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peach blossom
The whitest thing in the world

 

The whitest thing in the world
[aka, Peach blossoms]

BY MIRIAM MICHELSON.
(1870-1942)

"I CAN write, you know. I have written poems for our town paper, would you like to read them?"

       Bowman looked up. She was there still, standing by his desk, a slender, open-eyed creature, with a spray of peach blossoms rising and falling on a narrow, childish breast, with the crude perfume of rusticity about her and — yes, the enveloping glory of innocence, despite the direct look of her eyes and the persistence with which she had fought her way to him and refused now to be discouraged.

       "There's nothing, I tell you — nothing for you," the city editor repeated, impatiently.

       He twitched his green shade to a pugnacious angle and deliberately turned his back upon her. He was a heavy faced, black mustached hunter of news and driver of men. He hated a weakling when it was masculine and, if he could, he would have crucified anything in petticoats rather than weaken his staff and make himself ridiculous by accepting what he called the prevailing contemptible fashion of freak femininity as legitimate journalism.

       "I don't see why you won't give me a chance," the girl said, appealingly.

       The office boy, peeping in just then, half apprehensive for his own safety since he had permitted this applicant to evade him, yet betraying a malicious delight that so unsuspecting a lamb should make straight for the lion's very jaws, saw Bowman lift his head suddenly. Upon the city editor's face there had come an expression very like that which lighted his own small, impish face.

       "A—hem!" Bowman cleared his throat deliberately. "I believe I will, Miss — eh —–. Since you are so determined, I believe I will give you a chance. There's to be a big funeral today, Senator Hollingsworth, you know, millionaire, politician, philanthropist, old family — all that sort of thing. Suppose" — he passed his hand over his smiling, bitter mouth — "suppose you get me the names of all who attend, Miss — eh — Peachblossoms."

       A stifled titter came from the office boy before he rushed to finish his laugh outside. He knew that detail well; it was a stock pons asinorum of the profession. There were others over which the unfit might be made to stumble and fall, but this was Bowman's favorite. He had never yet presented it to a woman, however.

       The girl bent clear, childish eyes upon the man at the desk, gravely, gratefully. "Thank you, sir, I will. My name is Pettinelli, though — Therese Pettinelli," she added distinctly.

       She turned then and walked composedly, primly, out of the room.

       Bowman's grim mouth did not relax, but above his angry, dark eyes that followed her there came a perplexed frown. No novice had yet received that particular detail in just that way; there was still part of the comedy unenacted.

       He turned again to his desk and savagely thrust his blue pencil at a proof, as though merely to elide were not sufficient; he wanted to wound, too, the thing he disapproved. Then the door opened and again she stood before him.

       "I forgot to ask you, sir," she said, simply, "how shall I get the names?"

       A sneer of satisfaction, which he did not try to hide, bent Bowman's black mustache down at the corners. This was the regulation procedure.

       "You will station yourself at the cemetery gate," he said slowly, "and as each carriage comes up jump in, tell the mourners you come from the News and want their full names. That's all."

       She looked at him a moment, and his mocking, tired eyes, like black stars in a pool of leathery, wrinkled skin, met hers sarcastically. But no conception of his attitude could have come to her, for she stood a moment longer, as though considering the means he suggested, then bent her head. "Thank you, sir," she said with provincial politeness, and went out, shutting the door behind her.

       Bowman threw down his pencil and roared. The sound of his sardonic laughter brought the office boy in with a pretense of having heard a call, and the two laughed together, the city editor with an open-lunged delight in his joke, the boy discreetly accompanying him.

       They laughed again, and the office, with whom the joke had been shared, laughed with them, when the paper went to press that night without the names of those who had attended the funeral of Senator Andrew Hollingsworth. And they laughed even more heartily when, two days later, the office boy piloted the girl through the local room, choosing the most roundabout route to Bowman's office, and giving the staff an indicating wink behind her back that betrayed her identity.

       "Miss Peachblossoms, sir," he announced, throwing Bowman's door wide open with a significant glance.

       Bowman, who had been sitting listening to his star reporter's confession of utter failure in his attempt to interview the sensational murderer of the day, looked up pre-occupied as she entered, his black brows knitted in thought. In his intense concentration he had for the moment completely forgotten the girl.

       "I have brought you the names, sir," she said with a stiff little salutation that included Drake, the News's special writer.

       "Names?" repeated Bowman; "what names? Oh, Moses in Egypt!"

       He looked from the paper she had laid on the desk to the girl standing beside it. He was weary of the joke — even her getting the names was not a unique ending to it — and his mind, baffled by difficulties, was ceaselessly searching for a way to get the thing he wanted, a pen study of Manlloyd, the murderer.

       "Can't you bully Shaw, his attorney, Drake?" he asked, so absorbed that it required more effort to notice the girl than to ignore her. "Tell him we'll roast purgatory out of him the first chance he gives us. Tell him —–"

       "Oh, it isn't Shaw," Drake's fine, fastidious voice broke in, irritated by the rare failure, by Bowman's obtuse bludgeoning and by being made witness to an indignity to a woman. "Shaw's all right. He's a blackguard — a burly shyster who's playing the case for all the notoriety he can get out of it. It's the man himself, Manlloyd. The fellow's head is turned by the attention he gets. He actually is so puffed up by being an object of interest that he can't see the noose that's already dangling over his head. But we can talk it over later." He rose, glancing at the girl, who stood patiently waiting, the delicate bloom of her country-bred face coming and going as she listened, open-eyed.

       "Eh — what? Oh! What d'ye bring these things to me now for?" the city editor demanded of the girl, with an intonation that was almost a blow.

       She looked down on him puzzled. "I thought you wanted them, sir. Didn't you say —–"

       With an impatient shove, Bowman pushed the sheets of paper into the waste basket.

       "The worms have begun on Hollingsworth by this time," he growled. "Suppose you get me their names."

       Drake, who had just reached the door, stopped. He had often feit like kicking his city editor, but he really thought he was about to interfere this time, when the girl's voice came to him. It was a high, clear, immature voice, pretty and delicate as the fruit blossom she wore at her belt or the soft radiance of her baby-like skin, yet subtly lacking the modulation of culture, it seemed to him, as the flower lacked perfume and the face lacked soul.

       "You mean it is too late?" she was saying, unpenetrated by the hard significance of Bowman's tone. "I'm sorry. You see, sir, I could not get them the way you said, so I —–"

       With an unintelligible mutter that might have been an excuse the city editor got up from his chair, brushed past her and went into the next room. He pulled Drake along with him and closed the door behind them.

       After half an hour the office boy went in to her. "Bowman's gone out," he said, eyeing her with contemptuous curiosity.

       "Has he? Well, I'll wait, then," she said gently.

       The boy stared, opened his mouth, shut it and went out with a long drawn whistle.

       An hour later he came in again to say that Mr. Bowman had telephoned that he would not be back for a week; he had gone out of town.

       She rose regretfully and followed him out into the local room, remembered there that she had taken with her an illustrated magazine that had lain on the city editor's desk, retraced her steps unguided to replace it and found Bowman just sitting down to his desk.

'How lucky!' she said, smiling faintly down into his raging eyes.
"How lucky!" she said, smiling faintly down into his raging eyes.

N.B.: the original caption is incorrect for this drawing.
artist = Nodherny (New York Herald?)

       "How lucky!" she said, smiling faintly down into his raging eyes, "that I came back to bring back the magazine. Did you miss your boat, sir? What do you think I would better do next?"

       Her insensibility to atmosphere wrecked the city editor's last atom of self-control. "I think you'd better go straight to —–" He stopped suddenly. Her unsuspecting, waiting eyes, the innocent fragility of her face, that aura of virginity in which she walked as. in a protecting cloud, to which even the grossest spirit could not be blind, made, him hesitate.

       "Oh, go on the Manlloyd case, for all I care!" he cried.
 


CHAPTER II.

       Eustace Manlloyd, making his entrance into the court room, the hero of a case celebrated throughout the English-speaking world, paused before he took his seat between his lawyers to meet, or rather to look down on, the eyes fixed upon him.

