Chapter XXI: Marshaling the Evidence

For all her sweetness and light, Helen Illingworth was dowered with intense energy and a powerful will. What she began she finished, and she was not deterred from beginning things by fears of consequences. When she had so powerful an incentive as the rehabilitation of her lover, the resumption of their engagement, and their prospective marriage there was nothing that could stop her. She supplemented a man's analytical powers with a woman's intuition in her work.

She was convinced that Meade had not told the truth in that famous declaration in his father's office. She respected him for his desire to shield his father's name and fame even at the expense of his veracity, albeit she would not have been a woman if she had not resented the fact that in so doing he had sacrificed her happiness as well as his own. Indeed, perhaps, she could not have borne that separation and delay had it not been for the consciousness that in any event her father's hatred of the very name of Meade would have forced her to choose between the two men, and womanlike, she shrank from the necessity of such a decision. Time would be her ally. She was the more content to wait, therefore.

The question whether Meade, Junior, was the more responsible or even responsible at all was more or less academic to Illingworth. He would have had nothing further to do with either of them if both were living, and certainly not with the younger survivor. Really from the point of view of wealth and station a marriage between his daughter and Meade might have been considered a condescension on her part, in her father's eyes at least. Nothing could have justified such an alliance from a worldly standpoint but Meade's continued and unequivocal success.

Rightly had the old man made the match dependent upon the successful completion of the bridge. He congratulated himself on that wise decision. He tried to believe that if it had come to a final choice the daughter, in spite of the fact that such is the habit of women in the experience of life, would not have given up age and her father for youth and her lover. Indeed she was too genuinely devoted to her father to do that except as a last resort. She cherished the hope first, that Meade could re-establish himself--she had too sweeping a confidence in his character and capacity to doubt that--and second, that it could be shown that he had not been responsible for the failure of the bridge. She was more and more convinced that his assumption of the blame had been dictated by the highest of motives and instead of being a fit subject for censure and condemnation he merited admiration and applause. She hoped with her woman's wit to prove this eventually, perhaps in spite of her lover, and to this end she applied herself assiduously to solve the problem.

To her, at her request, came Rodney. Now the reporters had dealt very gently with Helen Illingworth. They had made no announcement of the engagement or of its breaking at her father's earnest request. There was no necessity of bringing her into the bridge story, although it would have added a dramatic touch to their narratives. They had held a brief conference before they separated and at Rodney's suggestion they had agreed to leave her out of it. There was enough without her. None of the yellow journals had suspected the broken engagement since it had never been announced, and the loyal young fellows kept their compact religiously as they had cheerfully promised themselves they would do.

Not that Helen was in the least ashamed of the engagement. Her inclination when she found it had not been referred to in any of the reports or discussions of the catastrophe had been to avow it. But upon reflection she saw it would only have caused further talk, it would have annoyed her father beyond expression, it would not have helped Meade any, and it might hamper her in her work. She realized that she had Rodney to thank for this omission and after she had time to collect herself she asked him to call upon her. He was very glad to come.

"I sent for you, Mr. Rodney, on account of Mr. Bertram Meade," she began, after thanking him for his courtesy toward her the day the older Meade died and thereafter.

"I divined as much, Miss Illingworth."

"I want you to help me."

"I shall be delighted to do so for three reasons."

"And those are?"

"First, for your own sake. I know, you will pardon me, how deeply interested you are in Meade's rehabilitation. Second, because I believe that he was not telling the truth, that he is shielding his father. Third, because he was my dearest friend at college. We were classmates and his happiness and future are as dear to me as my own."

"Mr. Rodney," returned the woman, flushing a little, "you know of course that we were engaged. You heard me say it. I know that it was due to you that the engagement was kept out of the papers. Personally, I should have proclaimed it from the house-tops but for my father. He considers it broken."

"And you? Forgive me, Miss Illingworth!"

"It is as binding upon me as it ever was, although Mr. Meade gave me complete and entire release before he went away."

"I suppose so. That would be like him."

"He said he would not link my life and its possibilities with a wrecked career like his and, although I told him frankly that nothing could be worse than separation, he persisted and----"

"I understand," said Rodney gravely. "Indeed as a man of honor he could do no less."

"You are all alike," said the woman a little bitterly. "Your notions are supreme. You may break hearts, you may ruin lives, you may sacrifice love and your best friend so long as you preserve those notions of honor intact."

"And yet it is just because we preserve those ideas of honor, which you call our notions, that your heart breaks in parting. If we weren't honorable men you wouldn't care for us at all."

"Yes, I suppose that's it. Well, I do care very much, as you understand. I may as well be frank with you. My father, of course, is bitterly antagonistic to Mr. Meade. He won't even allow his name to be mentioned."

"One can hardly blame him for that, Miss Illingworth. The failure of the bridge seriously embarrassed the Martlet Bridge Company, and it is a great handicap for them to overcome in seeking any further contracts."

