CHAPTER XXVII
SHE SPEAKS
Hazen's face was frightful to see; the more so that physical weaknesscontended with the outsweep of passion, so great and overwhelming in itspower and destructive force that to the two onlookers it seemed to springfrom deeper sources than ordinary life and death, and have its birth, aswell as its culmination, in the unknown and all that is most terriblein the human mind and human experience.
Anitra's eye was spellbound by it. As it dilated upon this vision ofunspeakable wrath and almost superhuman denunciation, her own exquisiteface filled with a reflected horror, almost equaling his in force andmeaning, till the two awed spectators saw in this moment of startledrecognition and the up-gathering of two great natures, the oncoming ofsome hideous climax for which the many strange and contradictoryexperiences of the last few days had not served to prepare them.
"You _hear_!"
In these words Hazen loosed out his soul.
The keen cry of the wind running through the house was his only answer.
"You _hear_!" he repeated, advancing and laying a determined hand uponher arm. "You have made a mock of us with your pretended deafness. Whatdoes it mean--Stop! no more play-acting," he fiercely admonished her, asher eyes assumed a look of startled inquiry and wandered away in vaguecuriosity to the papers scattered over the floor--"we have had enoughof that; you cannot deceive us--you cannot deceive _me_ twice. You playedat deafness--why? Because Anitra must have some disability to distinguishher from Georgian? Because you are not Anitra? Because you are Georgianafter all?"
Georgian!
The word fell like a plummet into the hollow of that great expectancy.Ransom shivered and even Harper's hard cheek changed color. Hazen onlystood unmoved, his look, his grasp, the spirit behind that look andgrasp, implacable and determined. Their influence was terrible; slowlyshe succumbed to it against her will and purpose, the will and purpose ofa very strong woman. Her eyes rose in a painful and lingering struggle tohis face. Then, with a cry her drawn and parched lips could not suppress,she flashed them in agony on Ransom, and this long-suffering man read inthem the maddening truth. They were his wife's eyes; the woman before himwas indeed Georgian.
"Speak!" rang out the voice of Hazen, as Harper, realizing from Ransom'sface what Ransom had just realized from hers, stepped to the door andclosed it. "The time is short; I have much, very much to do. For my sake,for the sake of this much-abused man, whom you allowed to marry you,speak out, tell the truth at once. You are Georgian."
"Yes," fell in almost an inaudible whisper from her lips. "I amGeorgian." Then as he loosed his grasp from her arm and she was leftstanding there alone, some instinct of isolation, some realization of themysterious pit she had dug for herself and possibly for others, in thisavowal of her identity, wrought her brain into momentary madness, andflinging up her arms she fell on her knees before Hazen as under thestroke of some unseen thunderbolt.
"You made me say it," she cried. "On your head be the punishment, not onmine nor on his." Then as Hazen drew slowly back, touched in his turn bysome emotion to which neither his look nor gesture gave any clew, sherose to her feet, and fixing him with a look of strange defiance, addedin milder but no less determined tones: "A tongue unloosed talks long andloud. You have made me give up my secret, but I shall not stop at that. Ishall say more; tell all my dreadful history; yours--mine. I will not bethought wicked because I undertook so great a deception. I will not havethis good man's opinion of me shaken; not for a minute; what I did, Idid for him and he shall know it whatever penalty it may incur. He ismy husband--his love to me is priceless, and I will hold it againstyou--against the Cause--against Heaven--yes, and against Hell."
Here was truth. To Ransom it came like balm and a renewed life. Boundingacross the room, he strove to seize her hand and draw her to himself.But Hazen would not have it. His anger, indeterminate before, wasconcentrated now, and not the white pleading of her face, nor the warninggesture of Ransom, could hold it back.
"Traitress!" he cried, "traitress to me and to the Cause. You thoughtto escape what is inescapable. Do you know what you have done? Youhave--" The rest hung in air. A sudden weakness had seized him and hesank faltering back into a chair Harper pushed towards him, stilldenouncing her, however, with lifted hand and accusing eyes, theimage--though no longer a speaking one--of the implacable and determinedavenger.
Georgian, shocked into silence, stared at him in a frenzy of complicatedemotions to which neither of them as yet had given the key capable ofrelieving the maddening tension.
"It is the pool; the pool," she finally murmured. "Its waters have beatenout your life." But he calmly shook his head.
"It is not in water to do that," he murmured. "Give me a moment. I've aquestion to ask. I think a drop of liquor--"
Harper had flask in hand almost before the word had left the other'smouth. The draft revived Hazen; he looked up at Georgian. "I believe you,so do these men believe you. But you were not alone in this plot. Whereis Anitra? Where is the deaf and solitary one you dragged from thestreets of New York to bolster up your plot? Tell us and tell us quickly.Where is Anitra?"
"Anitra? Do you ask that?" cried Harper, roused to speak for the firsttime by his boundless amazement and indignation. "You have described thebody in the pool--a description which fits either sister, and yet youwould make this woman tell us what you have seen with your own eyes."
He might as well not have spoken. Neither he nor she seemed to hear him.Certainly neither heeded.
"Anitra?" she repeated softly and with a strange intonation. "I amAnitra. I am both Georgian and Anitra. There have never been two of ussince I came into this house."