       He was familiar with them all by now — the judge's carefully measured, conscious scrutiny; the prosecuting attorney's unconcealed aversion, as though he, who was accustomed to handling reptiles, had found one here that even his professional experience could not make him touch willingly; his own lawyers' affectation of good fellowship, with the uneasy, shifty light that played behind Tom Shaw's eyes; the piercing keenness of the reporters' gaze, that strove to atrip him bare, to peer behind the mask of bored hauteur his face had learned to wear, and the fatigued, complacent light in his mother's eyes, as the vain, affected woman drank in each morning anew the Intoxicating draught of notoriety. Manlloyd knew she counted on a verdict of not guilty, but had she felt as sure of an unfavorable verdict, he sometimes wondered, would she have relinquished for assurance of his safety that sense of importance which, since the trial began, had become the breath of her nostrils? And then there was the cynical, good-tempered, indifferent glance of the bailiffs, the greedy gaze of the crowd, the fascinated horror in the women's eyes, the loathing in the men's.

       Though incapable of analysis in words, Manlloyd was too alert not to feel it all. It was all familiar, yet not altogether unpleasant at this stage, for Manlloyd was his mother's son. The excitement, the pre-eminence of his position, being watched and courted .and written about and photographed and sketched; the sense of being the pivot upon which the great drama revolved the whole long day, and day after day and week after week; the shrewd satisfaction in deceit, the impudent defying of authority, the consciousness of being pitted against the world, which, through respect, for its own forms of law — the forms by means of which he intended to go free despite it — elevated him, if only temporarily, to a pinnacle where no man's hand dared touch him, though every man's hand ached to get at him — all this Eustace Manlloyd felt. It is the consciousness of greatness. His was the greatness of infamy, but its manifestations differ from the other sort only in the way one looks at them, and given an oblique vision, the thing looks as delectable to a murderer as to a martyr.

       A martyr — there was nothing more alien to Manlloyd's nature than this. And yet in the rare moments when confidence deserted him he had faced the improbable alternative of conviction; at night once or twice, when he had waked in his cell and missed the tense, upholding strength of the crowd, the court and the warring attorneys, then he had seen himself sketchily. Vaguely and with strong distaste at the end, drop his role of Impudent defiance for this other gentler, reproachfully holy one.

       And yet even now, as he turned from greeting his mother — their morning caress had become as studied as actors' embraces — and faced the reporters' table he saw himself suddenly, unreasonably in the uncongenial role. And in the same second he became aware of a different glance, a different judgment, a different pair of eyes to meet.

       They were lucent, shining gray, crystal pools that had nothing to reflect, for behind them was a soul as clear and shallow as glass, and of all they looked upon, by virtue of their innocence they saw nothing blacker than themselves. They were bent upon him, these clear, credulous eyes, with such an intensity of impersonal sympathy, warming, elevating, intoxicating him, that Manlloyd bad looked into them for a long moment before they became conscious and wavered. And even then it seemed to be only because the reporter, whose name Manlloyd knew to be Drake, had deliberately thrust his shoulder between, shutting out their view.

       "Why do you stare at him so?" Drake asked the girl, irritably. Despite his horror at such an experience for a woman, he had helped her to a seat beside his own when he heard her inquire for the reporters' table.

'Why do you stare at him so?' Drake asked the girl irritably.
"Why do you stare at him so?" Drake asked the girl, irritably.

artist = Nodherny (New York Herald?)

       "Why" she stammered, blinking, as though the suddenness of being called upon for speech had staggered her. "Why — was I staring? * * * Isn't it terrible?"

       He looked down upon the shell pink of her childish face, with its quivering, pointed chin, its thin, sensitive nose and eyes lifted still toward the prisoner, who had moved his chair further to the right and bent forward, watching her curiously. To Drake she looked repugnantly inhuman, yet, like some old-young saint, so detached from the world, so medievally ignorant of life, so capable of touching pitch yet miraculously escaping defilement, so adoringly trustful and confident in her attitude of faith — and before such an altar!

       "Have you read any of the evidence?" Drake asked. A confused sense of helpless disgust came over him.

       "Of the awful things they say about him — you don't believe them? Think how terrible to say such things of an innocent man! And he's so young, so —–"

       The reporter turned to his work; but in a moment he had put down his pencil again.

       "You are also — do you also approve — what do you think of his mother?" he demanded.

       A burning blush swept in an agony of shame over her face.

       Her wordless repudiation of the woman comforted him; there was something so loathsome about innocence such as this joined even by a common sentiment with such a pervert as Manlloyd.

       "That mother of his has the sort of spirit to express which the Orientals invented a belief in ghouls. She'd pick her son's dead bones if there were money or notoriety to be got out of it," he growled.

       The girl beside him drew in her breath, as at some sharp, internal pain.

       "Doesn't it" — she laid a. timid hand for a moment on the edge of his sleeve — "doesn't it make you long to do something — something — anything to make up to him for it? Don't you feel you just must?"

       Drake looked at her. In a second he had mentally marshaled all the facts to lay before her, what he knew about this man and had written, what he knew and could not print. Then resolutely he turned to his work. There could be no thoroughfare between such a mind and his own.

       Yet once, toward the end of the day, an irritated sense of her helplessness and his own responsibility — the noblesse oblige of superior craftsmanship toward inexperience — prompted him to speak again to her.

       "What line are you going to take?" he asked kindly. "I write a general sort of story, you know, covering the whole thing. There's a shorthand report that goes, besides. Don't you think it might be well for you to specialize? You might roast the mother. Show up her vanity, her absurd airs of ladyhood on such a stage, her incredible enjoyment, eh?"

       She shuddered. "Oh, I couldn't, I couldn't!" she gasped.

       He looked from her trembling lips to the paper before her. She had not written a line.

       Drake gathered up his notes and left the court room. An indefinable feeling of discomfort he had been laboring under fell from him as he took a car to the office, his mind busy with preliminary arrangement of his material. Nor did he think again of the girl till Bowman, in his shirt sleeves, came into his room late that night with some pages of copy in his hand, a demoniac delight in his eye and a voice that was husky with sardonic laughter.

       "Let me read it to you, Drake. It's the richest thing I've come across in all my life. Oh, you've just got to listen. I'm a regular ancient mariner since I hopped on to this. No, I don't care whether you get through by twelve or by doomsday. I've read it to every man in the office and I'm not glutted yet. Just listen to this. It is simply yet chastely headed, you will observe, 'Eustace Manlloyd Is Innocent of the Murder of His Boy Friend.' What d'ye think of that for a healthy topic for a sane mind?"

       Drake did not think. He listened while his chief read the article, with many chuckling interpolations, with a workmanlike distaste for its crudity and clumsiness as well as a sarcastic eye for its effect upon his hearer.

       "You see, she sent it in as a lady star should," Bowman said when his laughter had subsided, "with a note saying she would call for the money tomorrow. How'd she guess we were going to run it?"

       "Run it!" exclaimed Drake, incredulously.

       "Why, of course, my dear sir. I'll have it rewritten and run as a contribution — letters from the people, you know — a girl's view of the case, signed 'Peachblossoms.' It'll make a hit, it's so asinine. The only danger is that we may be accused of faking it — it's too impossible; or a mob may wreck the office to show what becomes of papers that print pro-Manlloyd stuff. You can't fell what it might lead to. Anyway, it'll attract attention, I promise you." It did.

(To be Continued next week.)
(Copyright, 1907, by the New York Herald Company — All Rights Reserved.)



ad: The whitest thing in the world peach blossom
  • from The Detroit Free Press
    Sunday Magazine section, (1907-jul-14), p02
  • also from The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune
    magazine section, (1907-jul-14), p02
The whitest thing in the world
Synopsis of Preceding Chapters.

       Therese Peltinelli, ambitious and unsophisticated, seeks a position as a writer on a newspaper and is rebuffed by the editor, who, to get rid of her and discourage her, gives her an impossible assignment, which the young woman fills, but too late for the daily newspaper. Not realizing that she has failed, she believes she is regularly on the staff, and in a burst of hopeless frenzy the editor again, with the idea of getting rid of her, sends her to work on the murder trial of Eusatace Manlloyd, accused of slaying his boy friend. Miss Pettinelli, known as "Peachblossoms," sees the accused murderer in a new light and writes an amazing story which she delivers to the editor. She believes the man innocent, and the publication of the story she has written causes an immense sensation in the town and in legal circles.