"I know it was only my father's private fortune and that of all the others, that kept the works from going under."

"Everybody knows that and honors your father and his associates for their sacrifices."

"But I did not summon you here to discuss the affairs of the Martlet Bridge Company," said Helen, "interesting though they may be, but to see if by working together there was not some way by which we could prove that Bertram Meade has assumed the blame to save the honor and fame of his father."

"You believe that, Miss Illingworth?"

"I am sure of it."

"So am I," said Rodney quickly.

"Thank God," cried the girl a little hysterically, surprised and almost swept off her feet by this prompt avowal by one who, though young, was already an authority in the literature of engineering. "Why do you say that? What evidence have you?"

"Unfortunately," answered Rodney, "I haven't any tangible evidence whatever, but I know Bert Meade as few people know him, Miss Illingworth, perhaps not even you," he went on, in spite of her unspoken, but vigorous protest at that last statement, as she shook her head and smiled at him. "And there are several little circumstances that make me feel that he could not have been to blame. Have you any ground for your conviction?"

"Probably even less than you have and yet I, too, know him. You were four years at college with him, I was five minutes in his arms," she said boldly, "on the bridge. He saved my life there. I have never told anyone before." Rapidly she narrated the incident. "This is what made him speak, but this is beside the point and does not interest you," she concluded graphically.

"On the contrary it interests me intensely. It adds the least touch of romance to the tragedy. If I were a writer of fiction instead of handling the dry details of engineering operations, what an opportunity is here presented!"

"But you will respect my confidence?"

"Absolutely, my dear young lady. You may speak with perfect assurance."

Helen Illingworth looked into the plain, homely, but strong, reliable face of the man and dismissed any thought of reserve from her mind.

"Let us place," she began, "the little circumstances upon which our intuitions are based, if intuitions are ever based on anything tangible, together. Perhaps the sum of them may yield something."

"The suggestion is admirable," assented Rodney, "and as I knew him first and longest I will begin. Perhaps it would be well, too, to take down our evidence and then transcribe the notes so that we may consider them at leisure, getting an eye view as well as an ear view of them."

"That will be an admirable plan, but how?" asked the girl eagerly.

"I happen to have mastered shorthand and I can take down my words and yours."

He drew out a note-book, pad, and pencil from his pocket and sat down at the nearest table.

"Now, in the first place," he began, writing and speaking at the same time--it was a little difficult at first being so unusual, but as he spoke slowly and thoughtfully he managed it--"point one is Meade's absolutely unbounded devotion to his father. The old man was not always right. His theories and propositions were arguable and some were controverted. The boy was as clear as a bell on most things, but I recall that he would maintain his father's propositions tenaciously, determinedly, long after everybody, perhaps even the old man himself, had been convinced of their fallacy. Engineering is in Meade's blood. He is the fifth of his family to graduate at Harvard and three of his forbears were engineers, his grandfather noted and his father world-famous. He fairly idolized his father. The affection between them was delightful. The king could do no wrong. Meade was quick-tempered and not very receptive to criticism, but he would take the severest stricture from the old man without a murmur."

"Here we have," said the woman, who had listened with strained attention, "an early devotion to a person and an unbounded respect for his attainments."

"Exactly."

"Go on."

"The next point is, Meade was inordinately proud of his family reputation, especially in the engineering field. Of the two of the line who were not engineers, one was a soldier and a distinguished one, but his career had little interest for Meade. I have heard him say that there had been a steady, upward movement in his family, that had reached its culmination in his father. He hoped to be a good, useful engineer, but he never dreamed of going any higher or even approaching the altitude of the other man."

"It was a sort of fetish with him, then, wasn't it?" asked the woman as Rodney stopped again.

"You have hit it exactly. His love for the man, his admiration for the engineer, which sometimes blinded him, and his pride in his father's career as typifying his family, were unbounded."

"You have established a motive for any sacrifice: love, respect, pride!"

"That's the way it presents itself to me, Miss Illingworth. I know thoroughly the quixotic, impulsive, self-sacrificing nature of the man. I know that he would have done anything on earth to save his father, even at the sacrifice of his own career, and since I have seen you I can realize how powerful these motives must have been."

Rodney said this quite simply, as if it were a matter of course, rather than a compliment, and bluntly as he might have said it to a friend and comrade, and Helen Illingworth understood and was grateful.

"It has been a grief to me that I weighed so little in comparison," she said simply.

"I shouldn't put it that way exactly," observed Rodney carefully. "You see even if it could be shown that it was the old man's fault entirely the young one would still have to share some of the blame."

"You mean he should have foreseen it and pointed it out?"

"Yes."

"I think he did."

