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Title: Tales Of Men And Ghosts

Author: Edith Wharton

Release Date: October, 2003 [Etext# 4514]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on January 28, 2002]

Edition: 10

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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Tales Of Men And Ghosts, by Edith Wharton
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Edited by Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com


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Edited by Charles Aldarondo Aldarondo@yahoo.com




TALES OF MEN AND GHOSTS

BY

EDITH WHARTON



LONDON

1910






CONTENTS

I _The Bolted Door_
II _His Father's Son_
III _The Daunt Diana_
IV _The Debt_
V _Full Circle_
VI _The Legend_
VII _The Eyes_
VIII _The Blond Beast_
IX _Afterward_
X _The Letters_






THE BOLTED DOOR

I





HUBERT GRANICE, pacing the length of his pleasant lamp-lit library,
paused to compare his watch with the clock on the chimney-piece.

Three minutes to eight.

In exactly three minutes Mr. Peter Ascham, of the eminent legal firm
of Ascham and Pettilow, would have his punctual hand on the
door-bell of the flat. It was a comfort to reflect that Ascham was
so punctual--the suspense was beginning to make his host nervous.
And the sound of the door-bell would be the beginning of the
end--after that there'd be no going back, by God--no going back!

Granice resumed his pacing. Each time he reached the end of the room
opposite the door he caught his reflection in the Florentine mirror
above the fine old walnut _credence_ he had picked up at Dijon--saw
himself spare, quick-moving, carefully brushed and dressed, but
furrowed, gray about the temples, with a stoop which he corrected by
a spasmodic straightening of the shoulders whenever a glass
confronted him: a tired middle-aged man, baffled, beaten, worn out.

As he summed himself up thus for the third or fourth time the door
opened and he turned with a thrill of relief to greet his guest. But
it was only the man-servant who entered, advancing silently over the
mossy surface of the old Turkey rug.

"Mr. Ascham telephones, sir, to say he's unexpectedly detained and
can't be here till eight-thirty."

Granice made a curt gesture of annoyance. It was becoming harder and
harder for him to control these reflexes. He turned on his heel,
tossing to the servant over his shoulder: "Very good. Put off
dinner."

Down his spine he felt the man's injured stare. Mr. Granice had
always been so mild-spoken to his people--no doubt the odd change in
his manner had already been noticed and discussed below stairs. And
very likely they suspected the cause. He stood drumming on the
writing-table till he heard the servant go out; then he threw
himself into a chair, propping his elbows on the table and resting
his chin on his locked hands.

Another half hour alone with it!

He wondered irritably what could have detained his guest. Some
professional matter, no doubt--the punctilious lawyer would have
allowed nothing less to interfere with a dinner engagement, more
especially since Granice, in his note, had said: "I shall want a
little business chat afterward."

But what professional matter could have come up at that
unprofessional hour? Perhaps some other soul in misery had called on
the lawyer; and, after all, Granice's note had given no hint of his
own need! No doubt Ascham thought he merely wanted to make another
change in his will. Since he had come into his little property, ten
years earlier, Granice had been perpetually tinkering with his will.

Suddenly another thought pulled him up, sending a flush to his
sallow temples. He remembered a word he had tossed to the lawyer
some six weeks earlier, at the Century Club. "Yes--my play's as good
as taken. I shall be calling on you soon to go over the contract.
Those theatrical chaps are so slippery--I won't trust anybody but
you to tie the knot for me!" That, of course, was what Ascham would
think he was wanted for. Granice, at the idea, broke into an audible
laugh--a queer stage-laugh, like the cackle of a baffled villain in
a melodrama. The absurdity, the unnaturalness of the sound abashed
him, and he compressed his lips angrily. Would he take to soliloquy
next?

He lowered his arms and pulled open the upper drawer of the
writing-table. In the right-hand corner lay a thick manuscript,
bound in paper folders, and tied with a string beneath which a
letter had been slipped. Next to the manuscript was a small
revolver. Granice stared a moment at these oddly associated objects;
then he took the letter from under the string and slowly began to
open it. He had known he should do so from the moment his hand
touched the drawer. Whenever his eye fell on that letter some
relentless force compelled him to re-read it.

It was dated about four weeks back, under the letter-head of "The
Diversity Theatre." "MY DEAR MR. GRANICE:

"I have given the matter my best consideration for the last month,
and it's no use--the play won't do. I have talked it over with Miss
Melrose--and you know there isn't a gamer artist on our stage--and I
regret to tell you she feels just as I do about it. It isn't the
poetry that scares her--or me either. We both want to do all we can
to help along the poetic drama--we believe the public's ready for
it, and we're willing to take a big financial risk in order to be
the first to give them what they want. _But we don't believe they
could be made to want this._ The fact is, there isn't enough drama
in your play to the allowance of poetry--the thing drags all
through. You've got a big idea, but it's not out of swaddling
clothes.

"If this was your first play I'd say: _Try again_. But it has been
just the same with all the others you've shown me. And you remember
the result of 'The Lee Shore,' where you carried all the expenses of
production yourself, and we couldn't fill the theatre for a week.
Yet 'The Lee Shore' was a modern problem play--much easier to swing
than blank verse. It isn't as if you hadn't tried all kinds--"

Granice folded the letter and put it carefully back into the
envelope. Why on earth was he re-reading it, when he knew every
phrase in it by heart, when for a month past he had seen it, night
after night, stand out in letters of flame against the darkness of
his sleepless lids?

"_It has been just the same with all the others you've shown me._"

That was the way they dismissed ten years of passionate unremitting
work!

"_You remember the result of 'The Lee Shore.'_"

Good God--as if he were likely to forget it! He re-lived it all now
in a drowning flash: the persistent rejection of the play, his
sudden resolve to put it on at his own cost, to spend ten thousand
dollars of his inheritance on testing his chance of success--the
fever of preparation, the dry-mouthed agony of the "first night,"
the flat fall, the stupid press, his secret rush to Europe to escape
the condolence of his friends!

"_It isn't as if you hadn't tried all kinds._"

No--he had tried all kinds: comedy, tragedy, prose and verse, the
light curtain-raiser, the short sharp drama, the bourgeois-realistic
and the lyrical-romantic--finally deciding that he would no longer
"prostitute his talent" to win popularity, but would impose on the
public his own theory of art in the form of five acts of blank
verse. Yes, he had offered them everything--and always with the same
result.

Ten years of it--ten years of dogged work and unrelieved failure.
The ten years from forty to fifty--the best ten years of his life!
And if one counted the years before, the silent years of dreams,
assimilation, preparation--then call it half a man's life-time: half
a man's life-time thrown away!

And what was he to do with the remaining half? Well, he had settled
that, thank God! He turned and glanced anxiously at the clock. Ten
minutes past eight--only ten minutes had been consumed in that
stormy rush through his whole past! And he must wait another twenty
minutes for Ascham. It was one of the worst symptoms of his case
that, in proportion as he had grown to shrink from human company, he
dreaded more and more to be alone. ... But why the devil was he
waiting for Ascham? Why didn't he cut the knot himself? Since he was
so unutterably sick of the whole business, why did he have to call
in an outsider to rid him of this nightmare of living?

He opened the drawer again and laid his hand on the revolver. It was
a small slim ivory toy--just the instrument for a tired sufferer to
give himself a "hypodermic" with. Granice raised it slowly in one
hand, while with the other he felt under the thin hair at the back
of his head, between the ear and the nape. He knew just where to
place the muzzle: he had once got a young surgeon to show him. And
as he found the spot, and lifted the revolver to it, the inevitable
phenomenon occurred. The hand that held the weapon began to shake,
the tremor communicated itself to his arm, his heart gave a wild
leap which sent up a wave of deadly nausea to his throat, he smelt
the powder, he sickened at the crash of the bullet through his
skull, and a sweat of fear broke out over his forehead and ran down
his quivering face...

He laid away the revolver with an oath and, pulling out a
cologne-scented handkerchief, passed it tremulously over his brow
and temples. It was no use--he knew he could never do it in that
way. His attempts at self-destruction were as futile as his snatches
at fame! He couldn't make himself a real life, and he couldn't get
rid of the life he had. And that was why he had sent for Ascham to
help him...

The lawyer, over the Camembert and Burgundy, began to excuse himself
for his delay.

"I didn't like to say anything while your man was about--but the
fact is, I was sent for on a rather unusual matter--"

"Oh, it's all right," said Granice cheerfully. He was beginning to
feel the usual reaction that food and company produced. It was not
any recovered pleasure in life that he felt, but only a deeper
withdrawal into himself. It was easier to go on automatically with
the social gestures than to uncover to any human eye the abyss
within him.

"My dear fellow, it's sacrilege to keep a dinner waiting--especially
the production of an artist like yours." Mr. Ascham sipped his
Burgundy luxuriously. "But the fact is, Mrs. Ashgrove sent for me."

Granice raised his head with a quick movement of surprise. For a
moment he was shaken out of his self-absorption.

"_Mrs. Ashgrove?_"

Ascham smiled. "I thought you'd be interested; I know your passion
for _causes celebres_. And this promises to be one. Of course it's
out of our line entirely--we never touch criminal cases. But she
wanted to consult me as a friend. Ashgrove was a distant connection
of my wife's. And, by Jove, it _is_ a queer case!" The servant
re-entered, and Ascham snapped his lips shut.

Would the gentlemen have their coffee in the dining-room?

"No--serve it in the library," said Granice, rising. He led the way
back to the curtained confidential room. He was really curious to
hear what Ascham had to tell him.

While the coffee and cigars were being served he fidgeted about the
library, glancing at his letters--the usual meaningless notes and
bills--and picking up the evening paper. As he unfolded it a
headline caught his eye.

"ROSE MELROSE WANTS TO PLAY POETRY.

"THINKS SHE HAS FOUND HER POET."

He read on with a thumping heart--found the name of a young author
he had barely heard of, saw the title of a play, a "poetic drama,"
dance before his eyes, and dropped the paper, sick, disgusted. It
was true, then--she _was_ "game"--it was not the manner but the
matter she mistrusted!

Granice turned to the servant, who seemed to be purposely lingering.
"I shan't need you this evening, Flint. I'll lock up myself."

He fancied the man's acquiescence implied surprise. What was going
on, Flint seemed to wonder, that Mr. Granice should want him out of
the way? Probably he would find a pretext for coming back to see.
Granice suddenly felt himself enveloped in a network of espionage.

As the door closed he threw himself into an armchair and leaned
forward to take a light from Ascham's cigar.

"Tell me about Mrs. Ashgrove," he said, seeming to himself to speak
stiffly, as if his lips were cracked.

"Mrs. Ashgrove? Well, there's not much to _tell_."

"And you couldn't if there were?" Granice smiled.

"Probably not. As a matter of fact, she wanted my advice about her
choice of counsel. There was nothing especially confidential in our
talk."

"And what's your impression, now you've seen her?"

"My impression is, very distinctly, _that nothing will ever be
known._"

"Ah--?" Granice murmured, puffing at his cigar.

"I'm more and more convinced that whoever poisoned Ashgrove knew his
business, and will consequently never be found out. That's a capital
cigar you've given me."

"You like it? I get them over from Cuba." Granice examined his own
reflectively. "Then you believe in the theory that the clever
criminals never _are_ caught?"

"Of course I do. Look about you--look back for the last dozen
years--none of the big murder problems are ever solved." The lawyer
ruminated behind his blue cloud. "Why, take the instance in your own
family: I'd forgotten I had an illustration at hand! Take old Joseph
Lenman's murder--do you suppose that will ever be explained?"

As the words dropped from Ascham's lips his host looked slowly about
the library, and every object in it stared back at him with a stale
unescapable familiarity. How sick he was of looking at that room! It
was as dull as the face of a wife one has wearied of. He cleared his
throat slowly; then he turned his head to the lawyer and said: "I
could explain the Lenman murder myself."

Ascham's eye kindled: he shared Granice's interest in criminal
cases.

"By Jove! You've had a theory all this time? It's odd you never
mentioned it. Go ahead and tell me. There are certain features in
the Lenman case not unlike this Ashgrove affair, and your idea may
be a help."

Granice paused and his eye reverted instinctively to the table
drawer in which the revolver and the manuscript lay side by side.
What if he were to try another appeal to Rose Melrose? Then he
looked at the notes and bills on the table, and the horror of taking
up again the lifeless routine of life--of performing the same
automatic gestures another day--displaced his fleeting vision.

"I haven't a theory. I _know_ who murdered Joseph Lenman."

Ascham settled himself comfortably in his chair, prepared for
enjoyment.

"You _know?_ Well, who did?" he laughed.

"I did," said Granice, rising.

He stood before Ascham, and the lawyer lay back staring up at him.
Then he broke into another laugh.

"Why, this is glorious! You murdered him, did you? To inherit his
money, I suppose? Better and better! Go on, my boy! Unbosom
yourself! Tell me all about it! Confession is good for the soul."

Granice waited till the lawyer had shaken the last peal of laughter
from his throat; then he repeated doggedly: "I murdered him."

The two men looked at each other for a long moment, and this time
Ascham did not laugh.

"Granice!"

"I murdered him--to get his money, as you say."

There was another pause, and Granice, with a vague underlying sense
of amusement, saw his guest's look change from pleasantry to
apprehension.

"What's the joke, my dear fellow? I fail to see."

"It's not a joke. It's the truth. I murdered him." He had spoken
painfully at first, as if there were a knot in his throat; but each
time he repeated the words he found they were easier to say.

Ascham laid down his extinct cigar.

"What's the matter? Aren't you well? What on earth are you driving
at?"

"I'm perfectly well. But I murdered my cousin, Joseph Lenman, and I
want it known that I murdered him."

"_You want it known?_"

"Yes. That's why I sent for you. I'm sick of living, and when I try
to kill myself I funk it." He spoke quite naturally now, as if the
knot in his throat had been untied.

"Good Lord--good Lord," the lawyer gasped.

"But I suppose," Granice continued, "there's no doubt this would be
murder in the first degree? I'm sure of the chair if I own up?"

Ascham drew a long breath; then he said slowly: "Sit down, Granice.
Let's talk."






II





GRANICE told his story simply, connectedly.

He began by a quick survey of his early years--the years of drudgery
and privation. His father, a charming man who could never say "no,"
had so signally failed to say it on certain essential occasions that
when he died he left an illegitimate family and a mortgaged estate.
His lawful kin found themselves hanging over a gulf of debt, and
young Granice, to support his mother and sister, had to leave
Harvard and bury himself at eighteen in a broker's office. He
loathed his work, and he was always poor, always worried and in
ill-health. A few years later his mother died, but his sister, an
ineffectual neurasthenic, remained on his hands. His own health gave
out, and he had to go away for six months, and work harder than ever
when he came back. He had no knack for business, no head for
figures, no dimmest insight into the mysteries of commerce. He
wanted to travel and write--those were his inmost longings. And as
the years dragged on, and he neared middle-age without making any
more money, or acquiring any firmer health, a sick despair possessed
him. He tried writing, but he always came home from the office so
tired that his brain could not work. For half the year he did not
reach his dim up-town flat till after dark, and could only "brush
up" for dinner, and afterward lie on the lounge with his pipe, while
his sister droned through the evening paper. Sometimes he spent an
evening at the theatre; or he dined out, or, more rarely, strayed
off with an acquaintance or two in quest of what is known as
"pleasure." And in summer, when he and Kate went to the sea-side for
a month, he dozed through the days in utter weariness. Once he fell
in love with a charming girl--but what had he to offer her, in God's
name? She seemed to like him, and in common decency he had to drop
out of the running. Apparently no one replaced him, for she never
married, but grew stoutish, grayish, philanthropic--yet how sweet
she had been when he had first kissed her! One more wasted life, he
reflected...

But the stage had always been his master-passion. He would have sold
his soul for the time and freedom to write plays! It was _in
him_--he could not remember when it had not been his deepest-seated
instinct. As the years passed it became a morbid, a relentless
obsession--yet with every year the material conditions were more and
more against it. He felt himself growing middle-aged, and he watched
the reflection of the process in his sister's wasted face. At
eighteen she had been pretty, and as full of enthusiasm as he. Now
she was sour, trivial, insignificant--she had missed her chance of
life. And she had no resources, poor creature, was fashioned simply
for the primitive functions she had been denied the chance to
fulfil! It exasperated him to think of it--and to reflect that even
now a little travel, a little health, a little money, might
transform her, make her young and desirable... The chief fruit of
his experience was that there is no such fixed state as age or
youth--there is only health as against sickness, wealth as against
poverty; and age or youth as the outcome of the lot one draws.

At this point in his narrative Granice stood up, and went to lean
against the mantel-piece, looking down at Ascham, who had not moved
from his seat, or changed his attitude of rigid fascinated
attention.

"Then came the summer when we went to Wrenfield to be near old
Lenman--my mother's cousin, as you know. Some of the family always
mounted guard over him--generally a niece or so. But that year they
were all scattered, and one of the nieces offered to lend us her
cottage if we'd relieve her of duty for two months. It was a
nuisance for me, of course, for Wrenfield is two hours from town;
but my mother, who was a slave to family observances, had always
been good to the old man, so it was natural we should be called
on--and there was the saving of rent and the good air for Kate. So
we went.

"You never knew Joseph Lenman? Well, picture to yourself an amoeba
or some primitive organism of that sort, under a Titan's microscope.
He was large, undifferentiated, inert--since I could remember him he
had done nothing but take his temperature and read the _Churchman_.
Oh, and cultivate melons--that was his hobby. Not vulgar,
out-of-door melons--his were grown under glass. He had miles of it
at Wrenfield--his big kitchen-garden was surrounded by blinking
battalions of green-houses. And in nearly all of them melons were
grown--early melons and late, French, English, domestic--dwarf
melons and monsters: every shape, colour and variety. They were
petted and nursed like children--a staff of trained attendants
waited on them. I'm not sure they didn't have a doctor to take their
temperature--at any rate the place was full of thermometers. And
they didn't sprawl on the ground like ordinary melons; they were
trained against the glass like nectarines, and each melon hung in a
net which sustained its weight and left it free on all sides to the
sun and air...

"It used to strike me sometimes that old Lenman was just like one of
his own melons--the pale-fleshed English kind. His life, apathetic
and motionless, hung in a net of gold, in an equable warm ventilated
atmosphere, high above sordid earthly worries. The cardinal rule of
his existence was not to let himself be 'worried.' . . I remember
his advising me to try it myself, one day when I spoke to him about
Kate's bad health, and her need of a change. 'I never let myself
worry,' he said complacently. 'It's the worst thing for the
liver--and you look to me as if you had a liver. Take my advice and
be cheerful. You'll make yourself happier and others too.' And all
he had to do was to write a cheque, and send the poor girl off for a
holiday!

"The hardest part of it was that the money half-belonged to us
already. The old skin-flint only had it for life, in trust for us
and the others. But his life was a good deal sounder than mine or
Kate's--and one could picture him taking extra care of it for the
joke of keeping us waiting. I always felt that the sight of our
hungry eyes was a tonic to him.

"Well, I tried to see if I couldn't reach him through his vanity. I
flattered him, feigned a passionate interest in his melons. And he
was taken in, and used to discourse on them by the hour. On fine
days he was driven to the green-houses in his pony-chair, and
waddled through them, prodding and leering at the fruit, like a fat
Turk in his seraglio. When he bragged to me of the expense of
growing them I was reminded of a hideous old Lothario bragging of
what his pleasures cost. And the resemblance was completed by the
fact that he couldn't eat as much as a mouthful of his melons--had
lived for years on buttermilk and toast. 'But, after all, it's my
only hobby--why shouldn't I indulge it?' he said sentimentally. As
if I'd ever been able to indulge any of mine! On the keep of those
melons Kate and I could have lived like gods...

"One day toward the end of the summer, when Kate was too unwell to
drag herself up to the big house, she asked me to go and spend the
afternoon with cousin Joseph. It was a lovely soft September
afternoon--a day to lie under a Roman stone-pine, with one's eyes on
the sky, and let the cosmic harmonies rush through one. Perhaps the
vision was suggested by the fact that, as I entered cousin Joseph's
hideous black walnut library, I passed one of the under-gardeners, a
handsome full-throated Italian, who dashed out in such a hurry that
he nearly knocked me down. I remember thinking it queer that the
fellow, whom I had often seen about the melon-houses, did not bow to
me, or even seem to see me.

"Cousin Joseph sat in his usual seat, behind the darkened windows,
his fat hands folded on his protuberant waistcoat, the last number
of the _Churchman_ at his elbow, and near it, on a huge dish, a fat
melon--the fattest melon I'd ever seen. As I looked at it I pictured
the ecstasy of contemplation from which I must have roused him, and
congratulated myself on finding him in such a mood, since I had made
up my mind to ask him a favour. Then I noticed that his face,
instead of looking as calm as an egg-shell, was distorted and
whimpering--and without stopping to greet me he pointed passionately
to the melon.

"'Look at it, look at it--did you ever see such a beauty? Such
firmness--roundness--such delicious smoothness to the touch?' It was
as if he had said 'she' instead of 'it,' and when he put out his
senile hand and touched the melon I positively had to look the other
way.

"Then he told me what had happened. The Italian under-gardener, who
had been specially recommended for the melon-houses--though it was
against my cousin's principles to employ a Papist--had been assigned
to the care of the monster: for it had revealed itself, early in its
existence, as destined to become a monster, to surpass its plumpest,
pulpiest sisters, carry off prizes at agricultural shows, and be
photographed and celebrated in every gardening paper in the land.
The Italian had done well--seemed to have a sense of responsibility.
And that very morning he had been ordered to pick the melon, which
was to be shown next day at the county fair, and to bring it in for
Mr. Lenman to gaze on its blonde virginity. But in picking it, what
had the damned scoundrelly Jesuit done but drop it--drop it crash on
the sharp spout of a watering-pot, so that it received a deep gash
in its firm pale rotundity, and was henceforth but a bruised,
ruined, fallen melon?

"The old man's rage was fearful in its impotence--he shook,
spluttered and strangled with it. He had just had the Italian up and
had sacked him on the spot, without wages or character--had
threatened to have him arrested if he was ever caught prowling about
Wrenfield. 'By God, and I'll do it--I'll write to Washington--I'll
have the pauper scoundrel deported! I'll show him what money can
do!' As likely as not there was some murderous Black-hand business
under it--it would be found that the fellow was a member of a
'gang.' Those Italians would murder you for a quarter. He meant to
have the police look into it... And then he grew frightened at his
own excitement. 'But I must calm myself,' he said. He took his
temperature, rang for his drops, and turned to the _Churchman_. He
had been reading an article on Nestorianism when the melon was
brought in. He asked me to go on with it, and I read to him for an
hour, in the dim close room, with a fat fly buzzing stealthily about
the fallen melon.

"All the while one phrase of the old man's buzzed in my brain like
the fly about the melon. '_I'll show him what money can do!_' Good
heaven! If _I_ could but show the old man! If I could make him see
his power of giving happiness as a new outlet for his monstrous
egotism! I tried to tell him something about my situation and
Kate's--spoke of my ill-health, my unsuccessful drudgery, my longing
to write, to make myself a name--I stammered out an entreaty for a
loan. 'I can guarantee to repay you, sir--I've a half-written play
as security...'

"I shall never forget his glassy stare. His face had grown as smooth
as an egg-shell again--his eyes peered over his fat cheeks like
sentinels over a slippery rampart.

"'A half-written play--a play of _yours_ as security?' He looked at
me almost fearfully, as if detecting the first symptoms of insanity.
'Do you understand anything of business?' he enquired mildly. I
laughed and answered: 'No, not much.'

"He leaned back with closed lids. 'All this excitement has been too
much for me,' he said. 'If you'll excuse me, I'll prepare for my
nap.' And I stumbled out of the room, blindly, like the Italian."

Granice moved away from the mantel-piece, and walked across to the
tray set out with decanters and soda-water. He poured himself a tall
glass of soda-water, emptied it, and glanced at Ascham's dead cigar.

"Better light another," he suggested.

The lawyer shook his head, and Granice went on with his tale. He
told of his mounting obsession--how the murderous impulse had waked
in him on the instant of his cousin's refusal, and he had muttered
to himself: "By God, if you won't, I'll make you." He spoke more
tranquilly as the narrative proceeded, as though his rage had died
down once the resolve to act on it was taken. He applied his whole
mind to the question of how the old man was to be "disposed of."
Suddenly he remembered the outcry: "Those Italians will murder you
for a quarter!" But no definite project presented itself: he simply
waited for an inspiration.

Granice and his sister moved to town a day or two after the incident
of the melon. But the cousins, who had returned, kept them informed
of the old man's condition. One day, about three weeks later,
Granice, on getting home, found Kate excited over a report from
Wrenfield. The Italian had been there again--had somehow slipped
into the house, made his way up to the library, and "used
threatening language." The house-keeper found cousin Joseph gasping,
the whites of his eyes showing "something awful." The doctor was
sent for, and the attack warded off; and the police had ordered the
Italian from the neighbourhood.

But cousin Joseph, thereafter, languished, had "nerves," and lost
his taste for toast and butter-milk. The doctor called in a
colleague, and the consultation amused and excited the old man--he
became once more an important figure. The medical men reassured the
family--too completely!--and to the patient they recommended a more
varied diet: advised him to take whatever "tempted him." And so one
day, tremulously, prayerfully, he decided on a tiny bit of melon. It
was brought up with ceremony, and consumed in the presence of the
house-keeper and a hovering cousin; and twenty minutes later he was
dead...

"But you remember the circumstances," Granice went on; "how
suspicion turned at once on the Italian? In spite of the hint the
police had given him he had been seen hanging about the house since
'the scene.' It was said that he had tender relations with the
kitchen-maid, and the rest seemed easy to explain. But when they
looked round to ask him for the explanation he was gone--gone clean
out of sight. He had been 'warned' to leave Wrenfield, and he had
taken the warning so to heart that no one ever laid eyes on him
again."

Granice paused. He had dropped into a chair opposite the lawyer's,
and he sat for a moment, his head thrown back, looking about the
familiar room. Everything in it had grown grimacing and alien, and
each strange insistent object seemed craning forward from its place
to hear him.

"It was I who put the stuff in the melon," he said. "And I don't
want you to think I'm sorry for it. This isn't 'remorse,'
understand. I'm glad the old skin-flint is dead--I'm glad the others
have their money. But mine's no use to me any more. My sister
married miserably, and died. And I've never had what I wanted."

Ascham continued to stare; then he said: "What on earth was your
object, then?"

"Why, to _get_ what I wanted--what I fancied was in reach! I wanted
change, rest, _life_, for both of us--wanted, above all, for myself,
the chance to write! I travelled, got back my health, and came home
to tie myself up to my work. And I've slaved at it steadily for ten
years without reward--without the most distant hope of success!
Nobody will look at my stuff. And now I'm fifty, and I'm beaten, and
I know it." His chin dropped forward on his breast. "I want to chuck
the whole business," he ended.






III





IT was after midnight when Ascham left.

His hand on Granice's shoulder, as he turned to go--"District
Attorney be hanged; see a doctor, see a doctor!" he had cried; and
so, with an exaggerated laugh, had pulled on his coat and departed.

Granice turned back into the library. It had never occurred to him
that Ascham would not believe his story. For three hours he had
explained, elucidated, patiently and painfully gone over every
detail--but without once breaking down the iron incredulity of the
lawyer's eye.

At first Ascham had feigned to be convinced--but that, as Granice
now perceived, was simply to get him to expose himself, to entrap
him into contradictions. And when the attempt failed, when Granice
triumphantly met and refuted each disconcerting question, the lawyer
dropped the mask suddenly, and said with a good-humoured laugh: "By
Jove, Granice you'll write a successful play yet. The way you've
worked this all out is a marvel."

Granice swung about furiously--that last sneer about the play
inflamed him. Was all the world in a conspiracy to deride his
failure?

"I did it, I did it," he muttered sullenly, his rage spending itself
against the impenetrable surface of the other's mockery; and Ascham
answered with a smile: "Ever read any of those books on
hallucination? I've got a fairly good medico-legal library. I could
send you one or two if you like..."

Left alone, Granice cowered down in the chair before his
writing-table. He understood that Ascham thought him off his head.

"Good God--what if they all think me crazy?"

The horror of it broke out over him in a cold sweat--he sat there
and shook, his eyes hidden in his icy hands. But gradually, as he
began to rehearse his story for the thousandth time, he saw again
how incontrovertible it was, and felt sure that any criminal lawyer
would believe him.

"That's the trouble--Ascham's not a criminal lawyer. And then he's a
friend. What a fool I was to talk to a friend! Even if he did
believe me, he'd never let me see it--his instinct would be to cover
the whole thing up... But in that case--if he _did_ believe me--he
might think it a kindness to get me shut up in an asylum..."
Granice began to tremble again. "Good heaven! If he should bring in
an expert--one of those damned alienists! Ascham and Pettilow can do
anything--their word always goes. If Ascham drops a hint that I'd
better be shut up, I'll be in a strait-jacket by to-morrow! And he'd
do it from the kindest motives--be quite right to do it if he thinks
I'm a murderer!"

The vision froze him to his chair. He pressed his fists to his
bursting temples and tried to think. For the first time he hoped
that Ascham had not believed his story.

"But he did--he did! I can see it now--I noticed what a queer eye he
cocked at me. Good God, what shall I do--what shall I do?"

He started up and looked at the clock. Half-past one. What if Ascham
should think the case urgent, rout out an alienist, and come back
with him? Granice jumped to his feet, and his sudden gesture brushed
the morning paper from the table. Mechanically he stooped to pick it
up, and the movement started a new train of association.

He sat down again, and reached for the telephone book in the rack by
his chair.

"Give me three-o-ten ... yes."

The new idea in his mind had revived his flagging energy. He would
act--act at once. It was only by thus planning ahead, committing
himself to some unavoidable line of conduct, that he could pull
himself through the meaningless days. Each time he reached a fresh
decision it was like coming out of a foggy weltering sea into a calm
harbour with lights. One of the queerest phases of his long agony
was the intense relief produced by these momentary lulls.

"That the office of the _Investigator?_ Yes? Give me Mr. Denver,
please... Hallo, Denver... Yes, Hubert Granice. ... Just
caught you? Going straight home? Can I come and see you ... yes,
now ... have a talk? It's rather urgent ... yes, might give you
some first-rate 'copy.' ... All right!" He hung up the receiver
with a laugh. It had been a happy thought to call up the editor of
the _Investigator_--Robert Denver was the very man he needed...

Granice put out the lights in the library--it was odd how the
automatic gestures persisted!--went into the hall, put on his hat
and overcoat, and let himself out of the flat. In the hall, a sleepy
elevator boy blinked at him and then dropped his head on his folded
arms. Granice passed out into the street. At the corner of Fifth
Avenue he hailed a crawling cab, and called out an up-town address.
The long thoroughfare stretched before him, dim and deserted, like
an ancient avenue of tombs. But from Denver's house a friendly beam
fell on the pavement; and as Granice sprang from his cab the
editor's electric turned the corner.

The two men grasped hands, and Denver, feeling for his latch-key,
ushered Granice into the brightly-lit hall.

"Disturb me? Not a bit. You might have, at ten to-morrow morning ...
but this is my liveliest hour ... you know my habits of old."

Granice had known Robert Denver for fifteen years--watched his rise
through all the stages of journalism to the Olympian pinnacle of the
_Investigator's_ editorial office. In the thick-set man with
grizzling hair there were few traces left of the hungry-eyed young
reporter who, on his way home in the small hours, used to "bob in"
on Granice, while the latter sat grinding at his plays. Denver had
to pass Granice's flat on the way to his own, and it became a habit,
if he saw a light in the window, and Granice's shadow against the
blind, to go in, smoke a pipe, and discuss the universe.

"Well--this is like old times--a good old habit reversed." The
editor smote his visitor genially on the shoulder. "Reminds me of
the nights when I used to rout you out... How's the play, by the
way? There _is_ a play, I suppose? It's as safe to ask you that as to
say to some men: 'How's the baby?'"

Denver laughed good-naturedly, and Granice thought how thick and
heavy he had grown. It was evident, even to Granice's tortured
nerves, that the words had not been uttered in malice--and the fact
gave him a new measure of his insignificance. Denver did not even
know that he had been a failure! The fact hurt more than Ascham's
irony.

"Come in--come in." The editor led the way into a small cheerful
room, where there were cigars and decanters. He pushed an arm-chair
toward his visitor, and dropped into another with a comfortable
groan.

"Now, then--help yourself. And let's hear all about it."

He beamed at Granice over his pipe-bowl, and the latter, lighting
his cigar, said to himself: "Success makes men comfortable, but it
makes them stupid."

Then he turned, and began: "Denver, I want to tell you--"

The clock ticked rhythmically on the mantel-piece. The room was
gradually filled with drifting blue layers of smoke, and through
them the editor's face came and went like the moon through a moving
sky. Once the hour struck--then the rhythmical ticking began again.
The atmosphere grew denser and heavier, and beads of perspiration
began to roll from Granice's forehead.

"Do you mind if I open the window?"

"No. It _is_ stuffy in here. Wait--I'll do it myself." Denver pushed
down the upper sash, and returned to his chair. "Well--go on," he
said, filling another pipe. His composure exasperated Granice.

"There's no use in my going on if you don't believe me."

The editor remained unmoved. "Who says I don't believe you? And how
can I tell till you've finished?"

Granice went on, ashamed of his outburst. "It was simple enough, as
you'll see. From the day the old man said to me, 'Those Italians
would murder you for a quarter,' I dropped everything and just
worked at my scheme. It struck me at once that I must find a way of
getting to Wrenfield and back in a night--and that led to the idea
of a motor. A motor--that never occurred to you? You wonder where I
got the money, I suppose. Well, I had a thousand or so put by, and I
nosed around till I found what I wanted--a second-hand racer. I knew
how to drive a car, and I tried the thing and found it was all
right. Times were bad, and I bought it for my price, and stored it
away. Where? Why, in one of those no-questions-asked garages where
they keep motors that are not for family use. I had a lively cousin
who had put me up to that dodge, and I looked about till I found a
queer hole where they took in my car like a baby in a foundling
asylum... Then I practiced running to Wrenfield and back in a
night. I knew the way pretty well, for I'd done it often with the
same lively cousin--and in the small hours, too. The distance is
over ninety miles, and on the third trial I did it under two hours.
But my arms were so lame that I could hardly get dressed the next
morning...

"Well, then came the report about the Italian's threats, and I saw I
must act at once... I meant to break into the old man's room,
shoot him, and get away again. It was a big risk, but I thought I
could manage it. Then we heard that he was ill--that there'd been a
consultation. Perhaps the fates were going to do it for me! Good
Lord, if that could only be! ..."

Granice stopped and wiped his forehead: the open window did not seem
to have cooled the room.

"Then came word that he was better; and the day after, when I came
up from my office, I found Kate laughing over the news that he was
to try a bit of melon. The house-keeper had just telephoned her--all
Wrenfield was in a flutter. The doctor himself had picked out the
melon, one of the little French ones that are hardly bigger than a
large tomato--and the patient was to eat it at his breakfast the
next morning.

"In a flash I saw my chance. It was a bare chance, no more. But I
knew the ways of the house--I was sure the melon would be brought in
over night and put in the pantry ice-box. If there were only one
melon in the ice-box I could be fairly sure it was the one I wanted.
Melons didn't lie around loose in that house--every one was known,
numbered, catalogued. The old man was beset by the dread that the
servants would eat them, and he took a hundred mean precautions to
prevent it. Yes, I felt pretty sure of my melon ... and poisoning
was much safer than shooting. It would have been the devil and all
to get into the old man's bedroom without his rousing the house; but
I ought to be able to break into the pantry without much trouble.

"It was a cloudy night, too--everything served me. I dined quietly,
and sat down at my desk. Kate had one of her usual headaches, and
went to bed early. As soon as she was gone I slipped out. I had got
together a sort of disguise--red beard and queer-looking ulster. I
shoved them into a bag, and went round to the garage. There was no
one there but a half-drunken machinist whom I'd never seen before.
That served me, too. They were always changing machinists, and this
new fellow didn't even bother to ask if the car belonged to me. It
was a very easy-going place...

"Well, I jumped in, ran up Broadway, and let the car go as soon as I
was out of Harlem. Dark as it was, I could trust myself to strike a
sharp pace. In the shadow of a wood I stopped a second and got into
the beard and ulster. Then away again--it was just eleven-thirty
when I got to Wrenfield.

"I left the car in a dark lane behind the Lenman place, and slipped
through the kitchen-garden. The melon-houses winked at me through
the dark--I remember thinking that they knew what I wanted to know. ...
By the stable a dog came out growling--but he nosed me out,
jumped on me, and went back... The house was as dark as the grave.
I knew everybody went to bed by ten. But there might be a prowling
servant--the kitchen-maid might have come down to let in her
Italian. I had to risk that, of course. I crept around by the back
door and hid in the shrubbery. Then I listened. It was all as silent
as death. I crossed over to the house, pried open the pantry window
and climbed in. I had a little electric lamp in my pocket, and
shielding it with my cap I groped my way to the ice-box, opened
it--and there was the little French melon ... only one.

"I stopped to listen--I was quite cool. Then I pulled out my bottle
of stuff and my syringe, and gave each section of the melon a
hypodermic. It was all done inside of three minutes--at ten minutes
to twelve I was back in the car. I got out of the lane as quietly as
I could, struck a back road that skirted the village, and let the
car out as soon as I was beyond the last houses. I only stopped once
on the way in, to drop the beard and ulster into a pond. I had a big
stone ready to weight them with and they went down plump, like a
dead body--and at two o'clock I was back at my desk."

Granice stopped speaking and looked across the smoke-fumes at his
listener; but Denver's face remained inscrutable.

At length he said: "Why did you want to tell me this?"

The question startled Granice. He was about to explain, as he had
explained to Ascham; but suddenly it occurred to him that if his
motive had not seemed convincing to the lawyer it would carry much
less weight with Denver. Both were successful men, and success does
not understand the subtle agony of failure. Granice cast about for
another reason.

"Why, I--the thing haunts me ... remorse, I suppose you'd call it..."

Denver struck the ashes from his empty pipe.

"Remorse? Bosh!" he said energetically.

Granice's heart sank. "You don't believe in--_remorse?_"

"Not an atom: in the man of action. The mere fact of your talking of
remorse proves to me that you're not the man to have planned and put
through such a job."

Granice groaned. "Well--I lied to you about remorse. I've never felt
any."

Denver's lips tightened sceptically about his freshly-filled pipe.
"What was your motive, then? You must have had one."

"I'll tell you--" And Granice began again to rehearse the story of
his failure, of his loathing for life. "Don't say you don't believe
me this time ... that this isn't a real reason!" he stammered out
piteously as he ended.

Denver meditated. "No, I won't say that. I've seen too many queer
things. There's always a reason for wanting to get out of life--the
wonder is that we find so many for staying in!"

Granice's heart grew light. "Then you _do_ believe me?" he faltered.

"Believe that you're sick of the job? Yes. And that you haven't the
nerve to pull the trigger? Oh, yes--that's easy enough, too. But all
that doesn't make you a murderer--though I don't say it proves you
could never have been one."

"I _have_ been one, Denver--I swear to you."

"Perhaps." He meditated. "Just tell me one or two things."

"Oh, go ahead. You won't stump me!" Granice heard himself say with a
laugh.

"Well--how did you make all those trial trips without exciting your
sister's curiosity? I knew your night habits pretty well at that
time, remember. You were very seldom out late. Didn't the change in
your ways surprise her?"

"No; because she was away at the time. She went to pay several
visits in the country soon after we came back from Wrenfield, and
was only in town for a night or two before--before I did the job."

"And that night she went to bed early with a headache?"

"Yes--blinding. She didn't know anything when she had that kind. And
her room was at the back of the flat."

Denver again meditated. "And when you got back--she didn't hear you?
You got in without her knowing it?"

"Yes. I went straight to my work--took it up at the word where I'd
left off--_why, Denver, don't you remember?_" Granice suddenly,
passionately interjected.

"Remember--?"

"Yes; how you found me--when you looked in that morning, between two
and three ... your usual hour ...?"

"Yes," the editor nodded.

Granice gave a short laugh. "In my old coat--with my pipe: looked as
if I'd been working all night, didn't I? Well, I hadn't been in my
chair ten minutes!"

Denver uncrossed his legs and then crossed them again. "I didn't
know whether _you_ remembered that."

"What?"

"My coming in that particular night--or morning."

Granice swung round in his chair. "Why, man alive! That's why I'm
here now. Because it was you who spoke for me at the inquest, when
they looked round to see what all the old man's heirs had been doing
that night--you who testified to having dropped in and found me at
my desk as usual. ... I thought _that_ would appeal to your
journalistic sense if nothing else would!"

Denver smiled. "Oh, my journalistic sense is still susceptible
enough--and the idea's picturesque, I grant you: asking the man who
proved your alibi to establish your guilt."

"That's it--that's it!" Granice's laugh had a ring of triumph.

"Well, but how about the other chap's testimony--I mean that young
doctor: what was his name? Ned Ranney. Don't you remember my
testifying that I'd met him at the elevated station, and told him I
was on my way to smoke a pipe with you, and his saying: 'All right;
you'll find him in. I passed the house two hours ago, and saw his
shadow against the blind, as usual.' And the lady with the toothache
in the flat across the way: she corroborated his statement, you
remember."

"Yes; I remember."

Well, then?"

"Simple enough. Before starting I rigged up a kind of mannikin with
old coats and a cushion--something to cast a shadow on the blind.
All you fellows were used to seeing my shadow there in the small
hours--I counted on that, and knew you'd take any vague outline as
mine."

"Simple enough, as you say. But the woman with the toothache saw the
shadow move--you remember she said she saw you sink forward, as if
you'd fallen asleep."

"Yes; and she was right. It _did_ move. I suppose some extra-heavy
dray must have jolted by the flimsy building--at any rate, something
gave my mannikin a jar, and when I came back he had sunk forward,
half over the table."

There was a long silence between the two men. Granice, with a
throbbing heart, watched Denver refill his pipe. The editor, at any
rate, did not sneer and flout him. After all, journalism gave a
deeper insight than the law into the fantastic possibilities of
life, prepared one better to allow for the incalculableness of human
impulses.

"Well?" Granice faltered out.

Denver stood up with a shrug. "Look here, man--what's wrong with
you? Make a clean breast of it! Nerves gone to smash? I'd like to
take you to see a chap I know--an ex-prize-fighter--who's a wonder
at pulling fellows in your state out of their hole--"

"Oh, oh--" Granice broke in. He stood up also, and the two men eyed
each other. "You don't believe me, then?"

"This yarn--how can I? There wasn't a flaw in your alibi."

"But haven't I filled it full of them now?"

Denver shook his head. "I might think so if I hadn't happened to
know that you _wanted_ to. There's the hitch, don't you see?"

Granice groaned. "No, I didn't. You mean my wanting to be found
guilty--?"

"Of course! If somebody else had accused you, the story might have
been worth looking into. As it is, a child could have invented it.
It doesn't do much credit to your ingenuity."

Granice turned sullenly toward the door. What was the use of
arguing? But on the threshold a sudden impulse drew him back. "Look
here, Denver--I daresay you're right. But will you do just one thing
to prove it? Put my statement in the _Investigator_, just as I've
made it. Ridicule it as much as you like. Only give the other
fellows a chance at it--men who don't know anything about me. Set
them talking and looking about. I don't care a damn whether
_you_ believe me--what I want is to convince the Grand Jury! I
oughtn't to have come to a man who knows me--your cursed incredulity
is infectious. I don't put my case well, because I know in advance
it's discredited, and I almost end by not believing it myself.
That's why I can't convince _you_. It's a vicious circle." He laid a
hand on Denver's arm. "Send a stenographer, and put my statement in
the paper."

But Denver did not warm to the idea. "My dear fellow, you seem to
forget that all the evidence was pretty thoroughly sifted at the
time, every possible clue followed up. The public would have been
ready enough then to believe that you murdered old Lenman--you or
anybody else. All they wanted was a murderer--the most improbable
would have served. But your alibi was too confoundedly complete. And
nothing you've told me has shaken it." Denver laid his cool hand
over the other's burning fingers. "Look here, old fellow, go home
and work up a better case--then come in and submit it to the
_Investigator_."






IV





THE perspiration was rolling off Granice's forehead. Every few
minutes he had to draw out his handkerchief and wipe the moisture
from his haggard face.

For an hour and a half he had been talking steadily, putting his
case to the District Attorney. Luckily he had a speaking
acquaintance with Allonby, and had obtained, without much
difficulty, a private audience on the very day after his talk with
Robert Denver. In the interval between he had hurried home, got out
of his evening clothes, and gone forth again at once into the dreary
dawn. His fear of Ascham and the alienist made it impossible for him
to remain in his rooms. And it seemed to him that the only way of
averting that hideous peril was by establishing, in some sane
impartial mind, the proof of his guilt. Even if he had not been so
incurably sick of life, the electric chair seemed now the only
alternative to the strait-jacket.

As he paused to wipe his forehead he saw the District Attorney
glance at his watch. The gesture was significant, and Granice lifted
an appealing hand. "I don't expect you to believe me now--but can't
you put me under arrest, and have the thing looked into?"

Allonby smiled faintly under his heavy grayish moustache. He had a
ruddy face, full and jovial, in which his keen professional eyes
seemed to keep watch over impulses not strictly professional.

"Well, I don't know that we need lock you up just yet. But of course
I'm bound to look into your statement--"

Granice rose with an exquisite sense of relief. Surely Allonby
wouldn't have said that if he hadn't believed him!

"That's all right. Then I needn't detain you. I can be found at any
time at my apartment." He gave the address.

The District Attorney smiled again, more openly. "What do you say to
leaving it for an hour or two this evening? I'm giving a little
supper at Rector's--quiet, little affair, you understand: just Miss
Melrose--I think you know her--and a friend or two; and if you'll
join us..."

Granice stumbled out of the office without knowing what reply he had
made.

He waited for four days--four days of concentrated horror. During
the first twenty-four hours the fear of Ascham's alienist dogged
him; and as that subsided, it was replaced by the exasperating sense
that his avowal had made no impression on the District Attorney.
Evidently, if he had been going to look into the case, Allonby would
have been heard from before now. ... And that mocking invitation
to supper showed clearly enough how little the story had impressed
him!

Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to
inculpate himself. He was chained to life--a "prisoner of
consciousness." Where was it he had read the phrase? Well, he was
learning what it meant. In the glaring night-hours, when his brain
seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of
his irreducible, inexpugnable _selfness_, keener, more insidious,
more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever known. He had not
guessed that the mind was capable of such intricacies of
self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its own dark wind-
ings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the
feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his
hands and face, and in his throat--and as his brain cleared he
understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that
stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

Then, in the first morning hours, he would rise and look out of his
window at the awakening activities of the street--at the
street-cleaners, the ash-cart drivers, and the other dingy workers
flitting hurriedly by through the sallow winter light. Oh, to be one
of them--any of them--to take his chance in any of their skins! They
were the toilers--the men whose lot was pitied--the victims wept
over and ranted about by altruists and economists; and how gladly he
would have taken up the load of any one of them, if only he might
have shaken off his own! But, no--the iron circle of consciousness
held them too: each one was hand-cuffed to his own hideous ego. Why
wish to be any one man rather than another? The only absolute good
was not to be ... And Flint, coming in to draw his bath, would ask
if he preferred his eggs scrambled or poached that morning?

On the fifth day he wrote a long urgent letter to Allonby; and for
the succeeding two days he had the occupation of waiting for an
answer. He hardly stirred from his rooms, in his fear of missing the
letter by a moment; but would the District Attorney write, or send a
representative: a policeman, a "secret agent," or some other
mysterious emissary of the law?

On the third morning Flint, stepping softly--as if, confound it! his
master were ill--entered the library where Granice sat behind an
unread newspaper, and proferred a card on a tray.

Granice read the name--J. B. Hewson--and underneath, in pencil,
"From the District Attorney's office." He started up with a thumping
heart, and signed an assent to the servant.

Mr. Hewson was a slight sallow nondescript man of about fifty--the
kind of man of whom one is sure to see a specimen in any crowd.
"Just the type of the successful detective," Granice reflected as he
shook hands with his visitor.

And it was in that character that Mr. Hewson briefly introduced
himself. He had been sent by the District Attorney to have "a quiet
talk" with Mr. Granice--to ask him to repeat the statement he had
made about the Lenman murder.

His manner was so quiet, so reasonable and receptive, that Granice's
self-confidence returned. Here was a sensible man--a man who knew
his business--it would be easy enough to make _him_ see through that
ridiculous alibi! Granice offered Mr. Hewson a cigar, and lighting
one himself--to prove his coolness--began again to tell his story.

He was conscious, as he proceeded, of telling it better than ever
before. Practice helped, no doubt; and his listener's detached,
impartial attitude helped still more. He could see that Hewson, at
least, had not decided in advance to disbelieve him, and the sense
of being trusted made him more lucid and more consecutive. Yes, this
time his words would certainly carry conviction...






V





DESPAIRINGLY, Granice gazed up and down the shabby street. Beside
him stood a young man with bright prominent eyes, a smooth but not
too smoothly-shaven face, and an Irish smile. The young man's nimble
glance followed Granice's.

"Sure of the number, are you?" he asked briskly.

"Oh, yes--it was 104."

"Well, then, the new building has swallowed it up--that's certain."

He tilted his head back and surveyed the half-finished front of a
brick and limestone flat-house that reared its flimsy elegance above
a row of tottering tenements and stables.

"Dead sure?" he repeated.

"Yes," said Granice, discouraged. "And even if I hadn't been, I know
the garage was just opposite Leffler's over there." He pointed
across the street to a tumble-down stable with a blotched sign on
which the words "Livery and Boarding" were still faintly
discernible.

The young man dashed across to the opposite pavement. "Well, that's
something--may get a clue there. Leffler's--same name there, anyhow.
You remember that name?"

"Yes--distinctly."

Granice had felt a return of confidence since he had enlisted the
interest of the _Explorer's_ "smartest" reporter. If there were
moments when he hardly believed his own story, there were others
when it seemed impossible that every one should not believe it; and
young Peter McCarren, peering, listening, questioning, jotting down
notes, inspired him with an exquisite sense of security. McCarren
had fastened on the case at once, "like a leech," as he phrased
it--jumped at it, thrilled to it, and settled down to "draw the last
drop of fact from it, and had not let go till he had." No one else
had treated Granice in that way--even Allonby's detective had not
taken a single note. And though a week had elapsed since the visit
of that authorized official, nothing had been heard from the
District Attorney's office: Allonby had apparently dropped the
matter again. But McCarren wasn't going to drop it--not he! He
positively hung on Granice's footsteps. They had spent the greater
part of the previous day together, and now they were off again,
running down clues.

But at Leffler's they got none, after all. Leffler's was no longer a
stable. It was condemned to demolition, and in the respite between
sentence and execution it had become a vague place of storage, a
hospital for broken-down carriages and carts, presided over by a
blear-eyed old woman who knew nothing of Flood's garage across the
way--did not even remember what had stood there before the new
flat-house began to rise.

"Well--we may run Leffler down somewhere; I've seen harder jobs
done," said McCarren, cheerfully noting down the name.

As they walked back toward Sixth Avenue he added, in a less sanguine
tone: "I'd undertake now to put the thing through if you could only
put me on the track of that cyanide."

Granice's heart sank. Yes--there was the weak spot; he had felt it
from the first! But he still hoped to convince McCarren that his
case was strong enough without it; and he urged the reporter to come
back to his rooms and sum up the facts with him again.

"Sorry, Mr. Granice, but I'm due at the office now. Besides, it'd be
no use till I get some fresh stuff to work on. Suppose I call you up
tomorrow or next day?"

He plunged into a trolley and left Granice gazing desolately after
him.

Two days later he reappeared at the apartment, a shade less jaunty
in demeanor.

"Well, Mr. Granice, the stars in their courses are against you, as
the bard says. Can't get a trace of Flood, or of Leffler either. And
you say you bought the motor through Flood, and sold it through him,
too?"

"Yes," said Granice wearily.

"Who bought it, do you know?"

Granice wrinkled his brows. "Why, Flood--yes, Flood himself. I sold
it back to him three months later."

"Flood? The devil! And I've ransacked the town for Flood. That kind
of business disappears as if the earth had swallowed it."

Granice, discouraged, kept silence.

"That brings us back to the poison," McCarren continued, his
note-book out. "Just go over that again, will you?"