CHAPTER II. — CONCLUDED.

IN THE court room the next day the girl, with a bit of pale pink paper-like blossom stuck stiffly in her shin, waist, was a target for every eye. Drake, too, looked at her as she sat beside hin with a mingling of disgust and astonishment. Yet she appeared as unconscious of her regard as that of the court room habitues, who whispered of her to one another with that knowledge of the phrase that fits unspeakable things, that men learn whose daily life is passed among abnormalities. Evidently her mind, a blank, waxen plate, was capable of retaining but one image, that of a slight, stooped youth with deep set, inscrutable eyes, thick lips forming a beardless, sneering, sensual mouth, a clever, dominating nose, a broad, high forehead, and a superb carriage of the head that lent itself admirably to the haughty pose Manlloyd had adopted.

       The head bent, though, as Drake followed the girl's eyes — bent unmistakably and graciously in her direction, as a prince's (though a prince of criminals) might, toward one whose loyalty has been proved. It was an acknowledgment, insanely egotistic, but as confident of conferring distinction as though a coronet were set on that long, oddly shaped head where the light brown hair grew tine and straight.

       And, like a Jacobite whom the royal martyr's condescension doubly thrills, with reverent pity as well as loyalty, the girl received the salutation. The red ribbon of humility and pride flamed in her cheeks and the jewels of her eyes shone dazzling as a decoration.

       Drake looked down upon her. He had a sensation akin to nausea. He could no more continue to sit beside her than he could bear to be placed at Manlloyd's very elbow. He gathered his papers, rose and changed his seat. And although his impulsive action was remarked by half of those present, she did not notice it.

       When the reporters filed back into the court room after the noon intermission, past the table where the prisoner sat, every one of them saw a wilted spray of peach blossoms in his hand.
 


CHAPTER III.

       "Miss Peachblossoms, sir," announced the office boy.

       Bowman sprang to his feet. He reached out his hand to the girl and handed her to the chair he hurriedly placed. Upon his sallow, strong face a smile, as rare as it was triumphant, played.

       "You've seen him, then — you've had an interview with Manlloyd?" he questioned eagerly.

       "Yes, sir." She was as unmoved by his cordiality as she had been oblivious to the brutality of his first reception of her. "He said he wanted to thank me for my letter to the News."

       "Great!" The city editor rubbed his hands together. Satisfaction shone in his sardonic eyes and he looked upon her with that, almost tender brooding which marked the apogee of News reporters' careers. "And Drake insisted he was clever: too clever to be bamboozled! It's the beat of my lire!" he gazed ardently, yet impersonally, at her. "Great!" he repeated: "great!"

       The girl returned his gaze, a faint line of perplexity appearing between her large, wondering eyes.

       "But he is clever," she said in her deliberate, high tones. "He is very clever: the cleverest young man in the world, I think."

       Bowman's quick frown of disapproval passed quickly in the sunshine of his satisfaction.

       "But not as clever as a clever young woman — eh? Is that what you mean?" he chuckled. "Well, you fooled me with that modest daisy of yours, all right, and I've been in the business twenty years; I don't wonder you took him in. But he ought 'a been on his guard. I hadn't anything to lose but the chance of picking up a crackajack; he's got his neck to look after."

       She had looked uncomprehending, but her face cleared at his last words.

       "You think, too, then, that it would hurt him," she asked, "to have it printed?"

       "It'll hang him — properly done. Of course, he'll hang any way in time, but put the right tone in this and it'll fix things."

       "Yes. That's what I thought. That's what I told the reporter that you sent after me. He said I'd better see you first. But of course you know I'm not going to write it."

       "What!" Bowman jumped from his chair. "What are you, any way?" he demanded savagely.

       She had started at his exclamation, and she looked up at him now, standing over her, with a childish shrinking.

       "What — am I?" she repeated, puzzled. "I don't understand."

       "What's your game?" he demanded angrily. "Is it money? Are you thinking of selling to the highest bidder? All the papers in town put together can't offer you so much that I won't double it."

       "Do you think — do you mean," she said, rising horror struck, "that I would hurt him for money?"

       A gasp of rage and bewilderment held the city editor dumb for a moment. Then he threw up his hands.

       "I give it up," he said weakly. "What do you want? You can have anything. But I've got to have that interview."

       "To publish?" Her slim, prim little figure stiffened. "I will never write it for you."

       "But you will!" he returned quickly.

       "You could kill me first!" she said with tense, big-eyed simplicity.

       He looked at her, baffled by her literalness, by the determination that had drained the blood from her face and left it white and drawn.

       "Sit down a moment." He motioned her back to her chair and went into the adjoining room. When he returned he left the door open behind him.

       "Of course, you know," he said with grim good humor, "I can't compel yon to do anything you don't want to do. And — and newspaper men don't kill anybody for news — except themselves. Tell me, were you with him long? An hour? Phew! The mother there? What's his opinion of the case? Sure he'll get off, eh? Would you mind speaking louder, I'm a little deaf. Yes, and you asked him what his theory of Drexler's death was. And what did he say to that?"

       The office boy, whom Bowman turned out bodily when he came to ask if he might show in a local millionaire, was amazed to see the two chatting pleasantly; the girl serious, simple, voluble, childlike; the city editor eager, absorbed, repeating all she said in a voice that was harsh and tense.

       When she left an hour later, the boy, his eyes bulging with curiosity, ran after her with five gold pieces Bowman had sent her.

       "But he does not owe me anything," said the girl, putting her hands behind her with that childishness of gesture that suggested fear of physical compulsion.

       "He says you're to take it anyway," the boy insisted, hastily pressing the money into her reluctant hands.

       He was anxious to get back to the city editor's room, where Bowman, his black eyes glittering with satisfaction, had had sandwiches brought in for himself and his stenographer, who, between mouthfuls, read off his notes to a typewriter, which notes Drake, seated at Bowman's own desk, was already rewriting.

* * *

       The Peachblossom Girl, as she was now called in the court room and in the newspaper accounts of the trial, of which she had become a prominent figure, looked toward Manlloyd the morning the celebrated interview signed with her name appeared in the News, a world of entreaty in her eyes. She had been weeping, her delicate, unfinished face was unconcealably disfigured by tears, and as she bent her appealing gaze upon him involuntarily she clasped her hands in unworded prayer for forgiveness.

       Across the heads of those who sat between, Manlloyd returned the gaze. In his deep set eyes, in his twitching nostrils, upon his curling lips, drawn back and showing his teeth, a fury of such hatred surged as betrayed how strong a nature had been masquerading there. It passed, and Manlloyd gave his attention to the prosecuting attorney's summary, then in progress. But the Peachblossom Girl understood; she had been adjudged guilty of lese majeste.

       At noon she was at the News office. But the office boy knew when Bowman was not to be trifled with.

       "I tell you he ain't in," he said, when he found her waiting in tense anxiety in the anteroom. "He's gone to the country, an' he won't be back. Now, that's flat. No, you can't come in. No, no one else is in."

       "He's a coward." she cried, with a trembling voice; "a cruel coward that would hang an innocent man! Here, give him back his money" — she threw the jingling coins down upon the table — "and tell him I resign my position." Her position! The office boy was struck dumb. He wanted to laugh, but all he could do was to stand with open mouth while, the tears streaming down her cheeks, she flew out of the door and down the stairs.

       The reporters, who had become accustomed to varying their accounts of the trial with sensational personal mention of the Peachblossom Girl, missed her that, afternoon. The prosecuting attorney was finishing his address. A somewhat cold and methodical man, he refrained from temperament as well as by design, from that vituperative eloquence which had characterized his assistant's speech, and which the extraordinary brutality of the crime perhaps justified. But the very temperance of his language made the unspoken thing behind it powerful and effective. To Drake's fastidiously sensitive nature he seemed to be handling the theme with tongs; and his mental attitude — of repugnance, of hardly conquered loathing, of moral nausea — so affected the reporter that he was conscious of a sympathetic contagion. The perspiration beaded his forehead; he gulped nervously, as though his stomach had revolted, while he listened and looked at Manlloyd sitting composed and even attentive, the sneer on his pale lips accentuated perhaps a trifle, his well formed hands clasped, but loosely, on the table before him, his inscrutable eyes looking straight ahead.