"I think so, too, but if he did foresee it and point it out, he should not have allowed the older man to overawe him or force him to accept what he believed to be structurally unsound. And Meade realized that he was practically done for when he gave you up, unless he wished you to share his disgrace, and in the face of every conceivable opposition a woman would have to meet. I don't know whether he reasoned it out exactly in this way. I don't think he had time to argue the case, the shock was so swift and sudden, but as soon as he did see the situation he discovered that you were lost anyway, except of the charity of your affection, which he could not accept, and that he could save his father. This may all be the wildest speculation, but this is the way it presents itself to me."

"And to me," said Helen, "but before we go any further, let me say I should rather be his wife, shamed, humiliated, heartbroken, blameworthy though he may be, than enjoy any other fate or fortune."

"If anyone did love Meade for himself that is the kind of affection his qualities merit and would evoke in the mind of a discerning woman."

"Thank you. Will you go on, now?"

"Of course you know that what we have said is not evidence. It is all assumption, perhaps presumption."

"It's as true as gospel," said the girl earnestly.

"To you and to me, yes. Well," he continued, "I remember that Meade and I were talking just before he went to Burma three years ago about a new book by a German named Schmidt-Chemnitz, in which certain methods of calculations were proposed for the design of lacings. They were empiric, of course, because there haven't been enough experiments on big members like those in the International from which to deduce the true laws. You know it was the lacings of one of the compression members of the cantilever that gave way."

"Wait a minute," said Helen.

She went to her desk, opened a drawer, extracted therefrom a paper.

"Look at this," she said. She put her finger on the little sketch Abbott and Curtiss had discussed on the observation platform of the private car. "These are lacings, aren't they?"

"Yes," said Rodney, studying the sketch with deep interest. "Where did you get this?"

"Presently," said Miss Illingworth. "Go on with your account."

"Well, Meade and I got into a hot discussion over some of Schmidt-Chemnitz's formulas. I maintained that they were wrong. He took the opposite view. He was right. He was so interested in the matter that after we separated he wrote me a letter about it, adding some new arguments to re-enforce his contention. The other day I made a careful search among my papers and by happy chance I found the letter. I was half-convinced by his reasoning then, although the matter was dropped. I am altogether convinced now. His argument is very clear. I have examined since then the plan and sketches for that bridge. The calculations did not agree with those of Schmidt-Chemnitz. His methods were not used. Meade could not have forgotten the matter. I am morally certain that he made a protest to his father, probably in writing, then allowed himself to be persuaded by his father's reasoning. As a matter of fact, I suppose that Bertram Meade, Senior, was a greater authority on steel bridge designing than even Schmidt-Chemnitz. Well, sometimes, the smaller man is right. We know now and Bertram Meade, Senior, would admit it if he were alive, that Schmidt-Chemnitz was right, and we can make a good guess that young Meade did not let it pass without a protest."

"Mr. Rodney, it's wonderful."

"Well, that's not all. There was not a little bit of hesitation in Meade's assumption of the blame, not a person who heard it doubted it apparently. I have sounded them all carefully, except myself."

"And me."

"It was a splendid piece of dramatic acting,--one hates to call such a sacrifice by such a name--but that is what it was."

"My thought exactly," said the woman. "Is that all?"

"Not yet. I was the first man to see the older Meade except his son and Shurtliff."

"Oh, Shurtliff!"

"We'll come to him presently. It was obvious that the older Meade had been writing. I don't know whether the others noticed it, but it is my business to take in even inconsiderable details. The pen was still between his fingers. His hand was constricted and the pen had not dropped out, in fact I myself took it out and laid it on the desk."

"His last conscious act was to write something, therefore?"

"Yes, for confirmation I ascertained that there were ink-stains on his fingers."

"What did he write and to whom?"

"I don't know. I can only guess."

"What do you guess?"

"The assumption of entire responsibility and the exculpation of his son, probably to some paper."

"From the same motives that prompted Bert?"

"No, because it was true. But that is only an assumption, although not altogether without further evidence."

"And what is that?" asked the woman eagerly.

She had sat down opposite Rodney at the table and was leaning toward him. Her color came and went, her breathing was rapid and strained under the wild beating of her heart.

"The blotter on the desk. I examined it at my leisure. It had been used some time. I went over it with a magnifying glass. Meade, Senior, had evidently written a letter. I found the words 'fault is mine.' I have the blotter in my desk. The word 'fault' is barely decipherable, 'is' can be made out with difficulty, but 'mine' is quite plain. I am familiar with the older Meade's handwriting, and though this is weaker and feebler and more irregular than was his custom--ordinarily he wrote a bold, free hand--this is unmistakably his. Of course no one can say that he wrote any letter. This is piling assumption upon assumption and, furthermore, there is no evidence of any signature having been written beneath it."

"But there are signatures on the blotter?"

"Yes, one in particular, very clear."

"It might have been added later."

"Of course."

"Is that all?"

