he spoke, stepped over to a chair, but he still remained on his feet.
"No, it has n't brought me what I 'm after," said the other man. "Not yet! But it 's going to, in the end, Mr. Copeland, or I 'm going to know the reason why!"
He kept warning himself to be calm, yet he found his voice shaking a little as he spoke. The time was not yet ripe for his outbreak. The climactic moment was still some distance away. But he could feel it emerging from the mist just as a pilot sights the bell-buoy that marks his changing channel.
"Then might I ask what you are after?" inquired Copeland. He folded his arms, as though to fortify himself behind a pretense of indifferency.
"You know what I 've been after, just as I know what you 've been after," cried Blake. "You set out to get my berth, and you got it. And I set out to get Binhart, to get the man your whole push could n't round up—and I 'm going to get him!"
"Blake," said Copeland, very quietly, "you are wrong in both instances."
"Am I!"
"You are," was Copeland's answer, and he spoke with a studious patience which his rival resented even more than his open enmity. "In the first place, this Binhart case is a closed issue."
"Not with me!" cried Blake, feeling himself surrendering to the tide that had been tugging at him so long. "They may be able to buy off you cuff-shooters down at Headquarters. They may grease your palm down there, until you see it pays to keep your hands off. They may pull a rope or two and make you back down. But nothing this side o' the gates o' hell is going to make me back down. I began this man-hunt, and I 'm going to end it!"
He took on a dignity in his own eyes. He felt that in the face of every obstacle he was still the instrument of an ineluctable and incorruptible Justice. Uncouth and buffeted as his withered figure may have been, it still represented the relentlessness of the Law.
"That man-hunt is out of our hands," he heard Copeland saying.
"But it 's not out of my hands!" reiterated the detective.
"Yes, it 's out of your hands, too," answered Copeland. He spoke with a calm authority, with a finality, that nettled the other man.
"What are you driving at?" he cried out.
"This Binhart hunt is ended," repeated Copeland, and in the eyes looking down at him Blake saw that same vague pity which had rested in the gaze of Elsie Verriner.
"By God, it 's not ended!" Blake thundered back at him.
"It is ended," quietly contended the other. "And precisely as you have put it—Ended by God!"
"It's what?" cried Blake.
"You don't seem to be aware of the fact, Blake, that Binhart is dead—dead and buried!"
Blake stared up at him.
"Is what?" his lips automatically inquired.
"Binhart died seven weeks ago. He died in the town of Toluca, out in Arizona. He 's buried there."
"That 's a lie!" cried Blake, sagging forward in his chair.
"We had the Phœnix authorities verify the report in every detail. There is no shadow of doubt about it."
Still Blake stared up at the other man.
"I don't believe it," he wheezed.
Copeland did not answer him. He stepped to the end of the desk and with his scholarly white finger touched a mother-of-pearl bell button. Utter silence reigned in the room until the servant answered his summons.
"Bridley, go to my secretary and bring me the portfolio in the second drawer."
Blake heard and yet did not hear the message. A fog-like sense of unreality seemed to drape everything about him. The earth itself seemed to crumble away and leave him poised alone in the very emptiness of space. Binhart was dead!
He could hear Copeland's voice far away. He could see the returning figure of the servant, but it seemed as gray and ghostlike as the entire room about him. In his shaking fingers he took the official papers which Copeland handed over to him. He could read the words, he could see the signatures, but they seemed unable to impart any clear-cut message to his brain. His dazed eyes wandered over the newspaper clippings which Copeland thrust into his unsteady fingers. There, too, was the same calamitous proclamation, as final as though he had been reading it on a tombstone. Binhart was dead! Here were the proofs of it; here was an authentic copy of the death certificate, the reports of the police verification; here in his hands were the final and indisputable proofs.
But he could not quite comprehend it. He tried to tell himself it was only that his old-time enemy was playing some new trick on him, a trick which he could not quite fathom. Then the totality of it all swept home to him, swept through his entire startled being as a tidal-wave sweeps over a coast-shoal.
Blake, in his day, had known desolation, but it had seldom been desolation of spirit. It had never been desolation like this. He tried to plumb it, to its deepest meaning, but consciousness seemed to have no line long enough. He only knew that his world had ended. He saw himself as the thing that life had at last left him—a solitary and unsatisfied man, a man without an aim, without a calling, without companionship.
"So this ends the music!" he muttered, as he rose weakly to his feet. And yet it was more than the end of the music, he had to confess to himself. It was the collapse of the instruments, the snapping of the last string. It was the ultimate end, the end that proclaimed itself as final as the stabbing thought of his own death itself.
He heard Copeland asking if he would care for a glass of sherry. Whether he answered that query or not he never knew. He only knew that Binhart was dead, and that he himself was groping his way out into the night, a broken and desolate man.