       When the arraignment was over and the jury had withdrawn, men looked at one another, at the judge, at any one but Manlloyd. They were as conscious of the presence of Death in that close, still apartment as though the hangman had entered and stood behind them. Shaw, too, the prisoner's attorney, felt the swift touch of disaster. His ruddy coarse, broad face, down which the perspiration trickled, was set, graven with a cheap imitation of confidence, as though a mask he had set upon his features had melted in the fire of Justice's arraignment, and now betrayed not only the fear behind it, but the pretense that sought to hide that fear. He, not Manlloyd, looked the criminal; save that in the vulgar unscrupulousness of the attorney's face none might read capacity for such a crime as the murder of Drexler.

       It was while they still sat hushed in the tremor of a crisis that the Peachblossom Girl noiselessly entered the court, room. People made way for her, in the way they did for Manlloyd's mother, as for one who had a sad and guilty right to prominence upon that terrible stage. She did not take her seat among the reporters, but slipped into the place at a table the assistant prosecuting attorney had just vacated: it brought her so close to Manlloyd that she might have touched him. She looked worn and beaten with sorrow and strife, and in her face there was a starved sort of radiance, an intensity of emotional experience that changed living into a transparent ecstasy of suffering.

       Manlloyd seemed not. to have noticed her entrance. At a word from his attorney, who read in the jurors' faces how short a time they needed for deliberation, he had dropped his face into his hands; not in despair, but as one who, borne down by a strain that even so strong a nature must feel physically, is morally unconquered.

       When he lifted his head half an hour later, as the jurors filed back into the room, he saw the girl's note lying on the table before him. She had slipped it there, where it would meet his eyes the moment he looked up, yet had done it so unobtrusively, so stealthily, if there could be stealth in an action so self-unconscious, so uncontrollable, that he had not been aware.

       "Oh, pity and forgive me," he read mechanically, as the jury took its place and the clerk called the roll. "For pity's sake believe that I did not do it, and let me speak to you."

       Then the Judge's voice broke the stillness. Its effortful rigidity shook the court room.

       "Gentlemen of the jury, have you arrived at a verdict?"

       "We have."

       "Do you find the accused guilty or not guilty?"

       There was an instant's pause. Every ear in the courtroom waited for a merciful, modifying word. None came. It was death.

       A frightful scream tore its way through the silence with the mad freedom of hysteria. The mother of Manlloyd had become a struggling, shrieking mass of muscles. All her vanity, all her complacence was not proof against so terrible a thing as this.

       In the confusion that followed the prisoner's attorneys bent over the struggling woman, and for the briefest instant the chief figure in the scene found himself neglected, unsupported by the prying curiosity of shocked, hostile eyes and the necessity of repelling, confounding them. He had got to his feet and he swayed as he stood, still looking at the judge, whose words had become unintelligible to him; and in that moment, before the whole court, the Peachblossom Girl took her place at his side.

       He looked upon her with the helpless, appealing, bewildered glance of one who is stunned, who does not recognize the face that is nearest to him, but turns toward it in the extreme moment of his agony with an unspoken prayer for mere humanity.

       With an exquisite, mothering gesture, she drew his tottering figure down beside her, and he fell sobbing upon her breast. Her face was ghastly as it bent over him, but it shone with a radiance that made the reporters as they filed past her look away.
 


CHAPTER IV.

       It was the hour of Manlloyd's levee.

       The rules are very strict at San Pias. When a convicted murderer steps within the great, stone walls he is already dead. He has passed forever from the sight and knowledge of men. His name is gone — his identity has vanished. He is a mere bit of flotsam stranded on the beach, waiting for the ocean of eternity to resurge and carry his soul away. And his execution is a mere matter of unpleasant detail in the disposition of what is mortal of him.

       This is the phrase Warden Garnett used when he read his yearly report to the board of prison directors. It was an excellent way, and effective. It made one of his charges, who had appeared personally before the board to apply for a pardon, shiver at the cold, inhuman relentlessness of it.

       But it was mere phrase making — as so much that is effective is. Warden Garnett was very human himself; a red-faced, white-mustached old soldier, with a limp and a soldierly carriage, as well as a soldierly pretense of fierceness; with a simple, straightforward mind and a body that craved and enjoyed more and more the good things of this world — and things can be very good in an institution where people are very bad — as he grew older and accustomed to the ease of life in a public position.

       He intended, like a soldier, to die at his post — his easy, comfortable, generous post, one of the best in the gift of the state. Therefore, and with this noble ideal of duty before him, now that a change was imminent in the personnel of the board in whose lap lay the warden's official life and death, he assiduously cultivated the good-will of those of power and place, the press particularly.

       And the press — that great reflector of tastes and customs — was greedy for news of Manlloyd; what he ate, what he drank, what he said, how he said it, how he slept, what he wore, whom he saw, how he felt, how he conducted himself. The most trivial detail, the most insignificant word from this man was still the prize for which reporters and editors struggled and strained, spent human effort and treasure — like successors of those freebooting captains whose unscrupulousness, whose single-mindedness, whose devotion, temporary yet extreme, to duty, and whose facile transference of loyalty they inherit.

       At ten in the morning, therefore, wnen a late breakfast has been well digested, Manlloyd held his grand levee.

       It took place in the warden's private office, that the reportorial courtiers might be accommodated — artists, photographers and writers, representatives of every city daily and weekly, as well as many of the country papers.

      Before these gentlemen Manlloyd, "disgustingly dainty," as Drake phrased it, posed, trimming his well-kept finger nails as he listened, or looked up from the papers brought him by his guests, and chatted, when he was in the humor to be loquacious.

       And it was his humor often to speak now, to be as communicative as he had been surly and unapproachable while the trial was in progress. He had regained his poise. His collapse at the end he attributed to the contagion of hysteria and his sympathy for his mother. He smiled and even returned a wink when the Peachblossom Girl and her disappearance were commented upon. He spoke freely of his confidence that Shaw would procure him a new trial, and he would not countenance the most indirect allusion to possibility of another conviction. He was much interested in the newspapers, in which his own youthful, debauched, alert face was spread over entire pages, and he commented upon the varying degrees of skill with which sketches were drawn and articles written, arrogating to himself the critical faculty, as other princely patrons of art and letters have done in unbarred salons, but with an intelligent appreciation that always sickened Drake, to whom the discovery of any human quality in one so bestial was as revolting as the manifestation of personality might be to a physician who chloroforms the monstrosity in whose birth he has assisted.

       Manlloyd had his favorites in the court that dwelt at the village near the prison, driving in to pay its respects each morning. To these he vouchsafed interesting personal reminiscences and opinions, developing with surprising quickness knowledge of the value of a news item from daily contact with the news specialists who surrounded him and from close study of the inky mirror in which they afterward held him up for the world to gaze upon. He was surprisingly tolerant for a criminal, though capricious as a sovereign should be. Even Drake, whose antipathy Manlloyd was too shrewd not to perceive and to reciprocate, admitted this. He rather enjoyed being written up as a monster, as something loathly, with mysterious possibilities for better things, which only heightened the normal man's repulsion. He did not object to being ridiculed gently, nor even to being misquoted, and a tactful allusion to his dandified airs, his handsome hands or his imperious manner atoned for much.

       There had been but one instance of rigorous censorship in Manlloyd's court; it consisted in the ruthless banishment of a reporter who had dwelt too much upon the weakness the murderer had betrayed at the close of the trial, and an ignoring of the great criminal the following day. The first offense might have been pardoned, but no man and no man's paper that failed to recognize how great a notoriety was Manlloyd's could hope to be forgiven. That the unhappy journal had turned in despair to the murderer's mother was considered most unprofessional by the other newspapers; yet that afflicted lady was writing weekly letters about her son, and the name of Rebecca Manlloyd graced a payroll. Such evasion of authority was resented by the prince of criminals, who promptly followed the first banishment with a similar decree against his disloyal mother.

