But he went ahead and told him anyway, with scarcely the pause required by the warning thought to deliver its admonition.
"I'm a fugitive, Allan. I'm outside the law. I've lost all my rights of citizenship."
Jardine stopped his pacing, stunned. "Great God!" he breathed slowly.
Durand slapped at his own thigh, with a sort of angry despair. "It's got to be right tonight. Right now. It can't wait. I can't. I'm taking a risk even staying in the town that long--"
Jardine bent toward him, took him by the shoulders, gripped hard. "You're throwing away your whole future, your whole life's work--I can't let you--"
"I have no future, Allan. Not a very long one. And my life's work, I'm afraid, is behind me, anyway, whether I sell or not."
He let his wrists dangle limp, down between his legs, in a cowed attitude. "What are we going to do, Allan ?" he murmured abjectly. "Are you going to help me?"
There was a tapping at the door. Then a childish voice: "Papa. Mamma wants to know if you're going to be much longer. The duck's getting awfully dry. Nelly can't do a thing with it."
"Soon, dear, soon," Jardine called over his shoulder.
"Go in to your family," Durand urged. "I'm spoiling your supper. I'll sit in here and wait."
"I couldn't eat with this on my mind," Jardine said. He bent to him once more, as if in renewed effort to extract the confidence from him that he sought. "Look, Lou. We've known each other since you were twenty-three and I was twenty-eight. Since we were clerks together in the shipping department of old man Morel, perched on adjoining stools, slaving away. We got our promotions together. When he wanted to promote you, you spoke for me. When he wanted to promote me, I spoke for you. Finally, when we were ready, we pooled our resources and entered into business together. Our own import house. On a shoestring at first, even with the help of the money Auguste had brought to me in marriage. And you remember those early days."
"I remember, Allan."
"But we didn't care. We said we'd rather work for ourselves, and fail, than work for another man, and prosper. And we worked for ourselves--and prospered. But there are things in this business of ours, today, that cannot be taken out again. There is sweat, and worry, and the high hopes of two young fellows, and the prime years of their lives. Now you come to me and want to buy these things from me, want me to sell them to you, as if they were sackfuls of our green beans from Colombia-- How can I, even if I wanted to? How can I set a price ?"
"You can tell what the business is worth, in cold cash, that is on our books. And give me half, in exchange for a quit-claim, a deed of sale, whatever the necessary paper is. Forget I am Durand. I am just anybody, I am a stranger who happens to have a fifty per cent interest. Give its approximate value back to me in money, that is all I ask you." He gestured violently. "Don't you see, Allan? I can no longer participate in the business, I can no longer play any part in it. I can't be here to do so, I can't stay here."
"But why? There isn't anything you can have done--"
"There is. There's one thing."
Jardine was waiting, looking at him fixedly.
"Once I tell you, Allan, I'm at your mercy. You needn't give me a cent, and my half of the business goes to you, eventually, anyway-- by default."
But he was at his mercy anyway, he realized ruefully, whether he told him or not.
Jardine bridled a little, straightened up. "Lou, I don't take that kindly. We're friends--"
"Friendship stops short at what I'm about to tell you. There are no friends beyond a certain point. The law even forbids it, punishes it."
The tapping came again. "Mamma's getting put out. She says she's going to sit down without you, Papa. It was a special duck--"
And on that homespun domestic note, Durand blurted out, as if already past the point at which he could any longer stop himself:
"Allan, I've done murder. I can't stay here past tonight. I have to have money."
And dropped his head into his upturned, sheltering hands, as though the hangman's noose had already snapped his neck.
"Papa ?" came questioningly through the door.
"Wait, child, wait," Jardine said sickly, his face white as a sheet.
There was a ghastly silence.
"I knew it would come to this," Jardine said at last, dropping his voice. "She was bad for you from the first. Auguste sensed it on the very day of your marriage, she told me so herself; women are quicker that way--"
He was pouring himself a drink, as though it were his crime. "You met her-- You found her-- You lost your head--" He brought one to Durand. "But you're not to be blamed. Any man-- Let me find you a good lawyer, Lou. There isn't a court in the state--"
Durand looked up at him and gave a pathetic smile.
"You don't understand, Allan. It isn't--she. It's the very man I engaged to find her and arrest her. He did find her, and to save her I--"
Jardine, doubly horrified now, for at least in his earlier concern there had been, noticeably, a glint of vengeful satisfaction, recoiled a step.
"I'm with her again," Durand admitted. And in an almost inaudible whisper, as if he were telling it to his conscience and not to the other man in the room with him, "I love her more than my life itself."
"Papa," accosted them with frightening proximity, in a piping treble, "Mamma said I shouldn't leave this door until you come out of there!" The doorknob twisted, then unwound.
Jardine stood for a long moment, looking not so much at his friend as at some scene he alone could see.
His arm reached out slowly at last and fell heavily, dejectedly, but with unspoken loyalty, upon Durand's shoulder.
"I'll see that you get your half of the business' assets, Lou," he said. "And now--we mustn't keep Auguste waiting any longer. Keep a stiff upper lip. Come in and have supper with us."
Durand rose and crushed Jardine's hand almost shatteringly for a moment, between both of his. Then, as if ashamed of this involuntary display of emotion, hastily released it again.
Jardine opened the door, bent down to kiss someone who remained unseen, through the guarded opening. "Run in, dear. We're coming."
Durand braced himself for the ordeal to come, straightened his shoulders, jerked at the wings of his coat, adjusted his collar. Then he moved after his host.
"You won't tell them, Allan ?"
Jardine drew the door back and stood aside to let him go through first. "There are certain things a man doesn't take in to his suppertable with him, Lou." And he slung his arm about his friend's shoulder and walked beside him, loyally beside him, in to where his family waited.
53
At dawn he was already up, from a sleepless, worried bed, and dressed and pacing the floor of his shabby, hidden-away hotel room. Waiting for Jardine to come with the money--
("I can't get you the money before morning, Lou. I haven't it here in the house; I'll have to draw it from the bank. Can you wait ?"
"I'll have to. I'm at the Palmetto Hotel. Under the name of Castle. Room Sixty. Bring it to me there. Or as much of it as you can, I cannot wait for a complete inventory.")
--fearing more and more with the passing of each wracking hour that he wouldn't. Until, as the hour for the banks to open came and went, and the morning drew on, fear had become certainty and certainty had become conviction. And he knew that to wait on was only to invite the inevitable betrayal to overtake him, trap him where he was.
A hundred times he unlocked the door and listened in the dingy corridor outside, then went back and locked himself in again. Nothing, no one. He wasn't coming. Only a quixotic fool would have expected him to.
Again it occurred to him how completely at the mercy of his former partner he had put himself. All he had to do was bring the police with him instead of the money, and there was an end to it. Why should he give up thousands of hard-earned dollars? And money, Durand reminded himself, did strange things to people. Turned them even against their own flesh and blood, why not an outsider?