The Destroying Angel

The morning introduced him to a world of newspapers gone mad and garrulous with accounts of the sensation of the preceding night. What they told him only confirmed the history of his wife's career as detailed by the gratuitous Mr. Ember. There was, however, no suggestion in any report that Drummond had not in fact committed suicide – this, despite the total disappearance of the hypothetical corpse. No doubts seemed to have arisen from the circumstance that there had been, apparently, but a single witness of the felo de se. A man, breathless with excitement, had run up to the nearest policeman with word of what he claimed to have seen. In the subsequent confusion he had vanished. And so thoroughly, it seemed, had the mind of New York been prepared for some fatal accident to this latest lover of Sara Law that no one dreamed of questioning the authenticity of the report.

Several sensational sheets ran exhaustive résumés, elaborately illustrated, of the public life of "The Destroying Angel."

Some remarked the fact that little or nothing was known of the history of Sara Law prior to her appearance, under the management of Jules Max, as Joan Thursday.

Whitaker learned that she had refused herself to the reporters who besieged her residence.

It seemed to be an unanimous assumption that the news of Drummond's suicide had in some manner been conveyed to the woman while on the stage.

No paper mentioned the name of Whitaker…

In the course of the forenoon a note for Whitaker was delivered at the hotel.

The heavy sheet of white paper, stamped with the address in Fifty-seventh Street, bore this message in a strong but nervous hand:

"I rely upon the generosity you promise me. This marriage of ours, that is no marriage, must be dissolved. Please let my attorneys – Landers, Grimshaw & Clark, 149 Broadway – know when and where you will accept service. Forgive me if I seem ungrateful and unfeeling. I am hardly myself. And please do not try to see me now. Some day I hope to see and thank you; to-day – it's impossible. I am going away to forget, if I can.

"Mary Ladislas Whitaker."

Before nightfall Whitaker had satisfied himself that his wife had, in truth, left her town house. The servants there informed all who inquired that they had been told to report and to forward all letters to Messrs. Landers, Grimshaw & Clark.

Whitaker promptly notified those attorneys that he was ready to be served at their convenience. He further desired them to inform their client that her suit would be uncontested. But beyond their brief and business-like acknowledgment, he heard nothing more of the action for divorce.

He sought Max several times without success. When at length run to ground in the roulette room of a Forty-fourth Street gambling-house, the manager was grimly reticent. He professed complete ignorance of his star's welfare and whereabouts. He advised Whitaker to consult the newspapers, if his interest was so insatiable.

Warned by the manager's truculent and suspicious tone that his secret was, after all, buried no more than skin-deep, Whitaker dissembled artfully his anxiety, and abandoned Max to his pet vices.

The newspapers reported Sara Law as being in retirement in several widely separated sections of the country. She was also said to have gone abroad, sailing incognito by a second-class steamship from Philadelphia.

The nine-days' wonder disintegrated naturally. The sobriquet of "The Destroying Angel" disappeared from the newspaper scare-heads. So also the name of Drummond. Hugh Morten Whitaker, the dead man come to life, occupied public interest for a brief half-day. By the time that the executors of Carter Drummond and the attorneys representing his clients began to make sense of his estate and interests, their discoveries failed to command newspaper space.

This phenomenon was chiefly due to the fact that Whitaker didn't care to raise an outcry about his loss. Ember, it seemed, had guessed shrewdly: Drummond had appropriated to his own uses every dollar of the small fortune left in his care by his erstwhile partner. No other client of his had suffered, however. His peculations had been confined wholly to the one quarter whence he had had every reason to anticipate neither protest nor exposure. In Whitaker's too-magnanimous opinion, the man had not been so much a thief as one who yielded to the temptation to convert to his own needs and uses a property against which, it appeared, no other living being cared to enter a claim.

Whether or not he had ever learned or guessed that Sara Law was the wife of Whitaker, remained problematic. Whitaker inclined to believe that Drummond had known – that he had learned the truth from the lips of his betrothed wife. But this could not be determined save through her. And she kept close hidden.

The monetary loss was an inconsiderable thing to a man with an interest in mines in the Owen Stanley country. He said nothing. Drummond's name remained untarnished, save in the knowledge of a few.

Of these, Martin Ember was one. Whitaker made a point of hunting him up. The retired detective received confirmation of his surmise without any amazement.

"You still believe that he's alive?"

"Implicitly," Ember asserted with conviction.

"Could you find him, if necessary?"

"Within a day, I think. Do you wish me to?"

"I don't know…"

Ember permitted Whitaker to consider the matter in silence for some moments. Then, "Do you want advice?" he inquired.

"Well?"

"Hunt him down and put him behind the bars," said Ember instantly.

"What's the good of that?"

"Your personal safety."

"How?"

"Don't you suppose he misses all he's been accustomed to? – living as he does in constant terror of being discovered, the life of a hunted thing, one of the under-world, an enemy of society! Don't you suppose he'd be glad to regain all he's lost – business, social position, the esteem of his friends, the love of a woman who will soon be free to marry him?"

"Well?"

"With you out of the way, he could come back without fear."

"Oh – preposterous!"

"Is it?"

"Drummond's not that sort. He's weak, perhaps, but no criminal."

"A criminal is the creature of a warped judgment. There'd be no criminals if every one were able to attain his desires within the law. Misfortunes breed weird maggots in a man's brain. Drummond's dragging out a wretched existence in a world of false perspectives; he's not to be blamed if he presently begins to see things as they are not."

Ember permitted another pause to lengthen, unbroken by Whitaker.

"Shall I try to find him for you?" he asked quietly, in the end.

"No," Whitaker decided. "No. Let him alone – poor devil!"

Ember disclaimed further responsibility with a movement of his shoulders.

"But my wife? Could you find her as readily?"

"Possibly," the detective admitted cautiously. "But I don't mean to."

"Why not?"

"Because you don't want me to. Do you?"

"No…"

"But principally because she doesn't want me to. Otherwise she'd let you know where to look for her."

"True."

These fragments of dialogue are from a conversation that took place in the month of June, nearly seven weeks after the farewell performance at the Theatre Max. Interim, Whitaker had quietly resumed his place in the life of the town, regaining old friendships, renewing old associations. Save for the fact that he pursued no gainful occupation, all with him was much as it had been: as if the intervening six years of exile had been blotted out, or had never been. The mild excitement occasioned by his reappearance had already subsided; he was again an accepted and substantial factor in the society of his kind.