       The exiled news hunter appealed to the chief jailer one morning as he was crossing the yard on his way to take Manlloyd back to his cell.

       "It's the deuce and all, Kerr," the reporter said. "Who'd have thought the beggar would be strong enough to resist all we've offered him to let me come back? Here he is, the biggest criminal of the country, and we're clean out of it."

       "Not him." Kerr stopped a moment at the door of the office. "He's no biggest criminal. He's playing a part, I tell ye. Don't I know?"

       "You mean — does he weaken when you're alone with him? Tell me," demanded the reporter greedily.

       "No, not him. He shows off for me, too. His poor head's turned all right. But he's a weak little beast just the same. He'll die a dirty death — the cur!"

Both men looked up at the warden's vine-shaded porch above them.
Both men looked up at the warden's vine-shaded porch above them.

artist = Nodherny (New York Herald?)

       The jailer stepped into the office, leaving the disconsolate journalistic peri on the outside. Ten minutes later, with Manlloyd's wrist handcuffed to his, Kerr was crossing the yard, when something fluttered from the porch of the warden's quarters overhead.

       In an instant the jailer's foot was planted upon it and, constraining his prisoner to stoop with him, he bent and picked up the object. It was only a faded late peach blossom he had crushed into the rocky floor of the yard. Involuntarily Manlloyd reached out his hand for it and both men looked up at the warden's vine-shaded porch above them.

Constraining his prisoner to stoop with him, he bent and picked up the object.
Constraining his prisoner to stoop with him, he bent and picked up the object.

artist = Nodherny (New York Herald?)

       The face of a girl in a nurse's cap and apron looked down upon them. It was a thin, haggard face, with great, clear gray eyes; but when Manlloyd's eyes rested upon it a wave of color swept over it that made it as delicately appealing as the blossom itself had been before it was crushed by the jailer's foot. And, strangely, that radiant glow was reflected in Kerr's big, tanned, stolid face, as well as in the pallid one of his prisoner.
 


CHAPTER V.

       A firm, large kindness was Michael Kerr's, with not a trace of weakness or hysteria about it. There was an impersonal something in his manner to prisoners, a fatelike gentleness, an unalterable equanimity, as though he held it to be unworkmanlike to to show himself made of the same material as the creatures he guarded, soothed, tended and escorted to death. It was this very aloof dispassionateness that had been a tower of strength to many a suffering wretch whose nerves, crazed by; anticipation, sucked in greedily the calm solemnity of Kerr's face while his hand rested upon the immovable steel of the jailer's arm as they walked together toward the gallows.

       It had grown upon Kerr unawares — his love for the girl who had come to the prison as nursemaid to the Warden's grandchildren. This man knew human nature. In many a death watch he had sounded the depths and basenesses of the human heart. And it was the crystal clearness of the girl's soul that had revealed to him his own need, his passionate need of an antidote for the poisonous spiritual emanations in the midst of which his middle-aged, sober life was passing. Unshaken, calm, dutiful days his had been, that never admitted a questioning thought of the orders he received; that had never even weighed the right and wrong of it all; that had divided the world with a simple, clean cut cleavage into those who walked unhandcuffed without and those who wore stripes within. And of these last there was the natural subdivision into those who should wear stripes all their lives and those who should for one day be clad in the raiment of the outside and walk to death beside him.

       Of the former, the life timers, there was nothing to be asked, Kerr felt. For them there was neither hope nor despair. For them he had a limitless patience, a forbearance that might have been angelic but for the unshaken discipline behind it. But of those over whom he should one day be set in the death watch his attitude demanded a conception of the fit, a realization that to "die a dirty death" was worse than living an unclean life, was contemptibly cruel to the tortured, innocent body that was only an irresponsible partner in the crime yet suffered the penalty of it; and was moreover, a breach of good faith, an unfair, dishonorable act toward the jailer, whose very excess of patience, of gentle consideration, of untiring forbearance during the hysterical preliminary period was a debt which only a decent, swift, helpful death could discharge.

       Kerr had never been ill but twice in his life — once when the rope broke and he had to lift Harron's squirming body to another death; and again when he had dragged Pugh, the negro, squealing like a doomed, crazed animal, to the scaffold, and the frantic creature broke his bonds and clung to the death watch at the moment the drop was sprung with a death clutch which not even Kerr's two hundred pounds could resist.

       For the memory of such as died like this, the jailer felt an unlessening resentment. Of the others who had walked with him up that short companionway to death he thought kindly, even tenderly; as a father might whose troublesome boys have been disciplined and, at the end of the day's disturbance, lie safe asleep at last.

       Therefore he despised Manlloyd; and therefore knowing hi sown prejudice, his unparalleled patience with him.

       "He'll die a dirty death, the cur!" he had said to himself the day Manlloyd was brought in, eliminating at a glance the bulwark of tense, nerve stretched pretense behind which the trapped human animal and his secret take refuge from the question in men's eyes.

       He repeated this estimate to the new nursemaid when she led the conversation that way.

       She looked at him without anger — only an unbelieving horror in her eyes.

       "No; he'll die the death of a martyr," she said slowly; "a brave, innocent death that will make men wonder they could so misjudge him."

To be Concluded Next Sunday.
(Copyright, 1907, by the New York Herald Co. All Rights Reserved.)



peach blossom
  • from The Detroit Free Press
    Sunday Magazine section, (1907-jul-21), p02
  • also from The Minneapolis Sunday Tribune
    magazine section, (1907-jul-21), p02
The whitest thing in the world
Synopsis of Preceding Chapters.

   Therese Pettinelli, ambitious and unsophisticated, seeks a position as a writer on a newspaper and is rebuffed by the editor who, to get rid of her and discourage her, gives her an impossible assignment, which the young woman fills, but too late for the daily newspaper. Not realizing that she has failed, she believes she is regularly on the staff, and in a burst of hopeless frenzy the editor again, with the idea of getting rid of her, sends her to work on the murder trial of Eustace Manlloyd, accused of slaying his boy friend. Miss Pettinelli, known as "Peachblossoms," sees the accused murdered in a new light and writes an amazing story, which she delivers to the editor. She believes the man innocent, and the publication of the story she has written causes an immense sensation in the town and in legal circles. Manlloyd is convicted and sent to prison to await his execution, and the girl, who has fallen in love with him, gains admittance to the prison in the guise of a nurse. She reveals her identity to a jailer and tells him she wants to make amends to the convict for the harm she imagines she has done to him during her newspaper work at the trial. The jailer, Kerr, is in love with the girl and seeks to wed her, but she confesses that Manlloyd is the one for whom she cares.

       Kerr smiled patiently upon her as they walked together in the cool of the evening beyond the prison walls. To him the incapacity of innocence to realize guilt was only another charm in her.

       "At any rate, you believe he'll hang, he said. "Do you know, not one of those who go near him dare tell him so? They're all deceiving him."

       "Do I believe it? Look at me! Believing it is what makes me look like this. I'll tell him — if only I can see him!"

       He looked as she bade him, as though the sight were a new one, at the haggard, girlish face, pale to its fevered lips. It tugged at his heart, that wan, little face.

       "But" — Kerr stopped to lay a broad hand gently upon her arm — "why should it hurt you so, you poor little thing?"

       "Why — why, because it does. Because — you'll not tell — I'm the one the newspapers called the Peachblossom Girl."

       Kerr's hand dropped. The Peachblossom Girl — this bit of unsullied childhood. The woman who had shamelessly identified herself with such a thing as Manlloyd — and this girl — his girl!

       She had walked away from him, as he stood there stunned, and he had to hurry to catch up with her. There was a soft shade of color in her cheek when she heard him again beside her.

       "I couldn't help it," she faltered, appealingly. "It hurt me so — I had to — to help him. I had to make up if I could — for what the world was doing to him."

       "And you came here for that?"

       She nodded.

       "It won't do you any good. You cant see him."

       "I thought," her eyes were swimming in tears and her lips trembled, "I thought you were going to — to be good to me."

       "Good to you!" Kerr's voice broke; "Good to you, and bring you near to a beast like that!"

       She shivered as though she had been struck.

       "Don't — don't!" she cried, lifting imploring hands. "I can't bear for you to say things like that of him."