And Granice went over it again. It had all been so simple at the
time--and he had been so clever in covering up his traces! As soon
as he decided on poison he looked about for an acquaintance who
manufactured chemicals; and there was Jim Dawes, a Harvard
classmate, in the dyeing business--just the man. But at the last
moment it occurred to him that suspicion might turn toward so
obvious an opportunity, and he decided on a more tortuous course.
Another friend, Carrick Venn, a student of medicine whom
irremediable ill-health had kept from the practice of his
profession, amused his leisure with experiments in physics, for the
exercise of which he had set up a simple laboratory. Granice had the
habit of dropping in to smoke a cigar with him on Sunday afternoons,
and the friends generally sat in Venn's work-shop, at the back of
the old family house in Stuyvesant Square. Off this work-shop was
the cupboard of supplies, with its row of deadly bottles. Carrick
Venn was an original, a man of restless curious tastes, and his
place, on a Sunday, was often full of visitors: a cheerful crowd of
journalists, scribblers, painters, experimenters in divers forms of
expression. Coming and going among so many, it was easy enough to
pass unperceived; and one afternoon Granice, arriving before Venn
had returned home, found himself alone in the work-shop, and quickly
slipping into the cupboard, transferred the drug to his pocket.

But that had happened ten years ago; and Venn, poor fellow, was long
since dead of his dragging ailment. His old father was dead, too,
the house in Stuyvesant Square had been turned into a
boarding-house, and the shifting life of New York had passed its
rapid sponge over every trace of their obscure little history. Even
the optimistic McCarren seemed to acknowledge the hopelessness of
seeking for proof in that direction.

"And there's the third door slammed in our faces." He shut his
note-book, and throwing back his head, rested his bright inquisitive
eyes on Granice's furrowed face.

"Look here, Mr. Granice--you see the weak spot, don't you?"

The other made a despairing motion. "I see so many!"

"Yes: but the one that weakens all the others. Why the deuce do you
want this thing known? Why do you want to put your head into the
noose?"

Granice looked at him hopelessly, trying to take the measure of his
quick light irreverent mind. No one so full of a cheerful animal
life would believe in the craving for death as a sufficient motive;
and Granice racked his brain for one more convincing. But suddenly
he saw the reporter's face soften, and melt to a naive
sentimentalism.

"Mr. Granice--has the memory of it always haunted you?"

Granice stared a moment, and then leapt at the opening. "That's
it--the memory of it ... always ..."

McCarren nodded vehemently. "Dogged your steps, eh? Wouldn't let you
sleep? The time came when you _had_ to make a clean breast of it?"

"I had to. Can't you understand?"

The reporter struck his fist on the table. "God, sir! I don't
suppose there's a human being with a drop of warm blood in him that
can't picture the deadly horrors of remorse--"

The Celtic imagination was aflame, and Granice mutely thanked him
for the word. What neither Ascham nor Denver would accept as a
conceivable motive the Irish reporter seized on as the most
adequate; and, as he said, once one could find a convincing motive,
the difficulties of the case became so many incentives to effort.

"Remorse--_remorse_," he repeated, rolling the word under his tongue
with an accent that was a clue to the psychology of the popular
drama; and Granice, perversely, said to himself: "If I could only
have struck that note I should have been running in six theatres at
once."

He saw that from that moment McCarren's professional zeal would be
fanned by emotional curiosity; and he profited by the fact to
propose that they should dine together, and go on afterward to some
music-hall or theatre. It was becoming necessary to Granice to feel
himself an object of pre-occupation, to find himself in another
mind. He took a kind of gray penumbral pleasure in riveting
McCarren's attention on his case; and to feign the grimaces of moral
anguish became a passionately engrossing game. He had not entered a
theatre for months; but he sat out the meaningless performance in
rigid tolerance, sustained by the sense of the reporter's
observation.

Between the acts, McCarren amused him with anecdotes about the
audience: he knew every one by sight, and could lift the curtain
from every physiognomy. Granice listened indulgently. He had lost
all interest in his kind, but he knew that he was himself the real
centre of McCarren's attention, and that every word the latter spoke
had an indirect bearing on his own problem.

"See that fellow over there--the little dried-up man in the third
row, pulling his moustache? _His_ memoirs would be worth publishing,"
McCarren said suddenly in the last _entr'acte_.

Granice, following his glance, recognized the detective from
Allonby's office. For a moment he had the thrilling sense that he
was being shadowed.

"Caesar, if _he_ could talk--!" McCarren continued. "Know who he is,
of course? Dr. John B. Stell, the biggest alienist in the country--"

Granice, with a start, bent again between the heads in front of him.
"_That_ man--the fourth from the aisle? You're mistaken. That's not
Dr. Stell."

McCarren laughed. "Well, I guess I've been in court enough to know
Stell when I see him. He testifies in nearly all the big cases where
they plead insanity."

A cold shiver ran down Granice's spine, but he repeated obstinately:
"That's not Dr. Stell."

"Not Stell? Why, man, I _know_ him. Look--here he comes. If it isn't
Stell, he won't speak to me."

The little dried-up man was moving slowly up the aisle. As he neared
McCarren he made a slight gesture of recognition.

"How'do, Doctor Stell? Pretty slim show, ain't it?" the reporter
cheerfully flung out at him. And Mr. J. B. Hewson, with a nod of
amicable assent, passed on.

Granice sat benumbed. He knew he had not been mistaken--the man who
had just passed was the same man whom Allonby had sent to see him: a
physician disguised as a detective. Allonby, then, had thought him
insane, like the others--had regarded his confession as the
maundering of a maniac. The discovery froze Granice with horror--he
seemed to see the mad-house gaping for him.

"Isn't there a man a good deal like him--a detective named J. B.
Hewson?"

But he knew in advance what McCarren's answer would be. "Hewson? J.
B. Hewson? Never heard of him. But that was J. B. Stell fast
enough--I guess he can be trusted to know himself, and you saw he
answered to his name."






VI





SOME days passed before Granice could obtain a word with the
District Attorney: he began to think that Allonby avoided him.

But when they were face to face Allonby's jovial countenance showed
no sign of embarrassment. He waved his visitor to a chair, and
leaned across his desk with the encouraging smile of a consulting
physician.

Granice broke out at once: "That detective you sent me the other
day--"

Allonby raised a deprecating hand.

"--I know: it was Stell the alienist. Why did you do that, Allonby?"

The other's face did not lose its composure. "Because I looked up
your story first--and there's nothing in it."

"Nothing in it?" Granice furiously interposed.

"Absolutely nothing. If there is, why the deuce don't you bring me
proofs? I know you've been talking to Peter Ascham, and to Denver,
and to that little ferret McCarren of the _Explorer_. Have any of
them been able to make out a case for you? No. Well, what am I to
do?"

Granice's lips began to tremble. "Why did you play me that trick?"

"About Stell? I had to, my dear fellow: it's part of my business.
Stell _is_ a detective, if you come to that--every doctor is."

The trembling of Granice's lips increased, communicating itself in a
long quiver to his facial muscles. He forced a laugh through his dry
throat. "Well--and what did he detect?"

"In you? Oh, he thinks it's overwork--overwork and too much smoking.
If you look in on him some day at his office he'll show you the
record of hundreds of cases like yours, and advise you what
treatment to follow. It's one of the commonest forms of
hallucination. Have a cigar, all the same."

"But, Allonby, I killed that man!"

The District Attorney's large hand, outstretched on his desk, had an
almost imperceptible gesture, and a moment later, as if an answer to
the call of an electric bell, a clerk looked in from the outer
office.

"Sorry, my dear fellow--lot of people waiting. Drop in on Stell some
morning," Allonby said, shaking hands.

McCarren had to own himself beaten: there was absolutely no flaw in
the alibi. And since his duty to his journal obviously forbade his
wasting time on insoluble mysteries, he ceased to frequent Granice,
who dropped back into a deeper isolation. For a day or two after his
visit to Allonby he continued to live in dread of Dr. Stell. Why
might not Allonby have deceived him as to the alienist's diagnosis?
What if he were really being shadowed, not by a police agent but by
a mad-doctor? To have the truth out, he suddenly determined to call
on Dr. Stell.

The physician received him kindly, and reverted without
embarrassment to the conditions of their previous meeting. "We have
to do that occasionally, Mr. Granice; it's one of our methods. And
you had given Allonby a fright."

Granice was silent. He would have liked to reaffirm his guilt, to
produce the fresh arguments which had occurred to him since his last
talk with the physician; but he feared his eagerness might be taken
for a symptom of derangement, and he affected to smile away Dr.
Stell's allusion.

"You think, then, it's a case of brain-fag--nothing more?"

"Nothing more. And I should advise you to knock off tobacco. You
smoke a good deal, don't you?"

He developed his treatment, recommending massage, gymnastics,
travel, or any form of diversion that did not--that in short--

Granice interrupted him impatiently. "Oh, I loathe all that--and I'm
sick of travelling."

"H'm. Then some larger interest--politics, reform, philanthropy?
Something to take you out of yourself."

"Yes. I understand," said Granice wearily.

"Above all, don't lose heart. I see hundreds of cases like yours,"
the doctor added cheerfully from the threshold.

On the doorstep Granice stood still and laughed. Hundreds of cases
like his--the case of a man who had committed a murder, who
confessed his guilt, and whom no one would believe! Why, there had
never been a case like it in the world. What a good figure Stell
would have made in a play: the great alienist who couldn't read a
man's mind any better than that!

Granice saw huge comic opportunities in the type.

But as he walked away, his fears dispelled, the sense of
listlessness returned on him. For the first time since his avowal to
Peter Ascham he found himself without an occupation, and understood
that he had been carried through the past weeks only by the
necessity of constant action. Now his life had once more become a
stagnant backwater, and as he stood on the street corner watching
the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked himself despairingly how
much longer he could endure to float about in the sluggish circle of
his consciousness.

The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh
recoiled. He yearned for death from other hands, but he could never
take it from his own. And, aside from his insuperable physical
reluctance, another motive restrained him. He was possessed by the
dogged desire to establish the truth of his story. He refused to be
swept aside as an irresponsible dreamer--even if he had to kill
himself in the end, he would not do so before proving to society
that he had deserved death from it.

He began to write long letters to the papers; but after the first
had been published and commented on, public curiosity was quelled by
a brief statement from the District Attorney's office, and the rest
of his communications remained unprinted. Ascham came to see him,
and begged him to travel. Robert Denver dropped in, and tried to
joke him out of his delusion; till Granice, mistrustful of their
motives, began to dread the reappearance of Dr. Stell, and set a
guard on his lips. But the words he kept back engendered others and
still others in his brain. His inner self became a humming factory
of arguments, and he spent long hours reciting and writing down
elaborate statements of his crime, which he constantly retouched and
developed. Then gradually his activity languished under the lack of
an audience, the sense of being buried beneath deepening drifts of
indifference. In a passion of resentment he swore that he would
prove himself a murderer, even if he had to commit another crime to
do it; and for a sleepless night or two the thought flamed red on
his darkness. But daylight dispelled it. The determining impulse was
lacking and he hated too promiscuously to choose his victim... So
he was thrown back on the unavailing struggle to impose the truth of
his story. As fast as one channel closed on him he tried to pierce
another through the sliding sands of incredulity. But every issue
seemed blocked, and the whole human race leagued together to cheat
one man of the right to die.

Thus viewed, the situation became so monstrous that he lost his last
shred of self-restraint in contemplating it. What if he were really
the victim of some mocking experiment, the centre of a ring of
holiday-makers jeering at a poor creature in its blind dashes
against the solid walls of consciousness? But, no--men were not so
uniformly cruel: there were flaws in the close surface of their
indifference, cracks of weakness and pity here and there...

Granice began to think that his mistake lay in having appealed to
persons more or less familiar with his past, and to whom the visible
conformities of his life seemed a final disproof of its one fierce
secret deviation. The general tendency was to take for the whole of
life the slit seen between the blinders of habit: and in his walk
down that narrow vista Granice cut a correct enough figure. To a
vision free to follow his whole orbit his story would be more
intelligible: it would be easier to convince a chance idler in the
street than the trained intelligence hampered by a sense of his
antecedents. This idea shot up in him with the tropic luxuriance of
each new seed of thought, and he began to walk the streets, and to
frequent out-of-the-way chop-houses and bars in his search for the
impartial stranger to whom he should disclose himself.

At first every face looked encouragement; but at the crucial moment
he always held back. So much was at stake, and it was so essential
that his first choice should be decisive. He dreaded stupidity,
timidity, intolerance. The imaginative eye, the furrowed brow, were
what he sought. He must reveal himself only to a heart versed in the
tortuous motions of the human will; and he began to hate the dull
benevolence of the average face. Once or twice, obscurely,
allusively, he made a beginning--once sitting down at a man's side
in a basement chop-house, another day approaching a lounger on an
east-side wharf. But in both cases the premonition of failure
checked him on the brink of avowal. His dread of being taken for a
man in the clutch of a fixed idea gave him an unnatural keenness in
reading the expression of his interlocutors, and he had provided
himself in advance with a series of verbal alternatives, trap-doors
of evasion from the first dart of ridicule or suspicion.

He passed the greater part of the day in the streets, coming home at
irregular hours, dreading the silence and orderliness of his
apartment, and the critical scrutiny of Flint. His real life was
spent in a world so remote from this familiar setting that he
sometimes had the mysterious sense of a living metempsychosis, a
furtive passage from one identity to another--yet the other as
unescapably himself!

One humiliation he was spared: the desire to live never revived in
him. Not for a moment was he tempted to a shabby pact with existing
conditions. He wanted to die, wanted it with the fixed unwavering
desire which alone attains its end. And still the end eluded him! It
would not always, of course--he had full faith in the dark star of
his destiny. And he could prove it best by repeating his story,
persistently and indefatigably, pouring it into indifferent ears,
hammering it into dull brains, till at last it kindled a spark, and
some one of the careless millions paused, listened, believed...

It was a mild March day, and he had been loitering on the west-side
docks, looking at faces. He was becoming an expert in physiognomies:
his eagerness no longer made rash darts and awkward recoils. He knew
now the face he needed, as clearly as if it had come to him in a
vision; and not till he found it would he speak. As he walked
eastward through the shabby reeking streets he had a premonition
that he should find it that morning. Perhaps it was the promise of
spring in the air--certainly he felt calmer than for many days...

He turned into Washington Square, struck across it obliquely, and
walked up University Place. Its heterogeneous passers always allured
him--they were less hurried than in Broadway, less enclosed and
classified than in Fifth Avenue. He walked slowly, watching for his
face.

At Union Square he felt a sudden relapse into discouragement, like a
votary who has watched too long for a sign from the altar. Perhaps,
after all, he should never find his face... The air was languid,
and he felt tired. He walked between the bald grass-plots and the
twisted trees, making for an empty seat. Presently he passed a bench
on which a girl sat alone, and something as definite as the twitch
of a cord made him stop before her. He had never dreamed of telling
his story to a girl, had hardly looked at the women's faces as they
passed. His case was man's work: how could a woman help him? But
this girl's face was extraordinary--quiet and wide as a clear
evening sky. It suggested a hundred images of space, distance,
mystery, like ships he had seen, as a boy, quietly berthed by a
familiar wharf, but with the breath of far seas and strange harbours
in their shrouds... Certainly this girl would understand. He went
up to her quietly, lifting his hat, observing the forms--wishing her
to see at once that he was "a gentleman."

"I am a stranger to you," he began, sitting down beside her, "but
your face is so extremely intelligent that I feel... I feel it is
the face I've waited for ... looked for everywhere; and I want to
tell you--"

The girl's eyes widened: she rose to her feet. She was escaping him!

In his dismay he ran a few steps after her, and caught her roughly
by the arm.

"Here--wait--listen! Oh, don't scream, you fool!" he shouted out.

He felt a hand on his own arm; turned and confronted a policeman.
Instantly he understood that he was being arrested, and something
hard within him was loosened and ran to tears.

"Ah, you know--you _know_ I'm guilty!"

He was conscious that a crowd was forming, and that the girl's
frightened face had disappeared. But what did he care about her
face? It was the policeman who had really understood him. He turned
and followed, the crowd at his heels...






VII





IN the charming place in which he found himself there were so many
sympathetic faces that he felt more than ever convinced of the
certainty of making himself heard.

It was a bad blow, at first, to find that he had not been arrested
for murder; but Ascham, who had come to him at once, explained that
he needed rest, and the time to "review" his statements; it appeared
that reiteration had made them a little confused and contradictory.
To this end he had willingly acquiesced in his removal to a large
quiet establishment, with an open space and trees about it, where he
had found a number of intelligent companions, some, like himself,
engaged in preparing or reviewing statements of their cases, and
others ready to lend an interested ear to his own recital.

For a time he was content to let himself go on the tranquil current
of this existence; but although his auditors gave him for the most
part an encouraging attention, which, in some, went the length of
really brilliant and helpful suggestion, he gradually felt a
recurrence of his old doubts. Either his hearers were not sincere,
or else they had less power to aid him than they boasted. His
interminable conferences resulted in nothing, and as the benefit of
the long rest made itself felt, it produced an increased mental
lucidity which rendered inaction more and more unbearable. At length
he discovered that on certain days visitors from the outer world
were admitted to his retreat; and he wrote out long and logically
constructed relations of his crime, and furtively slipped them into
the hands of these messengers of hope.

This occupation gave him a fresh lease of patience, and he now lived
only to watch for the visitors' days, and scan the faces that swept
by him like stars seen and lost in the rifts of a hurrying sky.

Mostly, these faces were strange and less intelligent than those of
his companions. But they represented his last means of access to the
world, a kind of subterranean channel on which he could set his
"statements" afloat, like paper boats which the mysterious current
might sweep out into the open seas of life.

One day, however, his attention was arrested by a familiar contour,
a pair of bright prominent eyes, and a chin insufficiently shaved.
He sprang up and stood in the path of Peter McCarren.

The journalist looked at him doubtfully, then held out his hand with
a startled deprecating, "_Why--?_"

"You didn't know me? I'm so changed?" Granice faltered, feeling the
rebound of the other's wonder.

"Why, no; but you're looking quieter--smoothed out," McCarren
smiled.

"Yes: that's what I'm here for--to rest. And I've taken the
opportunity to write out a clearer statement--"

Granice's hand shook so that he could hardly draw the folded paper
from his pocket. As he did so he noticed that the reporter was
accompanied by a tall man with grave compassionate eyes. It came to
Granice in a wild thrill of conviction that this was the face he had
waited for...

"Perhaps your friend--he _is_ your friend?--would glance over it--or
I could put the case in a few words if you have time?" Granice's
voice shook like his hand. If this chance escaped him he felt that
his last hope was gone. McCarren and the stranger looked at each
other, and the former glanced at his watch.

"I'm sorry we can't stay and talk it over now, Mr. Granice; but my
friend has an engagement, and we're rather pressed--"

Granice continued to proffer the paper. "I'm sorry--I think I could
have explained. But you'll take this, at any rate?"

The stranger looked at him gently. "Certainly--I'll take it." He had
his hand out. "Good-bye."

"Good-bye," Granice echoed.

He stood watching the two men move away from him through the long
light hall; and as he watched them a tear ran down his face. But as
soon as they were out of sight he turned and walked hastily toward
his room, beginning to hope again, already planning a new statement.

Outside the building the two men stood still, and the journalist's
companion looked up curiously at the long monotonous rows of barred
windows.

"So that was Granice?"

"Yes--that was Granice, poor devil," said McCarren.

"Strange case! I suppose there's never been one just like it? He's
still absolutely convinced that he committed that murder?"

"Absolutely. Yes."

The stranger reflected. "And there was no conceivable ground for the
idea? No one could make out how it started? A quiet conventional
sort of fellow like that--where do you suppose he got such a
delusion? Did you ever get the least clue to it?"

McCarren stood still, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked up
in contemplation of the barred windows. Then he turned his bright
hard gaze on his companion.

"That was the queer part of it. I've never spoken of it--but I
_did_ get a clue."

"By Jove! That's interesting. What was it?"

McCarren formed his red lips into a whistle. "Why--that it wasn't a
delusion."

He produced his effect--the other turned on him with a pallid stare.

"He murdered the man all right. I tumbled on the truth by the merest
accident, when I'd pretty nearly chucked the whole job."

"He murdered him--murdered his cousin?"

"Sure as you live. Only don't split on me. It's about the queerest
business I ever ran into... _Do about it?_ Why, what was I to do?
I couldn't hang the poor devil, could I? Lord, but I was glad when
they collared him, and had him stowed away safe in there!"

The tall man listened with a grave face, grasping Granice's
statement in his hand.

"Here--take this; it makes me sick," he said abruptly, thrusting the
paper at the reporter; and the two men turned and walked in silence
to the gates.






HIS FATHER'S SON

I





AFTER his wife's death Mason Grew took the momentous step of selling
out his business and moving from Wingfield, Connecticut, to
Brooklyn.

For years he had secretly nursed the hope of such a change, but had
never dared to suggest it to Mrs. Grew, a woman of immutable habits.
Mr. Grew himself was attached to Wingfield, where he had grown up,
prospered, and become what the local press described as "prominent."
He was attached to his ugly brick house with sandstone trimmings and
a cast-iron area-railing neatly sanded to match; to the similar row
of houses across the street, the "trolley" wires forming a kind of
aerial pathway between, and the sprawling vista closed by the
steeple of the church which he and his wife had always attended, and
where their only child had been baptized.

It was hard to snap all these threads of association, visual and
sentimental; yet still harder, now that he was alone, to live so far
from his boy. Ronald Grew was practising law in New York, and there
was no more chance of returning to live at Wingfield than of a
river's flowing inland from the sea. Therefore to be near him his
father must move; and it was characteristic of Mr. Grew, and of the
situation generally, that the translation, when it took place, was
to Brooklyn, and not to New York.

"Why you bury yourself in that hole I can't think," had been
Ronald's comment; and Mr. Grew simply replied that rents were lower
in Brooklyn, and that he had heard of a house that would suit him.
In reality he had said to himself--being the only recipient of his
own confidences--that if he went to New York he might be on the
boy's mind; whereas, if he lived in Brooklyn, Ronald would always
have a good excuse for not popping over to see him every other day.
The sociological isolation of Brooklyn, combined with its
geographical nearness, presented in fact the precise conditions for
Mr. Grew's case. He wanted to be near enough to New York to go there
often, to feel under his feet the same pavement that Ronald trod, to
sit now and then in the same theatres, and find on his
breakfast-table the journals which, with increasing frequency,
inserted Ronald's name in the sacred bounds of the society column.
It had always been a trial to Mr. Grew to have to wait twenty-four
hours to read that "among those present was Mr. Ronald Grew." Now he
had it with his coffee, and left it on the breakfast-table to the
perusal of a "hired girl" cosmopolitan enough to do it justice. In
such ways Brooklyn attested the advantages of its propinquity to New
York, while remaining, as regards Ronald's duty to his father, as
remote and inaccessible as Wingfield.

It was not that Ronald shirked his filial obligations, but rather
because of his heavy sense of them, that Mr. Grew so persistently
sought to minimize and lighten them. It was he who insisted, to
Ronald, on the immense difficulty of getting from New York to
Brooklyn.

"Any way you look at it, it makes a big hole in the day; and there's
not much use in the ragged rim left. You say you're dining out next
Sunday? Then I forbid you to come over here for lunch. Do you
understand me, sir? You disobey at the risk of your father's
malediction! Where did you say you were dining? With the Waltham
Bankshires again? Why, that's the second time in three weeks, ain't
it? Big blow-out, I suppose? Gold plate and orchids--opera singers
in afterward? Well, you'd be in a nice box if there was a fog on the
river, and you got hung up half-way over. That'd be a handsome
return for the attention Mrs. Bankshire has shown you--singling out
a whipper-snapper like you twice in three weeks! (What's the
daughter's name--Daisy?) No, _sir_--don't you come fooling round
here next Sunday, or I'll set the dogs on you. And you wouldn't find
me in anyhow, come to think of it. I'm lunching out myself, as it
happens--yes sir, _lunching out_. Is there anything especially comic
in my lunching out? I don't often do it, you say? Well, that's no
reason why I never should. Who with? Why, with--with old Dr.
Bleaker: Dr. Eliphalet Bleaker. No, you wouldn't know about
him--he's only an old friend of your mother's and mine."

Gradually Ronald's insistence became less difficult to overcome.
With his customary sweetness and tact (as Mr. Grew put it) he began
to "take the hint," to give in to "the old gentleman's" growing
desire for solitude.

"I'm set in my ways, Ronny, that's about the size of it; I like to
go tick-ticking along like a clock. I always did. And when you come
bouncing in I never feel sure there's enough for dinner--or that I
haven't sent Maria out for the evening. And I don't want the
neighbors to see me opening my own door to my son. That's the kind
of cringing snob I am. Don't give me away, will you? I want 'em to
think I keep four or five powdered flunkeys in the hall day and
night--same as the lobby of one of those Fifth Avenue hotels. And if
you pop over when you're not expected, how am I going to keep up the
bluff?"

Ronald yielded after the proper amount of resistance--his intuitive
sense, in every social transaction, of the proper amount of force to
be expended, was one of the qualities his father most admired in
him. Mr. Grew's perceptions in this line were probably more acute
than his son suspected. The souls of short thick-set men, with
chubby features, mutton-chop whiskers, and pale eyes peering between
folds of fat like almond kernels in half-split shells--souls thus
encased do not reveal themselves to the casual scrutiny as delicate
emotional instruments. But in spite of the dense disguise in which
he walked Mr. Grew vibrated exquisitely in response to every
imaginative appeal; and his son Ronald was perpetually stimulating
and feeding his imagination.

Ronald in fact constituted his father's one escape from the
impenetrable element of mediocrity which had always hemmed him in.
To a man so enamoured of beauty, and so little qualified to add to
its sum total, it was a wonderful privilege to have bestowed on the
world such a being. Ronald's resemblance to Mr. Grew's early
conception of what he himself would have liked to look might have
put new life into the discredited theory of pre-natal influences. At
any rate, if the young man owed his beauty, his distinction and his
winning manner to the dreams of one of his parents, it was certainly
to those of Mr. Grew, who, while outwardly devoting his life to the
manufacture and dissemination of Grew's Secure Suspender Buckle,
moved in an enchanted inward world peopled with all the figures of
romance. In this high company Mr. Grew cut as brilliant a figure as
any of its noble phantoms; and to see his vision of himself suddenly
projected on the outer world in the shape of a brilliant popular
conquering son, seemed, in retrospect, to give to that image a
belated objective reality. There were even moments when, forgetting
his physiognomy, Mr. Grew said to himself that if he'd had "half a
chance" he might have done as well as Ronald; but this only
fortified his resolve that Ronald should do infinitely better.

Ronald's ability to do well almost equalled his gift of looking
well. Mr. Grew constantly affirmed to himself that the boy was "not
a genius"; but, barring this slight deficiency, he was almost
everything that a parent could wish. Even at Harvard he had managed
to be several desirable things at once--writing poetry in the
college magazine, playing delightfully "by ear," acquitting himself
honorably in his studies, and yet holding his own in the fashionable
sporting set that formed, as it were, the gateway of the temple of
Society. Mr. Grew's idealism did not preclude the frank desire that
his son should pass through that gateway; but the wish was not
prompted by material considerations. It was Mr. Grew's notion that,
in the rough and hurrying current of a new civilization, the little
pools of leisure and enjoyment must nurture delicate growths,
material graces as well as moral refinements, likely to be uprooted
and swept away by the rush of the main torrent. He based his theory
on the fact that he had liked the few "society" people he had
met--had found their manners simpler, their voices more agreeable,
their views more consonant with his own, than those of the leading
citizens of Wingfield. But then he had met very few.

Ronald's sympathies needed no urging in the same direction. He took
naturally, dauntlessly, to all the high and exceptional things about
which his father's imagination had so long sheepishly and
ineffectually hovered--from the start he _was_ what Mr. Grew had
dreamed of being. And so precise, so detailed, was Mr. Grew's vision
of his own imaginary career, that as Ronald grew up, and began to
travel in a widening orbit, his father had an almost uncanny sense
of the extent to which that career was enacting itself before him.
At Harvard, Ronald had done exactly what the hypothetical Mason Grew
would have done, had not his actual self, at the same age, been
working his way up in old Slagden's button factory--the institution
which was later to acquire fame, and even notoriety, as the
birthplace of Grew's Secure Suspender Buckle. Afterward, at a period
when the actual Grew had passed from the factory to the bookkeeper's
desk, his invisible double had been reading law at
Columbia--precisely again what Ronald did! But it was when the young
man left the paths laid out for him by the parental hand, and cast
himself boldly on the world, that his adventures began to bear the
most astonishing resemblance to those of the unrealized Mason Grew.
It was in New York that the scene of this hypothetical being's first
exploits had always been laid; and it was in New York that Ronald
was to achieve his first triumph. There was nothing small or timid
about Mr. Grew's imagination; it had never stopped at anything
between Wingfield and the metropolis. And the real Ronald had the
same cosmic vision as his parent. He brushed aside with a
contemptuous laugh his mother's tearful entreaty that he should stay
at Wingfield and continue the dynasty of the Grew Suspender Buckle.
Mr. Grew knew that in reality Ronald winced at the Buckle, loathed
it, blushed for his connection with it. Yet it was the Buckle that
had seen him through Groton, Harvard and the Law School, and had
permitted him to enter the office of a distinguished corporation
lawyer, instead of being enslaved to some sordid business with quick
returns. The Buckle had been Ronald's fairy godmother--yet his
father did not blame him for abhorring and disowning it. Mr. Grew
himself often bitterly regretted having bestowed his own name on the
instrument of his material success, though, at the time, his doing
so had been the natural expression of his romanticism. When he
invented the Buckle, and took out his patent, he and his wife both
felt that to bestow their name on it was like naming a battle-ship
or a peak of the Andes.

Mrs. Grew had never learned to know better; but Mr. Grew had
discovered his error before Ronald was out of school. He read it
first in a black eye of his boy's. Ronald's symmetry had been marred
by the insolent fist of a fourth former whom he had chastised for
alluding to his father as "Old Buckles;" and when Mr. Grew heard the
epithet he understood in a flash that the Buckle was a thing to
blush for. It was too late then to dissociate his name from it, or
to efface from the hoardings of the entire continent the picture of
two gentlemen, one contorting himself in the abject effort to repair
a broken brace, while the careless ease of the other's attitude
proclaimed his trust in the Secure Suspender Buckle. These records
were indelible, but Ronald could at least be spared all direct
connection with them; and from that day Mr. Grew resolved that the
boy should not return to Wingfield.

"You'll see," he had said to Mrs. Grew, "he'll take right hold in
New York. Ronald's got my knack for taking hold," he added, throwing
out his chest.

"But the way you took hold was in business," objected Mrs. Grew, who
was large and literal.

Mr. Grew's chest collapsed, and he became suddenly conscious of his
comic face in its rim of sandy whiskers. "That's not the only way,"
he said, with a touch of wistfulness which escaped his wife's
analysis.

"Well, of course you could have written beautifully," she rejoined
with admiring eyes.

"_ Written?_ Me!" Mr. Grew became sardonic.

"Why, those letters--weren't _they_ beautiful, I'd like to know?"

The couple exchanged a glance, innocently allusive and amused on the
wife's part, and charged with a sudden tragic significance on the
husband's.

"Well, I've got to be going along to the office now," he merely
said, dragging himself out of his rocking-chair.

This had happened while Ronald was still at school; and now Mrs.
Grew slept in the Wingfield cemetery, under a life-size theo-
logical virtue of her own choosing, and Mr. Grew's prognostications
as to Ronald's ability to "take right hold" in New York were being
more and more brilliantly fulfilled.






II





RONALD obeyed his father's injunction not to come to luncheon on the
day of the Bankshires' dinner; but in the middle of the following
week Mr. Grew was surprised by a telegram from his son.

"Want to see you important matter. Expect me to-morrow afternoon."

Mr. Grew received the telegram after breakfast. To peruse it he had
lifted his eye from a paragraph of the morning paper describing a
fancy-dress dinner which had taken place the night before at the
Hamilton Gliddens' for the house-warming of their new Fifth Avenue
palace.

"Among the couples who afterward danced in the Poets' Quadrille were
Miss Daisy Bankshire, looking more than usually lovely as Laura, and
Mr. Ronald Grew as the young Petrarch."

Petrarch and Laura! Well--if _anything_ meant anything, Mr. Grew
supposed he knew what that meant. For weeks past he had noticed how
constantly the names of the young people appeared together in the
society notes he so insatiably devoured. Even the soulless reporter
was getting into the habit of coupling them in his lists. And this
Laura and Petrarch business was almost an announcement...

Mr. Grew dropped the telegram, wiped his eye-glasses, and re-read
the paragraph. "Miss Daisy Bankshire ... more than usually lovely..."
Yes; she _was_ lovely. He had often seen her photograph in the
papers--seen her represented in every conceivable attitude of the
mundane game: fondling her prize bull-dog, taking a fence on her
thoroughbred, dancing a _gavotte_, all patches and plumes, or
fingering a guitar, all tulle and lilies; and once he had caught a
glimpse of her at the theatre. Hearing that Ronald was going to a
fashionable first-night with the Bankshires, Mr. Grew had for once
overcome his repugnance to following his son's movements, and had
secured for himself, under the shadow of the balcony, a stall whence
he could observe the Bankshire box without fear of detection. Ronald
had never known of his father's presence at the play; and for three
blessed hours Mr. Grew had watched his boy's handsome dark head bent
above the dense fair hair and white averted shoulder that were all
he could catch of Miss Bankshire's beauties.

He recalled the vision now; and with it came, as usual, its ghostly
double: the vision of his young self bending above such a white
shoulder and such shining hair. Needless to say that the real Mason
Grew had never found himself in so enviable a situation. The late
Mrs. Grew had no more resembled Miss Daisy Bankshire than he had
looked like the happy victorious Ronald. And the mystery was that
from their dull faces, their dull endearments, the miracle of Ronald
should have sprung. It was almost--fantastically--as if the boy had
been a changeling, child of a Latmian night, whom the divine
companion of Mr. Grew's early reveries had secretly laid in the
cradle of the Wingfield bedroom while Mr. And Mrs. Grew slept the
deep sleep of conjugal indifference.

The young Mason Grew had not at first accepted this astral episode
as the complete cancelling of his claims on romance. He too had
grasped at the high-hung glory; and, with his fatal tendency to
reach too far when he reached at all, had singled out the prettiest
girl in Wingfield. When he recalled his stammered confession of love
his face still tingled under her cool bright stare. The wonder of
his audacity had struck her dumb; and when she recovered her voice
it was to fling a taunt at him.

"Don't be too discouraged, you know--have you ever thought of trying
Addie Wicks?"

All Wingfield would have understood the gibe: Addie Wicks was the
dullest girl in town. And a year later he had married Addie Wicks...

He looked up from the perusal of Ronald's telegram with this memory
in his mind. Now at last his dream was coming true! His boy would
taste of the joys that had mocked his thwarted youth and his dull
gray middle-age. And it was fitting that they should be realized in
Ronald's destiny. Ronald was made to take happiness boldly by the
hand and lead it home like a bridegroom. He had the carriage, the
confidence, the high faith in his fortune, that compel the wilful
stars. And, thanks to the Buckle, he would have the exceptional
setting, the background of material elegance, that became his
conquering person. Since Mr. Grew had retired from business his
investments had prospered, and he had been saving up his income for
just such a contingency. His own wants were few: he had transferred
the Wingfield furniture to Brooklyn, and his sitting-room was a
replica of that in which the long years of his married life had been
spent. Even the florid carpet on which Ronald's tottering footsteps
had been taken was carefully matched when it became too threadbare.
And on the marble centre-table, with its chenille-fringed cover and
bunch of dyed pampas grass, lay the illustrated Longfellow and the
copy of Ingersoll's lectures which represented literature to Mr.
Grew when he had led home his bride. In the light of Ronald's
romance, Mr. Grew found himself re-living, with a strange tremor of
mingled pain and tenderness, all the poor prosaic incidents of his
own personal history. Curiously enough, with this new splendor on
them they began to emit a small faint ray of their own. His wife's
armchair, in its usual place by the fire, recalled her placid
unperceiving presence, seated opposite to him during the long drowsy
years; and he felt her kindness, her equanimity, where formerly he
had only ached at her obtuseness. And from the chair he glanced up
at the large discolored photograph on the wall above, with a brittle
brown wreath suspended on a corner of the frame. The photograph
represented a young man with a poetic necktie and untrammelled hair,
leaning negligently against a Gothic chair-back, a roll of music in
his hand; and beneath was scrawled a bar of Chopin, with the words:
"_ Adieu, Adele_."

The portrait was that of the great pianist, Fortune Dolbrowski; and
its presence on the wall of Mr. Grew's sitting-room commemorated the
only exquisite hour of his life save that of Ronald's birth. It was
some time before the latter memorable event, a few months only after
Mr. Grew's marriage, that he had taken his wife to New York to hear
the great Dolbrowski. Their evening had been magically beautiful,
and even Addie, roused from her habitual inexpressiveness, had
quivered into a momentary semblance of life. "I never--I never--"
she gasped out helplessly when they had regained their hotel
bedroom, and sat staring back entranced at the evening's evocations.
Her large immovable face was pink and tremulous, and she sat with
her hands on her knees, forgetting to roll up her bonnet-strings and
prepare her curl-papers.

"I'd like to _write_ him just how I felt--I wisht I knew how!" she
burst out suddenly in a final effervescence of emotion.

Her husband lifted his head and looked at her.

"Would you? I feel that way too," he said with a sheepish laugh. And
they continued to stare at each other shyly through a transfiguring
mist of sound.

Mr. Grew recalled the scene as he gazed up at the pianist's faded
photograph. "Well, I owe her that anyhow--poor Addie!" he said, with
a smile at the inconsequences of fate. With Ronald's telegram in his
hand he was in a mood to count his mercies.






III





"A CLEAR twenty-five thousand a year: that's what you can tell 'em
with my compliments," said Mr. Grew, glancing complacently across
the centre-table at his boy's charming face.

It struck him that Ronald's gift for looking his part in life had
never so romantically expressed itself. Other young men, at such a
moment, would have been red, damp, tight about the collar; but
Ronald's cheek was only a shade paler, and the contrast made his
dark eyes more expressive.

"A clear twenty-five thousand; yes, sir--that's what I always meant
you to have."

Mr. Grew leaned back, his hands thrust carelessly in his pockets, as
though to divert attention from the agitation of his features. He
had often pictured himself rolling out that phrase to Ronald, and
now that it was actually on his lips he could not control their
tremor.

Ronald listened in silence, lifting a nervous hand to his slight
dark moustache, as though he, too, wished to hide some involuntary
betrayal of emotion. At first Mr. Grew took his silence for an
expression of gratified surprise; but as it prolonged itself it
became less easy to interpret.

"I--see here, my boy; did you expect more? Isn't it enough?" Mr.
Grew cleared his throat. "Do _they_ expect more?" he asked
nervously. He was hardly able to face the pain of inflicting a
disappointment on Ronald at the very moment when he had counted on
putting the final touch to his felicity.

Ronald moved uneasily in his chair and his eyes wandered upward to
the laurel-wreathed photograph of the pianist above his father's
head.

"_ Is_ it that, Ronald? Speak out, my boy. We'll see, we'll look
round--I'll manage somehow."

"No, no," the young man interrupted, abruptly raising his hand as
though to silence his father.

Mr. Grew recovered his cheerfulness. "Well, what's the matter than,
if _she's_ willing?"

Ronald shifted his position again, and finally rose from his seat.

"Father--I--there's something I've got to tell you. I can't take
your money."

Mr. Grew sat speechless a moment, staring blankly at his son; then
he emitted a puzzled laugh. "My money? What are you talking about?
What's this about my money? Why, it ain't _mine_, Ronny; it's all
yours--every cent of it!" he cried.

The young man met his tender look with a gaze of tragic rejection.

"No, no, it's not mine--not even in the sense you mean. Not in any
sense. Can't you understand my feeling so?"

"Feeling so? I don't know how you're feeling. I don't know what
you're talking about. Are you too proud to touch any money you
haven't earned? Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"No. It's not that. You must know--"

Mr. Grew flushed to the rim of his bristling whiskers. "Know? Know
_what?_ Can't you speak?"

Ronald hesitated, and the two men faced each other for a long
strained moment, during which Mr. Grew's congested countenance grew
gradually pale again.

"What's the meaning of this? Is it because you've done something ...
something you're ashamed of ... ashamed to tell me?" he suddenly
gasped out; and walking around the table he laid his hand on his
son's shoulder. "There's nothing you can't tell me, my boy."

"It's not that. Why do you make it so hard for me?" Ronald broke out
with passion. "You must have known this was sure to happen sooner or
later."

"Happen? What was sure to hap--?" Mr. Grew's question wavered on his
lip and passed into a tremulous laugh. "Is it something _I've_ done
that you don't approve of? Is it--is it _the Buckle_ you're ashamed
of, Ronald Grew?"

Ronald laughed too, impatiently. "The Buckle? No, I'm not ashamed of
the Buckle; not any more than you are," he returned with a sudden
bright flush. "But I'm ashamed of all I owe to it--all I owe to
you--when--when--" He broke off and took a few distracted steps
across the room. "You might make this easier for me," he protested,
turning back to his father.

"Make what easier? I know less and less what you're driving at," Mr.
Grew groaned.

Ronald's walk had once more brought him beneath the photograph on
the wall. He lifted his head for a moment and looked at it; then he
looked again at Mr. Grew.

"Do you suppose I haven't always known?"

"Known--?"

"Even before you gave me those letters--after my mother's
death--even before that, I suspected. I don't know how it began ...
perhaps from little things you let drop ... you and she ...
and resemblances that I couldn't help seeing ... in myself ...
How on earth could you suppose I shouldn't guess? I always thought
you gave me the letters as a way of telling me--"

Mr. Grew rose slowly from his chair. "The letters? Dolbrowski's
letters?"

Ronald nodded with white lips. "You must remember giving them to me
the day after the funeral."

Mr. Grew nodded back. "Of course. I wanted you to have everything
your mother valued."

"Well--how could I help knowing after that?"

"Knowing _what?_" Mr. Grew stood staring helplessly at his son.
Suddenly his look caught at a clue that seemed to confront it with a
deeper bewilderment. "You thought--you thought those letters ...
Dolbrowski's letters ... you thought they meant ..."

"Oh, it wasn't only the letters. There were so many other signs. My
love of music--my--all my feelings about life ... and art... And
when you gave me the letters I thought you must mean me to know."

Mr. Grew had grown quiet. His lips were firm, and his small eyes
looked out steadily from their creased lids.

"To know that you were Fortune Dolbrowski's son?"

Ronald made a mute sign of assent.

"I see. And what did you mean to do?"

"I meant to wait till I could earn my living, and then repay you ...
as far as I can ever repay you... But now that there's a chance
of my marrying ... and your generosity overwhelms me ... I'm
obliged to speak."

"I see," said Mr. Grew again. He let himself down into his chair,
looking steadily and not unkindly at the young man. "Sit down,
Ronald. Let's talk."

Ronald made a protesting movement. "Is anything to be gained by it?
You can't change me--change what I feel. The reading of those
letters transformed my whole life--I was a boy till then: they made
a man of me. From that moment I understood myself." He paused, and
then looked up at Mr. Grew's face. "Don't imagine I don't appreciate
your kindness--your extraordinary generosity. But I can't go through
life in disguise. And I want you to know that I have not won Daisy
under false pretences--"

Mr. Grew started up with the first expletive Ronald had ever heard
on his lips.

"You damned young fool, you, you haven't _told_ her--?"

Ronald raised his head quickly. "Oh, you don't know her, sir! She
thinks no worse of me for knowing my secret. She is above and beyond
all such conventional prejudices. She's _proud_ of my parentage--"
he straightened his slim young shoulders--"as I'm proud of it ...
yes, sir, proud of it..."

Mr. Grew sank back into his seat with a dry laugh. "Well, you ought
to be. You come of good stock. And you're father's son, every inch
of you!" He laughed again, as though the humor of the situation grew
on him with its closer contemplation.

"Yes, I've always felt that," Ronald murmured, flushing.

"Your father's son, and no mistake." Mr. Grew leaned forward.
"You're the son of as big a fool as yourself. And here he sits,
Ronald Grew."

The young man's flush deepened to crimson; but Mr. Grew checked his
reply with a decisive gesture. "Here he sits, with all your young
nonsense still alive in him. Don't you see the likeness? If you
don't, I'll tell you the story of those letters."

Ronald stared. "What do you mean? Don't they tell their own story?"

"I supposed they did when I gave them to you; but you've given it a
twist that needs straightening out." Mr. Grew squared his elbows on
the table, and looked at the young man across the gift-books and the
dyed pampas grass. "I wrote all the letters that Dolbrowski
answered."

Ronald gave back his look in frowning perplexity. "You wrote them? I
don't understand. His letters are all addressed to my mother."

"Yes. And he thought he was corresponding with her."

"But my mother--what did she think?"

Mr. Grew hesitated, puckering his thick lids. "Well, I guess she
kinder thought it was a joke. Your mother didn't think about things
much."

Ronald continued to bend a puzzled frown on the question. "I don't
understand," he reiterated.

Mr. Grew cleared his throat with a nervous laugh. "Well, I don't
know as you ever will--_quite_. But this is the way it came about. I
had a toughish time of it when I was young. Oh, I don't mean so much
the fight I had to put up to make my way--there was always plenty of
fight in me. But inside of myself it was kinder lonesome. And the
outside didn't attract callers." He laughed again, with an
apologetic gesture toward his broad blinking face. "When I went
round with the other young fellows I was always the forlorn
hope--the one that had to eat the drumsticks and dance with the
left-overs. As sure as there was a blighter at a picnic I had to
swing her, and feed her, and drive her home. And all the time I was
mad after all the things you've got--poetry and music and all the
joy-forever business. So there were the pair of us--my face and my
imagination--chained together, and fighting, and hating each other
like poison.

"Then your mother came along and took pity on me. It sets up a gawky
fellow to find a girl who ain't ashamed to be seen walking with him
Sundays. And I was grateful to your mother, and we got along
first-rate. Only I couldn't say things to her--and she couldn't
answer. Well--one day, a few months after we were married,
Dolbrowski came to New York, and the whole place went wild about
him. I'd never heard any good music, but I'd always had an inkling
of what it must be like, though I couldn't tell you to this day how
I knew. Well, your mother read about him in the papers too, and she
thought it'd be the swagger thing to go to New York and hear him
play--so we went... I'll never forget that evening. Your mother
wasn't easily stirred up--she never seemed to need to let off steam.
But that night she seemed to understand the way I felt. And when we
got back to the hotel she said suddenly: 'I'd like to tell him how I
feel. I'd like to sit right down and write to him.'

"'Would you?' I said. 'So would I.'

"There was paper and pens there before us, and I pulled a sheet
toward me, and began to write. 'Is this what you'd like to say to
him?' I asked her when the letter was done. And she got pink and
said: 'I don't understand it, but it's lovely.' And she copied it
out and signed her name to it, and sent it."

Mr. Grew paused, and Ronald sat silent, with lowered eyes.

"That's how it began; and that's where I thought it would end. But it
didn't, because Dolbrowski answered. His first letter was dated
January 10, 1872. I guess you'll find I'm correct. Well, I went back
to hear him again, and I wrote him after the performance, and he
answered again. And after that we kept it up for six months. Your
mother always copied the letters and signed them. She seemed to
think it was a kinder joke, and she was proud of his answering my
letters. But she never went back to New York to hear him, though I
saved up enough to give her the treat again. She was too lazy, and
she let me go without her. I heard him three times in New York; and
in the spring he came to Wingfield and played once at the Academy.
Your mother was sick and couldn't go; so I went alone. After the
performance I meant to get one of the directors to take me in to see
him; but when the time came, I just went back home and wrote to him
instead. And the month after, before he went back to Europe, he sent
your mother a last little note, and that picture hanging up there..."

Mr. Grew paused again, and both men lifted their eyes to the
photograph.

"Is that all?" Ronald slowly asked.

"That's all--every bit of it," said Mr. Grew.

"And my mother--my mother never even spoke to Dolbrowski?"

"Never. She never even saw him but that once in New York at his
concert."

"The blood crept again to Ronald's face. "Are you sure of that,
sir?" he asked in a trembling voice.

"Sure as I am that I'm sitting here. Why, she was too lazy to look
at his letters after the first novelty wore off. She copied the
answers just to humor me--but she always said she couldn't
understand what we wrote."

"But how could you go on with such a correspondence? It's
incredible!"

Mr. Grew looked at his son thoughtfully. "I suppose it is, to you.
You've only had to put out your hand and get the things I was
starving for--music, and good talk, and ideas. Those letters gave me
all that. You've read them, and you know that Dolbrowski was not
only a great musician but a great man. There was nothing beautiful
he didn't see, nothing fine he didn't feel. For six months I
breathed his air, and I've lived on it ever since. Do you begin to
understand a little now?"

"Yes--a little. But why write in my mother's name? Why make it a
sentimental correspondence?"

Mr. Grew reddened to his bald temples. "Why, I tell you it began
that way, as a kinder joke. And when I saw that the first letter
pleased and interested him, I was afraid to tell him--_I couldn't_
tell him. Do you suppose he'd gone on writing if he'd ever seen me,
Ronny?"

Ronald suddenly looked at him with new eyes. "But he must have
thought your letters very beautiful--to go on as he did," he broke
out.

"Well--I did my best," said Mr. Grew modestly.

Ronald pursued his idea. "Where _are_ all your letters, I wonder?
Weren't they returned to you at his death?"

Mr. Grew laughed. "Lord, no. I guess he had trunks and trunks full
of better ones. I guess Queens and Empresses wrote to him."

"I should have liked to see your letters," the young man insisted.

"Well, they weren't bad," said Mr. Grew drily. "But I'll tell you
one thing, Ronny," he added suddenly. Ronald raised his head with a
quick glance, and Mr. Grew continued: "I'll tell you where the best
of those letters is--it's in _you_. If it hadn't been for that one
look at life I couldn't have made you what you are. Oh, I know
you've done a good deal of your own making--but I've been there
behind you all the time. And you'll never know the work I've spared
you and the time I've saved you. Fortune Dolbrowski helped me do
that. I never saw things in little again after I'd looked at 'em
with him. And I tried to give you the big view from the stars...
So that's what became of my letters."

Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his
elbows on the table, his face dropped on his hands.

Suddenly Mr. Grew's touch fell on his shoulder.

"Look at here, Ronald Grew--do you want me to tell you how you're
feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea
that you ain't the romantic figure you'd got to think yourself...
Well, that's natural enough, too; but I'll tell you what it proves.
It proves you're my son right enough, if any more proof was needed.
For it's just the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your
age--and if there's anybody here to laugh at it's myself, and not
you. And you can laugh at me just as much as you like..."






THE DAUNT DIANA

I





"WHAT'S become of the Daunt Diana? You mean to say you never heard
the sequel?"

Ringham Finney threw himself back into his chair with the smile of
the collector who has a good thing to show. He knew he had a good
listener, at any rate. I don't think much of Ringham's snuff-boxes,
but his anecdotes are usually worth while. He's a psychologist
astray among _bibelots_, and the best bits he brings back from his
raids on Christie's and the Hotel Drouot are the fragments of human
nature he picks up on those historic battle-fields. If his _flair_
in enamel had been half as good we should have heard of the Finney
collection by this time.

He really has--queer fatuous investigator!--an unusually sensitive
touch for the human texture, and the specimens he gathers into his
museum of heterogeneous memories have almost always some mark of the
rare and chosen. I felt, therefore, that I was really to be
congratulated on the fact that I didn't know what had become of the
Daunt Diana, and on having before me a long evening in which to
learn. I had just led my friend back, after an excellent dinner at
Foyot's, to the shabby pleasant sitting-room of my _rive-gauche_
hotel; and I knew that, once I had settled him in a good arm-chair,
and put a box of cigars at his elbow, I could trust him not to budge
till I had the story.






II





YOU remember old Neave, of course? Little Humphrey Neave, I mean. We
used to see him pottering about Rome years ago. He lived in two tiny
rooms over a wine shop, on polenta and lentils, and prowled among
the refuse of the Ripetta whenever he had a few _soldi_ to spend.
But you've been out of the collector's world for so long that you
may not know what happened to him afterward...

He was always a queer chap, Neave; years older than you and me, of
course--and even when I first knew him, in my raw Roman days, he
gave me an extraordinary sense of age and experience. I don't think
I've ever known any one who was at once so intelligent and so
simple. It's the precise combination that results in romance; and
poor little Neave was romantic.

He told me once how he'd come to Rome. He was _originaire_ of
Mystic, Connecticut--and he wanted to get as far away from it as
possible. Rome seemed as far as anything on the same planet could
be; and after he'd worried his way through Harvard--with shifts and
shavings that you and I can't imagine--he contrived to get sent to
Switzerland as tutor to a chap who'd failed in his examinations.
With only the Alps between, he wasn't likely to turn back; and he
got another fellow to take his pupil home, and struck out on foot
for the seven hills.