"There is one more bit of evidence."

"What's that?"

"The sheet of paper on which the design computations for the compression chord members appear was not with the other plans and tracings of the bridge."

"How do you know?"

"These plans were taken over by the Martlet Company after Meade's death and Mr. Curtiss and I examined them. We found that sheet missing."

"It's wonderful!" cried the girl, her eyes shining. "I was convinced before, but, if I had not been, you would have persuaded me beyond a doubt."

"I have persuaded myself, too," said Rodney. "But there is not a single thing here that would justify any publicity even if we were prepared to go against Meade's obvious desire. As I say, it is all assumption. No one could prove it."

"You are wrong," said the girl. "One person can prove it."

"Who is that?"

"Shurtliff."

"I wondered if that would occur to you."

"Of course. You think that Meade, Senior, wrote a letter assuming the blame because it was his. I have no doubt in the world now that Bertram Meade had made his protest in writing. Perhaps he indorsed it on the missing sheet," continued the woman, making bold and brilliant guesses. "Or maybe he wrote a letter that was attached to the sheet that we lack, and Mr. Meade got it out of the safe and wrote his letter and attached it with Bertram's protest to the missing drawing and gave them to Shurtliff and told him to take them to the papers. You know Shurtliff said that Meade declared he would assume the blame and he told the reporters so. Shurtliff has, or he knows who has, the missing paper."

"But what motive would the secretary have for such concealment?"

"He idolized the older Meade. Mr. Curtiss told me about him. A failure himself when he was a young man, Mr. Meade had faith in him and offered to promote his engineering efforts, but the man preferred to attach himself, personally, to Mr. Meade and so he became his private secretary. By his own showing he had been with the dead man on that afternoon. He has the papers."

The woman rose to her feet as she spoke with fine conviction.

"I believe you are right," said Rodney, leaning back in his chair and staring at her through his glasses. "If we can only make him speak----':

"We can."

"How?"

"I don't know, but that shall be my task."

"But where is he?"

"Working for my father."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that I suspected him from the first, and as there was an opening for a private confidential man, who understood engineering--a vacancy made by the promotion of my father's private secretary--I prevailed upon him to give the position to Shurtliff. Father hates the name of Meade, but he worships efficiency and he knows that Shurtliff is the very incarnation of the particular kind of ability that he desires, so he is with my father constantly and I have him always under my eye. When we go away in the car, he goes along."

"What are you going to do?"

"Win his confidence, his affection if I can, appeal to him, and----"

"By Jove," said Rodney, "I believe you can do it. You can't drive that old man."

"I know it," said the woman.

"You haven't told him that you thought it was his fault?"

"No. Now, to return to that picture and that plan. I can remember the day Bert saw it first."

"When was it?"

"The morning after the night I nearly fell off the bridge."

"Yes?"

"It was on the table on the observation platform where the men had left it. I had gone to the door to tell the attendant that Mr. Meade would breakfast with us; when I came back he was staring at it like one possessed. We had some conversation about it. I remember every word." She repeated it verbatim. "It was not so much what he said, but the way he looked; strained, one might say, alarmed. I puzzled over it a good deal and as we had"--she stopped and smiled--"we had other things to think of, I didn't dwell upon it until afterward. Mr. Rodney, he knew that lacing was weak. There was relief in his look and voice when he found that Curtiss and Abbott were both satisfied. If he knew it was weak, or if he thought it might be, he is the kind of man who would have said so. If we can find that missing sheet, if we can make Shurtliff tell, we can establish his innocence beyond peradventure."

"We certainly can and, if we do, it will be through you."

"Don't forget your own part, Mr. Rodney."

"I couldn't do anything with a man like Shurtliff. You can. You can win his devotion, you can let him see how much the reinstatement of Bert Meade in honor again means to you. You can do it."

"Meanwhile you will help me, won't you?"

"In any way, in every way. Do you know where he has gone?"

"I haven't the slightest idea. He might be in Africa, or South America, or out West, or up North. Do you see those flowers?"--she pointed to a great bunch of American Beauty roses, which had been forced for her apparently, and which she had received on that very day--"Dards, you know the Madison Avenue florist, sends me a box of magnificent blossoms, roses, violets, orchids, always different, every week. They speak to me of him."

"Have you ever tried to trace them?"

"No. I know whence they come and that is all. We will hear from him some day, somewhere, somehow. Meanwhile, we will work, work, work!"

"Miss Illingworth," said Rodney, rising, "I will transcribe this conversation and send you a copy. We will study it. Meanwhile if anything occurs to me I will communicate with you."

"And I with you."

"And you will allow me to say before I go that since I have had this conversation with you I do not see how even love for his father or his family name would have led Meade to do it."

"Don't say anything against him," said Helen Illingworth quickly. "He was mad with anxiety, shame, regret. Whatever he did I love him just the same."