       He walked beside her dazed till she paused at the gate with appealing, outstretched hand.

       "What curse is on you," he cried, holding her a minute, "and on me!"

       She only looked at him with childlike, troubled eyes.

       "Don't you know?" he asked.

       She shook her head.

       "Don't you know that I've been thinking of you every moment these past two months? Don't you know how I want to take you into my home, a home away from here, and nurse you and care for you there? And make you look strong an' happy, you pore little thing! An' never let you see the bad in life or hear a word of its wickedness, my little lamb — my pore little lamb! I wanted you so for my wife — I did!"

       The agitation in that quiet, steady voice caught her.

       "Oh," she panted, "I am so sorry for you!"

       "For me?" His laugh was short and mirthless. "What about you?"

       "I — I've got him — yet. I care for him," she murmured.

       A sudden cruel desire to make her suffer came to the man, who would have given his life to shield her.

       "What'll you do when he's hanged?" he demanded brutally.

       The intonation seemed not to have reached her. "I'll die, too, then," she said, softly.

       "Do you mean" — Kerr's voice was hoarse — "you'll kill yourself for — for a" —

       "No; it'll kill me," she said, with quiet confidence.

       A quick sigh of relief burst from him.

       "And if it shouldn't?" he persisted. "What then — what then?"

       "Oh, do you suppose I care," her voice rose for the first time, "what becomes of me then — after after that?"

       He took her hand in his and smoothed it with a loving touch.

       "I care," he said. "I care all I am and all I — hope for. I'll learn you to care, too, little girl, an' I'll wait forever if I have to — till you do."

       They passed within the gate and around to the side entrance of the warden's house.

       "You'll help me — then?" she stammered as she paused at the foot of the stairs. "You'll take me to see him?"

       "Never — so help me God!" He spoke under his breath.

       "Oh, I must — I must see him! Don't you see it's killing me not to be with him — now, now when he needs me! Oh, I beg of you" —

       "Never!" Kerr swore as he left her there.

       Yet within a fortnight she had her wish.

       Though she did not know it, Manlloyd had been in the hospital for some weeks, recovering from a slight operation. Every afternoon, when the prisoners were in the yard on the other side of the prison, she was sent to the roof to bring down the freshly washed linen for the baby she tended. Often from this height she had seen patients in the prison hospital, with the prison pallor intensified by illness, sitting in the roofed and barred sun house that looked, from where she stood, like a detached iron cage with a listless, suffering, striped beast within it. But after the first shuddering shock of sympathy she instinctively turned her back upon the place. A torturing passion of pity for one prisoner monopolized her; thought or sight of others she avoided as one shuns a blow.

       The wind was blowing her apron from her as she stood, a slender, chaste figure in the scant nurse's gown and cap, from which faint brown tendrils of her hair escaped. Her arms were stretched above her head where the linen flapped and tossed, when from the sun house, below and apart, came a low call.

       "Blossom! Blossom!"

       She knew his voice instantly, and the name he alone called her. She wheeled and, with her arms still full of the linen, ran to the low parapet that fenced in the roof, and bent over.

       "You've been ill?" she cried, a world of anxiety in her voice, as she peered toward the single figure that lay outstretched in an invalid's chair.

       Manlloyd nodded.

       "Very ill? But you're better?"

       "Oh, yes. I'll be well enough to hang in a week or so."

       She gave a faint cry and pressed her hands together.

       "You care?" he asked.

       "Oh, I — I can't bear it!" she cried.

       "What'd you come here for, then?"

       "To — to be" — The words died on her lips.

       "Peachblossoms!" He laughed, gratified. "You look like 'em now. No, I thought you came to be in at the hanging. It'll be a nice one; they're feeding me up so it'll all go off fine."

       She shook her head vigorously, like a child but speechless and shuddering.

       "Sure I did," he insisted, mockingly.

       "Is — is there anything I can do?" she asked, after another helpless negative and a silence.

       "You'd lose your job if you did."

       "Oh this!" she plucked contemptuously at her gown. "Do you think I care for this?"

       He pulled himself up to look curiously at her. "You don't mean to say you've got money?"

       "Me?" She opened innocent, bewildered eyes. "Why, you know I came down from the farm to be with my aunt. She's all the folks I've got. And now, since — since — you know" — Her voice trailed off into silence.

       "Since what?" he asked, curiously.

       "Since it's all been in the papers about you and — and me," she stammered, "she won't have anything to do with me. No," her voice was firmer now, "I'll starve when I quit here, but what do I care!"

       "I wonder why you care, Blossom," he said slowly.

       "Because — I can't help it," she cried passionately, and covered her face, sobbing. "It's so cruel, and you — you're so brave about it."

       "You don't catch Mother Manlloyd crying when there's no reporter around. Say," he sat up with sudden suspicion in his voice, "are you in with them? Mother Manlloyd's turning me into cash, writing weekly letters about her gifted son to the press. But if you dare, I'll find a way — I swear I will" —

       "Oh," her tear-stained face hung appealingly over him, "don't you trust me? Do — do trust me. I'll kill myself before I'll hurt you again. I'd do anything in the world to prove it. You couldn't think of anything I'd not try for you."

       He lay back appeased, persuaded.

       "Sweet little Blossom," he murmured, looking up.

       She fell upon her knees there by the parapet, resting her hot face upon her arm, and, as she did so, suddenly she felt a hand upon her shoulder. She jumped to her feet and faced Kerr. His big square face was white.

       "You can't do this. I'll see that you don't get another chance here, but if you find any other way I'll tell the old man, and out you go, sure's my name's Michael Kerr," he said firmly. "Now, go down stairs."

       She stood like a terrified thing, mechanically folding the clothing she had in her arms. But she let it drop with a gasp when Manlloyd's voice came up to them.

       "Take your hands off my girl, Kerr," he cried, with a sudden desire to assert himself audaciously to this quiet man, whose judgment of himself Manlloyd's infallible instinct had divined. "Just keep off."

       "I've ordered you back to your cell, Manlloyd." To the girl Kerr's deep voice seemed to fall like lead upon the man below. "Keep a civil tongue in your head. You don't want to attract anybody else's attention to the girl and get her in trouble."

       "Whew! Are you sweet on her, too?" laughed Manlloyd. Something in the jailer's voice had betrayed him to the murderer's keen ear, and he relished rivalry in which he had so clearly the upper hand.

       The girl wrung her hands in silent agony.

       "Go down stairs, I tell you," said Kerr to

       "Blossom!" called Manlloyd, "wait a minute. Can't you wait to say goodby? It's the last time, you know, and" —

      With a maddened cry the girl broke from the jailer and flew to the parapet, her arms outstretched.

       "You cur!" — the jailer, as he stood beside her, was looking down now upon him — "to take advantage of an innocent little thing like her." He got between the girl and the parapet, faced her and, keeping his eyes upon her, silently walked toward her. She retreated, half mad with misery and excitement, but step by step she moved back toward the stairs.

       "Blossom — Blossom!" called Manlloyd, a sudden resolution in his voice.

       The girl attempted to answer, but Kerr pushed her gently within and shut the door behind her.


CHAPTER VI.

       * * * "I pronounce you man and wife."

       The prison chaplain had hurried through the ceremony. He hurried away now from the death cell, like one who is glad to be done with an unpleasant affair.

       For a moment the Peachblossom Girl stood, her hand still reached between the bars, resting in Manlloyd's. Then she sank into a chair which the guard had placed, for her in the corridor beside the grating.

       The girl leaned her head against the grating. She seemed half dazed by the strain she had undergone and leaned dumbly against the grating. She had not spoken a word except the half inarticulate "Yes" in answer to the chaplain's question.

       The pathos of her relaxed, helpless little figure found Manlloyd.

       "Funny little Blossom!" he said, caressingly.

       She lifted her lips to his, a meaning look in her eyes. He bent to kiss her on the mouth, then suddenly put his hand to his lips.

       "Hush! Take care!" she whispered, rising to cover him from the eyes of the guard at the other end of the corridor. "He must not know you have it. They searched me — I couldn't keep it anywhere else."

       "What's it for?" he asked, slipping a tiny bottle into his pocket.