I'm telling you these early details merely to give you a notion of
the man's idealism. There was a cool persistency and a headlong
courage in his dash for Rome that one wouldn't have guessed in the
little pottering chap we used to know. Once on the spot, he got more
tutoring, managed to make himself a name for coaxing balky youths to
take their fences, and was finally able to take up the more
congenial task of expounding "the antiquities" to cultured
travellers. I call it more congenial--but how it must have seared
his soul! Fancy unveiling the sacred scars of Time to ladies who
murmur: "Was this _actually_ the spot--?" while they absently feel
for their hatpins! He used to say that nothing kept him at it but
the exquisite thought of accumulating the _lire_ for his collection.
For the Neave collection, my dear fellow, began early, began almost
with his Roman life, began in a series of little nameless odds and
ends, broken trinkets, torn embroideries, the amputated extremities
of maimed marbles: things that even the rag-picker had pitched away
when he sifted his haul. But they weren't nameless or meaningless to
Neave; his strength lay in his instinct for identifying, putting
together, seeing significant relations. He was a regular Cuvier of
bric-a-brac. And during those early years, when he had time to brood
over trifles and note imperceptible differences, he gradually
sharpened his instinct, and made it into the delicate and
redoubtable instrument it is. Before he had a thousand francs' worth
of _anticaglie_ to his name he began to be known as an expert, and
the big dealers were glad to consult him. But we're getting no
nearer the Daunt Diana...

Well, some fifteen years ago, in London, I ran across Neave at
Christie's. He was the same little man we'd known, effaced,
bleached, indistinct, like a poor "impression"--as unnoticeable as
one of his own early finds, yet, like them, with a _quality_, if one
had an eye for it. He told me he still lived in Rome, and had
contrived, by fierce self-denial, to get a few decent bits
together--"piecemeal, little by little, with fasting and prayer; and
I mean the fasting literally!" he said.

He had run over to London for his annual "look-round"--I fancy one
or another of the big collectors usually paid his journey--and when
we met he was on his way to see the Daunt collection. You know old
Daunt was a surly brute, and the things weren't easily seen; but he
had heard Neave was in London, and had sent--yes, actually
sent!--for him to come and give his opinion on a few bits, including
the Diana. The little man bore himself discreetly, but you can
imagine his pride. In his exultation he asked me to come with
him--"Oh, I've the _grandes et petites entrees_, my dear fellow:
I've made my conditions--" and so it happened that I saw the first
meeting between Humphrey Neave and his fate.

For that collection _was_ his fate: or, one may say, it was embodied
in the Diana who was queen and goddess of the realm. Yes--I shall
always be glad I was with Neave when he had his first look at the
Diana. I see him now, blinking at her through his white lashes, and
stroking his seedy wisp of a moustache to hide a twitch of the
muscles. It was all very quiet, but it was the _coup de foudre_. I
could see that by the way his hands trembled when he turned away and
began to examine the other things. You remember Neave's hands--thin,
sallow, dry, with long inquisitive fingers thrown out like antennae?
Whatever they hold--bronze or lace, hard enamel or brittle
glass--they have an air of conforming themselves to the texture of
the thing, and sucking out of it, by every finger-tip, the
mysterious essence it has secreted. Well, that day, as he moved
about among Daunt's treasures, the Diana followed him everywhere. He
didn't look back at her--he gave himself to the business he was
there for--but whatever he touched, he felt her. And on the
threshold he turned and gave her his first free look--the kind of
look that says: _"You're mine."_

It amused me at the time--the idea of little Neave making eyes at
any of Daunt's belongings. He might as well have coquetted with the
Kohinoor. And the same idea seemed to strike him; for as we turned
away from the big house in Belgravia he glanced up at it and said,
with a bitterness I'd never heard in him: "Good Lord! To think of
that lumpy fool having those things to handle! Did you notice his
stupid stumps of fingers? I suppose he blunted them gouging nuggets
out of the gold fields. And in exchange for the nuggets he gets all
that in a year--only has to hold out his callous palm to have that
great ripe sphere of beauty drop into it! That's my idea of
heaven--to have a great collection drop into one's hand, as success,
or love, or any of the big shining things, drop suddenly on some
men. And I've had to worry along for nearly fifty years, saving and
paring, and haggling and intriguing, to get here a bit and there a
bit--and not one perfection in the lot! It's enough to poison a
man's life."

The outbreak was so unlike Neave that I remember every word of it:
remember, too, saying in answer: "But, look here, Neave, you
wouldn't take Daunt's hands for yours, I imagine?"

He stared a moment and smiled. "Have all that, and grope my way
through it like a blind cave fish? What a question! But the sense
that it's always the blind fish that live in that kind of aquarium
is what makes anarchists, sir!" He looked back from the corner of
the square, where we had paused while he delivered himself of this
remarkable metaphor. "God, I'd like to throw a bomb at that place,
and be in at the looting!"

And with that, on the way home, he unpacked his grievance--pulled
the bandage off the wound, and showed me the ugly mark it had made
on his little white soul.

It wasn't the struggling, stinting, self-denying that galled him--it
was the inadequacy of the result. It was, in short, the old tragedy
of the discrepancy between a man's wants and his power to gratify
them. Neave's taste was too exquisite for his means--was like some
strange, delicate, capricious animal, that he cherished and pampered
and couldn't satisfy.

"Don't you know those little glittering lizards that die if they're
not fed on some wonderful tropical fly? Well, my taste's like that,
with one important difference--if it doesn't get its fly, it simply
turns and feeds on me. Oh, it doesn't die, my taste--worse luck! It
gets larger and stronger and more fastidious, and takes a bigger
bite of me--that's all."

That was all. Year by year, day by day, he had made himself into
this delicate register of perceptions and sensations--as far above
the ordinary human faculty of appreciation as some scientific
registering instrument is beyond the rough human senses--only to
find that the beauty which alone could satisfy him was
unattainable--that he was never to know the last deep identification
which only possession can give. He had trained himself in short, to
feel, in the rare great thing--such an utterance of beauty as the
Daunt Diana, say--a hundred elements of perfection, a hundred
_reasons why_, imperceptible, inexplicable even, to the average
"artistic" sense; he had reached this point by a long austere
process of discrimination and rejection, the renewed great refusals
of the intelligence which perpetually asks more, which will make no
pact with its self of yesterday, and is never to be beguiled from
its purpose by the wiles of the next-best-thing. Oh, it's a poignant
case, but not a common one; for the next-best-thing usually wins...

You see, the worst of Neave's state was the fact of his not being a
mere collector, even the collector raised to his highest pitch of
efficiency. The whole thing was blent in him with poetry--his
imagination had romanticized the acquisitive instinct, as the
religious feeling of the Middle Ages turned passion into love. And
yet his could never be the abstract enjoyment of the philosopher who
says: "This or that object is really mine because I'm capable of
appreciating it." Neave _wanted_ what he appreciated--wanted it with
his touch and his sight as well as with his imagination.

It was hardly a year afterward that, coming back from a long tour in
India, I picked up a London paper and read the amazing headline:
"Mr. Humphrey Neave buys the Daunt collection"... I rubbed my eyes
and read again. Yes, it could only be our old friend Humphrey. "An
American living in Rome ... one of our most discerning
collectors"; there was no mistaking the description. I clapped on my
hat and bolted out to see the first dealer I could find; and there I
had the incredible details. Neave had come into a fortune--two or
three million dollars, amassed by an uncle who had a corset-factory,
and who had attained wealth as the creator of the Mystic
Super-straight. (Corset-factory sounds odd, by the way, doesn't it?
One had fancied that the corset was a personal, a highly specialized
garment, more or less shaped on the form it was to modify; but,
after all, the Tanagras were all made from two or three moulds--and
so, I suppose, are the ladies who wear the Mystic Super-straight.)

The uncle had a son, and Neave had never dreamed of seeing a penny
of the money; but the son died suddenly, and the father followed,
leaving a codicil that gave everything to our friend. Humphrey had
to go out to "realize" on the corset-factory; and his description of
_that_ ... Well, he came back with his money in his pocket, and
the day he landed old Daunt went to smash. It all fitted in like a
Chinese puzzle. I believe Neave drove straight from Euston to Daunt
House: at any rate, within two months the collection was his, and at
a price that made the trade sit up. Trust old Daunt for that!

I was in Rome the following spring, and you'd better believe I
looked him up. A big porter glared at me from the door of the
Palazzo Neave: I had almost to produce my passport to get in. But
that wasn't Neave's fault--the poor fellow was so beset by people
clamouring to see his collection that he had to barricade himself,
literally. When I had mounted the state _Scalone_, and come on him,
at the end of half a dozen echoing saloons, in the farthest,
smallest _reduit_ of the vast suite, I received the same welcome
that he used to give us in his little den over the wine shop.

"Well--so you've got her?" I said. For I'd caught sight of the Diana
in passing, against the bluish blur of an old _verdure_--just the
background for her poised loveliness. Only I rather wondered why she
wasn't in the room where he sat.

He smiled. "Yes, I've got her," he returned, more calmly than I had
expected.

"And all the rest of the loot?"

"Yes. I had to buy the lump."

"Had to? But you wanted to, didn't you? You used to say it was your
idea of heaven--to stretch out your hand and have a great ripe
sphere of beauty drop into it. I'm quoting your own words, by the
way."

Neave blinked and stroked his seedy moustache. "Oh, yes. I remember
the phrase. It's true--it _is_ the last luxury." He paused, as if
seeking a pretext for his lack of warmth. "The thing that bothered
me was having to move. I couldn't cram all the stuff into my old
quarters."

"Well, I should say not! This is rather a better setting."

He got up. "Come and take a look round. I want to show you two or
three things--new attributions I've made. I'm doing the catalogue
over."

The interest of showing me the things seemed to dispel the vague
apathy I had felt in him. He grew keen again in detailing his
redistribution of values, and above all in convicting old Daunt and
his advisers of their repeated aberrations of judgment. "The miracle
is that he should have got such things, knowing as little as he did
what he was getting. And the egregious asses who bought for him were
no better, were worse in fact, since they had all sorts of
humbugging wrong reasons for admiring what old Daunt simply coveted
because it belonged to some other rich man."

Never had Neave had so wondrous a field for the exercise of his
perfected faculty; and I saw then how in the real, the great
collector's appreciations the keenest scientific perception is
suffused with imaginative sensibility, and how it's to the latter
undefinable quality that in the last resort he trusts himself.

Nevertheless, I still felt the shadow of that hovering apathy, and
he knew I felt it, and was always breaking off to give me reasons
for it. For one thing, he wasn't used to his new quarters--hated
their bigness and formality; then the requests to show his things
drove him mad. "The women--oh, the women!" he wailed, and
interrupted himself to describe a heavy-footed German Princess who
had marched past his treasures as if she were inspecting a cavalry
regiment, applying an unmodulated _Mugneeficent_ to everything from
the engraved gems to the Hercules torso.

"Not that she was half as bad as the other kind," he added, as if
with a last effort at optimism. "The kind who discriminate and say:
'I'm not sure if it's Botticelli or Cellini I mean, but _one of that
school_, at any rate.' And the worst of all are the ones who
know--up to a certain point: have the schools, and the dates and the
jargon pat, and yet wouldn't know a Phidias if it stood where they
hadn't expected it."

He had all my sympathy, poor Neave; yet these were trials
inseparable from the collector's lot, and not always without their
secret compensations. Certainly they did not wholly explain my
friend's attitude; and for a moment I wondered if it were due to
some strange disillusionment as to the quality of his treasures. But
no! the Daunt collection was almost above criticism; and as we
passed from one object to another I saw there was no mistaking the
genuineness of Neave's pride in his possessions. The ripe sphere of
beauty was his, and he had found no flaw in it as yet...

A year later came the amazing announcement--the Daunt collection was
for sale. At first we all supposed it was a case of weeding out
(though how old Daunt would have raged at the thought of anybody's
weeding _his_ collection!) But no--the catalogue corrected that
idea. Every stick and stone was to go under the hammer. The news ran
like wildfire from Rome to Berlin, from Paris to London and New
York. Was Neave ruined, then? Wrong again--the dealers nosed that
out in no time. He was simply selling because he chose to sell; and
in due time the things came up at Christie's.

But you may be sure the trade had found an answer to the riddle; and
the answer was that, on close inspection, Neave had found the
collection less impeccable than he had supposed. It was a
preposterous answer--but then there was no other. Neave, by this
time, was pretty generally recognized as having the subtlest _flair_
of any collector in Europe, and if he didn't choose to keep the
Daunt collection it could be only because he had reason to think he
could do better.

In a flash this report had gone the rounds and the buyers were on
their guard. I had run over to London to see the thing through, and
it was the queerest sale I ever was at. Some of the things held
their own, but a lot--and a few of the best among them--went for
half their value. You see, they'd been locked up in old Daunt's
house for nearly twenty years, and hardly shown to any one, so that
the whole younger generation of dealers and collectors knew of them
only by hearsay. Then you know the effect of suggestion in such
cases. The undefinable sense we were speaking of is a ticklish
instrument, easily thrown out of gear by a sudden fall of
temperature; and the sharpest experts grow shy and self-distrustful
when the cold current of depreciation touches them. The sale was a
slaughter--and when I saw the Daunt Diana fall at the wink of a
little third-rate _brocanteur_ from Vienna I turned sick at the
folly of my kind.

For my part, I had never believed that Neave had sold the collection
because he'd "found it out"; and within a year my incredulity was
justified. As soon as the things were put in circulation they were
known for the marvels they are. There was hardly a poor bit in the
lot; and my wonder grew at Neave's madness. All over Europe, dealers
began to be fighting for the spoils; and all kinds of stuff were
palmed off on the unsuspecting as fragments of the Daunt collection!

Meanwhile, what was Neave doing? For a long time I didn't hear, and
chance kept me from returning to Rome. But one day, in Paris, I ran
across a dealer who had captured for a song one of the best
Florentine bronzes in the Daunt collection--a marvellous _plaquette_
of Donatello's. I asked him what had become of it, and he said with
a grin: "I sold it the other day," naming a price that staggered me.

"Ye gods! Who paid you that for it?"

His grin broadened, and he answered: "Neave."

"_ Neave?_ Humphrey Neave?"

"Didn't you know he was buying back his things?"

"Nonsense!"

"He is, though. Not in his own name--but he's doing it."

And he _was_, do you know--and at prices that would have made a sane
man shudder! A few weeks later I ran across his tracks in London,
where he was trying to get hold of a Penicaud enamel--another of his
scattered treasures. Then I hunted him down at his hotel, and had it
out with him.

"Look here, Neave, what are you up to?"

He wouldn't tell me at first: stared and laughed and denied. But I
took him off to dine, and after dinner, while we smoked, I happened
to mention casually that I had a pull over the man who had the
Penicaud--and at that he broke down and confessed.

"Yes, I'm buying them back, Finney--it's true." He laughed
nervously, twitching his moustache. And then he let me have the
story.

"You know how I'd hungered and thirsted for the _real thing_--you
quoted my own phrase to me once, about the 'ripe sphere of beauty.'
So when I got my money, and Daunt lost his, almost at the same
moment, I saw the hand of Providence in it. I knew that, even if I'd
been younger, and had more time, I could never hope, nowadays, to
form such a collection as _that_. There was the ripe sphere, within
reach; and I took it. But when I got it, and began to live with it,
I found out my mistake. It was a _mariage de convenance_--there'd
been no wooing, no winning. Each of my little old bits--the rubbish
I chucked out to make room for Daunt's glories--had its own personal
history, the drama of my relation to it, of the discovery, the
struggle, the capture, the first divine moment of possession. There
was a romantic secret between us. And then I had absorbed its
beauties one by one, they had become a part of my imagination, they
held me by a hundred threads of far-reaching association. And
suddenly I had expected to create this kind of intense personal tie
between myself and a roomful of new cold alien presences--things
staring at me vacantly from the depths of unknown pasts! Can you
fancy a more preposterous hope? Why, my other things, my _own_
things, had wooed me as passionately as I wooed them: there was a
certain little bronze, a little Venus Callipyge, who had drawn me,
drawn me, drawn me, imploring me to rescue her from her unspeakable
surroundings in a vulgar bric-a-brac shop at Biarritz, where she
shrank out of sight among sham Sevres and Dutch silver, as one has
seen certain women--rare, shy, exquisite--made almost invisible by
the vulgar splendours surrounding them. Well! that little Venus, who
was just a specious seventeenth century attempt at the 'antique,'
but who had penetrated me with her pleading grace, touched me by the
easily guessed story of her obscure, anonymous origin, was more to
me imaginatively--yes! more than the cold bought beauty of the Daunt
Diana..."

"The Daunt Diana!" I broke in. "Hold up, Neave--_the Daunt Diana?_"

He smiled contemptuously. "A professional beauty, my dear
fellow--expected every head to be turned when she came into a room."

"Oh, Neave," I groaned.

"Yes, I know. You're thinking of what we felt that day we first saw
her in London. Many a poor devil has sold his soul as the result of
such a first sight! Well, I sold _her_ instead. Do you want the
truth about her? _Elle etait bete a pleurer._"

He laughed, and stood up with a little shrug of disenchantment.

"And so you're impenitent?" I paused. "And yet you're buying some of
the things back?"

Neave laughed again, ironically. "I knew you'd find me out and call
me to account. Well, yes: I'm buying back." He stood before me half
sheepish, half defiant. "I'm buying back because there's nothing
else as good in the market. And because I've a queer feeling that,
this time, they'll be _mine_. But I'm ruining myself at the game!"
he confessed.

It was true: Neave was ruining himself. And he's gone on ruining
himself ever since, till now the job's nearly done. Bit by bit, year
by year, he has gathered in his scattered treasures, at higher
prices than the dealers ever dreamed of getting. There are fabulous
details in the story of his quest. Now and then I ran across him,
and was able to help him recover a fragment; and it was wonderful to
see his delight in the moment of reunion. Finally, about two years
ago, we met in Paris, and he told me he had got back all the
important pieces except the Diana.

"The Diana? But you told me you didn't care for her."

"Didn't care?" He leaned across the restaurant table that divided
us. "Well, no, in a sense I didn't. I wanted her to want me, you
see; and she didn't then! Whereas now she's crying to me to come to
her. You know where she is?" he broke off.

Yes, I knew: in the centre of Mrs. Willy P. Goldmark's yellow and
gold drawing-room, under a thousand-candle-power chandelier, with
reflectors aimed at her from every point of the compass. I had seen
her wincing and shivering there in her outraged nudity at one of the
Goldmark "crushes."

"But you can't get her, Neave," I objected.

"No, I can't get her," he said.

Well, last month I was in Rome, for the first time in six or seven
years, and of course I looked about for Neave. The Palazzo Neave was
let to some rich Russians, and the splendid new porter didn't know
where the proprietor lived. But I got on his trail easily enough,
and it led me to a strange old place in the Trastevere, an ancient
crevassed black palace turned tenement house, and fluttering with
pauper clothes-lines. I found Neave under the leads, in two or three
cold rooms that smelt of the _cuisine_ of all his neighbours: a poor
shrunken little figure, seedier and shabbier than ever, yet more
alive than when we had made the tour of his collection in the
Palazzo Neave.

The collection was around him again, not displayed in tall cabinets
and on marble tables, but huddled on shelves, perched on chairs,
crammed in corners, putting the gleam of bronze, the opalescence of
old glass, the pale lustre of marble, into all the angles of his low
dim rooms. There they were, the proud presences that had stared at
him down the vistas of Daunt House, and shone in cold transplanted
beauty under his own painted cornices: there they were, gathered in
humble promiscuity about his bent shabby figure, like superb wild
creatures tamed to become the familiars of some harmless old wizard.

As we went from bit to bit, as he lifted one piece after another,
and held it to the light of his low windows, I saw in his hands the
same tremor of sensation that I had noticed when he first examined
the same objects at Daunt House. All his life was in his
finger-tips, and it seemed to communicate life to the exquisite
things he touched. But you'll think me infected by his mysticism if
I tell you they gained new beauty while he held them...

We went the rounds slowly and reverently; and then, when I supposed
our inspection was over, and was turning to take my leave, he opened
a door I had not noticed, and showed me into a slit of a room
beyond. It was a mere monastic cell, scarcely large enough for his
narrow iron bed and the chest which probably held his few clothes;
but there, in a niche of the bare wall, facing the foot of the
bed--there stood the Daunt Diana.

I gasped at the sight and turned to him; and he looked back at me
without speaking.

"In the name of magic, Neave, how did you do it?"

He smiled as if from the depths of some secret rapture. "Call it
magic, if you like; but I ruined myself doing it," he said.

I stared at him in silence, breathless with the madness and the
wonder of it; and suddenly, red to the ears, he flung out his boyish
confession. "I lied to you that day in London--the day I said I
didn't care for her. I always cared--always worshipped--always
wanted her. But she wasn't mine then, and I knew it, and she knew it ...
and now at last we understand each other." He looked at me
shyly, and then glanced about the bare cold cell. "The setting isn't
worthy of her, I know; she was meant for glories I can't give her;
but beautiful things, my dear Finney, like beautiful spirits, live
in houses not made with hands..."

His face shone with extraordinary sweetness as he spoke; and I saw
he'd got hold of the secret we're all after. No, the setting isn't
worthy of her, if you like. The rooms are as shabby and mean as
those we used to see him in years ago over the wine shop. I'm not
sure they're not shabbier and meaner. But she rules there at last,
she shines and hovers there above him, and there at night, I doubt
not, steals down from her cloud to give him the Latmian kiss.






THE DEBT

I





YOU remember--it's not so long ago--the talk there was about
Dredge's "Arrival of the Fittest"? The talk has subsided, but the
book of course remains: stands up, in fact, as the tallest thing of
its kind since--well, I'd almost said since "The Origin of Species."

I'm not wrong, at any rate, in calling it the most important
contribution yet made to the development of the Darwinian theory, or
rather to the solution of the awkward problem about which that
theory has had to make such a circuit. Dredge's hypothesis will be
contested, may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out
of the way all previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear's
magnificent attempt; and for our generation of scientific
investigators it will serve as the first safe bridge across a
murderous black whirlpool.

It's all very interesting--there are few things more stirring to the
imagination than that sudden projection of the new hypothesis, light
as a cobweb and strong as steel, across the intellectual abyss; but,
for an idle observer of human motives, the other, the personal, side
of Dredge's case is even more interesting and arresting.

Personal side? You didn't know there was one? Pictured him simply as
a thinking machine, a highly specialized instrument of precision,
the result of a long series of "adaptations," as his own jargon
would put it? Well, I don't wonder--if you've met him. He does give
the impression of being something out of his own laboratory: a
delicate scientific instrument that reveals wonders to the
initiated, and is absolutely useless in an ordinary hand.

In his youth it was just the other way. I knew him twenty years ago,
as an awkward lout whom young Archie Lanfear had picked up at
college, and brought home for a visit. I happened to be staying at
the Lanfears' when the boys arrived, and I shall never forget
Dredge's first appearance on the scene. You know the Lanfears always
lived very simply. That summer they had gone to Buzzard's Bay, in
order that Professor Lanfear might be near the Biological Station at
Wood's Holl, and they were picnicking in a kind of sketchy bungalow
without any attempt at elegance. But Galen Dredge couldn't have been
more awe-struck if he'd been suddenly plunged into a Fifth Avenue
ball-room. He nearly knocked his shock head against the low doorway,
and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel Lanfear's foot, and
became hopelessly entangled in her mother's draperies--though how he
managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear's dowdy muslins ran to no
excess of train.

When the Professor himself came in it was ten times worse, and I saw
then that Dredge's emotion was a tribute to the great man's
proximity. That made the boy interesting, and I began to watch.
Archie, always enthusiastic but vague, had said: "Oh, he's a
tremendous chap--you'll see--" but I hadn't expected to see quite so
clearly. Lanfear's vision, of course, was sharper than mine; and the
next morning he had carried Dredge off to the Biological Station.
And that was the way it began.

Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe,
New York State, and was working his way through college--waiting at
White Mountain hotels in summer--when Archie Lanfear ran across him.
There were eight children in the family, and the mother was an
invalid. Dredge never had a penny from his father after he was
fourteen; but his mother wanted him to be a scholar, and "kept at
him," as he put it, in the hope of his going back to "teach school"
at East Lethe. He developed slowly, as the scientific mind generally
does, and was still adrift about himself and his tendencies when
Archie took him down to Buzzard's Bay. But he had read Lanfear's
"Utility and Variation," and had always been a patient and curious
observer of nature. And his first meeting with Lanfear explained him
to himself. It didn't, however, enable him to explain himself to
others, and for a long time he remained, to all but Lanfear, an
object of incredulity and conjecture.

"_ Why_ my husband wants him about--" poor Mrs. Lanfear, the kindest
of women, privately lamented to her friends; for Dredge, at that
time--they kept him all summer at the bungalow--had one of the most
encumbering personalities you can imagine. He was as inexpressive as
he is to-day, and yet oddly obtrusive: one of those uncomfortable
presences whose silence is an interruption.

The poor Lanfears almost died of him that summer, and the pity of it
was that he never suspected it, but continued to lavish on them a
floundering devotion as uncomfortable as the endearments of a
dripping dog--all out of gratitude for the Professor's kindness! He
was full, in those days, of raw enthusiasms, which he forced on any
one who would listen when his first shyness had worn off. You can't
picture him spouting sentimental poetry, can you? Yet I've seen him
petrify a whole group of Mrs. Lanfear's callers by suddenly
discharging on them, in the strident drawl of Western New York,
"Barbara Frietchie" or "The Queen of the May." His taste in
literature was uniformly bad, but very definite, and far more
assertive than his views on biological questions. In his scientific
judgments he showed, even then, a remarkable temperance, a
precocious openness to the opposite view; but in literature he was a
furious propagandist, aggressive, disputatious, and extremely
sensitive to adverse opinion.

Lanfear, of course, had been struck from the first by his gift of
accurate observation, and by the fact that his eagerness to learn
was offset by his reluctance to conclude. I remember Lanfear's
telling me that he had never known a lad of Dredge's age who gave
such promise of uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the
plodding patience of the accumulator of facts. Of course when
Lanfear talked like that of a young biologist his fate was sealed.
There could be no question of Dredge's going back to "teach school"
at East Lethe. He must take a course in biology at Columbia, spend
his vacations at the Wood's Holl laboratory, and then, if possible,
go to Germany for a year or two.

All this meant his virtual adoption by the Lanfears. Most of
Lanfear's fortune went in helping young students to a start, and he
devoted his heaviest subsidies to Dredge.

"Dredge will be my biggest dividend--you'll see!" he used to say, in
the chrysalis days when poor Galen was known to the world of science
only as a perpetual slouching presence in Mrs. Lanfear's
drawing-room. And Dredge, it must be said, took his obligations
simply, with that kind of personal dignity, and quiet sense of his
own worth, which in such cases saves the beneficiary from
abjectness. He seemed to trust himself as fully as Lanfear trusted
him.

The comic part of it was that his only idea of making what is known
as "a return" was to devote himself to the Professor's family. When
I hear pretty women lamenting that they can't coax Professor Dredge
out of his laboratory I remember Mabel Lanfear's cry to me: "If
Galen would only keep away!" When Mabel fell on the ice and broke
her leg, Galen walked seven miles in a blizzard to get a surgeon;
but if he did her this service one day in the year, he bored her by
being in the way for the other three hundred and sixty-four. One
would have imagined at that time that he thought his perpetual
presence the greatest gift he could bestow; for, except on the
occasion of his fetching the surgeon, I don't remember his taking
any other way of expressing his gratitude.

In love with Mabel? Not a bit! But the queer thing was that he _did_
have a passion in those days--a blind, hopeless passion for Mrs.
Lanfear! Yes: I know what I'm saying. I mean Mrs. Lanfear, the
Professor's wife, poor Mrs. Lanfear, with her tight hair and her
loose figure, her blameless brow and earnest eye-glasses, and her
perpetual attitude of mild misapprehension. I can see Dredge
cowering, long and many-jointed, in a diminutive drawing-room chair,
one square-toed shoe coiled round an exposed ankle, his knees
clasped in a knot of red knuckles, and his spectacles perpetually
seeking Mrs. Lanfear's eye-glasses. I never knew if the poor lady
was aware of the sentiment she inspired, but her children observed
it, and it provoked them to irreverent mirth. Galen was the
predestined butt of Mabel and Archie; and secure in their mother's
virtuous obtuseness, and in her worshipper's timidity, they allowed
themselves a latitude of banter that sometimes turned their audience
cold. Dredge meanwhile was going on obstinately with his work. Now
and then he had queer fits of idleness, when he lapsed into a state
of sulky inertia from which even Lanfear's admonitions could not
rouse him. Once, just before an examination, he suddenly went off to
the Maine woods for two weeks, came back, and failed to pass. I
don't know if his benefactor ever lost hope; but at times his
confidence must have been sorely strained. The queer part of it was
that when Dredge emerged from these eclipses he seemed keener and
more active than ever. His slowly growing intelligence probably
needed its periodical pauses of assimilation; and Lanfear was
marvellously patient.

At last Dredge finished his course and went to Germany; and when he
came back he was a new man--was, in fact, the Dredge we all know. He
seemed to have shed his blundering, encumbering personality, and
come to life as a disembodied intelligence. His fidelity to the
Lanfears was unchanged; but he showed it negatively, by his
discretions and abstentions. I have an idea that Mabel was less
disposed to deride him, might even have been induced to softer
sentiments; but I doubt if Dredge even noticed the change. As for
his ex-goddess, he seemed to regard her as a motherly household
divinity, the guardian genius of the darning needle; but on
Professor Lanfear he looked with a deepening reverence. If the rest
of the family had diminished in his eyes, its head had grown even
greater.






II





FROM that day Dredge's progress continued steadily. If not always
perceptible to the untrained eye, in Lanfear's sight it never
deviated, and the great man began to associate Dredge with his work,
and to lean on him more and more. Lanfear's health was already
failing, and in my confidential talks with him I saw how he counted
on Galen Dredge to continue and amplify his doctrine. If he did not
describe the young man as his predestined Huxley, it was because any
such comparison between himself and his great predecessors would
have been repugnant to his taste; but he evidently felt that it
would be Dredge's role to reveal him to posterity. And the young man
seemed at that time to take the same view of his calling. When he
was not busy about Lanfear's work he was recording their
conversations with the diligence of a biographer and the accuracy of
a naturalist. Any attempt to question or minimize Lanfear's theories
roused in his disciple the only flashes of wrath I have ever seen a
scientific discussion provoke in him. In defending his master he
became almost as intemperate as in the early period of his literary
passions.

Such filial dedication must have been all the more precious to
Lanfear because, about that time, it became evident that Archie
would never carry on his father's work. He had begun brilliantly,
you may remember, by a little paper on _Limulus Polyphemus_ that
attracted a good deal of notice when it appeared in the _Central
Blatt_; but gradually his zoological ardour yielded to an absorbing
passion for the violin, which was followed by a sudden plunge into
physics. At present, after a side-glance at the drama, I understand
he's devoting what is left of his father's money to archaeological
explorations in Asia Minor.

"Archie's got a delightful little mind," Lanfear used to say to me,
rather wistfully, "but it's just a highly polished surface held up
to the show as it passes. Dredge's mind takes in only a bit at a
time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard
mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern. I saw just
how it would be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a
flash, and answer me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared
into one of his fathomless silences, and then came to the surface
like a dripping retriever, a long way beyond Archie's objections,
and with an answer to them in his mouth."

It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear's
career came to him: I mean, of course, John Weyman's gift to
Columbia of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection
with it, of a chair of Experimental Evolution. Weyman had always
taken an interest in Lanfear's work, but no one had supposed that
his interest would express itself so magnificently. The honour came
to Lanfear at a time when he was fighting an accumulation of
troubles: failing health, the money difficulties resulting from his
irrepressible generosity, his disappointment about Archie's career,
and perhaps also the persistent attacks of the new school of German
zoologists.

"If I hadn't Galen I should feel the game was up," he said to me
once, in a fit of half-real, half-mocking despondency. "But he'll do
what I haven't time to do myself, and what my boy can't do for me."

That meant that he would answer the critics, and triumphantly affirm
Lanfear's theory, which had been rudely shaken, but not displaced.

"A scientific hypothesis lasts till there's something else to put in
its place. People who want to get across a river will use the old
bridge till the new one's built. And I don't see any one who's
particularly anxious, in this case, to take a contract for the new
one," Lanfear ended; and I remember answering with a laugh: "Not
while Horatius Dredge holds the other."

It was generally known that Lanfear had not long to live, and the
Laboratory was hardly opened before the question of his successor in
the chair of Experimental Evolution began to be a matter of public
discussion. It was conceded that whoever followed him ought to be a
man of achieved reputation, some one carrying, as the French say, a
considerable "baggage." At the same time, even Lanfear's critics
felt that he should be succeeded by a man who held his views and
would continue his teaching. This was not in itself a difficulty,
for German criticism had so far been mainly negative, and there were
plenty of good men who, while they questioned the permanent validity
of Lanfear's conclusions, were yet ready to accept them for their
provisional usefulness. And then there was the added inducement of
the Laboratory! The Columbia Professor of Experimental Evolution has
at his disposal the most complete instrument of biological research
that modern ingenuity has yet produced; and it's not only in
theology or politics _que Paris vaut bien une messe!_ There was no
trouble about finding a candidate; but the whole thing turned on
Lanfear's decision, since it was tacitly understood that, by
Weyman's wish, he was to select his successor. And what a cry there
was when he selected Galen Dredge!

Not in the scientific world, though. The specialists were beginning
to know about Dredge. His remarkable paper on Sexual Dimorphism had
been translated into several languages, and a furious polemic had
broken out over it. When a young fellow can get the big men fighting
over him his future is pretty well assured. But Dredge was only
thirty-four, and some people seemed to feel that there was a kind of
deflected nepotism in Lanfear's choice.

"If he could choose Dredge he might as well have chosen his own
son," I've heard it said; and the irony was that Archie--will you
believe it?--actually thought so himself! But Lanfear had Weyman
behind him, and when the end came the Faculty at once appointed
Galen Dredge to the chair of Experimental Evolution.

For the first two years things went quietly, along accustomed lines.
Dredge simply continued the course which Lanfear's death had
interrupted. He lectured well even then, with a persuasive
simplicity surprising in the slow, inarticulate creature one knew
him for. But haven't you noticed that certain personalities reveal
themselves only in the more impersonal relations of life? It's as if
they woke only to collective contacts, and the single consciousness
were an unmeaning fragment to them.

If there was anything to criticize in that first part of the course,
it was the avoidance of general ideas, of those brilliant rockets of
conjecture that Lanfear's students were used to seeing him fling
across the darkness. I remember once saying this to Archie, who,
having recovered from his absurd disappointment, had returned to his
old allegiance to Dredge.

"Oh, that's Galen all over. He doesn't want to jump into the ring
till he has a big swishing knock-down argument in his fist. He'll
wait twenty years if he has to. That's his strength: he's never
afraid to wait."

I thought this shrewd of Archie, as well as generous; and I saw the
wisdom of Dredge's course. As Lanfear himself had said, his theory
was safe enough till somebody found a more attractive one; and
before that day Dredge would probably have accumulated sufficient
proof to crystallize the fluid hypothesis.






III





THE third winter I was off collecting in Central America, and didn't
get back till Dredge's course had been going for a couple of months.
The very day I turned up in town Archie Lanfear descended on me with
a summons from his mother. I was wanted at once at a family council.

I found the Lanfear ladies in a state of incoherent distress, which
Archie's own indignation hardly made more intelligible. But
gradually I put together their fragmentary charges, and learned that
Dredge's lectures were turning into an organized assault on his
master's doctrine.

"It amounts to just this," Archie said, controlling his women with
the masterful gesture of the weak man. "Galen has simply turned
round and betrayed my father."

"Just for a handful of silver he left us," Mabel sobbed in
parenthesis, while Mrs. Lanfear tearfully cited Hamlet.

Archie silenced them again. "The ugly part of it is that he must
have had this up his sleeve for years. He must have known when he
was asked to succeed my father what use he meant to make of his
opportunity. What he's doing isn't the result of a hasty conclusion:
it means years of work and preparation."

Archie broke off to explain himself. He had returned from Europe the
week before, and had learned on arriving that Dredge's lectures were
stirring the world of science as nothing had stirred it since
Lanfear's "Utility and Variation." And the incredible outrage was
that they owed their sensational effect to the fact of being an
attempted refutation of Lanfear's great work.

I own that I was staggered: the case looked ugly, as Archie said.
And there was a veil of reticence, of secrecy, about Dredge, that
always kept his conduct in a half-light of uncertainty. Of some men
one would have said off-hand: "It's impossible!" But one couldn't
affirm it of him.

Archie hadn't seen him as yet; and Mrs. Lanfear had sent for me
because she wished me to be present at the interview between the two
men. The Lanfear ladies had a touching belief in Archie's violence:
they thought him as terrible as a natural force. My own idea was
that if there were any broken bones they wouldn't be Dredge's; but I
was too curious as to the outcome not to be glad to offer my
services as moderator.

First, however, I wanted to hear one of the lectures; and I went the
next afternoon. The hall was jammed, and I saw, as soon as Dredge
appeared, what increased security and ease the interest of his
public had given him. He had been clear the year before, now he was
also eloquent. The lecture was a remarkable effort: you'll find the
gist of it in Chapter VII of "The Arrival of the Fittest." Archie
sat at my side in a white rage; he was too clever not to measure the
extent of the disaster. And I was almost as indignant as he when we
went to see Dredge the next day.

I saw at a glance that the latter suspected nothing; and it was
characteristic of him that he began by questioning me about my
finds, and only afterward turned to reproach Archie for having been
back a week without notifying him.

"You know I'm up to my neck in this job. Why in the world didn't you
hunt me up before this?"

The question was exasperating, and I could understand Archie's
stammer of wrath.

"Hunt you up? Hunt you up? What the deuce are you made of, to ask me
such a question instead of wondering why I'm here now?"

Dredge bent his slow calm scrutiny on his friend's quivering face;
then he turned to me.

"What's the matter?" he said simply.

"The matter?" shrieked Archie, his clenched fist hovering excitedly
above the desk by which he stood; but Dredge, with unwonted
quickness, caught the fist as it descended.

"Careful--I've got a _Kallima_ in that jar there." He pushed a chair
forward, and added quietly: "Sit down."

Archie, ignoring the gesture, towered pale and avenging in his
place; and Dredge, after a moment, took the chair himself.

"The matter?" Archie reiterated with rising passion. "Are you so
lost to all sense of decency and honour that you can put that
question in good faith? Don't you really _know_ what's the matter?"

Dredge smiled slowly. "There are so few things one _really knows_."

"Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting! Don't you know you're
insulting my father's memory?"

Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of
us to the other.

"Oh, that's it, is it? Then you'd better sit down. If you don't see
at once it'll take some time to make you."

Archie burst into an ironic laugh.

"I rather think it will!" he conceded.

"Sit down, Archie," I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with
a gesture that made his consent a protest.

Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors
were seated. He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care
which the habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of
his long, knotty hands.

"It's about the lectures?" he said.

Archie's answer was a deep scornful breath.

"You've only been back a week, so you've only heard one, I suppose?"

"It was not necessary to hear even that one. You must know the talk
they're making. If notoriety is what you're after--"

"Well, I'm not sorry to make a noise," said Dredge, putting a match
to his pipe.

Archie bounded in his chair. "There's no easier way of doing it than
to attack a man who can't answer you!"

Dredge raised a sobering hand. "Hold on. Perhaps you and I don't
mean the same thing. Tell me first what's in your mind."

The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance
really eloquent with filial indignation.

"It's an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what's in
yours. Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn't
stand in his place and use the chance he's given you to push
yourself at his expense."

Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.

"Is that the way it strikes you?" he asked at length.

"God! It's the way it would strike most men."

He turned to me. "You too?"

"I can see how Archie feels," I said.

"That I'm attacking his father's memory to glorify myself?"

"Well, not precisely: I think what he really feels is that, if your
convictions didn't permit you to continue his father's teaching, you
might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the
Lanfear lectureship."

"Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been
founded to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?"

"Certainly not," Archie broke in. "But there's a question of taste,
of delicacy, involved in the case that can't be decided on abstract
principles. We know as well as you that my father meant the
laboratory and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at
whatever cost to his own special convictions; what we feel--and you
don't seem to--is that you're the last man to put them to that use;
and I don't want to remind you why."

A slight redness rose through Dredge's sallow skin. "You needn't,"
he said. "It's because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made
me, shoved me off from the shore. Because he saved me ten or twenty
years of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my
best working years are still ahead of me. Every one knows that's
what your father did for me, but I'm the only person who knows the
time and trouble that it took."

It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never
closed to generous emotions.

"Well, then--?" he said, flushing also.

"Well, then," Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its
nasal edge, "I had to pay him back, didn't I?"

The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony.
"It would be the natural inference--with most men."

"Just so. And I'm not so very different. I knew your father wanted a
successor--some one who'd try and tie up the loose ends. And I took
the lectureship with that object."

"And you're using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!"

Dredge paused to re-light his pipe. "Looks that way," he conceded.
"This year anyhow."

"_ This year_--?" Archie gasped at him.

"Yes. When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it.
Or rather, I didn't see any other way of going on with it. The
change came gradually, as I worked."

"Gradually? So that you had time to look round you, to know where
you were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he
had done?"

"Oh, yes--I had time," Dredge conceded.

"And yet you kept the chair and went on with the course?"

Dredge refilled his pipe, and then turned in his seat so that he
looked squarely at Archie.

"What would your father have done in my place?" he asked.

"In your place--?"

"Yes: supposing he'd found out the things I've found out in the last
year or two. You'll see what they are, and how much they count, if
you'll run over the report of the lectures. If your father'd been
alive he might have come across the same facts just as easily."

There was a silence which Archie at last broke by saying: "But he
didn't, and you did. There's the difference."

"The difference? What difference? Would your father have suppressed
the facts if he'd found them? It's _you_ who insult his memory by
implying it! And if I'd brought them to him, would he have used his
hold over me to get me to suppress them?"

"Certainly not. But can't you see it's his death that makes the
difference? He's not here to defend his case."

Dredge laughed, but not unkindly. "My dear Archie, your father
wasn't one of the kind who bother to defend their case. Men like him
are the masters, not the servants, of their theories. They respect
an idea only as long as it's of use to them; when it's usefulness
ends they chuck it out. And that's what your father would have
done."

Archie reddened. "Don't you assume a good deal in taking it for
granted that he would have had to in this particular case?"

Dredge reflected. Yes: I was going too far. Each of us can only
answer for himself. But to my mind your father's theory is refuted."

"And you don't hesitate to be the man to do it?"

"Should I have been of any use if I had? And did your father ever
ask anything of me but to be of as much use as I could?"

It was Archie's turn to reflect. "No. That was what he always
wanted, of course."

"That's the way I've always felt. The first day he took me away from
East Lethe I knew the debt I was piling up against him, and I never
had any doubt as to how I'd pay it, or how he'd want it paid. He
didn't pick me out and train me for any object but to carry on the
light. Do you suppose he'd have wanted me to snuff it out because it
happened to light up a fact he didn't fancy? I'm using _his_ oil to
feed my torch with: yes, but it isn't really his torch or mine, or
his oil or mine: they belong to each of us till we drop and hand
them on."

Archie turned a sobered glance on him. "I see your point. But if the
job had to be done I don't see that you need have done it from his
chair."

"There's where we differ. If I did it at all I had to do it in the
best way, and with all the authority his backing gave me. If I owe
your father anything, I owe him that. It would have made him sick to
see the job badly done. And don't you see that the way to honour
him, and show what he's done for science, was to spare no advantage
in my attack on him--that I'm proving the strength of his position
by the desperateness of my assault?" Dredge paused and squared his
lounging shoulders. "After all," he added, "he's not down yet, and
if I leave him standing I guess it'll be some time before anybody
else cares to tackle him."

There was a silence between the two men; then Dredge continued in a
lighter tone: "There's one thing, though, that we're both in danger
of forgetting: and that is how little, in the long run, it all
counts either way." He smiled a little at Archie's outraged gesture.
"The most we can any of us do--even by such a magnificent effort as
your father's--is to turn the great marching army a hair's breadth
nearer what seems to us the right direction; if one of us drops out,
here and there, the loss of headway's hardly perceptible. And that's
what I'm coming to now."

He rose from his seat, and walked across to the hearth; then,
cautiously resting his shoulder-blades against the mantel-shelf
jammed with miscellaneous specimens, he bent his musing spectacles
on Archie.

"Your father would have understood why I've done, what I'm doing;
but that's no reason why the rest of you should. And I rather think
it's the rest of you who've suffered most from me. He always knew
what I was _there for_, and that must have been some comfort even
when I was most in the way; but I was just an ordinary nuisance to
you and your mother and Mabel. You were all too kind to let me see
it at the time, but I've seen it since, and it makes me feel that,
after all, the settling of this matter lies with you. If it hurts
you to have me go on with my examination of your father's theory,
I'm ready to drop the lectures to-morrow, and trust to the Lanfear
Laboratory to breed up a young chap who'll knock us both out in
time. You've only got to say the word."

There was a pause while Dredge turned and laid his extinguished pipe
carefully between a jar of embryo sea-urchins and a colony of
regenerating planarians.

Then Archie rose and held out his hand.

"No," he said simply; "go on."






FULL CIRCLE

I





GEOFFREY BETTON woke rather late--so late that the winter sunlight
sliding across his warm red carpet struck his eyes as he turned on
the pillow.

Strett, the valet, had been in, drawn the bath in the adjoining
dressing-room, placed the crystal and silver cigarette-box at his
side, put a match to the fire, and thrown open the windows to the
bright morning air. It brought in, on the glitter of sun, all the
shrill crisp morning noises--those piercing notes of the American
thoroughfare that seem to take a sharper vibration from the
clearness of the medium through which they pass.

Betton raised himself languidly. That was the voice of Fifth Avenue
below his windows. He remembered that when he moved into his rooms
eighteen months before, the sound had been like music to him: the
complex orchestration to which the tune of his new life was set. Now
it filled him with horror and weariness, since it had become the
symbol of the hurry and noise of that new life. He had been far less
hurried in the old days when he had to be up by seven, and down at
the office sharp at nine. Now that he got up when he chose, and his
life had no fixed framework of duties, the hours hunted him like a
pack of blood-hounds.

He dropped back on his pillows with a groan. Yes--not a year ago
there had been a positively sensuous joy in getting out of bed,
feeling under his bare feet the softness of the sunlit carpet, and
entering the shining tiled sanctuary where his great porcelain bath
proffered its renovating flood. But then a year ago he could still
call up the horror of the communal plunge at his earlier lodgings:
the listening for other bathers, the dodging of shrouded ladies in
"crimping"-pins, the cold wait on the landing, the reluctant descent
into a blotchy tin bath, and the effort to identify one's soap and
nail-brush among the promiscuous implements of ablution. That memory
had faded now, and Betton saw only the dark hours to which his blue
and white temple of refreshment formed a kind of glittering
antechamber. For after his bath came his breakfast, and on the
breakfast-tray his letters. His letters!

He remembered--and _that_ memory had not faded!--the thrill with
which he had opened the first missive in a strange feminine hand:
the letter beginning: "I wonder if you'll mind an unknown reader's
telling you all that your book has been to her?"

_ Mind?_ Ye gods, he minded now! For more than a year after the
publication of "Diadems and Faggots" the letters, the inane
indiscriminate letters of condemnation, of criticism, of
interrogation, had poured in on him by every post. Hundreds of
unknown readers had told him with unsparing detail all that his book
had been to them. And the wonder of it was, when all was said and
done, that it had really been so little--that when their thick broth
of praise was strained through the author's anxious vanity there
remained to him so small a sediment of definite specific
understanding! No--it was always the same thing, over and over and
over again--the same vague gush of adjectives, the same incorrigible
tendency to estimate his effort according to each writer's personal
preferences, instead of regarding it as a work of art, a thing to be
measured by objective standards!

He smiled to think how little, at first, he had felt the vanity of
it all. He had found a savour even in the grosser evidences of
popularity: the advertisements of his book, the daily shower of
"clippings," the sense that, when he entered a restaurant or a
theatre, people nudged each other and said "That's Betton." Yes, the
publicity had been sweet to him--at first. He had been touched by
the sympathy of his fellow-men: had thought indulgently of the
world, as a better place than the failures and the dyspeptics would
acknowledge. And then his success began to submerge him: he gasped
under the thickening shower of letters. His admirers were really
unappeasable. And they wanted him to do such preposterous things--to
give lectures, to head movements, to be tendered receptions, to
speak at banquets, to address mothers, to plead for orphans, to go
up in balloons, to lead the struggle for sterilized milk. They
wanted his photograph for literary supplements, his autograph for
charity bazaars, his name on committees, literary, educational, and
social; above all, they wanted his opinion on everything: on
Christianity, Buddhism, tight lacing, the drug-habit, democratic
government, female suffrage and love. Perhaps the chief benefit of
this demand was his incidentally learning from it how few opinions
he really had: the only one that remained with him was a rooted
horror of all forms of correspondence. He had been unutterably
thankful when the letters began to fall off.

"Diadems and Faggots" was now two years old, and the moment was at
hand when its author might have counted on regaining the blessed
shelter of oblivion--if only he had not written another book! For it
was the worst part of his plight that his first success had goaded
him to the perpetration of this particular folly--that one of the
incentives (hideous thought!) to his new work had been the desire to
extend and perpetuate his popularity. And this very week the book
was to come out, and the letters, the cursed letters, would begin
again!

Wistfully, almost plaintively, he contemplated the breakfast-tray
with which Strett presently appeared. It bore only two notes and the
morning journals, but he knew that within the week it would groan
under its epistolary burden. The very newspapers flung the fact at
him as he opened them.

READY ON MONDAY.

GEOFFREY BETTON'S NEW NOVEL

ABUNDANCE.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "DIADEMS AND FAGGOTS."

FIRST EDITION OF ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND ALREADY SOLD OUT.

ORDER NOW.

A hundred and fifty thousand volumes! And an average of three
readers to each! Half a million of people would be reading him
within a week, and every one of them would write to him, and their
friends and relations would write too. He laid down the paper with a
shudder.

The two notes looked harmless enough, and the calligraphy of one was
vaguely familiar. He opened the envelope and looked at the
signature: _Duncan Vyse_. He had not seen the name in years--what on
earth could Duncan Vyse have to say? He ran over the page and
dropped it with a wondering exclamation, which the watchful Strett,
re-entering, met by a tentative "Yes, sir?"

"Nothing. Yes--that is--" Betton picked up the note. "There's a
gentleman, a Mr. Vyse, coming to see me at ten."

Strett glanced at the clock. "Yes, sir. You'll remember that ten was
the hour you appointed for the secretaries to call, sir."

Betton nodded. "I'll see Mr. Vyse first. My clothes, please."

As he got into them, in the state of irritable hurry that had become
almost chronic with him, he continued to think about Duncan Vyse.
They had seen a lot of each other for the few years after both had
left Harvard: the hard happy years when Betton had been grinding at
his business and Vyse--poor devil!--trying to write. The novelist
recalled his friend's attempts with a smile; then the memory of one
small volume came back to him. It was a novel: "The Lifted Lamp."
There was stuff in that, certainly. He remembered Vyse's tossing it
down on his table with a gesture of despair when it came back from
the last publisher. Betton, taking it up indifferently, had sat
riveted till daylight. When he ended, the impression was so strong
that he said to himself: "I'll tell Apthorn about it--I'll go and
see him to-morrow." His own secret literary yearnings gave him a
passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see him triumph over the
ignorance and timidity of the publishers. Apthorn was the youngest
of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage of them, a
personal friend of Betton's, and, as it happened, the man afterward
to become known as the privileged publisher of "Diadems and
Faggots." Unluckily the next day something unexpected turned up, and
Betton forgot about Vyse and his manuscript. He continued to forget
for a month, and then came a note from Vyse, who was ill, and wrote
to ask what his friend had done. Betton did not like to say "I've
done nothing," so he left the note unanswered, and vowed again:
"I'll see Apthorn."

The following day he was called to the West on business, and was
gone a month. When he came back, there was another note from Vyse,
who was still ill, and desperately hard up. "I'll take anything for
the book, if they'll advance me two hundred dollars." Betton, full
of compunction, would gladly have advanced the sum himself; but he
was hard up too, and could only swear inwardly: "I'll write to
Apthorn." Then he glanced again at the manuscript, and reflected:
"No--there are things in it that need explaining. I'd better see
him."

