The Trey o' Hearts/Chapter 49
CHAPTER XLIX
The Last Trump
TOWARD the evening of the third day following the motor spill, Judith sat in the deeply recessed window of a bedchamber on the second floor of a hotel situated in the heart of California's orange-growing lands.
Behind her Seneca Trine sat, apparently asleep, in a wheeled invalid chair.
There was no other occupant of the room.
Though he had lain nearly two days in coma, her father's subsequent progress toward recovery of his normal state had been rapid. Now, according to a council of surgeons and physicians who had been summoned to deliberate on his case, he was in a fair way to round out the average span of a sound man's lifetime. He had apparently suffered nothing in consequence of his accident more serious than prolonged unconsciousness. For the last twenty-four hours he had been in full possession of his faculties and (for some reason impossible for Judith to fathom) uncommonly cheerful.
From this circumstance she drew a certain sense of mystified anxiety. Twice in the course of the morning she had caught his eye following her with a gleam of sardonic exultancy, as though he nursed some secret of extraordinary potentialities. She was oppressed by a great uneasiness.
Perhaps (she reasoned) the weather was responsible for this feeling. The day had been unconscionably hot, without a breath of air. Now, as it drew toward its close, its heat seemed to become more and more oppressive even as its light was darkened by a vast pall of inky cloud shouldering up over the mountains to the music of distant rumblings.
Within another ten minutes the man Judith loved with all her body and soul would be the husband of her sister. She had told herself she was resigned, but she was not, and she would never be. Her heart was breaking in her bosom as she sat there, listening to the ever-heavier detonations of the approaching thunderstorm and to the jubilant pealing of a great organ down below.
She had told herself that, though resigned, she could not bear to witness the ceremony. Now as the moment drew near she found herself unable to endure the strain alone.
Slowly, against her will, she rose and stole across the floor to her father's chair.
His breathing was slow and regular, beyond doubt he slept; there was no reason why she should not leave him for ten minutes; even though he waked, it could not harm him to await her return at the end of that scant period.
She crept from the room, closed the door silently, ran down the hall, and descended by a back way, a little used staircase, to the lower hall, which was to be the scene of the marriage.
Constructed in imitation of an old Spanish Mission chapel, it contained one of the finest organs in the world; at this close range its deep-throated tones vied with the warnings of the storm. Judith, lurking in a passageway whose open door revealed the altar steps and chancel, was shaken to the very marrow of her being by the majestic reverberations of the music.
Since they had regained contact with civilization in a section of the country where the Law estate had vast holdings of land, the chapel was thronged with men and women who had known Alan's father and wished to honour his son. ...
Above stairs, in the room Judith had quitted, Seneca Trine opened both eyes wide and laughed a silent laugh of savage triumph when the door closed behind his daughter. At last he was left to his own devices, and at a time the most fitting imaginable for what he had in mind.
With a grin. Trine raised both arms and stretched them wide apart. Then, grasping the arms of his chair, he lifted himself from it and stood trembling upon his own feet for the first time in almost twenty years.
Grasping the back of the wheeled chair, he used it as a crutch to guide his feeble and uncertain movements. But these became momentarily stronger and more confident.
This, then, was the secret he had hugged to his embittered bosom, a secret unsuspected even by the attending surgeon: that through the motor accident of three days ago he had regained the use of his limbs that had been stricken motionless—strangely enough, by a motor-car—nearly two decades since.
Slowly but surely moving to the bureau in the room, he opened one of its drawers and took out something he had, without her knowledge, seen Judith put away there while she thought he slept. With this hidden in the pocket of his dressing-gown, he steered a straight if very deliberate course to the door, let himself out, and like a materialized spectre of the man he once had been, navigated the corridor to the head of the broad central staircase, and step by step, clinging with both hands, negotiated the descent.
The lobby of the hotel was deserted. As the ceremony approached its end, every guest and servant in the house was crowding the doorway to the chapel. None opposed the progress of this ghastly vision in dressing-gown and slippered feet, chuckling insanely to himself as he tottered through the empty halls and corridors, finding an almost supernatural strength to sustain him till he found himself face to face with his chosen enemy and victim.
The first that blocked his way into the chapel, a bell-boy of the hotel, looked round at the touch of the clawlike hand upon his shoulder, and shrank back with a cry of terror—a cry that was echoed from half a dozen throats within another instant.
As if from the path of some grisly visitant from the world beyond the grave, the throng pressed back and cleared a way for Seneca Trine, father of the bride.
And as the way opened and he looked toward the altar and saw Alan standing hand in hand with Rose while the minister invoked a blessing upon the union that had been but that instant consummated, added strength, the strength of the insane, was given to Seneca Trine.
When Alan, annoyed by the disturbance in the body of the chapel, looked round, it was to see the aged maniac standing within a dozen feet of him; and as he cried out in wonder, Trine whipped a revolver from the pocket of his dressing-gown and swung it steadily to bear upon Alan's head.
At that instant the storm broke with infernal fury upon the land.
A crash of thunder so heavy and prolonged that it rocked the building upon its foundations accompanied the shattering of a huge stained glass window.
A bolt of bluish flame of dazzling brilliance slashed through the window like a flaming sword and smote the pistol in the hand of Seneca Trine, discharging the weapon even as it struck him dead.
As he fell, the bolt swerved and struck two others down—Alan Law and the woman who had just been made his wife.