       She looked at him. "Don't you know? I've been thinking of it all this time. It's for you to drink. They can never kill you — now."

'It's for you to drink, they can never kill you now.'
"It's for you to drink, they can never kill you now."

artist = Nodherny (New York Herald?)

       He withdrew his hand from his pocket as though he had been stung.

       "I tell you there's going to be a new trial. I'll never hang." He smiled confidently.

       She shook her head. "It's — it's only a week off," she urged. "Try — try to get reconciled — not to the shameful death they are preparing for an innocent man, but for this that I have brought you. It is sure — quick. Promise me you won't wait and hope too long."

       He looked at her curiously, doubtfully, yet wistfully.

       "You seem in a mighty hurry to get rid of me — for a wife," he tried to say lightly.

       She smiled feebly; her whole being was so obvious a denial.

       "Look here, Blossom," he remonstrated, fighting her conviction as though it were the one thing that barred his freedom, "'tain't going to be very gay for us if every day you come here you preach funeral to me. Why can't you believe that I know best? Let's talk of something lively."

       "Oh, I can't, I can't," she stammered. "I must get you to see the truth. No one would show it to you before you came here. And now that you're alone with the — the end so near, I must — I must help you to meet it. Suppose it was to come tomorrow — now, within an hour, how Could you" —

       He dropped her hand — threw it from him. "Then go!" he cried. He was shivering as if with cold. "I won't listen to it."

       She had risen and was standing swaying outside the bars. He walked away from her toward his cot, and when he turned she was gone.

       The following day was really his first in the death cell, for during the day before his mind had been filled entertainingly with thought of his strange wedding day; of how complete a triumph his was over Kerr; of how wonderful a break in the monotony of his days would be the playing upon this fresh, timid, devoted soul that quivered under his hand like a throbbing string. But today, this second day, had nothing in it — nothing.

       When it was 10 o'clock, the hour for the girl's visit; and she had not come a sort of terror of the time fell upon him. He found himself writhing under the phlegmatic, expressionless observation of the German guard, as though those calm, dull, unfaltering, animal-like eyes were boring holes through his brain. He threw himself upon his cot and tried to sleep. He had pulled the blankets up over his head, but presently he felt the German's hand upon his shoulder and his eyes again upon his face.

       "Can't you let a fellow alone a minute?" he cried, wrenching roughly away from the man's touch, his voice breaking with self-pity.

       Stolidly the German shook his head. "Dey kills deirselfs sometimes," he said.

       It seemed to him that he was fevered after this, and when his dinner came he sent it away untasted. He paced the cell with nervous, restless strides. He asked what time it was. He asked again after hours of agony and found that ten minutes had passed. He shrieked aloud then in relieving hysteria, and was lying quiet but exhausted upon the cot when the German asked him if he would see his mother.

       He nodded weakly. His cot was moved closer to the grating, and she came into the corridor heavily draped in black, her handkerchief to her eyes.

       He rallied at sight of this ostentatious woe.

       "The hanging's not over yet, you know, ma," he said, faintly, his pale lips writhing with the sarcasm.

       She threw back her veil. "How can you be so unfeeling, Eustace," she exclaimed. "But there, you always were. You never cared for my feelings — never for anybody but yourself. And this girl visitor of yours — see in what a position it placed me. I couldn't believe it at first. Did she really marry you? There was I sending in my article to the Press and not a word in it about the girl — forward, stupid piece of wax, thrusting herself into other people's affairs. Why didn't you tell me, Eustace? The Press people were awfully mad about it."

       "Would you have given us a big blowout — bridesmaids, a church wedding and your blessing, ma?" he mocked.

       She looked uncertainly at him, but continued complacently:— "I'm glad of one thing, she did have the decency not to be interviewed about it herself. No reporter could get a word out of her, no photograph, not a decent snapshot. But I suppose," she added, "you made her do that."

       He shook his bead. "You don't have to make her do that sort of thing," he said very slowly.

       She peered in upon him sharply. "You don't — care for her, Eustace?" she exclaimed.

       He was still.

       "You can't care for a queer little thing like that?" she insisted.

       "Haven't you just said I never cared for anybody but myself?" he demanded, brokenly.

       "How ill tempered you are today. Just as if you hadn't brought enough on me and I hadn't got enough to worry me. Didn't they say in the Press yesterday that the pity of the mothers of the world must go out to Rebecca Manlloyd in her loyalty to her miserable son? Well, anyway, it made the notice in the News much more valuable. I hope they sent you something for it. Money goes so fast with me. Fortunately, in here you don't need much."

       "No, but the girl may."

       "Nonsense, Eustace! You can't be meaning to leave your share in the ranch to her?"

       A gray shade seemed to be settling over his face as he sat up to look at her.

       "Leave it!" he gasped. "Then, you, too, believe. Why haven't you told me the truth?" he cried, his voice breaking hysterically.

       She murmured a protest that she had believed he would get another trial — that she still believed; indeed, she did.

       But he raved that it was a world of liars that deserved to have its neck wrung, as Drexler's had been, for lying, just for lying, nothing else; that Shaw, too, had not been near him since he had signed over his share of the ranch to him; that he was left to die like a rat in a trap; that even if he were guilty — which he wasn't — wasn't — wasn't — many worse men had got off; that he wished he could get out for just a day to show people what he thought of them!

       Mrs. Manlloyd shivered as she sat there helpless. She had never known the things mothers say — the native poetry of the race that, like a deep, sweet spring, is forever welling up from their hearts. She was afraid now, and touched, too, in a part of her nature so seldom appealed to that it had become rusty and inflexible. She had a sense of oppression, of nervous exasperation. She longed passionately for him to stop, to be his own hard, mocking self again, a self that had never required anything from her lean sympathies.

       He did stop, for the German tapped Mrs. Manlloyd on the shoulder and told her her time was up.

       "Good-bye, Eustace," she said, touching her lips to his perspiring forehead, close to the bars. "Keep up your spirits; you'll be better soon. I'll tell Shaw he mustn't desert you now. And it'll be all right. Perhaps by the next time I come you'll have got the good news. I'll be here soon again. It was mean of him to take your last cent. He's made enough out of you, not counting the newspaper notice he gets. Well," she sighed, "I must get along as best I can, I suppose. It costs so much to make these little trips out here."

       He wiped the perspiration from his face and put out his hand to her through the bars.

       She received the money it contained with a gratified exclamation.

       "Promise me, Eustace, you won't let yourself break down," she said, as she kissed him again. "I don't want to have you to worry about, too."

       "I promise," he said in a low voice, "but I want you to promise, too, to be good to her — the girl — I do care, mother — I care." The words seem wrung from him.

       He lay quite still after she was gone till the German asked him to get up while the cot was moved back into the corner.

       "It will besser sein — to-morrow," said the German. "Always es comes bad in dis cell at first."

       Manlloyd did not answer. In that stumbling sentence he had had a swift, terrible vision of his predecessors who had passed out of the death cell.

       "Don't let her come any more," he said, after a silence. "She thinks she'll come again before — the last day."

       The German looked over at him; it was Manlloyd's first admission that there was a last day.

       "Tell her the warden won't let anybody in any more," he went on, weakly. "I don't want any goodbys."

       The guard nodded. He had finished his task and was taking up the German newspaper (of which he could have mastered but a line an hour, so interminable was his reading), when Manlloyd spoke again.

       "Send for her — the girl — will you? Get her to come back again. I want her back."
 


CHAPTER VII.

       He bent to kiss her when she stood again outside the bars. But she drew back, blushing miserably.

       "Why," he protested, "you yourself — the other time" —

       "But that was because I had no other way to give you" —

       "The bottle, eh?" Mechanically he glanced toward the corner near his cot where he had concealed the poison beneath a scraped-out bit of mortar. He paused a moment and she waited docilely. "Queer little thing you are," he said musingly, at last, "aren't you?"

       "Yes," she said humbly.

       "But you don't get sulky, and you come back even if" —

       She thrust both her hands between the bars. It was a rarely expressive gesture for her.

       "And you keep away from those jackal reporters. And you tell the truth."

       He pressed her hands hard.