Once he went so far as to telephone Apthorn, but the publisher was
out. Then he finally and completely forgot.

One Sunday he went out of town, and on his return, rummaging among
the papers on his desk, he missed "The Lifted Lamp," which had been
gathering dust there for half a year. What the deuce could have
become of it? Betton spent a feverish hour in vainly increasing the
disorder of his documents, and then bethought himself of calling the
maid-servant, who first indignantly denied having touched anything
("I can see that's true from the dust," Betton scathingly
interjected), and then mentioned with hauteur that a young lady had
called in his absence and asked to be allowed to get a book.

"A lady? Did you let her come up?"

"She said somebody'd sent her."

Vyse, of course--Vyse had sent her for his manuscript! He was always
mixed up with some woman, and it was just like him to send the girl
of the moment to Betton's lodgings, with instructions to force the
door in his absence. Vyse had never been remarkable for delicacy.
Betton, furious, glanced over his table to see if any of his own
effects were missing--one couldn't tell, with the company Vyse
kept!--and then dismissed the matter from his mind, with a vague
sense of magnanimity in doing so. He felt himself exonerated by
Vyse's conduct.

The sense of magnanimity was still uppermost when the valet opened
the door to announce "Mr. Vyse," and Betton, a moment later, crossed
the threshold of his pleasant library.

His first thought was that the man facing him from the hearth-rug
was the very Duncan Vyse of old: small, starved, bleached-looking,
with the same sidelong movements, the same queer air of anaemic
truculence. Only he had grown shabbier, and bald.

Betton held out a hospitable hand.

"This is a good surprise! Glad you looked me up, my dear fellow."

Vyse's palm was damp and bony: he had always had a disagreeable
hand.

"You got my note? You know what I've come for?" he said.

"About the secretaryship? (Sit down.) Is that really serious?"

Betton lowered himself luxuriously into one of his vast Maple
arm-chairs. He had grown stouter in the last year, and the cushion
behind him fitted comfortably into the crease of his nape. As he
leaned back he caught sight of his image in the mirror between the
windows, and reflected uneasily that Vyse would not find _him_
unchanged.

"Serious?" Vyse rejoined. "Why not? Aren't _you?_"

"Oh, perfectly." Betton laughed apologetically. "Only--well, the
fact is, you may not understand what rubbish a secretary of mine
would have to deal with. In advertising for one I never imagined--I
didn't aspire to any one above the ordinary hack."

"I'm the ordinary hack," said Vyse drily.

Betton's affable gesture protested. "My dear fellow--. You see it's
not business--what I'm in now," he continued with a laugh.

Vyse's thin lips seemed to form a noiseless "_ Isn't_ it?" which
they instantly transposed into the audibly reply: "I inferred from
your advertisement that you want some one to relieve you in your
literary work. Dictation, short-hand--that kind of thing?"

"Well, no: not that either. I type my own things. What I'm looking
for is somebody who won't be above tackling my correspondence."

Vyse looked slightly surprised. "I should be glad of the job," he
then said.

Betton began to feel a vague embarrassment. He had supposed that
such a proposal would be instantly rejected. "It would be only for
an hour or two a day--if you're doing any writing of your own?" he
threw out interrogatively.

"No. I've given all that up. I'm in an office now--business. But it
doesn't take all my time, or pay enough to keep me alive."

"In that case, my dear fellow--if you could come every morning; but
it's mostly awful bosh, you know," Betton again broke off, with
growing awkwardness.

Vyse glanced at him humorously. "What you want me to write?"

"Well, that depends--" Betton sketched the obligatory smile. "But I
was thinking of the letters you'll have to answer. Letters about my
books, you know--I've another one appearing next week. And I want to
be beforehand now--dam the flood before it swamps me. Have you any
idea of the deluge of stuff that people write to a successful
novelist?"

As Betton spoke, he saw a tinge of red on Vyse's thin cheek, and his
own reflected it in a richer glow of shame. "I mean--I mean--" he
stammered helplessly.

"No, I haven't," said Vyse; "but it will be awfully jolly finding
out."

There was a pause, groping and desperate on Betton's part,
sardonically calm on his visitor's.

"You--you've given up writing altogether?" Betton continued.

"Yes; we've changed places, as it were." Vyse paused. "But about
these letters--you dictate the answers?"

"Lord, no! That's the reason why I said I wanted somebody--er--well
used to writing. I don't want to have anything to do with them--not
a thing! You'll have to answer them as if they were written to
_you_--" Betton pulled himself up again, and rising in confusion
jerked open one of the drawers of his writing-table.

"Here--this kind of rubbish," he said, tossing a packet of letters
onto Vyse's knee.

"Oh--you keep them, do you?" said Vyse simply.

"I--well--some of them; a few of the funniest only."

Vyse slipped off the band and began to open the letters. While he
was glancing over them Betton again caught his own reflection in the
glass, and asked himself what impression he had made on his visitor.
It occurred to him for the first time that his high-coloured
well-fed person presented the image of commercial rather than of
intellectual achievement. He did not look like his own idea of the
author of "Diadems and Faggots"--and he wondered why.

Vyse laid the letters aside. "I think I can do it--if you'll give me
a notion of the tone I'm to take."

"The tone?"

"Yes--that is, if I'm to sign your name."

"Oh, of course: I expect you to sign for me. As for the tone, say
just what you'd--well, say all you can without encouraging them to
answer."

Vyse rose from his seat. "I could submit a few specimens," he
suggested.

"Oh, as to that--you always wrote better than I do," said Betton
handsomely.

"I've never had this kind of thing to write. When do you wish me to
begin?" Vyse enquired, ignoring the tribute.

"The book's out on Monday. The deluge will begin about three days
after. Will you turn up on Thursday at this hour?" Betton held his
hand out with real heartiness. "It was great luck for me, your
striking that advertisement. Don't be too harsh with my
correspondents--I owe them something for having brought us
together."






II





THE deluge began punctually on the Thursday, and Vyse, arriving as
punctually, had an impressive pile of letters to attack. Betton, on
his way to the Park for a ride, came into the library, smoking the
cigarette of indolence, to look over his secretary's shoulder.

"How many of 'em? Twenty? Good Lord! It's going to be worse than
'Diadems.' I've just had my first quiet breakfast in two years--time
to read the papers and loaf. How I used to dread the sight of my
letter-box! Now I sha'n't know I have one."

He leaned over Vyse's chair, and the secretary handed him a letter.

"Here's rather an exceptional one--lady, evidently. I thought you
might want to answer it yourself--"

"Exceptional?" Betton ran over the mauve pages and tossed them down.
"Why, my dear man, I get hundreds like that. You'll have to be
pretty short with her, or she'll send her photograph."

He clapped Vyse on the shoulder and turned away, humming a tune.
"Stay to luncheon," he called back gaily from the threshold.

After luncheon Vyse insisted on showing a few of his answers to the
first batch of letters. "If I've struck the note I won't bother you
again," he urged; and Betton groaningly consented.

"My dear fellow, they're beautiful--too beautiful. I'll be let in
for a correspondence with every one of these people."

Vyse, at this, meditated for a while above a blank sheet. "All
right--how's this?" he said, after another interval of rapid writing.

Betton glanced over the page. "By George--by George! Won't she _see_
it?" he exulted, between fear and rapture.

"It's wonderful how little people see," said Vyse reassuringly.

The letters continued to pour in for several weeks after the
appearance of "Abundance." For five or six blissful days Betton did
not even have his mail brought to him, trusting to Vyse to single
out his personal correspondence, and to deal with the rest according
to their agreement. During those days he luxuriated in a sense of
wild and lawless freedom; then, gradually, he began to feel the need
of fresh restraints to break, and learned that the zest of liberty
lies in the escape from specific obligations. At first he was
conscious only of a vague hunger, but in time the craving resolved
into a shame-faced desire to see his letters.

"After all, I hated them only because I had to answer them"; and he
told Vyse carelessly that he wished all his letters submitted to him
before the secretary answered them.

At first he pushed aside those beginning: "I have just laid down
'Abundance' after a third reading," or: "Every day for the last
month I have been telephoning my bookseller to know when your novel
would be out." But little by little the freshness of his interest
revived, and even this stereotyped homage began to arrest his eye.
At last a day came when he read all the letters, from the first word
to the last, as he had done when "Diadems and Faggots" appeared. It
was really a pleasure to read them, now that he was relieved of the
burden of replying: his new relation to his correspondents had the
glow of a love-affair unchilled by the contingency of marriage.

One day it struck him that the letters were coming in more slowly
and in smaller numbers. Certainly there had been more of a rush when
"Diadems and Faggots" came out. Betton began to wonder if Vyse were
exercising an unauthorized discrimination, and keeping back the
communications he deemed least important. This sudden conjecture
carried the novelist straight to his library, where he found Vyse
bending over the writing-table with his usual inscrutable pale
smile. But once there, Betton hardly knew how to frame his question,
and blundered into an enquiry for a missing invitation.

"There's a note--a personal note--I ought to have had this morning.
Sure you haven't kept it back by mistake among the others?"

Vyse laid down his pen. "The others? But I never keep back any."

Betton had foreseen the answer. "Not even the worst twaddle about my
book?" he suggested lightly, pushing the papers about.

"Nothing. I understood you wanted to go over them all first."

"Well, perhaps it's safer," Betton conceded, as if the idea were new
to him. With an embarrassed hand he continued to turn over the
letters at Vyse's elbow.

"Those are yesterday's," said the secretary; "here are to-day's," he
added, pointing to a meagre trio.

"H'm--only these?" Betton took them and looked them over
lingeringly. "I don't see what the deuce that chap means about the
first part of 'Abundance' 'certainly justifying the title'--do you?"

Vyse was silent, and the novelist continued irritably: "Damned
cheek, his writing, if he doesn't like the book. Who cares what he
thinks about it, anyhow?"

And his morning ride was embittered by the discovery that it was
unexpectedly disagreeable to have Vyse read any letters which did
not express unqualified praise of his books. He began to fancy there
was a latent rancour, a kind of baffled sneer, under Vyse's manner;
and he decided to return to the practice of having his mail brought
straight to his room. In that way he could edit the letters before
his secretary saw them.

Vyse made no comment on the change, and Betton was reduced to
wondering whether his imperturbable composure were the mask of
complete indifference or of a watchful jealousy. The latter view
being more agreeable to his employer's self-esteem, the next step
was to conclude that Vyse had not forgotten the episode of "The
Lifted Lamp," and would naturally take a vindictive joy in any
unfavourable judgments passed on his rival's work. This did not
simplify the situation, for there was no denying that unfavourable
criticisms preponderated in Betton's correspondence. "Abundance" was
neither meeting with the unrestricted welcome of "Diadems and
Faggots," nor enjoying the alternative of an animated controversy:
it was simply found dull, and its readers said so in language not
too tactfully tempered by regretful comparisons with its
predecessor. To withhold unfavourable comments from Vyse was,
therefore, to make it appear that correspondence about the book had
died out; and its author, mindful of his unguarded predictions,
found this even more embarrassing. The simplest solution would be to
get rid of Vyse; and to this end Betton began to address his
energies.

One evening, finding himself unexpectedly disengaged, he asked Vyse
to dine; it had occurred to him that, in the course of an
after-dinner chat, he might delicately hint his feeling that the
work he had offered his friend was unworthy so accomplished a hand.

Vyse surprised him by a momentary hesitation. "I may not have time
to dress."

Betton stared. "What's the odds? We'll dine here--and as late as you
like."

Vyse thanked him, and appeared, punctually at eight, in all the
shabbiness of his daily wear. He looked paler and more shyly
truculent than usual, and Betton, from the height of his florid
stature, said to himself, with the sudden professional instinct for
"type": "He might be an agent of something--a chap who carries
deadly secrets."

Vyse, it was to appear, did carry a deadly secret; but one less
perilous to society than to himself. He was simply
poor--inexcusably, irremediably poor. Everything failed him, had
always failed him: whatever he put his hand to went to bits.

This was the confession that, reluctantly, yet with a kind of
white-lipped bravado, he flung at Betton in answer to the latter's
tentative suggestion that, really, the letter-answering job wasn't
worth bothering him with--a thing that any type-writer could do.

"If you mean you're paying me more than it's worth, I'll take less,"
Vyse rushed out after a pause.

"Oh, my dear fellow--" Betton protested, flushing.

"What _do_ you mean, then? Don't I answer the letters as you want
them answered?"

Betton anxiously stroked his silken ankle. "You do it beautifully,
too beautifully. I mean what I say: the work's not worthy of you.
I'm ashamed to ask you--"

"Oh, hang shame," Vyse interrupted. "Do you know why I said I
shouldn't have time to dress to-night? Because I haven't any evening
clothes. As a matter of fact, I haven't much but the clothes I stand
in. One thing after another's gone against me; all the infernal
ingenuities of chance. It's been a slow Chinese torture, the kind
where they keep you alive to have more fun killing you." He
straightened himself with a sudden blush. "Oh, I'm all right
now--getting on capitally. But I'm still walking rather a narrow
plank; and if I do your work well enough--if I take your idea--"

Betton stared into the fire without answering. He knew next to
nothing of Vyse's history, of the mischance or mis-management that
had brought him, with his brains and his training, to so unlikely a
pass. But a pang of compunction shot through him as he remembered
the manuscript of "The Lifted Lamp" gathering dust on his table for
half a year.

"Not that it would have made any earthly difference--since he's
evidently never been able to get the thing published." But this
reflection did not wholly console Betton, and he found it
impossible, at the moment, to tell Vyse that his services were not
needed.






III





DURING the ensuing weeks the letters grew fewer and fewer, and
Betton foresaw the approach of the fatal day when his secretary, in
common decency, would have to say: "I can't draw my pay for doing
nothing."

What a triumph for Vyse!

The thought was intolerable, and Betton cursed his weakness in not
having dismissed the fellow before such a possibility arose.

"If I tell him I've no use for him now, he'll see straight through
it, of course;--and then, hang it, he looks so poor!"

This consideration came after the other, but Betton, in rearranging
them, put it first, because he thought it looked better there, and
also because he immediately perceived its value in justifying a plan
of action that was beginning to take shape in his mind.

"Poor devil, I'm damned if I don't do it for him!" said Betton,
sitting down at his desk.

Three or four days later he sent word to Vyse that he didn't care to
go over the letters any longer, and that they would once more be
carried directly to the library.

The next time he lounged in, on his way to his morning ride, he
found his secretary's pen in active motion.

"A lot to-day," Vyse told him cheerfully.

His tone irritated Betton: it had the inane optimism of the
physician reassuring a discouraged patient.

"Oh, Lord--I thought it was almost over," groaned the novelist.

"No: they've just got their second wind. Here's one from a Chicago
publisher--never heard the name--offering you thirty per cent. on
your next novel, with an advance royalty of twenty thousand. And
here's a chap who wants to syndicate it for a bunch of Sunday
papers: big offer, too. That's from Ann Arbor. And this--oh, _this_
one's funny!"

He held up a small scented sheet to Betton, who made no movement to
receive it.

"Funny? Why's it funny?" he growled.

"Well, it's from a girl--a lady--and she thinks she's the only
person who understands 'Abundance'--has the clue to it. Says she's
never seen a book so misrepresented by the critics--"

"Ha, ha! That _is_ good!" Betton agreed with too loud a laugh.

"This one's from a lady, too--married woman. Says she's
misunderstood, and would like to correspond."

"Oh, Lord," said Betton.--"What are you looking at?" he added
sharply, as Vyse continued to bend his blinking gaze on the letters.

"I was only thinking I'd never seen such short letters from women.
Neither one fills the first page."

"Well, what of that?" queried Betton.

Vyse reflected. "I'd like to meet a woman like that," he said
wearily; and Betton laughed again.

The letters continued to pour in, and there could be no farther
question of dispensing with Vyse's services. But one morning, about
three weeks later, the latter asked for a word with his employer,
and Betton, on entering the library, found his secretary with half a
dozen documents spread out before him.

"What's up?" queried Betton, with a touch of impatience.

Vyse was attentively scanning the outspread letters.

"I don't know: can't make out." His voice had a faint note of
embarrassment. "Do you remember a note signed _Hester Macklin_ that
came three or four weeks ago? Married--misunderstood--Western army
post--wanted to correspond?"

Betton seemed to grope among his memories; then he assented vaguely.

"A short note," Vyse went on: "the whole story in half a page. The
shortness struck me so much--and the directness--that I wrote her:
wrote in my own name, I mean."

"In your own name?" Betton stood amazed; then he broke into a groan.

"Good Lord, Vyse--you're incorrigible!"

The secretary pulled his thin moustache with a nervous laugh. "If
you mean I'm an ass, you're right. Look here." He held out an
envelope stamped with the words: "Dead Letter Office." "My effusion
has come back to me marked 'unknown.' There's no such person at the
address she gave you."

Betton seemed for an instant to share his secretary's embarrassment;
then he burst into an uproarious laugh.

"Hoax, was it? That's rough on you, old fellow!"

Vyse shrugged his shoulders. "Yes; but the interesting question
is--why on earth didn't _your_ answer come back, too?"

"My answer?"

"The official one--the one I wrote in your name. If she's unknown,
what's become of _that?_"

Betton stared at him with eyes wrinkled by amusement. "Perhaps she
hadn't disappeared then."

Vyse disregarded the conjecture. "Look here--I believe _all_ these
letters are a hoax," he broke out.

Betton stared at him with a face that turned slowly red and angry.
"What are you talking about? All what letters?"

"These I've spread out here: I've been comparing them. And I believe
they're all written by one man."

Burton's redness turned to a purple that made his ruddy moustache
seem pale. "What the devil are you driving at?" he asked.

"Well, just look at it," Vyse persisted, still bent above the
letters. "I've been studying them carefully--those that have come
within the last two or three weeks--and there's a queer likeness in
the writing of some of them. The _g_'s are all like corkscrews. And
the same phrases keep recurring--the Ann Arbor news-agent uses the
same expressions as the President of the Girls' College at
Euphorbia, Maine."

Betton laughed. "Aren't the critics always groaning over the
shrinkage of the national vocabulary? Of course we all use the same
expressions."

"Yes," said Vyse obstinately. "But how about using the same _g_'s?"

Betton laughed again, but Vyse continued without heeding him: "Look
here, Betton--could Strett have written them?"

"Strett?" Betton roared. "_ Strett?_" He threw himself into his
arm-chair to shake out his mirth at greater ease.

"I'll tell you why. Strett always posts all my answers. He comes in
for them every day before I leave. He posted the letter to the
misunderstood party--the letter from _you_ that the Dead Letter
Office didn't return. _I_ posted my own letter to her; and that came
back."

A measurable silence followed the emission of this ingenious
conjecture; then Betton observed with gentle irony: "Extremely neat.
And of course it's no business of yours to supply any valid motive
for this remarkable attention on my valet's part."

Vyse cast on him a slanting glance.

"If you've found that human conduct's generally based on valid
motives--!"

"Well, outside of mad-houses it's supposed to be not quite
incalculable."

Vyse had an odd smile under his thin moustache. "Every house is a
mad-house at some time or another."

Betton rose with a careless shake of the shoulders. "This one will
be if I talk to you much longer," he said, moving away with a laugh.






IV





BETTON did not for a moment believe that Vyse suspected the valet of
having written the letters.

"Why the devil don't he say out what he thinks? He was always a
tortuous chap," he grumbled inwardly.

The sense of being held under the lens of Vyse's mute scrutiny
became more and more exasperating. Betton, by this time, had squared
his shoulders to the fact that "Abundance" was a failure with the
public: a confessed and glaring failure. The press told him so
openly, and his friends emphasized the fact by their circumlocutions
and evasions. Betton minded it a good deal more than he had
expected, but not nearly as much as he minded Vyse's knowing it.
That remained the central twinge in his diffused discomfort. And the
problem of getting rid of his secretary once more engaged him.

He had set aside all sentimental pretexts for retaining Vyse; but a
practical argument replaced them. "If I ship him now he'll think
it's because I'm ashamed to have him see that I'm not getting any
more letters."

For the letters had ceased again, almost abruptly, since Vyse had
hazarded the conjecture that they were the product of Strett's
devoted pen. Betton had reverted only once to the subject--to ask
ironically, a day or two later: "Is Strett writing to me as much as
ever?"--and, on Vyse's replying with a neutral head-shake, had added
with a laugh: "If you suspect _him_ you might as well think I write
the letters myself!"

"There are very few to-day," said Vyse, with his irritating
evasiveness; and Betton rejoined squarely: "Oh, they'll stop soon.
The book's a failure."

A few mornings later he felt a rush of shame at his own
tergiversations, and stalked into the library with Vyse's sentence
on his tongue.

Vyse started back with one of his anaemic blushes. "I was hoping
you'd be in. I wanted to speak to you. There've been no letters the
last day or two," he explained.

Betton drew a quick breath of relief. The man had some sense of
decency, then! He meant to dismiss himself.

"I told you so, my dear fellow; the book's a flat failure," he said,
almost gaily.

Vyse made a deprecating gesture. "I don't know that I should regard
the absence of letters as the ultimate test. But I wanted to ask you
if there isn't something else I can do on the days when there's no
writing." He turned his glance toward the book-lined walls. "Don't
you want your library catalogued?" he asked insidiously.

"Had it done last year, thanks." Betton glanced away from Vyse's
face. It was piteous, how he needed the job!

"I see. ... Of course this is just a temporary lull in the
letters. They'll begin again--as they did before. The people who
read carefully read slowly--you haven't heard yet what _they_
think."

Betton felt a rush of puerile joy at the suggestion. Actually, he
hadn't thought of that!

"There _was_ a big second crop after 'Diadems and Faggots,'" he
mused aloud.

"Of course. Wait and see," said Vyse confidently.

The letters in fact began again--more gradually and in smaller
numbers. But their quality was different, as Vyse had predicted. And
in two cases Betton's correspondents, not content to compress into
one rapid communication the thoughts inspired by his work, developed
their views in a succession of really remarkable letters. One of the
writers was a professor in a Western college; the other was a girl
in Florida. In their language, their point of view, their reasons
for appreciating "Abundance," they differed almost diametrically;
but this only made the unanimity of their approval the more
striking. The rush of correspondence evoked by Betton's earlier
novel had produced nothing so personal, so exceptional as these
communications. He had gulped the praise of "Diadems and Faggots" as
undiscriminatingly as it was offered; now he knew for the first time
the subtler pleasures of the palate. He tried to feign indifference,
even to himself; and to Vyse he made no sign. But gradually he felt
a desire to know what his secretary thought of the letters, and,
above all, what he was saying in reply to them. And he resented
acutely the possibility of Vyse's starting one of his clandestine
correspondences with the girl in Florida. Vyse's notorious lack of
delicacy had never been more vividly present to Betton's
imagination; and he made up his mind to answer the letters himself.

He would keep Vyse on, of course: there were other communications
that the secretary could attend to. And, if necessary, Betton would
invent an occupation: he cursed his stupidity in having betrayed the
fact that his books were already catalogued.

Vyse showed no surprise when Betton announced his intention of
dealing personally with the two correspondents who showed so
flattering a reluctance to take their leave. But Betton immediately
read a criticism in his lack of comment, and put forth, on a note of
challenge: "After all, one must be decent!"

Vyse looked at him with an evanescent smile. "You'll have to explain
that you didn't write the first answers."

Betton halted. "Well--I--I more or less dictated them, didn't I?"

"Oh, virtually, they're yours, of course."

"You think I can put it that way?"

"Why not?" The secretary absently drew an arabesque on the
blotting-pad. "Of course they'll keep it up longer if you write
yourself," he suggested.

Betton blushed, but faced the issue. "Hang it all, I sha'n't be
sorry. They interest me. They're remarkable letters." And Vyse,
without observation, returned to his writings.

The spring, that year, was delicious to Betton. His college
professor continued to address him tersely but cogently at fixed
intervals, and twice a week eight serried pages came from Florida.
There were other letters, too; he had the solace of feeling that at
last "Abundance" was making its way, was reaching the people who, as
Vyse said, read slowly because they read intelligently. But welcome
as were all these proofs of his restored authority they were but the
background of his happiness. His life revolved for the moment about
the personality of his two chief correspondents. The professor's
letters satisfied his craving for intellectual recognition, and the
satisfaction he felt in them proved how completely he had lost faith
in himself. He blushed to think that his opinion of his work had
been swayed by the shallow judgments of a public whose taste he
despised. Was it possible that he had allowed himself to think less
well of "Abundance" because it was not to the taste of the average
novel-reader? Such false humility was less excusable than the
crudest appetite for praise: it was ridiculous to try to do
conscientious work if one's self-esteem were at the mercy of popular
judgments. All this the professor's letters delicately and
indirectly conveyed to Betton, with the result that the author of
"Abundance" began to recognize in it the ripest flower of his
genius.

But if the professor understood his book, the girl in Florida
understood _him;_ and Betton was fully alive to the superior
qualities of discernment which this process implied. For his lovely
correspondent his novel was but the starting-point, the pretext of
her discourse: he himself was her real object, and he had the
delicious sense, as their exchange of thoughts proceeded, that she
was interested in "Abundance" because of its author, rather than in
the author because of his book. Of course she laid stress on the
fact that his ideas were the object of her contemplation; but
Betton's agreeable person had permitted him some insight into the
incorrigible subjectiveness of female judgments, and he was
pleasantly aware, from the lady's tone, that she guessed him to be
neither old nor ridiculous. And suddenly he wrote to ask if he might
see her. ...

The answer was long in coming. Betton fumed at the delay, watched,
wondered, fretted; then he received the one word "Impossible."

He wrote back more urgently, and awaited the reply with increasing
eagerness. A certain shyness had kept him from once more modifying
the instructions regarding his mail, and Strett still carried the
letters directly to Vyse. The hour when he knew they were passing
under the latter's eyes was now becoming intolerable to Betton, and
it was a profound relief when the secretary, suddenly advised of his
father's illness, asked permission to absent himself for a
fortnight.

Vyse departed just after Betton had despatched to Florida his second
missive of entreaty, and for ten days he tasted the furtive joy of a
first perusal of his letters. The answer from Florida was not among
them; but Betton said to himself "She's thinking it over," and
delay, in that light, seemed favourable. So charming, in fact, was
this phase of sentimental suspense that he felt a start of
resentment when a telegram apprised him one morning that Vyse would
return to his post that day.

Betton had slept later than usual, and, springing out of bed with
the telegram in his hand, he learned from the clock that his
secretary was due in half an hour. He reflected that the morning's
mail must long since be in; and, too impatient to wait for its
appearance with his breakfast-tray, he threw on a dressing-gown and
went to the library. There lay the letters, half a dozen of them:
but his eye flew to one envelope, and as he tore it open a warm wave
rocked his heart.

The letter was dated a few days after its writer must have received
his own: it had all the qualities of grace and insight to which his
unknown friend had accustomed him, but it contained no allusion,
however indirect, to the special purport of his appeal. Even a
vanity less ingenious than Betton's might have read in the lady's
silence one of the most familiar motions of consent; but the smile
provoked by this inference faded as he turned to his other letters.
For the uppermost bore the superscription "Dead Letter Office," and
the document that fell from it was his own last letter from Florida.

Betton studied the ironic "Unknown" for an appreciable space of
time; then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse's
similar experience with "Hester Macklin," and the light he was able
to throw on that obscure episode was searching enough to penetrate
all the dark corners of his own adventure. He felt a rush of heat to
the ears; catching sight of himself in the glass, he saw a red
ridiculous congested countenance, and dropped into a chair to hide
it between flushed fists. He was roused by the opening of the door,
and Vyse appeared on the threshold.

"Oh, I beg pardon--you're ill?" said the secretary.

Betton's only answer was an inarticulate murmur of derision; then he
pushed forward the letter with the imprint of the Dead Letter
Office.

"Look at that," he jeered.

Vyse peered at the envelope, and turned it over slowly in his hands.
Betton's eyes, fixed on him, saw his face decompose like a substance
touched by some powerful acid. He clung to the envelope as if to
gain time.

"It's from the young lady you've been writing to at Swazee Springs?"
he asked at length.

"It's from the young lady I've been writing to at Swazee Springs."

"Well--I suppose she's gone away," continued Vyse, rebuilding his
countenance rapidly.

"Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and
seventy-five souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local
post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be
sent to the Dead Letter Office."

Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn. "After all, the
same thing happened to me--with 'Hester Macklin,' I mean," he
recalled sheepishly.

"Just so," said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the
table. "_ Just so_," he repeated, in italics.

He caught his secretary's glance, and held it with his own for a
moment. Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something
scared and squirming.

"The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote
me this from there," he said, holding up the last Florida missive.

"Ha! That's funny," said Vyse, with a damp forehead.

"Yes, it's funny; it's funny," said Betton. He leaned back, his
hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a
crack in the cornice. Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table,
waited.

"Shall I get to work?" he began, after a silence measurable by
minutes. Betton's gaze descended from the cornice.

"I've got your seat, haven't I?" he said, rising and moving away
from the table.

Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair,
and began to stir about vaguely among the papers.

"How's your father?" Betton asked from the hearth.

"Oh, better--better, thank you. He'll pull out of it."

"But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?"

"Yes--it was touch and go when I got there."

Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.

"And I suppose," Betton continued in a steady tone, "your anxiety
made you forget your usual precautions--whatever they were--about
this Florida correspondence, and before you'd had time to prevent it
the Swazee post-office blundered?"

Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement. "What do you mean?" he
asked, pushing his chair back.

"I mean that you saw I couldn't live without flattery, and that
you've been ladling it out to me to earn your keep."

Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his
pen. "What on earth are you driving at?" he repeated.

"Though why the deuce," Betton continued in the same steady tone,
"you should need to do this kind of work when you've got such
faculties at your service--those letters were magnificent, my dear
fellow! Why in the world don't you write novels, instead of writing
to other people about them?"

Vyse straightened himself with an effort. "What are you talking
about, Betton? Why the devil do you think _I_ wrote those letters?"

Betton held back his answer, with a brooding face. "Because I wrote
'Hester Macklin's'--to myself!"

Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder. "Well--?"
he finally said, in a low tone.

"And because you found me out (you see, you can't even feign
surprise!)--because you saw through it at a glance, knew at once
that the letters were faked. And when you'd foolishly put me on my
guard by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had
then suddenly guessed that _I_ was the forger, you drew the natural
inference that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to
make _you_ think I had it. You saw that, to me, the worst thing
about the failure of the book was having _you_ know it was a
failure. And so you applied your superior--your immeasurably
superior--abilities to carrying on the humbug, and deceiving me as
I'd tried to deceive you. And you did it so successfully that I
don't see why the devil you haven't made your fortune writing
novels!"

Vyse remained silent, his head slightly bent under the mounting tide
of Betton's denunciation.

"The way you differentiated your people--characterised them--avoided
my stupid mistake of making the women's letters too short and
logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same
expressions: the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! I
swear, Vyse, I'm sorry that damned post-office went back on you,"
Betton went on, piling up the waves of his irony.

But at this height they suddenly paused, drew back on themselves,
and began to recede before the spectacle of Vyse's pale distress.
Something warm and emotional in Betton's nature--a lurking
kindliness, perhaps, for any one who tried to soothe and smooth his
writhing ego--softened his eye as it rested on the drooping figure
of his secretary.

"Look here, Vyse--I'm not sorry--not altogether sorry this has
happened!" He moved slowly across the room, and laid a friendly palm
on Vyse's shoulder. "In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as
it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago--oh, out of sheer
carelessness, of course--about that novel of yours I promised to
give to Apthorn. If I _had_ given it, it might not have made any
difference--I'm not sure it wasn't too good for success--but anyhow,
I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you,
might at least have got you a quicker hearing. Perhaps you thought
it was because the thing _was_ so good that I kept it back, that I
felt some nasty jealousy of your superiority. I swear to you it
wasn't that--I clean forgot it. And one day when I came home it was
gone: you'd sent and taken it. And I've always thought since you
might have owed me a grudge--and not unjustly; so this ... this
business of the letters ... the sympathy you've shown ... for I
suppose it _is_ sympathy ... ?"

Vyse startled and checked him by a queer crackling laugh.

"It's _not_ sympathy?" broke in Betton, the moisture drying out of
his voice. He withdrew his hand from Vyse's shoulder. "What is it,
then? The joy of uncovering my nakedness? An eye for an eye? Is it
_that?_"

Vyse rose from his seat, and with a mechanical gesture swept into a
heap all the letters he had sorted.

"I'm stone broke, and wanted to keep my job--that's what it is," he
said wearily ...






THE LEGEND

I





ARTHUR BERNALD could never afterward recall just when the first
conjecture flashed on him: oddly enough, there was no record of it
in the agitated jottings of his diary. But, as it seemed to him in
retrospect, he had always felt that the queer man at the Wades' must
be John Pellerin, if only for the negative reason that he couldn't
imaginably be any one else. It was impossible, in the confused
pattern of the century's intellectual life, to fit the stranger in
anywhere, save in the big gap which, some five and twenty years
earlier, had been left by Pellerin's unaccountable disappearance;
and conversely, such a man as the Wades' visitor couldn't have lived
for sixty years without filling, somewhere in space, a nearly
equivalent void.

At all events, it was certainly not to Doctor Wade or to his mother
that Bernald owed the hint: the good unconscious Wades, one of whose
chief charms in the young man's eyes was that they remained so
robustly untainted by Pellerinism, in spite of the fact that Doctor
Wade's younger brother, Howland, was among its most impudently
flourishing high-priests.

The incident had begun by Bernald's running across Doctor Robert
Wade one hot summer night at the University Club, and by Wade's
saying, in the tone of unprofessional laxity which the shadowy
stillness of the place invited: "I got hold of a queer fish at St.
Martin's the other day--case of heat-prostration picked up in
Central Park. When we'd patched him up I found he had nowhere to go,
and not a dollar in his pocket, and I sent him down to our place at
Portchester to re-build."

The opening roused his hearer's attention. Bob Wade had an odd
unformulated sense of values that Bernald had learned to trust.

"What sort of chap? Young or old?"

"Oh, every age--full of years, and yet with a lot left. He called
himself sixty on the books."

"Sixty's a good age for some kinds of living. And age is of course
purely subjective. How has he used his sixty years?"

"Well--part of them in educating himself, apparently. He's a
scholar--humanities, languages, and so forth."

"Oh--decayed gentleman," Bernald murmured, disappointed.

"Decayed? Not much!" cried the doctor with his accustomed
literalness. "I only mentioned that side of Winterman--his name's
Winterman--because it was the side my mother noticed first. I
suppose women generally do. But it's only a part--a small part. The
man's the big thing."

"Really big?"

"Well--there again. ... When I took him down to the country,
looking rather like a tramp from a 'Shelter,' with an untrimmed
beard, and a suit of reach-me-downs he'd slept round the Park in for
a week, I felt sure my mother'd carry the silver up to her room, and
send for the gardener's dog to sleep in the hall the first night.
But she didn't."

"I see. 'Women and children love him.' Oh, Wade!" Bernald groaned.

"Not a bit of it! You're out again. We don't love him, either of us.
But we _feel_ him--the air's charged with him. You'll see."

And Bernald agreed that he _would_ see, the following Sunday. Wade's
inarticulate attempts to characterize the stranger had struck his
friend. The human revelation had for Bernald a poignant and
ever-renewed interest, which his trade, as the dramatic critic of a
daily paper, had hitherto failed to discourage. And he knew that Bob
Wade, simple and undefiled by literature--Bernald's specific
affliction--had a free and personal way of judging men, and the
diviner's knack of reaching their hidden springs. During the days
that followed, the young doctor gave Bernald farther details about
John Winterman: details not of fact--for in that respect his
visitor's reticence was baffling--but of impression. It appeared
that Winterman, while lying insensible in the Park, had been robbed
of the few dollars he possessed; and on leaving the hospital, still
weak and half-blind, he had quite simply and unprotestingly accepted
the Wades' offer to give him shelter till such time as he should be
strong enough to go to work.

"But what's his work?" Bernald interjected. "Hasn't he at least told
you that?"

"Well, writing. Some kind of writing." Doctor Bob always became
vague and clumsy when he approached the confines of literature. "He
means to take it up again as soon as his eyes get right."

Bernald groaned. "Oh, Lord--that finishes him; and _me!_ He's
looking for a publisher, of course--he wants a 'favourable notice.'
I won't come!"

"He hasn't written a line for twenty years."

"A line of _what?_ What kind of literature can one keep corked up
for twenty years?"

Wade surprised him. "The real kind, I should say. But I don't know
Winterman's line," the doctor added. "He speaks of the things he
used to write merely as 'stuff that wouldn't sell.' He has a
wonderfully confidential way of _not_ telling one things. But he
says he'll have to do something for his living as soon as his eyes
are patched up, and that writing is the only trade he knows. The
queer thing is that he seems pretty sure of selling _now_. He even
talked of buying the bungalow of us, with an acre or two about it."

"The bungalow? What's that?"

"The studio down by the shore that we built for Howland when he
thought he meant to paint." (Howland Wade, as Bernald knew, had
experienced various "calls.") "Since he's taken to writing nobody's
been near it. I offered it to Winterman, and he camps there--cooks
his meals, does his own house-keeping, and never comes up to the
house except in the evenings, when he joins us on the verandah, in
the dark, and smokes while my mother knits."

"A discreet visitor, eh?"

"More than he need be. My mother actually wanted him to stay on in
the house--in her pink chintz room. Think of it! But he says houses
smother him. I take it he's lived for years in the open."

"In the open where?"

"I can't make out, except that it was somewhere in the East. 'East
of everything--beyond the day-spring. In places not on the map.'
That's the way he put it; and when I said: 'You've been an explorer,
then?' he smiled in his beard, and answered: 'Yes; that's it--an
explorer.' Yet he doesn't strike me as a man of action: hasn't the
hands or the eyes."

"What sort of hands and eyes has he?"

Wade reflected. His range of observation was not large, but within
its limits it was exact and could give an account of itself.

"He's worked a lot with his hands, but that's not what they were
made for. I should say they were extraordinarily delicate conductors
of sensation. And his eye--his eye too. He hasn't used it to
dominate people: he didn't care to. He simply looks through 'em all
like windows. Makes me feel like the fellows who think they're made
of glass. The mitigating circumstance is that he seems to see such a
glorious landscape through me." Wade grinned at the thought of
serving such a purpose.

"I see. I'll come on Sunday and be looked through!" Bernald cried.






II





BERNALD came on two successive Sundays; and the second time he
lingered till the Tuesday.

"Here he comes!" Wade had said, the first evening, as the two young
men, with Wade's mother sat in the sultry dusk, with the Virginian
creeper drawing, between the verandah arches, its black arabesques
against a moon-lined sky.

In the darkness Bernald heard a step on the gravel, and saw the red
flit of a cigar through the shrubs. Then a loosely-moving figure
obscured the patch of sky between the creepers, and the red spark
became the centre of a dim bearded face, in which Bernald discerned
only a broad white gleam of forehead.

It was the young man's subsequent impression that Winterman had not
spoken much that first evening; at any rate, Bernald himself
remembered chiefly what the Wades had said. And this was the more
curious because he had come for the purpose of studying their
visitor, and because there was nothing to divert him from that
purpose in Wade's halting communications or his mother's artless
comments. He reflected afterward that there must have been a
mysteriously fertilizing quality in the stranger's silence: it had
brooded over their talk like a large moist cloud above a dry
country.

Mrs. Wade, apparently apprehensive lest her son should have given
Bernald an exaggerated notion of their visitor's importance, had
hastened to qualify it before the latter appeared.

"He's not what you or Howland would call intellectual--"(Bernald
writhed at the coupling of the names)--"not in the least _literary;_
though he told Bob he used to write. I don't think, though, it could
have been what Howland would call writing." Mrs. Wade always
mentioned her younger son with a reverential drop of the voice. She
viewed literature much as she did Providence, as an inscrutably
mystery; and she spoke of Howland as a dedicated being, set apart to
perform secret rites within the veil of the sanctuary.

"I shouldn't say he had a quick mind," she continued, reverting
apologetically to Winterman. "Sometimes he hardly seems to follow
what we're saying. But he's got such sound ideas--when he does speak
he's never silly. And clever people sometimes _are_, don't you think
so?" Bernald groaned an unqualified assent. "And he's so capable.
The other day something went wrong with the kitchen range, just as I
was expecting some friends of Bob's for dinner; and do you know,
when Mr. Winterman heard we were in trouble, he came and took a
look, and knew at once what to do? I told him it was a dreadful pity
he wasn't married!"

Close on midnight, when the session on the verandah ended, and the
two young men were strolling down to the bungalow at Winterman's
side, Bernald's mind reverted to the image of the fertilizing cloud.
There was something brooding, pregnant, in the silent presence
beside him: he had, in place of any circumscribing impression of the
individual, a large hovering sense of manifold latent meanings. And
he felt a distinct thrill of relief when, half-way down the lawn,
Doctor Bob was checked by a voice that called him back to the
telephone.

"Now I'll be with him alone!" thought Bernald, with a throb like a
lover's.

In the low-ceilinged bungalow Winterman had to grope for the lamp on
his desk, and as its light struck up into his face Bernald's sense
of the rareness of his opportunity increased. He couldn't have said
why, for the face, with its ridged brows, its shabby greyish beard
and blunt Socratic nose, made no direct appeal to the eye. It seemed
rather like a stage on which remarkable things might be enacted,
like some shaggy moorland landscape dependent for form and
expression on the clouds rolling over it, and the bursts of light
between; and one of these flashed out in the smile with which
Winterman, as if in answer to his companion's thought, said simply,
as he turned to fill his pipe: "Now we'll talk."

So he'd known all along that they hadn't yet--and had guessed that,
with Bernald, one might!

The young man's glow of pleasure was so intense that it left him for
a moment unable to meet the challenge; and in that moment he felt
the brush of something winged and summoning. His spirit rose to it
with a rush; but just as he felt himself poised between the
ascending pinions, the door opened and Bob Wade plunged in.

"Too bad! I'm so sorry! It was from Howland, to say he can't come
to-morrow after all." The doctor panted out his news with honest
grief.

"I tried my best to pull it off for you; and my brother _wants_ to
come--he's keen to talk to you and see what he can do. But you see
he's so tremendously in demand. He'll try for another Sunday later
on."

Winterman nodded with a whimsical gesture. "Oh, he'll find me here.
I shall work my time out slowly." He pointed to the scattered sheets
on the kitchen table which formed his writing desk.

"Not slowly enough to suit us," Wade answered hospitably. "Only, if
Howland could have come he might have given you a tip or two--put
you on the right track--shown you how to get in touch with the
public."

Winterman, his hands in his sagging pockets, lounged against the
bare pine walls, twisting his pipe under his beard. "Does your
brother enjoy the privilege of that contact?" he questioned gravely.

Wade stared a little. "Oh, of course Howland's not what you'd call a
_popular_ writer; he despises that kind of thing. But whatever he
says goes with--well, with the chaps that count; and every one tells
me he's written _the_ book on Pellerin. You must read it when you
get back your eyes." He paused, as if to let the name sink in, but
Winterman drew at his pipe with a blank face. "You must have heard
of Pellerin, I suppose?" the doctor continued. "I've never read a
word of him myself: he's too big a proposition for _me_. But one
can't escape the talk about him. I have him crammed down my throat
even in hospital. The internes read him at the clinics. He tumbles
out of the nurses' pockets. The patients keep him under their
pillows. Oh, with most of them, of course, it's just a craze, like
the last new game or puzzle: they don't understand him in the least.
Howland says that even now, twenty-five years after his death, and
with his books in everybody's hands, there are not twenty people who
really understand Pellerin; and Howland ought to know, if anybody
does. He's--what's their great word?--_interpreted_ him. You must
get Howland to put you through a course of Pellerin."

And as the young men, having taken leave of Winterman, retraced
their way across the lawn, Wade continued to develop the theme of
his brother's accomplishments.

"I wish I _could_ get Howland to take an interest in Winterman: this
is the third Sunday he's chucked us. Of course he does get bored
with people consulting him about their writings--but I believe if he
could only talk to Winterman he'd see something in him, as we do.
And it would be such a god-send to the poor man to have some one to
advise him about his work. I'm going to make a desperate effort to
get Howland here next Sunday."

It was then that Bernald vowed to himself that he would return the
next Sunday at all costs. He hardly knew whether he was prompted by
the impulse to shield Winterman from Howland Wade's ineptitude, or
by the desire to see the latter abandon himself to the full
shamelessness of its display; but of one fact he was blissfully
assured--and that was of the existence in Winterman of some quality
which would provoke Howland to the amplest exercise of his fatuity.
"How he'll draw him--how he'll draw him!" Bernald chuckled, with a
security the more unaccountable that his one glimpse of Winterman
had shown the latter only as a passive subject for experimentation;
and he felt himself avenged in advance for the injury of Howland
Wade's existence.






III





THAT this hope was to be frustrated Bernald learned from Howland
Wade's own lips, the day before the two young men were to meet at
Portchester.

"I can't really, my dear fellow," the Interpreter lisped, passing a
polished hand over the faded smoothness of his face. "Oh, an
authentic engagement, I assure you: otherwise, to oblige old Bob I'd
submit cheerfully to looking over his foundling's literature. But
I'm pledged this week to the Pellerin Society of Kenosha: I had a
hand in founding it, and for two years now they've been patiently
waiting for a word from me--the _Fiat Lux_, so to speak. You see
it's a ministry, Bernald--I assure you, I look upon my calling quite
religiously."

As Bernald listened, his disappointment gradually changed to relief.
Howland, on trial, always turned out to be too insufferable, and the
pleasure of watching his antics was invariably lost in the impulse
to put a sanguinary end to them.

"If he'd only keep his beastly pink hands off Pellerin," Bernald
groaned, thinking of the thick manuscript condemned to perpetual
incarceration in his own desk by the publication of Howland's
"definitive" work on the great man. One couldn't, _after _Howland
Wade, expose one's self to the derision of writing about Pellerin:
the eagerness with which Wade's book had been devoured proved, not
that the public had enough appetite for another, but simply that,
for a stomach so undiscriminating, anything better than Wade had
given it would be too good. And Bernald, in the confidence that his
own work was open to this objection, had stoically locked it up. Yet
if he had resigned his exasperated intelligence to the fact that
Wade's book existed, and was already passing into the immortality of
perpetual republication, he could not, after repeated trials, adjust
himself to the author's talk about Pellerin. When Wade wrote of the
great dead he was egregious, but in conversation he was familiar and
fond. It might have been supposed that one of the beauties of
Pellerin's hidden life and mysterious taking off would have been to
guard him from the fingering of anecdote; but biographers like
Howland Wade were born to rise above such obstacles. He might be
vague or inaccurate in dealing with the few recorded events of his
subject's life; but when he left fact for conjecture no one had a
firmer footing. Whole chapters in his volume were constructed in the
conditional mood and packed with hypothetical detail; and in talk,
by the very law of the process, hypothesis became affirmation, and
he was ready to tell you confidentially the exact circumstances of
Pellerin's death, and of the "distressing incident" leading up to
it. Bernald himself not only questioned the form under which this
incident was shaping itself before posterity, but the mere radical
fact of its occurrence: he had never been able to discover any break
in the dense cloud enveloping Pellerin's later life and its
mysterious termination. He had gone away--that was all that any of
them knew: he who had so little, at any time, been with them or of
them; and his going had so slightly stirred the public consciousness
that even the subsequent news of his death, laconically imparted
from afar, had dropped unheeded into the universal scrap-basket, to
be long afterward fished out, with all its details missing, when
some enquiring spirit first became aware, by chance encounter with a
two-penny volume in a London book-stall, not only that such a man as
John Pellerin had died, but that he had ever lived, or written.

It need hardly be noted that Howland Wade had not been the pioneer
in question: his had been the wiser part of swelling the chorus when
it rose, and gradually drowning the other voices by his own
insistent note. He had pitched the note so screamingly, and held it
so long, that he was now the accepted authority on Pellerin, not
only in the land which had given birth to his genius but in the
Europe which had first acclaimed it; and it was the central point of
pain in Bernald's sense of the situation that a man who had so
yearned for silence as Pellerin should have his grave piped over by
such a voice as Wade's.

Bernald's talk with the Interpreter had revived this ache to the
momentary exclusion of other sensations; and he was still sore with
it when, the next afternoon, he arrived at Portchester for his
second Sunday with the Wades.

At the station he had the surprise of seeing Winterman's face on the
platform, and of hearing from him that Doctor Bob had been called
away to assist at an operation in a distant town.

"Mrs. Wade wanted to put you off, but I believe the message came too
late; so she sent me down to break the news to you," said Winterman,
holding out his hand.

Perhaps because they were the first conventional words that Bernald
had heard him speak, the young man was struck by the relief his
intonation gave them.

"She wanted to send a carriage," Winterman added, "but I told her
we'd walk back through the woods." He looked at Bernald with a
sudden kindness that flushed the young man with pleasure.

"Are you strong enough? It's not too far?"

"Oh, no. I'm pulling myself together. Getting back to work is the
slowest part of the business: not on account of my eyes--I can use
them now, though not for reading; but some of the links between
things are missing. It's a kind of broken spectrum ... here, that
boy will look after your bag."

The walk through the woods remained in Bernald's memory as an
enchanted hour. He used the word literally, as descriptive of the
way in which Winterman's contact changed the face of things, or
perhaps restored them to their primitive meanings. And the scene
they traversed--one of those little untended woods that still, in
America, fringe the tawdry skirts of civilization--acquired, as a
background to Winterman, the hush of a spot aware of transcendent
visitings. Did he talk, or did he make Bernald talk? The young man
never knew. He recalled only a sense of lightness and liberation, as
if the hard walls of individuality had melted, and he were merged in
the poet's deeper interfusion, yet without losing the least sharp
edge of self. This general impression resolved itself afterward into
the sense of Winterman's wide elemental range. His thought encircled
things like the horizon at sea. He didn't, as it happened, touch on
lofty themes--Bernald was gleefully aware that, to Howland Wade,
their talk would hardly have been Talk at all--but Winterman's mind,
applied to lowly topics, was like a powerful lens that brought out
microscopic delicacies and differences.

The lack of Sunday trains kept Doctor Bob for two days on the scene
of his surgical duties, and during those two days Bernald seized
every moment of communion with his friend's guest. Winterman, as
Wade had said, was reticent as to his personal affairs, or rather as
to the practical and material conditions to which the term is
generally applied. But it was evident that, in Winterman's case, the
usual classification must be reversed, and that the discussion of
ideas carried one much farther into his intimacy than any specific
acquaintance with the incidents of his life.

"That's exactly what Howland Wade and his tribe have never
understood about Pellerin: that it's much less important to know
how, or even why, he disapp--"

Bernald pulled himself up with a jerk, and turned to look full at
his companion. It was late on the Monday evening, and the two men,
after an hour's chat on the verandah to the tune of Mrs. Wade's
knitting-needles, had bidden their hostess good-night and strolled
back to the bungalow together.

"Come and have a pipe before you turn in," Winterman had said; and
they had sat on together till midnight, with the door of the
bungalow open on a heaving moonlit bay, and summer insects bumping
against the chimney of the lamp. Winterman had just bent down to
re-fill his pipe from the jar on the table, and Bernald, jerking
about to catch him in the yellow circle of lamplight, sat
speechless, staring at a fact that seemed suddenly to have
substituted itself for Winterman's face, or rather to have taken on
its features.

"No, they never saw that Pellerin's ideas _were_ Pellerin. ..." He
continued to stare at Winterman. "Just as this man's ideas are--why,
_are_ Pellerin!"

The thought uttered itself in a kind of inner shout, and Bernald
started upright with the violent impact of his conclusion. Again and
again in the last forty-eight hours he had exclaimed to himself:
"This is as good as Pellerin." Why hadn't he said till now: "This
_is_ Pellerin"? ... Surprising as the answer was, he had no choice
but to take it. He hadn't said so simply because Winterman was
_better than Pellerin_--that there was so much more of him, so to
speak. Yes; but--it came to Bernald in a flash--wouldn't there by
this time have been any amount more of Pellerin? ... The young man
felt actually dizzy with the thought. That was it--there was the
solution of the haunting problem! This man was Pellerin, and more
than Pellerin! It was so fantastic and yet so unanswerable that he
burst into a sudden startled laugh.

Winterman, at the same moment, brought his palm down with a sudden
crash on the pile of manuscript covering the desk.

"What's the matter?" Bernald gasped.

"My match wasn't out. In another minute the destruction of the
library of Alexandria would have been a trifle compared to what
you'd have seen." Winterman, with his large deep laugh, shook out
the smouldering sheets. "And I should have been a pensioner on
Doctor Bob the Lord knows how much longer!"