       "Sit down; you must be tired," he said, after a minute. And he pulled his own stool close and sat down by her with only the bars between them. "How'd you get up here?"

       "I walked."

       "It's awful hot out, they say?"

       She nodded.

       He sat silent, still holding her hands absently.

       "Been staying down at the inn?"

       She nodded again, silently — her clear eyes, which had at first been unaccustomed to the light, bent with pitying worship upon him. His features were grayed, old and thin. And something even she had not seen there till now was dawning in his face. As she looked upon him (it was a primitive instrument, this high keyed, one stringed nature of hers) it seemed to her that the preliminary, tortures of his agonizing death were already being administered.

       He reached down into his pocket and put his last gold piece in her hands. Mechanically her fingers closed on it for a moment. Then it fell ringing to the stone floor, while, withdrawing her hands from his, she covered her face and burst into passionate tears.

       He watched her, very pale and puzzled, a baffled longing growing in his eyes.

       "You don't want it — you won't take it?"

       Behind her hands she shook her head, in childlike, vigorous denial.

       "Don't cry," he said stiffly; "don't!"

       She wiped her eyes and composed herself. "I'm so — so sorry," she gasped, struggling to control her voice.

       He nodded thoughtfully.

       "It — breaks my heart — for you," she sobbed.

       "And," his pale lips writhed, "it breaks my heart — for you."

       The German's heavy step came to end their interview and waked both from their absorption. She clung to him then, drawing his hand out between the bars and laying her head upon it in dumb misery.

       He bent, and with his lips close to her ear. "You're the — the whitest thing in the whole world. You don't believe I did it?" he whispered.

       "No, no; how could I?"

       "And if you should ever hear later. After" —

       "No, no, never. Oh, believe me. You do trust me?"

       "Trust you! I wish I could trust Him, up there, as I trust" —

       His voice failed and he buried his face in his hands.

       "Listen" — she was clinging a moment longer to the bars — "always I will think of you and — and be proud of you and care for you. And I will never listen to a word against you, nor read one. And — and no matter what the world will be saving the day after — afterward, you will know that one person knew truly about you. It's like — like a picture," she went on, speaking rapidly now that she had but a moment more, "like a picture that everybody has been daubing, covering with mud, scratching, tearing; but so long as there's one clean copy of it in the world it's really not destroyed. And that picture I've got here."

       Her hands were clasped over her breast.

       After the chaplain went away Manlloyd could not sleep. Yet he was too excited and weakened physically to make the effort to be fully awake. So he lay feverishly dozing, waking with a shriek of agony from a dream with the cold sweat on his forehead, as though he had ventured too far into the future and the damp breath of death were already upon him; then, composing himself and lying back, only to die another of the thousand deaths that night held for him.

       The hammering on the gallows in the yard had ceased when he looked up to see Kerr standing over him, a glass in his hand.

       "What is it?" Manlloyd whispered.

       "Just something that'll quiet you." The death watch held the sedative to his lips, every feeling gone from him except the charity of the strong for the weak.

       Manlloyd sipped it tremulously. But when he had finished and Kerr attempted to take away his arm, upon which the murderer's head had been pillowed, Manlloyd held him.

       "I wonder," he said, hesitatingly, "if you'll be good to her — it doesn't seem you could be hard on anybody."

       A dull red suffused the jailer's face. He did not answer, but withdrew his arm and walked over to the table to set down the glass.

       "You're thinking," Manlloyd spoke, with the slow effort of exhaustion; "you're saying to yourself that it soils her to have me speak of her. Well" — he relapsed into silence, and Kerr remained standing with his back to him — "it would if — if — anything could. But, you see, even I haven't done that, and so I'm glad you're to have her. It'll all pass — about me. She won't forget. But, you see. it isn't me she really cared for; it's what she thought was me. That's why it's so — good that tomorrow settles me. But I wish, Kerr — I wish to God," his voice broke is he turned his face to the wall, "you'd be very tender with her at first — just after."

       When he waked at last in the gray of morning he went almost mad in the effort to make his brain accept the fact in store. The sedative had drugged his wits; he had forgotten the poison, or he might, in sheer terror of death, have leaped into its outstretched waiting arms. Despite the ominous stir in the corridor, he could not realize that it meant extinction to him. He battled with himself in that last waking as he lay there, cramped into stillness that he might for a moment longer appear to be asleep, seeking desperately somewhere, anywhere for calm. And just at that moment he heard Shaw's loud voice in the corridor without; was pierced by the words he uttered as by a shock of electricity; lived a moment of more exquisite agony than all he had endured and then fainted away.

       "D'ye know what it means?" Shaw was asking.

       Manlloyd shook his head. In his face was a vacant look, a dullness of horror as of one who has suffered overmuch.

       "Brace up here, brace up!" Shaw held a glass to his lips.

       Nauseated, Manlloyd pushed it away.

       "I can hear you. Don't shout. I'm listening," he protested.

       "Well, it's just the greatest, thing on earth." The attorney cried, his bellowing bass unsteady with excitement. His big, red face was quivering. His coarse, thick hair was uncombed. His baggy clothes were soiled and wrinkled. "It means just plain setting clear that's what it means. They call it a retrial. But the old negro's dead. Mrs. Aston's lost her mind and the letter — the "see-you-tomorrow letter,' has disappeared. Tom Shaw's saved your neck, young man, and, incidentally, he's made such a name out of the case that I don't begrudge a night I've stayed awake nor — but you might as well say thank you."

       "Thank you." Manlloyd's voice was toneless and obedient. "You must leave me alone now for a little. I'll rest."

       He staggered back to his couch. But when he got there he beheld Kerr's face. No pity dwelt there now, no slow solemnity as though the man's nature were lifted by supernatural grace. The jailer's face was all human now; resentful, fiercely personal jealousy was unmistakably graven upon it. With the quick perception that was his, Manlloyd saw it, and feebly put up a hand as though he expected to be struck.

       It was in that moment, when his corporal eyes were shielded from the fury that lived in Kerr's face, that an image stood out in front of Manlloyd with such distinctness as the seer of visions beholds once in his life, when physical weakness and spiritual racking set the faculties on edge before they destroy the reason.

       It was a girl's figure, very slim in its scant, light lines, surmounted by a face beneath a nurse's cap, a face that blazed through its pallor and terror with a very passion of pitying devotion, of faith, of self-renunciation.

       Instinctively Manlloyd waved his hands as though to push aside, to wipe out the longitudinal black lines, the bars that seemed to have been drawn straight across the picture from the cap to the hem of the skirt. Yet he knew the black marks were as much part of the vision as the face itself. He seemed never to have seen (hat face except through prison bars. They were inexorably between it and him.

       "And they'd always be between us, Blossom. I know now," he whispered, yet he felt that the words were so vital an expression of all that he was in that supreme moment that she must hear and understand. "And after awhile you'd see them as plain as I do this minute. And — and then that last picture you're keeping, the one clean copy in the whole world would get daubed and dirty, too. That'd be the real hanging — oh, God, I can't bear that! My love that came to me — my little love — there's one thing 1 can do for yon,' now that you're tied to me — one — only one, and — and that I can do because you believe in me, believe that I am capable of — of" —

       He caught Kerr's glance as, fighting for composure, the jailer turned away from him. He felt, obscurely a desire to say something to comfort him, and he was conscious suddenly of an odd, triumphant reversal of conditions that made him as much stronger now than this strong man as the death watch had been the night before, when he was a shivering, shrieking coward being carried inexorably on toward day and execution.

His head lay back upon its pillow, proud and pure in the supreme solemnity of death.
His head lay back upon its pillow, proud and pure in the supreme solemnity of death.

artist = Nodherny (New York Herald?)

       But Manlloyd's strength was nearly spent. He could only stagger to his couch, seek the tiny bottle she had brought him and draw the cork with his teeth.

       Then he drank the whole draught down.

       When Kerr found him the sneer had left his lips which smiled tranquilly. His head lay back upon its pillow, proud and pure in the supreme solemnity of death. And, as by an ennobling miracle of self-sacrifice, every eye that looked upon his dead face saw, not Eustace Manlloyd, the murderer, but the living picture the Peachblossom Girl carried in her breast.

THE END.