Bernald pulled himself together. "You've really got going again? The
thing's actually getting into shape?"

"This particular thing _is_ in shape. I drove at it hard all last
week, thinking our friend's brother would be down on Sunday, and
might look it over."

Bernald had to repress the tendency to another wild laugh.

"Howland--you meant to show _Howland_ what you've done?"

Winterman, looming against the moonlight, slowly turned a dusky
shaggy head toward him.

"Isn't it a good thing to do?"

Bernald wavered, torn between loyalty to his friends and the
grotesqueness of answering in the affirmative. After all, it was
none of his business to furnish Winterman with an estimate of
Howland Wade.

"Well, you see, you've never told me what your line _is_," he
answered, temporizing.

"No, because nobody's ever told _me_. It's exactly what I want to
find out," said the other genially.

"And you expect Wade--?"

"Why, I gathered from our good Doctor that it's his trade. Doesn't
he explain--interpret?"

"In his own domain--which is Pellerinism."

Winterman gazed out musingly upon the moon-touched dusk of waters.
"And what _is_ Pellerinism?" he asked.

Bernald sprang to his feet with a cry. "Ah, I don't know--but you're
Pellerin!"

They stood for a minute facing each other, among the uncertain
swaying shadows of the room, with the sea breathing through it as
something immense and inarticulate breathed through young Bernald's
thoughts; then Winterman threw up his arms with a humorous gesture.

"Don't shoot!" he said.






IV





DAWN found them there, and the risen sun laid its beams on the rough
floor of the bungalow, before either of the men was conscious of the
passage of time. Bernald, vaguely trying to define his own state in
retrospect, could only phrase it: "I floated ... floated. ..."

The gist of fact at the core of the extraordinary experience was
simply that John Pellerin, twenty-five years earlier, had
voluntarily disappeared, causing the rumour of his death to be
reported to an inattentive world; and that now he had come back to
see what that world had made of him.

"You'll hardly believe it of me; I hardly believe it of myself; but
I went away in a rage of disappointment, of wounded pride--no,
vanity! I don't know which cut deepest--the sneers or the
silence--but between them, there wasn't an inch of me that wasn't
raw. I had just the one thing in me: the message, the cry, the
revelation. But nobody saw and nobody listened. Nobody wanted what I
had to give. I was like a poor devil of a tramp looking for shelter
on a bitter night, in a town with every door bolted and all the
windows dark. And suddenly I felt that the easiest thing would be to
lie down and go to sleep in the snow. Perhaps I'd a vague notion
that if they found me there at daylight, frozen stiff, the pathetic
spectacle might produce a reaction, a feeling of remorse. ... So I
took care to be found! Well, a good many thousand people die every
day on the face of the globe; and I soon discovered that I was
simply one of the thousands; and when I made that discovery I really
died--and stayed dead a year or two. ... When I came to life again
I was off on the under side of the world, in regions unaware of what
we know as 'the public.' Have you any notion how it shifts the point
of view to wake under new constellations? I advise any who's been in
love with a woman under Cassiopeia to go and think about her under
the Southern Cross. ... It's the only way to tell the pivotal
truths from the others. ... I didn't believe in my theory any
less--there was my triumph and my vindication! It held out,
resisted, measured itself with the stars. But I didn't care a snap
of my finger whether anybody else believed in it, or even knew it
had been formulated. It escaped out of my books--my poor still-born
books--like Psyche from the chrysalis and soared away into the blue,
and lived there. I knew then how it frees an idea to be ignored; how
apprehension circumscribes and deforms it. ... Once I'd learned
that, it was easy enough to turn to and shift for myself. I was sure
now that my idea would live: the good ones are self-supporting. I
had to learn to be so; and I tried my hand at a number of things ...
adventurous, menial, commercial. ... It's not a bad thing for a
man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it.
Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a
book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and
go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms
reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are,
committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as
like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the
lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth
between times--as different from each other as those other
creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive
generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the
hidden likeness. ...

"Well, I proved my first guess, off there in the wilds, and it
lived, and grew, and took care of itself. And I said 'Some day it
will make itself heard; but by that time my atoms will have waltzed
into a new pattern.' Then, in Cashmere one day, I met a fellow in a
caravan, with a dog-eared book in his pocket. He said he never
stirred without it--wanted to know where I'd been, never to have
heard of it. It was _my guess_--in its twentieth edition! ... The
globe spun round at that, and all of a sudden I was under the old
stars. That's the way it happens when the ballast of vanity shifts!
I'd lived a third of a life out there, unconscious of human
opinion--because I supposed it was unconscious of _me_. But
now--now! Oh, it was different. I wanted to know what they said. ...
Not exactly that, either: I wanted to know _what I'd made them
say_. There's a difference. ... And here I am," said John
Pellerin, with a pull at his pipe.

So much Bernald retained of his companion's actual narrative; the
rest was swept away under the tide of wonder that rose and submerged
him as Pellerin--at some indefinitely later stage of their
talk--picked up his manuscript and began to read. Bernald sat
opposite, his elbows propped on the table, his eyes fixed on the
swaying waters outside, from which the moon gradually faded, leaving
them to make a denser blackness in the night. As Pellerin read, this
density of blackness--which never for a moment seemed inert or
unalive--was attenuated by imperceptible degrees, till a greyish
pallour replaced it; then the pallour breathed and brightened, and
suddenly dawn was on the sea.

Something of the same nature went on in the young man's mind while
he watched and listened. He was conscious of a gradually withdrawing
light, of an interval of obscurity full of the stir of invisible
forces, and then of the victorious flush of day. And as the light
rose, he saw how far he had travelled and what wonders the night had
prepared. Pellerin had been right in saying that his first idea had
survived, had borne the test of time; but he had given his hearer no
hint of the extent to which it had been enlarged and modified, of
the fresh implications it now unfolded. In a brief flash of
retrospection Bernald saw the earlier books dwindle and fall into
their place as mere precursors of this fuller revelation; then, with
a leap of helpless rage, he pictured Howland Wade's pink hands on
the new treasure, and his prophetic feet upon the lecture platform.






V





"IT won't do--oh, he let him down as gently as possible; but it
appears it simply won't do."

Doctor Bob imparted the ineluctable fact to Bernald while the two
men, accidentally meeting at their club a few nights later, sat
together over the dinner they had immediately agreed to consume in
company.

Bernald had left Portchester the morning after his strange
discovery, and he and Bob Wade had not seen each other since. And
now Bernald, moved by an irresistible instinct of postponement, had
waited for his companion to bring up Winterman's name, and had even
executed several conversational diversions in the hope of delaying
its mention. For how could one talk of Winterman with the thought of
Pellerin swelling one's breast?

"Yes; the very day Howland got back from Kenosha I brought the
manuscript to town, and got him to read it. And yesterday evening I
nailed him, and dragged an answer out of him."

"Then Howland hasn't seen Winterman yet?"

"No. He said: 'Before you let him loose on me I'll go over the
stuff, and see if it's at all worth while.'"

Bernald drew a freer breath. "And he found it wasn't?"

"Between ourselves, he found it was of no account at all. Queer,
isn't it, when the _man_ ... but of course literature's another
proposition. Howland says it's one of the cases where an idea might
seem original and striking if one didn't happen to be able to trace
its descent. And this is straight out of bosh--by Pellerin. ...
Yes: Pellerin. It seems that everything in the article that isn't
pure nonsense is just Pellerinism. Howland thinks poor Winterman
must have been tremendously struck by Pellerin's writings, and have
lived too much out of the world to know that they've become the
text-books of modern thought. Otherwise, of course, he'd have taken
more trouble to disguise his plagiarisms."

"I see," Bernald mused. "Yet you say there _is_ an original
element?"

"Yes; but unluckily it's no good."

"It's not--conceivably--in any sense a development of Pellerin's
idea: a logical step farther?"

"_Logical?_ Howland says it's twaddle at white heat."

Bernald sat silent, divided between the fierce satisfaction of
seeing the Interpreter rush upon his fate, and the despair of
knowing that the state of mind he represented was indestructible.
Then both emotions were swept away on a wave of pure joy, as he
reflected that now, at last, Howland Wade had given him back John
Pellerin.

The possession was one he did not mean to part with lightly; and the
dread of its being torn from him constrained him to extraordinary
precautions.

"You've told Winterman, I suppose? How did he take it?"

"Why, unexpectedly, as he does most things. You can never tell which
way he'll jump. I thought he'd take a high tone, or else laugh it
off; but he did neither. He seemed awfully cast down. I wished
myself well out of the job when I saw how cut up he was." Bernald
thrilled at the words. Pellerin had shared his pang, then--the "old
woe of the world" at the perpetuity of human dulness!

"But what did he say to the charge of plagiarism--if you made it?"

"Oh, I told him straight out what Howland said. I thought it fairer.
And his answer to that was the rummest part of all."

"What was it?" Bernald questioned, with a tremor.

"He said: 'That's queer, for I've never read Pellerin.'"

Bernald drew a deep breath of ecstasy. "Well--and I suppose you
believed him?"

"I believed him, because I know him. But the public won't--the
critics won't. And if it's a pure coincidence it's just as bad for
him as if it were a straight steal--isn't it?"

Bernald sighed his acquiescence.

"It bothers me awfully," Wade continued, knitting his kindly brows,
"because I could see what a blow it was to him. He's got to earn his
living, and I don't suppose he knows how to do anything else. At his
age it's hard to start fresh. I put that to Howland--asked him if
there wasn't a chance he might do better if he only had a little
encouragement. I can't help feeling he's got the essential thing in
him. But of course I'm no judge when it comes to books. And Howland
says it would be cruel to give him any hope." Wade paused, turned
his wineglass about under a meditative stare, and then leaned across
the table toward Bernald. "Look here--do you know what I've proposed
to Winterman? That he should come to town with me to-morrow and go
in the evening to hear Howland lecture to the Uplift Club. They're
to meet at Mrs. Beecher Bain's, and Howland is to repeat the lecture
that he gave the other day before the Pellerin Society at Kenosha.
It will give Winterman a chance to get some notion of what Pellerin
_was:_ he'll get it much straighter from Howland than if he tried to
plough through Pellerin's books. And then afterward--as if
accidentally--I thought I might bring him and Howland together. If
Howland could only see him and hear him talk, there's no knowing
what might come of it. He couldn't help feeling the man's force, as
we do; and he might give him a pointer--tell him what line to take.
Anyhow, it would please Winterman, and take the edge off his
disappointment. I saw that as soon as I proposed it."

"Some one who's never heard of Pellerin?"

Mrs. Beecher Bain, large, smiling, diffuse, reached out
parenthetically from the incoming throng on her threshold to waylay
Bernald with the question as he was about to move past her in the
wake of his companion.

"Oh, keep straight on, Mr. Winterman!" she interrupted herself to
call after the latter. "Into the back drawing-room, please! And
remember, you're to sit next to me--in the corner on the left, close
under the platform."

She renewed her interrogative clutch on Bernald's sleeve. "Most
curious! Doctor Wade has been telling me all about him--how
remarkable you all think him. And it's actually true that he's never
heard of Pellerin? Of course as soon as Doctor Wade told me _that_,
I said 'Bring him!' It will be so extraordinarily interesting to
watch the first impression.--Yes, do follow him, dear Mr. Bernald,
and be sure that you and he secure the seats next to me. Of course
Alice Fosdick insists on being with us. She was wild with excitement
when I told her she was to meet some one who'd never heard of
Pellerin!"

On the indulgent lips of Mrs. Beecher Bain conjecture speedily
passed into affirmation; and as Bernald's companion, broad and
shaggy in his visibly new evening clothes, moved down the length of
the crowded rooms, he was already, to the ladies drawing aside their
skirts to let him pass, the interesting Huron of the fable.

How far he was aware of the character ascribed to him it was
impossible for Bernald to discover. He was as unconscious as a tree
or a cloud, and his observer had never known any one so alive to
human contacts and yet so secure from them. But the scene was
playing such a lively tune on Bernald's own sensibilities that for
the moment he could not adjust himself to the probable effect it
produced on his companion. The young man, of late, had made but rare
appearances in the group of which Mrs. Beecher Bain was one of the
most indefatigable hostesses, and the Uplift Club the chief medium
of expression. To a critic, obliged by his trade to cultivate
convictions, it was the essence of luxury to leave them at home in
his hours of ease; and Bernald gave his preference to circles in
which less finality of judgment prevailed, and it was consequently
less embarrassing to be caught without an opinion.

But in his fresher days he had known the spell of the Uplift Club
and the thrill of moving among the Emancipated; and he felt an odd
sense of rejuvenation as he looked at the rows of faces packed about
the embowered platform from which Howland Wade was presently to hand
down the eternal verities. Many of these countenances belonged to
the old days, when the gospel of Pellerin was unknown, and it
required considerable intellectual courage to avow one's acceptance
of the very doctrines he had since demolished. The latter moral
revolution seemed to have been accepted as submissively as a change
in hair-dressing; and it even struck Bernald that, in the case of
many of the assembled ladies, their convictions were rather newer
than their clothes.

One of the most interesting examples of this facility of adaptation
was actually, in the person of Miss Alice Fosdick, brushing his
elbow with exotic amulets, and enveloping him in Arabian odours, as
she leaned forward to murmur her sympathetic sense of the situation.
Miss Fosdick, who was one of the most advanced exponents of
Pellerinism, had large eyes and a plaintive mouth, and Bernald had
always fancied that she might have been pretty if she had not been
perpetually explaining things.

"Yes, I know--Isabella Bain told me all about him. (He can't hear
us, can he?) And I wonder if you realize how remarkably interesting
it is that we should have such an opportunity _now_--I mean the
opportunity to see the impression of Pellerinism on a perfectly
fresh mind. (You must introduce him as soon as the lecture's over.)
I explained that to Isabella as soon as she showed me Doctor Wade's
note. Of course you see why, don't you?" Bernald made a faint motion
of acquiescence, which she instantly swept aside. "At least I think
I can _make you see why_. (If you're sure he can't hear?) Why, it's
just this--Pellerinism is in danger of becoming a truism. Oh, it's
an awful thing to say! But then I'm not afraid of saying awful
things! I rather believe it's my mission. What I mean is, that we're
getting into the way of taking Pellerin for granted--as we do the
air we breathe. We don't sufficiently lead our _conscious life_ in
him--we're gradually letting him become subliminal." She swayed
closer to the young man, and he saw that she was making a graceful
attempt to throw her explanatory net over his companion, who,
evading Mrs. Bain's hospitable signal, had cautiously wedged himself
into a seat between Bernald and the wall.

"_Did_ you hear what I was saying, Mr. Winterman? (Yes, I know who
you are, of course!) Oh, well, I don't really mind if you did. I was
talking about you--about you and Pellerin. I was explaining to Mr.
Bernald that what we need at this very minute is a Pellerin revival;
and we need some one like you--to whom his message comes as a
wonderful new interpretation of life--to lead the revival, and rouse
us out of our apathy. ...

"You see," she went on winningly, "it's not only the big public that
needs it (of course _their_ Pellerin isn't ours!) It's we, his
disciples, his interpreters, who discovered him and gave him to the
world--we, the Chosen People, the Custodians of the Sacred Books, as
Howland Wade calls us--it's _we_, who are in perpetual danger of
sinking back into the old stagnant ideals, and practising the Seven
Deadly Virtues; it's _we_ who need to count our mercies, and realize
anew what he's done for us, and what we ought to do for him! And
it's for that reason that I urged Mr. Wade to speak here, in the
very inner sanctuary of Pellerinism, exactly as he would speak to
the uninitiated--to repeat, simply, his Kenosha lecture, 'What
Pellerinism means'; and we ought all, I think, to listen to him with
the hearts of little children--just as _you_ will, Mr. Winterman--as
if he were telling us new things, and we--"

"Alice, _dear_--" Mrs. Bain murmured with a deprecating gesture; and
Howland Wade, emerging between the palms, took the centre of the
platform.

A pang of commiseration shot through Bernald as he saw him there, so
innocent and so exposed. His plump pulpy body, which made his
evening dress fall into intimate and wrapper-like folds, was like a
wide surface spread to the shafts of irony; and the mild ripples of
his voice seemed to enlarge the vulnerable area as he leaned
forward, poised on confidential finger-tips, to say persuasively:
"Let me try to tell you what Pellerinism means."

Bernald moved restlessly in his seat. He had the obscure sense of
being a party to something not wholly honourable. He ought not to
have come; he ought not to have let his companion come. Yet how
could he have done otherwise? John Pellerin's secret was his own. As
long as he chose to remain John Winterman it was no one's business
to gainsay him; and Bernald's scruples were really justifiable only
in respect of his own presence on the scene. But even in this
connection he ceased to feel them as soon as Howland Wade began to
speak.






VI





IT had been arranged that Pellerin, after the meeting of the Uplift
Club, should join Bernald at his rooms and spend the night there,
instead of returning to Portchester. The plan had been eagerly
elaborated by the young man, but he had been unprepared for the
alacrity with which his wonderful friend accepted it. He was
beginning to see that it was a part of Pellerin's wonderfulness to
fall in, quite simply and naturally, with any arrangements made for
his convenience, or tending to promote the convenience of others.
Bernald felt that his extreme docility in such matters was
proportioned to the force of resistance which, for nearly half a
life-time, had kept him, with his back to the wall, fighting alone
against the powers of darkness. In such a scale of values how little
the small daily alternatives must weigh!

At the close of Howland Wade's discourse, Bernald, charged with his
prodigious secret, had felt the need to escape for an instant from
the liberated rush of talk. The interest of watching Pellerin was so
perilously great that the watcher felt it might, at any moment,
betray him. He lingered in the crowded drawing-room long enough to
see his friend enclosed in a mounting tide, above which Mrs. Beecher
Bain and Miss Fosdick actively waved their conversational tridents;
then he took refuge, at the back of the house, in a small dim
library where, in his younger days, he had discussed personal
immortality and the problem of consciousness with beautiful girls
whose names he could not remember.

In this retreat he surprised Mr. Beecher Bain, a quiet man with a
mild brow, who was smoking a surreptitious cigar over the last
number of the _Strand_. Mr. Bain, at Bernald's approach, dissembled
the _Strand_ under a copy of the _Hibbert Journal_, but tendered his
cigar-case with the remark that stocks were heavy again; and Bernald
blissfully abandoned himself to this unexpected contact with
reality.

On his return to the drawing-room he found that the tide had set
toward the supper-table, and when it finally carried him thither it
was to land him in the welcoming arms of Bob Wade.

"Hullo, old man! Where have you been all this time?--Winterman? Oh,
_he's_ talking to Howland: yes, I managed it finally. I believe Mrs.
Bain has steered them into the library, so that they shan't be
disturbed. I gave her an idea of the situation, and she was awfully
kind. We'd better leave them alone, don't you think? I'm trying to
get a croquette for Miss Fosdick."

Bernald's secret leapt in his bosom, and he devoted himself to the
task of distributing sandwiches and champagne while his pulses
danced to the tune of the cosmic laughter. The vision of Pellerin
and his Interpreter, face to face at last, had a Cyclopean grandeur
that dwarfed all other comedy. "And I shall hear of it presently; in
an hour or two he'll be telling me about it. And that hour will be
all mine--mine and his!" The dizziness of the thought made it
difficult for Bernald to preserve the balance of the supper-plates
he was distributing. Life had for him at that moment the
completeness which seems to defy disintegration.

The throng in the dining-room was thickening, and Bernald's efforts
as purveyor were interrupted by frequent appeals, from ladies who
had reached repleteness, that he should sit down a moment and tell
them all about his interesting friend. Winterman's fame, trumpeted
abroad by Miss Fosdick, had reached the four corners of the Uplift
Club, and Bernald found himself fabricating _de toutes pieces_ a
Winterman legend which should in some degree respond to the Club's
demand for the human document. When at length he had acquitted
himself of this obligation, and was free to work his way back
through the lessening groups into the drawing-room, he was at last
rewarded by a glimpse of his friend, who, still densely encompassed,
towered in the centre of the room in all his sovran ugliness.

Their eyes met across the crowd; but Bernald gathered only
perplexity from the encounter. What were Pellerin's eyes saying to
him? What orders, what confidences, what indefinable apprehension
did their long look impart? The young man was still trying to
decipher their complex message when he felt a tap on the arm, and
turned to encounter the rueful gaze of Bob Wade, whose meaning lay
clearly enough on the surface of his good blue stare.

"Well, it won't work--it won't work," the doctor groaned.

"What won't?"

"I mean with Howland. Winterman won't. Howland doesn't take to him.
Says he's crude--frightfully crude. And you know how Howland hates
crudeness."

"Oh, I know," Bernald exulted. It was the word he had waited for--he
saw it now! Once more he was lost in wonder at Howland's miraculous
faculty for always, as the naturalists said, being true to type.

"So I'm afraid it's all up with his chance of writing. At least _I_
can do no more," said Wade, discouraged.

Bernald pressed him for farther details. "Does Winterman seem to
mind much? Did you hear his version?"

"His version?"

"I mean what he said to Howland."

"Why no. What the deuce was there for him to say?"

"What indeed? I think I'll take him home," said Bernald gaily.

He turned away to join the circle from which, a few minutes before,
Pellerin's eyes had vainly and enigmatically signalled to him; but
the circle had dispersed, and Pellerin himself was not in sight.

Bernald, looking about him, saw that during his brief aside with
Wade the party had passed into the final phase of dissolution.
People still delayed, in diminishing groups, but the current had set
toward the doors, and every moment or two it bore away a few more
lingerers. Bernald, from his post, commanded the clearing
perspective of the two drawing-rooms, and a rapid survey of their
length sufficed to assure him that Pellerin was not in either.
Taking leave of Wade, the young man made his way back to the
drawing-room, where only a few hardened feasters remained, and then
passed on to the library which had been the scene of the late
momentous colloquy. But the library too was empty, and drifting back
uncertainly to the inner drawing-room Bernald found Mrs. Beecher
Bain domestically putting out the wax candles on the mantel-piece.

"Dear Mr. Bernald! Do sit down and have a little chat. What a
wonderful privilege it has been! I don't know when I've had such an
intense impression."

She made way for him, hospitably, in a corner of the sofa to which
she had sunk; and he echoed her vaguely: "You _were_ impressed,
then?"

"I can't express to you how it affected me! As Alice said, it was a
resurrection--it was as if John Pellerin were actually here in the
room with us!"

Bernald turned on her with a half-audible gasp. "You felt that, dear
Mrs. Bain?"

"We all felt it--every one of us! I don't wonder the Greeks--it
_was_ the Greeks?--regarded eloquence as a supernatural power. As
Alice says, when one looked at Howland Wade one understood what they
meant by the Afflatus."

Bernald rose and held out his hand. "Oh, I see--it was Howland who
made you feel as if Pellerin were in the room? And he made Miss
Fosdick feel so too?"

"Why, of course. But why are you rushing off?"

"Because I must hunt up my friend, who's not used to such late
hours."

"Your friend?" Mrs. Bain had to collect her thoughts. "Oh, Mr.
Winterman, you mean? But he's gone already."

"Gone?" Bernald exclaimed, with an odd twinge of foreboding.
Remembering Pellerin's signal across the crowd, he reproached
himself for not having answered it more promptly. Yet it was
certainly strange that his friend should have left the house without
him.

"Are you quite sure?" he asked, with a startled glance at the clock.

"Oh, perfectly. He went half an hour ago. But you needn't hurry home
on his account, for Alice Fosdick carried him off with her. I saw
them leave together."

"Carried him off? She took him home with her, you mean?"

"Yes. You know what strange hours she keeps. She told me she was
going to give him a Welsh rabbit, and explain Pellerinism to him."

"Oh, _if_ she's going to explain--" Bernald murmured. But his
amazement at the news struggled with a confused impatience to reach
his rooms in time to be there for his friend's arrival. There could
be no stranger spectacle beneath the stars than that of John
Pellerin carried off by Miss Fosdick, and listening, in the small
hours, to her elucidation of his doctrines; but Bernald knew enough
of his sex to be aware that such an experiment may present a less
humorous side to its subject than to an impartial observer. Even the
Uplift Club and its connotations might benefit by the attraction of
the unknown; and it was conceivable that to a traveller from
Mesopotamia Miss Fosdick might present elements of interest which
she had lost for the frequenters of Fifth Avenue. There was, at any
rate, no denying that the affair had become unexpectedly complex,
and that its farther development promised to be rich in comedy.

In the charmed contemplation of these possibilities Bernald sat over
his fire, listening for Pellerin's ring. He had arranged his modest
quarters with the reverent care of a celebrant awaiting the descent
of his deity. He guessed Pellerin to be unconscious of visual
detail, but sensitive to the happy blending of sensuous impressions:
to the intimate spell of lamplight on books, and of a deep chair
placed where one could watch the fire. The chair was there, and
Bernald, facing it across the hearth, already saw it filled by
Pellerin's lounging figure. The autumn dawn came late, and even now
they had before them the promise of some untroubled hours. Bernald,
sitting there alone in the warm stillness of his room, and in the
profounder hush of his expectancy, was conscious of gathering up all
his sensibilities and perceptions into one exquisitely-adjusted
instrument of notation. Until now he had tasted Pellerin's society
only in unpremeditated snatches, and had always left him with a
sense, on his own part, of waste and shortcoming. Now, in the lull
of this dedicated hour, he felt that he should miss nothing, and
forget nothing, of the initiation that awaited him. And catching
sight of Pellerin's pipe, he rose and laid it carefully on a table
by the arm-chair.

"No. I've never had any news of him," Bernald heard himself
repeating. He spoke in a low tone, and with the automatic utterance
that alone made it possible to say the words.

They were addressed to Miss Fosdick, into whose neighbourhood chance
had thrown him at a dinner, a year or so later than their encounter
at the Uplift Club. Hitherto he had successfully, and intentionally,
avoided Miss Fosdick, not from any animosity toward that unconscious
instrument of fate, but from an intense reluctance to pronounce the
words which he knew he should have to speak if they met.

Now, as it turned out, his chief surprise was that she should wait
so long to make him speak them. All through the dinner she had swept
him along on a rapid current of talk which showed no tendency to
linger or turn back upon the past. At first he ascribed her reserve
to a sense of delicacy with which he reproached himself for not
having previously credited her; then he saw that she had been
carried so far beyond the point at which they had last faced each
other, that it was by the merest hazard of associated ideas that she
was now finally borne back to it. For it appeared that the very next
evening, at Mrs. Beecher Bain's, a Hindu Mahatma was to lecture to
the Uplift Club on the Limits of the Subliminal; and it was owing to
no less a person than Howland Wade that this exceptional privilege
had been obtained.

"Of course Howland's known all over the world as the interpreter of
Pellerinism, and the Aga Gautch, who had absolutely declined to
speak anywhere in public, wrote to Isabella that he could not refuse
anything that Mr. Wade asked. Did you know that Howland's lecture,
'What Pellerinism Means,' has been translated into twenty-two
languages, and gone into a fifth edition in Icelandic? Why, that
reminds me," Miss Fosdick broke off--"I've never heard what became
of your queer friend--what was his name?--whom you and Bob Wade
accused me of spiriting away after that very lecture. And I've never
seen _you_ since you rushed into the house the next morning, and
dragged me out of bed to know what I'd done with him!"

With a sharp effort Bernald gathered himself together to have it
out. "Well, what _did_ you do with him?" he retorted.

She laughed her appreciation of his humour. "Just what I told you,
of course. I said good-bye to him on Isabella's door-step."

Bernald looked at her. "It's really true, then, that he didn't go
home with you?"

She bantered back: "Have you suspected me, all this time, of hiding
his remains in the cellar?" And with a droop of her fine lids she
added: "I wish he _had_ come home with me, for he was rather
interesting, and there were things I think I could have explained to
him."

Bernald helped himself to a nectarine, and Miss Fosdick continued on
a note of amused curiosity: "So you've really never had any news of
him since that night?"

"No--I've never had any news of him."

"Not the least little message?"

"Not the least little message."

"Or a rumour or report of any kind?"

"Or a rumour or report of any kind."

Miss Fosdick's interest seemed to be revived by the strangeness of
the case. "It's rather creepy, isn't it? What _could_ have happened?
You don't suppose he could have been waylaid and murdered?" she
asked with brightening eyes.

Bernald shook his head serenely. "No. I'm sure he's safe--quite
safe."

"But if you're sure, you must know something."

"No. I know nothing," he repeated.

She scanned him incredulously. "But what's your theory--for you must
have a theory? What in the world can have become of him?"

Bernald returned her look and hesitated. "Do you happen to remember
the last thing he said to you--the very last, on the door-step, when
he left you?"

"The last thing?" She poised her fork above the peach on her plate.
"I don't think he said anything. Oh, yes--when I reminded him that
he'd solemnly promised to come back with me and have a little talk
he said he couldn't because he was going home."

"Well, then, I suppose," said Bernald, "he went home."

She glanced at him as if suspecting a trap. "Dear me, how flat! I
always inclined to a mysterious murder. But of course you know more
of him than you say."

She began to cut her peach, but paused above a lifted bit to ask,
with a renewal of animation in her expressive eyes: "By the way, had
you heard that Howland Wade has been gradually getting farther and
farther away from Pellerinism? It seems he's begun to feel that
there's a Positivist element in it which is narrowing to any one who
has gone at all deeply into the Wisdom of the East. He was intensely
interesting about it the other day, and of course I _do_ see what he
feels. ... Oh, it's too long to tell you now; but if you could
manage to come in to tea some afternoon soon--any day but
Wednesday--I should so like to explain--"






THE EYES

I





WE had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an
excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin's, by a tale of Fred
Murchard's--the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a
coal fire, Culwin's library, with its oak walls and dark old
bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly
experiences at first hand being, after Murchard's brilliant opening,
the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our
group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of
us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to
fulfil the condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we
could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of
us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham--whose story
was the slightest of the lot--had the habit of sending our souls
into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be
proud of our seven "exhibits," and none of us would have dreamed of
expecting an eighth from our host.

Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his
arm-chair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the
cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man
likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination
enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his
guests. By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist
tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of
the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been,
then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached
observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out
of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at
the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the
least desire to jump on the stage and do a "turn."

Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his
having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in
a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men
knew of his character than my mother's assertion that he had once
been "a charming little man with nice eyes" corresponded to any
possible reconstitution of his dry thwarted physiognomy.

"He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,"
Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather,"
some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this
description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes
in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a
leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it
in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to
the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen
habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience
seemed to have crossed his sky. Nevertheless, his dispassionate
survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of that costly
experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to have resulted
in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary
only because some one had to do the cooking. On the importance of
this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy was the
only science which he revered as dogma. It must be owned that his
little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view,
besides being a reason--though not the main one--for the fidelity of
his friends.

Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less
stimulating. His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting-place
for the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and draughty, but light,
spacious and orderly--a kind of academic grove from which all the
leaves had fallen. In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont
to stretch our muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong
as much as possible the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing
institution, one or two neophytes were now and then added to our
band.

Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these
recruits, and a good example of Murchard's somewhat morbid assertion
that our old friend "liked 'em juicy." It was indeed a fact that
Culwin, for all his mental dryness, specially tasted the lyric
qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the
flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was
not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young
idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a fine subject
for experimentation. The boy was really intelligent, and the
soundness of his nature was like the pure paste under a delicate
glaze. Culwin had fished him out of a thick fog of family dulness,
and pulled him up to a peak in Darien; and the adventure hadn't hurt
him a bit. Indeed, the skill with which Culwin had contrived to
stimulate his curiosities without robbing them of their young bloom
of awe seemed to me a sufficient answer to Murchard's ogreish
metaphor. There was nothing hectic in Frenham's efflorescence, and
his old friend had not laid even a finger-tip on the sacred
stupidities. One wanted no better proof of that than the fact that
Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.

"There's a side of him you fellows don't see. _I_ believe that story
about the duel!" he declared; and it was of the very essence of this
belief that it should impel him--just as our little party was
dispersing--to turn back to our host with the absurd demand: "And
now you've got to tell us about _your_ ghost!"

The outer door had closed on Murchard and the others; only Frenham
and I remained; and the vigilant servant who presided over Culwin's
destinies, having brought a fresh supply of soda-water, had been
laconically ordered to bed.

Culwin's sociability was a night-blooming flower, and we knew that
he expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after
midnight. But Frenham's appeal seemed to disconcert him comically,
and he rose from the chair in which he had just reseated himself
after his farewells in the hall.

"_My_ ghost? Do you suppose I'm fool enough to go to the expense of
keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my
friends' closets?--Take another cigar," he said, revolving toward me
with a laugh.

Frenham laughed too, pulling up his slender height before the
chimney-piece as he turned to face his short bristling friend.

"Oh," he said, "you'd never be content to share if you met one you
really liked."

Culwin had dropped back into his armchair, his shock head embedded
in its habitual hollow, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh
cigar.

"Liked--_liked?_ Good Lord!" he growled.

"Ah, you _have_, then!" Frenham pounced on him in the same instant,
with a sidewise glance of victory at me; but Culwin cowered
gnomelike among his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective
cloud of smoke.

"What's the use of denying it? You've seen everything, so of course
you've seen a ghost!" his young friend persisted, talking intrepidly
into the cloud. "Or, if you haven't seen one, it's only because
you've seen two!"

The form of the challenge seemed to strike our host. He shot his
head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes
had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.

"Yes," he suddenly flung at us on a shrill jerk of laughter; "it's
only because I've seen two!"

The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a
fathomless silence, while we continued to stare at each other over
Culwin's head, and Culwin stared at his ghosts. At length Frenham,
without speaking, threw himself into the chair on the other side of
the hearth, and leaned forward with his listening smile ...






II





"OH, of course they're not show ghosts--a collector wouldn't think
anything of them ... Don't let me raise your hopes ... their one
merit is their numerical strength: the exceptional fact of their
being _two_. But, as against this, I'm bound to admit that at any
moment I could probably have exorcised them both by asking my doctor
for a prescription, or my oculist for a pair of spectacles. Only, as
I never could make up my mind whether to go to the doctor or the
oculist--whether I was afflicted by an optical or a digestive
delusion--I left them to pursue their interesting double life,
though at times they made mine exceedingly comfortable ...

"Yes--uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable!
But it was part of my stupid pride, when the thing began, not to
admit that I could be disturbed by the trifling matter of seeing
two--

"And then I'd no reason, really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I
knew I was simply bored--horribly bored. But it was part of my
boredom--I remember--that I was feeling so uncommonly well, and
didn't know how on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come
back from a long journey--down in South America and Mexico--and had
settled down for the winter near New York, with an old aunt who had
known Washington Irving and corresponded with N. P. Willis. She
lived, not far from Irvington, in a damp Gothic villa, overhung by
Norway spruces, and looking exactly like a memorial emblem done in
hair. Her personal appearance was in keeping with this image, and
her own hair--of which there was little left--might have been
sacrificed to the manufacture of the emblem.

"I had just reached the end of an agitated year, with considerable
arrears to make up in money and emotion; and theoretically it seemed
as though my aunt's mild hospitality would be as beneficial to my
nerves as to my purse. But the deuce of it was that as soon as I
felt myself safe and sheltered my energy began to revive; and how
was I to work it off inside of a memorial emblem? I had, at that
time, the agreeable illusion that sustained intellectual effort
could engage a man's whole activity; and I decided to write a great
book--I forget about what. My aunt, impressed by my plan, gave up to
me her Gothic library, filled with classics in black cloth and
daguerrotypes of faded celebrities; and I sat down at my desk to
make myself a place among their number. And to facilitate my task
she lent me a cousin to copy my manuscript.

"The cousin was a nice girl, and I had an idea that a nice girl was
just what I needed to restore my faith in human nature, and
principally in myself. She was neither beautiful nor
intelligent--poor Alice Nowell!--but it interested me to see any
woman content to be so uninteresting, and I wanted to find out the
secret of her content. In doing this I handled it rather rashly, and
put it out of joint--oh, just for a moment! There's no fatuity in
telling you this, for the poor girl had never seen any one but
cousins ...

"Well, I was sorry for what I'd done, of course, and confoundedly
bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the
house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down
to the library to fetch a book she'd mislaid, like any artless
heroine on the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered,
and it suddenly occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly
thick and pretty, would look exactly like my aunt's when she grew
older. I was glad I had noticed this, for it made it easier for me
to do what was right; and when I had found the book she hadn't lost
I told her I was leaving for Europe that week.

"Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once
what I meant. She didn't take it in the least as I'd expected--it
would have been easier if she had. She held her book very tight, and
turned away a moment to wind up the lamp on my desk--it had a ground
glass shade with vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I
remember. Then she came back, held out her hand, and said:
'Good-bye.' And as she said it she looked straight at me and kissed
me. I had never felt anything as fresh and shy and brave as her
kiss. It was worse than any reproach, and it made me ashamed to
deserve a reproach from her. I said to myself: 'I'll marry her, and
when my aunt dies she'll leave us this house, and I'll sit here at
the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over there with
her embroidery and look at me as she's looking now. And life will go
on like that for any number of years.' The prospect frightened me a
little, but at the time it didn't frighten me as much as doing
anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on
my finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with
me.

"You'll wonder why I'm enlarging on this familiar incident. It's
because the evening on which it took place was the very evening on
which I first saw the queer sight I've spoken of. Being at that time
an ardent believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect
I naturally tried to trace some kind of link between what had just
happened to me in my aunt's library, and what was to happen a few
hours later on the same night; and so the coincidence between the
two events always remained in my mind.

"I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under
the weight of the first good action I had ever consciously
committed; and young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation.
Don't imagine from this that I had hitherto been an instrument of
destruction. I had been merely a harmless young man, who had
followed his bent and declined all collaboration with Providence.
Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote the moral order of the
world, and I felt a good deal like the trustful spectator who has
given his gold watch to the conjurer, and doesn't know in what shape
he'll get it back when the trick is over ... Still, a glow of
self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I
undressed that when I'd got used to being good it probably wouldn't
make me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in
bed, and had blown out my candle, I felt that I really _was_ getting
used to it, and that, as far as I'd got, it was not unlike sinking
down into one of my aunt's very softest wool mattresses.

"I closed my eyes on this image, and when I opened them it must have
been a good deal later, for my room had grown cold, and the night
was intensely still. I was waked suddenly by the feeling we all
know--the feeling that there was something near me that hadn't been
there when I fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the
darkness. The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but
gradually a vague glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two
eyes staring back at me. I couldn't see the face attached to
them--on account of the darkness, I imagined--but as I looked the
eyes grew more and more distinct: they gave out a light of their
own.

"The sensation of being thus gazed at was far from pleasant, and you
might suppose that my first impulse would have been to jump out of
bed and hurl myself on the invisible figure attached to the eyes.
But it wasn't--my impulse was simply to lie still ... I can't say
whether this was due to an immediate sense of the uncanny nature of
the apparition--to the certainty that if I did jump out of bed I
should hurl myself on nothing--or merely to the benumbing effect of
the eyes themselves. They were the very worst eyes I've ever seen: a
man's eyes--but what a man! My first thought was that he must be
frightfully old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids
hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken.
One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a
crooked leer; and between these pulpy folds of flesh, with their
scant bristle of lashes, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks
with an agate-like rim about the pupils, looked like sea-pebbles in
the grip of a starfish.

"But the age of the eyes was not the most unpleasant thing about
them. What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security.
I don't know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to
belong to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had
always kept just inside the danger lines. They were not the eyes of
a coward, but of some one much too clever to take risks; and my
gorge rose at their look of base astuteness. Yet even that wasn't
the worst; for as we continued to scan each other I saw in them a
tinge of faint derision, and felt myself to be its object.

"At that I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me out of
bed and pitched me straight on the unseen figure at its foot. But of
course there wasn't any figure there, and my fists struck at
emptiness. Ashamed and cold, I groped about for a match and lit the
candles. The room looked just as usual--as I had known it would; and
I crawled back to bed, and blew out the lights.

"As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now
applied myself to explaining them on scientific principles. At first
I thought the illusion might have been caused by the glow of the
last embers in the chimney; but the fire-place was on the other side
of my bed, and so placed that the fire could not possibly be
reflected in my toilet glass, which was the only mirror in the room.
Then it occurred to me that I might have been tricked by the
reflection of the embers in some polished bit of wood or metal; and
though I couldn't discover any object of the sort in my line of
vision, I got up again, groped my way to the hearth, and covered
what was left of the fire. But as soon as I was back in bed the eyes
were back at its foot.

"They were an hallucination, then: that was plain. But the fact that
they were not due to any external dupery didn't make them a bit
pleasanter to see. For if they were a projection of my inner
consciousness, what the deuce was the matter with that organ? I had
gone deeply enough into the mystery of morbid pathological states to
picture the conditions under which an exploring mind might lay
itself open to such a midnight admonition; but I couldn't fit it to
my present case. I had never felt more normal, mentally and
physically; and the only unusual fact in my situation--that of
having assured the happiness of an amiable girl--did not seem of a
kind to summon unclean spirits about my pillow. But there were the
eyes still looking at me ...

"I shut mine, and tried to evoke a vision of Alice Nowell's. They
were not remarkable eyes, but they were as wholesome as fresh water,
and if she had had more imagination--or longer lashes--their
expression might have been interesting. As it was, they did not
prove very efficacious, and in a few moments I perceived that they
had mysteriously changed into the eyes at the foot of the bed. It
exasperated me more to feel these glaring at me through my shut lids
than to see them, and I opened my eyes again and looked straight
into their hateful stare ...

"And so it went on all night. I can't tell you what that night was,
nor how long it lasted. Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide
awake, and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened
'em you'd see something you dreaded and loathed? It sounds easy, but
it's devilish hard. Those eyes hung there and drew me. I had the
_vertige de l'abime_, and their red lids were the edge of my abyss. ...
I had known nervous hours before: hours when I'd felt the wind
of danger in my neck; but never this kind of strain. It wasn't that
the eyes were so awful; they hadn't the majesty of the powers of
darkness. But they had--how shall I say?--a physical effect that was
the equivalent of a bad smell: their look left a smear like a
snail's. And I didn't see what business they had with me,
anyhow--and I stared and stared, trying to find out ...

"I don't know what effect they were trying to produce; but the
effect they _did_ produce was that of making me pack my portmanteau
and bolt to town early the next morning. I left a note for my aunt,
explaining that I was ill and had gone to see my doctor; and as a
matter of fact I did feel uncommonly ill--the night seemed to have
pumped all the blood out of me. But when I reached town I didn't go
to the doctor's. I went to a friend's rooms, and threw myself on a
bed, and slept for ten heavenly hours. When I woke it was the middle
of the night, and I turned cold at the thought of what might be
waiting for me. I sat up, shaking, and stared into the darkness; but
there wasn't a break in its blessed surface, and when I saw that the
eyes were not there I dropped back into another long sleep.

"I had left no word for Alice when I fled, because I meant to go
back the next morning. But the next morning I was too exhausted to
stir. As the day went on the exhaustion increased, instead of
wearing off like the lassitude left by an ordinary night of
insomnia: the effect of the eyes seemed to be cumulative, and the
thought of seeing them again grew intolerable. For two days I
struggled with my dread; but on the third evening I pulled myself
together and decided to go back the next morning. I felt a good deal
happier as soon as I'd decided, for I knew that my abrupt
disappearance, and the strangeness of my not writing, must have been
very painful for poor Alice. That night I went to bed with an easy
mind, and fell asleep at once; but in the middle of the night I
woke, and there were the eyes ...

"Well, I simply couldn't face them; and instead of going back to my
aunt's I bundled a few things into a trunk and jumped onto the first
steamer for England. I was so dead tired when I got on board that I
crawled straight into my berth, and slept most of the way over; and
I can't tell you the bliss it was to wake from those long stretches
of dreamless sleep and look fearlessly into the darkness, _knowing_
that I shouldn't see the eyes ...

"I stayed abroad for a year, and then I stayed for another; and
during that time I never had a glimpse of them. That was enough
reason for prolonging my stay if I'd been on a desert island.
Another was, of course, that I had perfectly come to see, on the
voyage over, the folly, complete impossibility, of my marrying Alice
Nowell. The fact that I had been so slow in making this discovery
annoyed me, and made me want to avoid explanations. The bliss of
escaping at one stroke from the eyes, and from this other
embarrassment, gave my freedom an extraordinary zest; and the longer
I savoured it the better I liked its taste.

"The eyes had burned such a hole in my consciousness that for a long
time I went on puzzling over the nature of the apparition, and
wondering nervously if it would ever come back. But as time passed I
lost this dread, and retained only the precision of the image. Then
that faded in its turn.

"The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I
believe, to write another great book--a definitive work on Etruscan
influences in Italian art. At any rate, I'd found some pretext of
the kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza di Spagna and
dabbling about indefinitely in the Forum; and there, one morning, a
charming youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light,
slender and smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a
ruined altar--one to Antinous, say--but he'd come instead from New
York, with a letter (of all people) from Alice Nowell. The
letter--the first I'd had from her since our break--was simply a
line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert Noyes, and appealing to
me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that he 'had talent,' and
'wanted to write'; and, an obdurate family having insisted that his
calligraphy should take the form of double entry, Alice had
intervened to win him six months' respite, during which he was to
travel on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ultimate ability
to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck
me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval 'ordeal.'
Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted
to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than
hers; and here was a beautiful embodiment of my chance.

"Well, I imagine it's safe to lay down the general principle that
predestined geniuses don't, as a rule, appear before one in the
spring sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods.
At any rate, poor Noyes wasn't a predestined genius. But he _was_
beautiful to see, and charming as a comrade too. It was only when he
began to talk literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the
symptoms so well--the things he had 'in him,' and the things outside
him that impinged! There's the real test, after all. It was
always--punctually, inevitably, with the inexorableness of a
mechanical law--it was _always_ the wrong thing that struck him. I
grew to find a certain grim fascination in deciding in advance
exactly which wrong thing he'd select; and I acquired an astonishing
skill at the game ...

"The worst of it was that his _betise_ wasn't of the too obvious
sort. Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and
even at dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the
microscope, fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of
a slim talent, something that he could make 'do' and be happy on;
and wasn't that, after all, what I was concerned with? He was so
charming--he continued to be so charming--that he called forth all
my charity in support of this argument; and for the first few months
I really believed there was a chance for him ...

"Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the
more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a
natural grace--it was as beautiful, really, as his eye-lashes. And
he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling
him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the
throat of some artless animal. At first I used to wonder what had
put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a
brain. Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry--an
instinctive ruse to get away from family life and an office desk.
Not that Gilbert didn't--dear lad!--believe in himself. There wasn't
a trace of hypocrisy in his composition. He was sure that his 'call'
was irresistible, while to me it was the saving grace of his
situation that it _wasn't_, and that a little money, a little
leisure, a little pleasure would have turned him into an inoffensive
idler. Unluckily, however, there was no hope of money, and with the
grim alternative of the office desk before him he couldn't postpone
his attempt at literature. The stuff he turned out was deplorable,
and I see now that I knew it from the first. Still, the absurdity of
deciding a man's whole future on a first trial seemed to justify me
in withholding my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging him a
little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth to
flower.

"At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the
point of getting his term of probation extended. When I left Rome he
went with me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and
Venice. I said to myself: 'If he has anything in him, it will come
out now; and it _did_. He was never more enchanting and enchanted.
There were moments of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring
sound seemed actually to pass into his face--but only to issue forth
in a shallow flood of the palest ink ...

"Well the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no
hand but mine to do it. We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to
stay with me, not wanting him to be alone in his dismal _pension_
when he had to face the necessity of renouncing his ambition. I
hadn't, of course, relied solely on my own judgment in deciding to
advise him to drop literature. I had sent his stuff to various
people--editors and critics--and they had always sent it back with
the same chilling lack of comment. Really there was nothing on earth
to say about it--

"I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I
decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell
myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy's hopes into
splinters--but I'd like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty
hasn't been justified on that plea? I've always shrunk from usurping
the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I
decidedly prefer that it shouldn't be on an errand of destruction.
Besides, in the last issue, who was I to decide, even after a year's
trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?

"The more I looked at the part I'd resolved to play, the less I
liked it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me,
with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil's is now ...
I'd been going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he
knew that his future hung on my verdict--we'd tacitly agreed to
that. The manuscript lay between us, on my table--a novel, his first
novel, if you please!--and he reached over and laid his hand on it,
and looked up at me with all his life in the look.

"I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from
his face and on the manuscript.

"'The fact is, my dear Gilbert,' I began--

"I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.

"'Oh, look here, don't take on so, my dear fellow! I'm not so
awfully cut up as all that!' His hands were on my shoulders, and he
was laughing down on me from his full height, with a kind of
mortally-stricken gaiety that drove the knife into my side.

"He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my
duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in
hurting him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him;
but more particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so uneasily
longed to prove my good faith and my immense desire to serve her. It
really seemed like failing her twice to fail Gilbert--

"But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that
encircle the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I
might be letting myself in for if I didn't tell the truth. I said to
myself: 'I shall have him for life'--and I'd never yet seen any one,
man or woman, whom I was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well,
this impulse of egotism decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get
away from it I took a leap that landed me straight in Gilbert's
arms.

"'The thing's all right, and you're all wrong!' I shouted up at him;
and as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his incredulous
clutch, I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is
supposed to attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making
people happy _has_ its charms--

"Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation in some
spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his
emotions, and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began
to wonder what their after-taste would be--so many of the finest
don't keep! Still, I wasn't sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle,
even if it _did_ turn a trifle flat.

"After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of
his eyes--his blissful eyes... Then I fell asleep, and when I woke
the room was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk--and there were
_the other eyes_ ...

"It was three years since I'd seen them, but I'd thought of them so
often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now,
with their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed
they would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against
them ... As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming
that made it so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap
out at me at such a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the
years since I'd seen them, though my worst indiscretions were not
dark enough to invite the searchings of their infernal glare; but at
this particular moment I was really in what might have been called a
state of grace; and I can't tell you how the fact added to their
horror ...

"But it's not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were
worse. Worse by just so much as I'd learned of life in the interval;
by all the damnable implications my wider experience read into them.
I saw now what I hadn't seen before: that they were eyes which had
grown hideous gradually, which had built up their baseness
coral-wise, bit by bit, out of a series of small turpitudes slowly
accumulated through the industrious years. Yes--it came to me that
what made them so bad was that they'd grown bad so slowly ...

"There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across
the little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of
fat flesh making a muddy shadow underneath--and as their filmy stare
moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit
complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse
than the first shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood
them; but that they made it so clear that some day I should ...
Yes, that was the worst part of it, decidedly; and it was the
feeling that became stronger each time they came back to me ...

"For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded
me of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat
over the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they
came to claim their morsel of mine: since I'd made Gilbert happy
they simply wouldn't loosen their fangs. The coincidence almost made
me hate him, poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over
it a good deal, but couldn't find any hint of an explanation except
in the chance of his association with Alice Nowell. But then the
eyes had let up on me the moment I had abandoned her, so they could
hardly be the emissaries of a woman scorned, even if one could have
pictured poor Alice charging such spirits to avenge her. That set me
thinking, and I began to wonder if they would let up on me if I
abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was insidious, and I had to
stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy! he was too charming
to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all, I never found
out what they wanted ..."






III





THE fire crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the
narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed
into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an
instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots
of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded
lamp-light it became once more a dim Rembrandtish blur.

Phil Frenham, sitting in a low chair on the opposite side of the
hearth, one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand
supporting his thrown-back head, and his eyes steadily fixed on his
old friend's face, had not moved since the tale began. He continued
to maintain his silent immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak,
and it was I who, with a vague sense of disappointment at the sudden
drop of the story, finally asked: "But how long did you keep on
seeing them?"

Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own
empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question.
He appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.

"How long? Oh, off and on all that winter. It was infernal. I never
got used to them. I grew really ill."

Frenham shifted his attitude silently, and as he did so his elbow
struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the
table behind him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he
resumed his former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted
palm, his eyes intent on Culwin's face. Something in his stare
embarrassed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on
with another question:

"And you never tried sacrificing Noyes?"

"Oh, no. The fact is I didn't have to. He did it for me, poor
infatuated boy!"

"Did it for you? How do you mean?"

"He wore me out--wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his
lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he
became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing--oh, ever
so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people,
giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what
he _really_ had to give. I'd foreseen this solution from the
beginning--felt sure that, once the first ardour of authorship was
quenched, he'd drop into his place as a charming parasitic thing,
the kind of chronic Cherubino for whom, in old societies, there's
always a seat at table, and a shelter behind the ladies' skirts. I
saw him take his place as 'the poet': the poet who doesn't write.
One knows the type in every drawing-room. Living in that way doesn't
cost much--I'd worked it all out in my mind, and felt sure that,
with a little help, he could manage it for the next few years; and
meanwhile he'd be sure to marry. I saw him married to a widow,
rather older, with a good cook and a well-run house. And I actually
had my eye on the widow ... Meanwhile I did everything to
facilitate the transition--lent him money to ease his conscience,
introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But
nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate
head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on
repeating Gautier's axiom, and battering and filing at his limp
prose till he'd spread it out over Lord knows how many thousand
sloppy pages. Now and then he would send a pailful to a publisher,
and of course it would always come back.

"At first it didn't matter--he thought he was 'misunderstood.' He
took the attitudes of genius, and whenever an opus came home he
wrote another to keep it company. Then he had a reaction of despair,
and accused me of deceiving him, and Lord knows what. I got angry at
that, and told him it was he who had deceived himself. He'd come to
me determined to write, and I'd done my best to help him. That was
the extent of my offence, and I'd done it for his cousin's sake, not
his.

"That seemed to strike home, and he didn't answer for a minute. Then
he said: 'My time's up and my money's up. What do you think I'd
better do?'

"'I think you'd better not be an ass,' I said.

"He turned red, and asked: 'What do you mean by being an ass?'

"I took a letter from my desk and held it out to him.

"'I mean refusing this offer of Mrs. Ellinger's: to be her secretary
at a salary of five thousand dollars. There may be a lot more in it
than that.'

"He flung out his hand with a violence that struck the letter from
mine. 'Oh, I know well enough what's in it!' he said, scarlet to the
roots of his hair.

"'And what's your answer, if you know?' I asked.

"He made none at the minute, but turned away slowly to the door.
There, with his hand on the threshold, he stopped to ask, almost
under his breath: 'Then you really think my stuff's no good?'

"I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don't defend my
laugh--it was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation
that the boy was a fool, and that I'd done my best for him--I really
had.

"He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That
afternoon I left for Frascati, where I'd promised to spend the
Sunday with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by
the same token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the
eyes. I dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me
before when their visitations ceased; and when I woke the next
morning, in my peaceful painted room above the ilexes, I felt the
utter weariness and deep relief that always followed on that
repairing slumber. I put in two blessed nights at Frascati, and when
I got back to my rooms in Rome I found that Gilbert had gone ...
Oh, nothing tragic had happened--the episode never rose to _that_.
He'd simply packed his manuscripts and left for America--for his
family and the Wall Street desk. He left a decent little note to
tell me of his decision, and behaved altogether, in the
circumstances, as little like a fool as it's possible for a fool to
behave ..."






IV





CULWIN paused again, and again Frenham sat motionless, the dusky
contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.

"And what became of Noyes afterward?" I finally asked, still
disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some
connecting thread between the parallel lines of the tale.

Culwin twitched his shoulders. "Oh, nothing became of him--because
he became nothing. There could be no question of 'becoming' about
it. He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a
clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him
once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn't shaved. I
was told he drank. He didn't recognize me."

"And the eyes?" I asked, after another pause which Frenham's
continued silence made oppressive.

Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the
shadows. "I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two
and two together if you can. For my part, I haven't found the link."

He rose stiffly, his hands in his pockets, and walked over to the
table on which reviving drinks had been set out.

"You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my
dear fellow. Here, Phil--" He turned back to the hearth.

Frenham still sat in his low chair, making no response to his host's
hospitable summons. But as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes
met in a long look; after which, to my intense surprise, the young
man, turning suddenly in his seat, flung his arms across the table,
and dropped his face upon them.

Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his
face.

"Phil--what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared _you?_ My dear
boy--my dear fellow--I never had such a tribute to my literary
ability, never!"

He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the
hearth-rug, his hands still in his pockets, gazing down in honest
perplexity at the youth's bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no
answer, he moved a step or two nearer.

"Cheer up, my dear Phil! It's years since I've seen them--apparently
I've done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos.
Unless my present evocation of them has made _you_ see them; which
would be their worst stroke yet!"

His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved
still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on
the lad's shoulders.

"Phil, my dear boy, really--what's the matter? Why don't you answer?
_Have_ you seen the eyes?"

Frenham's face was still pressed against his arms, and from where I
stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this
unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did
so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his perplexed
congested face, and I caught its sudden reflection in the mirror
behind Frenham's head.

Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the
mirror, as if scarcely recognizing the countenance in it as his own.
But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an
appreciable space of time he and the image in the glass confronted
each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go
of Frenham's shoulders, and drew back a step, covering his eyes with
his hands ...

Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.






THE BLOND BEAST

I





IT had been almost too easy--that was young Millner's first feeling,
as he stood again on the Spence door-step, the great moment of his
interview behind him, and Fifth Avenue rolling its grimy Pactolus at
his feet.

Halting there in the winter light, with the clang of the ponderous
vestibule doors in his ears, and his eyes carried down the
perspective of the packed interminable thoroughfare, he even dared
to remember Rastignac's apostrophe to Paris, and to hazard
recklessly under his small fair moustache: "Who knows?"

He, Hugh Millner, at any rate, knew a good deal already: a good deal
more than he had imagined it possible to learn in half an hour's
talk with a man like Orlando G. Spence; and the loud-rumouring city
spread out there before him seemed to grin like an accomplice who
knew the rest.

A gust of wind, whirling down from the dizzy height of the building
on the next corner, drove sharply through his overcoat and compelled
him to clutch at his hat. It was a bitter January day, a day of
fierce light and air, when the sunshine cut like icicles and the
wind sucked one into black gulfs at the street corners. But
Millner's complacency was like a warm lining to his shabby coat, and
heaving steadied his hat he continued to stand on the Spence
threshold, lost in the vision revealed to him from the Pisgah of its
marble steps. Yes, it was wonderful what the vision showed him. ...
In his absorption he might have frozen fast to the door-step if
the Rhadamanthine portals behind him had not suddenly opened to let
out a slim fur-coated figure, the figure, as he perceived, of the
youth whom he had caught in the act of withdrawal as he entered Mr.
Spence's study, and whom the latter, with a wave of his affable
hand, had detained to introduce as "my son Draper."

It was characteristic of the odd friendliness of the whole scene
that the great man should have thought it worth while to call back
and name his heir to a mere humble applicant like Millner; and that
the heir should shed on him, from a pale high-browed face, a smile
of such deprecating kindness. It was characteristic, equally, of
Millner, that he should at once mark the narrowness of the shoulders
sustaining this ingenuous head; a narrowness, as he now observed,
imperfectly concealed by the wide fur collar of young Spence's
expensive and badly cut coat. But the face took on, as the youth
smiled his surprise at their second meeting, a look of almost
plaintive good-will: the kind of look that Millner scorned and yet
could never quite resist.

"Mr. Millner? Are you--er--waiting?" the lad asked, with an
intention of serviceableness that was like a finer echo of his
father's resounding cordiality.

"For my motor? No," Millner jested in his frank free voice. "The
fact is, I was just standing here lost in the contemplation of my
luck"--and as his companion's pale blue eyes seemed to shape a
question, "my extraordinary luck," he explained, "in having been
engaged as your father's secretary."

"Oh," the other rejoined, with a faint colour in his sallow cheek.
"I'm so glad," he murmured: "but I was sure--" He stopped, and the
two looked kindly at each other.

Millner averted his gaze first, almost fearful of its betraying the
added sense of his own strength and dexterity which he drew from the
contrast of the other's frailness.

"Sure? How could any one be sure? I don't believe in it yet!" he
laughed out in the irony of his triumph.

The boy's words did not sound like a mere civility--Millner felt in
them an homage to his power.

"Oh, yes: I was sure," young Draper repeated. "Sure as soon as I saw
you, I mean."

Millner tingled again with this tribute to his physical straightness
and bloom. Yes, he looked his part, hang it--he looked it!

But his companion still lingered, a shy sociability in his eye.

"If you're walking, then, can I go along a little way?" And he
nodded southward down the shabby gaudy avenue.

That, again, was part of the high comedy of the hour--that Millner
should descend the Spence steps at young Spence's side, and stroll
down Fifth Avenue with him at the proudest moment of the afternoon;
O. G. Spence's secretary walking abroad with O. G. Spence's heir! He
had the scientific detachment to pull out his watch and furtively
note the hour. Yes--it was exactly forty minutes since he had rung
the Spence door-bell and handed his card to a gelid footman, who,
openly sceptical of his claim to be received, had left him
unceremoniously planted on the cold tessellations of the vestibule.

"Some day," Miller grinned to himself, "I think I'll take that
footman as furnace-man--or to do the boots." And he pictured his
marble palace rising from the earth to form the mausoleum of a
footman's pride.

Only forty minutes ago! And now he had his opportunity fast! And he
never meant to let it go! It was incredible, what had happened in
the interval. He had gone up the Spence steps an unknown young man,
out of a job, and with no substantial hope of getting into one: a
needy young man with a mother and two limp sisters to be helped, and
a lengthening figure of debt that stood by his bed through the
anxious nights. And he went down the steps with his present assured,
and his future lit by the hues of the rainbow above the pot of gold.
Certainly a fellow who made his way at that rate had it "in him,"
and could afford to trust his star.

Descending from this joyous flight he stooped his ear to the
discourse of young Spence.

"My father'll work you rather hard, you know: but you look as if you
wouldn't mind that."

Millner pulled up his inches with the self-consciousness of the man
who had none to waste. "Oh, no, I shan't mind that: I don't mind any
amount of work if it leads to something."

"Just so," Draper Spence assented eagerly. "That's what I feel. And
you'll find that whatever my father undertakes leads to such awfully
fine things."

Millner tightened his lips on a grin. He was thinking only of where
the work would lead him, not in the least of where it might land the
eminent Orlando G. Spence. But he looked at his companion
sympathetically.

"You're a philanthropist like your father, I see?"

"Oh, I don't know." They had paused at a crossing, and young Draper,
with a dubious air, stood striking his agate-headed stick against
the curb-stone. "I believe in a purpose, don't you?" he asked,
lifting his blue eyes suddenly to Millner's face.

"A purpose? I should rather say so! I believe in nothing else,"
cried Millner, feeling as if his were something he could grip in his
hand and swing like a club.

Young Spence seemed relieved. "Yes--I tie up to that. There _is_ a
Purpose. And so, after all, even if I don't agree with my father on
minor points ..." He coloured quickly, and looked again at
Millner. "I should like to talk to you about this some day."

Millner smothered another smile. "We'll have lots of talks, I hope."

"Oh, if you can spare the time--!" said Draper, almost humbly.

"Why, I shall be there on tap!"

"For father, not me." Draper hesitated, with another self-confessing
smile. "Father thinks I talk too much--that I keep going in and out
of things. He doesn't believe in analyzing: he thinks it's
destructive. But it hasn't destroyed my ideals." He looked wistfully
up and down the clanging street. "And that's the main thing, isn't
it? I mean, that one should have an Ideal." He turned back almost
gaily to Millner. "I suspect you're a revolutionist too!"

"Revolutionist? Rather! I belong to the Red Syndicate and the Black
Hand!" Millner joyfully assented.

Young Draper chuckled at the enormity of the joke. "First rate!
We'll have incendiary meetings!" He pulled an elaborately armorial
watch from his enfolding furs. "I'm so sorry, but I must say
good-bye--this is my street," he explained. Millner, with a faint
twinge of envy, glanced across at the colonnaded marble edifice in
the farther corner. "Going to the club?" he said carelessly.

His companion looked surprised. "Oh, no: I never go _there_. It's
too boring." And he brought out, after one of the pauses in which he
seemed rather breathlessly to measure the chances of his listener's
indulgence: "I'm just going over to a little Bible Class I have in
Tenth Avenue."

Millner, for a moment or two, stood watching the slim figure wind
its way through the mass of vehicles to the opposite corner; then he
pursued his own course down Fifth Avenue, measuring his steps to the
rhythmic refrain: "It's too easy--it's too easy--it's too easy!"

His own destination being the small shabby flat off University Place
where three tender females awaited the result of his mission, he had
time, on the way home, after abandoning himself to a general sense
of triumph, to dwell specifically on the various aspects of his
achievement. Viewed materially and practically, it was a thing to be
proud of; yet it was chiefly on aesthetic grounds--because he had
done so exactly what he had set out to do--that he glowed with pride
at the afternoon's work. For, after all, any young man with the
proper "pull" might have applied to Orlando G. Spence for the post
of secretary, and even have penetrated as far as the great man's
study; but that he, Hugh Millner, should not only have forced his
way to this fastness, but have established, within a short half
hour, his right to remain there permanently: well, this, if it
proved anything, proved that the first rule of success was to know
how to live up to one's principles.

"One must have a plan--one must have a plan," the young man
murmured, looking with pity at the vague faces which the crowd bore
past him, and feeling almost impelled to detain them and expound his
doctrine. But the planlessness of average human nature was of course
the measure of his opportunity; and he smiled to think that every
purposeless face he met was a guarantee of his own advancement, a
rung in the ladder he meant to climb.

Yes, the whole secret of success was to know what one wanted to do,
and not to be afraid to do it. His own history was proving that
already. He had not been afraid to give up his small but safe
position in a real-estate office for the precarious adventure of a
private secretaryship; and his first glimpse of his new employer had
convinced him that he had not mistaken his calling. When one has a
"way" with one--as, in all modesty, Millner knew he had--not to
utilize it is a stupid waste of force. And when he had learned that
Orlando G. Spence was in search of a private secretary who should be
able to give him intelligent assistance in the execution of his
philanthropic schemes, the young man felt that his hour had come. It
was no part of his plan to associate himself with one of the masters
of finance: he had a notion that minnows who go to a whale to learn
how to grow bigger are likely to be swallowed in the process. The
opportunity of a clever young man with a cool head and no prejudices
(this again was drawn from life) lay rather in making himself
indispensable to one of the beneficent rich, and in using the
timidities and conformities of his patron as the means of his
scruples about formulating these principles to himself. It was not
for nothing that, in his college days, he had hunted the
hypothetical "moral sense" to its lair, and dragged from their
concealment the various self-advancing sentiments dissembled under
its edifying guise. His strength lay in his precocious insight into
the springs of action, and in his refusal to classify them according
to the accepted moral and social sanctions. He had to the full the
courage of his lack of convictions.

To a young man so untrammelled by prejudice it was self-evident that
helpless philanthropists like Orlando G. Spence were just as much
the natural diet of the strong as the lamb is of the wolf. It was
pleasanter to eat than to be eaten, in a world where, as yet, there
seemed to be no third alternative; and any scruples one might feel
as to the temporary discomfort of one's victim were speedily
dispelled by that larger scientific view which took into account the
social destructiveness of the benevolent. Millner was persuaded that
every individual woe mitigated by the philanthropy of Orlando G.
Spence added just so much to the sum-total of human inefficiency,
and it was one of his favourite subjects of speculation to picture
the innumerable social evils that may follow upon the rescue of one
infant from Mount Taygetus.

"We're all born to prey on each other, and pity for suffering is one
of the most elementary stages of egotism. Until one has passed
beyond, and acquired a taste for the more complex forms of the
instinct--"

He stopped suddenly, checked in his advance by a sallow wisp of a
dog which had plunged through the press of vehicles to hurl itself
between his legs. Millner did not dislike animals, though he
preferred that they should be healthy and handsome. The dog under
his feet was neither. Its cringing contour showed an injudicious
mingling of races, and its meagre coat betrayed the deplorable habit
of sleeping in coal-holes and subsisting on an innutritious diet. In
addition to these physical disadvantages, its shrinking and
inconsequent movements revealed a congenital weakness of character
which, even under more favourable conditions, would hardly have
qualified it to become a useful member of society; and Millner was
not sorry to notice that it moved with a limp of the hind leg that
probably doomed it to speedy extinction.

The absurdity of such an animal's attempting to cross Fifth Avenue
at the most crowded hour of the afternoon struck him as only less
great than the irony of its having been permitted to achieve the
feat; and he stood a moment looking at it, and wondering what had
moved it to the attempt. It was really a perfect type of the human
derelict which Orlando G. Spence and his kind were devoting their
millions to perpetuate, and he reflected how much better Nature knew
her business in dealing with the superfluous quadruped.

An elderly lady advancing in the opposite direction evidently took a
less dispassionate view of the case, for she paused to remark
emotionally: "Oh, you poor thing!" while she stooped to caress the
object of her sympathy. The dog, with characteristic lack of
discrimination, viewed her gesture with suspicion, and met it with a
snarl. The lady turned pale and shrank away, a chivalrous male
repelled the animal with his umbrella, and two idle boys backed his
action by a vigorous "Hi!" The object of these hostile
demonstrations, apparently attributing them not to its own unsocial
conduct, but merely to the chronic animosity of the universe, dashed
wildly around the corner into a side street, and as it did so
Millner noticed that the lame leg left a little trail of blood.
Irresistibly, he turned the corner to see what would happen next. It
was deplorably clear that the animal itself had no plan; but after
several inconsequent and contradictory movements it plunged down an
area, where it backed up against the iron gate, forlornly and
foolishly at bay.

Millner, still following, looked down at it, and wondered. Then he
whistled, just to see if it would come; but this only caused it to
start up on its quivering legs, with desperate turns of the head
that measured the chances of escape.

"Oh, hang it, you poor devil, stay there if you like!" the young man
murmured, walking away.

A few yards off he looked back, and saw that the dog had made a rush
out of the area and was limping furtively down the street. The idle
boys were in the offing, and he disliked the thought of leaving them
in control of the situation. Softly, with infinite precautions, he
began to follow the dog. He did not know why he was doing it, but
the impulse was overmastering. For a moment he seemed to be gaining
upon his quarry, but with a cunning sense of his approach it
suddenly turned and hobbled across the frozen grass-plot adjoining a
shuttered house. Against the wall at the back of the plot it cowered
down in a dirty snow-drift, as if disheartened by the struggle.
Millner stood outside the railings and looked at it. He reflected
that under the shelter of the winter dusk it might have the luck to
remain there unmolested, and that in the morning it would probably
be dead of cold. This was so obviously the best solution that he
began to move away again; but as he did so the idle boys confronted
him.

"Ketch yer dog for yer, boss?" they grinned.

Millner consigned them to the devil, and stood sternly watching them
till the first stage of the journey had carried them around the
nearest corner; then, after pausing to look once more up and down
the empty street, laid his hand on the railing, and vaulted over it
into the grass-plot. As he did so, he reflected that, since pity for
suffering was one of the most elementary forms of egotism, he ought
to have remembered that it was necessarily one of the most
tenacious.






II





"My chief aim in life?" Orlando G. Spence repeated. He threw himself
back in his chair, straightened the tortoise-shell _pince-nez_, on
his short blunt nose, and beamed down the luncheon table at the two
young men who shared his repast.

His glance rested on his son Draper, seated opposite him behind a
barrier of Georgian silver and orchids; but his words were addressed
to his secretary who, stylograph in hand, had turned from the
seductions of a mushroom _souffle_ in order to jot down, for the
Sunday _Investigator_, an outline of his employer's views and
intentions respecting the newly endowed Orlando G. Spence College
for Missionaries. It was Mr. Spence's practice to receive in person
the journalists privileged to impart his opinions to a waiting
world; but during the last few months--and especially since the vast
project of the Missionary College had been in process of
development--the pressure of business and beneficence had
necessitated Millner's frequent intervention, and compelled the
secretary to snatch the sense of his patron's elucubrations between
the courses of their hasty meals.

Young Millner had a healthy appetite, and it was not one of his
least sacrifices to be so often obliged to curb it in the interest
of his advancement; but whenever he waved aside one of the triumphs
of Mr. Spence's _chef_ he was conscious of rising a step in his
employer's favour. Mr. Spence did not despise the pleasures of the
table, though he appeared to regard them as the reward of success
rather than as the alleviation of effort; and it increased his sense
of his secretary's merit to note how keenly the young man enjoyed
the fare which he was so frequently obliged to deny himself. Draper,
having subsisted since infancy on a diet of truffles and terrapin,
consumed such delicacies with the insensibility of a traveller
swallowing a railway sandwich; but Millner never made the mistake of
concealing from Mr. Spence his sense of what he was losing when duty
constrained him to exchange the fork for the pen.

"My chief aim in life!" Mr. Spence repeated, removing his eye-glass
and swinging it thoughtfully on his finger. ("I'm sorry you should
miss this _souffle_, Millner: it's worth while.) Why, I suppose I
might say that my chief aim in life is to leave the world better
than I found it. Yes: I don't know that I could put it better than
that. To leave the world better than I found it. It wouldn't be a
bad idea to use that as a head-line. _'Wants to leave the world
better than he found it.'_ It's exactly the point I should like to
make in this talk about the College."

Mr. Spence paused, and his glance once more reverted to his son,
who, having pushed aside his plate, sat watching Millner with a
dreamy intensity.

"And it's the point I want to make with you, too, Draper," his
father continued genially, while he turned over with a critical fork
the plump and perfectly matched asparagus which a footman was
presenting to his notice. "I want to make you feel that nothing else
counts in comparison with that--no amount of literary success or
intellectual celebrity."

"Oh, I _do_ feel that," Draper murmured, with one of his quick
blushes, and a glance that wavered between his father and Millner.
The secretary kept his eyes on his notes, and young Spence
continued, after a pause: "Only the thing is--isn't it?--to try and
find out just what _does_ make the world better?"

"To _try_ to find out?" his father echoed compassionately. "It's not
necessary to try very hard. Goodness is what makes the world
better."

"Yes, yes, of course," his son nervously interposed; "but the
question is, what _is_ good--"

Mr. Spence, with a darkening brow, brought his fist down
emphatically on the damask. "I'll thank you not to blaspheme, my
son!"

Draper's head reared itself a trifle higher on his thin neck. "I was
not going to blaspheme; only there may be different ways--"

"There's where you're mistaken, Draper. There's only one way:
there's my way," said Mr. Spence in a tone of unshaken conviction.

"I know, father; I see what you mean. But don't you see that even
your way wouldn't be the right way for you if you ceased to believe
that it was?"

His father looked at him with mingled bewilderment and reprobation.
"Do you mean to say that the fact of goodness depends on my
conception of it, and not on God Almighty's?"

"I do ... yes ... in a specific sense ..." young Draper
falteringly maintained; and Mr. Spence turned with a discouraged
gesture toward his secretary's suspended pen.

"I don't understand your scientific jargon, Draper; and I don't want
to.--What's the next point, Millner? (No; no _savarin_. Bring the
fruit--and the coffee with it.)"

Millner, keenly aware that an aromatic _savarin au rhum_ was
describing an arc behind his head previous to being rushed back to
the pantry under young Draper's indifferent eye, stiffened himself
against this last assault of the enemy, and read out firmly: "_ What
relation do you consider that a man's business conduct should bear
to his religious and domestic life?_"

Mr. Spence mused a moment. "Why, that's a stupid question. It goes
over the same ground as the other one. A man ought to do good with
his money--that's all. Go on."

At this point the butler's murmur in his ear caused him to push back
his chair, and to arrest Millner's interrogatory by a rapid gesture.
"Yes; I'm coming. Hold the wire." Mr. Spence rose and plunged into
the adjoining "office," where a telephone and a Remington divided
the attention of a young lady in spectacles who was preparing for
Zenana work in the East.

As the door closed, the butler, having placed the coffee and
liqueurs on the table, withdrew in the rear of his battalion, and
the two young men were left alone beneath the Rembrandts and
Hobbemas on the dining-room walls.

There was a moment's silence between them; then young Spence,
leaning across the table, said in the lowered tone of intimacy: "Why
do you suppose he dodged that last question?"

Millner, who had rapidly taken an opulent purple fig from the
fruit-dish nearest him, paused in surprise in the act of hurrying it
to his lips.

"I mean," Draper hastened on, "the question as to the relation
between business and private morality. It's such an interesting one,
and he's just the person who ought to tackle it."

Millner, despatching the fig, glanced down at his notes. "I don't
think your father meant to dodge the question."

Young Draper continued to look at him intently. "You think he
imagined that his answer really covers the ground?"

"As much as it needs to be covered."

The son of the house glanced away with a sigh. "You know things
about him that I don't," he said wistfully, but without a tinge of
resentment in his tone.

"Oh, as to that--(may I give myself some coffee?)" Millner, in his
walk around the table to fill his cup, paused a moment to lay an
affectionate hand on Draper's shoulder. "Perhaps I know him
_better_, in a sense: outsiders often get a more accurate focus."

Draper considered this. "And your idea is that he acts on principles
he has never thought of testing or defining?"

Millner looked up quickly, and for an instant their glances crossed.
"How do you mean?"

"I mean: that he's an inconscient instrument of goodness, as it
were? A--a sort of blindly beneficent force?"

The other smiled. "That's not a bad definition. I know one thing
about him, at any rate: he's awfully upset at your having chucked
your Bible Class."

A shadow fell on young Spence's candid brow. "I know. But what can I
do about it? That's what I was thinking of when I tried to show him
that goodness, in a certain sense, is purely subjective: that one
can't do good against one's principles." Again his glance appealed
to Millner. "_ You_ understand me, don't you?"

Millner stirred his coffee in a silence not unclouded by perplexity.
"Theoretically, perhaps. It's a pretty question, certainly. But I
also understand your father's feeling that it hasn't much to do with
real life: especially now that he's got to make a speech in
connection with the founding of this Missionary College. He may
think that any hint of internecine strife will weaken his prestige.
Mightn't you have waited a little longer?"

"How could I, when I might have been expected to take a part in this
performance? To talk, and say things I didn't mean? That was exactly
what made me decide not to wait."

The door opened and Mr. Spence re-entered the room. As he did so his
son rose abruptly as if to leave it.

"Where are you off to, Draper?" the banker asked.

"I'm in rather a hurry, sir--"

Mr. Spence looked at his watch. "You can't be in more of a hurry
than I am; and I've got seven minutes and a half." He seated himself
behind the coffee--tray, lit a cigar, laid his watch on the table,
and signed to Draper to resume his place. "No, Millner, don't you
go; I want you both." He turned to the secretary. "You know that
Draper's given up his Bible Class? I understand it's not from the
pressure of engagements--" Mr. Spence's narrow lips took an ironic
curve under the straight-clipped stubble of his moustache--"it's on
principle, he tells me. He's _principled_ against doing good!"

Draper lifted a protesting hand. "It's not exactly that, father--"

"I know: you'll tell me it's some scientific quibble that I don't
understand. I've never had time to go in for intellectual
hair-splitting. I've found too many people down in the mire who
needed a hand to pull them out. A busy man has to take his choice
between helping his fellow-men and theorizing about them. I've
preferred to help. (You might take that down for the _Investigator_,
Millner.) And I thank God I've never stopped to ask what made me
want to do good. I've just yielded to the impulse--that's all." Mr.
Spence turned back to his son. "Better men than either of us have
been satisfied with that creed, my son."

Draper was silent, and Mr. Spence once more addressed himself to his
secretary. "Millner, you're a reader: I've caught you at it. And I
know this boy talks to you. What have you got to say? Do you suppose
a Bible Class ever _hurt_ anybody?"

Millner paused a moment, feeling all through his nervous system the
fateful tremor of the balance. "That's what I was just trying to
tell him, sir--"

"Ah; you were? That's good. Then I'll only say one thing more. Your
doing what you've done at this particular moment hurts me more,
Draper, than your teaching the gospel of Jesus could possibly have
hurt those young men over in Tenth Avenue." Mr. Spence arose and
restored his watch to his pocket. "I shall want you in twenty
minutes, Millner."

The door closed on him, and for a while the two young men sat silent
behind their cigar fumes. Then Draper Spence broke out, with a catch
in his throat: "That's what I can't bear, Millner, what I simply
can't _bear:_ to hurt him, to hurt his faith in _me!_ It's an awful
responsibility, isn't it, to tamper with anybody's faith in
anything?"






III





THE twenty minutes prolonged themselves to forty, the forty to
fifty, and the fifty to an hour; and still Millner waited for Mr.
Spence's summons.

During the two years of his secretaryship the young man had learned
the significance of such postponements. Mr. Spence's days were
organized like a railway time-table, and a delay of an hour implied
a casualty as far-reaching as the breaking down of an express. Of
the cause of the present derangement Hugh Millner was ignorant; and
the experience of the last months allowed him to fluctuate between
conflicting conjectures. All were based on the indisputable fact
that Mr. Spence was "bothered"--had for some time past been
"bothered." And it was one of Millner's discoveries that an
extremely parsimonious use of the emotions underlay Mr. Spence's
expansive manner and fraternal phraseology, and that he did not
throw away his feelings any more than (for all his philanthropy) he
threw away his money. If he was bothered, then, it could be only
because a careful survey of his situation had forced on him some
unpleasant fact with which he was not immediately prepared to deal;
and any unpreparedness on Mr. Spence's part was also a significant
symptom.

Obviously, Millner's original conception of his employer's character
had suffered extensive modification; but no final outline had
replaced the first conjectural image. The two years spent in Mr.
Spence's service had produced too many contradictory impressions to
be fitted into any definite pattern; and the chief lesson Millner
had learned from them was that life was less of an exact science,
and character a more incalculable element, than he had been taught
in the schools. In the light of this revised impression, his own
footing seemed less secure than he had imagined, and the rungs of
the ladder he was climbing more slippery than they had looked from
below. He was not without the reassuring sense of having made
himself, in certain small ways, necessary to Mr. Spence; and this
conviction was confirmed by Draper's reiterated assurance of his
father's appreciation. But Millner had begun to suspect that one
might be necessary to Mr. Spence one day, and a superfluity, if not
an obstacle, the next; and that it would take superhuman astuteness
to foresee how and when the change would occur. Every fluctuation of
the great man's mood was therefore anxiously noted by the young
meteorologist in his service; and this observer's vigilance was now
strained to the utmost by the little cloud, no bigger than a man's
hand, adumbrated by the banker's unpunctuality.

When Mr. Spence finally appeared, his aspect did not tend to
dissipate the cloud. He wore what Millner had learned to call his
"back-door face": a blank barred countenance, in which only an
occasional twitch of the lids behind his glasses suggested that some
one was on the watch. In this mood Mr. Spence usually seemed
unconscious of his secretary's presence, or aware of it only as an
arm terminating in a pen. Millner, accustomed on such occasions to
exist merely as a function, sat waiting for the click of the spring
that should set him in action; but the pressure not being applied,
he finally hazarded: "Are we to go on with the _Investigator_, sir?"

Mr. Spence, who had been pacing up and down between the desk and the
fireplace, threw himself into his usual seat at Millner's elbow.

"I don't understand this new notion of Draper's," he said abruptly.
"Where's he got it from? No one ever learned irreligion in my
household."

He turned his eyes on Millner, who had the sense of being
scrutinized through a ground-glass window which left him visible
while it concealed his observer. The young man let his pen describe
two or three vague patterns on the blank sheet before him.

"Draper has ideas--" he risked at last.

Mr. Spence looked hard at him. "That's all right," he said. "I want
my son to have everything. But what's the point of mixing up ideas
and principles? I've seen fellows who did that, and they were
generally trying to borrow five dollars to get away from the
sheriff. What's all this talk about goodness? Goodness isn't an
idea. It's a fact. It's as solid as a business proposition. And it's
Draper's duty, as the son of a wealthy man, and the prospective
steward of a great fortune, to elevate the standards of other young
men--of young men who haven't had his opportunities. The rich ought
to preach contentment, and to set the example themselves. We have
our cares, but we ought to conceal them. We ought to be cheerful,
and accept things as they are--not go about sowing dissent and
restlessness. What has Draper got to give these boys in his Bible
Class, that's so much better than what he wants to take from them?
That's the question I'd like to have answered?"

Mr. Spence, carried away by his own eloquence, had removed his
_pince-nez_ and was twirling it about his extended fore-finger with
the gesture habitual to him when he spoke in public. After a pause,
he went on, with a drop to the level of private intercourse: "I tell
you this because I know you have a good deal of influence with
Draper. He has a high opinion of your brains. But you're a practical
fellow, and you must see what I mean. Try to make Draper see it.
Make him understand how it looks to have him drop his Bible Class
just at this particular time. It was his own choice to take up
religious teaching among young men. He began with our office-boys,
and then the work spread and was blessed. I was almost alarmed, at
one time, at the way it took hold of him: when the papers began to
talk about him as a formative influence I was afraid he'd lose his
head and go into the church. Luckily he tried University Settlement
first; but just as I thought he was settling down to that, he took
to worrying about the Higher Criticism, and saying he couldn't go on
teaching fairy-tales as history. I can't see that any good ever came
of criticizing what our parents believed, and it's a queer time for
Draper to criticize _my_ belief just as I'm backing it to the extent
of five millions."

Millner remained silent; and, as though his silence were an
argument, Mr. Spence continued combatively: "Draper's always talking
about some distinction between religion and morality. I don't
understand what he means. I got my morals out of the Bible, and I
guess there's enough left in it for Draper. If religion won't make a
man moral, I don't see why irreligion should. And he talks about
using his mind--well, can't he use that in Wall Street? A man can
get a good deal farther in life watching the market than picking
holes in Genesis; and he can do more good too. There's a time for
everything; and Draper seems to me to have mixed up week-days with
Sunday."

Mr. Spence replaced his eye-glasses, and stretching his hand to the
silver box at his elbow, extracted from it one of the long cigars
sheathed in gold-leaf which were reserved for his private
consumption. The secretary hastened to tender him a match, and for a
moment he puffed in silence. When he spoke again it was in a
different note.

"I've got about all the bother I can handle just now, without this
nonsense of Draper's. That was one of the Trustees of the College
with me. It seems the _Flashlight_ has been trying to stir up a
fuss--" Mr. Spence paused, and turned his _pince-nez_ on his
secretary. "You haven't heard from them?" he asked.

"From the _Flashlight?_ No." Millner's surprise was genuine.

He detected a gleam of relief behind Mr. Spence's glasses. "It may
be just malicious talk. That's the worst of good works; they bring
out all the meanness in human nature. And then there are always
women mixed up in them, and there never was a woman yet who
understood the difference between philanthropy and business." He
drew again at his cigar, and then, with an unwonted movement, leaned
forward and mechanically pushed the box toward Millner. "Help
yourself," he said.

Millner, as mechanically, took one of the virginally cinctured
cigars, and began to undo its wrappings. It was the first time he
had ever been privileged to detach that golden girdle, and nothing
could have given him a better measure of the importance of the
situation, and of the degree to which he was apparently involved in
it. "You remember that San Pablo rubber business? That's what
they've been raking up," said Mr. Spence abruptly.

Millner paused in the act of striking a match. Then, with an
appreciable effort of the will, he completed the gesture, applied
the flame to his cigar, and took a long inhalation. The cigar was
certainly delicious.

Mr. Spence, drawing a little closer, leaned forward and touched him
on the arm. The touch caused Millner to turn his head, and for an
instant the glance of the two men crossed at short range. Millner
was conscious, first, of a nearer view than he had ever had of his
employer's face, and of its vaguely suggesting a seamed sandstone
head, the kind of thing that lies in a corner in the court of a
museum, and in which only the round enamelled eyes have resisted the
wear of time. His next feeling was that he had now reached the
moment to which the offer of the cigar had been a prelude. He had
always known that, sooner or later, such a moment would come; all
his life, in a sense, had been a preparation for it. But in entering
Mr. Spence's service he had not foreseen that it would present
itself in this form. He had seen himself consciously guiding that
gentleman up to the moment, rather than being thrust into it by a
stronger hand. And his first act of reflection was the resolve that,
in the end, his hand should prove the stronger of the two. This was
followed, almost immediately, by the idea that to be stronger than
Mr. Spence's it would have to be very strong indeed. It was odd that
he should feel this, since--as far as verbal communication went--it
was Mr. Spence who was asking for his support. In a theoretical
statement of the case the banker would have figured as being at
Millner's mercy; but one of the queerest things about experience was
the way it made light of theory. Millner felt now as though he were
being crushed by some inexorable engine of which he had been playing
with the lever. ...

He had always been intensely interested in observing his own
reactions, and had regarded this faculty of self-detachment as of
immense advantage in such a career as he had planned. He felt this
still, even in the act of noting his own bewilderment--felt it the
more in contrast to the odd unconsciousness of Mr. Spence's
attitude, of the incredible candour of his self-abasement and
self-abandonment. It was clear that Mr. Spence was not troubled by
the repercussion of his actions in the consciousness of others; and
this looked like a weakness--unless it were, instead, a great
strength. ...

Through the hum of these swarming thoughts Mr. Spence's voice was
going on. "That's the only rag of proof they've got; and they got it
by one of those nasty accidents that nobody can guard against. I
don't care how conscientiously a man attends to business, he can't
always protect himself against meddlesome people. I don't pretend to
know how the letter came into their hands; but they've got it; and
they mean to use it--and they mean to say that you wrote it for me,
and that you knew what it was about when you wrote it. ... They'll
probably be after you tomorrow--"

Mr. Spence, restoring his cigar to his lips, puffed at it slowly. In
the pause that followed there was an instant during which the
universe seemed to Hugh Millner like a sounding-board bent above his
single consciousness. If he spoke, what thunders would be sent back
to him from that intently listening vastness?

"You see?" said Mr. Spence.

The universal ear bent closer, as if to catch the least articulation
of Millner's narrowed lips; but when he opened them it was merely to
re-insert his cigar, and for a short space nothing passed between
the two men but an exchange of smoke-rings.

"What do you mean to do? There's the point," Mr. Spence at length
sent through the rings.

Oh, yes, the point was there, as distinctly before Millner as the
tip of his expensive cigar: he had seen it coming quite as soon as
Mr. Spence. He knew that fate was handing him an ultimatum; but the
sense of the formidable echo which his least answer would rouse kept
him doggedly, and almost helplessly, silent. To let Mr. Spence talk
on as long as possible was no doubt the best way of gaining time;
but Millner knew that his silence was really due to his dread of the
echo. Suddenly, however, in a reaction of impatience at his own
indecision, he began to speak.

The sound of his voice cleared his mind and strengthened his
resolve. It was odd how the word seemed to shape the act, though one
knew how ancillary it really was. As he talked, it was as if the
globe had swung around, and he himself were upright on its axis,
with Mr. Spence underneath, on his head. Through the ensuing
interchange of concise and rapid speech there sounded in Millner's
ears the refrain to which he had walked down Fifth Avenue after his
first talk with Mr. Spence: "It's too easy--it's too easy--it's too
easy." Yes, it was even easier than he had expected. His sensation
was that of the skilful carver who feels his good blade sink into a
tender joint.

As he went on talking, this surprised sense of mastery was like wine
in his veins. Mr. Spence was at his mercy, after all--that was what
it came to; but this new view of the case did not lessen Millner's
sense of Mr. Spence's strength, it merely revealed to him his own
superiority. Mr. Spence was even stronger than he had suspected.
There could be no better proof of that than his faith in Millner's
power to grasp the situation, and his tacit recognition of the young
man's right to make the most of it. Millner felt that Mr. Spence
would have despised him even more for not using his advantage than
for not seeing it; and this homage to his capacity nerved him to
greater alertness, and made the concluding moments of their talk as
physically exhilarating as some hotly contested game.

When the conclusion was reached, and Millner stood at the goal, the
golden trophy in his grasp, his first conscious thought was one of
regret that the struggle was over. He would have liked to prolong
their talk for the purely aesthetic pleasure of making Mr. Spence
lose time, and, better still, of making him forget that he was
losing it. The sense of advantage that the situation conferred was
so great that when Mr. Spence rose it was as if Millner were
dismissing him, and when he reached his hand toward the cigar-box it
seemed to be one of Millner's cigars that he was taking.






IV





THERE had been only one condition attached to the transaction:
Millner was to speak to Draper about the Bible Class.

The condition was easy to fulfil. Millner was confident of his power
to deflect his young friend's purpose; and he knew the opportunity
would be given him before the day was over. His professional duties
despatched, he had only to go up to his room to wait. Draper nearly
always looked in on him for a moment before dinner: it was the hour
most propitious to their elliptic interchange of words and silences.

Meanwhile, the waiting was an occupation in itself. Millner looked
about his room with new eyes. Since the first thrill of initiation
into its complicated comforts--the shower-bath, the telephone, the
many-jointed reading-lamp and the vast mirrored presses through
which he was always hunting his scant outfit--Millner's room had
interested him no more than a railway-carriage in which he might
have been travelling. But now it had acquired a sort of historic
significance as the witness of the astounding change in his fate. It
was Corsica, it was Brienne--it was the kind of spot that posterity
might yet mark with a tablet. Then he reflected that he should soon
be leaving it, and the lustre of its monumental mahogany was veiled
in pathos. Why indeed should he linger on in bondage? He perceived
with a certain surprise that the only thing he should regret would
be leaving Draper. ...

It was odd, it was inconsequent, it was almost exasperating, that
such a regret should obscure his triumph. Why in the world should he
suddenly take to regretting Draper? If there were any logic in human
likings, it should be to Mr. Spence that he inclined. Draper, dear
lad, had the illusion of an "intellectual sympathy" between them;
but that, Millner knew, was an affair of reading and not of
character. Draper's temerities would always be of that kind; whereas
his own--well, his own, put to the proof, had now definitely classed
him with Mr. Spence rather than with Mr. Spence's son. It was a
consequence of this new condition--of his having thus distinctly and
irrevocably classed himself--that, when Draper at length brought
upon the scene his shy shamble and his wistful smile, Millner, for
the first time, had to steel himself against them instead of
yielding to their charm.

In the new order upon which he had entered, one principle of the old
survived: the point of honour between allies. And Millner had
promised Mr. Spence to speak to Draper about his Bible Class. ...

Draper, thrown back in his chair, and swinging a loose leg across a
meagre knee, listened with his habitual gravity. His downcast eyes
seemed to pursue the vision which Millner's words evoked; and the
words, to their speaker, took on a new sound as that candid
consciousness refracted them.

"You know, dear boy, I perfectly see your father's point. It's
naturally distressing to him, at this particular time, to have any
hint of civil war leak out--"

Draper sat upright, laying his lank legs knee to knee.

"That's it, then? I thought that was it!"

Millner raised a surprised glance. "_ What's_ it?"

"That it should be at this particular time--"

"Why, naturally, as I say! Just as he's making, as it were, his
public profession of faith. You know, to men like your father
convictions are irreducible elements--they can't be split up, and
differently combined. And your exegetical scruples seem to him to
strike at the very root of his convictions."

Draper pulled himself to his feet and shuffled across the room. Then
he turned about, and stood before his friend.

"Is it that--or is it this?" he said; and with the word he drew a
letter from his pocket and proffered it silently to Millner.

The latter, as he unfolded it, was first aware of an intense
surprise at the young man's abruptness of tone and gesture. Usually
Draper fluttered long about his point before making it; and his
sudden movement seemed as mechanical as the impulsion conveyed by
some strong spring. The spring, of course, was in the letter; and to
it Millner turned his startled glance, feeling the while that, by
some curious cleavage of perception, he was continuing to watch
Draper while he read.

"Oh, the beasts!" he cried.

He and Draper were face to face across the sheet which had dropped
between them. The youth's features were tightened by a smile that
was like the ligature of a wound. He looked white and withered.

"Ah--you knew, then?"

Millner sat still, and after a moment Draper turned from him, walked
to the hearth, and leaned against the chimney, propping his chin on
his hands. Millner, his head thrown back, stared up at the ceiling,
which had suddenly become to him the image of the universal
sounding-board hanging over his consciousness.

"You knew, then?" Draper repeated.

Millner remained silent. He had perceived, with the surprise of a
mathematician working out a new problem, that the lie which Mr.
Spence had just bought of him was exactly the one gift he could give
of his own free will to Mr. Spence's son. This discovery gave the
world a strange new topsy-turvyness, and set Millner's theories
spinning about his brain like the cabin furniture of a tossing ship.

"You _knew_," said Draper, in a tone of quiet affirmation.

Millner righted himself, and grasped the arms of his chair as if
that too were reeling. "About this blackguardly charge?"

Draper was studying him intently. "What does it matter if it's
blackguardly?"

"Matter--?" Millner stammered.

"It's that, of course, in any case. But the point is whether it's
true or not." Draper bent down, and picking up the crumpled letter,
smoothed it out between his fingers. "The point, is, whether my
father, when he was publicly denouncing the peonage abuses on the
San Pablo plantations over a year ago, had actually sold out his
stock, as he announced at the time; or whether, as they say
here--how do they put it?--he had simply transferred it to a dummy
till the scandal should blow over, and has meanwhile gone on drawing
his forty per cent interest on five thousand shares? There's the
point."

Millner had never before heard his young friend put a case with such
unadorned precision. His language was like that of Mr. Spence making
a statement to a committee meeting; and the resemblance to his
father flashed out with ironic incongruity.

"You see why I've brought this letter to you--I couldn't go to _him_
with it!" Draper's voice faltered, and the resemblance vanished as
suddenly as it had appeared.

"No; you couldn't go to him with it," said Millner slowly.

"And since they say here that _you_ know: that they've got your
letter proving it--" The muscles of Draper's face quivered as if a
blinding light had been swept over it. "For God's sake,
Millner--it's all right?"

"It's all right," said Millner, rising to his feet.

Draper caught him by the wrist. "You're sure--you're absolutely
sure?"

"Sure. They know they've got nothing to go on."

Draper fell back a step and looked almost sternly at his friend.
"You know that's not what I mean. I don't care a straw what they
think they've got to go on. I want to know if my father's all right.
If he is, they can say what they please."

Millner, again, felt himself under the concentrated scrutiny of the
ceiling. "Of course, of course. I understand."

"You understand? Then why don't you answer?"

Millner looked compassionately at the boy's struggling face.
Decidedly, the battle was to the strong, and he was not sorry to be
on the side of the legions. But Draper's pain was as awkward as a
material obstacle, as something that one stumbled over in a race.

"You know what I'm driving at, Millner." Again Mr. Spence's
committee-meeting tone sounded oddly through his son's strained
voice. "If my father's so awfully upset about my giving up my Bible
Class, and letting it be known that I do so on conscientious
grounds, is it because he's afraid it may be considered a criticism
on something _he_ has done which--which won't bear the test of the
doctrines he believes in?"

Draper, with the last question, squared himself in front of Millner,
as if suspecting that the latter meant to evade it by flight. But
Millner had never felt more disposed to stand his ground than at
that moment.

"No--by Jove, no! It's not _that_." His relief almost escaped him in
a cry, as he lifted his head to give back Draper's look.

"On your honour?" the other passionately pressed him.

"Oh, on anybody's you like--on _yours!_" Millner could hardly
restrain a laugh of relief. It was vertiginous to find himself
spared, after all, the need of an altruistic lie: he perceived that
they were the kind he least liked.

Draper took a deep breath. "You don't--Millner, a lot depends on
this--you don't really think my father has any ulterior motive?"

"I think he has none but his horror of seeing you go straight to
perdition!"

They looked at each other again, and Draper's tension was suddenly
relieved by a free boyish laugh. "It's his convictions--it's just
his funny old convictions?"

"It's that, and nothing else on earth!"

Draper turned back to the arm-chair he had left, and let his narrow
figure sink down into it as into a bath. Then he looked over at
Millner with a smile. "I can see that I've been worrying him
horribly. So he really thinks I'm on the road to perdition? Of
course you can fancy what a sick minute I had when I thought it
might be this other reason--the damnable insinuation in this
letter." Draper crumpled the paper in his hand, and leaned forward
to toss it into the coals of the grate. "I ought to have known
better, of course. I ought to have remembered that, as you say, my
father can't conceive how conduct may be independent of creed.
That's where I was stupid--and rather base. But that letter made me
dizzy--I couldn't think. Even now I can't very clearly. I'm not sure
what _my_ convictions require of me: they seem to me so much less to
be considered than his! When I've done half the good to people that
he has, it will be time enough to begin attacking their beliefs.
Meanwhile--meanwhile I can't touch his. ..." Draper leaned
forward, stretching his lank arms along his knees. His face was as
clear as a spring sky. "I _won't_ touch them, Millner--Go and tell
him so. ..."






V





In the study a half hour later Mr. Spence, watch in hand, was doling
out his minutes again. The peril conjured, he had recovered his
dominion over time. He turned his commanding eye-glasses on Millner.

"It's all settled, then? Tell Draper I'm sorry not to see him again
to-night--but I'm to speak at the dinner of the Legal Relief
Association, and I'm due there in five minutes. You and he dine
alone here, I suppose? Tell him I appreciate what he's done. Some
day he'll see that to leave the world better than we find it is the
best we can hope to do. (You've finished the notes for the
_Investigator?_ Be sure you don't forget that phrase.) Well, good
evening: that's all, I think."

Smooth and compact in his glossy evening clothes, Mr. Spence
advanced toward the study door; but as he reached it, his secretary
stood there before him.

"It's not quite all, Mr. Spence."

Mr. Spence turned on him a look in which impatience was faintly
tinged with apprehension. "What else is there? It's two and a half
minutes to eight."

Millner stood his ground. "It won't take longer than that. I want to
tell you that, if you can conveniently replace me, I'd like--there
are reasons why I shall have to leave you."

Millner was conscious of reddening as he spoke. His redness deepened
under Mr. Spence's dispassionate scrutiny. He saw at once that the
banker was not surprised at his announcement.

"Well, I suppose that's natural enough. You'll want to make a start
for yourself now. Only, of course, for the sake of appearances--"

"Oh, certainly," Millner hastily agreed.

"Well, then: is that all?" Mr. Spence repeated.

"Nearly." Millner paused, as if in search of an appropriate formula.
But after a moment he gave up the search, and pulled from his pocket
an envelope which he held out to his employer. "I merely want to
give this back."

The hand which Mr. Spence had extended dropped to his side, and his
sand-coloured face grew chalky. "Give it back?" His voice was as
thick as Millner's. "What's happened? Is the bargain off?"

"Oh, no. I've given you my word."

"Your word?" Mr. Spence lowered at him. "I'd like to know what
that's worth!"

Millner continued to hold out the envelope. "You do know, now. It's
worth _that_. It's worth my place."

Mr. Spence, standing motionless before him, hesitated for an
appreciable space of time. His lips parted once or twice under their
square-clipped stubble, and at last emitted: "How much more do you
want?"

Millner broke into a laugh. "Oh, I've got all I want--all and more!"

"What--from the others? Are you crazy?"

"No, you are," said Millner with a sudden recovery of composure.
"But you're safe--you're as safe as you'll ever be. Only I don't
care to take this for making you so."

Mr. Spence slowly moistened his lips with his tongue, and removing
his _pince-nez_, took a long hard look at Millner.

"I don't understand. What other guarantee have I got?"

"That I mean what I say?" Millner glanced past the banker's figure
at his rich densely coloured background of Spanish leather and
mahogany. He remembered that it was from this very threshold that he
had first seen Mr. Spence's son.

"What guarantee? You've got Draper!" he said.






AFTERWARD

I





"Oh, there _is_ one, of course, but you'll never know it."

The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a bright
June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp perception of its
latent significance as she stood, in the December dusk, waiting for
the lamps to be brought into the library.

The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they sat
at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very house of
which the library in question was the central, the pivotal
"feature." Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a country place
in one of the southern or southwestern counties, had, on their
arrival in England, carried their problem straight to Alida Stair,
who had successfully solved it in her own case; but it was not until
they had rejected, almost capriciously, several practical and
judicious suggestions that she threw it out: "Well, there's Lyng, in
Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's cousins, and you can get it for a
song."

The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water
pipes, and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading in
its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of the
economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition, with
unusual architectural felicities.

"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the
two, had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience' would
make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with the
pieces numbered, and set up again." And they had proceeded to
enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions and
exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin
recommended was _really_ Tudor till they learned it had no heating
system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds till
she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-supply.

"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued to
exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively wrung from
her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a sudden relapse
to distrust: "And the ghost? You've been concealing from us the fact
that there is no ghost!"

Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her
laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent perceptions,
had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida's answering hilarity.

"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."

"Yes, yes; but that won't do. I don't want to have to drive ten
miles to see somebody else's ghost. I want one of my own on the
premises. _Is_ there a ghost at Lyng?"

His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that she
had flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there _is_ one, of course, but
you'll never know it."

"Never know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world
constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"

"I can't say. But that's the story."

"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows it's a ghost?"

"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."

"Till afterward?"

"Not till long, long afterward."

"But if it's once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why
hasn't its _signalement_ been handed down in the family? How has it
managed to preserve its incognito?"

Alida could only shake her head. "Don't ask me. But it has."

"And then suddenly--" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous depth
of divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to one's self,
_'That was_ it?'"

She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her
question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the shadow
of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils. "I suppose
so. One just has to wait."

"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who
can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than that,
Mary?"

But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to, for
within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair they were
established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for to the point
of planning it out in all its daily details had actually begun for
them.

It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a
wide-hooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the
sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to a
deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such
sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years the
soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne had
ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness that
still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue Star Mine
had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the leisure to
taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new state to be
one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves only to
harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting and gardening
(against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of the production
of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of Culture"; and
with such absorbing work ahead no existence could be too
sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world, or plunge
deep enough into the past.

Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position. But
to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the whole
incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they put
it--that for the production of its effects so little of a given
quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and so short
a distance a difference.

"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives
such depth to their effects, such relief to their least contrasts.
They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every exquisite
mouthful."

The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact that
it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes, abound
the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having been for
centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had probably not
been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had
fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn
fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews;
but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their
sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had
felt from the first the occasional brush of an intenser memory.

The feeling had never been stronger than on the December afternoon
when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she rose from
her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth. Her husband had
gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long tramps on the downs.
She had noticed of late that he preferred to be unaccompanied on
these occasions; and, in the tried security of their personal
relations, had been driven to conclude that his book was bothering
him, and that he needed the afternoons to turn over in solitude the
problems left from the morning's work. Certainly the book was not
going as smoothly as she had imagined it would, and the lines of
perplexity between his eyes had never been there in his engineering
days. Then he had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but
the native demon of "worry" had never branded his brow. Yet the few
pages he had so far read to her--the introduction, and a synopsis of
the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession of his
subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.

The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had
done with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one other
possible element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were his
health, then? But physically he had gained since they had come to
Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed. It was only
within a week that she had felt in him the undefinable change that
made her restless in his absence, and as tongue-tied in his presence
as though it were _she_ who had a secret to keep from him!

The thought that there _was_ a secret somewhere between them struck
her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down
the dim, long room.

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be
piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of
velvet shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of
books, the smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in
the banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually
discarded as too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed,
as became the tenant of a haunted house, made the customary
inquiries among her few rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, "They
du say so, Ma'am," the villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive
specter had apparently never had sufficient identity for a legend to
crystallize about it, and after a time the Boynes had laughingly set
the matter down to their profit-and-loss account, agreeing that Lyng
was one of the few houses good enough in itself to dispense with
supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its
beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so much
that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as _the_
ghost." And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped
out of their references, which were numerous enough to make them
promptly unaware of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier
curiosity revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense
gradually acquired through close daily contact with the scene of the
lurking mystery. It was the house itself, of course, that possessed
the ghost-seeing faculty, that communed visually but secretly with
its own past; and if one could only get into close enough communion
with the house, one might surprise its secret, and acquire the
ghost-sight on one's own account. Perhaps, in his long solitary
hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the
afternoon, her husband _had_ acquired it already, and was silently
carrying the dread weight of whatever it had revealed to him. Mary
was too well-versed in the code of the spectral world not to know
that one could not talk about the ghosts one saw: to do so was
almost as great a breach of good-breeding as to name a lady in a
club. But this explanation did not really satisfy her. "What, after
all, except for the fun of the _frisson_," she reflected, "would he
really care for any of their old ghosts?" And thence she was thrown
back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's
greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no
particular bearing on the case, since, when one _did_ see a ghost at
Lyng, one did not know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned
_had_ seen one when they first came, and had known only within the
last week what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of
the hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the early days of
their tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay confusion of
unpacking, settling, arranging of books, and calling to each other
from remote corners of the house as treasure after treasure of their
habitation revealed itself to them. It was in this particular
connection that she presently recalled a certain soft afternoon of
the previous October, when, passing from the first rapturous flurry
of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had
pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel that opened at her touch, on
a narrow flight of stairs leading to an unsuspected flat ledge of
the roof--the roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on all
sides too abruptly for any but practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown
down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her
discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge,
he had passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long,
tossed horizon-line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back
to trace the arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the
shadow of the cedar on the lawn.

"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about
within his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like
some long, satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled court,
the squat lions on the gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the
highroad under the downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had
felt his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her turn to
glance at him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a
shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and,
following his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in loose,
grayish clothes, as it appeared to her--who was sauntering down the
lime-avenue to the court with the tentative gait of a stranger
seeking his way. Her short-sighted eyes had given her but a blurred
impression of slightness and grayness, with something foreign, or at
least unlocal, in the cut of the figure or its garb; but her husband
had apparently seen more--seen enough to make him push past her with
a sharp "Wait!" and dash down the twisting stairs without pausing to
give her a hand for the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional
clutch at the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow
him down more cautiously; and when she had reached the attic landing
she paused again for a less definite reason, leaning over the oak
banister to strain her eyes through the silence of the brown,
sun-flecked depths below. She lingered there till, somewhere in
those depths, she heard the closing of a door; then, mechanically
impelled, she went down the shallow flights of steps till she
reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and
hall and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and after
listening in vain for any sound of voices within, she quickly
crossed the threshold, and found her husband alone, vaguely
fingering the papers on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the
shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she
fancied, a little brighter and clearer than usual.

"What was it? Who was it?" she asked.

"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

"The man we saw coming toward the house." Boyne shrugged his
shoulders. "So I thought; but he must have got up steam in the
interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon Steep
before sunset?"

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing,
had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their
first vision from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of
climbing ever since they had first seen its bare spine heaving
itself above the low roof of Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of
the other incident's having occurred on the very day of their ascent
to Meldon that had kept it stored away in the unconscious fold of
association from which it now emerged; for in itself it had no mark
of the portentous. At the moment there could have been nothing more
natural than that Ned should dash himself from the roof in the
pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they were
always on the watch for one or the other of the specialists employed
about the place; always lying in wait for them, and dashing out at
them with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the
distance the gray figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's
explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on
his face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him
anxious? Why, above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer
with that authority on the subject of the stable-drains, had the
failure to find him produced such a look of relief? Mary could not
say that any one of these considerations had occurred to her at the
time, yet, from the promptness with which they now marshaled
themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that they must all
along have been there, waiting their hour.






II





Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library
was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint
light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself
in the tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of
deeper gray in the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward
her, her heart thumped to the thought, "It's the ghost!"

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of
whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from the
roof was now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as
_not_ having been Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending
fear of the disclosure. But almost with the next tick of the clock
the ambiguous figure, gaining substance and character, showed itself
even to her weak sight as her husband's; and she turned away to meet
him, as he entered, with the confession of her folly.

"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold, "but I
never _can_ remember!"

"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.

"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no
response in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied
face.

"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable
interval.

"Why, I actually took _you_ for it, my dear, in my mad determination
to spot it!"

"Me--just now?" His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a
faint echo of her laugh. "Really, dearest, you'd better give it up,
if that's the best you can do."

"Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have _you?"_ she asked, turning
round on him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light
struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she presented.

"Have _you?"_ Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had
disappeared on her errand of illumination.

"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the
sharp stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the
letters.

"I never tried," he said, tearing open the wrapper of a newspaper.

"Well, of course," Mary persisted, "the exasperating thing is that
there's no use trying, since one can't be sure till so long
afterward."

He was unfolding the paper as if he had hardly heard her; but after
a pause, during which the sheets rustled spasmodically between his
hands, he lifted his head to say abruptly, "Have you any idea _how
long?"_

Mary had sunk into a low chair beside the fireplace. From her seat
she looked up, startled, at her husband's profile, which was darkly
projected against the circle of lamplight.

"No; none. Have _you_" she retorted, repeating her former phrase
with an added keenness of intention.

Boyne crumpled the paper into a bunch, and then inconsequently
turned back with it toward the lamp.

"Lord, no! I only meant," he explained, with a faint tinge of
impatience, "is there any legend, any tradition, as to that?"

"Not that I know of," she answered; but the impulse to add, "What
makes you ask?" was checked by the reappearance of the parlor-maid
with tea and a second lamp.

With the dispersal of shadows, and the repetition of the daily
domestic office, Mary Boyne felt herself less oppressed by that
sense of something mutely imminent which had darkened her solitary
afternoon. For a few moments she gave herself silently to the
details of her task, and when she looked up from it she was struck
to the point of bewilderment by the change in her husband's face. He
had seated himself near the farther lamp, and was absorbed in the
perusal of his letters; but was it something he had found in them,
or merely the shifting of her own point of view, that had restored
his features to their normal aspect? The longer she looked, the more
definitely the change affirmed itself. The lines of painful tension
had vanished, and such traces of fatigue as lingered were of the
kind easily attributable to steady mental effort. He glanced up, as
if drawn by her gaze, and met her eyes with a smile.

"I'm dying for my tea, you know; and here's a letter for you," he
said.

She took the letter he held out in exchange for the cup she
proffered him, and, returning to her seat, broke the seal with the
languid gesture of the reader whose interests are all inclosed in
the circle of one cherished presence.

Her next conscious motion was that of starting to her feet, the
letter falling to them as she rose, while she held out to her
husband a long newspaper clipping.

"Ned! What's this? What does it mean?"

He had risen at the same instant, almost as if hearing her cry
before she uttered it; and for a perceptible space of time he and
she studied each other, like adversaries watching for an advantage,
across the space between her chair and his desk.

"What's what? You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length, moving
toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of
apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed
foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her
the sense of his feeling himself invisibly surrounded.

Her hand shook so that she could hardly give him the clipping.

"This article--from the 'Waukesha Sentinel'--that a man named Elwell
has brought suit against you--that there was something wrong about
the Blue Star Mine. I can't understand more than half."

They continued to face each other as she spoke, and to her
astonishment, she saw that her words had the almost immediate effect
of dissipating the strained watchfulness of his look.

"Oh, _that_!" He glanced down the printed slip, and then folded it
with the gesture of one who handles something harmless and familiar.
"What's the matter with you this afternoon, Mary? I thought you'd
got bad news."

She stood before him with her undefinable terror subsiding slowly
under the reassuring touch of his composure.

"You knew about this, then--it's all right?"

"Certainly I knew about it; and it's all right."

"But what _is_ it? I don't understand. What does this man accuse you
of?"

"Oh, pretty nearly every crime in the calendar." Boyne had tossed
the clipping down, and thrown himself comfortably into an arm-chair
near the fire. "Do you want to hear the story? It's not particularly
interesting--just a squabble over interests in the Blue Star."

"But who is this Elwell? I don't know the name."

"Oh, he's a fellow I put into it--gave him a hand up. I told you all
about him at the time."

"I daresay. I must have forgotten." Vainly she strained back among
her memories. "But if you helped him, why does he make this return?"

"Oh, probably some shyster lawyer got hold of him and talked him
over. It's all rather technical and complicated. I thought that kind
of thing bored you."

His wife felt a sting of compunction. Theoretically, she deprecated
the American wife's detachment from her husband's professional
interests, but in practice she had always found it difficult to fix
her attention on Boyne's report of the transactions in which his
varied interests involved him. Besides, she had felt from the first
that, in a community where the amenities of living could be obtained
only at the cost of efforts as arduous as her husband's professional
labors, such brief leisure as they could command should be used as
an escape from immediate preoccupations, a flight to the life they
always dreamed of living. Once or twice, now that this new life had
actually drawn its magic circle about them, she had asked herself if
she had done right; but hitherto such conjectures had been no more
than the retrospective excursions of an active fancy. Now, for the
first time, it startled her a little to find how little she knew of
the material foundation on which her happiness was built.

She glanced again at her husband, and was reassured by the composure
of his face; yet she felt the need of more definite grounds for her
reassurance.

"But doesn't this suit worry you? Why have you never spoken to me
about it?"

He answered both questions at once: "I didn't speak of it at first
because it _did_ worry me--annoyed me, rather. But it's all ancient
history now. Your correspondent must have got hold of a back number
of the 'Sentinel.'"

She felt a quick thrill of relief. "You mean it's over? He's lost
his case?"

There was a just perceptible delay in Boyne's reply. "The suit's
been withdrawn--that's all."

But she persisted, as if to exonerate herself from the inward charge
of being too easily put off. "Withdrawn because he saw he had no
chance?"

"Oh, he had no chance," Boyne answered.

She was still struggling with a dimly felt perplexity at the back of
her thoughts.

"How long ago was it withdrawn?"

He paused, as if with a slight return of his former uncertainty.
"I've just had the news now; but I've been expecting it."

"Just now--in one of your letters?"

"Yes; in one of my letters."

She made no answer, and was aware only, after a short interval of
waiting, that he had risen, and strolling across the room, had
placed himself on the sofa at her side. She felt him, as he did so,
pass an arm about her, she felt his hand seek hers and clasp it, and
turning slowly, drawn by the warmth of his cheek, she met the
smiling clearness of his eyes.

"It's all right--it's all right?" she questioned, through the flood
of her dissolving doubts; and "I give you my word it never was
righter!" he laughed back at her, holding her close.






III





One of the strangest things she was afterward to recall out of all
the next day's incredible strangeness was the sudden and complete
recovery of her sense of security.

It was in the air when she woke in her low-ceilinged, dusky room; it
accompanied her down-stairs to the breakfast-table, flashed out at
her from the fire, and re-duplicated itself brightly from the flanks
of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. It was as
if, in some roundabout way, all her diffused apprehensions of the
previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the
newspaper article,--as if this dim questioning of the future, and
startled return upon the past,--had between them liquidated
the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. If she had indeed
been careless of her husband's affairs, it was, her new state seemed
to prove, because her faith in him instinctively justified such
carelessness; and his right to her faith had overwhelmingly affirmed
itself in the very face of menace and suspicion. She had never seen
him more untroubled, more naturally and unconsciously in possession
of himself, than after the cross-examination to which she had
subjected him: it was almost as if he had been aware of her lurking
doubts, and had wanted the air cleared as much as she did.

It was as clear, thank Heaven! as the bright outer light that
surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the
house for her daily round of the gardens. She had left Boyne at his
desk, indulging herself, as she passed the library door, by a last
peep at his quiet face, where he bent, pipe in his mouth, above his
papers, and now she had her own morning's task to perform. The task
involved on such charmed winter days almost as much delighted
loitering about the different quarters of her demesne as if spring
were already at work on shrubs and borders. There were such
inexhaustible possibilities still before her, such opportunities to
bring out the latent graces of the old place, without a single
irreverent touch of alteration, that the winter months were all too
short to plan what spring and autumn executed. And her recovered
sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar zest to
her progress through the sweet, still place. She went first to the
kitchen-garden, where the espaliered pear-trees drew complicated
patterns on the walls, and pigeons were fluttering and preening
about the silvery-slated roof of their cot. There was something
wrong about the piping of the hothouse, and she was expecting an
authority from Dorchester, who was to drive out between trains and
make a diagnosis of the boiler. But when she dipped into the damp
heat of the greenhouses, among the spiced scents and waxy pinks and
reds of old-fashioned exotics,--even the flora of Lyng was in the
note!--she learned that the great man had not arrived, and the day
being too rare to waste in an artificial atmosphere, she came out
again and paced slowly along the springy turf of the bowling-green
to the gardens behind the house. At their farther end rose a grass
terrace, commanding, over the fish-pond and the yew hedges, a view
of the long house-front, with its twisted chimney-stacks and the
blue shadows of its roof angles, all drenched in the pale gold
moisture of the air.

Seen thus, across the level tracery of the yews, under the suffused,
mild light, it sent her, from its open windows and hospitably
smoking chimneys, the look of some warm human presence, of a mind
slowly ripened on a sunny wall of experience. She had never before
had so deep a sense of her intimacy with it, such a conviction that
its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as they said to children,
"for one's good," so complete a trust in its power to gather up her
life and Ned's into the harmonious pattern of the long, long story
it sat there weaving in the sun.

She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the
gardener, accompanied by the engineer from Dorchester. But only one
figure was in sight, that of a youngish, slightly built man, who,
for reasons she could not on the spot have specified, did not
remotely resemble her preconceived notion of an authority on
hot-house boilers. The new-comer, on seeing her, lifted his hat, and
paused with the air of a gentleman--perhaps a traveler--desirous of
having it immediately known that his intrusion is involuntary. The
local fame of Lyng occasionally attracted the more intelligent
sight-seer, and Mary half-expected to see the stranger dissemble a
camera, or justify his presence by producing it. But he made no
gesture of any sort, and after a moment she asked, in a tone
responding to the courteous deprecation of his attitude: "Is there
any one you wish to see?"

"I came to see Mr. Boyne," he replied. His intonation, rather than
his accent, was faintly American, and Mary, at the familiar note,
looked at him more closely. The brim of his soft felt hat cast a
shade on his face, which, thus obscured, wore to her short-sighted
gaze a look of seriousness, as of a person arriving "on business,"
and civilly but firmly aware of his rights.

Past experience had made Mary equally sensible to such claims; but
she was jealous of her husband's morning hours, and doubtful of his
having given any one the right to intrude on them.

"Have you an appointment with Mr. Boyne?" she asked.

He hesitated, as if unprepared for the question.

"Not exactly an appointment," he replied.

"Then I'm afraid, this being his working-time, that he can't receive
you now. Will you give me a message, or come back later?"

The visitor, again lifting his hat, briefly replied that he would
come back later, and walked away, as if to regain the front of the
house. As his figure receded down the walk between the yew hedges,
Mary saw him pause and look up an instant at the peaceful
house-front bathed in faint winter sunshine; and it struck her, with
a tardy touch of compunction, that it would have been more humane to
ask if he had come from a distance, and to offer, in that case, to
inquire if her husband could receive him. But as the thought
occurred to her he passed out of sight behind a pyramidal yew, and
at the same moment her attention was distracted by the approach of
the gardener, attended by the bearded pepper-and-salt figure of the
boiler-maker from Dorchester.

The encounter with this authority led to such far-reaching issues
that they resulted in his finding it expedient to ignore his train,
and beguiled Mary into spending the remainder of the morning in
absorbed confabulation among the greenhouses. She was startled to
find, when the colloquy ended, that it was nearly luncheon-time, and
she half expected, as she hurried back to the house, to see her
husband coming out to meet her. But she found no one in the court
but an under-gardener raking the gravel, and the hall, when she
entered it, was so silent that she guessed Boyne to be still at work
behind the closed door of the library.

Not wishing to disturb him, she turned into the drawing-room, and
there, at her writing-table, lost herself in renewed calculations of
the outlay to which the morning's conference had committed her. The
knowledge that she could permit herself such follies had not yet
lost its novelty; and somehow, in contrast to the vague
apprehensions of the previous days, it now seemed an element of her
recovered security, of the sense that, as Ned had said, things in
general had never been "righter."

She was still luxuriating in a lavish play of figures when the
parlor-maid, from the threshold, roused her with a dubiously worded
inquiry as to the expediency of serving luncheon. It was one of
their jokes that Trimmle announced luncheon as if she were divulging
a state secret, and Mary, intent upon her papers, merely murmured an
absent-minded assent.

She felt Trimmle wavering expressively on the threshold as if in
rebuke of such offhand acquiescence; then her retreating steps
sounded down the passage, and Mary, pushing away her papers, crossed
the hall, and went to the library door. It was still closed, and she
wavered in her turn, disliking to disturb her husband, yet anxious
that he should not exceed his normal measure of work. As she stood
there, balancing her impulses, the esoteric Trimmle returned with
the announcement of luncheon, and Mary, thus impelled, opened the
door and went into the library.

Boyne was not at his desk, and she peered about her, expecting to
discover him at the book-shelves, somewhere down the length of the
room; but her call brought no response, and gradually it became
clear to her that he was not in the library.

She turned back to the parlor-maid.

"Mr. Boyne must be up-stairs. Please tell him that luncheon is
ready."

The parlor-maid appeared to hesitate between the obvious duty of
obeying orders and an equally obvious conviction of the foolishness
of the injunction laid upon her. The struggle resulted in her saying
doubtfully, "If you please, Madam, Mr. Boyne's not up-stairs."

"Not in his room? Are you sure?"

"I'm sure, Madam."

Mary consulted the clock. "Where is he, then?"

"He's gone out," Trimmle announced, with the superior air of one who
has respectfully waited for the question that a well-ordered mind
would have first propounded.

Mary's previous conjecture had been right, then. Boyne must have
gone to the gardens to meet her, and since she had missed him, it
was clear that he had taken the shorter way by the south door,
instead of going round to the court. She crossed the hall to the
glass portal opening directly on the yew garden, but the
parlor-maid, after another moment of inner conflict, decided to
bring out recklessly, "Please, Madam, Mr. Boyne didn't go that way."

Mary turned back. "Where _did_ he go? And when?"

"He went out of the front door, up the drive, Madam." It was a
matter of principle with Trimmle never to answer more than one
question at a time.

"Up the drive? At this hour?" Mary went to the door herself, and
glanced across the court through the long tunnel of bare limes. But
its perspective was as empty as when she had scanned it on entering
the house.

"Did Mr. Boyne leave no message?" she asked.

Trimmle seemed to surrender herself to a last struggle with the
forces of chaos.

"No, Madam. He just went out with the gentleman."

"The gentleman? What gentleman?" Mary wheeled about, as if to front
this new factor.

"The gentleman who called, Madam," said Trimmle, resignedly.

"When did a gentleman call? Do explain yourself, Trimmle!"

Only the fact that Mary was very hungry, and that she wanted to
consult her husband about the greenhouses, would have caused her to
lay so unusual an injunction on her attendant; and even now she was
detached enough to note in Trimmle's eye the dawning defiance of the
respectful subordinate who has been pressed too hard.

"I couldn't exactly say the hour, Madam, because I didn't let the
gentleman in," she replied, with the air of magnanimously ignoring
the irregularity of her mistress's course.

"You didn't let him in?"

"No, Madam. When the bell rang I was dressing, and Agnes--"

"Go and ask Agnes, then," Mary interjected. Trimmle still wore her
look of patient magnanimity. "Agnes would not know, Madam, for she
had unfortunately burnt her hand in trying the wick of the new lamp
from town--" Trimmle, as Mary was aware, had always been opposed to
the new lamp--"and so Mrs. Dockett sent the kitchen-maid instead."

Mary looked again at the clock. "It's after two! Go and ask the
kitchen-maid if Mr. Boyne left any word."

She went into luncheon without waiting, and Trimmle presently
brought her there the kitchen-maid's statement that the gentleman
had called about one o'clock, that Mr. Boyne had gone out with him
without leaving any message. The kitchen-maid did not even know the
caller's name, for he had written it on a slip of paper, which he
had folded and handed to her, with the injunction to deliver it at
once to Mr. Boyne.

Mary finished her luncheon, still wondering, and when it was over,
and Trimmle had brought the coffee to the drawing-room, her wonder
had deepened to a first faint tinge of disquietude. It was unlike
Boyne to absent himself without explanation at so unwonted an hour,
and the difficulty of identifying the visitor whose summons he had
apparently obeyed made his disappearance the more unaccountable.
Mary Boyne's experience as the wife of a busy engineer, subject to
sudden calls and compelled to keep irregular hours, had trained her
to the philosophic acceptance of surprises; but since Boyne's
withdrawal from business he had adopted a Benedictine regularity of
life. As if to make up for the dispersed and agitated years, with
their "stand-up" lunches and dinners rattled down to the joltings of
the dining-car, he cultivated the last refinements of punctuality
and monotony, discouraging his wife's fancy for the unexpected; and
declaring that to a delicate taste there were infinite gradations of
pleasure in the fixed recurrences of habit.

Still, since no life can completely defend itself from the
unforeseen, it was evident that all Boyne's precautions would sooner
or later prove unavailable, and Mary concluded that he had cut short
a tiresome visit by walking with his caller to the station, or at
least accompanying him for part of the way.

This conclusion relieved her from farther preoccupation, and she
went out herself to take up her conference with the gardener. Thence
she walked to the village post-office, a mile or so away; and when
she turned toward home, the early twilight was setting in.

She had taken a foot-path across the downs, and as Boyne, meanwhile,
had probably returned from the station by the highroad, there was
little likelihood of their meeting on the way. She felt sure,
however, of his having reached the house before her; so sure that,
when she entered it herself, without even pausing to inquire of
Trimmle, she made directly for the library. But the library was
still empty, and with an unwonted precision of visual memory she
immediately observed that the papers on her husband's desk lay
precisely as they had lain when she had gone in to call him to
luncheon.

Then of a sudden she was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She
had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone
in the long, silent, shadowy room, her dread seemed to take shape
and sound, to be there audibly breathing and lurking among the
shadows. Her short-sighted eyes strained through them,
half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched
and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible propinquity she
threw herself suddenly on the bell-rope and gave it a desperate
pull.

The long, quavering summons brought Trimmle in precipitately with a
lamp, and Mary breathed again at this sobering reappearance of the
usual.

"You may bring tea if Mr. Boyne is in," she said, to justify her
ring.

"Very well, Madam. But Mr. Boyne is not in," said Trimmle, putting
down the lamp.

"Not in? You mean he's come back and gone out again?"

"No, Madam. He's never been back."

The dread stirred again, and Mary knew that now it had her fast.

"Not since he went out with--the gentleman?"

"Not since he went out with the gentleman."

"But who _was_ the gentleman?" Mary gasped out, with the sharp note
of some one trying to be heard through a confusion of meaningless
noises.

"That I couldn't say, Madam." Trimmle, standing there by the lamp,
seemed suddenly to grow less round and rosy, as though eclipsed by
the same creeping shade of apprehension.

"But the kitchen-maid knows--wasn't it the kitchen-maid who let him
in?"

"She doesn't know either, Madam, for he wrote his name on a folded
paper."

Mary, through her agitation, was aware that they were both
designating the unknown visitor by a vague pronoun, instead of the
conventional formula which, till then, had kept their allusions
within the bounds of custom. And at the same moment her mind caught
at the suggestion of the folded paper.

"But he must have a name! Where is the paper?"

She moved to the desk, and began to turn over the scattered
documents that littered it. The first that caught her eye was an
unfinished letter in her husband's hand, with his pen lying across
it, as though dropped there at a sudden summons.

"My dear Parvis,"--who was Parvis?--"I have just received your
letter announcing Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is now
no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--"

She tossed the sheet aside, and continued her search; but no folded
paper was discoverable among the letters and pages of manuscript
which had been swept together in a promiscuous heap, as if by a
hurried or a startled gesture.

"But the kitchen-maid _saw_ him. Send her here," she commanded,
wondering at her dullness in not thinking sooner of so simple a
solution.

Trimmle, at the behest, vanished in a flash, as if thankful to be
out of the room, and when she reappeared, conducting the agitated
underling, Mary had regained her self-possession, and had her
questions pat.

The gentleman was a stranger, yes--that she understood. But what had
he said? And, above all, what had he looked like? The first question
was easily enough answered, for the disconcerting reason that he had
said so little--had merely asked for Mr. Boyne, and, scribbling
something on a bit of paper, had requested that it should at once be
carried in to him.

"Then you don't know what he wrote? You're not sure it _was_ his
name?"

The kitchen-maid was not sure, but supposed it was, since he had
written it in answer to her inquiry as to whom she should announce.

"And when you carried the paper in to Mr. Boyne, what did he say?"

The kitchen-maid did not think that Mr. Boyne had said anything, but
she could not be sure, for just as she had handed him the paper and
he was opening it, she had become aware that the visitor had
followed her into the library, and she had slipped out, leaving the
two gentlemen together.

"But then, if you left them in the library, how do you know that
they went out of the house?"

This question plunged the witness into momentary inarticulateness,
from which she was rescued by Trimmle, who, by means of ingenious
circumlocutions, elicited the statement that before she could cross
the hall to the back passage she had heard the gentlemen behind her,
and had seen them go out of the front door together.

"Then, if you saw the gentleman twice, you must be able to tell me
what he looked like."

But with this final challenge to her powers of expression it became
clear that the limit of the kitchen-maid's endurance had been
reached. The obligation of going to the front door to "show in" a
visitor was in itself so subversive of the fundamental order of
things that it had thrown her faculties into hopeless disarray, and
she could only stammer out, after various panting efforts at
evocation, "His hat, mum, was different-like, as you might say--"

"Different? How different?" Mary flashed out at her, her own mind,
in the same instant, leaping back to an image left on it that
morning, but temporarily lost under layers of subsequent
impressions.

"His hat had a wide brim, you mean? and his face was pale--a
youngish face?" Mary pressed her, with a white-lipped intensity of
interrogation. But if the kitchen-maid found any adequate answer to
this challenge, it was swept away for her listener down the rushing
current of her own convictions. The stranger--the stranger in the
garden! Why had Mary not thought of him before? She needed no one
now to tell her that it was he who had called for her husband and
gone away with him. But who was he, and why had Boyne obeyed his
call?






IV





It leaped out at her suddenly, like a grin out of the dark, that
they had often called England so little--"such a confoundedly hard
place to get lost in."

_A confoundedly hard place to get lost in!_ That had been her
husband's phrase. And now, with the whole machinery of official
investigation sweeping its flash-lights from shore to shore, and
across the dividing straits; now, with Boyne's name blazing from the
walls of every town and village, his portrait (how that wrung her!)
hawked up and down the country like the image of a hunted criminal;
now the little compact, populous island, so policed, surveyed, and
administered, revealed itself as a Sphinx-like guardian of abysmal
mysteries, staring back into his wife's anguished eyes as if with
the malicious joy of knowing something they would never know!

In the fortnight since Boyne's disappearance there had been no word
of him, no trace of his movements. Even the usual misleading reports
that raise expectancy in tortured bosoms had been few and fleeting.
No one but the bewildered kitchen-maid had seen him leave the house,
and no one else had seen "the gentleman" who accompanied him. All
inquiries in the neighborhood failed to elicit the memory of a
stranger's presence that day in the neighborhood of Lyng. And no one
had met Edward Boyne, either alone or in company, in any of the
neighboring villages, or on the road across the downs, or at either
of the local railway-stations. The sunny English noon had swallowed
him as completely as if he had gone out into Cimmerian night.

Mary, while every external means of investigation was working at its
highest pressure, had ransacked her husband's papers for any trace
of antecedent complications, of entanglements or obligations unknown
to her, that might throw a faint ray into the darkness. But if any
such had existed in the background of Boyne's life, they had
disappeared as completely as the slip of paper on which the visitor
had written his name. There remained no possible thread of guidance
except--if it were indeed an exception--the letter which Boyne had
apparently been in the act of writing when he received his
mysterious summons. That letter, read and reread by his wife, and
submitted by her to the police, yielded little enough for conjecture
to feed on.

"I have just heard of Elwell's death, and while I suppose there is
now no farther risk of trouble, it might be safer--" That was all.
The "risk of trouble" was easily explained by the newspaper clipping
which had apprised Mary of the suit brought against her husband by
one of his associates in the Blue Star enterprise. The only new
information conveyed in the letter was the fact of its showing
Boyne, when he wrote it, to be still apprehensive of the results of
the suit, though he had assured his wife that it had been withdrawn,
and though the letter itself declared that the plaintiff was dead.
It took several weeks of exhaustive cabling to fix the identity of
the "Parvis" to whom the fragmentary communication was addressed,
but even after these inquiries had shown him to be a Waukesha
lawyer, no new facts concerning the Elwell suit were elicited. He
appeared to have had no direct concern in it, but to have been
conversant with the facts merely as an acquaintance, and possible
intermediary; and he declared himself unable to divine with what
object Boyne intended to seek his assistance.

This negative information, sole fruit of the first fortnight's
feverish search, was not increased by a jot during the slow weeks
that followed. Mary knew that the investigations were still being
carried on, but she had a vague sense of their gradually slackening,
as the actual march of time seemed to slacken. It was as though the
days, flying horror-struck from the shrouded image of the one
inscrutable day, gained assurance as the distance lengthened, till
at last they fell back into their normal gait. And so with the human
imaginations at work on the dark event. No doubt it occupied them
still, but week by week and hour by hour it grew less absorbing,
took up less space, was slowly but inevitably crowded out of the
foreground of consciousness by the new problems perpetually bubbling
up from the vaporous caldron of human experience.

Even Mary Boyne's consciousness gradually felt the same lowering of
velocity. It still swayed with the incessant oscillations of
conjecture; but they were slower, more rhythmical in their beat.
There were moments of overwhelming lassitude when, like the victim
of some poison which leaves the brain clear, but holds the body
motionless, she saw herself domesticated with the Horror, accepting
its perpetual presence as one of the fixed conditions of life.

These moments lengthened into hours and days, till she passed into a
phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of
life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless
processes of civilization make but the faintest impression. She had
come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke of the wheel,
revolving with its motion; she felt almost like the furniture of the
room in which she sat, an insensate object to be dusted and pushed
about with the chairs and tables. And this deepening apathy held her
fast at Lyng, in spite of the urgent entreaties of friends and the
usual medical recommendation of "change." Her friends supposed that
her refusal to move was inspired by the belief that her husband
would one day return to the spot from which he had vanished, and a
beautiful legend grew up about this imaginary state of waiting. But
in reality she had no such belief: the depths of anguish inclosing
her were no longer lighted by flashes of hope. She was sure that
Boyne would never come back, that he had gone out of her sight as
completely as if Death itself had waited that day on the threshold.
She had even renounced, one by one, the various theories as to his
disappearance which had been advanced by the press, the police, and
her own agonized imagination. In sheer lassitude her mind turned
from these alternatives of horror, and sank back into the blank fact
that he was gone.

No, she would never know what had become of him--no one would ever
know. But the house _knew_; the library in which she spent her long,
lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been
enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which
had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt
his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there
were moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls
seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their
secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never
come. Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the
secrets intrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always
been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the
mysteries it had surprised. And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face
with its portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break
it by any human means.






V





"I don't say it _wasn't_ straight, yet don't say it _was_ straight.
It was business."

Mary, at the words, lifted her head with a start, and looked
intently at the speaker.

When, half an hour before, a card with "Mr. Parvis" on it had been
brought up to her, she had been immediately aware that the name had
been a part of her consciousness ever since she had read it at the
head of Boyne's unfinished letter. In the library she had found
awaiting her a small neutral-tinted man with a bald head and gold
eye-glasses, and it sent a strange tremor through her to know that
this was the person to whom her husband's last known thought had
been directed.

Parvis, civilly, but without vain preamble,--in the manner of a man
who has his watch in his hand,--had set forth the object of his
visit. He had "run over" to England on business, and finding himself
in the neighborhood of Dorchester, had not wished to leave it
without paying his respects to Mrs. Boyne; without asking her, if
the occasion offered, what she meant to do about Bob Elwell's
family.

The words touched the spring of some obscure dread in Mary's bosom.
Did her visitor, after all, know what Boyne had meant by his
unfinished phrase? She asked for an elucidation of his question, and
noticed at once that he seemed surprised at her continued ignorance
of the subject. Was it possible that she really knew as little as
she said?

"I know nothing--you must tell me," she faltered out; and her
visitor thereupon proceeded to unfold his story. It threw, even to
her confused perceptions, and imperfectly initiated vision, a lurid
glare on the whole hazy episode of the Blue Star Mine. Her husband
had made his money in that brilliant speculation at the cost of
"getting ahead" of some one less alert to seize the chance; the
victim of his ingenuity was young Robert Elwell, who had "put him
on" to the Blue Star scheme.

Parvis, at Mary's first startled cry, had thrown her a sobering
glance through his impartial glasses.

"Bob Elwell wasn't smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he
might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It's the kind
of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it's what the
scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr. Parvis,
evidently pleased with the aptness of his analogy.

Mary felt a physical shrinking from the next question she tried to
frame; it was as though the words on her lips had a taste that
nauseated her.

"But then--you accuse my husband of doing something dishonorable?"

Mr. Parvis surveyed the question dispassionately. "Oh, no, I don't.
I don't even say it wasn't straight." He glanced up and down the
long lines of books, as if one of them might have supplied him with
the definition he sought. "I don't say it _wasn't_ straight, and yet
I don't say it _was_ straight. It was business." After all, no
definition in his category could be more comprehensive than that.

Mary sat staring at him with a look of terror. He seemed to her like
the indifferent, implacable emissary of some dark, formless power.

"But Mr. Elwell's lawyers apparently did not take your view, since I
suppose the suit was withdrawn by their advice."

"Oh, yes, they knew he hadn't a leg to stand on, technically. It was
when they advised him to withdraw the suit that he got desperate.
You see, he'd borrowed most of the money he lost in the Blue Star,
and he was up a tree. That's why he shot himself when they told him
he had no show."

The horror was sweeping over Mary in great, deafening waves.

"He shot himself? He killed himself because of _that?_"

"Well, he didn't kill himself, exactly. He dragged on two months
before he died." Parvis emitted the statement as unemotionally as a
gramophone grinding out its "record."

"You mean that he tried to kill himself, and failed? And tried
again?"

"Oh, he didn't have to try again," said Parvis, grimly.

They sat opposite each other in silence, he swinging his eye-glass
thoughtfully about his finger, she, motionless, her arms stretched
along her knees in an attitude of rigid tension.

"But if you knew all this," she began at length, hardly able to
force her voice above a whisper, "how is it that when I wrote you at
the time of my husband's disappearance you said you didn't
understand his letter?"

Parvis received this without perceptible discomfiture. "Why, I
didn't understand it--strictly speaking. And it wasn't the time to
talk about it, if I had. The Elwell business was settled when the
suit was withdrawn. Nothing I could have told you would have helped
you to find your husband."

Mary continued to scrutinize him. "Then why are you telling me now?"

Still Parvis did not hesitate. "Well, to begin with, I supposed you
knew more than you appear to--I mean about the circumstances of
Elwell's death. And then people are talking of it now; the whole
matter's been raked up again. And I thought, if you didn't know, you
ought to."

She remained silent, and he continued: "You see, it's only come out
lately what a bad state Elwell's affairs were in. His wife's a proud
woman, and she fought on as long as she could, going out to work,
and taking sewing at home, when she got too sick--something with the
heart, I believe. But she had his bedridden mother to look after,
and the children, and she broke down under it, and finally had to
ask for help. That attracted attention to the case, and the papers
took it up, and a subscription was started. Everybody out there
liked Bob Elwell, and most of the prominent names in the place are
down on the list, and people began to wonder why--"

Parvis broke off to fumble in an inner pocket. "Here," he continued,
"here's an account of the whole thing from the 'Sentinel'--a little
sensational, of course. But I guess you'd better look it over."

He held out a newspaper to Mary, who unfolded it slowly,
remembering, as she did so, the evening when, in that same room, the
perusal of a clipping from the "Sentinel" had first shaken the
depths of her security.

As she opened the paper, her eyes, shrinking from the glaring
head-lines, "Widow of Boyne's Victim Forced to Appeal for Aid," ran
down the column of text to two portraits inserted in it. The first
was her husband's, taken from a photograph made the year they had
come to England. It was the picture of him that she liked best, the
one that stood on the writing-table up-stairs in her bedroom. As the
eyes in the photograph met hers, she felt it would be impossible to
read what was said of him, and closed her lids with the sharpness of
the pain.

"I thought if you felt disposed to put your name down--" she heard
Parvis continue.

She opened her eyes with an effort, and they fell on the other
portrait. It was that of a youngish man, slightly built, in rough
clothes, with features somewhat blurred by the shadow of a
projecting hat-brim. Where had she seen that outline before? She
stared at it confusedly, her heart hammering in her throat and ears.
Then she gave a cry.

"This is the man--the man who came for my husband!"

She heard Parvis start to his feet, and was dimly aware that she had
slipped backward into the corner of the sofa, and that he was
bending above her in alarm. With an intense effort she straightened
herself, and reached out for the paper, which she had dropped.

"It's the man! I should know him anywhere!" she cried in a voice
that sounded in her own ears like a scream.

Parvis's voice seemed to come to her from far off, down endless,
fog-muffled windings.

"Mrs. Boyne, you're not very well. Shall I call somebody? Shall I
get a glass of water?"

"No, no, no!" She threw herself toward him, her hand frantically
clenching the newspaper. "I tell you, it's the man! I _know_ him! He
spoke to me in the garden!"

Parvis took the journal from her, directing his glasses to the
portrait. "It can't be, Mrs. Boyne. It's Robert Elwell."

"Robert Elwell?" Her white stare seemed to travel into space. "Then
it was Robert Elwell who came for him."

"Came for Boyne? The day he went away?" Parvis's voice dropped as
hers rose. He bent over, laying a fraternal hand on her, as if to
coax her gently back into her seat. "Why, Elwell was dead! Don't you
remember?"

Mary sat with her eyes fixed on the picture, unconscious of what he
was saying.

"Don't you remember Boyne's unfinished letter to me--the one you
found on his desk that day? It was written just after he'd heard of
Elwell's death." She noticed an odd shake in Parvis's unemotional
voice. "Surely you remember that!" he urged her.

Yes, she remembered: that was the profoundest horror of it. Elwell
had died the day before her husband's disappearance; and this was
Elwell's portrait; and it was the portrait of the man who had spoken
to her in the garden. She lifted her head and looked slowly about
the library. The library could have borne witness that it was also
the portrait of the man who had come in that day to call Boyne from
his unfinished letter. Through the misty surgings of her brain she
heard the faint boom of half-forgotten words--words spoken by Alida
Stair on the lawn at Pangbourne before Boyne and his wife had ever
seen the house at Lyng, or had imagined that they might one day live
there.

"This was the man who spoke to me," she repeated.

She looked again at Parvis. He was trying to conceal his disturbance
under what he imagined to be an expression of indulgent
commiseration; but the edges of his lips were blue. "He thinks me
mad; but I'm not mad," she reflected; and suddenly there flashed
upon her a way of justifying her strange affirmation.

She sat quiet, controlling the quiver of her lips, and waiting till
she could trust her voice to keep its habitual level; then she said,
looking straight at Parvis: "Will you answer me one question,
please? When was it that Robert Elwell tried to kill himself?"

"When--when?" Parvis stammered.

"Yes; the date. Please try to remember."

She saw that he was growing still more afraid of her. "I have a
reason," she insisted gently.

"Yes, yes. Only I can't remember. About two months before, I should
say."

"I want the date," she repeated.

Parvis picked up the newspaper. "We might see here," he said, still
humoring her. He ran his eyes down the page. "Here it is. Last
October--the--"

She caught the words from him. "The 20th, wasn't it?" With a sharp
look at her, he verified. "Yes, the 20th. Then you _did_ know?"

"I know now." Her white stare continued to travel past him. "Sunday,
the 20th--that was the day he came first."

Parvis's voice was almost inaudible. "Came _here_ first?"

"Yes."

"You saw him twice, then?"

"Yes, twice." She breathed it at him with dilated eyes. "He came
first on the 20th of October. I remember the date because it was the
day we went up Meldon Steep for the first time." She felt a faint
gasp of inward laughter at the thought that but for that she might
have forgotten.

Parvis continued to scrutinize her, as if trying to intercept her
gaze.

"We saw him from the roof," she went on. "He came down the
lime-avenue toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that
picture. My husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down
ahead of me; but there was no one there. He had vanished."

"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.

"Yes." Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. "I
couldn't think what had happened. I see now. He _tried_ to come
then; but he wasn't dead enough--he couldn't reach us. He had to
wait for two months; and then he came back again--and Ned went with
him."

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has
successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted
her hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting
temples.

"Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent him
to this room!" she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling
ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the
ruins, crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb
to his touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the
tumult she heard but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair,
speaking on the lawn at Pangbourne.

"You won't know till afterward," it said. "You won't know till long,
long afterward."






THE LETTERS

I





UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed
in the cold spring sunshine. As she breasted the incline, she
noticed the first waves of wistaria over courtyard railings and the
high lights of new foliage against the walls of ivy-matted gardens;
and she thought again, as she had thought a hundred times
before, that she had never seen so beautiful a spring.

She was on her way to the Deerings' house, in a street near the
hilltop; and every step was dear and familiar to her. She went there
five times a week to teach little Juliet Deering, the daughter of
Mr. Vincent Deering, the distinguished American artist. Juliet had
been her pupil for two years, and day after day, during that time,
Lizzie West had mounted the hill in all weathers; sometimes with her
umbrella bent against a driving rain, sometimes with her frail
cotton parasol unfurled beneath a fiery sun, sometimes with the snow
soaking through her patched boots or a bitter wind piercing her thin
jacket, sometimes with the dust whirling about her and bleaching the
flowers of the poor little hat that _had_ to "carry her through"
till next summer.

At first the ascent had seemed tedious enough, as dull as the trudge
to her other lessons. Lizzie was not a heaven-sent teacher; she had
no born zeal for her calling, and though she dealt kindlyand
dutifully with her pupils, she did not fly to them on winged feet.
But one day something had happened to change the face of life, and
since then the climb to the Deering house had seemed like a
dream-flight up a heavenly stairway.

Her heart beat faster as she remembered it--no longer in a tumult of
fright and self-reproach, but softly, peacefully, as ifbrooding over
a possession that none could take from her.

It was on a day of the previous October that she had stopped, after
Juliet's lesson, to ask if she might speak to Juliet's papa. One had
always to apply to Mr. Deering if there was anything to be said
about the lessons. Mrs. Deering lay on her lounge up-stairs, reading
greasy relays of dog-eared novels, the choice of which she left to
the cook and the nurse, who were always fetching them forher from
the _cabinet de lecture;_ and it was understood inthe house that she
was not to be "bothered" about Juliet. Mr. Deering's interest in his
daughter was fitful rather than consecutive; but at least he was
approachable, and listened sympathetically, if a little absently,
stroking his long, fair mustache, while Lizzie stated her difficulty
or put in her plea for maps or copy-books.

"Yes, yes--of course--whatever you think right," he would always
assent, sometimes drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and
laying it carelessly on the table, or oftener saying, with his
charming smile: "Get what you please, and just put it onyour
account, you know."

But this time Lizzie had not come to ask for maps or copy-books, or
even to hint, in crimson misery,--as once, poor soul! she had had to
do,--that Mr. Deering had overlooked her last little account had
probably not noticed that she had left it, some two months earlier,
on a corner of his littered writing-table. That hour had been bad
enough, though he had done his best to make it easy to carry it off
gallantly and gaily; but this was infinitely worse. For she had come
to complain of her pupil; to say that, much as she loved little
Juliet, it was useless, unless Mr. Deering could "do something," to
go on with the lessons.

"It wouldn't be honest--I should be robbing you; I'm not sure that I
haven't already," she half laughed, through mounting tears, as she
put her case. Little Juliet would not work, would not obey. Her
poor, little, drifting existence floated aimlessly between the
kitchen and the _lingerie_, and all the groping tendrils ofher
curiosity were fastened about the doings of the backstairs.

It was the same kind of curiosity that Mrs. Deering, overhead in her
drug-scented room, lavished on her dog-eared novels and onthe
"society notes" of the morning paper; but since Juliet's horizon was
not yet wide enough to embrace these loftier objects, her interest
was centered in the anecdotes that Celeste and Suzanne brought back
from the market and the library. That these were not always of an
edifying nature the child's artless prattle too often betrayed; but
unhappily they occupied her fancy to the complete exclusion of such
nourishing items as dates and dynasties, and the sources of the
principal European rivers.

At length the crisis became so acute that poor Lizzie felt herself
bound to resign her charge or ask Mr. Deering's intervention; and
for Juliet's sake she chose the harder alternative. It _was_ hard to
speak to him not onlybecause one hated still more to ascribe it to
such vulgar causes, but becauseone blushed to bring them to the
notice of a spirit engaged with higher things. Mr. Deering was very
busy at that moment: he had a new picture "on." And Lizzie entered
the studio with the flutterof one profanely intruding on some sacred
rite; she almost heard the rustle of retreating wings as she
approached.

And then--and then--how differently it had all turned out! Perhaps
it wouldn't have, if she hadn't been such a goose--she who so seldom
cried, so prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering
cageful of "feelings." But if she had cried, it was because he had
looked at her so kindly, so softly, and because she had nevertheless
felt him so pained and shamed by what she said. The pain, of course,
lay for both in the implication behind her words--in the one word
they left unspoken. If little Juliet was as she was, it was because
of the mother up-stairs--the mother who had given her child her
futile impulses, and grudged her the care that might have guided
them. The wretched case so obviously revolved in its own vicious
circle that when Mr. Deering had murmured, "Of course if my wife
were not an invalid," they both turned with a simultaneous spring to
the flagrant "bad example" of Celeste and Suzanne, fastening on that
with a mutual insistence that ended inhis crying out, "All the more,
then, how can you leave her to them?"

"But if I do her no good?" Lizzie wailed; and it was then
that,--when he took her hand and assured her gently, "But you do, you
do!"--it was then that, in the traditional phrase, she "brokedown,"
and her conventional protest quivered off into tears.

"You do _me_ good, at any rate--you make the houseseem less like a
desert," she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself
drawn to him, and they kissed each other through her weeping.

They kissed each other--there was the new fact. One does not, if one
is a poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin's Pension Suisse at
Passy, and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out
trustfully to other eyes--one does not, under these common but
defenseless conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without
being now and then kissed,--waylaid once by a noisy student between
two doors, surprised once by one's gray-bearded professoras one bent
over the "theme" he was correcting,--but these episodes, if they
tarnish the surface, do not reach the heart: itis not the kiss
endured, but the kiss returned, that lives. And Lizzie West's first
kiss was for Vincent Deering.

As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her--something
deeper than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of
Mrs. Deering. A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and
started out blindly to seek the sun.

She might have felt differently, perhaps,--the shame and penitence
might have prevailed,--had she not known him so kind and tender, and
guessed him so baffled, poor, and disappointed. She knew the failure
of his married life, and she divined a corresponding failure in his
artistic career. Lizzie, who had made her own faltering snatch at
the same laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency to bear on the
question of his pictures, which she judged to be extremely
brilliant, but suspected of having somehowfailed to affirm their
merit publicly. She understood that he had tasted an earlier moment
of success: a mention, a medal, something official and tangible;
then the tide of publicity had somehow setthe other way, and left
him stranded in a noble isolation. It was extraordinary and
unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and exceptional
should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities that
governed her own life, should have known povertyand obscurity and
indifference. But she gathered that this had been the case, and felt
that it formed the miraculous link between them. For through what
medium less revealing than that of sharedmisfortune would he ever
have perceived so inconspicuous an object as herself? And she
recalled now how gently his eyes had rested on her from the
first--the gray eyes that might have seemed mocking if they had not
been so gentle.

She remembered how he had met her the first day, when Mrs. Deering's
inevitable headache had prevented her from receiving the new
teacher, and how his few questions had at once revealed his interest
in the little stranded, compatriot, doomed to earn a precarious
living so far from her native shore. Sweet as the moment of
unburdening had been, she wondered afterward what had determined it:
how she, so shy and sequestered, had found herselfletting slip her
whole poverty-stricken story, even to the avowalof the ineffectual
"artistic" tendencies that had drawn her to Paris, and had then left
her there to the dry task of tuition. She wondered at first, but she
understood now; she understood everything after he had kissed her.
It was simply because he wasas kind as he was great.

She thought of this now as she mounted the hill in the spring
sunshine, and she thought of all that had happened since. The
intervening months, as she looked back at them, were merged in a
vast golden haze, through which here and there rose the outline of a
shining island. The haze was the general enveloping sense of his
love, and the shining islands were the days they had spent together.
They had never kissed again under his own roof. Lizzie's
professional honor had a keen edge, but she had been spared the
vulgar necessity of making him feel it. It was of theessence of her
fatality that he always "understood" when his failing to do so might
have imperiled his hold on her.

But her Thursdays and Sundays were free, and it soon became a habit
to give them to him. She knew, for her peace of mind, onlytoo much
about pictures, and galleries and churches had been the one bright
outlet from the grayness of her personal atmosphere. For poetry,
too, and the other imaginative forms of literature, she had always
felt more than she had hitherto had occasion to betray; and now all
these folded sympathies shot out their tendrils to the light. Mr.
Deering knew how to express with unmatched clearness and competence
the thoughts that trembled in her mind: to talk with him was to soar
up into the azure on the outspread wings of his intelligence, and
look down dizzily yet distinctly, on all the wonders and glories of
the world. She was a little ashamed, sometimes, to find how few
definite impressions she brought back from these flights; but that
was doubtless because her heart beatso fast when he was near, and
his smile made his words like a long quiver of light. Afterward, in
quieter hours, fragments of theirtalk emerged in her memory with
wondrous precision, every syllable as minutely chiseled as some of
the delicate objects in crystal or ivory that he pointed out in the
museums they frequented. It wasalways a puzzle to Lizzie that some
of their hours should be so blurred and others so vivid.

On the morning in question she was reliving all these memories with
unusual distinctness, for it was a fortnight since she had seen her
friend. Mrs. Deering, some six weeks previously, had gone to visit a
relation at St.-Raphael; and, after she had been a month absent, her
husband and the little girl had joined her. Lizzie'sadieux to
Deering had been made on a rainy afternoon in the damp corridors of
the Aquarium at the Trocadero. She could not receive him at her own
_pension_. That a teacher should bevisited by the father of a pupil,
especially when that father wasstill, as Madame Clopin said, _si
bien_, was against that lady's austere Helvetian code. From
Deering's first tentative hint of another solution Lizzie had
recoiled in a wild unreasoned flurry of all her scruples, he took
her "No, no, _no!_" as he tookall her twists and turns of
conscience, with eyes half-tender and half-mocking, and an instant
acquiescence which was the finest homage to the "lady" she felt he
divined and honored in her.

So they continued to meet in museums and galleries, or to extend, on
fine days, their explorations to the suburbs, where now and then, in
the solitude of grove or garden, the kiss renewed itself, fleeting,
isolated, or prolonged in a shy, silent pressure of the hand. But on
the day of his leave-taking the rain kept them under cover; and as
they threaded the subterranean windings of the Aquarium, and Lizzie
looked unseeingly at the monstrous faces glaring at her through
walls of glass, she felt like a poor drowned wretch at the bottom of
the sea, with all her glancing, sunlit memories rolling over her
like the waves of its surface.

"You'll never see him again--never see him again," the wavesboomed
in her ears through his last words; and when she had said good-by to
him at the corner, and had scrambled, wet and shivering, into the
Passy omnibus, its great, grinding wheels took up the derisive
burden--"Never see him, never see him again."

All that was only two weeks ago, and here she was, as happy as a
lark, mounting the hill to his door in the spring sunshine. Soweak a
heart did not deserve such a radiant fate; and Lizzie saidto herself
that she would never again distrust her star.






II





THE cracked bell tinkled sweetly through her heart as she stood
listening for the scamper of Juliet's feet. Juliet, anticipatingthe
laggard Suzanne, almost always opened the door for her governess,
not from any unnatural zeal to hasten the hour of her studies, but
from the irrepressible desire to see what was going on in the
street. But on this occasion Lizzie listened vainly for astep, and
at length gave the bell another twitch. Doubtless someunusually
absorbing incident had detained the child below-stairs; thus only
could her absence be explained.

A third ring produced no response, and Lizzie, full of dawning
fears, drew back to look up at the shabby, blistered house. She saw
that the studio shutters stood wide, and then noticed, without
surprise, that Mrs. Deering's were still unopened. No doubt
Mrs. Deering was resting after the fatigue of the journey.
Instinctively Lizzie's eyes turned again to the studio; and as she
looked, she saw Deering at the window. He caught sight of her, and
an instant later came to the door. He looked paler than usual, and
she noticed that he wore a black coat.

"I rang and rang--where is Juliet?"

He looked at her gravely, almost solemnly; then, without answering,
he led her down the passage to the studio, and closed the door when
she had entered.

"My wife is dead--she died suddenly ten days ago. Didn't you see it
in the papers?"

Lizzie, with a little cry, sank down on the rickety divan. She
seldom saw a newspaper, since she could not afford one for her own
perusal, and those supplied to the Pension Clopin were usually in
the hands of its more privileged lodgers till long after the hour
when she set out on her morning round.

"No; I didn't see it," she stammered.

Deering was silent. He stood a little way off, twisting an unlit
cigarette in his hand, and looking down at her with a gaze that was
both hesitating and constrained.

She, too, felt the constraint of the situation, the impossibility of
finding words that, after what had passed between them, should seem
neither false nor heartless; and at last she exclaimed, standing up:
"Poor little Juliet! Can't I go to her?"

"Juliet is not here. I left her at St.-Raphael with the relations
with whom my wife was staying."

"Oh," Lizzie murmured, feeling vaguely that this added to the
difficulty of the moment. How differently she had pictured
theirmeeting!

"I'm so--so sorry for her!" she faltered out.

Deering made no reply, but, turning on his heel, walked the length
of the studio, and then halted vaguely before the picture on the
easel. It was the landscape he had begun the previous autumn, with
the intention of sending it to the Salon that spring. But it was
still unfinished--seemed, indeed, hardly moreadvanced than on the
fateful October day when Lizzie, standing before it for the first
time, had confessed her inability to dealwith Juliet. Perhaps the
same thought struck its creator, for hebroke into a dry laugh, and
turned from the easel with a shrug.

Under his protracted silence Lizzie roused herself to the fact that,
since her pupil was absent, there was no reason for her remaining
any longer; and as Deering again moved toward her she said with an
effort: "I'll go, then. You'll send for me when shecomes back?"

Deering still hesitated, tormenting the cigarette between his
fingers.

"She's not coming back--not at present."

Lizzie heard him with a drop of the heart. Was everything to be
changed in their lives? But of course; how could she have dreamed it
would be otherwise? She could only stupidly repeat: "Not coming
back? Not this spring?"

"Probably not, since are friends are so good as to keep her. The
fact is, I've got to go to America. My wife left a little property,
a few pennies, that I must go and see to--for the child."

Lizzie stood before him, a cold knife in her breast. "I see--I see,"
she reiterated, feeling all the while that she strained her eyes
into impenetrable blackness.

"It's a nuisance, having to pull up stakes," he went on, with a
fretful glance about the studio.

She lifted her eyes slowly to his face. "Shall you be gone long?"
she took courage to ask.

"There again--I can't tell. It's all so frightfully mixed up." He
met her look for an incredibly long, strange moment. "Ihate to go!"
he murmured as if to himself.

Lizzie felt a rush of moisture to her lashes, and the old, familiar
wave of weakness at her heart. She raised her hand to her face with
an instinctive gesture, and as she did so he held out his arms.

"Come here, Lizzie!" he said.

And she went--went with a sweet, wild throb of liberation, with the
sense that at last the house was his, that _she_ was his, if he
wanted her; that never again would that silent, rebuking presence in
the room above constrain and shame her rapture.

He pushed back her veil and covered her face with kisses. "Don't
cry, you little goose!" he said.






III





THAT they must see each other again before his departure, in
someplace less exposed than their usual haunts, was as clear to
Lizzie as it appeared to be to Deering. His expressing the wish
seemed, indeed, the sweetest testimony to the quality of his feeling,
since, in the first weeks of the most perfunctory widowerhood, a man
of his stamp is presumed to abstain from light adventures. If, then,
at such a moment, he wished so much to be quietly and gravely with
her, it could be only for reasons she did not call by name, but of
which she felt the sacred tremor in her heart; and it would have
seemed incredibly vain and vulgar to put forward, at such a crisis,
the conventional objections by means of which such littleexposed
existences defend the treasure of their freshness.

In such a mood as this one may descend from the Passy omnibus at the
corner of the Pont de la Concorde (she had not let him fetch her in
a cab) with a sense of dedication almost solemn, and may advance to
meet one's fate, in the shape of a gentleman of melancholy elegance,
with an auto-taxi at his call, as one has advanced to the
altar-steps in some girlish bridal vision.

Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper roomof the
quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest
for seclusion to be based on sentimental motives, so soberly did
Deering give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at
his side. She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure
their hour together: she was already learning that Deering shrank
from sadness. He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face
their coming separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this
completer nearness; but she waited, as always, for him to strike the
opening note.

Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the
hour. Her heart was unversed inhappiness, but he had found the tone
to lull her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any
golden wonder. Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something
tacit and confirmed between them, as if his tenderness were a habit
of the heart hardly needing the support of outward proof.

Such proof as he offered came, therefore, as a kind of crowning
luxury, the flower of a profoundly rooted sentiment; andhere again
the instinctive reserves and defenses would have seemed to vulgarize
what his trust ennobled. But if all the tender casuistries of her
heart were at his service, he took no grave advantage of them. Even
when they sat alone after dinner, with the lights of the river
trembling through their one low window, and the vast rumor of Paris
inclosing them in a heart of silence, he seemed, as much as herself,
under the spell of hallowing influences. She felt it most of all as
she yielded to the arm hepresently put about her, to the long caress
he laid on her lips and eyes: not a word or gesture missed the note
of quiet union, or cast a doubt, in retrospect, on the pact they
sealed with their last look.

That pact, as she reviewed it through a sleepless night, seemed to
have consisted mainly, on his part, in pleadings for full and
frequent news of her, on hers in the assurance that it shouldbe
given as often as he asked it. She had felt an intense desirenot to
betray any undue eagerness, any crude desire to affirm anddefine her
hold on him. Her life had given her a certain acquaintance with the
arts of defense: girls in her situation were commonly supposed to
know them all, and to use them as occasion called. But Lizzie's very
need of them had intensified her disdain. Just because she was so
poor, and had always, materially, so to count her change and
calculate her margin, she would at least know the joy of emotional
prodigality, would give her heart as recklessly as the rich their
millions. She was sure now that Deering loved her, and if he had
seized the occasion of their farewell to give her some definitely
worded sign of his feeling--if, more plainly, he had asked her to
marry him,--his doing so would have seemed less like a proof of his
sincerity than of his suspecting in her the need of a verbal
warrant. That he had abstained seemed to show that he trusted her as
she trusted him, and that they were one most of all in this deep
security of understanding.

She had tried to make him divine all this in the chariness of her
promise to write. She would write; of course she would. Buthe would
be busy, preoccupied, on the move: it was for him to lether know
when he wished a word, to spare her the embarrassment ofill-timed
intrusions.

"Intrusions?" He had smiled the word away. "You can't wellintrude,
my darling, on a heart where you're already established, to the
complete exclusion of other lodgers." And then, taking her hands,
and looking up from them into her happy, dizzy eyes: "You don't know
much about being in love, do you, Lizzie?" he laughingly ended.

It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she
wondered afterward if she had not deserved it. Was she really cold
and conventional, and did other women give more richly and
recklessly? She found that it was possible to turn about every one
of her reserves and delicacies so that they looked like selfish
scruples and petty pruderies, and at this game she came in time to
exhaust all the resources of an over-abundant casuistry.

Meanwhile the first days after Deering's departure wore a soft,
refracted light like the radiance lingering after sunset. _He_, at
any rate, was taxable with no reserves, nocalculations, and his
letters of farewell, from train and steamer, filled her with long
murmurs and echoes of his presence. How he loved her, how he loved
her--and how he knew how to tell her so!

She was not sure of possessing the same aptitude. Unused tothe
expression of personal emotion, she fluctuated between the impulse
to pour out all she felt and the fear lest her extravagance should
amuse or even bore him. She never lost the sense that what was to
her the central crisis of experience must be a mere episode in a
life so predestined as his to romantic accidents. All that she felt
and said would be subjected to the test of comparison with what
others had already given him: from all quarters of the globeshe saw
passionate missives winging their way toward Deering, forwhom her
poor little swallow-flight ofdevotion could certainly not make a
summer. But such moments were succeeded by others in which she
raised her head and dared inwardly to affirm her conviction that no
woman had ever loved him just as she had, and that none, therefore,
had probably found just such things to say to him. And this
conviction strengthened the other less solidly based belief that
_he_ also, for the same reason, had found new accents to express his
tenderness, and that the three letters she wore all day in her
shabby blouse, and hid all night beneath her pillow, surpassed not
only in beauty, but in quality, all he had ever penned for other
eyes.

They gave her, at any rate, during the weeks that she wore them on
her heart, sensations even more complex and delicate than Deering's
actual presence had ever occasioned. To be with him was always like
breasting a bright, rough sea, that blinded while it buoyed her: but
his letters formed a still pool of contemplation, above which she
could bend, and see the reflection of the sky, and the myriad
movements of life that flitted and gleamed below the surface. The
wealth of his hidden life--that was what most surprised her! It was
incredible to her now that she had had no inkling of it, but had
kept on blindly along the narrow track of habit, like a traveler
climbing a road in a fog, who suddenly finds himself on a sunlit
crag between blue leagues of sky and dizzy depths of valley. And the
odd thing was that all the people about her--the whole world of the
Passy pension--were still plodding along the same dull path,
preoccupied with the pebbles underfoot, and unconscious of the glory
beyond the fog!

There were wild hours when she longed to cry out to them what one
saw from the summit--and hours of tremulous abasement when she asked
herself why _her_ happy feet had been guided there, while others, no
doubt as worthy, stumbled and blundered in obscurity. She felt, in
particular, a sudden urgent pity for the two or three other girls at
Mme. Clopin's--girls older, duller, less alive than she, and by that
very token more appealingly flung upon her sympathy. Would they ever
know? Had they ever known?--those were the questions that haunted
her as she crossed her companions on the stairs, faced them at the
dinner-table, and listened to their poor, pining talk in the dim-lit
slippery-seated _salon_. One ofthe girls was Swiss, the other
English; the third, Andora Macy, was ayoung lady from the Southern
States who was studying French with the ultimate object of imparting
it to the inmates of a girls' school at Macon, Georgia.

Andora Macy was pale, faded, immature. She had a drooping Southern
accent, and a manner which fluctuated between arch audacity and fits
of panicky hauteur. She yearned to be admired, and feared to be
insulted; and yet seemed tragically conscious that she was destined
to miss both these extremes of sensation, or to enjoy them only at
second hand in the experiences of her more privileged friends.

It was perhaps for this reason that she took a wistful interest in
Lizzie, who had shrunk from her at first, as the depressing image of
her own probable future, but to whom she had now suddenly become an
object of sentimental pity.






IV





MISS MACY's room was next to Miss West's, and the Southerner's knock
often appealed to Lizzie's hospitality when Mme. Clopin's early
curfew had driven her boarders from the _salon_. It sounded thus one
evening just as Lizzie, tired from an unusually long day of tuition,
was in the act of removing her dress. She was in too indulgent a
mood to withhold her "Come in," and as Miss Macy crossed the
threshold, Lizzie felt that Vincent Deering's first letter--the
letter from the train--had slipped from her loosened bodice to the
floor.

Miss Macy, as promptly noting the fact, darted forward to recover
the letter. Lizzie stooped also, fiercely jealous of her touch; but
the other reached the precious paper first, andas she seized it,
Lizzie knew that she had seen whence it fell, and was weaving round
the incident a rapid web of romance.

Lizzie blushed with annoyance. "It's too stupid, having no pockets!
If one gets a letter as she is going out in the morning, she has to
carry it in her blouse all day."

Miss Macy looked at her with swimming eyes. "It's warm fromyour
heart!" she breathed, reluctantly yielding up the missive.

Lizzie laughed, for she knew better: she knew it was the letter that
had warmed her heart. Poor Andora Macy! _She_ would never know. Her
bleak bosom would never take fire from such a contact. Lizzie looked
at her with kind eyes, secretly chafing at the injustice of fate.

The next evening, on her return home, she found Andora hovering in
the entrance hall.

"I thought you'd like me to put this in your own hand," Miss Macy
whispered significantly, pressing a letter upon Lizzie. "I couldn't
_bear_ to see it lying on the table with theothers."

It was Deering's letter from the steamer. Lizzie blushed tothe
forehead, but without resenting Andora's divination. She could not
have breathed a word of her bliss, but she was not altogethersorry
to have it guessed, and pity for Andora's destitution yielded to the
pleasure of using it as a mirror for her own abundance. DEERING
wrote again on reaching New York, a long, fond, dissatisfied letter,
vague in its indication of his own projects, specific in the
expression of his love. Lizzie brooded over every syllable of it
till they formed the undercurrent of all her waking thoughts, and
murmured through her midnight dreams; but she wouldhave been happier
if they had shed some definite light on the future.

That would come, no doubt, when he had had time to look about and
get his bearings. She counted up the days that must elapse before
she received his next letter, and stole down early to peepat the
papers, and learn when the next American mail was due. Atlength the
happy date arrived, and she hurried distractedly through the day's
work, trying to conceal her impatience by the endearments she
bestowed upon her pupils. It was easier, in her present mood, to
kiss them than to keep them at their grammars.

That evening, on Mme. Clopin's threshold, her heart beat so wildly
that she had to lean a moment against the door-post beforeentering.
But on the hall table, where the letters lay, there was none for
her.

She went over them with a feverish hand, her heart dropping down and
down, as she had sometimes fallen down an endless stairway in a
dream--the very same stairway up which she had seemed to flywhen she
climbed the long hill to Deering's door. Then it suddenly struck her
that Andora might have found and secreted her letter, and with a
spring she was on the actual stairs and rattling Miss Macy's
door-handle.

"You've a letter for me, haven't you?" she panted.

Miss Macy, turning from the toilet-table, inclosed her in attenuated
arms. "Oh, darling, did you expect one to-day?"

"Do give it to me!" Lizzie pleaded with burning eyes.

"But I haven't any! There hasn't been a sign of a letter for you."

"I know there is. There _must_ be," Lizzie persisted, stamping her
foot.

"But, dearest, I've _watched_ for you, and there'sbeen nothing,
absolutely nothing."

Day after day, for the ensuing weeks, the same scene reenacted
itself with endless variations. Lizzie, after the first sharp spasm
of disappointment, made no effort to conceal her anxiety from Miss
Macy, and the fond Andora was charged to keep a vigilant eyeupon the
postman's coming, and to spy on the _bonne_ for possible negligence
or perfidy. But these elaborate precautions remained fruitless, and
no letter from Deering came.

During the first fortnight of silence Lizzie exhausted all the
ingenuities of explanation. She marveled afterward at the reasons
she had found for Deering's silence: there were moments when she
almost argued herself into thinking it more natural than his
continuing to write. There was only one reason which her
intelligence consistently rejected, and that was the possibility
that he had forgotten her, that the wholeepisode had faded from his
mind like a breath from a mirror. From that she resolutely turned
her thoughts, aware that if she suffered herself to contemplate it,
the motive power of life would fail, and she would no longer
understand why she rose up in the morning and laydown at night.

If she had had leisure to indulge her anguish she might havebeen
unable to keep such speculations at bay. But she had to be up and
working: the _blanchisseuse_ had to be paid, and Mme. Clopin's
weekly bill, and all the little "extras" that even her frugal habits
had to reckon with. And in the depths of her thought dwelt the
dogging fear of illness and incapacity, goading her to work while
she could. She hardly remembered the time when she had been without
that fear; it was second nature now, and it kept her on her feet
when other incentives might have failed. In the blankness of her
misery shefelt no dread of death; but the horror of being ill and
"dependent" was in her blood.

In the first weeks of silence she wrote again and again to Deering,
entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first
she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet
in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been
too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his
fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers
had not been light enough. She should havekept to the character of
the "little friend," the artless consciousness in which tormented
genius may find an escape from its complexities; and instead, she
had dramatized their relation, exaggerated her own part in it,
presumed, forsooth, to share the front of the stage with him,
instead of being content to serve asscenery or chorus.

But though to herself she admitted, and even insisted on, the
episodical nature of the experience, on the fact that for Deeringit
could be no more than an incident, she was still convinced that his
sentiment for her, however fugitive, had been genuine.

His had not been the attitude of the unscrupulous male seeking a
vulgar "advantage." For a moment he had really needed her, andif he
was silent now, it was perhaps because he feared that she had
mistaken the nature of the need and built vain hopes on its possible
duration.

It was of the very essence of Lizzie's devotion that it sought
instinctively the larger freedom of its object; she could not
conceive of love under any form of exaction or compulsion. To make
this clear to Deering became an overwhelming need, and in a last
short letter she explicitly freed him from whatever sentimental
obligation its predecessors might have seemed to impose. In
thisstudied communication she playfully accused herself of having
unwittingly sentimentalized their relation, affirming, in
self-defense, a retrospective astuteness, a sense of the
impermanence of the tenderer sentiments, that almost put Deering in
the fatuous position of having mistaken coquetry for surrender. And
she ended gracefully with a plea for the continuance of the friendly
regardwhich she had "always understood" to be the basis of their
sympathy. The document, when completed, seemed to her worthy of what
she conceived to be Deering's conception of a woman of the world,
and she found a spectral satisfaction in the thought of making her
final appearance before him in that distinguished character. But she
was never destined to learn what effect the appearance produced; for
the letter, like those it sought to excuse, remained unanswered.






V





THE fresh spring sunshine which had so often attended Lizzie Weston
her dusty climb up the hill of St.-Cloud beamed on her, some two
years later, in a scene and a situation of altered import.

The horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysees filtered its rays through
the symmetrical umbrage inclosing the graveled space about Daurent's
restaurant, and Miss West, seated at a table within that privileged
circle, presented to the light a hat much better able to sustain its
scrutiny than those which had sheltered the brow of Juliet Deering's
instructress.

Her dress was in keeping with the hat, and both belonged to a
situation rich in such possibilities as the act of a leisurely
luncheon at Daurent's in the opening week of the Salon. Her
companions, of both sexes, confirmed and emphasized this impression
by an elaborateness of garb and an ease of attitude implying the
largest range of selection between the forms of Parisian idleness;
and even Andora Macy, seated opposite, as in the place of co-hostess
or companion, reflected, in coy grays and mauves, the festal note of
the occasion.

This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary
gentleman straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedgedin
the remotest corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the
occurrence did not rise above the usual. For nearly a year she had
been acquiring the habit of such situations, and the act of offering
a luncheon at Daurent's to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of
Providence, and their friend Mr. Jackson Benn, produced in herno
emotion beyond the languid glow which Mr. Benn's presence was
beginning to impart to such scenes.

"It's frightful, the way you've got used to it," Andora Macyhad
wailed in the first days of her friend's transfigured fortune, when
Lizzie West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of
an old and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had
formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and
conjecture in her own improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never
given any sign of life to the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly
been conscious of including them in the carefully drawn will which,
following the old American convention, scrupulously divided his
hoarded millions among his kin. It was by a mere genealogical
accident that Lizzie, falling just within the golden circle, found
herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to release her from the
prospect of a long gray future in Mme. Clopin's pension.

The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presentlyfound
that it had destroyed her former world without giving her anew one.
On the ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that
had ever sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease,
and the removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed
existence blossomed with no compensating joys. Shehad hoped great
things from the opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her,
above all, in various artful feminine ways, to be "nice" to the
companions of her less privileged state; but such widenings of scope
left her, as it were, but the more conscious of the empty margin of
personal life beyond them. It was not till she woke to the leisure
of her new days that she had the full sense of what was gone from
them.

Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient
sensations: she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with
random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in "on
approval." It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson
Benn had fixed her attention, and the languid effort of her
imagination to adjust him to her requirements was seconded by
thefond complicity of Andora and the smiling approval of her
cousins. Lizzie did not discourage these demonstrations: she
suffered serenely Andora's allusions to Mr. Benn's infatuation, and
Mrs. Mears's casual boast of his business standing. All the better
ifthey could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and round
unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment: Lizzie
looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.

"I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare! Doesn't it
make you nervous, Lizzie?" Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling
her feather boa about an outraged bosom. Mrs. Mears was still in that
stage of development when her countrywomen taste to the full the
peril of being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.

Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn's round
baby cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular
collar. "Is some one staring at me?" she asked with a smile.

"Don't turn round, whatever you do! There--just over there, between
the rhododendrons--the tall fair man alone at that table. Really,
Harvey, I think you ought to speak to the head-waiter, orsomething;
though I suppose in one of these places they'd only laugh at you,"
Mrs. Mears shudderingly concluded.

Her husband, as if inclining to this probability, continued the
undisturbed dissection of his chicken wing; but Mr. Benn, perhaps
aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude,
sternly revolved upon the parapet of his high collar inthe direction
of Mrs. Mears's glance.

"What, that fellow all alone over there? Why, _he's_ not French; he's
an American," he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the
facial muscles.

"Oh!" murmured Mrs. Mears, as perceptibly disappointed, and Mr. Benn
continued carelessly: "He came over on the steamer with me. He's
some kind of an artist--a fellow named Deering. He wasstaring at
_me_, I guess: wondering whether I was going to remember him. Why,
how d' 'e do? How are you? Why, yes, of course; with pleasure--my
friends, Mrs. Harvey Mears--Mr. Mears; my friends Miss Macy and Miss
West."

"I have the pleasure of knowing Miss West," said Vincent Deering
with a smile.






VI





EVEN through his smile Lizzie had seen, in the first moment, how
changed he was; and the impression of the change deepened to the
point of pain when, a few days later, in reply to his brief note, she
accorded him a private hour.

That the first sight of his writing--the first answer to
hisletters--should have come, after three long years, in the shape
of this impersonal line, too curt to be called humble, yet
confessing to a consciousness of the past by the studied avoidance
of its language! As she read, her mind flashed back over what she
had dreamed his letters would be, over the exquisite answers she had
composed above his name. There was nothing exquisite in the
conventional lines before her; but dormant nerves began to throb
again at the mere touch of the paper he had touched, and she threw
the little note into the fire before she dared to reply to it.

Now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the
one live spot in her consciousness. Once more her tormented
throbbing self sank back passive and numb, but now withall its power
of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet
so unknown, at the opposite corner of herhearth. She was still
Lizzie West, and he was still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled
between them, and she saw his face through its fog. It was his face,
really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively
studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so
blurred its handsome lines. Shekept afterward no precise memory of
the actual details of his narrative: the pain it evidently cost him
to impart it was so much the sharpest fact in her new vision of him.
Confusedly, however, she gathered that on reaching America he had
found his wife's small property gravely impaired; and that, while
lingering on to securewhat remained of it, he had contrived to sell
a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success,
during which he received orders and set up a studio. But
inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and
a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out
his small advantage. There followed a period of eclipse, still more
vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had
tried his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment
from a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers,
illustrating magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly
understood, as the social tout of a new hotel desirous of
advertising its restaurant. These disjointed facts were strung on a
slender thread of personal allusions--references to friends who had
been kind (jealously, she guessed them to be women), and to enemies
who had darkly schemed against him. But, true to his tradition of
"correctness," he carefully avoided the mention of names, and left
her trembling conjectures to grope dimly through an alien crowded
world in which there seemed little room for her small shy presence.

As she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable
sense of his unhappiness. Nothing he had said explained or excused
his conduct to her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had
been humiliated, and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage,
that there was no conceivable justification for any scheme of things
in which such facts were possible. She could not have said why: she
simply knew that it hurt too much tosee him hurt.

Gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal
grievance was due to her having so definitely determinedher own
future. She was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to
marry Jackson Benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her
in dealing with the case of Vincent Deering. Her personal safety
insured her the requisite impartiality, and justified her in
dwelling as long as she chose on the last lines of a chapter to
which her own act had deliberately fixed the close. Any lingering
hesitations as to the finality of her decision were dispelled by the
imminent need of making it known to Deering; and when her visitor
paused in his reminiscences to say, with a sigh, "But many things
have happened to you too," his words did not so much evokethe sense
of her altered fortunes as the image of the protector to whom she
was about to intrust them.

"Yes, many things; it's three years," she answered.

Deering sat leaning forward, in his sad exiled elegance, hiseyes
gently bent on hers; and at his side she saw the solid form of Mr.
Jackson Benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of
his tight black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby
cheeks and hard blue chin. Then the vision faded as Deeringbegan to
speak.

"Three years," he repeated, musingly taking up her words. "I've so
often wondered what they'd brought you."

She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that
he should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse
into the blunder of becoming "personal."

"You've wondered?" She smiled back bravely.

"Do you suppose I haven't?" His look dwelt on her. "Yes, Idaresay
that _was_ what you thought of me."

She had her answer pat--"Why, frankly, you know, I _didn't_ think of
you." But the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it
indignantly away. If it was his correctness toignore, it could never
be hers to disavow.

"_ Was_ that what you thought of me?" she heard himrepeat in a tone
of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she
resolutely answered: "How could I know what to think? I had no word
from you."

If she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer
would create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with
which he met it proved that she had underestimatedhis resources.

"No, you had no word. I kept my vow," he said.

"Your vow?"

"That you _shouldn't_ have a word--not a syllable. Oh, I kept it
through everything!"

Lizzie's heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of
the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish
the still small voice of reason.

"What _was_ your vow? Why shouldn't I have had asyllable from you?"

He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it
almost seemed forgiving.

Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down
in a chair at her side. The deliberation of his movement might have
implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if
thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice
her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and
approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room. "This
is charming. Yes, things _have_ changed foryou," he said.

A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of
a vain return upon the past. It was as if all her retrospective
tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to
protect him from it. But his evasiveness exasperated her, and
suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire tohold him fast, face to
face with his own words.

Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had mether with
another.

"You _did_ think of me, then? Why are you afraid totell me that you
did?"

The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.

"Didn't my letters tell you so enough?"

"Ah, your letters!" Keeping her gaze on his in a passion
ofunrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not
theleast quiver of a sensitive nerve. He only gazed back at her more
sadly.

"They went everywhere with me--your letters," he said.

"Yet you never answered them." At last the accusation trembled to
her lips.

"Yet I never answered them."

"Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?"

All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed
them on him, as if to escape from their rage.

Deering hardly seemed to hear her question. He merely shifted his
attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by
the least gesture, to remind her of the privilegeswhich such
nearness had once implied.

"There were beautiful, wonderful things in them," he said, smiling.

She felt herself stiffen under his smile.

"You've waited three years to tell me so!"

He looked at her with grave surprise. "And do you resent mytelling
you even now?"

His parries were incredible. They left her with a breathless sense
of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire
to drive him against thewall and pin him there.

"No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at
the time--"

And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of
meeting her squarely on her own ground.

"When at the time I didn't? But how _could_ I--at thetime?"

"Why couldn't you? You've not yet told me?"

He gave her again his look of disarming patience. "Do I need to?
Hasn't my whole wretched story told you?"

"Told me why you never answered my letters?"

"Yes, since I could only answer them in one way--by protesting my
love and my longing."

There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers,
of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past. "You mean,
then, that you didn't write because--"

"Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that
my wife's money was gone, and that what I could earn--I've so little
gift that way!--was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and
educated. It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked
andbarred between us."

Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of
her incredulity. "You might at least have told me--have explained.
Do you think I shouldn't have understood?"

He did not hesitate. "You would have understood. It wasn'tthat."

"What was it then?" she quavered.

"It's wonderful you shouldn't see! Simply that I couldn't write you
_that_. Anything else--not _that!_"

"And so you preferred to let me suffer?"

There was a shade of reproach in his eyes. "I suffered too," he
said.

It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment
it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent
them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. Buteven as the
impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so
often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence,
she always failed to reckon with--the fact of thedeep irreducible
difference between his image in her mind and hisactual self, the
mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of
his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his
personality. She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to
herself that she "never could rememberhim," so completely did the
sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove
its perpetual wonders. Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was,
it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence;
and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel
his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private
injury paled.

"I suffered horribly," he repeated, "and all the more that Icouldn't
make a sign, couldn't cry out my misery. There was onlyone escape
from it all--to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me."

The blood rushed to Lizzie's forehead. "Hate you--you prayed that I
might hate you?"

He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in
his. "Yes; because your letters showed me that, if youdidn't, you'd
be unhappier still."

Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it,
and her thoughts, too--her poor fluttering stormy thoughts--felt
themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of
communion.

"And I meant to keep my resolve," he went on, slowly releasing his
clasp. "I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things
swept me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I
felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now
that we were near each other. How was it possibleto see you and want
you to hate me?"

He had moved away, but not to resume his seat. He merely paused at a
little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, inthe transient
attitude that precedes departure.

Lizzie's heart contracted. He was going, then, and this washis
farewell. He was going, and she could find no word to detainhim but
the senseless stammer "I never hated you."

He considered her with his faint grave smile. "It's not necessary,
at any rate, that you should do so now. Time and circumstances have
made me so harmless--that's exactly why I've dared to venture back.
And I wanted to tell you how I rejoice inyour good fortune. It's the
only obstacle between us that I can't bring myself to wish away."

Lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden
evocation of Mr. Jackson Benn. He stood there again, between herself
and Deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and
sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes
that desperately wailed for reembodiment.

Deering was continuing his farewell speech. "You're rich now, you're
free. You will marry." She vaguely saw him holding out his hand.

"It's not true that I'm engaged!" she broke out. They were the last
words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her
conscious thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up
in the irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her
forever the spectral claim of Mr. Jackson Benn.






VII





IT was the firm conviction of Andora Macy that every object in the
Vincent Deerings' charming little house at Neuilly had been
expressly designed for the Deerings' son to play with.

The house was full of pretty things, some not obviously applicable
to the purpose; but Miss Macy's casuistry was equal tothe baby's
appetite, and the baby's mother was no match for them in the art of
defending her possessions. There were moments, in fact, when Lizzie
almost fell in with Andora's summary division of her works of art
into articles safe or unsafe for the baby to lick, or resisted it
only to the extent of occasionally substituting some less precious
or less perishable object for the particular fragility on which her
son's desire was fixed. And it was with this intention that, on a
certain fair spring morning--which worethe added luster of being the
baby's second birthday--she had murmured, with her mouth in his
curls, and one hand holding a bitof Chelsea above his dangerous
clutch: "Wouldn't he rather have that beautiful shiny thing over
there in Aunt Andorra's hand?"

The two friends were together in Lizzie's little morning-room--the
room she had chosen, on acquiring the house, because, when she sat
there, she could hear Deering's step as he paced up and down before
his easel in the studio she had built for him. His step had been
less regularly audible than she had hoped, for, after three years of
wedded bliss, he had somehow failed to settle downto the great work
which was to result from that privileged state; but even when she did
not hear him she knew that he was there, above her head, stretched
out on the old divan from Passy, and smoking endless cigarettes
while he skimmed the morning papers; and the sense of his nearness
had not yet lost its first keen edge of bliss.

Lizzie herself, on the day in question, was engaged in a more
arduous task than the study of the morning's news. She had
neverunlearned the habit of orderly activity, and the trait she
least understood in her husband's character was his way of letting
the loose ends of life hang as they would. She had been disposed at
first to ascribe this to the chronic incoherence of his first
_menage;_ but now she knew that, though he basked under therule of
her beneficent hand, he would never feel any active impulse to
further its work. He liked to see things fall into place about him
at a wave of her wand; but his enjoyment of her household magic in
no way diminished his smiling irresponsibility, and it was with one
of its least amiable consequences that his wife and her friend were
now dealing.

Before them stood two travel-worn trunks and a distended
portmanteau, which had shed their contents in heterogeneous
heapsover Lizzie's rosy carpet. They represented the hostages left
byher husband on his somewhat precipitate departure from a New
Yorkboarding-house, and indignantly redeemed by her on her learning,
in a curt letter from his landlady, that the latter was not
disposedto regard them as an equivalent for the arrears of Deering's
board.

Lizzie had not been shocked by the discovery that her husband had
left America in debt. She had too sad an acquaintance with the
economic strain to see any humiliation in such accidents; but it
offended her sense of order that he should not have liquidated his
obligation in the three years since their marriage. He took her
remonstrance with his usual disarming grace, and left her to forward
the liberating draft, though her delicacy had provided him with a
bank-account which assured his personal independence. Lizzie had
discharged the duty without repugnance, since she knewthat his
delegating it to her was the result of his good-humored indolence
and not of any design on her exchequer. Deering was not dazzled by
money; his altered fortunes had tempted him to no excesses: he was
simply too lazy to draw the check, as he had been too lazy to
remember the debt it canceled.

"No, dear! No!" Lizzie lifted the Chelsea figure higher. "Can't you
find something for him, Andora, among that rubbish over there?
Where's the beaded bag you had in your hand just now? I don't think
it could hurt him to lick that."

Miss Macy, bag in hand, rose from her knees, and stumbled through
the slough of frayed garments and old studio properties. Before the
group of mother and son she fell into a raptured attitude.

"Do look at him reach for it, the tyrant! Isn't he just like the
young Napoleon?"

Lizzie laughed and swung her son in air. "Dangle it before him,
Andora. If you let him have it too quickly, he won't care for it.
He's just like any man, I think."

Andora slowly lowered the shining bag till the heir of the Deerings
closed his masterful fist upon it. "There--my Chelsea'ssafe!" Lizzie
smiled, setting her boy on the floor, and watchinghim stagger away
with his booty.

Andora stood beside her, watching too. "Have you any idea where that
bag came from, Lizzie?"

Mrs. Deering, bent above a pile of dis-collared shirts, shook an
inattentive head. "I never saw such wicked washing! There isn't one
that's fit to mend. The bag? No; I've not the least idea."

Andora surveyed her dramatically. "Doesn't it make you utterly
miserable to think that some woman may have made it for him?"

Lizzie, bowed in anxious scrutiny above the shirts, broke into an
unruffled laugh. "Really, Andora, really--six, seven, nine; no,
there isn't even a dozen. There isn't a whole dozen of _anything_. I
don't see how men live alone!"

Andora broodingly pursued her theme. "Do you mean to tell me it
doesn't make you jealous to handle these things of his that other
women may have given him?"

Lizzie shook her head again, and, straightening herself with a smile,
tossed a bundle in her friend's direction. "No, it doesn't make me
the least bit jealous. Here, count these socks for me, like a
darling."

Andora moaned, "Don't you feel _anything at all?_" asthe socks
landed in her hollow bosom; but Lizzie, intent upon her task,
tranquilly continued to unfold and sort. She felt a great deal as
she did so, but her feelings were too deep and delicate for the
simplifying process of speech. She only knew that each article she
drew from the trunks sent through her the long tremor of Deering's
touch. It was part of her wonderful new life that everything
belonging to him contained an infinitesimal fraction of himself--a
fraction becoming visible in the warmth of her love as certain
secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature.
And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of
his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy
from its contrast to his present cherished state. His shirts were
all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace. As for
his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked
to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or bring it home
with the colors "run"! And in these homely tokens of his well-being
she saw the symbol of what her tenderness had brought him. He was
safe in it, encompassed by it, morally and materially, and she
defied the embattled powers of malice to reach him through the armor
of her love. Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had
one desired to express them: they wereno more to be distinguished
from the sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in
which they murmur.

"Oh, do _look_ at him, Lizzie! He's found out how toopen the bag!"

Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who satthroned
on a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring
knees. She thought vaguely, "Poor Andora!" and then resumed the
discouraged inspection of a buttonless white waistcoat. The next
sound she was aware of was a fluttered exclamation from her friend.

"Why, Lizzie, do you know what he used the bag for? To keepyour
letters in!"

Lizzie looked up more quickly. She was aware that Andora's pronoun
had changed its object, and was now applied to Deering. And it
struck her as odd, and slightly disagreeable, that a letter of hers
should be found among the rubbish abandoned in her husband's New
York lodgings.

"How funny! Give it to me, please."

"Give the bag to Aunt Andora, darling! Here--look inside, and see
what else a big big boy can find there! Yes, here's another! Why,
why--"

Lizzie rose with a shade of impatience and crossed the floorto the
romping group beside the other trunk.

"What is it? Give me the letters, please." As she spoke, she
suddenly recalled the day when, in Mme. Clopin's _pension_, she had
addressed a similar behest to Andora Macy.

Andora had lifted a look of startled conjecture. "Why, thisone's
never been opened! Do you suppose that awful woman could have kept
it from him?"

Lizzie laughed. Andora's imaginings were really puerile. "What awful
woman? His landlady? Don't be such a goose, Andora. How can it have
been kept back from him, when we've found it here among his things?"

"Yes; but then why was it never opened?"

Andora held out the letter, and Lizzie took it. The writingwas hers;
the envelop bore the Passy postmark; and it was unopened. She stood
looking at it with a sudden sharp drop of the heart.

"Why, so are the others--all unopened!" Andora threw out on a rising
note; but Lizzie, stooping over, stretched out her hand.

"Give them to me, please."

"Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie--" Andora, still on her knees, continued to hold
back the packet, her pale face paler with anger and compassion.
"Lizzie, they're the letters I used to post for you--_the letters he
never answered!_ Look!"

"Give them back to me, please."

The two women faced each other, Andora kneeling, Lizzie motionless
before her, the letters in her hand. The blood had rushed to her
face, humming in her ears, and forcing itself into the veins of her
temples like hot lead. Then it ebbed, and she felt cold and weak.

"It must have been some plot--some conspiracy!" Andora cried, so
fired by the ecstasy of invention that for the moment she seemed
lost to all but the esthetic aspect of the case.

Lizzie turned away her eyes with an effort, and they rested on the
boy, who sat at her feet placidly sucking the tassels of the bag.
His mother stooped and extracted them from his rosy mouth, which a
cry of wrath immediately filled. She lifted him in her arms, and for
the first time no current of life ran from his bodyinto hers. He
felt heavy and clumsy, like some one else's child; and his screams
annoyed her.

"Take him away, please, Andora."

"Oh, Lizzie, Lizzie!" Andora wailed.

Lizzie held out the child, and Andora, struggling to her feet,
received him.

"I know just how you feel," she gasped out above the baby's head.

Lizzie, in some dark hollow of herself, heard the echo of a laugh.
Andora always thought she knew how people felt!

"Tell Marthe to take him with her when she fetches Juliet home from
school."

"Yes, yes." Andora gloated over her. "If you'd only give way, my
darling!"

The baby, howling, dived over Andora's shoulder for the bag.

"Oh, _take_ him!" his mother ordered.

Andora, from the door, cried out: "I'll be back at once. Remember,
love, you're not alone!"

But Lizzie insisted, "Go with them--I wish you to go with them," in
the tone to which Miss Macy had never learned the answer.

The door closed on her outraged back, and Lizzie stood alone. She
looked about the disordered room, which offered a dreary image of
the havoc of her life. An hour or two ago everything about her had
been so exquisitely ordered, without and within; her thoughtsand
emotions had lain outspread before her like delicate jewels laid
away symmetrically in a collector's cabinet. Now they had been
tossed down helter-skelter among the rubbish there on the floor, and
had themselves turned to rubbish like the rest. Yes, there lay her
life at her feet, among all that tarnished trash.

She knelt and picked up her letters, ten in all, and examined the
flaps of the envelops. Not one had been opened--not one. Asshe
looked, every word she had written fluttered to life, and every
feeling prompting it sent a tremor through her. With
vertiginousspeed and microscopic vision she was reliving that whole
period of her life, stripping bare again the black ruin over which
the drift of three happy years had fallen.

She laughed at Andora's notion of a conspiracy--of the letters
having been "kept back." She required no extraneous aid in
deciphering the mystery: her three years' experience of Deering shed
on it all the light she needed. And yet a moment before shehad
believed herself to be perfectly happy! Now it was the worstpart of
her anguish that it did not really surprise her.

She knew so well how it must have happened. The letters hadreached
him when he was busy, occupied with something else, and had been put
aside to be read at some future time--a time which nevercame.
Perhaps on his way to America, on the steamer, even, he had met
"some one else"--the "some one" who lurks, veiled and ominous, in
the background of every woman's thoughts about her lover. Or perhaps
he had been merely forgetful. She had learned from experience that
the sensations which he seemed to feel with the most exquisite
intensity left no reverberations in his mind--thathe did not relive
either his pleasures or his pains. She needed no better proof of
that than the lightness of his conduct toward hisdaughter. He seemed
to have taken it for granted that Juliet would remain indefinitely
with the friends who had received her after her mother's death, and
it was at Lizzie's suggestion that the littlegirl was brought home
and that they had established themselves at Neuilly to be near her
school. But Juliet once with them, he became the model of a tender
father, and Lizzie wondered that he had not felt the child's
absence, since he seemed so affectionately aware of her presence.

Lizzie had noted all this in Juliet's case, but had taken for
granted that her own was different; that she formed, for Deering, the
exception which every woman secretly supposes herself to formin the
experience of the man she loves. Certainly, she had learned by this
time that she could not modify his habits, but she imagined that she
had deepened his sensibilities, had furnished him with an
"ideal"--angelic function! And she now saw that the fact of her
letters--her unanswered letters--having, on his own assurance,
"meant so much" to him, had been the basis on which this beautiful
fabric was reared.

There they lay now, the letters, precisely as when they had left her
hands. He had not had time to read them; and there had been a moment
in her past when that discovery would have been thesharpest pang
imaginable to her heart. She had traveled far beyond that point. She
could have forgiven him now for having forgottenher; but she could
never forgive him for having deceived her.

She sat down, and looked again vaguely about the room. Suddenly she
heard his step overhead, and her heart contracted. She was afraid he
was coming down to her. She sprang up and bolted the door; then she
dropped into the nearest chair, tremulous and exhausted, as if the
pushing of the bolt had required an immense muscular effort. A
moment later she heard him on the stairs, andher tremor broke into a
cold fit of shaking. "I loathe you--I loathe you!" she cried.

She listened apprehensively for his touch on the handle of the door.
He would come in, humming a tune, to ask some idle question and lay
a caress on her hair. But no, the door was bolted; she was safe. She
continued to listen, and the step passed on. He had not been coming
to her, then. He must have gone down-stairs to
fetchsomething--another newspaper, perhaps. He seemed to read little
else, and she sometimes wondered when he had found time to store the
material that used to serve for their famous "literary" talks. The
wonder shot through her again, barbed with a sneer. At that moment
it seemed to her that everything he had ever done and beenwas a lie.

She heard the house-door close, and started up. Was he going out? It
was not his habit to leave the house in the morning.

She crossed the room to the window, and saw him walking, with a
quick decided step, between the budding lilacs to the gate. What
could have called him forth at that unwonted hour? It was odd that
he should not have told her. The fact that she thought it odd
suddenly showed her how closely their lives were interwoven. Shehad
become a habit to him, and he was fond of his habits. But toher it
was as if a stranger had opened the gate and gone out. She wondered
what he would feel if he knew that she felt _that_.

"In an hour he will know," she said to herself, with a kind of
fierce exultation; and immediately she began to dramatize the scene.
As soon as he came in she meant to call him up to her room and hand
him the letters without a word. For a moment she gloated on the
picture; then her imagination recoiled from it. She was humiliated
by the thought of humiliating him. She wanted to keephis image
intact; she would not see him.

He had lied to her about her letters--had lied to her when he found
it to his interest to regain her favor. Yes, there was thepoint to
hold fast. He had sought her out when he learned that she was rich.
Perhaps he had come back from America on purpose to marry her; no
doubt he had come back on purpose. It was incredible that she had
not seen this at the time. She turned sick at the thought of her
fatuity and of the grossness of his arts. Well, the event proved
that they were all heneeded. But why had he gone out at such an
hour? She was irritated to find herself still preoccupied by his
comings and goings.

Turning from the window, she sat down again. She wondered what she
meant to do next. No, she would not show him the letters; she would
simply leave them on his table and go away. She would leave the
house with her boy and Andora. It was a relief to feela definite
plan forming itself in her mind--something that her uprooted
thoughts could fasten on. She would go away, of course; and
meanwhile, in order not to see him, she would feign a headache, and
remain in her room till after luncheon. Then she and Andora would
pack a few things, and fly with the child while he was dawdling
about up-stairs in the studio. When one's house fell, one fled from
the ruins: nothing could be simpler, more inevitable.

Her thoughts were checked by the impossibility of picturing what
would happen next. Try as she would, she could not see herself and
the child away from Deering. But that, of course, was because of her
nervous weakness. She had youth, money, energy: all the trumps were
on her side. It was much more difficult to imagine what would become
of Deering. He was so dependent on her, and they had been so happy
together! The fact struck her as illogical, and even immoral, and
yet she knew he had been happy with her. It never happened like that
in novels: happiness "built on a lie" always crumbled, and buried
the presumptuous architect beneath the ruins. According to the laws
of every novel she had ever read, Deering, having deceived her once,
would inevitably have gone on deceiving her. Yet she knew he had not
gone on deceiving her.

She tried again to picture her new life. Her friends, of course,
would rally about her. But the prospect left her cold; she did not
want them to rally. She wanted only one thing--the life she had been
living before she had given her baby the embroideredbag to play
with. Oh, why had she given him the bag? She had been so happy, they
had all been so happy! Every nerve in her clamored for her lost
happiness, angrily, unreasonably, as the boy had clamored for his
bag! It was horrible to know too much; there was always blood in the
foundations. Parents "kept things" from children--protected them
from all the dark secrets of pain and evil. And was any life livable
unless it were thus protected? Could any one look in the Medusa's
face and live?

But why should she leave the house, since it was hers? Here, with
her boy and Andora, she could still make for herself the semblance
of a life. It was Deering who would have to go; he would understand
that as soon as he saw the letters.

She pictured him in the act of going--leaving the house as he had
left it just now. She saw the gate closing on him for the last time.
Now her vision was acute enough: she saw him as distinctlyas if he
were in the room. Ah, he would not like returning to the old life of
privations and expedients! And yet she knew he wouldnot plead with
her.

Suddenly a new thought rushed through her mind. What if Andora had
rushed to him with the tale of the discovery of the letters--with
the "Fly, you are discovered!" of romantic fiction? What if he _had_
left her for good? It would not be unlikehim, after all. Under his
wonderful gentleness he was always evasive and inscrutable. He might
have said to himself that he would forestall her action, and place
himself at once on the defensive. It might be that she _had_ seen
him go out of the gate forthe last time.

She looked about the room again, as if this thought had given it a
new aspect. Yes, this alone could explain her husband's going out.
It was past twelve o'clock, their usual luncheon hour, and he was
scrupulously punctual at meals, and gently reproachful if shekept
him waiting. Only some unwonted event could have caused himto leave
the house at such an hour and with such marks of haste. Well,
perhaps it was better that Andora should have spoken. She mistrusted
her own courage; she almost hoped the deed had been done for her.
Yet her next sensation was one of confused resentment. She said to
herself, "Why has Andora interfered?" She felt baffled and angry, as
though her prey had escaped her. If Deering had been in the house,
she would have gone to him instantly and overwhelmed him with her
scorn. But he had gone out, and she did not know where he had gone,
and oddly mingled with her anger against him was the latent instinct
of vigilance, thesolicitude of the woman accustomed to watch over
the man she loves. It would be strange never to feel that solicitude
again, never to hear him say, with his hand on her hair: "Why, you
foolish child, were you worried? Am I late?"

The sense of his touch was so real that she stiffened herself
against it, flinging back her head as if to throw off his hand. The
mere thought of his caress was hateful; yet she felt it in all her
traitorous veins. Yes, she felt it, but with horror and repugnance.
It was something she wanted to escape from, and the fact of
struggling against it was what made its hold so strong. It was as
though her mind were sounding her body to make sure of
itsallegiance, spying on it for any secret movement of revolt.

To escape from the sensation, she rose and went again to thewindow.
No one was in sight. But presently the gate began to swing back, and
her heart gave a leap--she knew not whether up ordown. A moment
later the gate opened slowly to admit a perambulator, propelled by
the nurse and flanked by Juliet and Andora. Lizzie's eyes rested on
the familiar group as if she hadnever seen it before, and she stood
motionless, instead of flyingdown to meet the children.

Suddenly there was a step on the stairs, and she heard Andora's
agitated knock. She unbolted the door, and was strainedto her
friend's emaciated bosom.

"My darling!" Miss Macy cried. "Remember you have your child--and
me!"

Lizzie loosened herself gently. She looked at Andora with afeeling
of estrangement which she could not explain.

"Have you spoken to my husband?" she asked, drawing coldly back.

"Spoken to him? No." Andora stared at her in genuine wonder.

"Then you haven't met him since he left me?"

"No, my love. Is he out? I haven't met him."

Lizzie sat down with a confused sense of relief, which welled up to
her throat and made speech difficult.

Suddenly light came to Andora. "I understand, dearest. Youdon't feel
able to see him yourself. You want me to go to him for you." She
looked about her, scenting the battle. "You're right, darling. As
soon as he comes in I'll go to him. The sooner we get it over the
better."

She followed Lizzie, who without answering her had turned
mechanically back to the window. As they stood there, the gate moved
again, and Deering entered the garden.

"There he is now!" Lizzie felt Andora's fervent clutch uponher arm.
"Where are the letters? I will go down at once. You allow me to
speak for you? You trust my woman's heart? Oh, believe me, darling,"
Miss Macy panted, "I shall know just what to say to him!"

"What to say to him?" Lizzie absently repeated.

As her husband advanced up the path she had a sudden trembling
vision of their three years together. Those years were her
wholelife; everything before them had been colorless and
unconscious, like the blind life of the plant before it reaches the
surface ofthe soil. They had not been exactly what she dreamed; but
if they had taken away certain illusions, they had left richer
realities in their stead. She understood now that she had gradually
adjusted herself to the new image of her husband as he was, as he
would always be. He was not the hero of her dream, but he was the
man she loved, and who had loved her. For she saw now, in this last
wide flash of pity and initiation, that, as a solid marble may
bemade out of worthless scraps of mortar, glass and pebbles, so
outof mean mixed substances may be fashioned a love that will bear
the stress of life.

More urgently, she felt the pressure of Miss Macy's hand.

"I shall hand him the letters without a word. You may rely, love, on
my sense of dignity. I know everything you're feeling at this
moment!"

Deering had reached the door-step. Lizzie continued to watch him in
silence till he disappeared under the glazed roof of the porch below
the window; then she turned and looked almost compassionately at her
friend.

"Oh, poor Andora, you don't know anything--you don't know anything
at all!" she said.

THE END



End of Project Gutenberg's Tales Of Men And Ghosts, by Edith Wharton